"the veracity of Pynchon's account"

[Joel Katz]

yeah, but, are you referring to, like, recursive history, or dromological 
history?


>From: MalignD at aol.com
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: Re: "the veracity of Pynchon's account"
>Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 19:17:26 EDT
>
> > <<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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