M&D c50 The Golem

[Lemuel Underwing]

"America, withal, for centuries had been *kept hidden*, as are certain
Bodies of Knowledge. Only now and then were selected persons allow'd
Glimpses of the New World,--"
"Never Reporters that anyone else was likely to believe,-- men who ate the
Flesh and fornicated with the Ghosts of their Dead, murderers and Pirates
on the run, monks in parchment Coracles stitched together from copied Pages
of the Book of Jonah, fishermen too many Nights our of Port, any Runagate
craz'd enough to sail West."

M&D c50 p.487

-------
common themes in P. reminds me off Kermode's Genesis of Secrecy, when he
talks about The Crying of Lot 49

  " This passage [the story of the first sino-american conflict] describes
an historical event which is held to have occurred, to have left no trace,
and to be susceptible of honest report only in the most uncertain and
indeterminate manner. It admirably represents a modern skepticism
concerning the reference of text to events. Events exist only as texts,
already to that extent interpreted, and if we were able to discard the
interpretative material and be as honest as historians, quite honestly,
pretend to be, all we should have left would be some nonsignificant dubiety
as this account of the first engagement ever to take place between American
and Russian forces. The book contains characters who attach importance to
that encounter: members of a crackpot political party, and users of a
communication system which bears no significant messages, and is in illegal
opposition to the United States Post Office, which at least professes to do
so. Their view of history exists only by the fiat of an absurd ideology.
And as we read on the question arises, whether we do not live in a complex
of semiotic systems which are either empty or are operated on the
gratuitous assumption that a direct realism exists between a sign and a
corresponding object "in reality." The only sense attributable to the naval
engagement arises from the operation of coded fantasies upon a lunatic
group. And the impotence of that group, as we see from its account of the
seafight, is such that their pseudo-history cannot supplant the official
histories, which serve a different and much more successful ideology.
   The story of the sea battle occurs not in the work of a professed
historian, not even as a nightmare example in a book by some distracted
philosopher of history, but in a novel called *The Crying of Lot 49 . *It
is, for all that, a serious historiographical exercise. It illustrates the
point that we are capable of a skepticism very remote from the pleromatic
certitudes of the evangelists, remote even from the sober historicism of
only yesterday. We can, indeed, no longer assume that we have the capacity
to make value-free statements about history, or suppose that there is some
special dispensation whereby the signs that constitute an historical text
have reference to events in the world. That it would not be possible to
discover a passage like the one I have just quoted in a genuine historical
work is an indication that we mostly go about our business as if the
contrary of what we profess to believe were the truth; somehow, from
somewhere, a privilege, an authority, [a grace? -Lud] descends upon our
researches; and as long as we do things as have generally been done -- as
long, that is, as the institution which guarantees our studies upholds the
fictions that give them value -- we shall continue to write historical
narrative as if it were an altogether different matter from making fictions
or, *a foritiori*, from telling lies."


On Wed, Apr 3, 2013 at 3:51 PM, Lemuel Underwing <luunderwing at gmail.com>wrote:

> What is the Golem? Is it "the" American Religion?
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20130403/05ed3738/attachment.html>