John Barth Vs. Pynchon

[Mark A. Douglas]

"jbor" jbor at bigpond.com wrote January 23, 2001 3:29 PM
>
> ----------
> >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
>
I'm not necessarily sure that Barth has to have an opinion on Pynchon, per
se.  He was fairly prolific (or at least blurby) on the authors he liked
(Coover, Hawkes), but I recall him doing a piece in the NYTBR on the nature
of blurbs, the whys and whatnots and quibbles between friends and publishers
over them, and the gist (if I'm recalling correctly) was that he wasn't
going to do any more blurbs for either friends or colleagues (some problem
with Stephen Dixon, I believe...again, memory failing)...but he did do an
obituary for Hawkes...I'm digressing horribly from my original thought here.
One of my original points being that quite often comments by authors on
authors turn into literary pissing matches:  I'm thinking mainly of Gass and
Gardner's debate on morality in fiction, which at one point did involve
quite a few of the names Klinkowitz brings up:  Hawkes, Barth, Coover, et
cetera.  Which leads to my second point, which is about Klinkowitz, but
isn't necessarily about him, per se.  Again, recall being what it is, but he
was very influential for his time, taking a mantle from Leslie Fiedler,
doing what I call splat books, id est, splattering a bunch of authors
together, doing brief synopses of their major works (Tanner churned out a
book or two like this also), and successfully lumping them into a group, or
if you will, a "school" of writers, which would lead to a sort of
canonization.  Imagine teaching Hawkes' "Second Skin" as black comedy...a
daunting task, but tried for a while because of his inclusion with Barth and
Gass and Pynchon and Coover (and Vonnegut and to some extent, but not til
later, Heller) in the 'black comedy' school of writing.

My main point being that these critics (in Klinkowitz and Fiedler's cases:
read: failed authors) were very successful in determining the fame or at
least literary fame of authors they liked.  Fiedler was an early champion of
Joseph McElroy, but they had a falling out, and Fiedler slashed his next
three or four novels...I don't think K. even deals with him, but he is
firmly in the same ballpark with Pynchon and Gaddis (whom K. also sort of
ignores).

I'm looking at an anthology entitled "Super Fiction", ed. by Joe David
Bellamy, pub. in 1975 as an original Vintage book:  what's amusing now is
the subtitle ("The American Story Transformed"), and the categories and the
authors they include:
"Fantasy-Fabulation-Irrealism"--Vonnegut, Coover, Rudolph Wurlitzer, Ursule
Molinaro
"Neo-Gothic"--Oates, Hawkes, Leonard Michaels, Pynchon ['In Which Esther
Gets a Nose Job']
"Myth-Parable"--Gardner, Gass, Barton Midwood, Robley Wilson, Jr.
"Metafiction-Technique as Subject"--Barth, Barthelme, Sorrentino, Sukenick
"Parody & Put-On"--Reed, Judith Rascoe, John Batki, Updike.

And yeah, the Klinkowitzes and Fiedlers and Tanners did their share of
damage to authors when you consider that their texts were used in the 70's
by the professors and deans who decided what authors should be studied in
the professors and deans' dotages during the 80's and 90's.

And then Rich (but not in this context):

>Not sure what you mean by content. My quibble with much of Barth is that
his
>books seem all technique--I'm thinking more of his later works--Sinbad and
>such.  I did like very much The Sot-Weed Factor but I don't beleive it has
>the richness of M&D--Barth has admitted to culling material from an
>encyclopedia for background.  Who can guess how much Mr. Pynchon digested
>over the years for M&D.
>
>Rich

Barth strikes me as an author who completely fell in love with technique,
content be damned.  If you consider everything written after "LETTERS", the
story varies very little.  Even "Sindbad" contains the same basic story of
old author on boat with loving woman/wife/girlfriend/muse.  His 1st phase
works will be remembered for their technique, not their stories, and his 2nd
phase of stuff, beginning with "Sabbatical" on simply won't be remembered.
I liked "The Sot-Weed Factor" too, until I read M&D, and beside it,
'Sot-Weed' becomes an extended stand-up comedy bit, page after page of
waiting for the punch line.

I simply no longer compare the two authors:  Pynchon exhibits so much more
depth than Barth that the two don't seem comparable, and with his later
works, Barth sort of falls into a Tom Robbinish-hole.

The only contemporaries of Pynchon that come close to him, or surpass him
for richness and depth in a reading experience, IM(extraordinarily)HO, are
McElroy and Gaddis.

Yikes.  Sorry, I'm kind of mouthy tonight.

Mark