IG Farben & French Shakespeare.1&2

[MalignD at aol.com]

I understand what you're asking and they're certainly fair questions.  I'm 
not sure I can answer them in the terms you lay out, but I won't try to dodge 
them.

I think that art, all art worth talking about, is about art.  Art, original 
art, creates its own terms.  If everything in "the real world" referred to in 
GR proved false, would GR be a lesser novel?  If so, by what criteria?  

For all his convoluted irony, no one is more articulate and honest about this 
than Nabokov.  To paraphrase him--one reaches the end of a novel, the artist 
runs down the curtain, the show is over, everything dissolves.  The end.  Art 
is artifice.  

He said also (also in paraphrase) that his critical faculty was the hair on 
the back of his neck.  I agree.

One does not achieve great art setting out to write history or pedagogy.  If 
that were true, Michener might by Pynchon (or Gibbon).

An example.  Faulkner, for many, defines--is the historian of--the 
ante-bellum south.  Is it because he was accurate, because his rendering of th
e south after the war, particularly in the 20th century, is rigorously 
researched, could stand up to scrutiny?  I would argue no. He may or may not 
be accurate, but that's not the source of his persuasiveness and power.  Put 
another way, were Faulkner's novels the work of an equally knowledgeable, 
equally insightful hack, they'd likely be undiscussed and unremembered.  At 
issue is the power of art, the enormous power, in this case, of Faulkner's 
writing.  I have no idea whether Faulkner is fair or accurate, nor do I know 
or particularly care about his own prejudices or biases.  I do know that his 
art is powerful and seductive, a mountain of prose that (in the moment one is 
reading it) obliterates most of what might be argued against it. But not on 
the strength of its demonstrable truth; rather on the strength of its beauty 
and magnificence.

So with Pynchon in GR.