Beginning with a profile of encyclopedic aspirations in Don DeLillo’s novel Underworld, this chapter extends the analysis through Moby-Dick by Herman Melville and The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. These are among numerous instances of cultural and intellectual audacity characterized as the encyclopedic novel after the publication of Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. The analysis expands by recounting the history of the encyclopedia as a form emerging from the earlier genre of the anatomy. This legacy, pioneering the cross-referencing system familiar from reference works in general, is now thoroughly integrated into our computational search engines. The novels characterized as encyclopedic, however, turn out to resist the sense of instantaneity and rapidity evident in digital platforms, going so far as to find value in indigence, revealed as the art of non-compliance with compulsory forms of “progress.”
Wstęp. Thomas Pynchon: między proroctwem a apokalipsą
