First ATD hatchet job

[Daniel Julius]

Couple things --

I agree with Morris that part of this criticism speaks directly to our
previous discussion of "flat" v. "round" characters, particularly the part
where he calls Pynchon "Manichean."  And yeah, I had to look that up, but I
thought it was a novel way to accuse him of not fleshing out characters,
esp. if you take as an indication of roundness the ability for characters to
surprise the reader, to act out of accordance with what they have already
been described as.  Clearly a Manichean should be incapable of doing this,
because their characters will be emblems of either side of a binary system,
and thus unchanging.

And secondly, I really bristle at this: "He believes in conspiracies, not
histories."  Historiographically, I'm very interested in what we call
history, and it seems like people kind of instinctively (ideologically)
create a three-tier hierarchy of truthfulness -- veracity in descending
order -- with Supposed Objective Truth (what *really* happened on top),
followed by the Historical Record, followed lastly by Fiction (where
conspiracies for this critic-feller are gonna lie, I'm sure).  But so
Objective Truth is an unattainable construct, literally inaccessible
immediately after it is completed, and so we have competing systems of
representation with History against Fiction.  So what I think people like
this dood forget is that both are representations, irrevocably divorced from
historical truth, and therefore kind of on equal footing.

Thoughts?

--
Dan
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