Postmodernist nostalgia and the fantasization of the historical in Thomas Pynchon's V

Re1 •ista de Estudios Nortemnericanos, 11.° 7 (2000), pp. 125 - 132 POSTMODERNIST NOSTALGIA AND THE FANTASIZATION OF THE HISTORICAL IN THOMAS PYNCHON'S V ] OSÉ LISTE N OYA Universidade da Coruña A nostalgia for the historical ha s permeated assiduously both postmodernist fict ion and key critica! texts which reflect theorctically on the nature of the postmodem itself. At the sarne time, that the unease with the postmodernist demise of traditional conceptions of the historical should take the form of nostalgia, signals the difficulties in breaking wi th a linear, teleological historical sense. The nostalgia which Jamcnts the disappearance of a traditional notion of historical process, the nostalgia which is always a retrospective or belated narrativization of the past. can be seen as a reification of a determinate concept of the historical rather than a truly historicizing gesture itself. In turn, postmodernist texts such as Thomas Pynchon' s V employ the nostalgic impulse self-parodically to point to the inescapable fictionalization implicit in any historical recreation. Thus. in the case at hand, we find what the perhaps most hi storically-minded theorist of postmodernism, Fredric Jame son, would conceivably call «nostalgia freaks» inhabiting the fictional hisloricizations ofThomas Pynchon's V. So much so that Jameson's notion of a postrnodernist «nostalgia mode» can be applied, with a critica! awareness of Jameson's own nostalgic leanings, to the novel's slructural interrelation of what it terms the «mitTor worlds» of past and present. Jameson views th e no stalgia mode's «random cannibalization of ali styles of the past» ( 1984, 65-66) as a negative sign of postmodemism's suppression of historical time. Concentrating especially on postmodernist film, he sees th e nostalgia mode as a stylistic recreation of the past through the projection of a sim ulatory image of a historical period, rather than initiating the historicizing exploration of its «factuality.» This reflects for Jameson the postmodernist predominance of what he calls the «spatial logic of the 126 José Liste Noya simulacrum» (66) or the mass-and-informational-media-influenced conversion of t he world and its history into image. In Pynchon's novel Herbert Stencil, of course, is pre-eminent amongst these nostalgia «freaks,» though by no means alone in excrcising what the narrator calls the unacknowledged «right of imaginative anxiety or historical care» (62). He inherits this obsession with the past, in appropriately textual form, from the paternal precedent of Sidney Stenci l. We find other forms of historical concern in the dangerous «hoth ouse» nostalgia of the self-simulating, ontologically blurrcd textual presence of V. herself, and the more wary reconstmction of the past textually practiced by Fausto Maijstral. The ultimate recipient of these specifically textual reconstructions, the reader, runs the risk of being con verted into a connoisscur of the nostalgic were it not for the thematic foregrounding which the notion undergoes. Indccd the narrator, in one of thc few direct, apparently but not conclusively au thoritative intmsions to be found in the novel, questions this modc of historical consciousness: The spring wore on, large currents and small eddies alike resulting in headlines. People read wh at news they wanted to and each accordingly built bis own rathouse ofhistory's rags and straws. In the city of New York alone there were al a rough estímate five million diffcrent rathouses. God knew what was going on in the minds of cabinet ministers, heads of state and civil servants in the capitals of the world. Doubtless their private versions of history showed up in action. If a normal distribution of types prevailed they die!. (225) Taken at foce value, such a generalization, which can also be extended to the reader's creation of his or her own interpretive «rathouse,» aligns itself with Fredric Jameson 's denunciation of what he considers postrnodemism 's dehistoricizing employment of the nostalgia mode. On the other hand, if the passage were true to its own narrative logic, epistemological relativism would also invade the fictionalized «prívate versions» of this unidentified narrator, as the contradictions and ambiguities of other narrative episodes would secm to confirm and ironically foreground. Thus the passag e implicitly reveals the discursively situated nature of any historical representation by explicitly stressing the evaluative hierarchies and relations of force which underlie what it calls the «normal distribution of types» uf historical agents and their investments in determinate historicizations. In this respect, we can detect the beginnings of a postmodernist reading of the textualized historicity which is manifestcd in such forms as nostalgia. Furthermore, if nostalgia can he considered a species of historical voyeu1ism. especially in thc case of those who, like Stencil and the readcr, can only recreate textually a pasl in whi ch they die! not participate empirically, then the whole notion of historical representation, fictionally highlighted in this case, succumbs to the self-distancing ambiguities of th e voyeuristic gaze. Of course. Pynchon 's novel rnakes the point that such a «voyeur istic gaze ,, may constitute the vcry nature of all acts of historical rnemory, whether the «voyeur» is a historical participant or not. Gravit_v's Rainhow will go on to draw out the foil, Postmodemfat Nostalfiia ami tite Fantasíwtíon uf the Historica/ 127 somewhat sinistcr implications of such a v1s 1o n of history with both their epistemological and política! consequences. The bone of contention in the case of Jameson's critique with respect to other theorists of the postrnodern líes in his assurnption of an ultimately nonrepresentational historical reality underlying its co ntingent representations and supposedly scrving asan authoritative guideline for the «objective» reconstruction of, in his words. a «putative real world» (71). Jameson's view, which is itself belied somewhat self-consciously by the suggestion of a doubt in that adjective «putative,» is fictionally contradictcd in Pynchon 's novel by Fausto Maijstral's assertion that the «facts are history, and only men have histories» (305). Rcad in a postmodern light, Fausto· s comments and their exhaustive claborntion in the novel' s eleventh chapter can be seen to presage the di scursive l y-orien ted conceptions of a postmodern historical consciousness. In response to Jamcson's incrcasingly dubitative rejection of postmodernist forms of hist01ical representation. Linda Hutcheon proclaims in her analysis of postmodernist «lüstoriographic mctafiction» that: Historiograph ic mctafiction sclf-consciously rerninds us th at, while events did occur in the real empirical past. we name and constitute those events as historical facts by selection and na1rntívc positioning. And. even more basically. we only know of those past events through their discursive inscription, through their traces in the present. ( 1988, 97) lmplicit in Hutcheon 's discoursc-conscious reflections we may detect a wavering adherencc to a reality principie which is jeopardized by the afTinnation that the real. in this ca se the historical real. only cxists as a representation. As Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth puts it, «the debates about postmodernism come down to discussion abont what, if anything. provides a reality principie for any construct» ( 199 2, 59). Jf postmodern ism seriously unscttles thc idea of a grounding principle for ontological di stinctions. then the field of discursive constructions becom es ripe for the textual ÍITuption of such representational modcs as thc fantastic. The real, however, and the historical real are not textualizcd out of existence in postmodernist íiction, though their ex p licitly textual nature may be foregrounded. lndeed, the ambivalent subversivene ss of postmodernist fiction s ee ms to ar ise out of its self-conscious complicity with the rcpresentational slructures of the real itself. Its ultirnate aim is not the breakdown of representational distinctions, such as the real and the fantastic. but a questioning, never an irnpossible banishmen t, of representation itself through the fictional disjunctions of divergent modes of representational discourse. Hence, the parasitical relationship with respect to the discourses of thc real of the fantastic, onc of the favoured modes of this questioning. Th e re al in postmode mist fiction. as distinct from conventional. consensually-acccpted represcntatio ns of reality, is often figurally -that is, non-mimetically-presented as that which resists represcntation. albeit through the interstices of repr esen tation itself. For postrnodern writing to mercly assert its own reality as a consciously ficlional construct -a nd then to imperiously transfer this affirmation to the whole of the real-would not be to escape 128 José Lisie Noya the insistence of the real but to self-consciously a ll ude to the latt er's pervasive yet representa ti onally absent presence. One may need to represent the world in textual form but this tends to open out the problematic notion of text rather than flattening the di sso nances of world (Wi ld e 1987, 4). The internment within the «hothouse» of textual self-reflexivity. as the fictional parallels of V. suggest, becomes a form of reprcsentational impri sonment. The «prison,» in this case, as the charact er Fausto Maijstral muses, exists not so much to endose as to shut out ali that remains unrepresented or beyond thc bounds of discursive articulation. In other words, all that tra ditionally has pertained to the r ea lm of the fantastic in fictional narrative. For Fausto, his confessional «room» sea ls off th e insistence of the unrepresentahle present so that the paradigma ti ca ll y absent pr ese nce of the past can be dealt with: Why use the room as introduction to an apologia'? Because the room, though windowless and cold at night, is a hothouse. Because the room is the past, though it has no hi story of its own. Because, as the physical being-there of a bed or horizontal plane determines what we ca11 love; as a high place must exist before God's word can come to a ílock and any sort of religion begin; so must there he a room, sealed against the present. before we can make any attempt to deal with the past. (305) This may seem to run against more postmodem conceptions of historiography, as well as Fausto's own practi ce and comments elsewhere, which explicitly take into account the discursive and temporal situatedness of historiographical texts or the mutual imbrications of past and present. As Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth claims: «For postmodernisrn, historic al time is a thing of Lh e past in more than one sense. History now is not just the convention that uses the past to hold the present in a controlled pattern of meaning: history now takes up the interesting position of confronting its own historicity» (43). History, then , is not banishe d as a thema ti c concern in postmodernist fiction; rather, it must now be understood as a textual or textualizi ng activity whcreby «facts» are submitt e<l to a prm:ess of narrativization whose endresult is th e production of «histories.» The novel's covert self-reflexivity is provided with a th ema tization in the sh ape of its «rn irr or worlds» of past and present. The metaphorical co nceit of the «mirror,» however, as it is employed structurally and th ema tically, comes to seriously un settle the hierarc hi cal relationship between past and present. The relationship between past and prese nt is never symmetrical, neither in a purely temporal nor in a structural sense within a textual construct. The un avoidabilily of the textual representation of the past unhinges the «V-shaped» re lations between past and pr esent which promise mutual illumination. As a textual construct, the past enters the domain of interpretation rather th an conforming a com plem entary relationship according to which the past unproblematically explains the present, as Hcrbert Stencil sets out to do. Indeed, the present, once represented, becomes the past, as the modernists realized to th eir dcspair in their aesthetic attempt to capture a timeless now and here. The present is that which Postmodernist Nos t<1lxia <111tl the Fan 1así:atio11 of the Hi.1 1m·ical 129 eludes re-prese11tation; t he past may be represented because it is irremediably abscnt. Withín a represcntatíonal co ntext, then. we ali live in the past. for to make Lhc present pr es ent is lo condemn it to the absence implied in reprcsentationality. For t he present to appc ar or mani fest itself as the present is al ready to foil into the realm of reprcsentation. hence to bc come a r epr esented past . This is the paradox with which ali the «artist-historians» of V, inclu<ling the rea<lcr. are facc<l . Thc «mir ror» worl<ls of past a n<l present are ma<lc to bear out the literal connotations of the metaphor of the mirror: an in verse symmetry obtains. not a hi era rc hi cal subor<lination of one tempora l domain to the other. This produces a tcmporally une ven textual landscape but it also foregrounds th e fa11tasy of historical realily. The bclatedncss of the past with respect to thc present destabilizcs any simple Jincarity which might be established between the narrative's dual strands. the skewed vectors forming its V-structure. thc quest and anti-quest of Herbert Stcncil and Bcnny Profane respectively. Ironically, the text's laboured explorations ofhistorical causality through the figure of Hcrbe11 Stencil tcnd to find thcir (ir)resolution in an acausal convcrgence with the casual nihilism of Benny Profane. The latter, indeed. concludes with the avowal. shared by the more disconccrtcd readers of Pynchon' s fiction. that «offüand I'd say 1 ha ven·¡ learn ed a goddam thing» ( 454 ). If Stenc ir s search for or igins transfonns itselfinto the origin ofthe search.likewise the exhaustive depiction of narrative and historical causa li ty brecds ih acausal antithesis through the paranoid prol i feration of hypothetical causali ti es . lf the past can be considered thc mimir in which the present seeks its identityconfcrring rellection. as Fausto sets out consciously to do and as Stencil fearfully contemplates as a solipsistic dcad-end. thc invcrsions and dimensionless distancing which this mirror imposes align its effects with the supplcmentary projections of the voyeur. In other wor ds, this particular textual mirror is self -reflexive. not reflectivc of a his torically -u nificd self, and lhus it participat cs in the ambiguities. bo th cpistemological and ontological. of fictional self-rellexiv ity. If thc mirror motif traditionally belongs to thc domains of thc fantastic. Pynchon 's novel al so extends the textual ambivalence of the fantastic to other scenarios. The «mi1rnr.» in Py nchon 's text. both th em ati zes the otherness of the fantastic and figures forth the ambivalencc of the textual. In thc ca se of V's mirror-worlds of past and present, it also reflects the fantastic textualizalions wh ich render history suspect. Appropriately it is Malta, the point of convcrgence of the text's narrati ve strands. which will functi on emblematically as a metaphorical «hub» for thc temporal «spokes» which constitute the hist or ical time of the tcxt: «in Malta where ali histo ry seemed simultaneously present. where a li streets were strait with ghosts» ( 481 ). On Malta. indeed. the «one-way a nd ongoing» (481) vector of hi s tor ical tim e which establishes thc iffevcrsiblc flow from past to present is scrio usly displaced through the island' s physical foregrounding of history as a series of textual remains or ruin s. What the i sla nd lays b are in i ts en i gmat ic mu teness is th e n otion that history is a narra t iviza tion of traces, t races whi ch are condem n ed to an i nanimate «textual stillness» (4 74) if they lack interpretive animation. Yet the ir s il ent dependence on inter pr etation also shows up, in Fau sto Maijstral's words, «the fiction of continuity, 130 José Liste Noya the fiction of cause and effect, the fiction of a humanized history endowed with 'reason'» (306). Fausto 's is not the last word on the nature of the historical in V., though, in many respects, bis denial of intrinsic mcaning in the historical process, indeed his dcnial that therc is anything like history or process, seems to be suppo11ed by thematic parallcls throughout the te xt, as well as by the noncommittal detachment of the extradiegetic narrator. At the same time, it is precisely this detachment, together with the ambivalence contained in the insistence on the textual nature of historical constructs, that postpones the possibility of determinate resolution. Fausto's comment above fits in more clearly with this line of thinking if for «humanized» we substitute the idea of a textuali:,ed history. By doing so we are merely making explicit what both Fausto and Herbert Stencil, whether forced to do so or not, adrnit is both cause and condition of their respective historical quests. lf Herbert Stencil's appears to be the more textual of the two, eonstrained as he is to Jead a surrogate existence through the diaries of bis father, Fausto in turn can only make sense of his lived experience by converting it into a textual ai1ifact, though what sense is forthcoming depends, as Fausto recognizes, on the interpretive light which is cast on bis confession. The dcscription of Malta sums up the enigmatic status of a textual history: But Valletta seemed serene in her own pasl, in thc Mediterranean wornb, in something so insulating that Zeus himself might once have quarantined her and her island for an old sin or an older pestilence. So at peace was Valletta tha t with the leas! distance she would deteriorate to mere spectacle. She eeased to existas anything quiek or pulsed. and was assumed again into the textual stillness ofher own history. (474) If detachment produces «stillness». neve11heless the «textual» nature of history also solicits the re stlessness of hcnneneutic effort. With this effort comes the possibility of the disruption of unilinear conceptions of historicity and a concornitant fantasization of the historical. In this context, the voyeuristic gaze of Stencil can be compared with the character V.'s nostalgic recreations of the past, in conlrast to Fausto's more openly textual approach. Within the text's own t en ns , the forrner approach the status of static or inanimate fetish constructions whereas the latter, Fausto, moves between the two potes to end up assuming the self - consciousl y reconstructed nature of the historical archive. Fausto makes explicit the te xtual knowledge or awareness of textuality which Stencil tries to shun. Nevertheless, frorn thc very beginning Herbert Stencil has had to confront the specifically textual origins of his ques l. V. first appears as a text, an obscure piece of writing in bis father' s diary, which ed il only be explicated in an equally textual forrn. Stencil's own «writings» attempt to endose V. within the clarifying frame of a nanativization of these textual traces . Yet the interpretive rnultiplicity of thesc narrativ es, their prornise and postponement of meaning, their multiplicalion of narrat iv e voices, their le asing habit of overlapping with ostensibly non-Stencilian nairntives and their explicit processes Postmodemist Nostalgia and the Fwztasiwtion ofthe Historirnl 131 of tcxtualization, ali of this confirms the impossibility of producing any conclusivc «official report.» At thc same time, this emphasis on the textual should not be scen as a strategy of interpretive reductionism which ironically produces a delemünate (anti-)meaning in the shape of a meaningless (textual) void. Stencil, badgered by Fausto, admits the literal textuality of bis quest: «Stencil sketched the entire history of Y. that night and strengthened a long suspicion. That it did add up only to the recunence of an initial and a few dead objects>' (445). But this, which as such does appear reductively determínate, is irnmediately contradicted by the authoritative yet ambivalent scenario traced out in the novel's Epilogue and also conlrasts with Stencil's own practice elsewhere. Thc recuITing initial and «dead» objccts are specifically textual remains which, as such, only exist within the interpretive construct of a history. This should not be seen as a way of avoiding the ontological ambi valence of such elements but, quite the contrary, as the only means of fully respecting the complexity and intractability of the ontological. As Stencil reflects ea rlier: «'Stencil would rather depend on the imperfect vision of hurnans for his history. Somehow govemment rcports, bar graphs, rnass movements are too treacherous'» (388). In other words, history or the real only exist as, in Jacques Derrida 's words, an «interpretive cxperience» ( 1988, 137), an experience which is always multiple or «imperfect» from the point of view of those modes of representation, such as those delineated by Stcncil, which presume objectivity or transparency. Tcxtuality, then, does not banish the ontological density of the real but, rather, opens it out in its full irreducibility. V.'s relentlcss textualization ofthe relationship bctween past and present brings into view those fantastic projcctions or nostalgia visions which conform history, whcther personal or collective, but also reveals their nalure as simulalions, thus undermining their cognitive and ontological status. This points to a more adversaria! use of the fantastic in its disruption of established historical modes of representation, an effect which is heightened by the explicit fictionalizations of the historiographical impulse in works like '~ The textual mirror of history is fragmented when archiva! remains are used indistinctly as fact and fiction. Indeed, the novel's processes of textual embedding and sedimentation render such a dichotomy suspect by revealing the fictionalization which underlies any dctermination of the factual and hence the surprising factuality of the fi ctional. At this early stage in Pynchon's oeuvre, the probing of the textual/ historical «tmderground» does not produce a full-scale irruption of ontological heterogeneity but the narrativc signs are there to indicate a move ment in this dir ec tion. The interpretive authority of the text's thematizations is ironically subverted by their vcry authoritativeness when contrasted with the denial of authority elsewhere in the text. The very arguments of unavoidable textuality which serve to cast in doubt Stencil's and Fausto's historical reconstructions also infiltrate the apparently authoritative accounts of the narrator, aided by the latt er' s self-distancing tactics. The undermining of the t ext's «hothouse» narratives opens on to the fantastic panorama of the «Street's» noisy silenc e. The reader , forced to exp lor e this textual realm of indeterminate ontological and episte molo gica l status, end s up self-consciously enacting the highly unsel f-conscious position of Benny Profane: 132 }OJ é Liste Noya The sto ri es. by thc time Profane hearc.I thcm. wcrc pretty much apocryphal and more fantasy than t he record it self wam mted . At no point in the twenty or so ycars the l ege nd had bee n h an d ec.I on e.lid it occur to anyone to qucsti on the old prics t' s sanity. lt is tlús way with sewer stories. They jusl are. Truth or fals i ty don 't appl y. (120) WORKSCIT ED DERRIDA. JAC QUES. Limited, file. Ec.1. Gern ld Graff. Eva nston: Northwcstern University Press. l 988. ERMARTH . ELIZABETH DEEDS. Seque/ 111 His111ry: Postmodemism 1111(1 the Cri sis of Representational Time. Pr inceton. N.J .: Princct on Univcrsity Press. 1992. H UTC HE ON . LINDA. A Poetics of Postmodemi .rni : History . Theorv , Fic tion . London : Routledgc. 1988. JAMESON, FREDRIC. «Postmodernism. or The Cultural Logic of Late Capital ism.» New Left Review 146 (1984 ): 53-92. PYNC HON , THOMAS. V. 1963. Lo ndon : Pica dor . 197.'i. WILDE . ALAN. Middle Growuls: Studies in Co11te 111p omry l1111ericc 111 Fi ction. Ph iladelphia: U. of Pennsylvania P .. 1987.