Back to the Future

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

              Mr Haney:
              my point, I guess, is that if indeed you did
              link up all the characters in the Pynchon oeuvre
              with recognizable antecedents, it would still be
              possible for an English major with the gift of opacity,
              not to mention 2nd nature for a professor or critic,
              to build symbolic schemes not from the
              originals but from the fabrications (although with
              red and blue versions of a family history ready to 
              hand they would probably feel enabled both to
              synthesize those with each other, and to relate the
              views implied by all three to the fictioneering views
              in the novels) 
 
              although what you may be indicating is that
              we don't want to, and in fact can't really get
              too far away from reality as it's lived...

Very good point. I recall reading in "King Leopold's Ghost' by 
Adam Hochschild [ISBN: 0-618-00190-3], the author noting 
that most critical examinations of "Heart of Darkness" ingore 
the horrifying fact that most of the novel consisted of events 
that really happened. Much easier to get into the Freudian or 
Mythic dimensions than observe ugly daylight realities of
slavery and corporatized death.

Also note [as a sidebar]:

              The book comes in two different editions, one 
              "Male" and one "Female", which differ in 
              only a critical paragraph.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_the_Khazars