meta [part the second]

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Tue Dec 15 23:29:01 CST 2009


 David Morris:
>
> Pynchon makes art.  Not history, and not proscriptions for life in
> general.  And nearly every point he makes bout something in his texts
> is countered with opposing or alternate views somewhere nearby in the
> same text.  Isolate and believe them at your own peril.
>

For once, I can cite something: a passage in Mason & Dixon, where the
subjective nature
of historical writing is equated with fiction.  The comparison is
fairly taut, crafty more than artsy...

"History can as little pretend to the Veracity of the one [Chronology,
"for that is left to lawyers"]
as claim the Power of the other [Remembrance, "for Remembrance belongs
to the People"]
- her Practitioners, to survive, must soon learn the arts of the quidnunc, spy,
and Taproom Wit, - that there may ever continue more than one life-line
back into a Past we risk, each day, losing our forebears in forever..."

Please let me know if this is not a reasonable statement:
---at the core of most historical writing is some kind of narrative or other---

The German word for history, Geschichte, is the same as that for story...
even in English, "story" is implicit in "history"..

Cherrycoke's book "Christ and History" and the conversation about
history in M&D that follows the excerpt at least hint at some relationship...


Wouldn't it be fairly easy to cite a lot of textual evidence from
Gravity's Rainbow that
its narrative of WWII is not of "a good war"?



-- 
- "Souvenirs out of a childhood Doc had never felt he wanted much to
escape from"- IV, p 125



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