DFW - conseils de lecture

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“Soon another postmodern work came his way. That book was Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Charlie McLagan, a fellow student, had turned him on to Pynchon the semester before… One day McLagan had run into Wallace and [Mark] Costello discussing One Hundred Years of Solitude and tossed them his copy of The Crying of Lot 49, which they promptly read. The novel is the story of Oedipa Maas, a young woman trying to uncover a centuries-old conspiracy involving a secret postal organization known as Trystero… One thing that caught Wallace’s eye about the book was the idea that to live in America was to live in a world of confusion, where meaning was refracted and distorted, especially by the media that engulf and reconfigure every gesture… Lot 49 was an agile and ironic meta-commentary, and the effect on Wallace cannot be overstated (so much so that in a later letter to one of his editors Wallace, ever nervous of his debt to the other writer, would lie and say he had not read the book). Wallace reading Pynchon was, remembers Costello, ‘like Bob Dylan finding Woody Guthrie.’”

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“When the semester started, Wallace showed his new commitment to fiction. He believed that if he was going to write better, he had to study it, just as he had philosophy. So during the next two semesters he took classes in the American novel and modern British poetry, finding himself particularly drawn to Frank Norris’s ungainly naturalist novel McTeague in the former and to T.S. Eliot’s cryptic “The Waste Land” in the other.”

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“If Wittgenstein was the obvious philosophical point of departure for Wallace’s book [The Broom of the System], the literary influences were even clearer… He took the flat, echoing tone of his dialogue from Don DeLillo, whose novels he had been reading while working on the book. (One night a friend who did part-time work as an Amherst security guard bumped into him at his switchboard working his way through Ratner’s Star.)”

Then, in a footnote to the mention of Ratner’s Star: “Wallace once wrote Jonathan Franzen he was glad everyone focused on his debt in Broom of the System to Pynchon, because it meant they didn’t see how much he had taken from DeLillo.”

UTSSAONMRP - Pour les écrivains américains qui n'ont pas la clairvoyance oraculaire d'un Don DeLillo, le déploiement mimétique d'emblèmes de la culture populaire apparait au mieux comme un tic exaspérant, au pire comme une platitude dangereuse venue compromettre la dignité du roman en le bannissant de l'Éternité platonicienne où il devrait résider.
> DeLillo a révélé l'image, le signal, la donnée et le technologique comme agents de chaos spirituel et non d'ordre social

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“Wallace drove east to Saratoga Springs in July 1987,” Max writes. “[He] had brought along his story-in-progress [“Westward the Course of Empire takes Its Way”] to work on. He quickly took it up again. The story takes as its point of departure John Barth’s long story “Lost in the Funhouse,” a touchstone of postmodern fiction written in 1967 that Wallace had long loved… Barth, then, was the teacher Wallace deserved, “Lost in the Funhouse” the wise, self-aware text his own teachers could never produce to help him on his own way… As he finished his work at Arizona, he also had come to feel that there was something irritating about “Lost in the Funhouse,” condescending, and, if you were of a recursive cast of mind, false about the way Barth kept breaking into the narrative to show readers falsity. Didn’t such an intrusion, in the end, just create more of a performance?”

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“When he met Stephanie Hubbard and Doug Eich, a couple in the orbit of the recovery group he had just joined, his interest was both literary and culinary. He would go to their house, where Hubbard would cook, while he and Eich discussed language and fiction… Eich and Wallace shared a passion for DeLillo and also Cormac McCarthy… [They] agreed that the gritty portrait of the alcoholic in Suttree was far more interesting than the self-pitying Consul in Lowry’s Under the Volcano.”

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“In April 1999, Salon.com asked Wallace for his list of underappreciated novels, and in his response he included longtime loves like Omensetter’s Luck, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, and Blood Meridian, but added Jerzy Kosinski’s little-known Steps, ‘a collection of unbelievably creepy little allegorical tableaux done in a terse elegant voice that’s like nothing else anywhere ever. Only Kafka’s fragments get anywhere close.’”

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“Christmas 1985, they [Wallace and Gale Walden] each had car trouble, so they agreed that it would be romantic to join up and drive in a convoy back to Tucson, Wallace from Urbana, Walden from the South Side of Chicago… On the trip, Wallace listened to the southwestern accents. He had long wanted to write a variation on William Gass’s novel Omensetter’s Luck. The laconic hillbilly voice of the story appealed to him. As a ‘weird kind of forger,’ imitating it would be a fun challenge. ‘He started to talk out “John Billy” at rest stops,’ Walden remembers. ‘He was trying to get the cadence of the dialogue.’”

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+ La fonction du Balai
+ Le Roi Pâle - Le héros d'hier repoussait les barrières et les frontières - donnait naissance aux choses. Les héros des sociétés d'hier généraient des faits. Car voila ce qu'est la société, une agglomération de faits. Dans le monde d'aujourd'hui les limites sont fixées et la plupart des faits importants ont été générés. Ajdh la frontière héroïque se situe dans l'ordonnancement et le déploiement de ces faits. La classification, l'organisation, la présentation.