/lit/ - Literature

>> Post-modernists I am double disappointed.

i take it you haven't gotten to the... arrangement... between Colonel Ernest Pudding and Katje Borgesius.

The reason why Gravity's Rainbow is better than Naked Lunch, apart from its scope and genuinely more accomplished craft, is that it works more politically and, as such and through such means, places itself at the top of the postmodern pantheon. The ending is one of the best I've ever read.

This is one of my favourite books. I think Pynchon is a fantastic writer. The descriptions and imagery this guy can conjure up is really great. I can agree that it can be a love it or hate it thing.

Yet I love Burroughs stream of consciousness. More disappointing than the shock of bananas or adenoids is reading Slothrop's genealogy and realising that this is a sad filk of Catch-22.

I'll call you back when I hit unfilked text. Or am convinced that it is filks all the way down.

I think I prefer J.G. Ballard's clinical excess, and its perversion into Will Self over this tendentious drooling crap. And I like sputum drooling crap.

>[What it was like before the war] "All I remember is that it was silly. Just overwhelmingly silly. Nothing happened."

All sympathy gone for these characters. Pomo is as isolated from the world as its French intellectuals were from 1968. For starters: they weren't in Czechoslovakia.

>>2047530
>that ending
I don't even have an appropriate ending.

>>2047627
derp, second "ending" should be "image".

>Vomitting…the cherry from some Radcliffe girl

Wow, yet another American Bourgeois College Book.

why are you even reading this book if you obviously aren't enjoying it.

>>2047623
It's only indirectly about the war, it's more about the political paradigm that came with the war, and developed after it. As such and being distinctly part of that pomo tradition of eschewing tangible realism for political and psychological realism, i.e. realism on a different level, we can forgive Pynchon for not speaking for the oppressed Czech, Baltic, Hungarian or Scandinavian populations (or whatever other ill you can conjure).

>>2047623
It's only indirectly about the war, it's more about the political paradigm that came with the war, and developed after it. As such and being distinctly part of that pomo tradition of eschewing tangible realism for political, cultural and psychological realism, i.e. realism on a different level, we can forgive Pynchon for not speaking for the oppressed Czech, Baltic, Hungarian or Scandinavian populations (or whatever other ill you can conjure).

>>2047553
Burroughs and Heller weren't speaking for culture in the same way that Pynchon is. The filk elements is meant to be bathic humour of quite a sophisticated level.

>>2047572
JG Ballard is gratuitous and unsubtle

>>2047644
More importantly the oppressed British and American populations. The Beveridge report is an invisible constraint upon the freewill of almost Randian twerps. I have a great deal of sympathy for Wooster—there is no sympathy here.

>>2047639
You only read books you enjoy? Are you serious?

Pynchon is a billion times better than William S. Burroughs. My god. Not even the same spectrum. You have failed.

>>2047646
> gratuitous and unsubtle
So's Brecht. There's a point where baroque becomes rococo.

>>2047648
>Reading books you don't enjoy
>Reading for reasons other than pleasure

Sure is undergrad in here

>>2047648
>You only read books you enjoy? Are you serious?
yes. if i do not enjoy a book, i put it down.
reading a book you do not enjoy is a waste of time.

>>2047653
>>2047657
Some of us read for work, its a higher calling than edification or education, both of which are higher than simple enjoyment. (And if you want some word play, I'm taking up Zizek's enjoyment.)

>>2047652
baroque is rococo as far as the semantics go, my friend, but using Brecht as an analog for Ballard is a little wrongheaded, from my perspective. The gratuity for Brecht is a sort of bathos which is, by most accounts, an acceptable place for gratuity. For Ballard, gratuity is an opportunity to make lurid, sensationalist Marxist political statements with car crash fetish analogues among other things.

>>2047662
i had written out a long reply to this but it was pointless - it's not like i'm actually going to change you opinion - so i shortened it to this:

>both of which are higher than simple enjoyment
i disagree.

>>2047657
To be fair, I read books like Ulysses and Gravity's Rainbow at an age where I could certainly understand them but perhaps couldn't engage with the subtleties of their craft, without of course any useful experience of what literary subtlety is and where it can be found in literature, and as a result, enjoyed neither to the extent that they could be enjoyed.

The net result of this was that my reading and tastes were given a real baptism of fire and progressed and matured much quicker than they should have done. It's the same with anyone trying anything new I guess; complex and difficult art has to be tolerated until you're acclimatized to its quirks and pleasures.

>>2047668
Or you can learn to abstractly and systematically appreciate that which you loathe; and, to aptly critique its short comings, overstatements and misuses.

>>2047675
Sure, but remember that critical power only comes with experience

>>2047678
I sat half a year of English in undergraduate fifteen years ago, and I'm reading this while resolving some problems with Bourdieu and post-structuralists. I'm using it to confirm the mapping of the separation of modernism and post-modernism, particularly in relation to epistemology.

Also, I am frustrated because there isn't enough gay sex—Red the Toilet Negro's Pomade Dingleberry Action was unfulfilling.

>>2047682
Philosophy, even textual philosophy, is quite separate from taste and the interpretative abilities that come with experience with literary college education aren't entirely the same thing as appreciation.

Brotip: Traditional paradigms of modern-postmodern definition are all a little off the mark, particularly where any sort of separation or intrinsic change is claimed. It's more of a sort of progression with perspective and a maturing of certain idealistic sensibilities, concurrent with massive cultural and political change that the artists of these two generations felt responsible to speak for.

>>2047686
The suspicion I'm following up is that post-modernism is a cultural movement primarily restricted to the bourgeoisie and to the Erhenreich's PMC. Gravity's Rainbow is mapping out a perfect post-war Foucaultian nightmare.

The problem then is why did the ruling class and its lackeys shift from modernist perspectives prior to the great political economic reconfiguration of the 1970s; and, what of literature that serves the class?

Even while time travelling by being hung, Burroughs returns again and again to the primary social antagonism. BEE wouldn't know a social antagonism if it fucked him in the bum without lube or poppers—he seems blithely unaware of the moments when he's voiced it as his attempts to replicate those moments are dismal failures.

>>2047688
I quite obviously forgot my nick.

>>2047688
There is this thing that people have about class and certain sorts of politico-cultural conscience, and I'm not sure I like it entirely. As far as art's concerned, it's uncharitable to suggest that certain sorts of art are written to be accesible only to certain classes and maybe wrongheaded to suggest that literature of GR's scope would ignore certain classes in how and to whom it speaks. Pynchon himself was a normal petit bourgeois kid growing up and was doubtless conscious of the issues of other classes.

It's also a little difficult to consider Gravity's Rainbow or art of its ilk to be sort of class or party instruments when primarily they're trying to speak some sort of truth about some sort of new politique, a truth that may kind of be, of necessity, pretty autonomous. And hell, of course BEE isn't too wary of class or social issues; he's a second rate writer, writing for unadventurous thinkers that want to discover something clever and 'big' without having to engage properly

>>2047696
The idea of the autonomy of art is suspect, but not in the manner of an instrument of party or class action. And it certainly isn't the readership that's restricted from interfacing with works.

It is more the effortlessly privileged and technocratic narrative emerging in GR embodies the consciousness of a class. It isn't impossible to write over class barriers, Zola does a half way adequate job.

The other thing is that I haven't observed an epistemic crisis that post-modernism speaks to in the non-fictive working class archives I've read; this crisis simply doesn't appear in the documents of people who work for a living.

(The crisis that appears mirrors almost precisely the crisis of the 1890s, and the 1910s, and the 1920s, and the 1930s.)

And this is why I'm reaching out to the Erhenreich's voicing of the Professional-Managerial Class (ha, also Post-Modern Condition, ha) in relation to Gravity's Rainbow—the welfare state's funding spigot dried up for non-instrumentalised research.

>>2047702
The idea that art is autonomous is quite a standard position among certain literary/textual philosophers but equally the opposite is true. What I'm actually saying is that its text is autonomous in the sense that it can't be instrumentalized by classes of people for certain ends, it exists outside the political, speaking of the political.

Sure, the epistemic pomo issues don't speak to the unintellectual, or equally, the uneducated, but they speak of the culture they inhabit and thus, it speaks for them and is utterly accesible to them. This PMC thing sounds relateable though, as conceivably it is part of the cultural/political changes Gravity's Rainbow speaks for.

>>2047713
>Sure, the epistemic pomo issues don't speak to the unintellectual, or equally, the uneducated, but they speak of the culture they inhabit and thus, it speaks for them and is utterly accesible to them.

I've done some training in party work with blue and white collar workers. They can get that epistemic desychronisation of meanings and texts may be significant intellectually. But they don't reproduce this complex in their own texts.

They can read it; but they don't experience it as a crisis themselves—they simply *do not inhabit a post-modern world*. The working class do not live in a simulacra, they live in a class society dominated by grand narratives, and they're the one tied up in leather being hit.

I'm suggesting that a bourgeois hegemony declaiming post-modernism is repressing and producing as subaltern the actual working class experience of modernity.

(The Erhenreich's aren't universally supported, even within the Marxist conceptions of potential "new classes", and they're particularly US in their bent, so it suits this text.)

>Meanwhile> They finally correlated the bomb and fuck charts. 1/8th of the text in.

>>2047727
You're forgetting about the great Post-modern writer, Don DeLillo who started life as a blue collar parking attendant. This is the man that probably bested Pynchon at his game a couple of times. I myself have worked blue collar jobs, it's never forced any sort of identity or psychology on me.

Sure, these silly class narratives appeal to the uneducated or unintellectual working class but not necessarily to everyone in that class. Class, in the end, is of course an identity that speaks very, very little of a person's psychology in the grand scheme of things and was something in the end, that has almost been subsumed by modernity. The numbers of true blue collar workers in the west are dwindling, considering the fact that even the most petty office worker is technically middle class by Marx's designation.

>>2047747
>considering the fact that even the most petty office worker is technically middle class by Marx's designation.

Uh, no. You'll want to revisit Marx on the nature of wage labour. Marx's category has always encompassed all those who only possess the capacity to subsist off the sale of their labour power for wages or salaries.

The rest of your comment is fine.

>>2047783
But labour in Marx's terms is tied up with the tangible products of industry not the intangible products of office work.

>>2047792
Dame Quickly is a productive worker remember, and she's in the service industry?

Transport workers are productive workers remember, because they contribute to the production of the commodity as capable of being circulated.

Even the shop assistant who deboxes the commodity into individual units is a productive worker.

The productive/unproductive worker distinction isn't relevant to class status; but, rather, to strategic possibilities of resistance.

>>2047809
But the vast majority of office is intellectual to an extent. How is that a wrong-headed claim?

And what sort of tangible labour product can you hence derive?

>>2047747
>I myself have worked blue collar jobs

why am i not surprised

>>2047827
Well you could only not be surprised for elitist and bigoted reasons, I'm sure.

Well the fabulous massacre of subaltern dodos is getting boring. Never mind the Indonesians, they talk back.

>>2048500
lol that part is one of the best. It goes on and on and on and has nothing to do with anything ever. Probably the only part of GR that really deserves a DFW comparison

>>2048806
Sums himself up so nasty: Leni grew up in Lübeck, in a row of kleinbürger houses beside the Trave.