ATD: unanswered questions #2

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Great summing up, Bekah!

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: Bekah <Bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net>

>Against the Day is about the pre-modern (pre-WWI) era but told  
>through post-modern (our) tropes.  All narrative history is bound  
>this way of course, but in AtD  it was used deliberately and with  
>dramatic effect.
>
>Iow,  the story is basically a fictionalized  history  but told with  
>a modern sensibility - almost the same tone J.G. Farrell used in The  
>Siege of Krishnapur  where Farrell explored the antics of a fictional  
>English community in colonial India through a 1970s morality /  
>mentality.  This is not the same as writing about a given  period  
>honoring the morality of the times at all - in fact,  it's very, very  
>different.   But where Farrell's work was totally ironic - Pynchon  
>seems to be working with a little tiny bit of very serious 21st  
>century moralism within the irony.  Imo,  he uses our understanding  
>of history to project a pre-modern world. "Our" understanding of  
>history according to Howard Zinn, if you will.  (The 20th Century: A  
>People's History by Howard Zinn  - "With all its limitations, it is a  
>history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's  
>movements of resistance."  - )
>
>  This is not the traditionalist David Hackett Fischer,  yet a  
>certain sense of providence is there.  And it's certainly not  John  
>Lukacs - shoot,  it's not even Eric Hobsbawm (Marxist).    The  
>history (as event) may be essentially the same,  only the  
>perspective, using full editorial and literary options,  has  
>influenced the narrative.  (heh)
>
>That said,  "it seems as though" many sentences included phrases like  
>"almost as if," indicating, acknowledging,  some kind of minor  
>alteration somewhere - but perhaps it was the light - the time of day?
>
>I think because OBA was writing a lot of meta-historical meta-fiction  
>rather than  straight historical fiction like Mason & Dixon  -  
>(magical chapters excepted)  he had to skip the clear view of a  
>couple protagonists (M&D)  in favor of a multi-character approach -  
>there are lots and lots of characters in history.     In GR the focus  
>was on individual  response(s) to history.   V. , Vineland  and  The  
>Crying of Lot 49 were more like portraits of the times viewed within  
>the times.  Against the Day is fictionalized history viewed from our  
>own ethical times.
>
>The science in AtD is presented as the people in those times thought  
>of it - kind of magical to them what with all they, in all their  
>ignorance, had discovered.  Who knew what the future held?   (We do -  
>the reader over here in the 21st century.)   The politics are  
>presented as the people of that day thought of it - good vs evil,  
>anarchy vs democracy.    The overarching (if I may use the term)   
>morality of it all is presented in our own underlying POV -  the  
>ultimate bi-location, perhaps?    But who knows,  our cultural POV  
>may be that of the Chums - going from some kind of  benevolent  
>totalitarianism to a more or less democratic/capitalistic  
>(anarchist?)/ domestic (?) paradigm.   (We grew up,  ventured around  
>geographically and sexually,  got jobs,  got married,  bought a  
>house, had kids, got divorced,  and watched moving pictures.)   Where  
>are the boundaries when you're talking metafiction/meta-history?
>
>As to the phrase in my post about  "top down,"  Howard Zinn's  
>historiography is sometimes called  history from the "bottom up."  I  
>suppose that could be provided by the Nunatak thing dragged up in  
>Iceland (?) but I'd rather think that  TRP  turned the idea upside  
>down and from the vantage of a sky-craft (or the 21st century)   
>viewed history "from above"  - far above - in the here and now.
>
>Bekah
>  babbling
>
>
>