Pynchon and George Eliot

[Jay Herzog]

A big part of me thinks that the brainy novels about
systems--sometimes (un)fairly called the
my-thick-novel/cock-is-bigger-than-your-thick-novel/cock school of
maximalist postmodernism (David Foster Wallace, Don DeLillo, William
T. Vollmann, Jeffrey Eugenides, Neal Stephenson, Jonathan
Franzen)--has its roots, ironically, in a woman's work:

    That great Frenchman first carried out the conception that living
bodies, fundamentally considered, are not associations of organs which
can be understood by studying them first apart, and then as it were
federally; but must be regarded as consisting of certain primary webs
or tissues, out of which the various organs—brains, heart, lungs, and
so on—are compacted, as the various accommodations of a house are
built up in various proportions of wood, iron, stone, brick, zinc, and
the rest, each material having its peculiar composition and
proportions. No man, one sees, can understand and estimate the entire
structure or its parts—what are its frailties and what its repairs,
without knowing the nature of the materials.

That's from George Eliot's Middlemarch, perhaps the greatest of all
English-language novels from one of the greatest of all fiction
writers. Its understanding of the world as a system of webs—of
interlocking designs that confound us when viewed too closely but
equally confuse us when we look only as the webs and not the
individual threads as well—is a shadow that looms large over
postmodernism. Her voice—which interrupts itself and changes
direction, which is carefully observant but rarely judgmental, which
is exuberantly learned but also comfortable with the
colloquial—resonates. The above passage, with its metaphors of anatomy
and architecture for human civilization and the individual, informs
Pynchon's use of the sciences to explain humanity.

More here:

http://quietbubble.typepad.com/quiet_bubble/2006/11/against_the_day.html