meshugginah posts

[Doug Millison]

At 9:04 AM 7/5/97, Jules Siegel wrote:
>I'm saying that the reality is mostly in his own head and has very little to
>do with anything outside.

Pynchon's novels are indeed rooted deep in "reality" at every level -
personal, emotional, historical, mythic, cosmic. Scholars and more casual
readers have traced out his references to hundreds if not thousands of
"real" events and literary works, touchstones that are firmly documented in
our collective consensus reality -- to suggest otherwise is pissing in the
wind.  As others have noted, Pynchon is not writing journalism or history
in his novels, he's creating something altogether new:  fiction, art,
backed by intention and conviction -- things that few journalists have
attempted or can understand, perhaps. Pynchon goes deeper than the
encyclopedic to tap into the feeling of the times he writes about as well
as any writer I've read. As artists have done for centuries, Pynchon also
manages to put his finger on, and bring to the surface, the deeper pulse
behind events, and he has in many cases given artistic expression to
historical facts that have only years later been documented more fully by
other, non-fiction writers -- the way the recent book "Planet Dora", for
example, fleshes out the life of those who built the V2s, which Pynchon
covered so brilliantly in GR, to name just one such example.

Thanks,
Doug


D O U G  M I L L I S O N ||||||||||||| millison at online-journalist.com