The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus

Author:Franzen, Jonathan & Kraus, Karl [Franzen, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2013-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

it’s like the bitter irony of my picking up Gravity’s Rainbow when I can’t write these days, oh what a mess, I find Bloom’s style revolting in hindsight, his Manifesto a travesty like late Nietzsche, but I recognize Pynchon as my major precursor, the better he is the more I want to hate him but the less I can, a strange state of affairs, such as my reading list of novels in the last five years respectably large yet somehow managing to avoid all Joyce, Faulkner, Proust, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Austen, Stendhal, Mailer, my God, you’d think I’ve hardly read a thing, what fear what fear, my suitcase stuffed with more irony, you name—Derrida, Bloom, Burke, Jameson twice, Lacan, Marcuse, Lukacs, Barthes—it, but how many novels? just one, of course, cover reading “The most important work of fiction yet produced by any living writer,” influence, why fight it? does Irving? well, it hardly matters with Irving, but there’s almost nothing he does in Garp that Pynchon doesn’t do better, or Heller, and it seems that Pynchon’s Irving is just one among a dozen tricks the book is pulling off, how can you write in America anymore? how keep going without big genius? well, I hear you saying, who knows that one or both of us isn’t a genius, who says you have to be the best?

[…]

You scowl from my picture of you in your black tank top, arms as fluid and smooth as air, a coffee cup in one hand, a cigarette in the other. I hope you’re thinking, oh come on Jon, take it easy now, it’s all the same letter (call it V., title of Pynchon’s oh god great first novel, how could he? how could he?—“THOMAS PYNCHON is known almost exclusively through his writing. In all other respects, he craves and guards his privacy. The public facts about his life are few and far between”—from the blurb About the Author at the back of Bantam Book #0-553-14761-7, His Most Highly Praised Novel.) You still scowl. I know, I know.

[…]

I’d almost swear that this is a Pynchon toxin numbing my spirit. Why else do I want to go back to p. 321, where I left off reading after lunch?

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