Franzen on Gaddis and Pynchon

[Otto]

"One pretty good definition of college is that it's a place where people are
made to read difficult books. Certainly, my own moments of peak collegiate
learning occurred whenever I acquired new tools to unlock difficulty-when I
was forced to figure out, all by myself, that Emily Dickinson sometimes
meant the opposite of what her words said, or when my German professor asked
us, with a mysterious grin, whether it was possible that Josef K. was
guilty. To learn about irony, ambiguity, symbol, voice, and point of view,
it made sense to read the most sophisticated texts."

"To prove to myself, if not to my father, that I was engaged in a serious
professional pursuit, I tried to join this d. I was one of
those skinny young men in scary glasses and thrift-store clothes whomyou see
on Boston or Brooklyn subways, young men who look like they possess massive
amounts of data about small-label rock bands or avant-garde literature or
video technology, the very size of these data-sets affording a kind of
psychic protection. And Gaddis ought to have been my ideal. Gaddis, it was
generally agreed, was the really smart, really angry, really forbidding
Systems writer. "The Recognitions" was an ur--text of postwar fiction, both
the grand-daddy of difficulty and the first great cultural critique, which,
even if Heller and Pynchon hadn't read it while composing "Catch-22" and
"V.," managed to anticipate the spirit of both. Gaddis was the original
intense, thrift-store-clad, monster-data-set young man whose ambition, if he
let it show in public, would have singed his fellow subway riders'
eyebrows."

"I liked the idea of socially engaged fiction, I was at work on my own
Systems novel of conspiracy and apocalypse, and I craved academic and
hipster
respect of the kind that Pynchon and Gaddis got and Saul Bellow and Ann
Beattie didn't. But Bellow and Beattie, not to mention Dickens and Conrad
and Bronte and Dostoyevsky and Christina Stead, were the writers I actually,
unhiply enjoyed reading. If Coover's "The Public Burning" and Pynchon's "The
Crying of Lot 49" moved me, it was mainly because I loved Coover's character
Richard Nixon and Pynchon's Oedipa Maas. But postmodern fiction wasn't
supposed to be about sympathetic characters. Characters, properly speaking,
weren't even supposed to exist. Characters were feeble, suspect constructs,
like the author himself, like the human soul. Nevertheless, to my shame, I
seemed to need them."

"Reading the whole thing would also confer bragging rights. If somebody
asked me if I'd read "The Sot-Weed Factor," I could shoot back, No, but have
you read "The Recognitions"? And blow smoke from the muzzle of my gun."

"From a Congregationalist childhood I'd gone straight to a collegiate
worship of Art, without noticing the transition and without ever quite
buying either faith. One day a secretary called from the Congregational
church to ask if I still wanted to be a member, and I said no, and that was
that. But it's much harder to leave a small, embattled cult than a
mainstream suburban church. Nothing in my Congregational experience had
prepared me for the fanatical fervor, the guilt-provoking authority, of Mr.
Difficult."

MR. DIFFICULT
William Gaddis and the problem of hard-to-read books.
BY JONATHAN FRANZEN
The New Yorker Magazine, September 30, 2002

These parts (plus a lot more) are missing in the translation:

"Du sagst Kunst, ich sage Unterhaltung
Mr. Difficult oder Der gefährliche Pakt zwischen dem Autor und seinem Leser:
Wie ich lernte, die Romane von William Gaddis zu lesen"

Aus dem Amerikanischen von Joachim Kalka

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
Dienstag, 5. November 2002
Literatur p. 1-2

(credits to Kai)

Otto

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