1945 Did this really happen or was it just a hilarious imaginative construct in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)? If it did, Mickey Rooney immediately suppressed the memory of the event as too improbable, the narrator assures us. Did giant industries really influence the bombing in the Second World War so as to obliterate their outdated plant, while sparing factories making the most advanced weapons for use against their ‘own’ side?
Or to take another Pynchon fiction (but is it fiction?), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), is Oedipa Maas really the victim of a secret, elaborate, electronic assault on her integrity, or does she just think she is? Does a secret, alternative postal system really exist, with a long history extending back into Renaissance Europe? Plausible references to actual historical events (albeit up to now given a more innocent interpretation), reinforced by scholarly footnotes, support the hypothesis. And what about Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)? Was an American Nazi dressed up as Captain America really allowed to visit prisoners of war in Dresden, trying to recruit them to the Wehrmacht?
This is the fiction of paranoia, very fashionable in the sixties because it paralleled events in both political and critical history. On one level it was an appropriate response to covert operations in real life, like the plot to kill Kennedy (see 29 November) and the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, which showed that the US had been waging a top-secret war in Vietnam from as early as 1945. On another it deconstructed distinctions between fact and fiction, posing both as plots to control the world.
As for the ‘truth’ behind the allegations, a popular paradigm is the so-called urban myth. Do giant albino alligators really roam the New York sewers? Remember all those baby alligators given children as toys during the 1950s? What did your mother do with yours when you got tired of it? Exactly. But lacking proof, the truth remains elusive. Who wants to go down into the sewers to find out? Well, in the case of Pynchon studies, the resourceful Tim Ware does. He runs the Thomas Pynchon Wiki (http://pynchonwiki.com/). According to him, Mickey Rooney wasn’t really at Potsdam, though he came close. He was in Germany attached to an army entertainment at the time of the conference, but was unable to get away.