Reading, rainy Sunday afternoon.

[Monte Davis]

1975 and all that -- but I'd hate to defend Poirier's position that
Nabokov's engagement with history in *Ada* (1969) was "private and local"
-- especially now, since AtD's earth and counter-earth. (And however much
mandarin Nabokov insisted he despised political (or any other "committed")
fiction, there's no shortage of European reality 1917-1939 in  Despair,
Bend Sinister, Invitation to a Beheading, et al.)

On Sat, Dec 29, 2018 at 11:59 AM bulb <bulb at vheissu.net> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
>
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>