Reading, rainy Sunday afternoon.

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>From Poirier's The Importance of Thomas Pynchon, Twentieth Century
Literature Vol. 21, No. 2, Essays on Thomas Pynchon (May, 1975), pp.
151-162:

"[...] In Pynchon we find ourselves in a curious fictional world which is
often directly referring us back to the real one. This is of course always
true of novels to some degree. But in Pynchon the factuality seems willingly
to participate in the fiction; it disguises itself as fiction to placate us
and the characters. Fact is consciously manipulated by "They" in order to
create the comforting illusion that it is fiction, an illusion contrived to
deceive Oedipa or Slothrop into not believing in the reality of what is
happening to them. Crazy names like Pierce Inverarity turn out, when we do a
little investigation, to be a compound of a quite famous, real-life stamp
collector named Pierce, and of the fact that if you should go to Mr. Pierce
for the kind of flawed peculiar stamps so important in The Crying of Lot 49
you would ask him an "inverse rarity." What sound like crazy schemes turn
out to have actual experiments, such as Maxwell's Demon, again in The Crying
of Lot or historically important institutions like Thurn and Taxis. With
slight exception all of Pynchon's material in The Crying of Lot 49 about
postal service is historically verifiable, and even a cursory glance into
tionary will show that some of the figures in Gravity's Rainbow were
historical, not only obvious ones like the chemist Liebig or Clerk Maxwell,
or Frederick Kekul6, but also Kathe Kollwitz and Admiral Rozhdestvenski.
Eventually get to wonder at almost every point if perhaps we are being given
not at all but history.

This is not simply to say that Pynchon's fictions have historical analogues
or that he allegorizes history. Rather, his fictions are often seamlessly
into the stuff, the very factuality of history. His practices are vastly
different from such allegorizations as one gets in Barth's Giles Goat-Boy,
different Borges' inventions of fictional conspiracies which are analagous
to the historical ones of the Nazi period, and different, too, from the
obsessive patternings finds in Nabokov, which are private, local, and, while
including certain of American reality, never derived directly from them. In
Pynchon's the plots of wholly imagined fiction are inseparable from the
plots of history or science. More than that, he proposes that any effort to
these plots must itself depend on an analytical method which, both
derivations and in its execution, is probably part of some systematic
against free forms of life. [...] "

Michel.