/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.20183344]

What is the most confusing piece of prose, metaphor, analogy, allegory, or book in general that you have read? One that makes you baffled by either the quality or the meaning.

[Anonymous No.20183351]

the bible

[Anonymous No.20183354]

>>20183344
Moby Dick. You could probably read that book for years and treat it like a sacred text.

[Anonymous No.20183376]

>>20183344
It was when I picked up a book I wrote a couple of years later. Apparently I was trying to convey the creation of the universe from the perspective of a painter but the actual prose was a convoluted but very beautiful clusterfuck.

[Anonymous No.20183389]

A Thousand Plateaus is painful.

[Anonymous No.20183396]

>>20183389
Also anything by Alfred North Whitehead, but it's a different kind fo pain.

[Anonymous No.20183950]

I don't remember. Anything I found challenging I either
a) worked it out, and moved on
b) didn't bother, and moved on
What do you want me to do, remember confusing shit just to rattle off?

[Anonymous No.20184010]

>>20183376
post it plox

[Anonymous No.20184136]

>>20184010
If you insist

[Anonymous No.20184145]

>Lysidike took her ability to read his mind as a matter of course, but his converse power was still unsettling. Time was only Anaximander ever gleaned what she thought with any proficiency; but he deduced her nature from what his oily smarts told him was the nature of a person, and only sardonically hinted at his mastery. Tlexictli didn’t even have to puzzle to catch her straight away, so the privacy she took for a metaphysical given in her youth broke up, and she felt her disagreements with her husband as dumb sensory pressures, like heat or cold. Their cross-purposes weren’t any easier for their transparency, but there was nothing to worry over – they’d conducted business together before becoming sentimental.

[Anonymous No.20184147]

>>20184136
I don't get it

[Anonymous No.20184152]

>>20183344
My diary desu. Either that or various schizoposts on this website, usually /fit/.

[Anonymous No.20184163]

Ron Miller's Silk and Steel

[Anonymous No.20184174]

>>20184163
Basically the English translation of >>20184136

[Anonymous No.20184207]

>>20183344
I don’t know if I got filtered by Vonnegut or if he is actually trash. None of it makes sense, or it makes sense but is just…dumb. It’s like diary of a wimpy kid for adults.

[Anonymous No.20184210]

[Anonymous No.20184418]

Jacques Lacan’s ‘Ècrits’. The writing style is very bizarre and opaque, loads of coy allusions, puns that are difficult to translate, and intentionally ambiguous grammatical constructions. Huge waste of time unless you’re really into Lacan, Freud, and the history of Western Philosophy including the more obscure figures. Look at Goodreads and you will see a bunch of butthurt pseuds complaining about how unintelligible it is. They hear that it’s difficult and see it as a chance to test their IQ or something, while not realizing that the material they’re reading requires a lot of contextual familiarity. Same thing happens with Derrida, Hegel, Heidegger, etc.

[Anonymous No.20184421]

VALIS by PKD is the most challenging piece of art I’ve engaged with.

[Anonymous No.20184470]

>>20184418
>they hear that it’s difficult and see it as a chance to test their IQ
>be me
>google “difficult fiction”
>buy books
>determined to prove to myself I’m smart like my old man, my hero
>realize I’m not that smart
>abhor marvel movies, netflix entertainment
>too stupid to really engage with complex literature
I wasn’t prepared for this level of torment.

[Anonymous No.20184495]

>>20184470
start at the beginning and work your way up

[Anonymous No.20184500]

Gertrude Stein's cubist works

[Anonymous No.20184508]

Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?

[Anonymous No.20184584]

>>20184470
What books in particular did you try reading? I’m the anon who you replied to, and the reason I originally became interested in literature and philosophy as a result of some fantasy of being ‘well-read’, and being ‘an intellectual’. Once I got acclimated to the process of reading more difficult texts, and once I came to realize what it really means to be ‘an intellectual’, my perspective has entirely changed. Now I’m just a pretentious retard who won’t shut up about a bunch of obtuse bullshit that barely anyone cares about, plus I’m poor as fuck because I spent all my time reading Hegel instead of running crypto scams or selling coke.

[Anonymous No.20184593]

When I was in elementary school I often borrowed random books from the library if they looked cool. Among them was a fantasy-looking book with a gargoyle on the cover. That goddamn book was so perplexing to kid me that it felt like my neurons were frying as I tried to comprehend it. To me at that age it may as well have been Hegel. I returned it soon after.

To this day I don't remember what the book is, or why something so hard would be in an elementary school library.

[Anonymous No.20184594]

>>20184136
what is the name of this book?

[Anonymous No.20184652]

>>20184495
This is decent advice, but the ‘start with the Greeks’ dogma on this board is mostly just autism. Start with something that piques your interest and doesn’t require loads of contextual knowledge. With philosophy, decent starting points are Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Foucault, Camus, the Stoics, and of course Plato and Aristotle. The latter two are undeniably important and you should absolutely read them at some point, but it’s really not necessary to start with them. As you continue to read, you’ll start to recognize the influence of certain thinkers on others, and you’ll have moments where something that seemed painfully obscure at first is illuminated by some footnote in a seemingly unrelated text. For example, if you read Plato’s ‘Parmenides’, you might feel lost and irritated, but a year later while you’re reading Hegel you’ll realize that the discourse on ‘the One’ is entirely tied up in Hegel’s discourse on totality, the self-sundering Notion, etc.

Don’t be so hard on yourself, IQ is a meme, people on this board are mostly underage. If you want to read this stuff, take your time and don’t expect enlightenment.

[Anonymous No.20184877]

>>20184584
>>20184652
These are thoughtful enough responses that you deserve to know I made the greentext up. Thank you for being encouraging.

[Anonymous No.20184892]

>>20184652
Aristotle is not a good starting place. Schopenhauer is questionable too.

[Anonymous No.20185254]

>>20183354
midwit

[Anonymous No.20185260]

>>20184207
His stories are intentionally simple in story shape. He makes some comments about good stories not meaning anything, but not sure if that's what you experienced with him.

[Anonymous No.20185293]

>>20184594
Das Gross Buch von R*d*it.