NP but Nixon

[alice wellintown]

http://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/00/ariss/paper.html


A second devastating consequence of conventional history is that once
consolidated, the voices of Pynchon's beloved "preterite," the
suffering and powerless masses, are written out and covered-up. "What
passes is a truth so terrible that history--at best a conspiracy, not
always among gentlemen, to defraud--will never admit it. The truth
will be repressed or in ages of particular elegance be disguised as
something else" (GR 164). Antonio Marquez suggests that for Pynchon,
history is a "system of illusions, an enormous con-game that shields
grotesque lies and conspiracies" (Marquez 55). But beyond the fact
that so many crimes, like the extermination of the Hereros in Africa,
are virtually written out of official histories, a philosophy of
history that tends to focus on events, causes, and effects, rather
than on people, completely disregards human suffering. Ultimately,
such a perception perpetuates a deceptive aggrandizement of the past.
When students of history are forced to painstakingly memorize a series
of meaningless facts, names, dates, and places, it becomes easy to
neglect the real pain that real people experienced.
.....Just as in Gravity's Rainbow, questions regarding the value of
linear history are raised a number of times in Mason & Dixon. Chapter
35 presents us with a debate over that very issue between members of
the framing narrative. The epigraph by Wicks begins, "Facts are but
the Play-things of lawyers,--