MDDM Ch. 70 Prolegomena

[Terrance]

Dave Monroe wrote:
> 
> >From David Foreman, "Historical Documents Relating to
> Mason & Dixon," Pynchon and Mason & Dixon, ed. Brooke
> Horvath and Irving Malin (Newark: U of Delaware P,
> 2000), pp. 143-66 ...
> 
> "There is a game among Thomas Pynchon's readers.  In
> order to cope with the enormous amount of scientific,
> historical, pop-cultural, and artistic references in
> Pynchon's novels (some of them of dubious accuracy),
> the reader must ask at some point, 'Is this true or is
> he making this up?'" (p. 143)


"Is this true or is he making it up?" 

Why must the reader ask this question? 

More often than not the question is not, 

did P make this up or is this a fact?

but something like, 

Did Pynchon change some the facts (date, time, place, what anachronism
or absurdity is in play here?)? And if so, why? 

Some examples: 

Unless you happen to be an expert in 
Gnostic texts you are not going to even think to ask this question when
you read what turns out to be a bogus citation of a gnostic text in GR.
The citation is bogus. He made it up. But you won't know this unless you
happen to be an expert in Gnostic texts or if you "play the game" and
look it up. 

Some of the references, as noted, are not bogus but of dubious accuracy.
When we look these up, but  we can't always be sure that P has
deliberately altered the facts or some of the facts. So he may get the
time, place, all the proper nouns, and so on correct, but the date is
incorrect. Is it an anachronism or did he make a mistake? 


> 
> "To compound these difficulties, Pynchon' novels often
> present imagined events and people as if they are
> true." (p. 143)
> 
> Once again, what work of fiction doesn't, but ...

But it's the compounding that makes a difference. 
As with the use of metonymy or the use of other arts metonymically (a
conspicuous feature or characteristic of the Modern novel BTW), or the
use of staged scenes or dreams or film or whatever Modern techniques P
employs, it's the compounding that makes the difference. 

The game may not be a game at all, but only what American authors or
prose fiction have been up to for quite some time. 

Putting aside all this postmodern jargon we could turn to a genre study
to make sense of why P compounds so. 


Bakhtin. 




   
  1) Carnival
  2) quest-motif serves to test philosophical truths
  3) the trilevelled construction of "earth," a "nether world"
  and an "olympus" 
  4) dissolution or merging of identities, in particular, the
  motif of the double.
  5) extraordinary freedom of philosophical invention within
  the plot
  6) combination of free fantasy, symbolism and --on
  occasion--the mystical religious element with the crude
  naturalism of low life
  7) the concern with ultimate philosophical positions
  8) the experimental fantasticality in the handling of
  perspective which can imperceptibly shift from ant's to
  bird's view
  9) eccentric or scandalous behaviour--spectacular
  stomach-turning passages
  10) utopian--or, to be more accurate, dystopian--elements of
  the quest motif
  11) the juxtaposition of items normally distant, often in
  oxymoronic combinations
  12) the parody of various genres and the mixture of prose
  and verse diction
  13) the variety of styles
  15) topicality and publicistic quality--WWII novel that
  illustrates ideological issues of the 1960s