Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Key to Abbreviations
- Reminiscence and Re-Creation in Contemporary American Fiction
- Introduction
- 1 A Disruption of Sensibility
- 2 The Transition to Post-Modernism: Norman Mailer and a New Frontier in Fiction
- 3 Thomas Pynchon: An Interface of History and Science
- 4 John Barth: Clio as Kin to Calliope
- Conclusion: “Subjective Historicism”
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- PERMISSIONS
4 - John Barth: Clio as Kin to Calliope
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Key to Abbreviations
- Reminiscence and Re-Creation in Contemporary American Fiction
- Introduction
- 1 A Disruption of Sensibility
- 2 The Transition to Post-Modernism: Norman Mailer and a New Frontier in Fiction
- 3 Thomas Pynchon: An Interface of History and Science
- 4 John Barth: Clio as Kin to Calliope
- Conclusion: “Subjective Historicism”
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- PERMISSIONS
Summary
“We'll be moving out again. Infantry always gets the worst of it.” The lieutenant lit a cigarette. “But, God, I wish the campaign was over.”
“What for? We'll just have to write the history when it is. That's always the worst time.”
–Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (1948)“I'm Morehouse Professor of Latent History at the Osmond Institute…. This professorship deals with events that almost took place, events that definitely took place but remained unseen and unremarked on, … and events that probably took place but were definitely not chronicled…. One of the major thrusts of latent history is to avoid a narrow purview. We're presently assembling evidence about the French Revolution indicating that a dissident faction of the sans-culottes used to assemble secretly under cover of dark for the sole purpose of wearing culottes…. It's axiomatic that people in the Middle Ages went to bed early. We're studying this to learn what effect it had on the Hundred Years' War dragging on for as long as it did. Latent history never tells us where we stand in the sweep of events but rather how we can get out of the way.”
–Don DeLillo, Great Jones Street (1973)“Historians have always known that history and the narrative of history never wholly coincide, ” says J. Hillis Miller (“Narrative and History” 461). So have novelists. If those of the twentieth century view history as an ongoing process, they also realize that any written account of history conveys only parts of that process.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Reminiscence and Re-creation in Contemporary American Fiction , pp. 106 - 136Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989