Internet Perfidity

[andrew at cee.hw.ac.uk]

Peter Giordano writes:
> Fiction is a vital force and I want it in my life but I want to be able so
> sort out fact from fiction - Perhaps those who need to create myths about
> the private lives of their favorite authors should consider writing novels
> - It is a time-honored genre of the novel (see for example Colin Macinnes'
> novel about Shakespeare THREE YEARS TO PLAY)

Finally, this debate comes back on topic. The difference between fact
and fiction is a major theme in GR and M&D, particularly wrt history.
In GR Pynchon recreates what can be verified almost perfectly yet the
parts for which no verification appears to exist (e.g. the existence
off Blacks in the German Forces, let alone black squads like the
Schwarzkommando) would only convince us in our most paranoid moments.
That's the joke but its also the moral lesson. History is accepted in
major part on the mythic strength of the accounts historians revive
from the surviving relics i.e. precisely because of the fictional
elements which are woven in to animate the dead bones (cf. Browning's
The Ring and the Book). In M&D Pynchon uses narrative embedding to
mimic the layering of historical accounts as they are transmitted hand
to hand to hand to the reader. Yet at the end of this chain of
transmission we do not receive multiply indirect reported speech. We
are handed a participant's eye picture. It would not be much of a
novel if we heard only the voice of Wicks Cherrycoke recalling `He
saids' and `he replieds'. Similarly, a history would not be much of a
history if it did not locate us in the minds of the people's it treats
of, display us the terrain of the lands it surveys, school us in the
concepts of the culture it critiques. True, a historian's primary duty
is to investigate, record and assess the value of source materials but
the aim in doing so, the whole point of doing so, is to present us,
readers of history, with the big picture. Not so very different to the
novelist's art, eh?


Andrew Dinn
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How do you know but ev'ry bird that cuts the airy way
Is an immense world of pleasure clos'd by your senses five