Pynchon & Dickens

[alice malice]

Dickens Again? Really? Two of my favorites, Pynchon and Dickens, but I
can't make the connection that others make here. Pynchon may have read
Dickens. I guess he did at Cornell, even with Nabokov, but Pynchon is
not Dickensian. Lots of characters, with silly names, allegory,
talking door knobs, satire, does not make Pynchon an imitator of
Dickens. If I had to connect Pynchon to a European at all, it would be
Orwell, but Pynchon is so American. While he dabbled in everything
here and across the pond, and is too encyclopedic to pigeonhole by
genre or any other classification, he is surely an American Author who
writes in a globalized period. This is one thing he does share with
Dickens, among others, but to favor Dickens over the American
development of fiction and of the ideas and experimentation that
Pynchon drew from seems a stretch.   His early influences are well
known and include, as he lists them in his SL Introduction: Henry
Adams and Norbert Wiener (Adams was a and may still be the most
important influence on P), Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Melville, Twain,
Mailer, Bellow, Roth, The Beats, Kerouac, Jazz, Playboy,  Barthelme,
Fitzgerald, Zappa....but, of course, these are but the early,
juvenile, though perhaps, as in the case of Adams, formative
influences. P has influences from all over the globe, and we should
include in the American influences, those Americans outside the USA,
Marquez for example, ao Dickens has much to contend with.

My critique of Wood is essentially that he often misreads American
Fiction because he either doesn't know, which I doubt, or ignores,
the history of its development. He's too keen to trace American
Fiction to Europe, because his favorite authors are European, and this
is a mistake.  I like to contrast him with Tony Tanner because
Tannner, though also British, nails American Fiction. I do have lots
of praise for Mr. Wood, his Broken Estate critique of Pynchon seems
right on, and that he names Pynchon's true American father, Melville,
is also right, though Twain and Henry Adams are, though Wood doesn't
see it,  surely Pynchon's mothers. Speaking of Twain, critics tried
and  failed to connect Twain with Dickens, and this makes a lot more
sense than connecting Pynchon with the Victorian satirist. Though
recently Pynchon has added his voice to his work, I can't imagine him
reading GR or M&D or AGTD in the voice of his stoner California
novels, something that Dickens and Twain had in common, the public
reading of their works and a voice that was created to that end.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1966/jan/20/the-truth-of-mark-twain/
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l