Pynchon as historian? (was: meshugginah posts)

[Joaquin Stick]

On Sat, 5 Jul 1997, Jules Siegel wrote:

> Vineland is a caricature by someone who did not have very much close contact
> and whose personal lifestyle is the opposite of the real world many seem to
> believe he's attempting to portray. My point isn't that this is bad writing,
> (although I could make that one, if I wished to be the target of the usual
> inane flaming) but that this was my world and it grates me to see it
> reflected in such an awkward and unfeeling parody. It's also annoying that
> others seem to think this is the way things really were, that Thomas Pynchon
> had a handle on the underground.

Who are these people? Does anybody who reads Pynchon as a "historian" have
a firm grasp on what a satirist's task or raison d'etre is? I think
Stephen Greenblatt & Co. have made such a muddle of lit. crit. that it's
now improssible to look at a work of literature outside of its "historical
context." Let us make no mistake about it, Pynchon is a satirist, not a
historian. Whether he chooses to realistically portray Northern
California, Alexandria, Nordhausen, Mount Vernon or anywhere else is
ultimately somewhat immaterial. He ain't talking about then, he's talking
about NOW! Using the historical episodes and a conscious misapprehension
of that past (through his intentional anachronism or outright changing of
the story--either the events or the dialect) as a commentary on the
results that have come down to the present is as old a satirical device as
Aristophanes and should be seen as such. You can't mine a satire for
historical detail accurately, no matter what the New Historicists tell
you.

> The thread started because Vaska commented that he seldom gets the wrong
> word. In my experience in reading his work, he frequently is using words he
> doesn't really quite appreciate in ways that he doesn't seem to have
> carefully considered. In the last couple of months I have pretty much read
> Gravity's Rainbow in full. I found many things in it that I admired, but
> authenticity wasn't usually one of them. Vineland was quite disappointing,
> to say the least, and not merely for the reasons I'm discussing here.

Not to beat a dead horse, but why the @$^%*#!! does this matter in the
context of what the novel is doing? Authenticity in a novel that involves
a story of a sado-masochistic German officer putting himself into a secret
rocket to eventually blow up the theatre in which you are watching a movie
of the book you've been reading. This IS NOT HISTORY. Pardon the shouting,
but I simply don't expect Pynchon to be historically accurate to the
painful minutiae, especially when his commentary is temporally dislocated
BY DEFINITION. Should Kafka have studied the mind of the cockroach more?
Should we villify Twain for not capturing the speech of King Arthur's
Court (or the Connecticut Yankee, for that matter) more accurately? 
 
> This kind of discussion is important because people are trying to understand
> an infuriatingly difficult writer. There's all kinds of close textual
> analysis going on. The presumption is usually that Pynchon is basing his use
> of these words and figures of speech on some reality and that what he means
> can be deduced by careful study and reference to the presumed sources.

Huh? Where is this presumption coming from? I don't presume that he
thought Washington spoke Yiddish any more than I presume that Yusef the
Factotum thought to himself in Queen's English. This presumption may not
be as universal as you believe. 
 
> I'm saying that the reality is mostly in his own head and has very little to
> do with anything outside. These are invented worlds and they may have some
> internal consistency but they do not correlate very well with the sources.

YES, YES, YES!! (if by "invented" you mean fictional/literary/didactic
rather than documentary/true-to-"facts"/historically accurate and
"sources" to mean the established historical perception of the past). Let
me submit that if you can be indignant that Pynchon's "counter-history" of
the Northern California scene is incongruous with your experience of the
same, then Pynchon is equally within his artistic "rights" to be skeptical
of the constructed "histories" of the past and is positing his vision of
that time in order to make an artistic point. Yes, I understand you claim
and have "experience" of that time period whereas Pynchon is only
recreating an "experience" of the time periods he deals with, but any
construction in writing of either instance inevitably involved selective
memory (both chronicler and artist must edit some) and it is the
difference between the goals of the two that make this whole discussion
polarized. Pynchon isn't chronicling Aptos and environs, he's satirizing
parts of it and frankly, despite considerable personal "experience" with a
similar scene to that described in _Vineland_, I am not above the
admission that there is a WHOOOOOOOLE hell of a lot that can be satirized
in such a lifestyle (just as there is in most anything...) 

<<Clinton/Pynchon "poser" rant clipped for reasons of sanity maintenance>>
 
> Despite what you say, historians do use fictional works as descriptive of a
> time. Fiction is often political propaganda. It affects the way people think
> about real-world issues and how they act on them. Pynchon's works do provide
> a very accurate description of certain states of mind that were and are
> typical of our time. The rest of it is not very accurate in a historical
> sense. Some of it is even damaging, as in his drug gluttony scenes in
> Gravity's Rainbow. Mascaro took me to task for even mentioning drugs when
> talking about Pynchon's work. He felt this was politically uncool from the
> drug using perspective. But it's OK for Pynchon to draw these absurdly
> skewed and often ugly caricatures of drug users that have less merit than
> Cheech & Chong and none of their warmth?

Then the historians are the ones fucking up. It is like using a science
textbook as an example of literature from a period (okay, okay, Francis
Bacon and Thomas Browne can be read as literature too...I'm speaking more
of post-science/humanities cleaving here)...the goals of the writer
differ, and therefore the analysis should as well. I mean, is _A Farewell
to Arms_ a proper historical document of the Italian front in WWI? I agree
that it is evocative of the period, but you can't hope to use it as a
proper history book.
 
> I am not criticizing Pynchon as an artist. I am informing those who consider
> him some kind of historian that he is a primary source only sui generis,
> that is of himself and not of the world he portrays. In these novels and
> short stories he captured some of the spirit of our time at the expense of
> its historical reality. You don't think that matters because you weren't
> part of that historical reality. I was. You don't like what People magazine
> does to people. To me, Thomas Pynchon is the literary version of People and
> uses pretty much the same techniques. People is exquisitely well done from a
> technical sense. That doesn't mean it can't be criticized for what it does
> in a political sense. The same goes for Thomas Pynchon.

One last time: Pynchon is not a historian. Anyone who consideres him to be
is, in my humble opinion, a Berkeley professor with serious brain damage
(pace Doctor G'blatt, you know you're a nutcase, tho'...). If you resent
your culture being parodied because you lived it, I suggest that you
desensitize yourself completely from all media. If I see another Gen-Xer
portrayed like a fucking Mountain Dew commercial and that used as the
standard for an entire generation I will throw up. By the way, you weren't
a part of historical reality. That term is a full-blown oxymoron. You were
a part of your personal historical reality and Pynchon did not subtitle
Vineland as "A Parody of Jules' Siegel's Perception of the World" and if
his "political" impact is so injurious I suspect that is peripheral rather
than intentional. I'd rather read Pynchon's satire than P.J. O'Rourke or
Lush Rimbaugh any old day. At least he understands the difference between
satire and "fact".

D. Alfred "20-something and never owned a skateboard or Nine-Inch Nails
album" Fledermaus