Conspiracy of Commodities

[alice malice]

In 1976, Edward Mendelson used the novel Gravity's Rainbow in order to
introduce a genre that had "never previously been identified," the
"encyclopedic narrative." A cynical reading of his essay (published in
a volume on Thomas Pynchon entitled Mindful Pleasures) would view the
new genre as Mendelson's excuse to glorify his favorite novelist, for
his definition of "encyclopedic authors" is extremely exclusive:
Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, Goethe, Melville, Joyce, and of course
Pynchon. Yet Mendelson does provide a set of criteria for encyclopedic
narratives which extends beyond their exceptional authors: (1) they
all include an extensive account of at least one technology or
science, (2) they are an encyclopedia of literary styles, (3) they all
provide a history of language (are metalinguistic), and (4) they all
propose a theory of social organization. Yet one suspects that all
committed writers of the globalized, late capitalist era, to the
extent that they are running on all cylinders, would in one way or
another address such categories. This chapter, in fact, will reference
the above categories more or less explicitly even as it argues, using
the work of Umberto Eco and Thomas Pynchon, that the most distinctive
feature of contemporary encyclopedic narratives is that they enact an
aesthetic of crowdedness that not only relates to their situation in
the era of late capitalism but also incorporates, on the level of both
form and content, the four categories presented by Mendelson.

https://library.villanova.edu/Find/Record/1417797/TOC
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