Borges & Pynchon

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

Rediscovered Borges. Do enjoy it. Now I'm thinking about him & our 
author: Yes, in Pynchon's early novels there's what Bloom calls "anxiety 
of influence". But is this also the case in the later ones? Well, a 
continuity of shared motifs is that buildings - but I'm not sure that 
Pynchon took that (exclusively) from Borges - still tend to appear 
smaller from the outside than they eventually turn out to be ...

" ... We are obsessed with building labyrinths, where before there was 
open plain and sky. To draw even more complex patterns on the blank 
sheet. We cannot abide that OPENNESS: it is terror to us. Look at 
Borges. Look at the suburbs of Buenos Aires The tyrant Rosas has been 
dead a century, but his cult flourishes. Beneath the city streets, the 
warrens of rooms and corridors, the fences and the networks of steel 
track, the Argentine heart, in its perversity and guilt, longs for a 
return to that first unscribbled serenity ... that anarchic oneness of 
pampas and sky...."

Gravity's Rainbow, p. 264

"Both Borges and Pynchon write fantasies, but while Borges's fantasies 
are built upon curiosities of language or mathematics, Pynchon's are 
extensions of man's capacity for evil and for love. Borges's language is 
one that is triumphantly capable of delight and astonishment, but 
Pynchon writes from the knowledge that language can also hurt and 
connect. GRAVITY'S RAINBOW cataclysmically alters the landscape of 
recent fiction, and it alters the landscape of our moral knowledge as 
well. "

Edward Mendelson (1975): The Sacred, the Profane, and the Crying of Lot 49

http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/TheSacredTheProfaneAndTheCryingOfLot49.pdf