Wiliam Gibson favored this

[Thomas Eckhardt]

You were probably responding to my comment, Mark, as I was the one 
suggesting to compare random paragraphs.

The following is a little reductive, I know, but for the sake of the 
argument:

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.

"1984" may be the most important novel of the 20th century -- but it is 
not the best, not by a long shot.

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:

"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.

     '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/.'"

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/07/surveyors-of-the-enlightenment/376912/

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.





Am 21.02.2016 um 12:55 schrieb Mark Thibodeau:
> Just putting it out there that maybe, just maybe, comparing random
> sample paragraphs from different authors' novels isn't the BEST way to
> determine the relative value of each.
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l