/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.22916601]

He is the definitive /lit/ icon no matter how hard nu-/lit/ tries to run away from its history. There is no other writer on the same wavelength as this board.

[Anonymous No.22916619]

>>>137979803

[Anonymous No.22916666]

>>22916601
I never read IJ nor will I, pseud lit that has "muh experimental narrative" does not concern me
McCarthy is my king of /lit/ and you cannot change my mind

[Anonymous No.22916696]

>>22916601
> on the same wavelength
That’s a Pynchon expression lol
Use your little idol’s words instead

[Anonymous No.22916724]

>>22916666
Although DFW is not superior to him, McCarthy is a juvenile author who writes quintessential boomer novels. All the existential angst he carries on from the beginning to the end of his writing career is the cry of an adolescente who wants at all cost believe in fairytales - tales from which the rest of Europe moved on about a century ago. He is incapable to look at the world with a naked eye and when he does all he sees is apocalypse - but not real apocalypse, i.e. the apocalypse of things as they are (see Krasznahorkai for a better take on that) but the fictionalized version of a apocalypse of someone waiting for judgement day only to prove that god and the devil indeed exist, and that life ultimately makes sense, albeit only as a fight between good and evil. He is never willing to except that it may not make any sense, or that it might, simply, be a mystery. He doesn't want to stay with the mystery as it is, so he either complains about the bleakness of life, or prophetizes an apocalypse that never comes.
Authors whom he shuns - those who don't write about "life or death matters", such as Proust, Flaubert, etc. - saw very clearly that this apocalypse is not the shower of atom bombs followed by the second coming of Jesus and/or Satan that McCarthy never got to see, but the reality of everyday life, once you observe it for what it is. But McCarthy, saved maybe for Suttree and the Orchard Keeper, never saw it like this, and got more and more sucked into total fantasy.
The saddest thing about him is that he kept preaching the end of the world, and died without seeing it. Imagine living more than eighty years with the feeling that all is ending, not seeing it end, and yet being incapable of question that feeling.
Moreover, he never wrote a single good female character in his career, which is the ultimate failure for a writer. Try writing fiction with human characters and disqualify half of humanity by being unable to portray the opposite sex. DFW was pretty bad ad this too, but he beats McCarthy's eternal whore/madonnas any time.

[Anonymous No.22916744]

>>22916696
No it's not.

[Anonymous No.22916749]

>>22916601
nowdays /lit/ is more mccarthy and pynchon than dfw and joyce

[Anonymous No.22916753]

>He is the definitive /lit/ icon
Follow your leader

[Anonymous No.22916758]

>>22916724
I aint reading all that

[Anonymous No.22916963]

>>22916666
>muh experimental narrative
His narratives are far from experimental, really he just applied techniques to realism which are not normally associated with realism but had not been considered experimental for decades.
>>22916724
How are Joelle and Toni Ware not great female characters?

[Anonymous No.22917137]

>>22916963
Toni Ware was good, but it's because it seems to be partly inspired by a real person. For the same reason, the other layered female character he wrote is Avril Incandenza.
As for Joelle, the whole story of the character and how she's written feels too much movie-like, and she reads more like a deconstruction of some diva character than a real person. The same is true for Lenore in the Broom - a sort of manic pixie dream girl with a Wittgenstein fetish.
Overall the main problem with DFW, in writing females as well as anything else, is that TV fucked up his brain, and that he really struggles to get out of TV tropes or to observe reality independently from them. Up to The Pale King and Oblivion there's so much stuff that just reads like a variation, deconstruction, de-decontruction of a TV trope. And it's great fun, because we all watched a lot of TV. But it ultimately falls flat once you unpack it - he's brilliant but in a very superficial way.
Now Oblivion: that's his best book, and the one where he writes about reality, and not some TV-filtered version of it, or where he doesn't need to go all this roundabout way through deconstruction to talk about it. It's the book where he stands out as a groundbreaking writer, for me. The rest is very smart, but it's like a very smart blockbuster, for kids who go to uni.

[Anonymous No.22917183]

I'm really sad he's gone. /lit/ rarely talks about it but I think Pale King was rubbing up against true greatness. He was truly mastering and maturing his writing style by this point. I would've loved to seen it finished.

[Anonymous No.22917186]

>>22917137
You are not actually saying anything beyond 'just trust me, bro,' you already stated your opinion and restating in a more verbose fashion does not validate it or provide anything worth talking about. What makes Avril more "layered," why does Toni Ware seem inspired by a real person? Why don't Joelle and Avril seem inspired by real people? What makes Joelle's character feel movie like? Etc.

I can't really respond in any intelligent or productive way to your feelings, I am not here to cuddle you, explain why and provide something which can actually be discussed.

[Anonymous No.22917205]

>>22916601
>>22916666
I've only read his short story about the kid who is about to jump off the diving board. It was pretty good, and, of course, short. You could start with that.

[Anonymous No.22917297]

>>22916601

You are forgetting about TAO LIN

[Anonymous No.22917357]

>>22916744
Yes it is

[Anonymous No.22917423]

>>22917357
nta and I am loath to defend a frog but that usage of 'wavelength' is older than Pynchon, hardly his language, common slang by the time he started writing.

2. fig. with allusion to radio reception, implying (esp. mutual) understanding; esp. in phr. to be on the same wavelength (as someone else), to understand each other.
1927 Amer. Speech II. 276/2 Have one's wave length, know one's sentiments.
1929 A. E. Housman Let. 16 Feb. (1971) i. 276 Only the archangel Raphael could recite my poetry properly, but..you would do it quite nicely, and I shall try not to set up interfering wave⁓lengths. a
1936 Kipling Let. in C. Carrington Rudyard Kipling (1955) xx. 509 Every man has to work out his creed according to his own wave-length, and the hope is that the Great Receiving Station is tuned to take all wave-lengths. 1938 Times Lit. Suppl. 24 Sept. 617/3 She finally comes to believe that she is the only person in Riverville who was ‘born civilized’ and that nobody else there is of her own ‘wavelength’.
1947 T. S. Eliot Milton 12 It is only in the period that the wave-length of Milton's verse is to be found.
1959 Economist 6 June 919/2 Editors and publishers..have to..find the wave⁓length of their..readers.
1964 H. Waldock in Barcelona Traction, Light & Power Co. Case (Internat. Court of Justice) II. 112, I do not think that it would assist the Court if I were to deal with every contention advanced by our opponents in their Observations and Conclusions; for on some points we are really not on the same wave⁓length.
1976 Ld. Home Way Wind Blows ii. 27 In September A. W. Whitworth took over, and I like to think we were soon on each other's wave-length.
1983 D. Dunnett Dolly & Bird of Paradise xiii. 168 We weren't on the same wavelength really... He was clever. And my thoughts are easy to read.

[Anonymous No.22917429]

>>22917423
> common slang by the time he started writing.
You can’t prove this

[Anonymous No.22917560]

>>22917429
I literally provided the proof.

[Anonymous No.22917584]

>>22917560
No, you *literally* didn’t. You provided some usages, not how it was “common slang by the time he started writing”.

[Anonymous No.22917616]

>>22917584
>i don't understand dictionaries
If it was not common usage it would be notated as slang and have a single usage example. I did not provide the usage examples, that was the OED.

[Anonymous No.22917799]

>>22916724
>>22916724
I think you write a lot to cover up your fundamental projections on McCarthy of what he was doing in his writings, as if you already came up with a dislike of McCarthy and want to twist interpretations of his work to support this dislike.

On “No female characters” — Melville hardly had any, either; and in his last two books, McCarthy has Alicia, anyway.

On “McCarthy only being able to see ‘Apocalypse’ when he looks out at the world but not the ‘apocalypse of things as they are’” — Suttree is far from apocalyptic; and Blood Meridian is also arguably investigating this “apocalypse of things as they are” in portraying the bloodshed between Americans and Native Americans not always consciously thought much of about or the full horror of it understood, yet which is in our relatively recent history.

> but the fictionalized version of a apocalypse of someone waiting for judgement day only to prove that god and the devil indeed exist, and that life ultimately makes sense, albeit only as a fight between good and evil. He is never willing to except that it may not make any sense, or that it might, simply, be a mystery. He doesn't want to stay with the mystery as it is, so he either complains about the bleakness of life, or prophetizes an apocalypse that never comes.
A bizarre reading, as Blood Meridian certainly DOES stay in the zone of this mystery firmly, ends on that note, without some final “apocalyptic” reckoning, the Judge being defeated, or ever fully explained away, but rather deliberately ends on a strongly ambiguous note.

This is just a bad reading all around.

>The saddest thing about him is that he kept preaching the end of the world, and died without seeing it. Imagine living more than eighty years with the feeling that all is ending, not seeing it end, and yet being incapable of question that feeling.

He wasn’t “preaching” it. He was writing about horrific stuff in history that already approximates an “apocalypse”, and he made a speculative portrayal of it in The Road, sure, but I have no clue where you extrapolate this to McCarthy being some specific preacher of this. He was trying to make great art that also touches on timeless themes.

Also, ironically, geopolitically speaking, the world IS indeed closer and closer to global conflagration than it’s been for the majority of known history, it’s basically been like this since WW2 and the atom bomb, so it’s unsurprising that McCarthy, a child during WW2 and who came of young adulthood during the Cold War, can write about what seems to you “too dramatic and apocalyptic-seeming themes.”

[Anonymous No.22917815]

>>22916724
>>22917799
I can admit I like both extremes of literature — the ultra-sensitive, domestic Flauberts and Prousts, and the neo-Biblical bombast of a McCarthy or Melville. I can read and love both types of books, but you seem to have this view that “if the book actually touches on extreme life-and-death situations, war, violence, etc., it CAN’T be good because it just CAN’T.” Just because both types of authors are doing extremely different things from each other, doesn’t mean they can’t be great.

But from the start of your post, anyway, it comes off as extremely condescending, bombastic, and polemical. I have no clue what you mean by, “All the existential angst he carries on from the beginning to the end of his writing career is the cry of an adolescente who wants at all cost believe in fairytales - tales from which the rest of Europe moved on about a century ago.” for instance. What “fairy tales” are you talking about? If anything, he’s often deconstructing such “fairy tales” much of the time, I have no clue what you mean of a “fairy tale” element or “belief in fairy tales” you see in McCarthy, unless you see his allusions to the religious and supernatural in such a light, in which case, you’re so unduly skeptical and condescending about things like this you can’t really come off as an unbiased reader.

[Anonymous No.22917873]

>trying some of his short stories to see if I can manage Infinite Jest
>have to re-read every paragraph 3 times to determine where the fuck the parenthesis that just ended started

[Anonymous No.22918351]

>>22916758
This post should be used in a /lit/ banner

[Anonymous No.22918359]

>>22918351
If there is a IJ banner it should be the young CT attempting to socialize. I have considered making and submitting the banner a few times but I have no idea how to submit a banner and do not care enough to figure out how, but it would be fun to make and stretch those old muscles from my past life in graphic design.

>I'm afraid I'm far too self-conscious really to join in here, so I'm just going to lurk creepily at the fringe and listen, if that's all right, just so you know.