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[John M. Krafft]

From:	MIAVX2::JMKRAFFT     "John M. Krafft"  9-MAR-1992 20:54:45.39
To:	
CC:	JMKRAFFT    
Subj:	Pynchon, Burroughs, Gibson

X-News: miavx2 alt.cyberpunk:618
From: tmaddox at milton.u.washington.edu (Tom Maddox)
Subject:Pynchon, Burroughs, Gibson
Date: 6 Mar 92 04:28:20 GMT
Message-ID:<1992Mar6.042820.26291 at u.washington.edu>

In article <1992Mar03.141123.7332 at zds.com> rjdm at zds.com (Rian Murphy) writes:
>Let's face it: in the grand scheme of Fiction, Pynchon is ten or fifteen 
>times the writer Gibson is--as I'm sure Gibson would admit.  I don't 
>think Pynchon needs to read _Neuromancer_ for inspiration, thank you 
>very much.

	Whether Pynchon *needs* to read Gibson is not the issue--which is, 
rather, whether he has.  As with about ten thousand other questions about
Pynchon, I suspect this one will go unanswered.

	Whether Gibson would "admit" that Pynchon is ten or fifteen times
the writer is likewise empirical, but Gibson and I have talked about Pynchon
numerous times over the last ten years or so, and I've never heard him 
express anything to that effect.

	My suspicion is that Gibson would find the key term of comparison
as meaningless as I do.  If one Pynchon equals ten-fifteen Gibsons, then 
what does one Joyce equal?  One Faulkner?  One Shakespeare?  One Delany?
And who gets to set the terms of comparison?

	Such comparisons are dodgy at best, given that they are always 
products of their historical moment, further given that the history of
such statements shows how wrong they usually are--and precisely at the 
point where the maker of the comparison is most sure.

	S. Johnson was confident, for instance, that Samuel Richardson's
novels were far superior to Henry Fielding's--to put the matter simply,
Fielding's books were immoral, while Richardson's were exquisitely moral,
and since the morality of a book determined its ultimate worth . . .

	And Samuel Taylor Coleridge found Blake's work to be interesting but
obviously mad.

	And any eduated reader of Shakespeare's time would have found obvious--
trivially so--the proposition that even mediocre verse was superior to the
best drama, and he could have explained why in considerable detail.

	At any rate:  Pynchon does what he does quite well, and so does
Gibson.  If you want to place a literary historical bet that Pynchon will
outlive Gibson, that his work is inherently, essentially more serious, more
valuable, or whatever, go right ahead, but remember, contemporary judgments
about the value of literature are usually extremely unreliable.

>I'd also be willing to bet that Pynchon DOESN'T read Gibson.  Gibson is 
>neither good enough nor bad enough for Pynchon to be interested in.

	I've been reading Pynchon since 1964, I did part of my dissertation
on _Gravity's Rainbow_, and I'd take that bet, even money (which is about
my estimate of the odds).

>AND ANOTHER THING:  Both Gibson AND Pynchon read William S. Burroughs.  
>Burroughs is the godfather of punk and the godfather of cyberpunk as 
>well.

	And yet another.  Burroughs reads Gibson.  He named _Neuromancer_
as his favorite novel the year it came out (in an article in _Esquire_).

	And just for fun, Gibson on Burroughs:

"'Ride music beams back to base.'
	He phases out on a vector of train whistles and the one particular
steel-engraved slant of winter sun these manifestations favor, leaving the
faintest tang of Players Navy Cut and opening pianor bars of East St. Louis,
this dangerous old literary gentleman who sent so many of us out, under
sealed orders, years ago . . .

Inspector Lee taught a new angle--
	Frequencies of silence, blank walls at street level.  In the flat
field.  We became field operators.  Decoding the lattices.  Patrolling the
deep faults.  Under the lights.  Machine Dreams.  The crowds, swept with 
con . . . . Shibuya Times Square Picadilly.  A parked car, an arena of grass,
a fountain filled with earth.  In the hour of the halogen wolves . . . The
hour remembered.  In radio silence . . ."

	from Wm. Gibson, "Academy Leader" in _Cyberspace:  First Steps_, 
	edited by Michael Benedikt, MIT Press, 1991



				Tom Maddox
			tmaddox at u.washington.edu
		"Writing is reading and reading is writing."
				A. S. Byatt