Internet Perfidity

[David Casseres]

Andrew, you say

>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?

I wish I had my copy of M&D with me.  Somewhere not too long before p. 
400 is Cherrycoke's own musing about History, mostly about what it is not 
-- neither the recording of facts nor "Remembrance, which belongs to the 
People."  It seems to me the novelist's art, at least in Pynchon's case, 
is closer to Remembrance, in this sense, than to history -- though 
fiction mingles with both.


Cheers,
David