Gaddis Interview

[rich]

wonderful stuff here including some bits on Pynchon and how sometimes
scholars overestimate the intelligence of authors

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2577/the-art-of-fiction-no-101-william-gaddis

"Many of these similarities that critics and doctoral students have
dug up are absolutely coincidences. Stephen, for instance—the reason I
chose that name is he was the first Christian martyr."

'The coincidences turn up down to the smallest details. There is, for
instance, a character who has covered the mirrors with handkerchiefs.
Apparently this happens somewhere in Ulysses, too. And they said, Ah!
This is where he got that. Where I got it was when I was in a hotel in
Panama and I had washed my handkerchiefs and spread them on the
windows and the mirrors to dry—they almost look pressed when they’re
peeled away that way—a Panamanian friend came in and said, “All the
mirrors are covered. Who’s dead? What’s happened?” I said, “No, I’m
just drying my handkerchiefs.” Then I found the same incident in
McTeague in what? 1903 or 1905, whenever McTeague was written. This
always strikes me as dangerous—finding “sources.” '

'While The Recognitions prefigured the style of the Pynchon
generation, I wonder if there was any Pynchonian influence that went
into your second novel, JR, which opens with a direct discussion of
the questions of energy, disorder, chaos, entropy, the second law of
thermodynamics?'

GADDIS

Well, going back a bit further, Nathanael West had sketched entropy
nicely in Miss Lonelyhearts in the early thirties. Norbert Wiener
extrapolated the concept to communications around 1950, and, of
course, entropy was mentioned in connection with The Recognitions. So
I think both Pynchon and I—and I don’t know him—are simply involved
with different aspects of the same problems. I would doubt that my
work has influenced him; his has certainly not influenced mine in any
way at all.