SLSL "Make it literary"

[jbor]

    Apparently I felt I had to put on a whole extra overlay of rain
    images and references to "The Waste Land" and _A Farewell to Arms_.
    I was operating on the motto "Make it literary", a piece of bad
    advice I made up all by myself and then took. (Intro p. 4)

I think the "literary" allusions to Pasiphaë and "the Wandering Jew"
probably also fall into this category. Like the Eliot/Hemingway and Biblical
stuff they are pretty much an "overlay" - gratuitous, ostentation rather
than substance.

I guess it's possible that Aristophanes' 'The Frogs' is similarly another
example of this "bad advice"/poor writing aspect but, with no persuasive
evidence to indicate that the allusion is actually there in the text, I'm
willing to give Pynchon the benefit of the doubt on it.

What Pynchon doesn't criticise in the 'Intro' are the other sorts of
references peppered throughout the piece: to contemporary jazz musicians; to
lit crit and philosophy texts; to potboiler fiction; to Marlon Brando; to
_Life_ magazine; to the Rudy Vallee song from the Betty Boop cartoon; to a
Gilbert and Sullivan musical; to brand name products like Coke and de Nobili
cigars etc. This sort of eclecticism - the splicing together of high and low
cultural references - is something which characterises postmodernist
fiction, and it's a defining feature of Pynchon's work from the get-go.

best