/lit/ - Literature

I wouldn't worry about it. A few years after the book was published, Pynchon told his friend Jules Siegel: "I was so fucked up while I was writing it . . . that now I go back over some of those sequences and I can't figure out what I could have meant." The man himself has no idea what any of it means.

>>7208252
I agree that some of it is indecipherable, but the vast majority of it is still coherent. All of academia wouldn't rave about it if was entirely gibberish.

>>7208270
>All of academia wouldn't rave about it if was entirely gibberish

>>7208286
I think you have a warped view of what academia is like.

>>7208252
Why take this at face value? His actual friends say he pronounces his name PynchON...

>>7208270
>>7208351
I think you have a warped view of what the book is like.

Because Gottfried is a sacrifice on the tip of the rocket. He's covered in Imipolex too, I think?

Did you miss this:

But why are we taught to feel reflexive shame whenever the subject comes up? Why will the Structure allow every other kind of sexual behavior but that one? Because submission and dominance are resources it needs for its very survival. They cannot be wasted in private sex. In any kind of sex. It needs our submission so that it may remain in power. It needs our lusts after dominance so that it can co-opt us into its own power game. There is no joy in it, only power. I tell you, if S and M could be established universally, at the family level, the But why are we taught to feel reflexive shame whenever the subject comes up? Why will the Structure allow every other kind of sexual behavior but that one? Because submission and dominance are resources it needs for its very survival. They cannot be wasted in private sex. In any kind of sex. It needs our submission so that it may remain in power. It needs our lusts after dominance so that it can co-opt us into its own power game. There is no joy in it, only power. I tell you, if S and M could be established universally, at the family level, the State would wither away.

>>7208360
I don't think you've even read the book.

He's the sacrifice, the lamb, Blicero making a final offering to The Other Kingdom in hopes of transcending the Zero in Death. He answers to a higher power than Nazi Germany.

>>7208252
This is the dumbest thing to get posted around /lit/. When you know what you're looking for the book is almost to direct with what it says. With the exceptions of a few hallucinatory episodes that aren't intended to make sense, none of the book is unexplained or completely abstract.

>>7208286
You seem like the kind of person who would get triggered by this image.

>>7208996
The human mind is known for finding connections, patterns, and coherence where there is none. That's where conspiracies come from, and that's the point of the book. If you think you've "solved" Gravity's Rainbow (or V., or Lot 49), then you've fallen prey to the same misguided obsession and quest for meaning and resolution that afflicts the characters. This is what Pynchon's books are about.

>>7209034
Good try. If you think Pynchon books just pose some riddle to "solve", you probably haven't read them.

>>7209050
That's my entire point. There is no riddle to solve.

>>7209059
But that doesn't mean it's gibberish. It has characters, conflict, overarching themes, and a series of plot arcs.

>>7209034
To a certain extent, I think you're right about this: Apophenia, the human tendency to perceive meaningful patterns within random data.

That said, I think it's important to understand how Pinecone is actually using this idea that we are super-paranoid to be self-effacing about what he suspects (or maybe knows) is going on with re: to the Military-Industrial Complex, Globalized Corporations. If someone came out and made all these loosely based claims about the dangers of the MIC and Globalized Corps., people would just shrug him off as a paranoid conspiracy theorist; it's through this constant self-effacing Pulp style that we are able to-- paradoxically--take ourselves and each other seriously.

If we as a culture suspect that there may some foul play surrounding the 9/11 attacks (speculation that the CIA funded them, [insert truther theory here]), then the only way we are able to discuss it, or mention our suspicions, is through obvious, self-effacing jest, i.e., BUSHDID9/11, JET FUEL CANT MELT STEEL BEAMS.

It's funny because it's so ironic and playful, but we say it because it's the only way we can talk about our suspicions in the world, especially those which we have little to no evidence for.

>>7209059
it's not a riddle, the modern world has reached the tipping point of progress and we're collectively heading for the grave now

the military industrial complex is a self-governing system now and the world of global politics has been loaded for death since the end of the second world war

>>7209088
Me: There's no riddle.

You: Dude, it's NOT a riddle.

Am I being punk'd? Also, the stuff in Gravity's Rainbow about the military-industrial complex (the seeming content of the novel) is just decoration of the walls of the maze. The maze, the fact of it, is the point. Gravity's Rainbow could have been about anything. Pynchon's main concern is finding scenarios that motivate endless quests. That's V., that's Lot 49, that's Gravity's Rainbow. Pynchon doesn't care a lick about the military-industrial complex. It's not that kind of book. He cares as much about the m-ic as much as Dashiell Hammett cares about stopping crime. It's the occasion for the type of story Pynchon tells (and the one he's been telling over and over). Gravity's Rainbow is set during World War II because that's a cool setting for a Pynchonian maze. As Pynchon says, he writes comic books for the high-brow crowd. It's a testament to his talent, though, that you bought into the "message" so completely.

>>7209117
You don't seem to have read the book. It really doesn't at all try to hide its main ideas through motifs of Them, The System, The Counterforce, and Blicero's desire to find transcendence in The System's ordered death. It's a very poetic critique of modern means of war, and the cyclical economic nature of it.

Of course unsolvable puzzles are plot devices in most of his major works, but we are not meant to look for answers in the places Slothrop does. The conspiracies against him are tangled, interchanging and unfinished thoughts. In many ways, Slothrop is the driving force that threads together a series of vignettes that make up GR, but not central to its plot. A story of Force and Counterforce, the impulse of war, The Rocket of Death and The Rocket of Exploration.

Yeah i havent read it and i dont feel like continuing to reply. Call it a victory, too tired today. Congrats.

That was one of the most beautiful passages in the book

He needed to ignite a switch or something

Gottfried and blicero's relationship is written as heavily psycho-analytic

The bdsm and the sex is crucial for any number of reasons

>>7208360
That is how you pronounce it. PynchON.

>>7210246
That's how you pronounce it? Wardine be cry? You are retarded. I diagnose thee.

>>7210264
That's how Pynchon himself pronounces it. Listen to him on The Simpsons.

>>7210280
*squares his fedora in the mirror*