<div dir="ltr">Thomas, believe me, you don't have to sell me on the uncanny brilliance of Pynchon's prose. I myself have described reading Gravity's Rainbow as being like imbibing some alien liquor, capable of pushing the receptive reader to the edge of a near literal drunkenness. It's incredible. It's amazing. <div><br></div><div>But it ain't the only game in town. </div><div><br></div><div>Foucault's Pendulum, for me, steeped since early adolescence in the Continental tradition of occult obsession (of which the Anglo variety is but a pale and paltry shadow), was an INCREDIBLY important novel. So much so that I forced myself to read it in French, feeling that it would somehow be closer to the Italian original. Having subsequently re-read it in English, I would say that I made a wise choice.</div><div><br></div><div>I'll probably try to explain myself more clearly in a future essay for the P-list. As for now, however, I have a bunch of illustrations to churn out, and I've been doing far more procrastinating than is advisable to someone with my health and economic issues. </div><div><br></div><div>Not trying to start any fights here, I just thought the rather ugly dismissal of Eco on the occasion of his death was unseemly and distasteful. I loved the man's work, both his fiction and non, and I can't fathom the knee-jerk "he ain't shit" attitude that his demise was greeted with by some here. </div><div><br></div><div>And as for mocking the Sherlock Holmes stuff from Name of the Rose... really? From fans of the guy who brought us the Learned English Dog, and characters named Bigfoot and Mucho Maas? Come on, guys.</div><div><br></div><div>Yours,</div><div>Jerky</div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 4:51 PM, Thomas Eckhardt <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:thomas.eckhardt@uni-bonn.de" target="_blank">thomas.eckhardt@uni-bonn.de</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">You were probably responding to my comment, Mark, as I was the one suggesting to compare random paragraphs.<br>
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The following is a little reductive, I know, but for the sake of the argument:<br>
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For me, the ultimate test of one's worth as a writer lies in one's prose style. No matter how intrigued I am by subject matter, plot lines or the author's knowledge of science or her/his general erudition -- it is the style that counts. Everything else is secondary, even if it is interesting, suspenseful, important etc.<br>
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"1984" may be the most important novel of the 20th century -- but it is not the best, not by a long shot.<br>
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It is a common experience for most novices to GR to have no idea just what on earth is going on on the novel's first pages but to keep reading for the prose. Rick Moody put this best:<br>
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"What accounts for the perpetual hold Gravity's Rainbow has on the consciousness of American writers and critics? What accounts for the myth that has sprung up around it -- a myth that seems to have ensnared even the facts of the author's life, or, at least, our idea of those facts? What makes GR so crucial to the voyage of younger American writers? I'd contend that it's Pynchon's style, not his subject. Whereas the prose in V., Lot 49, and the early stories is occasionally inventive and arrestingly lyrical ("For it was now like walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless. Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth"), in GR it is more than dazzling -- it's uncanny. It discards the usual limits on English and American prose. In fact, the writing -- notwithstanding the physics and hard science in a novel often fascinated with the intricacies of ordnance technologies -- seems to me the point of GR, its motivating force, especially as this language elucidates Pynchon's febrile imagination. Take, for example, the stunning opening page, with its nightmarish evocation of the London Blitz.<br>
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  'They have begun to move. They pass in line, out of the main station, out of downtown, and begin pushing into older and more desolate parts of the city. Is this the way out? Faces turn to the windows, but no one dares ask, not out loud. Rain comes down. No, this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive /knotting into/ -- they go in under archways, secret entrances of rotted concrete that only looked like loops of an underpass ... and it is poorer the deeper they go ... ruinous secret cities of poor, places /whose names he has never heard/.'"<br>
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<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/07/surveyors-of-the-enlightenment/376912/" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/07/surveyors-of-the-enlightenment/376912/</a><br>
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True, in terms of "uncanny prose" VL, IV and BE are not on the same level as GR, but for me generally the above holds true for them as well. And Eco, as much as I may like him as a public intellectual or a semioticist or a literary theorist or a medievalist -- as a writer of fictions he is nowhere near the same ballpark.<div class="HOEnZb"><div class="h5"><br>
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Am 21.02.2016 um 12:55 schrieb Mark Thibodeau:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
Just putting it out there that maybe, just maybe, comparing random<br>
sample paragraphs from different authors' novels isn't the BEST way to<br>
determine the relative value of each.<br>
</blockquote>
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