Stencil's imperfect vision of the human heart

[alice wellintown]

In his yarning Stencil reminds us that he is a parody of Henry Adams
and Adams’s historical methods: “Stencil would rather depend on the
imperfect vision of humans for his history, Somehow government
reports, bar graphs, mass movements are too treacherous” (HP418).
Taking these words as a pronouncement of the implied author about his
own methods for dealing with history by fiction making, we could argue
that Pynchon reminds us that he is not an historian or a scientist; he
is, rather like the Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke, who uses romance to
entertain and amuse, but also to convey a pluralistic and pragmatic,
though necessarily and acceptably imperfect vision of human history,
or, to come closer to the truth of the human heart than history or the
novel can.
To Stencil and to Cherrycoke, and to Pynchon, reducing human history
to reports, bar-graphs, mass movements, and scientific law, is too
treacherous. History making is dangerous or untrustworthy. Is
Cherrycoke’s “untrustworthy remembrancer” or Stecil’s “imperfect human
vision” any less dangerous, any more reliable? If history that claims
the truth is tainted by its methods, by its motives, is romance free
of these hazards?
Pynchon’s Stencil is a parody of Henry Adams’s belief that human
history could be explained by a law of physics: The Second Law of
Thermodynamics. Stencil’s fear of entropy is not only a form of
paranoia that connects an eventual entropic end of the universe with
everything else in the western world, but also a fear of acceleration
(decadence and evolution) or that the end is near. So Stencil’s fear
is not exactly Adams’s fear.  Stencil fears that the decline of the
west will be interrupted or made final by a big bang in the Middle
East or wherever the next world war takes place. For Adams, the end
won’t come not with a bang but with a whimper. What has this to do
with history making? Well, Adams applies a scientific law, but ignores
the scientific method. Stencil applies the romantic method and the law
of ambiguity. The only conclusion possible is the imperfect vision of
the human heart.