“Who could have foreseen, any more than the actress who falls in love with her leading man, that the fiction might prove after all more desirable – strangely, more durable – than anything the civilian world had to offer…”
page 701
Linking this with the preface to the book I feel he is talking about the book-writing process and the fictional world here the way he has viewed it through his career. If Orson Welles faced personality problems after doing Citizen Kane can anyone guess what writing Gravitys Rainbow (and Against the Day) has done to Pynchon as a feedback?
