"Although the longer a fellow's name has been in the magazines, the harder it is to tell fiction from non-fiction."
* * * * * * * * * *
Okay, maybe Randolph does understand the ambiguity of comparing the Chums to Wyatt Earp.
I'm sure Pynchon loved the idea of suggesting the difficulty of telling fiction from non-fiction since he puts so much effort into the historical accuracy of his books while also seeding them with wildly unbelievable scenes and confusing but imaginative flights of fancy. Just think about Byron the Bulb in Gravity's Rainbow! Nobody's going to mistake that for non-fiction but it's the kind of whimsical strangeness that he loves to sprinkle into texts full of painstakingly accurate details. So you know Pynchon will vacillate wildly from one extreme to the other so that when you're reading a bit that sounds historically accurate, you can't know for sure that it's not. Or what about that scene in Gravity's Rainbow where Slothrop is being cajoled into eating all the wine jellies and it's so funny that you figure it's all got to be made up but then you accidentally find an old advertisement on the Internet for a Meggezone and your head explodes and you decide, "I'm just going to believe everything Pynchon writes is true until somebody disproves it for me."
So right now, I believe young lads flew around the world in airships, dogs could talk and read, and Laszlo Jamf once conditioned a baby to get unprovoked boners. Which, while obviously being silly in a shocking way, is based on the Pavlovian "Little Albert" experiment by John Watson and Rosalie Rayner in which they conditioned a small child to be afraid of small animals. Famously in this experiment, like in Slothrop's case, Little Albert was never deconditioned, let alone brought back to "beyond the zero."
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