Wiliam Gibson favored this

Sun Feb 21 16:34:44 CST 2016

Mark,

you are construing a "rather ugly dismissal" and a "he ain't shit"
attitude. What I wanted to point out is that to call Eco an "absolute
giant" is too much, even if he died the day before; as stylist he was no
giant, and I have difficulties imagining that somebody reads his novels for
the prose.

So you would say the English translation is bad? The German seems quite good

2016-02-21 23:10 GMT+01:00 Mark Thibodeau <jerkyleboeuf at gmail.com>:

> 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.
>
> But it ain't the only game in town.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> Yours,
> Jerky
>
> On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 4:51 PM, Thomas Eckhardt <
> thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de> wrote:
>
>> 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.
>>>
>>
>
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