/lit/ - Literature

He’s actually one of the least greats

He took the time which is a rare thing in this world.

>>22223849
“the greats” is bullshit no matter where you look
literature, art, music, it’s all bullshit
your intuition and personal canon is worth more than any ridiculous qualification of what is or is not “great”

>>22223849
Read him and find out

Name greater greats?

>>22224011
I still think it's worth understanding why he's such an important literary figure.

>>22224168
I've been reading him for a while. Halfway through V. right now.

>>22224296
>Name greater greats?
Meant for >>22223884

>>22224296
Nobody told you to read V..

>>22223849
Gravity's Rainbow is dog shit.

>>22224296
>name greater greats

An exercise in futility because you will just dismiss any names put forth without sound reasoning, even if you’ve never read them

>>22224451
Not liking something doesn't mean it's shit. Idiots often react strongly to things they don't understand so that they can pretend they're an intellectual

>>22224366
I probably did but with a caveat. V. Is my favorite of his despite its flaws, the Confessions of Fauto Maijstral is enough reason on its own to read V..

>>22224471
Anon, I'm asking you because I want to know. I made this thread because I wanted to know. I don't give a shit about flame wars or whatever the fuck.

I want to know what makes Pynchon so special. I'd like to know more about the greats. If you feel there are greater greats, I'd like to know about them too.

>>22224366
I already read GR and I wanted more.

I can't really tell you because I don't know anything about lit. crit. I like the way he writes and my autistic interests line up well with Pynchsters.

>>22224594
I used to be into Pynchon when I first got into reading but I don’t think so highly of him anymore. He only has one book I’d consider rereading. So my list of writers better than him would be long

>>22224671
ATD is great as far as his later output is concerned.

>>22224486
That's the worst chapter in the book. You are a pleb.

>>22224626
Still useful input, thanks anon.

>>22224671
>So my list of writers better than him would be long
Name a few.

>>22224483
What makes GR great?

>>22224594
Oh you're just an idiot

>>22225831
God forbid someone want to discuss literature on a literature discussion board.

Bump.

>>22224451
You're dog shit.

>>22224471
You mean like you did?

>>22228100
>dude, entropy

Bravo, Pynchon

>>22224486
>maijstral chapter
ew
you probably like the epilogue too

>>22228100
checked

>>22224011
Right. Canon is just a bunch of dead white guys like OPs pic. If you believe in "the greats of literature" then you are a sexist and racist. This is a reminder that everyone should round out there reading of all these slaveowners with some good old YA novels by trans black women.

One of the best ways to really evaluate the worth of any book imo is to grab paragraph at random from it, place it before you, and then reverse engineer exactly what the writer needed to know or master to be able to write that paragraph to that level of precision.

Take this paragraph for instance:

>He left the dodoes to rot, he couldn’t endure to eat their flesh. Usually, he hunted alone. But often, after months of it, the isolation would begin to change him, change his very perceptions—the jagged mountains in full daylight flaring as he watched into freak saffrons, streaming indigos, the sky his glass house, all the island his tulipomania. The voices—he insomniac, southern stars too thick for constellations teeming in faces and creatures of fable less likely than the dodo—spoke the words of sleepers, singly, coupled, in chorus. The rhythms and timbres were Dutch, but made no waking sense. Except that he thought they were warning him… scolding, angry that he couldn’t understand. Once he sat all day staring at a single white dodo’s egg in a grass hummock. The place was too remote for any foraging pig to’ve found. He waited for scratching, a first crack reaching to net the chalk surface: an emergence. Hemp gripped in the teeth of the steel snake, ready to be lit, ready to descend, sun to black-powder sea, and destroy the infant, egg of light into egg of darkness, within its first minute of amazed vision, of wet downstirred cool by these south-east trades… . Each hour he sighted down the barrel. It was then, if ever, he might have seen how the weapon made an axis potent as Earth’s own between himself and this victim, still one, inside the egg, with the ancestral chain, not to be broken out for more than its blink of world’s light. There they were, the silent egg and the crazy Dutchman, and the hookgun that linked them forever, framed, brilliantly motionless as any Vermeer. Only the sun moved: from zenith down at last behind the snaggleteeth of mountains to Indian ocean, to tarry night. The egg, without a quiver, still unhatched. He should have blasted it then where it lay: he understood that the bird would hatch before dawn. But a cycle was finished. He got to his feet, knee and hip joints in agony, head gonging with instructions from his sleeptalkers droning by, overlapping, urgent, and only limped away, piece at right shoulder arms.

First, analyze the semantic elements: on the simplest level, Pynchon needed to know what Dodoes were. Then, he needed to have, in his mind's eye, a general lay of the land for an island Dodoes might inhabit. He needed to know the region was in the south and the stars seen from that spot would be "too thick for constellations". He needed to know Dodoes could lay eggs in grassy regions and grassy regions might contain a "hummock". [cont]

>>22229573
[cont] He needed to know the island might also contain foraging pigs. He needed to know hookguns in those days fire with hemp in the barrel. He needed to know the south-east trade winds would pass there and be cooling. He needed to know the distinctive traits of a Vermeer. He needed to know the location of his character was close to the Indian Ocean.

Then, look at the metaphorical & imagistic:
sky is glass house
island madness is tulipomania
stars as fat, as faces, as creatures
eggshell as chalk + eggshell crack as net, egg of light, egg as part of "ancestral chain", as silent,
gun as snake, as sun, as sea (black-powder), as egg, as axis, as Vermeerian
mountains as snaggleteeth
head as gong etc... etc...

Then the phonetic effects (too much to list so will provide a brief sample):
"He left the dodoes to rot, he couldn’t endure to eat their flesh." - d consonance and e assonance
"jagged mountains in full daylight flaring as he watched into freak saffrons, streaming indigos, the sky his glass house, all the island his tulipomania" -- g consonance (jag, light, flaring, indig, glass), f consonance, (full, flaring, freak, saffrons) etc... etc...

you can also analyze the syntactical balance of the long sentences or the thematic function of the paragraph within the macronarrative etc...

Now consider that Pynchon has all that linguistic information in 361 words (though this paragraph is definitely one of his less dense ones). Now try to write a paragraph of the same length with as much unique semantic info, connecting imagery, and phonetic control. That should illustrate for you just how hard it is to achieve whatever Pynchon is doing.

>>22229573
In his foreword to Slow Learner, Pynchon admits that he just makes a lot of stuff up. The impression of omniscience that he conveys is largely an illusion.
Not that it's necessarily a poor reflection on him. He possesses an unusually vivid imagination that can make almost anything seem real.

>>22229573
He had to know all of this AND be able to coordinate it into writing while blitzed on psychedelics.

>>22229621
>he just makes a lot of stuff up.
I don't remember this. Post the quote.

>>22229621
Yeah, I don't think going island mad necessarily creates that specific range of colours, nor is he particularly detailed about where the mountains are, but the details that are there must still be of a certain level of verisimilitude to indicate the factoid at least passed his consciousness (like hemp for guns)

>>22229621
Yea it's fiction retard

Especially relevant here is this bit from William Gass' Temple of Texts which talks about the effect of good sentences:

>Anyone who looks with care into the good books shall find in them fine sentences of every length, on every imaginable subject, expressing the entire range of thoughts and feelings possible, in styles both as unified and various as the colors of the spectrum; and sentences that take such notice of the world that the world seems visible in their pages, palpable, too, so a reader might fear to touch those paragraphs concerned with conflagrations or disease or chicanery lest they be victimized, infected, or burned; yet such sentences as make the taste of sweet earth and fresh air—things that seem ordinarily without an odor or at all attractive to the tongue—as desirable as wine to sip or lip to kiss or bloom to smell; for instance this observation from a poem of Elizabeth Bishop’s: “Greenish-white dogwood infiltrated the wood, each petal burned, apparently, by a cigarette butt”—well, she’s right; go look—or this simile for style, composed by Marianne Moore: “It is as though the equidistant three tiny arcs of seeds in a banana had been conjoined by Palestrina”—peel the fruit, make the cut, scan the score, hear the harpsichord transform these seeds into music.....

>>22229655
I'm not talking about plots and characters, you fucking ape. I'm referring to the real locations and historical contexts where Pynchon's novels are set.

>>22223849
My friend who works at NASA says he's not even real. All his books were written by AI.

>>22229619
>d consonance and e assonance
What does this mean?

>>22229780
in a, wait for it, fiction book.

>>22231125
Listen to & look at the 'd' and 'e' in that sentence. Also Google exists.

>>22229661
Gass hated Pynchon's work though.

>>22229619
>d and e assonance
This is high schoolers do analysis? Lol.

>>22231740
I googled it, I know what consonance and assonance mean. I'm just curious as to why stringing together the same sounds is a marker of technical ability.

>>22232518
It's the mixture of everything at once, delivering powerful sonic effects while achieving symbolic and semantic condensation. 'e' assonance in particular facilitates euphony (Keats: "beechen green, and shadows numberless") while slowly building up to the flourish of "jagged mountains in full daylight flaring as he watched into freak saffrons, streaming indigos, the sky his glass house, all the island his tulipomania." Notice how the shapes you mouth widen as the prose climaxes, and the fricatives create turbulence. But I didn't want to spend ages delineating all those sonic effects so I just listed them.

>>22232430
Don't be a fucking cunt. I listed more stuff than that, just to illustrate the sheer work going on on a technical level to balance all the varied elements, because this thread was going to shit anyway without concrete examples. Would it hurt, for once, to restrain the urge to act snarky just so we can learn how to appreciate what goes on in a master's craft together? Would you like to provide any stirring analyses of your own to contribute to the thread?

>>22232576
I still don't see it. It feels like a bit of a stretch. I thought there was something like a phonetic memory (i.e., phonetically, Pynchon doesn't use too many new sounds to convey his ideas or imagery in that sentence) but the sounds of the word and their sonic effects being the build-up themselves feels like you're giving him too much credit. I'm kind of retarded though, so maybe I'm just being retarded.

>>22223849
AI wrote gravitys rainbow but the CIA dont want you to know that

>>22232765
That explains its quality.

>>22232763
Sorry I don't understand your comment. This is like the basics of good writing in that the music of prose works by a combination of aural effects (consonance, assonance, alliteration, repetition, parallelism, internal rhyme etc...) & rhythmic effects and I was just outlining some sounds that Pynchon uses in this paragraph. There isn't really anything to 'see' nor do I have any idea what you mean by 'giving him too much credit'. Every published writer knows how to do this. The specific phonetic-complex each writer creates is what determines the atmosphere of the work.

Let me write some rather simplistic examples for you:

>She whispered softly to me, her words of love flowing through my ears.
>And the earth broke open with a rambunctious roar, throwing forth runnels of lava.
>The grotesque froglike beast with squamous hide gibbered madly in the night.
>Tall mountains stood, firm and imposing before us, like armored sentinels taking guard.

Obviously you can tell that these 4 examples invoke different atmospheres and feelings due to the type of sounds I'm using. The first is tender, the second violent, the third grotesque, and the fourth grandiose. These are rather simplistic examples but you can tell from the Pynchon paragraph above that he invokes far more complex aural-effects than my examples, switching to whichever mood or phonetic-complex he sees fit.

>>22232830
Gass in his book Finding A Form has a lot of nice essays on this btw.

>>22223849
Middlebrow to his Cornell alumnus chum Vonnegut's low brow.

>>22232858
Vonnegut had pretty high bushy brows. On the other hand in the above picture you can hardly see Pynchon's.

>>22232830
Guess I'm just retarded. Your examples make perfect sense to me. I've tried something similar in my own writing too (but at a much lower level, obviously). I just didn't catch any tones from the Pynchon example which is why I thought you were giving him too much credit.

If you don't mind me asking, how would you describe the phonetic complex of the two Pynchon examples you highlighted?

>>22232846
Appreciate the recommendation, by the way.

>>22232900
For that paragraph in particular Pynchon maintains a baseline level of euphony which pulls off into different moods at the relevant moments, like when the character faces the egg with a gun:

>Hemp gripped in the teeth of the steel snake, ready to be lit, ready to descend, sun to black-powder sea, and destroy the infant, egg of light into egg of darkness, within its first minute of amazed vision, of wet downstirred cool by these south-east trades...

Here you have violence in gripped, teeth, steel, lit, powder, destroy which is suddenly tempered by the lushness of "wet downstirred cool by these south-east trades".

Compare that later to the mute sublimity here:

>There they were, the silent egg and the crazy Dutchman, and the hookgun that linked them forever, framed, brilliantly motionless as any Vermeer. Only the sun moved: from zenith down at last behind the snaggleteeth of mountains to Indian ocean, to tarry night.

Yet a word like 'snaggleteeth' pops out because it phonetically deviates from the rest of the words, yet is also setup by words like 'crazy' and 'framed' so it isn't too dissonant from the whole, almost as if perfect to fit there.

Hard to explain some of this stuff sometimes, but Pynchon somehow manages to maximize the phonetic variation while still delivering dense semantic and symbolic information

>>22231523
You're a, wait for it, retard.

>>22233534
cry harder

>>22232951
Appreciate it, thanks anon.

>>22232576
>appreciate what goes on in a master's craft together?
What master? You wrote a high school dissertation of published prose. Could be done for any seni literary writer. A true great doesn't need his qualities explained. They are intangibly felt even if the readers have no words to express it.

>>22232576
>while slowly building up to the flourish of "jagged mountains in full daylight flaring as he watched into freak saffrons, streaming indigos, the sky his glass house, all the island his tulipomania." Notice how the shapes you mouth widen as the prose climaxes, and the fricatives create turbulence. But I didn't want to spend ages delineating all those sonic effects so I just listed them.
LOL. What fucking retardation! This is like a shill trying to convince you about John Green. Even if the prose isn't anything spectacular, your attempts at explaining its qualities are spectacularly bad.

>>22234332
I agree my good indobro. A literary writer possessing of 'seni' deserves to have his craft explained to the masses, while one who truly grates can have their badness intangibly felt and thus deserves no such explanation. You grasp the core of my analysis perfectly.

>>22234342
Why thank you! I do think a bit of spectacular baldness in how one conducts one's analysis is essential to any sound literary critique. And I completely agree! The best literature retards the urge to copulate, and, rather, instills the urge to create and sublimate. I don't always agree with Freudian schools of analysis but I find, at the very least, that aspect of their thought very sound.

Bumping for more opinions.

>>22229573
>protagonist is clearly the author's self-insert
>self-insert protagonist fantasizes about murdering an innocent newborn the moment it hatches
>self-insert protagonist would waste powder & shot instead of just a fist or foot
>self-insert protagonist waits all day to ambush hatchling instead of just picking up the egg and eating it raw or cooked
>self-insert protagonist doesn't get to fulfill his sick murder fantasy and just "goes home"

I'd had my suspicions, but this proves it: Pynchon is a vile subhuman and a worthless hack... and, worst of all, filthy cryptoj*w.

Tell me I got filtered. I dare you. Do you know what else I got filtered by? Basically all shitty "literature" (especially modern)... or, more accurately: I FILTERED IT. This garbage is fit for the bonfire, and little else.

Pynchon's work is clearly intended to insult & undermine the culture of the White Man.

Fucking hook gun, are you goddamn kidding me? Fuck outta here.

>>22235937

You're reading at a "depiction = endorsement" Tumblr level. Your politics are just different from theirs, so you've fooled yourself into thinking you're less retarded

Only on 4chan can some guy give his earnest contribution towards something and be told he’s a retard by three different people who have nothing to offer. I personally am not impressed by Pynchon’s wankery but the guy’s posts are better than 99% of the board

>>22234477
Seething shill. Don't patronize me for a typo when you are clearly ESL yourself.

Your analysis is still high school tier. The fact that you don't understand my point says everything. But then again you are shilling Pynchon so its unlikely you have any experience with Great stylists.

>>22236150
High school essays aren't earnest contribution you tumblrina, and expecting a pat on the back on 4chan is the most tumblr thing imaginable. Cry somewhere else.

>>22236267
Bitter pseud coke

>>22236283
cope

>>22236283
Dumbass tumblrina

>>22236259
>Your analysis is still high school tier
Post better analysis. He's the only one contributing to this discussion.

>>22236267
Post an ernest contribution then.

>>22236839
>he's
Sure.

Has he honestly written anything better than The Recognitions?

>>22236150
Didn't ask

>>22223849
>>22224168
>>22230626
>>22232765
I wouldn't worry about it

>>22233538
no u

>>22235937
Absolute nanowit, and reddit-spacer to boot.

>>22223849
gravity’s rainbow is mk ultra project monarch psychic mind melding psycho mantis when he reads your ps1 memory card.

bleeding edge is a little pedestrian, it’s refreshing to feel the sincere love Pynchon clearly had for middle class life in the states but i found it too mild.

>>22229573
>>22229619
This is good for at least putting effort into the post, but I think it’s more than just “what wide-ranging obscure knowledge you show that you know” that makes fiction great. Not that I don’t find Pynchon’s fiction great, I do. But that specific point is too pedestrian and literal a marker of what makes an author “great.” All it would take is reading a history or nonfiction book/source of some kind (or multiple) that has that information and putting it in. Any historical fiction author who does some meticulous research and puts it in their book would then be “great” by this metric.

It’s what this source material is transfigured into that makes him stand (or fall) as a writer. He IS often a beautiful stylist when he’s not being turgid, that much is also true.

But besides that, I feel the interweaving of so many relevant themes to the modern era is also what makes him great. It’s a mind-fucking meld of WW2 history (and some earlier history of Europe, the U.S., and Africa), psychoanalysis, magic, mysticism, the occult and the paranormal, analyses of totalitarian power structures like communism, fascism, Nazism, monopoly capitalism, etc., the mass psychosexual sociology of sadomasochism (cf. Wilhelm Reich), freewill vs. determinism vs. probabilistic chaos (chance), and more, that all merges together with parallelisms and synchronicities between these different themes in a way as complex and interconnected as a fugue of Bach’s.

Above all, though, I think what makes him great is his unparalleled limericks. Also, I personally like Mason & Dixon a lot more than G.R., but appreciate G.R. a lot for what it does.

This is good for at least putting effort into the post, but I think it’s more than just “what wide-ranging obscure knowledge you show that you know” that makes fiction great. Not that I don’t find Pynchon’s fiction great, I do. But that specific point is too pedestrian and literal a marker of what makes an author “great.” All it would take is reading a history or nonfiction book/source of some kind (or multiple) that has that information and putting it in. Any historical fiction author who does some meticulous research and puts it in their book would then be “great” by this metric.

It’s what this source material is transfigured into that makes him stand (or fall) as a writer. He IS often a beautiful stylist when he’s not being turgid, that much is also true.

But besides that, I feel the interweaving of so many relevant themes to the modern era is also what makes him great. It’s a mind-fucking meld of WW2 history (and some earlier history of Europe, the U.S., and Africa), psychoanalysis (from the Freudian to the Jungian to the Skinnerian), magic, mysticism, the occult and the paranormal, analyses of totalitarian power structures like communism, fascism, Nazism, monopoly capitalism, etc., the mass psychosexual sociology of sadomasochism (cf. Wilhelm Reich), freewill vs. determinism/behaviorism vs. probabilistic chaos (chance), the conspiratorial vs. non-conspiratorial view of history and politics (paranoia vs. official consensus reality that “there are no conspiracies”), scientific and mathematical concepts like entropy, the battle between the inorganic and the organic, etc., and more, that all merges together with parallelisms and synchronicities between these different themes in a way as complex and interconnected as a fugue of Bach’s.

Above all, though, I think what makes him great is his unparalleled limericks. Also, I personally like Mason & Dixon a lot more than G.R., but appreciate G.R. a lot for what it does.

>>22223849
I agree with the anon who questions the idea of “greats.” But if you’re asking me what I like about him, it’s the same as any good writer: he has a unique sensibility and he pushes it to an extreme. What’s not to like about a writer who has chops and is willing to go over-the-top?

>>22223849
Whether he’s great or not I think he might be the great popularizer of “paranoid fiction” (things are all apparently connected, rather than singular images or metaphors that lock into place as the story goes on). But I’m not too sure. Also... uhh he can write good sentences and sometimes he’s funny.

>>22240257
>“paranoid fiction”
You nailed it. This sums up Gravity's Rainbow, which tapped into Cold War nuclear paranoia like no other novel.