John Barth Vs. Pynchon

[jbor]

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>From: "Otto Sell" <o.sell at telda.net>
>

> Contrary to Pynchon who is generally silent about his
> work Barth has produced his own "secondary" literature which is very
> readable and great fun in itself.

Though I must say that the impression I get from reading some of Barth's
essays and articles is that he wasn't and isn't that much of a fan of
Pynchon's work. I think that the 'Literature of Exhaustion' hole that JB dug
in the late 60s was intended for Pynchon, amongst others; Barth little
realising at the time, perhaps, that he was actually burying himself in it
as well. Jerome Klinkowitz picked up on this irony in the mid-70s when he
tried to establish a clique of vanguard "post-contemporary American fiction"
writers with Vonnegut at the helm, along with Donald Barthelme, Jerzy
Kosinski, Leroi Jones (Imamu Amiri Baraka), James Park Sloan, Ronald
Sukenick, Raymond Federman and Gilbert Sorrentino (Klinkowitz, _Literary
Disruptions: The Making of a Post-Contemporary American Fiction_, University
of Illinois, Urbana, 1975); where Barth and Pynchon are cast as "regressive
parodists, who ... have confused the course of American fiction and held
back the critical ... appreciation" due the new brigade, and are excluded
along with a third retinue which Klinkowitz labels "the Updike group",
consisting of John Updike, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud,
who, according to JK, are plugging away in an antiquated
neo-realist/moralist mode.

Klinkowitz appoints other writers such as Richard Brautigan, Robert Coover,
Wm Gass, Steve Katz, Clarence Major, Ishmael Reed and Charles Wright to his
post-contemporary coterie, and finds a like-minded approach in the works of
Samuel Beckett, Alain Robbe-Grillet and the French nouveau roman writers,
and also in the "New Journalism" of Tom Wolfe, James Simon Kunen, Gay Talese
and Norman Mailer.

Possibly Klinkowitz's brand of fervid partisanship did more damage than good
to the careers of some of the young U.S. writers whose virtues he was
extolling -- and little harm to those he was attempting to denounce -- but
it was an influential study in its time nonetheless.

Anyway, even in Barth's later essays, the 'Replenishment' retraction and
those in _The Friday Book_ and _Further Fridays_, I don't recall seeing any
references to Pynchon or his work whatsoever. While it doesn't seem odd for
Pynchon not to mention Barth (because Pynchon is neither a teacher nor a
critic), the reverse does seem to beg a question about Barth's attitude
towards Pynchon and his work, in terms of "anxiety of influence" or some
sort of adversarial instinct, because I agree that there are definite
similarities in both style and substance between the two.

best