Storyworld and Historiographic Metafiction: Belgium in Against the Day

In December 2006, Thomas Pynchon wrote to the British newspaper The Telegraph in support of Ian McEwan, who had been accused of stealing a phrase for his novel, Atonement (2001). Presenting himself as a historical novelist, Pynchon used the occasion to consider the question of verisimilitude: “Oddly enough, most of us who write historical fiction do feel some obligation to accuracy. It is that Ruskin business about ‘a capacity responsive to the claims of fact, but unoppressed by them’” (2006b.