scholarship or "conspiracy theories"? WAS re:thoughts

[Doug Millison]

Paul Mackin wrote a thoughtful response to Max's post. But I wonder --
given that many serious Pynchon scholars take seriously Pynchon's artistic,
historical, and political allusions and expend considerable time and energy
in tracking them to see what their referents might add to our understanding
of Pynchon's books -- if it's really fair to put that activity in the
category of constructing "conspiracy theories"? Such a label would seem to
marginalize their scholarship. Given the fact that Pynchon peppers his text
so obviously with such allusions, weaving such a dense subtext, my
questions to the analytical Pynchon reader or scholar is, how can you
ignore it and why would you want to?

Answering Paul's objection to this reading of the English Candy episode, I
wouldn't characterize Pynchon's use  the Holocaust in GR as making any of
the points about the Holocaust that were obvious in the 60s or 70s.  By
tying U.S. corporations, through multinational cartels and tangled lines of
ownership and alliances, to Nazi crimes, Pynchon draws our attention to an
aspect of WWII that many people (U.S. automakers among them) still seek to
minimize if not deny outright -- drawing our attention to what is, in fact,
remains a "secret history" of WWII.

Pynchon also wants us to have the conversation about the "meaning of
meaning" that Paul refers to -- this becomes very obvious in M&D. He also
wants us to just have fun reading his books, laughing at things like the
Mrs. Quoad episode.  And -- why exclude this possibility? -- he also
invites (cf. Terrance's quote from Driblette in COL49 in a post earlier
today; Pynchon does this sort of thing in all his books) readers to dig in,
trace his allusions, and be surprised at where they sometimes lead and how
the allusions sometimes create a "second story" (Dugdale's term, isn't it?)
with uncanny applicability.

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