ABSTRACT
Using the literary epic as the point of transnational and trans-temporal interconnection, this chapter will outline patterns of literary infl uence in the work of John Updike, Philip Roth and Don DeLillo. Assigning literary infl uences, especially transnational infl uences, can be somewhat problematic, as highlighting a catalogue of sources may not tell us anything meaningful beyond simple assumptions of linear progeny. Furthermore, identifying trans-cultural strands of infl uence in the discussion of a perceived national phenomenon (in this case the American epic) is likely to offend those who insist on the territorial fencing-off of literature. Indeed, Roth himself acknowledges the diffi culty of identifying infl uence in his portrayal of writers, fathers and literary forebears, and the discomfort of the author-narrator with each addendum to the non-biological patrilinear inheritance.1 He famously rejected, for instance, Philip Rahv’s division of American writers into Whitman-esque ‘Redskins’ and Jamesian ‘Palefaces’, adopting the title ‘Redface’ to describe an approach to writing which is both vulgar and refi ned, both raucous and aesthetic, both earthy and ethereal.2 In his later fi ctional writing, meanwhile, Roth extends the catalogue even further with direct and subtle references to Joyce, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Byron, Virgil, Maupassant, Twain, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Colette, Chekhov, Kafka, Gogol, Kundera, Genet, Yeats, Synge, Hardy, Mann, Melville, Miller, Hawthorne, Malamud, Bellow,
Beckett and Dos Passos. Given such a swathe of acknowledged infl uences, chasing after linear trails of patrimony seems somewhat redundant. However, my task here is made slightly easier since each author has, in interview and practice, admitted the very specifi c infl uence of Joyce and the Joycean method upon their work. Molly Bloom’s soliloquy inspires that of Janet Angstrom in Rabbit, Run (1960); DeLillo, following Joyce, turns to ingrained mythologies rather than factual account in his conception of ‘counter-history’; and Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman, in his quest for an artistic vocation, is undoubtedly a version of Stephen Dedalus.
