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I also agree with Olija that we need to look at DFW's relationship to Pynchon as well.
I would love a discussion of Wallace & Pynchon, since they're arguably my two favorite American authors and there's no shortage of material, or stylistic or philosophical or technical points, to compare. I kind of feel like this might warrant its own thread rather than taking over this one, but, in the interest of getting that conversation going anyway, here are some pretty fascinating (more or less spoiler-free, I hope) comments from DFW on the matter (from a 1997
interview published in the Minnesota Daily, a student paper right up the road from where I'm sitting):
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Q: So now we see Pynchon scrambling to keep up with the techniques that television stole from him.
A: Pynchon's another one whom I regard as really kind of old-fashioned. I like early Pynchon. I like The Crying of Lot 49. I like Gravity's Rainbow. But the Pynchon of Slow Learner and Vineland, which I didn't like very much, seems to be making the same tired jokes -- 'look how shallow and superficial the culture is.' All right -- I've been told -- TV itself now tells that to me. It just seems like more of the same. I'm not as big a Pynchon fan as some other people are.
Q: The word Pynchon is on every one of you're book covers as a comparison. Does this drive you crazy?
A: Pynchon was important to me when I was in college. The first book that I wrote, Broom of the System, some reviewer for the New York Times said it was a rip-off of The Crying of Lot 49, like that I hadn't read yet. So I got all pissed, and then I went and read The Crying of Lot 49, and it was absolutely, incredibly good. I think a certain amount of this is marketing, and, you know, the fastest way to tell what something is like is to compare it to something else. And having read Gaddis and having read Pynchon and DeLillo and Coover and McElroy and Sorrentino, I can see that the kind of stuff that I do or like that Bill Vollmann does or that Richard Powers does is certainly more like that than it's like, you know, Irwin Shaw or John Updike. Writers are bad to ask about this though, because we're all egomaniacs, and we all want to be utterly unique and, you know, not like anybody else, and so there's a certain amount of bristling about it, but after a while there's just no way to help it. Gravity's Rainbow is a great book, but for the most part Pynchon kind of annoys me, and I think his approach to a certain amount of stuff is kind of shallow, to be honest with you. So I get uncomfortable about that, and when people ask it over and over again I get the sense that they're saying they think I'm ripping him off or just rehashing stuff he's done, in which case I get pissed, but if that's how they're seeing it, it means I've failed. I mean if my stuff's coming off derivative of somebody else, it means there's something that I'm doing that isn't right. But I find myself doing it all the time. I'll see a movie, and I'll really like it, and I'll recommend it to friends, and I'll say, well, it's sort of like this combined with this. I mean it's such a convenient shorthand. And nobody likes to have it done to them. You don't want to have a friend say to you, 'You're just exactly like this other guy we know.' You say, 'No, I'm not. I'm me.' But we do it to each other all the time.
Q: Are the names Mondragon and Bodine (from Infinite Jest) allusions to Pynchon's Kurt Mondaugen and Pig Bodine?
A: Well, Jethro Bodine is from The Beverly Hillbillies. That's not a Pig Bodine thing. But there were a few -- That thing in Infinite Jest where two representatives (Steeply and Marathe) of two countries are on a cliff-side and are making enormous shadows and playing with it -- and there's even the use of the word Brockengespenst, which comes out of Slothrop and Geli Tripping (from Gravity's Rainbow) fucking on the Brockengespenst -- that's an outright allusion. And I think there are a couple -- that's not supposed to be any kind of inter-textual allusion. I just thought it was really cool. And I've been to Tucson, and you actually can do that with the shadows, and I thought it was neat. But I'm not trying to lace the book with allusions to other texts. There's nothing wrong with it. I'm not just particularly interested in it.