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point where it is manageably inanimate." However, finding plots
for history is an aesthetic as well as a political activity and the
Yeats-Joyce use of myth as Eliot articulated it was designed spe–
cifically as "a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving shape and
significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which
is contemporary history." According to Pynchon such mythic proce–
dure involves "nacreous inference, poetic license and forcible dis–
location of personality" into a past where we don't belong and
have "no right in." Such mythologizing forces the contingent into
a pattern and the fiction of cyclical history, versions of which
appear in Yeats, Joyce and Eliot, is no better than the fictions of
continuity, progress or the Hegelian fiction of history endowed with
reason or spirit. Cyclical history, so often embodied in the structure
of the quest, literally "stencilizes" everything; that is, if the Waste
Land experience recurs in Dante, the Jacobeans and Baudelaire,
then the present is a repetition of the past.
If
Stephen is Telemachus
and Bloom, Ulysses, and both are Hamlet and Shakespeare, then
the past is a stencil for the present and the future, and history is
mechanical repetition. Mythic forms like conspiracy theories of
history make the world "manageably inanimate."
Pynchon makes this point in the novel's epilogue, devoted prim–
arily to Stencil's father. At the end of a long life of espionage activi–
ties in the British foreign service, the old Victorian realizes that his–
tory's plot can never be known. "Short of examining the entire his–
tory of each individual participating, . . . short of anatomizing each
soul, what hope has anyone of understanding" a historical situation;
unless we know
"all
the accidents - a variation in the weather, the
availability of a ship," our interpretations of history are only fictions.
Finally the elder Stencil comes to understand that history, like in–
animate objects, has no human meaning. "Any Situation takes shape
from events much lower than the merely human. It has, like
God.,
its own logic and its own justification for being and the best you
can do is cope" with events, with accidents, with contingencies. There
is no unity of paradoxes, no Brooksian drama, in history.
Pynchon's emphasis on myths of history nicely rounds out the
contemporary critique of modernist notions of myth and metaphor.
We have in these contemporaries a sense that modernist literary
conceptions violate the indifferent nature of things, the unique other-
