Pynchonian Rorschach

[David Casseres]

>David Caseras wrote:

Casseres, actually.  If you can take people to task for not figuring out 
you're female (with no visible evidence as far as I can recall), I'll 
take you to task for not knowing the spelling of My Name, when it's 
displayed on ev'ry post.

>>Seems to me Gravity's Rainbow has not been subjected to the same kind of 
>>fact-checking as Mason & Dixon....

>It has, actually.  Ditto for _V_.  By a number of people.  There's all sorts
>of critical literature on that around....

I was just thinking about what's here in the list discussion, which is 
what I responded to.  Professional criticism of Pynchon's earlier novels 
has been going on for years, but M&D's only out a few months and already 
people are concluding that Pynchon's concern with accuracy has lapsed.  I 
think it's unwarranted.  Someone spots a wrong date for Laplace, but how 
much did he get *right*?  We don't know yet.

>>I claim if the two novels were approached in the same way, the concern 
>>for historical accuracy would turn out to be about the same, and about as 
>>relevant to the literary intent of the two novels.

>Claim away as much as you like, but do get your facts right.

I stand corrected, or at least reminded.

>Let's do some
>justice to the amount of labour, of sheer dogged work, Pynchon put into
>those novels.

You mistake my intent.  I am just as impressed as anyone by Pynchon's 
research in his earlier work, and I didn't even *need* academic 
fact-checking to tell me how much work it must have been, or how much it 
does for the novels as literature.  I just don't see any justification 
for jumping to the conclusion that Mason & Dixon is slacking off.  To me 
the (as yet) unverified historical references in M&D are *one hundred 
percent* as convincing and effective as the ones in V. or Gravity's 
Rainbow.  Most of the "mistakes" that have been cited here are plausibly 
explainable as jokes or devices of one kind or another, parallel to 
similar departures in, say, Gravity's Rainbow.

A small koan: if no scholar had ever checked Pynchon's facts in the 
earlier novels, would the novels be any less wonderful?




Cheers,
David