Pynchon mention in DF Wallace article

[Doug Millison]

http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?20000210039R

I haven't read it in detail yet, but skimming through, Pynchon's name
jumped out. The article is called "The Panic of Influence" by A.O. Scott, a
long essay about _Brief Interviews with Hideous Men_ and Wallace's other
books.

Here are the Pynchon mentions from the article:

"David Foster Wallace, who was born in 1962 and who published his first
novel, The Broom of the System, when he was twenty-five, has been widely
hailed since then as the heir to such postmodern old masters as John Barth,
William Gaddis, and Thomas Pynchon. [...] And while he admires the radical
panache of his literary fathers, Wallace cannot help but regard them with
an envious, quasi-Oedipal hostility: "If I have a real  enemy," he once
told an interviewer, "a patriarch for my  patricide, it's probably Barth
and Coover and Burroughs, even Nabokov and Pynchon."

Of _Girl With Curious Hair_, Scott writes:  "The proceedings are shot
through with an air of wild Pynchonian intrigue. "

Of _Infinte Jest_, Scott writes: "The novel's Pynchonesque elements-the
fact that part of the United States is now a federation called O.N.A.N.,
the symbiotic relationship between terrorists and law enforcement agencies,
the shadowy career of underground filmmaker-turned-tennis-coach James
Incandenza-feel  rather willed and secondhand."

"One of the critical commonplaces about Pynchon, Gaddis, et al.-a
commonplace to which Wallace clearly subscribes-is that their stylistic and
formal inventions were created under pressure of lived experience. What
made realism untenable for these writers, according to the conventional
wisdom Wallace has absorbed, was reality itself: Pynchon's involuted,
encrypted sentences, Barth's blatant narrative intrusions, Coover's
self-consuming artifacts-all of these were designed to explode the
hypocrisies and jar the complacencies of a monstrously complex society
whose deepest workings could not be represented by traditional narrative
means. But what these writers passed on to their students and followers
was, for the most part, the habit of formal and stylistic invention for its
own sake, an empty set of quotation marks, a self-consciousness without
selves. "


The article also quotes a Pynchon mention from Wallace's essay, E Unibus
Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction:

"The rebellious irony in the best postmodern fiction wasn't just credible
asart; it seemed downright socially useful in its capacity for what
counterculture critics called "a critical negation that would make it
self-evident to everyone that the world is not  as it seems" [the quote is
from music critic Greil Marcus]. Kesey's black parody of asylums suggested
that our arbiters of sanity were often crazier than their patients.
Pynchon reoriented our view of paranoia  from deviant psychic fringe to
central thread in the corporo-bureaucratic weave; DeLillo exploded image,
signal, data and tech as agents of spiritual chaos and not social  order.
Burroughs's icky explorations of  American narcosis exploded hypocrisy;
Gaddis's exposure of abstract capital as deforming exploded hypocrisy;
Coover's  repulsive political farces exploded hypocrisy."



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