"the veracity of Pynchon's account"

[Otto]

<<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.

But the way you paraphrase it isn't the way it has been said above: "The
problem with history is it pretends to be true."

"pernicious" -- strange word choice that needs explanation. It's only
pernicious for the official version of history.

> Pynchon wrote a novel.  That was his choice and, one must
> assume, his goal was to write a good one.

Why not let him say what he thinks about it instead of your speculation:

"I think we all have tried to deal with the slow escalation of our
helplessness and terror in the few ways open to us, from not thinking about
it to going crazy from it. Somewhere on this spectrum of impotence is
writing fiction about (...)."
("Slow Learner"-Intro, p. 19)

> 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.
>

Paranoia is used in the book as a total increase of cause and effect. Again,
see Lance W. Ozier's "The Calculus of Transformation" on that, got it only
in German. If the world is explained by a total law of "cause and effect" it
leads to stasis:

"isn't that every paranoid's wish? to perfect methods of immobility?" (572)
(quoted by Ozier)

> But one is a fool to think that Pynchon is in any way writing reliable
> history.

The purpose of calling history fiction isn't the simple reversal that
fiction could become the "true history" -- whoever says this is indeed a
fool. A novel always remains of course fiction, there never has been an
American soldier whose cock could show where the rockets would come down.

> 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?

The question makes no sense, he wrote the book. But not because he's so
paranoid that he believes that everything connects. That's the paranoid's or
Puritan's view of things. Paranoia and Puritanism are no healthy states of
mind. But there are of course some connections. The problem with history is,
as Kent wrote, indeed that "it pretends to be true." The problem isn't that
Pynchon had claimed to have written "reliable history" -- he never did so.
He claimed to have written fiction.

Otto