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: