Chabon on BE

[Fiona Shnapple]

What facts? Don't you find it even a bit ironic that some 50 years
after V. some academics are still reading Pynchon fictions to confirm
their own hobby horse theory, of history, or science, or whatever, by
claiming the truth of what the author intends with support of facts
outside the text, or by sifting through the facts in the text and
holding them up to the light of history?

With little to go on the biographical data, academics have charged
ahead with the creation of an Author whose inclusion, exclusion,
transformations, distortions, modifications, anachronizations,
fictionalizations of facts and history can all be explained by showing
how the Author's apparent contradictions, are a natural process as the
author  matures, or is influenced by this or that academic hotshot,
slowly learns a craft that academics converse about endlessly, so a
unity, an Author is constructed in the image of the academic.

So, one of the Baileys or somebody proposed that we look into distance
and style to discover how the text instructs us to read it.This kind
of discovery, taking the text as it is, as a work of fiction has many
advantages.

The first is that it keeps us honest. This notion that Chabon's Review
is wrong because it ignores or gets wrong some tid-bit is absurd
enough. No?
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