The post that broke /lit/
>>24816745Should use the word substance instead of sustenance
why is Knausgard in therehis work is very charming and easy to read
>>24816765came to say this
>>24816745>everything has to be brief>that's why everyone uses gigantic run-on sentenceswhich one is it??
>forever run along [sic] sentences>everything has to be briefOP is a brainlet
>uses words wrong>contradicts itself>screenshots own posts for more attention>randomly complains about capitalismyup, it's another tranny
>>24816782>>24816787>>24816792The post that was so stupid it *unified* /lit/
>>24816782>>24816787>>24816792>>24816798Can you seriously not understand that brevity in this instant refers to the run-along sentences jumping from subject to subject, never really unpacking anything instead "drop a million superficial bombs of depth". I swear nobody here actually reads and has the inference ability of a tiktok Zoomer.
"Brief" in that sentence is clearly referring to the adjective meaning a short duration. Everyone on this board is retarded.
>>24816745Looks like it got 6 response
>>24816771OP probably meant to say Krasznahorkai, only proving that he's read neither. Post invalidated.
>>24816805The poster that /lit/ broke
>>24816745You mean that it broke you.
>>24816805Is this that troon from the Irreversible Damage thread? This cluster b behavior is giving me deja vu and also the heebie jeebies.
>>24816843Fuck you bloody bitch
>>24816805this, what utterly retarded posters /lit/ has. probably mccarthy fanboys, they're always low iq.
>>24816849(You)
>>24816745>"Superficial"The optical democracy line from Blood Meridian has been a consistent topic of study for decades.
>>24816745Dumb post obviously written by an ESL.
>>24816877>The optical democracy line from Blood Meridian has been a consistent topic of study for decades.Why? It's very easily intelligible. Compared with Dickens or James, whose literary apparel is always a natural match for the idea being expressed, it IS superficially stylised.
>>24816913>Why? It's very easily intelligible. Compared with Dickens or JamesProbably because it's 100 years newer than those two and hasn't already been researched to death. Funny you talk about beng superficially stylized and then mention Dickens.But anyway, going from "superficial" to "superficially stylized" seems like moving the goalpost..
>>24816745>>24816805>le critic face
>>24816887I fuck your mother.
i only read social media posts so tf unc be sayin tho
Another plotfag filtered
>>24816877>it's the desert which is empty as hell>everything looks the same>nothing takes precedence, not even man, he blends in too>the clearer things are, the more they blend in>we choose what we want to see in that type of landscape>men, rock, it doesn't matter>This is pretty easy to understand I thought
>>24816926>Probably because it's 100 years newer than those two and hasn't already been researched to death.That's not a good justification. Something still needs some unique quality to be continually researched and reinterpreted, and I don't see that interpretative potential in the McCarthy passage.>Funny you talk about beng superficially stylized and then mention Dickens.There's nothing superficial about Dickens style. It's not a covering for something of inferior worth or different in quality, it is the natural expression for the ideas being expressed. You could not possibly rephrase a Dickens passage, it comes out perfect. You might say the ideas are in some ways superficial or indulgent, but compared with McCarthy, the thought processes of Dickens are a thousand times more substantial and intelligent.>But anyway, going from "superficial" to "superficially stylized" seems like moving the goalpost..I'm not the Op but it seems like it's pretty much the same discussion.
>>24817034Yes it's a critique on anthropocentrism, our tendancy to think that we as humans are the center of the universe.
>>24817042Right, and the desert removes that illusion. Your rotting corpse is no more relevant to the desert than sun-bleached paloverde.
>>24817046But a corpse is relevant to another human.
>>24817037>the thought processes of Dickens are a thousand times more substantial and intelligent.I don't want to be that guy, but half of Dicken's books were rushed to fit his serialization schedule.. I remember reading a study showing that Dicken's books had a smaller vocabulary range towards the end of them. >I found it lol, picrel
>>24817067and you think another human finding it important is relevant because of anthropocentrism
>>24816745/lit/ has been broken for much longer than 10 days.
>>24817080So is the importance of going against anthropocentrism.
>>24817096Meta
>>24816745I've only read blood meridian but I genuinely believe it to be the worst book I've ever read.
>>24817139Is the Hobbit your favorite?
>>24817139You don't believe that, actually.
>>24817037You're retarded. You speak as if you know what you're talking about but you don't have any idea what you're talking about. What did you understand from that passage? Do you think it's talking about some esoteric kinship between man and rock? Mccarthy is talking about hierarchy. That in a landscape where there is no telling as to where the seams of reality are, the slightest thing becomes invested with great significance. It is reflected even in his prose that, unlike Dickens or Joyce, does not subjugate with multiple dependent clauses. His polysyndeton gives equal weight to descriptions of violence as it does to the movement of grains of sand in the wind. This "optical democracy" is the very basis Blood meridian's thesis. A thesis which is trying to hold up narrative intelligence itself in court. Read any of Holden's speeches properly, though I fear your mental apparatus is too weak to read anything beyond 19th century realism and its inheritors.>You could not possibly rephrase a Dickens passage, it comes out perfect.Completely false and asinine comment. If same standards were applied to both writers, Mccarthy would be the gold standard for Chekhov's gun relative to Dickens. Dickens is the most fluff stuffing writer in the canon.>and I don't see that interpretative potential in the McCarthy passage.That's because you're too low IQ.
>>24817034That's not it, remotely.
>>24817037>the thought processes of Dickens are a thousand times more substantial and intelligent.Lol. It's okay to be a midwit, anon. But don't pretend that if things aren't understood to you then they can't possibly exist.
>>24817494Yea, it is. But go ahead and enthrall us with you acumen.
>>24817533No it is not. That's only the impression that your pea sized brain could deal with.
>>24816745
>>24816745>lacking any real sustenance. O Prometheus of literature, please bestow your knowledge of truly "substantial" literature upon us. But you wont, because you'll either recommend avant garde naval gazing like Pynchon, purposefully obfuscated philosophy that hides its contradictions behind nonsense terminology, or classical literature, which I enjoy personally, but can easily be hand waved away by critics as overtly Christian or whatever.
>>24817535Is this the part where you feign a deeper understanding but never deliver, and then ride into the sunset totally gratified that you got one over on the dumbasses?
>>24817547There already is one ITT>>24817489You're mangling the passage just to pick and choose what fits your interpretation. You say things start to blend in when the passage clearly says: 'the clarity of these articles belied their familiarity', there is no blending in, all the individual entities are clearly defined. It says that "none could put forth claim of precedence", which has nothing to do with objects blending in with the empty desert. That's fucking stupid. How the fuck can something blend in further if it is clearer to the eye? The passage is about narrative significance. It's how people perceive things. People see a million different things everyday but most of these entities are either ignored or are subjugated to some article of greater significance. They become part of "its" story. It's subtle. Imagine if there was a storm front moving towards the company, it sure would be very difficult to claim that the storm doesn't have greater significance than some spider crawling on the ground in that moment. But where does this significance come from if not from human perception? This is the problem you see. Most of you don't understand the nuances but will then turnaroud and blame the writer for purple writing. It's purple because he wants to say more than just say "everything looked the same and of little value there".
>>24817572>How the fuck can something blend in further if it is clearer to the eye? Have you ever been to a desert, you know, out of mom's basement? I live in one. It's a perfect description of it. Everything is clear in the sun, for hundreds of miles in every direction, yet nothing is distinguishable from anything else. You don't know what you're looking at. The description of the crucified man's ribs as a "tree" and his skin as a "hide" further reinforces this seeming contradiction, which as I mentioned before is only apparent to someone who has actually been in a fucking desert. Bleached paloverde branches look exactly like bones.The passage doesn't directly espouse moral nihilism, but it paints a picture of what moral confusion looks like in the place where the only hierarchy that exists is one in line with natural law, or, as Holden so profoundly puts it, the law of war--which existed in some desert somewhere long before man.And don't get me wrong, I love McCarthy
>>24817587>You don't know what you're looking at. The description of the crucified man's ribs as a "tree" and his skin as a "hide" further reinforces this seeming contradiction, which as I mentioned before is only apparent to someone who has actually been in a fucking desert. Bleached paloverde branches look exactly like bones.None of this is relevant to the passage, retard. The passage is not talking about metaphors or figurative language. If anything it is a nice metatext on the figurative language used by the narrator in the rest of the book. The figurative language that the Narrator frequently uses to describe objects forces upon them some significance that is more than just physical, which may or may not be real. This is why Blood meridian can be simultaneously read as a christian, anti-christian, gnostic or anti-gnostic text. But these suggestions, laved on these articles, are at mercy of the narrator's perception/whim.>The passage doesn't directly espouse moral nihilism, but it paints a picture of what moral confusion looks like in the place where the only hierarchy that exists is one in line with natural law, or, as Holden so profoundly puts it, the law of war--which existed in some desert somewhere long before man.What waffle. You are just throwing shit at the wall now. What does optical democracy have to do with the law of war? Sure, you can come to it the long way round by situating it in human perception and a respite from language games, but it has no direct relevance to the passage given above. You're an idiot.>And don't get me wrong, I love McCarthyThat's no defense against being stupid.
>>24816838>>24816798Kek
>>24817611>What waffle. You are just throwing shit at the wall now. What does optical democracy have to do with the law of war? Sure, you can come to it the long way round by situating it in human perception and a respite from language games, but it has no direct relevance to the passage given above. You're an idiot.Sure it does. The terrain bequeaths a strange equality to everything because our pre-conceptions are laid bare in the face of it. The law of war unites it into one, non-hierarchical whole. This is optical democracy. The pre-conceptions (our preferences) are made whimsical in the face of this, and man and rock and bone and stick are the same.It's like the guy who thinks reality is a certain way until his plane crashes in the mountains and he's faced with what reality really is.At least that's the way I've seen it. I'd like listening to you more if you weren't such a dick about it though.
>>24817667>The law of war unites it into one, non-hierarchical whole. This is optical democracy. The pre-conceptions (our preferences) are made whimsical in the face of this, and man and rock and bone and stick are the same.More random waffle. Sit and think about it then come back and talk. You don't have to shoehorn war into everything related to BM.
>>24816849Stop being butthurt. Your kind are of the lowest IQ on the board.
>>24816805>in this instantNow you're just fucking with me
>>24817068This is completely irrelevant. A hypothesised restrictiveness or decline in quality in one respect does not mean his entire creative process atrophied. And that is obvious to anyone who has read his later works.>>24817489Yes anon, none of this is profound or brilliant, it's a very simple idea artificially padded out. And the effect of McCarthy's style is ridiculously obvious, really a gimmick. You're proving all the stereotypes about the low iq of McCarthy fans true. And there's something else, I really have to mention the fact that you use a phrase like 'mental apparatus' without any self-awareness. Even if you're using the phrase ironically, it's completely forced and is undoubtedly the result of your too great reverence for McCarthy. A speech from Holden is a pubescent pulpy mixture and adumbration of Heraclitus, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. It's on the intellectual level of pop-philosophy for stupid Americans. You also fail to see the irony of calling someone unintelligent for enjoying the prose of 19th century realism...>Chekhov's gunLol, got anymore cliches to pull out? You clearly have no idea what makes good literature or even what the relation of a thought to a sentence is. I tried to state it as clearly as possible, by explaining that a dislike for the ideas and subject matter of Dickens has nothing whatsoever to do with complexity of his thought. But I'll state it even more clearly and hope you're not too retarded for it: the idea is the same as the style in a truly great writer. The highly involved 'fluff' of Dickens nonetheless requires more intelligence and insight than any sentence written by McCarthy. You may dismiss the subject matter as fluff, you may not care for the fictional worlds and themes and observations of Dickens, but it is the product of a far more refined and highly sensitive artistic nervous system. Comparatively, McCarthy is rife with artificial, overworked and cliched language, which is really only written, like pulp, to titillate and impress readers with sounding intelligent or epical than actually expressing ideas that are intelligent or epical.>That's because you're too low IQ.Lol, please describe or point me towards another equally significant interpretation of the passage. I'm sure it's just as open to reevaluation as a passage in a great philosopher.>>24817509Learn proper English before defending your daddy McCarthy.
>>24817744>dickens fanboy posts insane amounts of fluff with no substanceI already know that you have not read one page of Mccarthy, so I am not even gonna bother with your """valuation""". Vague dismissals with retarded arguments give you away. You're too low IQ to actually read cerebral literature so you've resorted to defending 19th century trite like Dickens. You'd need ungodly amounts of mental gymnastics to posit dickens as some herald of great art, when the truth is that he indulges midwittery which is the only aesthetic that you understand.>ridiculously obviousYeah lol. It's obvious when smart people have already acknowledged it. You can post 12 more lines of saying nothing and pretending like you know what you're talking about. Then you have the audacity to talk about self awareness....You're insanely retarded.
>>24816745And this idiot’s recommended modern writers are mysteriously missing from the post as not to expose himself, even though providing a counterexample would have been the logical thing to do.
>>24817744>Learn proper English before defending your daddy McCarthy.Lol. Rich coming from an ESL.>The highly involved 'fluff' of Dickens nonetheless requires more intelligence and insight than any sentence written by McCarthy.Kek. Dickens is for retarded freemen who, because they can't understand true art, have put him on a pedestal. Sold him as art to retarded people just like you. There is no great artistic consciousness in Dickens. He wrote period pieces, though with a little verve. It won't move anyone but the stupid. Being stupid is okay, but at least acknowledge it, anon.
>>24817744>>24817766One more thing>But I'll state it even more clearly and hope you're not too retarded for it: the idea is the same as the style in a truly great writer. Apparently you struggle with reading comprehension too. I very clearly demonstrated how the idea of optical democracy is the very basis of Mccarthy's writing style. Much more so than Dickens' propensity for purple and bruised prose to describe working class people going to each other's houses. Only a simpleton can think that Dickens' highly obvious and in your face style is true art while Mccarthy's far more novel style isn't. But you have neither read Mccarthy and are a simpleton to boot, so perhaps I should expect it.
>>24817703It's far from random. Upon investigation it's a pretty common interpretation of the passage.I would think about what you said if I could make sense of much substance beneath the ad-hominems. The passage is not talking about figurative language or metaphor even though it expressly uses both, it is not about the terrain bequeathing an underlying equality to all its elements even though it says almost exactly that. The passage is REALLY about narrative significance and not anthropomorphized human perception but it's definitely about the significance humans put on their perceptions.Like, huh? What?Explain your view better without ad hominems and jumbling up ideas and I might have something more to think about.
>>24817744>pubescent pulpy mixture. It's on the intellectual level of pop-philosophy for stupid Americans>rife with artificial, overworked and cliched language, which is really only written, like pulp, to titillate and impress readers with sounding intelligent or epical than actually expressing ideas that are intelligent or epical.One can easily replace McCarthy with Dickens as the subject of these infantile insults and it'd be even truer. You pretend to sense artistic consciousness yet your only acquaintance with McCarthy is from a couple one-star rated Goodreads reviews. You are trying to prop Dickens as some Jamesian genius when Dickens was far closer to a writer of pulp in his time than McCarthy was in his. You've lost the plot, really badly i might add.
Dickens was a writer of cliched prose. The only thing that separated his writing style from other Victorians was unironically his windiness and how obstinately purple he made his passages. If anyone is accusing another writer of cliched language while fanboying for Dickens, then that person can safely be assumed as retarded.
>>24817139Careful, McCarthyfags are prone to telling you how wrong you are while posting a contextless pasage from the book to "prove" how good McCarthy's prose is.
>>24817819Especially when you're accusing Cormac fucking Mccarthy for cliched language lol. Mccarthy as well be writing in a completely new and private language if Dickens is to be our standard for novelty.
>>24817744>please describe or point me towards another equally significant interpretation of the passage. I'm sure it's just as open to reevaluation as a passage in a great philosopher.Two guys are literally fighting over their interpretations in this very thread.
>>24817819>dickens prose is windy and purplenta but this reads like a stereotype of a stupid person's idea of 19th century literature. not taking a side in the debate, just think its stupid to insult dickens like that.
>>24817843>stupid to insult dickens like that.Goes both ways. I just think you can't defend Dickens of all people while bringing down other great writers over "artificial, overwrought, pulpy, cliched etc.". Dickens is probably as much in the firing line as anyone else in the canon when it comes to those.
>>24817489That's not even what the passage is saying though
>Joyce criticized Dickens's lack of "art" and finding his "greatness of the soul" undeserved. He believed that praise for Dickens's supposed "greatness of the soul" was misguided. Joyce saw Dickens as a significant, albeit problematic, predecessor, comparable to Shakespeare in influence on spoken language, but one to both imitate and reject, particularly regarding Dickens's views on the Irish. He also parodied Dickens's style in Ulysses.
>>24817744The post that broke the McCarthy fag
>>24817802Once again you're getting stuck on individual words without accounting their context. The "equality" mentioned is not the literal equality of things blending in. It's the equality of significance. The passage there doesn't use figurative language, unless you regard any sort of rhetorical device to be figurative language. I have stated things very clearly. Put your anger aside and read it. Ideas are not as "rough" as you want them to be. To say that the passage is a critique of anthropocentrism ignores that the passage may only be tangentially related to it. If nothing is precedent over another, one may deduce that it is claiming an anti-anthropocentric equality among entities present but that's not the subject of the passage. The subject of the passage is the equality bestowed upon things by the inability of perception to award greater significance to any one entity. Which is how figurative language in the book works. It gives meaning or narrative significance to certain objects through similes/metaphors. That's how Mccarthy weaves in all the religious and philosophical strains.
>>24817893NTA but having read the chain of replies I also have zero idea of what your interpretation even is, even from this post here. You're not very god at conveying your ideas is all.
>>24817893this is the most pseud post i've ever seen on a board full of them
>>24817893>>24817802You're both saying the same thing, stfu.
This is entertaining.
Sometimes I open a thread and suddenly find I have to take stock of my life and how I'm spending my time. Just a thought.
>>24817959I am not god at all, but you're stupid. Everything I have written is straight-forward if you just read the passage holistically.>>24817962Be less retarded.
>>24818123>I am not god at all, but you're stupid. Everything I have written is straight-forward if you just read the passage holistically.NTA but it doesn't make much sense to me either. Maybe you're just a chud. Are you the guy in the other thread seething about how much smarter you are than everyone else when everyone else is laughing at you and then backing away when your sperg out stops being funny and starts getting kind of scary? I think maybe you should get some help before you shoot up a school.
>>24818129That's a lot of projection, which kinda proves my point.>ntaLol. Sure
>>24818129>Are you the guy in the other thread seething about how much smarter you are than everyone else when everyone else is laughing at you and then backing away when your sperg out stops being funny and starts getting kind of scary?Kek. Looks like someone got assblasted in the other thread
>>24816745Better question is why modern writing is so obsessed with symbolism
>>24817744Based for getting Cuckcarthy fanboys seething
>>24816771>charming and easy to readthats the disaster. thats the catastrophe
Bumper
>>24818214english teachers saying curtains are blue = good writing
>>24816745It probably broke lit because it makes 0 fucking sense. This shit was written by some pseudo-intellectual zoomer who thought they were using big words correctly. Instead they, probably (You), said something retarded. I'd hazard a guess that the replies on that post are not too far off from my opinion either.
>>24818234>>24817890See>>24817712Cowardly little shit. Stop hiding behind others. You hate him yet you cannot stop the urge to visit McCarthy related threads
>superficial bombs of depth>interrogated furtherHow ironic.
>>24818301Its over
>>24818289You didn't refute any of his points. I agree though that at least in BM McCarthy tries to stuff meaning into the mundane and that no matter how hard he tries to frame a certain scene as a profound allegory if you subtract the specious narration you're just left with cowboy tropes. With Dickens meanwhile the story characters emotional impact and whatever point he's trying to make are fused seamlessly. Every now and then in BM there's a great a scene that earns its place but most of the book is filler trying to make a point
>>24818356>With Dickens meanwhile the story characters emotional impact and whatever point he's trying to make are fused seamlessly. This is bullshit. If he actually could do it there wouldn't have been 100s of volumes of criticism dedicated to pointing out how useless and fluffy a lot of his books are. Compare it to something like Ulysses which has a far greater volume of circumstantial details and one-off references with no greater context, but no one calls that fluff. Ulysses doesn't invite those criticisms because the narrative justifies it (being a tour of the cluttered mind of a highly uninteresting person). Dickens have no such net.Besides, there were no points to address. He (really you) isn't even familiar with Mccarthy's fictions. Lest he would have noticed that I clearly defined how Mccarthy's style of writing is well within the idea of optical democracy. Neither are you. I implore you to go back and reread it (if you have read it to begin with) now that you have read some interpretations in this thread. It might turn out to be a different book. What you take to be filler trying to make a point might just be scenes with a quiet profundity. It's a problem with most of Mccarthy's work, most people have no idea what they are really reading.
>>24817893I don't think that's it. Man does lend significance to his own perception. This is the entire concept of the book and is evident when the members of the party weakly try and explain their perception of what God is to Holden, who dismisses their perceptions. We think we matter but the universe thinks we only matter insofar that we are at the mercy of its laws--primarily the law of war. We are its tools, if it so chooses. The universe cares not for the Anasazi or the Conquistadors or giant animals that lived in deep time on their own. The universe chose all of these things to die, despite their attempts to establish themselves in its memory. War is god and Holden is its avatar. He records the existence of these things as he finds them and then erases whatever memory remains of them by destroying the relics.Optical democracy is the perception of the universe itself. All things are united in that perception and rendered equal despite the individual desires for their own perceptions to be more relevant.
>>24818047I don't think we are. He seems to be saying that the perception of the narrator himself is the key element here. I think that's a unique and really cool idea, but his inability to clearly elucidate it and penchant to call everyone an idiot is holding him back.
>>24818617Being an idiot is holding all of you back.
I could easily destroy you with my fist with your hands tied behind your back.
>>24816805Can you name your favorite book? And on the oft chance that you're a girl, can you post your feet?
Bump
>>24818617Pretty sure this guy is the one guy suffocating half the threads with his need to demonstrate his (imagined) superiority. I guess you can't really expect anything else on 4chan, but it sure is exhausting. Imagine being this guy's mother and having him yell at you and call you a waffle for not cutting his sandwiches on the diagonal like he prefers.
>>24818668Who hurt you, lil bro?
>>24818668For not understanding the relevance of cutting sandwiches on a diagonal, which in his head is some non-metaphor the Narrator uses to expose the underlying truth of the universe via Cantors diagonalization methodOr something
/lit/ is reaching levels of pretentious never thought possible.
Idiots are mad at being called out for being idiots. Oh well....
>>24816838Lol
>>24818668Just become smarter than you are if it bothers you so much.
>>24816805You're really REALLY dumb, anon.
>>24816913>literary apparelKys.
Ok discussion over it's time for everyone to hit the showers and then after that read some more before posting again.
>>24816745I noticed this about movies. They have become about "moments". They're built around the trailer imagery, and everything in between, including the plot itself, is an afterthought. I am sure they write the screenplay this way: we need to have this evocative screencap somewhere, so how do we get there? Does the screencap even make sense? If it doesn't, we'll cobble together a meaning for it. They know that people will skip the parts inbetween to get to the epic trailer moment, clap like a seal and post about in on reddit and then forget about the movie a week later. I'd do that too, but it's shit.Pic related, people have wanked themselves so much over this steaming pile of shit. I fucking hated this dogshit movie, thank God I always pirate.
>>24818522We just have different philosophies of what constitutes good literature. I dislike allegory in general. McCarthy I guess is good for what he's aiming for but it's not something that interests me. That said, where do you clearly outline your interpretation of BM? I think mine is different and correct ironically.
>>24818522>no one calls that fluff.I call it shit, is that the same?
>>24818771It's not an allegory lol. So much for being correct.
>>24818783But youre a nobody
>>24818795It's a philosophical allegory. By allegory I mean the story is meant to represent/illustrate some larger point rather than existing for itself
>>24818802>I mean the story is meant to represent/illustrate some larger point rather than existing for itselfYou can say this for literally any novel. And what this point might be? When the Judge spoke, at the end, on men not knowing what event they were even there for, let alone the purpose, he was really answering to people like you. The events presented in the book aren't of the same genealogy as from a dickens novel, or even a modernist text. The tug of war between signification and nihilism permeates the core of each event in the book. You can remove what you didn't understand but the book will be the lesser for it for someone else. It just doesn't serve the same purpose as a 19th century realist novel, but that doesn't mean it's filler. Whether what constitutes the book is allegorical or not is, I'd say, the biggest point of contention that Holden deliberately speaks on mutiple times. That's what ironically gives the book its narrative thrust. Someone else might have a different interpretation. I go back to the Judge frequently because he gives a legitimate perspective at viewing the events of the book. Harold bloom though the Judge a sophist, so he likely had different interpretations of the events altogether. The book is interpretively open. Calling it an allegory is far too binding. A dickens novel is far more restrictive by comparison. You might say, "what about the complexity of characters at display?", but that's not outside the scope of allegory, by your definition. The characters are that way because they have to serve a purpose and further the themes of the story. Even in Nabokov the characters don't exist for the sake of it. and his ardent defenders will be the first to vouch for it.
>>24818908That's an awful lot of rambling to say "there are multiple way to interpret the book", anon.
>>24818943If I wrote just two lines, multiple people ITT would start crying as to how much of a snob I am.
>>24818908The Judge IS the perception of the universe, and he is there to judge man. He is its personification. It erases everything it decides to destroy.
>>24818956Nta but this is true kek
>>24817142never read it but I'd probably like it >>24817278It's just my opinion obviously, but yeah I do>>24817823Yeah, I hated both his prose and the story. To me it was basically reading a Marvel movie. Purple prose slop, cringe violence and action for slop entertainment, and fake and gay stereotypical male pandering kinda like how the NFL is. The reddit/onions/marvel of books. But just imo, I really don't actually care if others liked it.
>>24818956No, people call you a snob because you're a snob.
It's good knowing I am far smarter than everyone ITT. This must be how God feels! (am I doing it right?)
>>24818908I'm still not sure what you're saying but the judge represents some deterministic order in a cold, entropic universe, with the warring factions in the book as pawns. The kid tries to escape it but can't. The idiot shouldn't exist so he puts it in chains. His knowledge of the natural world and interference with the flights of the bats shows his relation to the arrangement. The desert is constantly likened to a void, the people to lights or shadows that disappear without memory, and the judge marks sketches in his book as a documentation of the current notch in the order, with the other characters riding on futilely. He sketches some cultural ruins and erases others. It's all the dance and the judge is the dancer. There's probably more to be said but I just finished it for the first time yesterday.
>>24819246Your brain is fried
The post that unified *some* of /lit/ and broke *some* of /lit/ and didn't really rattle *some* of /lit/ one way or another
>>24819848bro dropped the /lit/ civil war DLC
>>24819848>>24819850Lol
>>24816805I thought it was going to contrast at first, which might make sense, but "postmodern brevity" is a total lie. Millennial writing is infamous for obnoxiously long-winded dialogue that never fucking ends.
>>24816745>The post that broke /lit/For being boring as fuck?
>>24819021That he'll be called a snob or he was unnecessarily long-winded?
I am enjoying this thread. For all the vitriol at least it's actual literary discussion for once. And its a beautiful autumn day.
>>24820874This. Im glad youre enjoying anon :)
>>24816877I think it's undeniable that McCarthy has great technical ability. To my mind the question is more whether he's used that ability to worthwhile ends. I mean at what point does blood meridian say much of anything that game of thrones doesn't? It's all just endlessly bleak man-is-a-wolf-to-man armchair brooding, only with a hell of a lot more style. It's like prestige television.I'll say this though. You might think it would be easy to imitate his florid, slightly silly cod-archaic style - 'in the darkness before the day yet was' - 'darker woods that harbour yet a few last wolves' - but even though there's lots of individual lines you can make fun of, somehow it all hangs together. I can't quite put a finger on why. He's kind of like Lovecraft in that respect. He gets away with things and takes liberties nobody else could while still being taken seriously.
>>24820264Post modernism started in the 50s. It's not a millennial thing
>>24819818Cormac McCarthy appeals to the same type of retarded losers that the NFL and Marvel appeal to. Brain dead retards who failed at life and use this gay pandering slop as a cope for their own failed masculinity. Go read more McCarthy wearing your XXL graphic tshirt while eating McDonalds.
>>24820957It was probably DFW (or maybe Edmund White) who said that some dark magic allows Mccarthy's writing style to hang together without coming apart. Even the way he wrote conversations later on (which some anons can't digest, over in the Border trilogy thread) had this vibe to them. Judge Holden is the same way. It's as if he is trying to straddle the line dividing absurdity and profundity, and to his credit, he pulls it off in my estimation.It comes down to his ability with rhetoric. He is already prepping the ground, preparing the reader to have their reading sensibilities challenged. James wood classified his style under 3 heads mainly: afflatus (this is the high-falutin Mccarthy), deflatus (this is the minimalist Mccarthy), and a middle style between the other two. It's the first (and occasionally the third) that would usually bother people. But it's the third one that also preps the reader to embrace the high falutin exclamations when they eventually come. You see, Mccarthy frequently modulates the tone of delivery while taking Shakespearen liberties with the grammar. After 4 chapters of tepid manglings, he starts hitting the reader with denser constructs, but by then the reader has had his/her expectations subconsciously revised. What won't fly in any other book, exists usually without problem in BM. Sometimes it does not work, but when it does it has the opposite effect of what a hieractic shriek should typically have on a serious reader. Many of these "silly" individual lines are usually delivered in slightly romantic tones or in neutered ones to make the effect more palatable. One of the misconceptions with the book is that the prose is all blood and thunder all the time. That's not true. The content might be gothic but the registers of narration vary all over. With Holden's speeches too it's the rhetoric that is doing the heavy-lifting. If presented rightly, even these registers can be wholly sincere.>>24820960Your real problems is with americans. It's sad you let it cloud your enjoyment.
>>24820957Lovecraft's style is the entire problem with him. Even his biggest supporters dismiss him as a stylist. It's inspite of his stylistic incompetence that he became a highly influential figure. Primarily because his horror aesthetic was very powerful and something of his neurotic mind got through despite his paradoxical attempts to drown it. It's more Dosto than Mccarthy.
>>24821047Lovecraft's style is good and the only people who complain about it are filtered zoomers
>>24821049No it's not. It's one step away from being as obnoxious as Hope Hodgson's (who too got away with it on account of his imagination and eccentricity). The worst part is that it is not new. It's just modern horror in Edwardian English. Lovecraft has been highly influential but his writing style has been anything but.
>>24821033I'm american and its true I don't like most American culture. That being said, I'm just being annoying/provocative when I say this stuff. My opinion is personal (obviously) and I'm just saying how much I didn't enjoy by making blanket statements about others who did enjoy it. It's called trolling, it's called we do a little bit of trolling etc...
>>24821052>No it's notIt is>West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut. There are dark narrow glens where the trees slope fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle without ever having caught the glint of sunlight. On the gentler slopes there are farms, ancient and rocky, with squat, moss-coated cottages brooding eternally over old New England secrets in the lee of great ledges; but these are all vacant now, the wide chimneys crumbling and the shingled sides bulging perilously beneath low gambrel roofs.
>>24821047>Lovecraft's style is the entire problem with him. Even his biggest supporters dismiss him as a stylistI have to disagree. Not personally, that is, but his biggest modern proponent is certainly Houellebecq who says in the preface to the second edition of his biography:>This extraordinary ability to create a universe, this visionary power, probably struck me too greatly at the time and prevented me—this is my only regret—from paying sufficient homage to Lovecraft’s style. His writing, in fact, is not implemented entirely through hypertrophy and delirium; there is also at times a delicacy in his work, a luminous depth that is altogether rare. This is especially true in the case of “The Whisperer in Darkness,” [...] Here, we are at a point where the extreme acuity of sensory perception is about to propel us into a philosophical perception of the world; in other words, here we are inside poetry.
>>24821033>Many of these "silly" individual lines are usually delivered in slightly romantic tones or in neutered ones to make the effect more palatable. One of the misconceptions with the book is that the prose is all blood and thunder all the time. That's not true. The content might be gothic but the registers of narration vary all over.Hmm. I suppose you must be right. I have been meaning to reread blood meridian to give it a fairer shake. I remember the style grating on me at first but pretty soon you end up transported into another world where it all seems perfectly natural — only the occasional overreach taking you out of it. But god, its rough in the opening where you lurch from quite excellent and seamless naturalistic description, the kind of prose you wouldn't even notice, just see —>See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods [...] At fourteen he runs away. He will not see again the freezing kitchenhouse in the predawn dark. The firewood, the washpots.And then all of a sudden you run into:> He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost [...] The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off. Who are these fucking poets whose names are now lost? The 19th and 20th centuries were the peak of poetry as a genuinely popular mass artform. If someone they were reading in that era is forgotten it's because they were shit, and yet McCarthy can't help but describe it as though priceless Sumerian tablets have been shattered in the sacking of a city. And the less said about the ridiculous diction of the other line the better.
>>24816745That poster sounds incredibly retarded (probably ESL) but I agree with everything he said.
>>24820960>NFL and Marvel appeal to. Implying those people read at all let alone read literary fiction. You are dumb as hell.
>>24821047Lovecraft is a great stylist actually. Contemporaries of him criticized him because his style was archaic and out of fashion (none of that matters a century later) and nowadays he’s criticized by fags with BFA in creative writing who think literature should adhere to gay little rules.
>>24821052>The worst part is that it is not new.Holy shit you’re retarded, what does new have to do with anything?
>>24821066>Here, we are at a point where the extreme acuity of sensory perception is about to propel us into a philosophical perception of the world; in other words, here we are inside poetryThis was my feeling reading the opening to At the Mountains of Madness. People who go into it with expectations of instant reward are missing the point. It's about the journey. You need some imaginative dasein for yourself to feel it.
>>24821206Its the same slop but different format. Sorry, but it's true!
>>24818075thanks anon I wasted too much time reading these gay-ass replies
>>24818767How on earth is pic related? Plot made perfect sense.
>>24820957It's not about the originality of the theme. It's about how any given authors use of language moves you. Now, I'm of the opinion that if at least some McCarthy doesn't move you you're either extremely shallow or a class A dullard. But each to his own, etc.
>>24816745>ctrl + F Knaus>1 result>ctrl + F Fosse>0 results>ctrl + F McCarthy>45 resultsMcCarthy is not good nor is he insightful but merely grotesqueness with purple prose. Also, the absolute state.
>>24823657Is the first part of my struggle a good representation of what I am going to get from the rest of it? I considered getting into it but there's only so much third rate proust I can tolerate in my life before I stop giving a chance to neurotic queer intellectuals foreverSame question extends to fosse. At least they are kind enough to split their stuff into bite size chunks
>>24823667Oh, I haven't read them. This is /lit/.
>>24822434>Now, I'm of the opinion that if at least some McCarthy doesn't move you you're either extremely shallow or a class A dullard. But each to his own, etc.I didn't say it doesn't! That's what I was saying. His technique work. McCarthy can produce effects. I'm just questioning the substance underneath them. Of course not everything has to be chock full of substance. The effect has merit in its own right.
>>24823657You're retarded
>>24823742Have you considered the fact that you're blind to the substance of the book? Saying that Blood meridian is only about man-is-wolf-to-man reveals a blurb tier understanding of the book. Why must a book validate some midwit's moral view before it qualifies as a "substantial work"?
>>24816805>>24816745>run-along
