"the veracity of Pynchon's account"

[kent mueller]

Yes, it's banal, mundane and basic.  Yes there is a history of actual facts,
things that happened and are known and can't be denied.  More and more so.
More facts sooner, and more partisan versions that are harder to verify.
But history is or has been always selective, and now you can select your
history.

Works like GR or Gaddis' Recognition's or JR incorporate history in a way
that is somehow signaled "This is an obscure fact I have found, incorporated
within a fictional text, possibly worthy of research on your own, dear
reader, whether you are a PHD candidate writing a thesis or a wing nut
autodidact sitting in a coffee house."  But you're right to say GR is just a
novel, a very good one (#3 in my all time favorites), The paranoid
conspiratorial aspect ties it together in a way that Naked Lunch fails to
do, and was never meant to do, for Burroughs, and I wouldn't take my facts
from either book.

I certainly don't think Pynchon presents a version of truth or history per
se, in fact I think much of GR is concerned with the idea that history can't
be presented with certainty, and that's tantalizing in itself; its paranoid
history is presented in a tone of self-doubt, by a preterite omniscient
narrator who's a bit of a schlub.  A-a-a-nd connecting everything at the end
wasn't his concern.  It is a work of fiction, and tries it's best to act
like one.

Kent Mueller   

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


<<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?


  

 



This message scanned for viruses by CoreComm <http://www.core.com/>



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20041022/0368d1a3/attachment.html>