"the veracity of Pynchon's account"

[MalignD at aol.com]

> <<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. >>
> 
All of this is mundane and the blah blah blah of "history is fiction because 
it's necessarily selective" would be banal if it weren't pernicious.

Pynchon wrote a novel.   That was his choice and, one must assume, his goal 
was to write a good one.  The "paranoid history" aspect of the novel, the idea 
that everthing connects, is a big part of what makes the book tantalizing.   
It is also what Pynchon used, rather than more traditional story structure, to 
rope the whole thing together.   And it's very effective.

But one is a fool to think that Pynchon is in any way writing reliable 
history.   Does one think that, if Pynchon found that everything didn't quite 
connect, actually--that history rarely if ever connects in the, finally, simplistic 
(if satisfying) ways that he suggests--that he'd have abandoned the book?


>   
> 
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