"the veracity of Pynchon's account"

[kent mueller]

The problem with history is it pretends to be true.  Sometimes it is.  So
which is the correct history, the true account?  For a most recent example:
the Swiftboat Veterans or John Kerry?
Did Truman drop the atom bombs to save millions of lives, or because the
Japanese were about to surrender to the Russians?  The Kennedy
assassination?  I've read so many versions of Watergate that I still don't
have a clue whether it was about the bestiality photos of a White House
secretary or a 2nd 500,000 Howard Hughes loan or something else entirely.
There are the cold hard facts, and then a story wove around them.

Fiction doesn't have to pretend, even when it is true.  That's what makes it
of a higher order, even when it's bad.

Not sure why I'm responding to the post of a complete jerk, but this Jolly
phuck could actually add something if he pulled up his pants and took the
blunt out of his mouth, and put down the Goddamn baseball bat.  Too bad.
His flames are a faulty Bic.

Kent Mueller   


Visit KM art's web site at http://www.execpc.com/~artkm/

From: jolly <jollyrogerx99 at yahoo.com>
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 12:46:00 -0700 (PDT)
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: Re: "the veracity of Pynchon's account"


"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 tthis 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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