Homage and Imposture

[Richard Romeo]

>jbor wrote:>
>As with everything there are degrees. Nods to a(nother) master such as
>Rushdie's here and, say, Gibson's in *Neuromancer* (or Pynchon's in
>*Vineland* to those "geniuses with wood who could build you anything from a
>bowling alley to a Carpenter Gothic outhouse" i.e. Gaddis) are one thing;
>even the sorts of stylistic and thematic emulation which DeLillo, Foster
>Wallace, Neal Stephenson, Barry Westburg, Larry Daw and the like go in for
>have their appeal; but there is something quite sad -- pathological even --
>when apparently intelligent people overtly *pretend to be* someone else as,
>say, that Wanda Tinasky character for example. Quite quite sad.
>
>best
>------------------------
what I find sad is that such references to other fictional characters in a 
another work of fiction tends to limit the work's depth and resonance, in 
some cases. Literaure today has expanded to include non-literary subjects.  
One could say folks like Joyce did it all the time, but many of his 
allusions and such are to works that are very old--Dante, Shakespeare, etc.  
Now, writers of today, I'm think DFW in this case, are trying to put the 
literary cat back in the bag, referencing in albeit clever ways, Gaddis, 
Pynchon, etc.  But his non-literary allusions are just digs at other's 
better use of scientific or political metaphor.  Re-reading DeLillo's End 
Zone covers in 250 pgs much of the overworked nonsense in IJ.  Not to blame 
DFW for all these things, I'm thinking Rushdie's use of the Lot49 allusion 
seems particualrly lame to me, and the knowing wink from the reader only 
highlights the underlying neglible effect of such an allusion. I prefer my 
lit taken from the life outside the english dept and into that shout in the 
street that Stephen D. would note as "God."

P.S.  Reading Hawkes' The Cannibal--his dense, visual descriptions of 
Germany in 1945 is very reminiscent of the Zone--of course, Hawkes' book was 
released in the late 40s--if anything, it may have given TRP some pointers 
on style...fwiw

Rich

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