Why isn't Pynchon as major a figure among true, serious literary types in the same way Joyce, Proust, and Tolstoy are?

>Crying Lot 49 is his level
>Gravity's Shitschmear was a fluke

>>24481005 (OP)
No idea, I found him to be a much better writer than Tolstoy with his dull realism.

>>24481005 (OP)
Because postmodernism is contentious and it’s not settled yet. Give it til after WW3 cracker

>why isn't this genre writer held in the same esteem as some of the greatest writers in history

>>24481005 (OP)
Cuz he’s ugly. No good writer has even been outright ugly

All he does is play games under a veneer of shlock. The greats play games but they also give you a fulfilling thing on the surface.

>>24481005 (OP)
Joyce, Proust, and Tolstoy came about at a time when there was a more serious intellectual environment, now the only people with any concern about literature arent really concerned at all and only use it as a vehicle for their own egos. It started to become that way after WWII, and has sort of completely consumed what once was, which is why the only recent literary figures of note are DFW and McCarthy.

Gravity's Rainbow is on that level

Pynchon used to be everywhere on this board 10 years ago.

>>24481227
OP was asking about serious literary types

>>24481321
I think you'll be sorely disappointed once you meet them

>>24481005 (OP)
Because he's basically disclosing what the CIA has been doing for the past 80 years. Which is why he's basically reduced to 'le goofy reclusive author who writes about paranoia XD'. Few people try to understand what he's actually doing.

>>24481376
Is this a clever postmodern post about paranoia and conspiracies or are you genuinely deluded?

>>24481321
Like who? There is academia which is absent from the public and whos bearing in authors does not influence discourse at all but rather mirrors it if at all, and theres mainstream media which jerks off to political/identity fiction. The craze for authors like DFW and Pynchon as seen on /lit/ back in the days was a reflection of cultural attitudes of readers.

>>24481393
No, this is absolutely factual, you fucking retard.

>>24481395
I still balk whenever someone mentions DFW and pynch in the same sentence

>>24481005 (OP)
Because he's still alive.

>>24481005 (OP)
because that PoMo stuff is anti-classic.
it's too tied up with its own contemporary reference that it becomes anchored in a place in time instead of becoming timeless like the classics.
same goes for stuff like DFW's Infinite Jest.

>>24481424

>>24481811
Have you ever read DFW?

>>24481806 I wrote this post hoc >>24481424
I usually skip/exclude the middle in threads as a heuristic.

>>24481811
Cuz Pynchon is a good writer and DFW was a narcissistic depressive who couldn’t write anything outside of that small sphere

>>24481005 (OP)
He is still alive

He is just not as good as them.

>>24482875
Joyce > Proust > Pynchon > Tolstoy

>>24481005 (OP)
because he wrote bleeding edge

Kind of crazy how low in esteem he's fallen. I wonder if it's a result of postmodernism being less exalted.

>>24483693
What are you talking about? everyone's hype for new book

>>24483693
think he was mostly an american thing anyway. less than a blip over here in the uk academic scene.

>>24483832
Well, you guys have shakespeare, the romantics, chaucer, etc. Of course you wouldn't have time for genre lit+

>>24483832
Not really in germany either.

>>24482976
lmao

>>24481005 (OP)
serious literary types are too stuck up to find fart jokes funny which is what 90% of pinchon's books are made of

>>24481376
What has he exposed that I can't find out by simply reading based MkUltra schizo blogs?

I think he's gotten more mainstream since the Inherent Vice movie.

>>24483832
He reminds me of Martin Amis. I’m sure if you were an upper middle class boy studying English at Oxford in 1983 then Amis must have seemed like God almighty. And for a long time, men who indeed had been oxbridge undergraduates in the early 80s held sway over UK literature.
Same with Pynchon - he must have hit so differently if you were stoned at Harvard and shooting the shit with your roommate in the 70s and 80s.
But those people aren’t in charge anymore - it’s the mimsy girls who preferred Joyce Carol Oates and Angela Carter while the boys were waving around their pomo doorstoppers

>>24484761
It's fascinating how granite-like an author's reputation can seem one moment, how it can feel like that one author is the only one that matters right here, right now, only for that reputation to crumble into dust and for the author to be exiled to the bargain bin periphery of "forgotten classics" five, ten, twenty, or thirty years later.

>>24481005 (OP)
Like others mentioned, he never managed to break into the european scene like other americans did, Faulkner or Hemingway for example, plus there's the issue of his primary target demographic, middle class american boomers dying out both as academics and critics, and as an audience.

Later generations find his style and themes very passé. For lefties he's too old, white, and male, and nowhere near radical enough politically, for chuds and especially younger chuds raised in the aftermath of the hippies and the 1968 movement, he's just an icon of everything wrong, embarrassing, and disgusting about the boomer ethos. And no other groups besides these two are autistic enough to bother with maximalist postmodern literature seriously.

In short, he's a living fossil.

>>24484867
I, for one, am looking forward to Shadow Ticket and hope we still get another doorstopper. Even if it's posthumous.

>>24484867
I just read Vineland and I can see what you're saying definitely the weakest I've read from him.
That said I absolutely loved Mason & Dixon and Gravity's Rainbow.

>>24484816
Time’s winged chariot. Consider the previous generation - I have an old edition of Mailer essays from about 1971, and the blurb confidently predicts he will win the Nobel and is the greatest American writer of his era. And now…
Mailer has an amusing essay ‘Thoughts on the talent in the room’ where he gives his confident opinions on his contemporaries (obviously with himself at the top) and some of them you’ve barely heard of

>>24485033
ya or how about mary mccarthy lmao even in our era where women authors are prioritized no one wants to read her shit

>>24481056
>implying Tolstoy isn't Dickens-lite and Proust isn't Flaubert-lite
I pity the fool

>>24485043
Or Iris Murdoch. I can remember when she was a byword for ‘books smart people read’. You’d think our current culture would lap up a bisexual female philosopher/novelist and yet nobody can summon the energy to read her anymore

>>24481116
>DFW
>literary figure of note

>>24485083
Not the anon you replied to, but on a sadder note, Updike also seems to have fallen into oblivion. I think he's a fantastic writer but I can also see why his settings and characters and themes would have zero appeal in the present day. Reading the first Rabbit recently felt like reading about jurassic era dinosaurs.

Same goes for Revolutionary Road by Yates.

>>24481005 (OP)
Because normalfags hate spergs and don't understand their mental artistry

I used to like him until I read Bleeding Edge
He makes all these non-sensical or surface level references to things, which makes me question what he talks about in some of his other books

>>24484867
>Later generations find his style and themes very passé. For lefties he's too old, white, and male, and nowhere near radical enough politically, for chuds and especially younger chuds raised in the aftermath of the hippies and the 1968 movement, he's just an icon of everything wrong, embarrassing, and disgusting about the boomer ethos. And no other groups besides these two are autistic enough to bother with maximalist postmodern literature seriously.
This is only true about Vineland. Bleeding Edge, Gravitys Rainbow, and arguably V are still very pertinent when it comes to "chuds'" interests, and lefties would easily take kindly to the colonialism talk in Mason & Dixon and the feminist-adjacent sensibilities of Lot 49. And Inherent Vice will always be big with hipsters.

>>24481005 (OP)
Joyce was moreso in the same position Pynchon is in the sense that his only readers included faggots who competed in intellectual circlejerks.

>>24481005 (OP)
In what respect? Papers published? I just think time will tell with this kind of thing when it comes to prestige. No modern author is as esteemed as like... Jane Austen despite quality being comparable imo.

I brought him up in my class once and talked about his depiction of colonialism in Africa. I tried to explain how he handled it with so empathy and grace. Instead of everyone being taken with him this one girl started discussing white man savior complex and how we need to uplift marginalized voices to talk about their own experiences. Pretty much everyone agreed with here even the professor. Also I consider myself a leftist so I couldn't voice disagreement with her.

I guess what I'm saying is he's on the left but he's not really left enough in the current environment and it's never going to go back. He comes across as an old-school New-Deal-white-man-only-leftist that doesn't appeal to the current generation of leftists.

>>24485324
I thought it was funny how in GR he put into words something that I thought about before I ever knew him, that it is impossible to look at black hair and not think of pubic hair.

>>24485244
Joyce is universal.
You're either a low IQ chud or an autist to understand him.
>>24485324
>I tried to explain how he handled it with so empathy and grace. Instead of everyone being taken with him this one girl started discussing white man savior complex and how we need to uplift marginalized voices to talk about their own experiences.
You should print the Herero pages from V and show to the girl and ask if any of her contemporary marginalized voices can write about colonialism as poignantly as that.
I think the issue is that no one actually reads Pynchon and just throws leftists memes - white middle class, white saviour, etc.
I'm reading V. Read Gravity's Rainbow and Mason & Dixon. He writes well from the subaltern voice. I don't see any type of white saviour issues. It reads and hits well. It definitely is better than contemporary navel gazing by privileged racial minorities whose parents had enough money to move West and then life a middle class life but who think that they're somehow victims of some colonialist conspiracy regime. I highly doubt that any of these leftists have the ability to write about someone outside their own self, like blacks in Namibia, or Egyptians slaving to the English, or the lost people of post WWII people, or the Indian, or the black slaves of Cape Town Dutch families.
Leftists need to read more instead of throwing current thing pomo buzzwords.

>>24485445
That would require self-reflection which they are sorely lacking.

>>24484592
He exposed all of this before those blogs even existed. He was writing about MK Ultra experiments as they were happening.

>>24485324
>leftists eating their own with their purity tests
color me surprised

What are you talking about? He has one of the most popular subreddits of any literary fiction writer.

>>24485373
not all pubes are black you know

>>24486197
Nothing good can come of this. They’ve got so many of us focused in shit like race and gender when it all
boils down to class warfare.

>>24485373
Do blonde or brunette people have black pubic hair? That's the only way this retardation would make some sense

>>24486919
It’s an American thing. Sex and black people are inextricably linked for them.
It comes up in the scat scene which gets memed - only an American would make the connection to a black penis - poor character writing because a European of the type he’s aiming at wouldn’t think that way.
Actually illustrative of the point of the ‘don’t write outside your lane’ line of thought, not that I agree with it. The good faith steel man argument is to avoid that kind of blunder

>>24487193
that's great hans now back to the poopenfhartenschitten cukstoel

>>24485324
>white people need to show solidarity with people of color and anti-colonial struggles
>but also, any attempt at expressing that solidarity is white saviorism
It's such an utterly incoherent worldview, and it's an incompetent stance to take in a majority-white country. If you want to achieve black liberation or an anti-colonial foreign policy or whatever else in this country, you'll need to get at least a large portion of the white working class on your side. That's never going to happen, though, if you berate any white ally for merely wishing to express that solidarity. It's so stupid, I can't explain this level of incompetence beyond it being some covert liberal attempt to prevent any genuine socialist or anti-colonial movement from emerging.

>>24485445
Have you read lots of Namibian novels about colonialism or are you just assuming Pynchon writes about this topic better than them because he’s a highly regarded white male writer?

>>24487760
Can you recommend some Namibian novels about the topic?

>>24487760
the reason pynch wrote about african colonialism in gr was because what the germans did to the herero was a trial run for what they did to europeans

>>24487578
As a leftist I can see where that anon or his classmate or whoever is coming from...to some degree. But they've taken it too far. Basically we want to give those marginalized voices an opportunity--whether that be publishing a book or having it studied in college--whereas previously it was just white men who were praised for talking about whatever issue. The problem is that person has retroactively cast it on an older book, and anyway that's not even the issue, as I said, it's more about giving newer opportunities to marginalized voices, not erasing white people's.

>>24488103
that guy's scenario so obviously never even happened its just one of those weird "and then everybody clapped" things that leftists dream up to congratulate themselves for holding the right opinions

>>24488103
I had the same issue happen to me but with another white male author. I think it's because a generation has been raised to be performative for social points on tiktok. At some point the reaction to it (maga, trump, etc.) will be worse than what they were trying to replace. Oh well.

>>24485193
Referencing things doesn't make the books actually bad, like why would obscure references be any different

>>24485324
You are really overestimating how many people actually are that uptight about authors they read. Not everyone is a university activist

By what metric? I consider /lit/ as much of an authority as any other literary group and he is an all star here.

>>24488207
We're basically the big-dick-swingers of the literary world.

>>24488207
Yep, not only here but like I mentioned earlier he has one of the biggest subreddits for a lit fic author so I don't know what OP's talking about.

>>24488110
I recently completed my undergrad in a very left-wing campus, and anon's story isn't unrealistic at all. A solid chunk of modern academia, at least from my experience, seems to neglect the content of a text to instead focus on the perspective/identity of the person who is saying it. I don't know what's behind it, maybe it's born out of Spivak's critique of Derrida, but I can't stand it. I've seen firsthand plenty of "Marxist" professors who will criticize actual Marxist authors for being "Eurocentric", then praise liberal/anti-Marxist authors solely for being a "subaltern perspective". I'm not a Marxist nor am I really on the left, but the incoherence of it honestly gives me sympathy for the actual, orthodox Marxists who are criticized for not playing into these identity games. I'll take an Althusser over some identity-obsessed pseudo-Marxist any day.

>chuds, white
Grrrrr
>chuds, non-white
Yaaaas queeen slaaaaay

Why are lefties like this?

>>24481005 (OP)
It’s almost insulting to mention his name in comparison to Joyce (PBUH).

>>24488891
lol, what? why? if anything pynch is the heir to joyce. what joyce was to modernism, pynchon is to post-modernism

>>24489180
Lol

>>24489183
why 'lol'?

>>24489191
"To compare Pynchon with Joyce, say, is to compare a kindergartener to a graduate student (the permanent majority of the culturally inadequate will promptly respond that the kindergartener sees more clearly than the graduate student and that his incompetence with language is a sign of innocence not ignorance and hence grace). Pynchon’s prose rattles on and on, broken by occasional lengthy songs every bit as bad, lyrically, as those of Bob Dylan."

- Gore Vidal

>>24481005 (OP)
I'm not an Anglo but isn't Pynchon held in high regard by all those techbros types?
>inb4 techbros don't read
Modern ones don't, the ones who actually laid the groundwork for Sillicon Valley's success obviously did read a lot. He always struck me as a geek-adjacent writer

>>24481005 (OP)
Only americans consider him seriously because they lack good writers compared to Europe.

>>24489527
"wah wah wah if someone i dont like likes an author im interested in thats a heckin bad thing"
Grow up and read him or don't, pussy

>>24487934
>he could not

>>24489525
>Gore Vidal

>>24489767
QED

>>24481005 (OP)
because no one talks about post war literature

>>24481005 (OP)
Thoughts on Against the Day :
------------------------------

The problem with "Against the Day" is that it places an undue burden on the reader. Quite simply, there are too many story arcs, way too many characters, too many obscure references and too much blending of the real and the imaginary. The reader is forced to either gloss over the story or to spend an inordinate amount of time tracking down these references.

I see a strong simularity in this respect to Gaddis' work where the stylistic narrative choices purposely made by the author needlessly overcomplicate and detract from the story. In Gaddis' case of not identifying the speaker and in Pynchon's case over use of characters, obscure references, and overall zanieness.

It's almost like the author is saying, if you want to understand, you must meet my brain and my fantasy world creation on MY terms and I will not accomodate you. Even though both authors have insightful things to write this level of arrogance is off putting. Finally, it introduces difficulty where difficulty shouldn't be. "Blood Meridian" and "Europe Central" are arguably just as complex, but they don't suffer from these types of distractions of having to read, re-read, and visit supplementary guides to figure out what is happening.

>>24489970
Pleb: filtered

>>24490188
No I just don't like mayonnaise.

>>24489970
There’s a really good read through on the thomas pynchon subreddit that helps explain stuff and has really good discussion. Honestly anytime I need something pynchon related reddit is the first place I check.

>>24489970
I'm only a little bit through ATD, but isn't the appeal of it that it's some nevwr ending adventure like the kind you'd find in old adventure pulp magazines? Like an episodic adventure? That's the vibe I get so far. No spoilers please.

>>24490488
"The vibe" - that's cute :)

I'm currently about 600 pages thru - hoping to finish by August (I target about 10 pages a day). I think you're absolutely right in that he's trying to mimic some of the old serialized pulp magazines.

I like Pynchon and maximalist novels in general, but he definitely doesn't make them accessible even though some of the tangents can be fun to research and track down (imagine trying to keep up in the pre-internet days).

The amount of characters and plot lines is the hardest for me...trying to keep them all straight in your head is not easy.

>>24481005 (OP)
People got too self-aware about deciding classics and stuff after like the 50s. He's about as close as you get, but people have trouble taking stuff without the mystery of antiquity as seriously. It's not as novel.
Also he's not as good as like Gaddis or whatever so knowers don't pick him for the highest level anyway.

I'm going to read GR next month with that reddit group. Should I research anything going in?

>>24481005 (OP)
cus the nigga trash bruh

>>24491028
Cures for homosexuality because you are a redditor

>>24491340
Nah, he’s ok; reddit unironically has like way better pynchon discussion than here.

>>24490253
Because he was always a reddit writer. He perfectly appeals to redditor sensibilities

>entire book is dedicated to setting up a joke in the end
>the joke is not funny
I hate this nigga with a passion

I rank him as the best American writer of his generation and he's certainly the best American writer still alive, but I do think he made some "mistakes" or he just "missed" being a canonical great. And I find it interesting, even if tangential, that he was born too late to be classed with the Beat generation and born just too early to be classed with the Boomers. Like, he was 32 in 1969 and probably really trying to relate to all the younger people around him in California and my assumption is he struggled. Also highly probable he actually was one-shotted by some sort of MK Ultra LSD experiment or something and, in another timeline, he actually was a canonical great and, back in this one, he was just so mega-talented that even after being one-shotted he was able to produce all he produced. He came from an extraordinarily old family, by American standards at least, but I never got the impression that he resented that fact nor America itself and that he was more disturbed by the changing world and the changing America around him that, again, I suspect, he actually really liked. Whereas the boomer hippies did not like America and their parents and he mistook their rebellion as a mere critical call for change when in fact they were really just assholes rebelling for rebellion's sake. I think if he never went so far with the weird character names and had slightly more focused plots, even conspiracy plots and even allowing for extremely large doorstoppers, it would have had him resonate more historically and more popular. I also get the feeling that the rocket ship of McCarthy's success post the No Country for Old Men movie really bothered him which is why we've only seen Bleeding Edge since, because I think he also really believes he is the best of his generation (and, again, he is) and that he would agree with me that he just slightly missed it. Like, everything was there, and I mean everything was there for him to go take it, and he just missed like the one final thing that he couldn't grasp. Anyway, I'm really excited for Shadow Ticket.

>>24491822
>best of his generation
You're just as delusional as he apparently is

>>24491845
>“So the city became the material expression of a particular loss of innocence—not sexual or political innocence but somehow a shared dream of what a city might at its best prove to be—its inhabitants became, and have remained, an embittered and amnesiac race, wounded but unable to connect through memory to the moment of the injury, unable to summon the face of their violator. Out of that night and day of unconditional wrath, folks would’ve expected to see any city, if it survived, all newly reborn, purified by flame, taken clear beyond greed, real-estate speculating, local politics—instead of which, here was this weeping widow, some one-woman grievance committee in black, who would go on to save up and lovingly record and mercilessly begrudge every goddamn single tear she ever had to cry, and over the years to come would make up for them all by developing into the meanest, cruelest bitch of a city, even among cities not notable for their kindness. To all appearance resolute, adventurous, manly, the city could not shake that terrible all-night rape, when “he” was forced to submit, surrendering, inadmissably, blindly feminine, into the Hellfire embrace of “her” beloved. He spent the years afterward forgetting and fabulating and trying to get back some self-respect. But inwardly, deep inside, “he” remained the catamite of Hell, the punk at the disposal of all the denizens thereof, the bitch in men’s clothing."
He wrote that about you, anon. He told me.

>>24491973
What shitty, shitty prose. That's actually my primary point why he should be nowhere near a best of list

>>24491997
I think that's AI. I've only read GR but his prose in that book is far, far superior to this chatgpt word salad.

>>24491997
well one of the beautiful things about the internet is we can all express our opinions.

>>24481005 (OP)
Because he writes slapstick comedy instead of fart-huffing (literally in Joyce's case) self serious shit

>>24492011
it's from against the day

Pynchon’s my least favorite writer for sure, because my least favorite thing in books is goofs, gags, jokes and rambunctious behavior, and his books are filled to the brim with this. Every novel is like one of those novelty snake cans, you open the book and POP you get a face fulla snakes and you wince silently. The faggot, the redditor, to do it. And then you think “what’s he gonna do next, this shithead” and you pick the book back up and BZZZZ you get a shock and “chrissake” you've been pranked again by "the old Pynchmeister", that loser. “Did that Pynch?” he "sez", laughing “yukyukyukyuk”. Watch him as he shoves a pair of plastic buck teeth right up his mouth and displays em for you – left, right, center – “You like these? Do I look handsome?” Pulls out a mirror. “Ah!” I wish I was exaggerating. And you're in physical pain cringing as he snaps his suspenders, exits stage right, and reappears hauling a huge golden gong

>>24481005 (OP)
Because his entire career is predicated on making art which is offputting to midwits. It’s very easy to like Pushkin and Twain and seem intelligent without having to offer an original opinion on their work, much harder with Pynchon because his work is blatantly making fun of traditional literary styles and there isn’t really a scholarly consensus for them to parrot yet. Take Blood Meridian as an example. Before the wendigoon video no one in the internet-weird-guy-who-watches-too-much-anime-from-the-90s clique had ever heard of it and as such if you liked the book you had to have not only read it but also come out with some kind of meaning from the book which wasn’t spoonfed to you. Now, you can just get your opinions from a youtube video on it and look smart without the work involved. Academia is 99% redditposting middle-manager midwits and they don’t really have the capacity to form their own frameworks of meaning.

>>24492106
>no one in the internet-weird-guy-who-watches-too-much-anime-from-the-90s clique
Hey, I'm a weird internet guy who watches too much anime and I got into McCarthy because of the Coen Brothers adaptation of No Country for Old Men likea decace before Wendigoon even had a channel

>>24491822
this an actually good effort post

>>24491822
>I never got the impression that he resented that fact nor America itself and that he was more disturbed by the changing world and the changing America around him that, again, I suspect, he actually really liked.
Why on earth would you think this?

>>24492050
Post the other one with Jeremiah X-Box

>>24492768
Read Mason & Dixon. It’s his most overtly patriotic work. In essence, America for him is a kind of historical blank slate. A great project that was sidetracked unfortunately but the spirit lives on in the people. NTA btw

>>24494275
Nice analysis. What do you think he's saying about America in GR and IV?

>>24492750
>weird speculation about pynchon's mindset with no evidentiary basis
>good effort post
just cuz a post is long doesn't mean it's not retarded. you really thinking being 32 in '69 is too old to understand youth culture? lmao abbie hoffman was 32 in 1969. dumb ass post.

>>24492768
I'll try to keep it short. Young anons aren't really capable of understanding until they have some years under them but, in any historical timeline, there are moments that happen that kind of coalesce into what can best be described as a sort of gravitational force that creates a genuine and stark demarcation line in time. Both personally and societally. A separation of before and after that our memories of "the way things were," so to speak, sort of solidify and move on. For a cheap /lit/ metaphor, like chapters in a book. The assassination of JFK in 1963 was the beginning of one such moment societally but then the mass adoption of color television that occurred around 1965-1966 cemented it. Color broadcasts in America began in 1954, but the general public didn't start buying color tv's until about 1966, which would also be around the same time that Pynchon's best friend died in a motorcycle accident. Again, a lot of young people don't understand just how different life in America was in the early 1960s compared to the late-1960s, and obviously the war in Vietnam would be another event that would be superfluous but it was genuinely like seeing the world in b&w versus color. IBM exploded during this time, too, as did advertising and air travel (boeing) and military industrial complex psyops, etc. The prior America was truly a different America and Pynchon would have been in his late 20s during this transition so, he was certainly old enough to remember the older America yet young enough or youthful enough in spirit to try and be a part of this bold new future America. The closest parallels to our modern times I'd argue would be mass adoption of the internet in late 90s through the smartphone bookending 9/11 and Afghanistan/Iraq in between, and it's possible/probable that we're witnessing another one now with COVID, followed by mass adoption of AI, followed by who knows what, but we'll need a bit more distance to really be able to tell if it's a major or minor one. What I'm trying to get at is, despite the reclusivity, by all accounts, Pynchon has not been a brooding and bitter author. By all accounts, he enjoys life and, though Borges is probably his favorite, he's always had great love and respect for the American authors that came before him as well as his family's long history in America and it shows in his work. And I think the extreme lengths he's gone for anonymity is he's merely wanted to continue to experience that. Still, if one is going to be a canonical great, one has to say SOMETHING and there is no hiding from the time and life you're born into and all of us have to grapple with the world we're presented with and, I guess I just don't believe a person who is clearly so extraordinarily intelligent and talented and I would say grateful would continue to come back again and again to shoot his shot at canonical greatness, if they didn't have some sort of appreciation for their time and place.

>>24494623
very well put

>>24494623
5 star post my negroid

>>24489525
I loved Pynchon, I thought he was incredible, and probably comparable with the best ever written, but when I read Ulysses I had a very similar thought to Vidal: it was as if Pynchon was a child, and Joyce was an adult, or more than an adult. I failed to grasp so, so much of Ulysses, but I recognized Joyce was an absolute freak in the domain of literary genius. Now that I've read more I get the sense that Joyce's titanic beauty and complexity seats him below (but not too many tiers below) your Shakespeare & co.; I was just mistaken, naïvely, about how exceptional Pynchon was. That's not abnormal; people love him for a reason, especially dreamy, stuck-up intellectual young men, like I was, and hopefully Pynchon draws them up through the pipeline of deep reading into the older, less neurotic, better portions of the canon. My love affair with pomo, followed by disgust with it, helped propel me to better places; hopefully it does that with others. A lot of our Pynchon worshippers are probably just in awe of great literature whose appeal can finally land with them on their own level and in their own culture. (But they should reread the Divine Comedy and Shakespeare.)

>>24495418
Pynchon tends to be the gateway to serious literature for a lot of intellectual young men.

>>24485086
Say what you want about him, DFW was ahead of his time. He predicted all of this horseshit.

>>24495938
This. For all of the valid criticism that can be made about most of DFW's writings, E Unibus Pluram was weirdly prophetic. Almost every piece of modern media, from blockbusters to tv shows to youtube videos, is obsessed with being as ironic and insincere as humanly possible. Every piece of serious dialogue has to be followed by a quip that deflates all tension, every plot has to have some metacommentary on why its narrative is actually silly, and every internet message has to give some self-deprecating signal that the poster doesn't take himself too seriously. It's amazing that DFW was able to anticipate all this in 1993, well before Whedonism infected nearly every piece of media.

>>24495999
Checked. For at least the last ten years I've been unable to keep track of how many layers of irony we're supposed to be operating under.

>>24495999
Is that really true though?
Last movie I watched was Nickel Boys, having read the book, and it didn’t strike me as trying to be insincere and ironic. Unless I missed a trick, they wanted you to take it seriously.

>>24495999
elaborate?

>>24496081
Yeah, sincerity's everywhere nowadays. Millenials and gen z are honestly too sincere tbqh

>>24495418
In bro’s defense it’s not fair to compare to Shakespeare and Joyce. They’re just on a different level over everyone.

>>24481005 (OP)
he is though? GR especially was pretty much instantly recognised as a masterpiece

>>24496332
True, I hope I didn't express the idea too harshly to Pynchon or his readers. I did genuinely adore him, and Mason & Dixon had a major impact on me. Maybe, in the end, just as much as any of us, I got Pynched

>>24496372
Nah, I still like him

He's suppressed in mainstream culture because he speaks hidden truths

>>24481005 (OP)
Do you seriously have to ask that?

>>24494498
Well, I can only speak on GR because I’ve never actually read V but I want to preface this by saying that I don’t think GR necessarily deals with America as a major thematic at all. He mentions the idea of America in passing from time to time, mostly in the course of the recounting of Slothrop’s ancestors, but the focus is always on America as it stands in relation to whatever larger thing he’s exploring. We never really deal with what Pynchon thinks about America qua America although we do get hints. From the recounting of Slothrop’s heritage we see an America which is not yet fully formed: the sense of community is a kind of inverse view of Protestant paranoia, the class structures of the old world impose themselves in a decaying form (the very decay of Slothrop’s own family line as evidence to this), the wealth of the new world is founded in rape and pillage of the land (Slothrop's family fortune based on paper mills, and deforestation which Pynchon takes specific note of, as an example), the cultural memory is shattered (Slothrop’s inability to remember his own Father’s face or what he said to him), and etc. Notably, these things don’t all happen at once. It’s a steady rate of decay which eats at Slothrop much like the paranoia which consumes him ever so slowly. When you compare it to his treatment of Europe it’s interestingly different. Pynchon treats Europe like a collection of old phobias and prejudices which states and economies masquerade over. Even the home of the paranoid plot, Them, is based in the old world. I think Pynchon is a much more directly emotional writer than he is a writer of systems if that makes any sense. I mean that when you really boil down all of the paranoia and plots it really comes down to an emotional connection between two people in one way or another. The firing of the 00000 was ultimately due to the relationship between Gottfried and Blicero, Slothrop’s surveillance is due to Pointsman’s relationship with his friend who died (who we can assume was handling the operation, seeing as there was one, before him), Slothrop’s answer to the call of adventure was spurred by his pain for Tantivy. In a way he paints America as having less of these emotional burdens than the old world and offers up a picture of a fresh start. Not because of new laws or societal orientations or anything else like that fundamentally, but simply because the people are less burdened by the weight of the past. Like that Marx quote ‘the dead weighed like horrors on the minds of the living’

>>24481005 (OP)
I tried to make sense of him, and I'll be the first to admit that maybe I'm just an idiot, but my sneaking suspicion is that there really isn't anything to "get" at all...

>>24496489
Just reread it. Pynchon's actuality pretty straightforward but with jangly prose, the difficulty is optional after it clicks and that's one of the reasons I love him

>>24481005 (OP)
Because he is not a major figure. He is just a good writer.

>>24495418
I was the same. Got into Pynchon as a 19 year old and i despise him mostly these days. He has great imagination but is seriously lacking limguistic talents

I think it’s less him and more postmodernism has just completely fallen out of favor in the academic/critical milieu.

>>24481005 (OP)
He's not great

>>24495418
>My love affair with pomo, followed by disgust with it
you have learned nothing. you are still the same pseudointellectual reactionary you were coming into pomo literature. humble yourself

>>24496301
They are candid, not sincere. Being candid means being open to the degree of vulgarity, but being sincere means truly saying something with feeling and conviction.

>>24498277
pomo hasn’t been a thing for awhile so i doubt that accounts for it

>>24498740
Even if it weren’t a movement’s standing doesn’t really impact an individual author’s. See: Joyce and modernism.

>>24485324
lefties making everything about race. i dont care who writes anything if its good. except for jews