Accordingly, the extent of the man’s temporal horizon is that of the war itself: as the end of the war approaches - ‘as the pinchers east and west continue their slow reflex contraction’ - he speaks of ‘darkness invading his mind, of an attrition of self …’. In this context, war appears not merely as a phenomenon constituted by invasions, but as an invasive force in its own right - one that breaches the psychological ‘border’ that separates the subject from its external environment, evacuates and occupies, and eventually dissolves the border completely. In Gravity’s Rainbow, this conception is taken to its logical extreme in the description of a patient at the ‘White Visitation’ mental hospital, a ‘long-time schiz who believes that he is World War II’.1 The man resists the intrusion of the public realm via the media - he ‘gets no newspapers, refuses to listen to the wireless’ - but, for him, World War II is uniquely all-encompassing and all-pervasive: ‘still, the day of the Normandy invasion somehow his temperature shot up to 104°’. Please become a fan of "New Books in History" on Facebook if you haven't already.A notable facet of Pynchon’s and Ballard’s fictional reconstructions of World War II is a sense that the conflict is peculiarly threatening to the division between public and private realms of experience and temporality.
We should thank Kees for telling us the tale in this fascinating account.īy the way, Kees is also editor of The Historian, a journal of popular history that you should really read. It was in such books that Europeans learned about the "discoveries," and by such books that modern publishing was born. The results were part fact, part fiction, and all international bestseller. They assigned him a ghost writer who listened to Struys' stories and, where he found them wanting, embellished them with material purloined from other travel books. Of course Stuys could neither read nor write, but that didn't stand in the way of the publishers. He went everywhere, did everything, and when he got back from his adventures he was asked by some profit-seeking Dutch publishers to "contribute" his tales to a book about his travels. Sturys was an illiterate, itinerant, indefatigable Dutch sail maker. A Seventeenth-Century Dutch Globetrotter (Palgrave MacMillan, 2008). And after they made port at home, they often "wrote" books about their travels for readers eager to hear about what was "out there"-or at least what these travelers said was "out there." Take the subject of Kees Boterbloem new book The Fiction and Reality of Jan Struys. But the "Age of Discovery" continued well into the seventeenth century as Europeans continued to travel the globe in search of riches, fame and adventure. You know, Columbus, Magellan and all that. When we speak of the "Age of Discovery," we usually mean the later fifteenth and sixteenth century.
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