Pynchon in Prof. Kermode's Genesis of Secrecy

[ludd oafery]

a few pages later Kermode writes of P. again:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   And of course it is true that John's account of the breaking of the legs
and the spar thrust, or Mark's account of Peter's denial, could hardly have
achieved success in the world had they been recorded in the manner of
Pynchon's naval battle. The evangelists too were writing for a small
community regarded as eccentric and possessing a communication system at
odds with officialdom, but their object was different.  It would have
seemed insane to the author of John's gospel to profess not to know which
ship was sent out, or where the sighting occurred, or whether either ship
fired; or to allow that there was no physical evidence to prove that the
encounter took place. And it would have seemed equally insane to believe
that the world was a mass of interlinked communication systems bearing no
messages, or only message of the utmost triviality. He may have thought of
the world as like a book; but if so the system was saturated with messages
of the very highest importance. Lest they should be disbelieved or
misunderstood or corrupted, there was a need for realism, and an equal need
for the structure of the *testimonia, *so that this sequence of events
should seem a piece of, even the crown of, an historical development
perceptible to the eye of the interpreter and written into the structure of
the world, now seen as a book, as a codex. So it continued to be seen, by
Dante at the climax of the poem, by Mallarme at the end of the great age of
the book. Pynchon's joke belongs to another age, which we still have hardly
come to terms with.





On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 8:12 PM, ludd oafery <recoignishon at gmail.com> wrote:

> So I finally got a copy, subtitled "on the Interpretation of Narrative",
>  and 'tis a wonderful book in its own right, but I especially wanted to
> share his passages on Pynchon's tCoL49.
>
> So I shall transcribe his sections on Pynchon for your Reading Pleasure.
>
>
> He uses the Story of the Sea-Battle in tCoL49 (pp50-51) here :
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>    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.
>
>
>
>
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