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

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.