history & fiction & Pynchon & V.

[Doug Millison]

I'm still not sure what it is about DeLong's article that is so 
upsetting to my P-list colleagues.  DeLong asks a serious question 
about historians that would seem to echo Pynchon's concerns about 
history and fiction, especially as we see this directly addressed 
in M&D.  Pynchon obviously puts a lot of history into his fictions, 
and he plays some interesting games with his historical tid-bits in 
his fictional settings.  Why?  What can we learn from the way Pynchon 
uses his fictional character Esther -- who shares a name with a 
Holocaust-preventer in the eponymously-named Old Testament book -- to 
comment on the Holocaust in V., for example?

DeLong addresses an issue that strikes a nerve.  If not historians, 
whom can we trust to tell us the truth? It's a question that goes to 
the heart of Pynchon's fictional project: it's at the center of 
Slothrop's fears as he gradually learns, to use a Firesign Theatre 
phrase that was popular at the time Pynchon was composing GR, that 
"everything you know is wrong."  The media lie, politicians lie, 
parents lie to their children. This question motivates Mason and 
Dixon as they come to learn that they are being used as pawns, too; 
it's at the center of Vineland with its critique of the way TV 
manipulates and distorts history.

DeLong:
"Indeed, it is hard to see how anyone could write a history that was not
informed by their current political agenda, or make leaps of interpretation
or judgments about sources that would strike others as highly strained or
worse. For nearly two centuries the touchstones of the historian's task have
been those of Leopold von Ranke: to relate the past "wie es eigentlich
gewesen"--how it essentially was (see Ranke, 1981); and not to cram the past
into categories that make sense only in the present, for "every age must be
regarded as immediate to God" (Ranke, quoted in Fritz Stern, Varieties of
History). But we don't know how it essentially was: we weren't there. And it
is not enough to simply present the documents and records we have: they only
give us knowledge of the skeleton, not the whole animal. So a historian must
recreate the past, must imagine it. As Evans (1997, pp. 21-22) summarizes
George M. Trevelyan, history was "a mixture of the scientific (research),
the imaginative or speculative (interpretation), and the literary
(presentation).... The historian who would give the best interpretation of
the Revolution was the one who, 'having... weighted all the important
evidence... has the largest grasp of intellect, the warmest human sympathy,
the highest imaginative power...'"

DeLong's article (and the judge's finding last year that Irving's 
libel suit against Lipstadt was groundless, which prompted the Evans 
book that DeLong reviews) suggests, to me, that it's worthwhile to 
question the way historians deal with the facts of history and weave 
their own prejudices into the histories they write -- as Pynchon 
would seem to be doing in his work.



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