Pynchon and George Eliot

[Tore Rye Andersen]

>From: "Jay Herzog" <zogboy at gmail.com>

>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:

>[George Eliot's Middlemarch]
>
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.

You may be right, and you've sure found a great quote to support your idea, 
but I think an equal case can be made for Melville's Moby-Dick, which was 
published twenty years prior to Middlemarch. What you say about Eliot's 
voice certainly holds true for Melville's as well, as does the idea of the 
world as a system of webs: "Would to God these blessed calms would last. But 
the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms 
crossed by storms, a storm for every calm. There is no steady un-retracing 
progress in this life".
I also think, perhaps sadly, that in comparing cocks, the young male turks 
would be more apt to compare their cocks to Melville's than to George 
Eliot's....

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