pynchon-l-digest V2 #1844

[Doug Millison]

At the very least, I'm glad to have highlighted the fact that 
"jbor's" historical authority on WWII,  A.J.P. Taylor, is a historian 
of WWII origins favored by neo-Nazis -- an unfortunate reflection on 
a revisionist historian who, despite the shortcomings of his work, is 
not considered a Holocaust denier.

It might be worth considering why Pynchon makes one of GR's most 
wounded characters, Brigadier Pudding, a detail- and 
contingency-oriented historian (plodding along with his 
can't-see-the-forest-for-the-trees Things That Can Happen in European 
Politics) who apparently doesn't have a clue about the bigger forces 
that swept him (and the rest of the world) into the hells of WWI and 
WWII, forces which continue to keep him in ignorance and impel him to 
self-destructive behavior.

Pynchon's focus on historical detail and his questioning of 
cause-and-effect (he questions it but doesn't altogether undermine it 
of course, utilizing it to move his story along and tidy up plot ends 
as necessary) might make it tempting to put him in Taylor's box,  but 
that fails  when we note that Pynchon does not refrain from drawing 
sweeping conclusions about the causes of the War in GR -- the sort of 
causal explanation that Paul Kennedy faults Taylor for not providing 
(in the Atlantic Monthly article I pointed out and which "jbor" found 
so much to his/her liking); most obviously, GR shows a War caused by 
the needs of multinational corporations to find new markets, and by 
the needs of a certain kind of macho mentality (perhaps best 
expressed in the Nazi travesties Pynchon depicts, and in Major 
Marvey) bent on conquest and destruction as they find expression in 
war and the rape of the earth -- ordinary individuals seem nearly 
powerless in the face of  these forces that bring into being, shape, 
and feed the War.

Given Pynchon's attraction to history and the extraordinary attention 
he pays to the historical material that he works with, I've wondered 
why he didn't choose to write history, and synthesize a worldview 
that way.  Fiction frees him from the sort of methodological and 
theoretical boundaries that constrict the historian (hence the sort 
of criticism that can legitimately be raised by the likes of Paul 
Kennedy and DeLong, when their historian colleagues, such as Taylor, 
all into question their own work because of their own lack of 
methodological rigour or selective vision) -- Pynchon can zoom in on 
historical minutiae then zoom out to show the big picture of powerful 
forces at work in history; by bringing contemporary references into 
his historical settings, he can use WWII in GR to describe the Cold 
War and Vietnam during the time in which he writes GR, for example. 
And have a lot of fun as he does this, I expect.

  FrodeauxB at aol.com:
"[snip] A-and Doug, be careful casting your pearls before swine, not 
that there's anything wrong with that either. "

Toss a tid-bit, watch the five of them root around in their own muck, 
twisting into knots and contradicting themselves and baldly lying. 
It's quite amusing, actually, although a bit pathetic to see how they 
appear to be visualizing this conversation as some sort of physical 
encounter, in which they imagine they are physically beating me 
("drubbing" was the word Malign used, I think, and yapping dog 
"Morris" tends to those sorts of tropes, too) -- that's a bit creepy, 
but no accounting for taste, whatever gets you off I guess.
-- 
d  o  u  g    m  i  l  l  i  s  o  n  <http://www.online-journalist.com>