Wiliam Gibson favored this

[ish mailian]

While the formalist's approach has merit, sure, the prose, the style
of later Pynchon is in many respects superior to GR. This is true of
the late work of many a great author. So it aint just the style.

Nothing, of course, will ever take the place of the good old fashion
of "liking" a work of art or not liking it; the more improved
criticism will not abolish that primitive, that ultimate, test. I
mention this to guard myself from the accusation of intimating that
the idea, the subject, of a novel or a picture, does not matter. It
matters, to my sense, in the highest degree, and if I might put up a
prayer it would be that artists should select none but the richest.

THE ART OF FICTION
by Henry James

On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 6:21 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> Every man is entitled to his own opinion, and every other man is entitled to
> knock him down [not physically]
> over it. -----Dr. Samuel Johnson..(and this is probably a paraphrase,
> Jochen, who rightly likes quotes properly looked pup but I'm Tired)
>
> On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 5:34 PM, Jochen Stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> 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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