The Influence of My Influence

As a writer of fiction I once described my style as a unit-sphere around an axes of Thomas Pynchon-Haruki Murakami-Denis Johnson, with other influences being David Mitchell, Roberto Bolan(y)o, and maybe Mark Richard. (My main blogging and non-fiction influence has always been HST.) Today I think the Denis Johnson leg of that unit-sphere may have been taken over by Richard Flanagan, but my entire view of that scenario may have been fundamentally altered.

I still would cite those writers as influences on me: Pynchon, Murakami, Johnson, Flanagan, Mitchell. But the unit-sphere idea I speak about less with people. I think my material would fit in well with the direction of Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, Mo Yan, and especially Tom Robbins, a kind of Pynchon-lite. But I have other influences--non-fiction writers who've helped with a kind of pacing and scope, guys like Carl Sagan and Frans de Waal.

But, that being said, this post is about the discovery and acquisition of some of the foundational sources of my influences.

Pynchon has always cited the Beat writers as one of his influences, and who am I to dispute that? The direction I feel like my fiction heads is a world where Pynchon was not influenced by the Beats as much as Chandler Brossard, someone living in New York a few years before the Beat authors and more influential in France and England than in the States. His material has a certain level of dread and excitement and trippy-ness that I find irresistible:

I jabber on  to anyone who'll listen about the importance of Brossard, and really, he's influenced more than anyone knows. Maybe "influence" is the wrong word. Maybe prefigured is better. Reading his stuff is almost as if Camus' Meresault was young and schizo.

Now, Haruki Murakami is an influence to anyone's imagination who reads his material, and I'm no different. Murakami himself cites Yukio Mishima as one of his influences, and that makes sense. Mishima is the pen name of Kimitake Hiraoka, Japan's most celebrated author (on the international scene) before Murakami, a political activist who wrote prolifically and attempted a coup, only to fail. Using a kitana, he spilled his own guts in a ritualistic suicide, good old-fashioned seppuku.

His masterpiece is a tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility, a set of four books that follows the believed reincarnations of the main character's close friend. I had been reading about the set on the Internet. Then, once again at the $1 Bookstore here in downtown Long Beach, I looked up at one specific shelf and saw:

Obviously I purchased it, but haven't started reading past page 3 yet. It is number three of the four Sea of Fertility books (Spring Snow (1969), Runaway Horses (1969), The Temple of Dawn (1970), The Decay of the Angel (1971)), and covers Thailand and India as well as different parts of Japan. It being from the middle of the four makes me a little nervous, but at this point I don't care so much.

For me, Mishima and Brossard are the elders at the base of a inverted tent, a structure that stretches upwards with Pynchon and Murakami, Wallace and Flanagan and Robbins and Johnson and Mitchell, Bolan(y)o and Mo Yan and Lethem and Haddon. Why shouldn't Camus fit in somewhere? That existentialist absurdity helps color good stuff.