Pynchon and Beats

[Amy]

I have taught the Beats a lot (my academic specialization
is post-1945 American lit), but wasn't struck by the Pynchon
connection until I taught William Burroughs' _Naked Lunch_
in a course on the avant-garde.  _Naked Lunch_ is
Pynchonesque in so many ways it's scary: there's the same
surreal quality that Pynchon plays with, the same hard edge
to the prose combined with a weird lyricism, the same thematic
subtexts of conspiracy and paranoia, similar embedded political
commentary on the U.S. as a kind of redneck Big Brother
who hit the lottery and went multinational.  I haven't read
Seed's book, so I don't know if he discusses this connection.
But it's worth looking into; I'd go so far as to argue that
Burroughs is as much a forefather to Pynchon as his Puritan
ancestors.  (Burroughs also implies what appears in Pynchon
as the preterite/elect dichotomy.)  And, of course, there
is in Burroughs the drugs--ambivalence toward them, but
also a willingness to use them, the psychic state they
induce, and the market surrounding them as social metaphor.

I have more trouble seeing Ginsberg's, or even Kerouac's,
direct influence on TP's writing.

AE