Heresy Of The Day

[Paul Mackin]

On Wed, 9 Aug 2000, J Suete wrote:

> Ah, I would like to return this copy of 
> Gravity's Rainbow.
> 
> Anything wrong sir?  
> 
> It's a fiction.
> 

Oh but sir, it's HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAfiction. It's DIFFERENT from history
but  not OTHER than history. In other words it's carefully crafted so that
you safely need infer no distasteful hierarchical binary opposition
within.


> 
> A fiction? But what about that letter Pynchon read or was it a letter
> he wrote about the Dora slaves and the Herero? Whatever! In the Zone,
> that’s in the fictional story I call Gravity’s R, there are Zone
> Herero. And guess what? These Zone  Herero regard the rocket as both
> their Destiny and their Torah.

He said the situations of the two peoples were similar, then turned around
and wrote GR, in which, for whatever reason and with whatever interpretive
consequences, he gave a DIFFERENT twist to the history of one persecuted
people.


			P.