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The Anxiety of Influence: The John Barth/David Foster Wallace Connection

2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 55; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00111619.2013.771905

1939-9138

Charles B. Harris,

Themes in Literature Analysis

Abstract A common misconception among critics is that a young David Foster Wallace fell under the influence of John Barth and other postmodernist writers, only to wrest himself free of this sinister authority as he matured as a writer, steering his own fiction away from its sway and becoming one of postmodern fiction's strongest detractors in the process. But a close reading of Wallace's early novella "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way" reveals that Wallace's literary relationship with Barth is better understood as agonistic rather than antagonistic, an example of what Harold Bloom iconically describes as "the anxiety of influence." "Westward" should be read as not only a misprision of "Lost in the Funhouse," Barth's predecessor text, but as a self-aware misprision, a knowing enactment of the anxiety of influence, as well as a fulfillment of the putatively unrealized possibilities of Barth's fiction and postmodern fiction in general. Keywords: David Foster WallaceJohn Barthpostmodernism"Lost in the Funhouse," "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way," Harold Bloomthe anxiety of influenceCynthia Ozick Notes 1Connie Luther, just one example among many, argues that the figure of Ambrose in CitationWallace's novella "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way" (1989), a character clearly based on Barth, represents "a strong indictment of what Wallace sees as an artistic abandonment of social responsibility in postmodernism" (59). Similarly, Wallace's biographer D. T. Max refers to Wallace's "intense antagonism toward [Barth]" (312, n. 1) and maintains that when Wallace decided to leave Illinois State University in 2002, he no longer cared for the kind of writing favored by ISU's English department, which Max describes as an "oasis for experimental literature in the prairie" (266). 2In the wake of poststructuralist theory, Bloom's concept of literary influence has been interrogated and, in some instances, discredited because of its perceived commitment to an author-centered criticism and its privileging of ideas involving genius, originality, and a linear notion of literary history. Wallace studied contemporary literary theory at Amherst and Arizona, so it's unlikely that he would have been unaware of the debates pitting influence against intertextuality, which were well underway by the time he wrote "Westward." Nonetheless, the explanatory power of Bloom's theory seems to have impressed him enough that he includes it as an important intertext in "Westward." For a still-useful discussion of the "generational conflict" over the concepts of influence and intertextuality, see Clayton and Rothstein. 3 Infinite Jest, as Burn reminds us, contains a quotation from Bloom's book and an accompanying footnote (Franzen 97). A. O. Scott may have been the earliest critic to note this connection in his 2000 omnibus review of CitationWallace's work through Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999). Marshall Boswell similarly identifies "Westward" as a "self-conscious act of patricide" (104) in which "Wallace treats Barth's achievement as the oedipal father of his own artistic enterprise, in deliberate accordance with Harold Bloom's famous theory of artistic influence" (103). Also see Boswell's "Heading Westward." 4My thanks to Stephen J. Burn for informing me of this marginalia. Wallace's copy of Lost in the Funhouse is part of the archive of Wallace's papers at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. For a summary of this collection, see Schwartzburg. 5Wallace's essay, Marshall Boswell observes, "has the same centrality in unfolding the shape of Wallace's career as John Barth's famous 1968 [sic] essay, 'The Literature of Exhaustion,' had in shaping the career of Wallace's primary fictional father" (Understanding 9). See also Samuel Cohen, "To Wish to Try to Sing to the Next Generation" (72). 6Other examples of the postmodern tendency to bracket emotion within architectonics would include Raymond Federman's harrowing account of his Holocaust experience in "The Voice in the CitationCloset" (1977), that unspeakable event of which he is nonetheless compelled to speak. "[T]hat was the challenge," he writes in The Twofold Vibration, "never to speak the reality of the event but to render it concrete into the blackness of the words" (118). In Citation Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Kurt Vonnegut requires similar narrative distance to relate the devastation of firebombed Dresden that he himself witnessed, cushioning the scene within multiple perspectives, constructing what is finally a story within a memory within a novel. See Harris, "Time, Uncertainty, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr." 7On the "technological worldview" and "technological thinking," see Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology." 8Describing Barth as socially conscious would have confused Barth as a young man. "I can't in fiction get very interested in such things," he told John Enck in 1965, his first major interview. "My argument is with the facts of life, not the conditions of it" (28). At least by Citation Chimera (1972), however, Barth begins to deal more directly with social issues, in this case feminism. See my chapter on Chimera in Passionate Virtuosity, 127–58. 9A "feature of the biological evolution of the human brain and human consciousness," Barth writes in On With the Story, "[…] appears to be essentially of a scenario-making character" (147). See also his discussion of "the brain's biologically evolved narrativity" in Once upon a Time (10–71). 10Barth changes "still-human hearts" in the original 1967 essay to "human hearts" in the revised version included in The Friday Book. 11"The classical realist form," Wallace told Larry McCaffery, "is soothing, familiar, and anesthetic; it drops us right into spectation. It doesn't set up the sort of expectations serious 1990s fiction ought to be setting up in readers" (34). 12See Boswell's analysis of a similar "reverse thrust" in "Brief Interview (#20)" in his Understanding (193–98). 13See also Boswell's "Heading Westward" (31–32). 14Reflecting on his specialness, Mark acknowledges his belief that "there's some simple, radical difference about him. He hopes it's genius, fears it's madness" ("Westward" 355). The passage is borrowed almost word-for-word from "Funhouse" (Funhouse 89). 15The quoted phrase is from Gerald Graff's 1979 jeremiad against postmodern fiction, Literature against Itself. "One of the most useful functions that literature and the humanities could serve right now," Graff asserts, "would be to shore up the sense of reality, to preserve the distinction between the real and the fictive, and to help us resist those influences, both material and intellectual, that would turn lying into a universal principle" (12–13). Graff later repudiated this argument. 16Which is what Wallace seems to have in mind when he told Laura Miller that he's always thought of himself as a realist, who renders the way "that the world acts on [his] nerve endings." "The world that I live in consists of 250 advertisements a day and any number of unbelievably entertaining options, most of which are subsidized by corporations that want to sell me things" (60). See Mary Holland's chapter on "poststructural realism" in her Succeeding Postmodernism. Also see Hal Foster's discussion of what he describes as traumatic realism and Hirt's concluding chapter on "Postmodernism and 'New Realism"' (142–46). 17See Bowell's reading of the role of Lacanian theory in Infinite Jest (Understanding 128–32, 151–56). 18See Ozick's essay "Judaism & Harold Bloom," in which Ozick rejects Bloom's theory of poetic influence as anti-Jewish. 19"It is clear," Peckham writes, "that the artist is rewarded […] for breaking or violating rules, for offering discontinuous experience. But all other human activity is normally rewarded for offering a continuity of experience, for following rules" (220). 20As I suggest in "The Age of the World View," Barth, too, retains an attachment to humanist values while at the same time rejecting the logocentric worldview out of which traditional humanism emerged (424–25). For an illuminating discussion of "postmodern humanism," see Mary Holland's Succeeding Postmodernism. For a discussion of "postironic belief," see Konstantinou, "No Bull." 21A recent example of this longing is provided by Jonathan Franzen in his famous Harper's essay, "Perchance to Dream," in which Franzen declares his intention to abandon postmodernist cultural critique, in large part because such work disappoints the audience's "expectations of entertainment" ("Why Bother?" 70). "Ultimately," Franzen declares in his review of Sven Birkerts's The Gutenberg Elegies, "if novelists want their work to be read, the responsibility for making it attractive and imperative is solely their own" (176). 22Barth, too, in "Life-Story," addresses the onerous pressure of seeking reader approbation: "The reader! You, dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bastard, it's you I'm addressing, who else, from inside this monstrous fiction […]. Can nothing surfeit, saturate you, turn you off? Where's your shame" (Funhouse 127). 23As Boswell observes about a similar reverse thrust from story to reader in Brief Interviews, "[…] the actual reader is right there inside the piece, as both 'object' and 'subject,' as the person addressed directly and whose empathy becomes the work's silent and therefore living dynamic force" (Understanding 198). 24"The stronger the man," writes Bloom, "the larger his resentments, and the more brazen his clinamen" (43). 25See Philip Coleman's analysis of Wallace's use of Jameson's theory in "Westward," in Hering (62–74). 26In 2006, Wallace declined invitations to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Infinite Jest, declaring as unappealing the "idea of doing any more public events around a book I don't remember" (Max 291). He also dismissed his first novel, telling McCaffery, "The popularity of Broom mystifies me" (32). 27An argument that Bradley J. Fest makes in an unpublished essay, "The Virtuous Feedback Loop of Influence: Barth Reading Wallace Reading Barth," presented at the 2011 Duquesne Graduate Conference, "Echoes: Across Disciplines, Texts, Times." The first critic to propose this reverse influence was probably Jennifer Schuessler in her 2001 review of Coming Soon!!! Stephen Burn also suggests that "the germ of [Barth's] novel lies in David Foster Wallace's critique of postmodern fiction" (Franzen 12). The apophrades, in Bloom's formulation, is that "grand and final revisionary moment" that comes only to the strongest poets. "For all of them achieve a style that captures and oddly retains priority over their precursors, so that the tyranny of time is overturned, and one can believe, for startled moments, that they are being imitated by their ancestors" (141). 28In his 1998 interview with Tom Scocca, Wallace says that he "mostly typewrites." Regarding computers, he describes himself as an "old fogy" (88). 29Barth's most expansive consideration of e-literature is found in his essay "The End of the World as We've Known It," collected in Final Fridays (153–71). In the essay, Barth concludes that electronic literature, especially hypertext, poses no real threat to the medium of print.