9 - History
from PART III - ISSUES
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2012
Summary
In a heated discussion about the value of historical novels, Ives LeSpark says to his son in Mason & Dixon (1997), “Facts are Facts, and to believe otherwise is not only to behave perversely, but also to step in imminent peril of being grounded, young Pup.” LeSpark is an arms dealer, and his profession, his threat and his assumptions about history are not linked by accident: for Pynchon, the Western military-industrial complex has always advocated a common sense view of things that tends to stifle dissent and sanctions business as usual. To believe that history is a series of inevitable and indisputable facts that add up to a narrative of Western progress is, for Pynchon, both to standardize and to colonize history and to make it congenial to totalitarian, or just oppressively uniform, world views and seemingly determined ends.
In the same passage in Mason & Dixon, however, LeSpark's son Ethelmer pronounces judgment on this theory about the facticity of history:
Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir'd, or coerc'd, only in Interests that must ever prove base. She is too innocent, to be left within the reach of anyone in Power,— who need but touch her, and all her Credit is in the instant vanish'd, as if it had never been. She needs rather to be tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev’ry Radius, Masters of Disguise to provide her the Costume, Toilette, and Bearing, and Speech nimble enough to keep her beyond the Desires, or even the Curiosity, of Government.
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- The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon , pp. 121 - 135Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011
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