The flattened American landscape of minor writers

[Tore Rye Andersen]

Guy Pursey:
 
> Thanks Tore. That's the essay I was thinking of - alongside JR, he lists
> a few other books he couldn't finish because he didn't feel they kept to
> their "contract", Mason & Dixon being one of them. It was an interesting
> essay but a pretty weak argument compared with say DFW's more in-depth
> analysis* of theorists like Jameson (and I got the feeling DFW actually
> finished all the books he was talking about).

Wallace was the kind of writer, thinker and essayist Franzen aspires to be.
His "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" should be compulsory 
reading in every English department - and the interview with Wallace by
Larry McCaffery which accompanied the essay's first appearance in 'Review
of Contemporary Fiction' is quite simply one of the best author interviews
I know of, even though I don't necessarily agree with all of Wallace's assessments.
The interview can be found here:
 
http://samizdat.cc/shelf/documents/2005/03.07-dfwinterview/dfwinterview.pdf
 
Before doing to Franzen what Franzen did to Gaddis, though, I'll hasten to add
that I enjoyed "The Corrections" immensely.
 
> And, if we take Franzen's attitude to be commonplace, is his
> "status"/"contract" divide indicative of a public perception a new
> high/low culture of sorts, despite that fact that authors like Pynchon
> set out to blur the original distinction?

Interesting question.
I think that divide is still pretty operative in the public opinion, even though
authors like Pynchon have done their best to eradicate it. The problem is that
Pynchon (and Wallace and others like them) are so damn hard to read, that only
trained readers can see that the divide is being eradicated. I believe that Pynchon
genuinely loves so-called 'low' culture, and I believe that he would refuse the
distiction between high and low, but it is an indisputable fact, and something of
a paradox, that not all readers have the capacity to read Pynchon and understand his
genuine love for preterite culture. Pynchon's sympathy is no doubt with the preterite,
but not all preterite can read him.
 
In other words, the erasure of the distinction between high culture and low culture is 
a project undertaken mostly by authors who belong solidly to high culture, or by schooled
readers like us who may occasionally 'slum' with Tom Clancy or a Harry Potter
novel. And if that is the case - if the 'common' reader (no disrespect intended)
never reads those democratic (but nevertheless very difficult) authors, has the 
divide really been erased? Not in the public opinion, I would argue, and it is
easy to see the reasons why not.
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