About 100 pages in, and while it's definitely enjoyable and has good prose, what the fuck am I reading? What's up with Slothrop? Why did he crawl through a shit filled toilet in Harlem and why do his hard-ons predict V2s? I mean I'm sure it'll all be explained, but what the fuck is up with Pynchon? Why the hell is this universally renowned as one of the greatest books of the 20th century? Does the story about a guy getting a hard-on in WWII seriously turn into some profound exploration of the human condition and the metaphysical truth of reality?
>>25123759I haven't read it yet — need to finish infinite jest first — but I would imagine the meaning would be clearer after finishing the book. Just a thought
>>25123759>Does the story about a guy getting a hard-on in WWII seriously turn into some profound exploration of the human condition and the metaphysical truth of reality?yeah basically
>>25123764Yes, obviously, I've just been taken aback, that's all. Thought it was something like Sound and the Fury, or Moby-Dick, or Catch-22, etc, and it's just... weird. Really weird. This is my first post-modern book, though, so perhaps they're all like this.
Don't misconstrue me, though. It's weird- exceedingly weird- but in a good way, a great way, really. I'm not sure what it is, what it is about Pynchon's style of writing and the characters that is so invigorating, but I don't think I've been sucked into a novel so much since I read Absalom, Absalom!
>>25123759>What the fuck am I reading?Hopefully not the original print run of that edition. And shit porn. You're reading shit porn, disguised as a postmodern novel.
>>25123759there is no metaphysical truth or lessonat the time this was uncommon
Yeah, that pinecone fella is a goofball alright. I struggled through it because I found the writing though good, equally annoying and reddit.
>>25123926it's do u have free will
>I mean im sure it will all be explained Lol
>>25123759Rick and Morty the novelisation
*holds up spork*
>>25123759High IQ quirk chungus
>>25124104>high iqHe’s the quintessential midwit
>>25123764How are you liking Infinite Jest? It’s awful isn’t it? DFW sure was a hack, guy mistook pedantry and circumlocution for good writing. His most avid readers certainly bought into it! No wonder he became an hero!!!
>>25124117A high IQ midwit, yes.
>>25124120I feel the appeal of DFW is actually the opposite. He tries to blindside you with pedantry and circumlocution and then hits you with
I take it you're not that big of a surrealism guy?
>>25124171nta but I never actually found this book as surreal as say, Naked Lunch, hell, even Joyce and Rimbaud at times. the last 100 or so pages is certainly trippy though
>>25123759He's using hysteron proteron, but taken to the extreme. Not on a sentence level, but on a book level - he hits you with metaphors and symbolism, but explains their significance later in the book. For instance, the link between toilets and racial tensions is explained near the end of the book:Well there’s one place where Shit ’n’ Shinola do come together, and that’s in the men’s toiletat the Roseland Ballroom, the place Slothrop departed from on his trip down the toilet, asrevealed in the St. Veronica Papers (preserved, mysteriously, from that hospital’s greatholocaust). Shit, now, is the color white folks are afraid of. Shit is the presence of death, notsome abstract-arty character with a scythe but the stiff and rotting corpse itself inside thewhiteman’s warm and private own asshole, which is getting pretty intimate. That’s what thatwhite toilet’s for. You see many brown toilets? Nope, toilet’s the color of gravestones, classicalcolumns of mausoleums, that white porcelain’s the very emblem of Odorless and OfficialDeath. Shinola shoeshine polish happens to be the color of Shit. Shoeshine boy Malcolm’s inthe toilet slappin’ on the Shinola, working off whiteman’s penance on his sin of being born thecolor of Shit ’n’ Shinola. It is nice to think that one Saturday night, one floor-shakingLindyhopping Roseland night, Malcolm looked up from some Harvard kid’s shoes and caughtthe eye of Jack Kennedy (the Ambassador’s son), then a senior. Nice to think that young Jackmay have had one of them Immortal Lightbulbs then go on overhead—did Red suspend hisragpopping just the shadow of a beat, just enough gap in the moiré there to let white Jack seethrough, not through to but through through the shine on his classmate Tyrone Slothrop’sshoes? Were the three ever lined up that way—sitting, squatting, passing through? EventuallyJack and Malcolm both got murdered. Slothrop’s fate is not so clear. It may be that They havesomething different in mind for Slothrop.Same with Kenosha Kid. He does this to mimic the effect a supersonic rocket has, the impact before the sound, a reversal of cause and effect. A reread will make many of the previously odd sections much clearer. For instance, I noticed that one of the weirdest moments in the book:
>>25124529>Now something, oh, kind of funny happens here. Not that Slothrop is really aware of it now, while it’s going on—but later on, it will occur to him that he was—this may sound odd, but he was somehow, actually, well, inside his own cock. If you can imagine such a thing. Yes, inside the metropolitan organ entirely, all other colonial tissue forgotten and left to fend for itself, his arms and legs it seems woven among vessels and ducts, his sperm roaring louder and louder, getting ready to erupt, somewhere below his feet... maroon and evening cuntlight reaches him in a single ray through the opening at the top, refracted through the clear juices flowing up around him. He is enclosed. Everything is about to come, come incredibly, and he’s helpless here in this exploding emprise... red flesh echoing... an extraordinary sense of waiting to rise...Has a direct correlation with the ending of the book, the launch of 00000.I'd also say the weirdness is a commentary of sorts on the disintegration of the social norms that happened in the 60's and 70's. America went from prohibition to drugs and free sex becoming mainstream. We get a brief prolepsis to the 60's/70's and a quote from Nixon, plus Slothrop is THE perfect recipient of a hysteron proteron like this - almost all the weird sex and drugs shit happens to him specifically. I'm not too confident about this reading, as it doesn't explain Katje/Pudding (unless you take their relationship to be at the behest of the precursors to the three letter agencies, who'd later manipulate the 60's the same way). If any of you have a better explanation for all the weird sex shit, I'm all ears.It's a great book, but also a very weird one, and I doubt I understood than like 50% of it. All the symbols, themes, characters and plot points are all to tangled. To this day I still don't know what the Kirghiz Light was.
>>25124531>>25124529I was going to read this book because Jonathan Blow shilled it and now I've lost all interest .
>>25124665it's the epic gamer book
>>25124529Faulkner made a living doing this shit
>>25123759>I mean I'm sure it'll all be explainedlol>Does the story about a guy getting a hard-on in WWII seriously turn into some profound exploration of the human condition and the metaphysical truth of reality?Yes
>>25123759It's quirky chungus distilled into a book for hipsters
>>25124690
>>25124844It's really not
another author who is beloved by redditors who don't read him and politely ignored by actual humans
Woke postmodern globohomo degenerate gooner sodomy slop
>>25124690"The pain is terrible" always makes me lose it for some reason
>>25123759It’s too American for my tastes, it often read like some psychedelic 60s comic book with decent prose.
>Now everybody -Woah… le deep
>>25123759Pynchon is the kind of unc that tells you nephew don't trust CNN, but then his esoteric knowledge is stuff like did you know Epstein started /pol/ and woke was invented by a coprophilic cabal that controls Democrat party to stop OWS (but we must still vote for the Democrats and support trans rights, btw). Good prose and some memorable scenes though.
>>25125918What the fuck are you talking about you raving lunatic?
>>25126175apparently this hugely influential novel was written by a retarded guy from 4chan
>>25126186Pynchon is a retarded guy from reddit thoughbeit
>>25123759>What the fuck am I reading?ya got PYNCHED son
>>25123926gay hylic book
>>25123759yeah I got halfway, to the octopus attack on the beach(?), and realized that I had no clue what anything I was reading meant.I knew the plot points, the references, and vague historical valences, but it seems to me like there's a secret 4th thing that this book just doesn't have any of, but is necessary to have words in sequence carry any meaning.
>>25126680(Me)And like this guy >>25124529 says, I thought stopping at the halfway point felt right. I watched the rocket go up. No need to bother with the back half, since it's just a rerun in reverse.
>>25123759>Why did he crawl through a shit filled toilet in HarlemHe was experimented on by a psychologist (Laszlo Jamf.) It was a hallucination experienced under sodium pentothal.>why do his hard-ons predict V2s?It's hinted that Jamf replaced his cock with an erectile homing beacon for the bombs, manufactured from a mysterious polymer called Imipolex G.More generally, the book is about paranoia and conspiracies. When bombs start targeting all the places where Slothrop gets a boner, that leads to pretty strong paranoia.
>>25124171There's nothing surreal about Gravity's Rainbow.
>>25126680Pointsman staged the octopus thing because he knew Slothrop would play the White Knight and rescue Katje. Katje was planted on Slothrop to spy on him.
>>25126175t. millennial boomer
