pynchon-l-digest V2 #1686

[Doug Millison]

ourj:
>If two historians disagree about what happened, or about why it happened,
>then *at least* one of them is writing something which might also be called
>"fiction", isn't she?

Bogus dichotomy.  The two historians provide differing views of the 
event, each of which will offer some admixture of accuracy and 
misperception or fabrication due to perspective, cultural 
conditioning, brain chemistry, wishful thinking, criminal intent, or 
many other possible factors.  Check out Kurosawa's film, Rashomon, 
for a classic exposition of the underlying phenomenon.

Doesn't the postmodern view build on the ability to hold and honor 
multiple perspectives simultaneously?

Setting one historian against another, as rj would have us do here, 
and accusing one of writing "fiction" would also seem to replicate 
that We/They dichotomy that Pynchon eloquently shows to be the root 
of much evil, so to speak -- Bersani's essay on paranoia in Pynchon's 
work is worth reading in this regard. It would also seem to creep 
towards the perpetuatation of the sort of "persecution and hatred" 
that he was raving about the other day with regard to those poor, 
persecuted war criminals and the corporations that profited from 
their crimes and the poor little rich boy Bush Jr., or at the very 
least perpetuate a nasty kind of name-calling that's hardly the soul 
of genteel academic debate.

On another subject, still wondering if, as you said the other day, 
Pynchon renders justice to Major Marvy as some sort of representative 
of post-War America -- which is, of course, one of the ways that 
Hollander reads Pynchon, for which you have excoriated him soundly in 
this forum on many occasions, for linking characters and situations 
in Pynchon's novels to people and situations in the "real" world of 
history and politics without textual justification that meets your 
standards -- isn't Pynchon doing the same to Blicero/Weissmann as a 
representative of pre- and WWII-era Nazi German in his portrayal of 
him as a monster, diseased, predatory, in love with death?
-- 
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