"the veracity of Pynchon's account"

[jolly]

"concern with the veracity of Pynchon�s account?" 
 
GR, as postmodernist Ur-text, and the cottage industry it has spawned (as well as much of literary studies as a whole), reveal, I assert, a sort of narcissistic, a-historical, anti-empirical mode of perception, which, even if allegedly leftist ( i,e the concern with the "preterite" and the occasional anarchist themes), is a form of , yes, bourgeois hedonism, if not quasi-aristocratic nihilism.  So that is a project I am working on.  Additionally, the incessant pynchonian zaniness of GR is an improper and, indeed, disrespectful aesthetic response to an event of monumental tragic proportions such as WWII.       
 
 
"Fiction and literature certainly have other things to offer besides factual
information (something any decent student of lit. th. knows, so I don�t see why this knowledge would undercut the critical enterprise)." 
 
Yeah, that's the party line, which anyone who has taken a few lit classes learns to parrot.  I simply have grown to disagree with this priviledging of literature over history, and over "factual" investigations, whether economic or biological. I always enjoyed history classes more than the rhetorical circle jerking of Eng-wish or American lit. anyways.  Lit.  types might tell you about Hamlet's crisis of indecision;  can they tell you about Oliver Cromwell or the sick phuck that was King James or King Henry VIII? They can tell you about Melville's "whiteness of the whale" , but can they discuss Jeffersonian rationalism, or Lincoln's monetary reform or even the Civil War battles?  And they can discuss GR and Osbie, the "preterite",  and the Zone and the White Visitation and  Pointsman, ad nauseam, but can they say discuss the Beer Hall Putsch, or  purge of the Social Democrats such as Kautsky?   Some of them can surely.  But my point is that the lit. biz has become--and I think this is
 over the last 50 years or so--this bizarre pseudo-psychological field, and those "scholars" working in this field are not required to verify or substantiate their ideas either inductively (evidence, data) or deductively; of course neither are novelists.  Po-mo has, I think, just made the problem worse.  

		
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