Let's be clear: anyone who discusses GR in terms of 'plot,' 'themes of paranoia,' or 'character arcs' has fundamentally failed the test the book sets for you. You're trying to use a city map to navigate the open ocean.The book is not a narrative; it's a cognitive payload delivery system. Its purpose is not to be understood in the conventional sense of assembling a coherent story. Its purpose is to simulate, at a neurological level, the experience of living within a totalizing, incomprehensible system of information—to induce the state of apophenia and intellectual vertigo that defines the post-war consciousness.Pynchon bombards you with acronyms, equations, historical detritus, and obscene limericks not for you to meticulously decode and file away, but to overload your analytical faculties. He is forcing your brain to abandon its search for linear causality. The text itself is the Zone. It's an environment, not a story.The book is a filter. Not for intelligence, but for a specific kind of intellectual vanity—the need to solve, to map, to declare mastery over a text. The moment you pull out a character chart or a plot summary, you have been successfully 'filtered'. You've chosen the map over the territory. The true reading of the book is the experience of being lost within it.So, the question isn't "what does it mean?" The real question is: at what point during your reading did you abandon the pretense of analytical observation and simply surrender to the data stream? Or are you still LARPing as a literary critic, trying to connect dots that were designed to remain scattered?
Let's be clear: anyone who discusses Blood Meridian in terms of 'plot,' 'themes of paranoia,' or 'character arcs' has fundamentally failed the test the book sets for you. You're trying to use a city map to navigate the open ocean.The book is not a narrative; it's a cognitive payload delivery system. Its purpose is not to be understood in the conventional sense of assembling a coherent story. Its purpose is to simulate, at a neurological level, the experience of living within a totalizing, incomprehensible system of information—to induce the state of apophenia and intellectual vertigo that defines the post-war consciousness.McCarthy bombards you with descriptions, nature, historical detritus, and the Judge’s diatribes, not for you to meticulously decode and file away, but to overload your analytical faculties. He is forcing your brain to abandon its search for linear causality. The text itself is the Zone. It's an environment, not a story.The book is a filter. Not for intelligence, but for a specific kind of intellectual vanity—the need to solve, to map, to declare mastery over a text. The moment you pull out a character chart or a plot summary, you have been successfully 'filtered'. You've chosen the map over the territory. The true reading of the book is the experience of being lost within it.So, the question isn't "what does it mean?" The real question is: at what point during your reading did you abandon the pretense of analytical observation and simply surrender to the data stream? Or are you still LARPing as a literary critic, trying to connect dots that were designed to remain scattered?
>>24694479I remembered a post saying how the Judge tells you how to read the book. Not in an obvious 4th wall break but it’s like ambiguous. Is that true?
>>24694447>swung to the other fencePlot is fairly important to understanding GR and it does not take all that smart of a person to understand. Interpretation wise it is a novel with two plots in a frame story, one is reality and one is Slothrop's hallucinatory world; the line between them is not as clear as it seems at first glance but the clues are all there and not that difficult to find. Once you figure out the two plots and see how they work with the frame story, everything falls into place. It is pretty much the same structure as V. but Stencil is made the main character and his story is integrated into the whole with more subtly. This is the basic structure of Pynchon's novel's, he expands and develops it and plays with it a fair amount through his career but it is always there.
>>24694508It’s not isolated to a single moment. It’s generally realized that the narrator in BM only describes things, but the judge shows us how to engage with the narration. In a way it’s like the narrator and judge are both working to create a perfected idea of what we would take for granted as normal narration.
When I read AI prÖse my heart bursts into full gallop and my adrenal glands vents their entire cortisol supply. I go completely apeshit. It's completely heartless. Like an Asian diasporic's HR email. Kill yourself.
>>24694447>it's a cognitive payload delivery systemWhat are you a fag? Stfu and wash my car
>>24694512>M&Dmost everything is unknown and explained by God. What little is known simple tangible things but we are starting to figure things out and we learn that just because it looks like a duck and poops like a duck, does not make it a duck. But this newfangled knowledge is mostly a hobby of the well off and/or insane, no biggie, God can sort it out when he sees fit too.>AtDWhole lot of stuff is known, everyone is in on it. The unknown is just something we haven't named yet or something we have not invented yet. Anything is possible, we are our own Gods.>GRWe know almost nothing, mainly because so much knowledge that we had to special and invent ways to deal with it all that no one can comprehend anything more than a tiny bit. The known has become the unknown and the world is once again beyond understanding, guess it is time to make new gods, hopefully the can sort out this mess.
>>24694817
>>24694447>Its purpose is to simulate, at a neurological level, the experience of living within a totalizing, incomprehensible system of information—to induce the state of apophenia and intellectual vertigo that defines the post-war consciousness.I don't understand the purpose of using art to approximate experience in this way. We already know how it feels; we live it. Then the merit becomes whether it replicated a general experience somewhat precisely. If it did, you go "Yeah I guess. Anyways..." I see many other emotions as being more worthy of induction.
AI slop
>>24694817Decent but a little to tidy, makes your reductions seem not reductive. Also, learn to proof read.
>>24695409lol
>>24694447ai cope
>>24694447You all laugh but this is actually what "academics" think about Gravity's Rainbow
>>24695658Have you read a lot of secondary literature on Pynch? I've read the companions for GR and 49 and LMAO they are so dumb.
>>24695683He has not read any. Also, learn the purpose of companions, they are not meant to explain the book and they are not even meant to help in interpretation.
>>24694508It's kind of a 4th wall break. Why would the most educated man in the book deliver those speeches in that manner to a party of criminals and illiterates only to hear himself called crazy for the umpteenth time? It's clever, not subtle. The kind of book Mccarthy foregrounds it to be hides some very blatant things he has been doing since the start. The first draft of the book (pic related) was quite unapologetically a metafiction
I don't read Pynchon for the plot. I read him for language games, puns, songs, amusing character concepts, and humorous takes on subjects that I find interesting like history, physics, mathematics, and 20th century pop culture.>Pynchon bombards you with acronyms, equations, historical detritus, and obscene limericks not for you to meticulously decode and file away, but to overload your analytical faculties.I don't care why he does it. I just think it is fun to read. Maybe it helps that Pynch wasn't my first foray into pomo nonsense. I read GR when I was an engineering grad student, so when he starts bringing up the Navier–Stokes equations, it was right in my wheelhouse. I minored in German, so long blocks of German text were fun to translate. And I spend a lot of my free time reading about history, so his historical allusions are fun to spot. Pynchon is just fucking fun. He matches all of my interests.
>>24694447>The book is not a narrative; it's a cognitive payload delivery system.My coworkers would laugh at me if I said this IRL.
>>24694479Blood meridian is a filter for cognitive intelligence. It's one of the clearest examples of a book of that sort, post-Kafka
>>24695787Did not expect an effort post from a BM shitpost on a GR thread. Maybe not a real effort post in your point of view, since you just read/understood the book. But appreciated nonetheless. Thank you!
>>24694447Nice post. Your thoughts on the dodo bird hunting part?
>>24695787What about that do you think is metafictional?
>>24695908Read the first passage
>>24694447I gave up looking for structure after burroughs and arundathi Roy. I don't miss it.
>>24694447not, but, not, but—not, but. Biggest problem with AI is that it can't escape this sentence structure. You can even tell it explicitly not to use these words and it will still do it, or some very similar variation of it.
>>24695949I was giving you the benefit of the doubt, I see I was wrong to do so. Second person is not inherently meta and breaking the forth wall does not make something metafictional. We need to know who "you" is before we can decide if it is meta and we need to see the meta being relied on for interpretation before we can call it metafiction. That page does not demonstrate that and hints towards a more clearly defined narrator than metafiction. But it could just be a an artifact of his drafting process, playing with things, following whims, seeing what happens and worrying more about getting it down on paper than picayune details that are trivial to fix.Also, the "kind of a 4th wall break" you speak of is metatextuality and not a 4th wall break at all; really it is just supertext, the opposite of subtext.
>>24695949Christ, did you mean first paragraph and not passage? If so, you are even more retarded than I thought.
>>24694447>The book is a filter. Not for intelligence, but for a specific kind of intellectual vanity—the need to solve, to map, to declare mastery over a text. The moment you pull out a character chart or a plot summary, you have been successfully 'filtered'. You've chosen the map over the territory. The true reading of the book is the experience of being lost within it.By writing this aren't you analyzing it and therefore being filtered? Also what makes wanting to understand things "vain"? If humans didn't develop their reasoning skills we would've never left the caves.
>>24694447>—to induce the state of apophenia and intellectual vertigo that defines the post-war consciousness.Boomer Nihilism and Hedonism were the only reliable solution(s) to Soviet Active Measures. >The real question is: at what point during your reading did you abandon the pretense of analytical observation and simply surrender to the data stream? Or are you still LARPing as a literary critic, trying to connect dots that were designed to remain scattered?Schroedinger's Wank.>>24694447>Pynchon bombards you withMaterial that makes one question why and how it ever passed NSA censors and the wisdom of removing The Georgia Literature Commission in hindsight of the Venona decryptions.
