Pynchon as historian?

[Alan Westrope]

On Sat, 5 Jul 1997, Joaquin Stick <dmaus at email.unc.edu> wrote:
[much text snipped...]

>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?

At the risk of being thought a pedantic nuisance, I'll mention that an
eminent Russian-born entomologist has argued persuasively that the insect
in question is a beetle, not, as commonly thought, a cockroach.

Or so I am told by my friend Vivian d'Arc Blume, who asks me to append,
"...truth, whose mother is history, rival of time...," for reasons that
are unclear to me.

-- 
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