Thread 24694447

Let's be clear: anyone who discusses GR in terms of 'plot,' 'themes of paranoia,' or 'character arcs' has fundamentally failed the test the book sets for you. You're trying to use a city map to navigate the open ocean.

The book is not a narrative; it's a cognitive payload delivery system. Its purpose is not to be understood in the conventional sense of assembling a coherent story. Its purpose is to simulate, at a neurological level, the experience of living within a totalizing, incomprehensible system of information—to induce the state of apophenia and intellectual vertigo that defines the post-war consciousness.

Pynchon bombards you with acronyms, equations, historical detritus, and obscene limericks not for you to meticulously decode and file away, but to overload your analytical faculties. He is forcing your brain to abandon its search for linear causality. The text itself is the Zone. It's an environment, not a story.

The book is a filter. Not for intelligence, but for a specific kind of intellectual vanity—the need to solve, to map, to declare mastery over a text. The moment you pull out a character chart or a plot summary, you have been successfully 'filtered'. You've chosen the map over the territory. The true reading of the book is the experience of being lost within it.

So, the question isn't "what does it mean?" The real question is: at what point during your reading did you abandon the pretense of analytical observation and simply surrender to the data stream? Or are you still LARPing as a literary critic, trying to connect dots that were designed to remain scattered?

Let's be clear: anyone who discusses Blood Meridian in terms of 'plot,' 'themes of paranoia,' or 'character arcs' has fundamentally failed the test the book sets for you. You're trying to use a city map to navigate the open ocean.

The book is not a narrative; it's a cognitive payload delivery system. Its purpose is not to be understood in the conventional sense of assembling a coherent story. Its purpose is to simulate, at a neurological level, the experience of living within a totalizing, incomprehensible system of information—to induce the state of apophenia and intellectual vertigo that defines the post-war consciousness.

McCarthy bombards you with descriptions, nature, historical detritus, and the Judge’s diatribes, not for you to meticulously decode and file away, but to overload your analytical faculties. He is forcing your brain to abandon its search for linear causality. The text itself is the Zone. It's an environment, not a story.

The book is a filter. Not for intelligence, but for a specific kind of intellectual vanity—the need to solve, to map, to declare mastery over a text. The moment you pull out a character chart or a plot summary, you have been successfully 'filtered'. You've chosen the map over the territory. The true reading of the book is the experience of being lost within it.

So, the question isn't "what does it mean?" The real question is: at what point during your reading did you abandon the pretense of analytical observation and simply surrender to the data stream? Or are you still LARPing as a literary critic, trying to connect dots that were designed to remain scattered?

>>24694479
I remembered a post saying how the Judge tells you how to read the book. Not in an obvious 4th wall break but it’s like ambiguous. Is that true?

>>24694447 (OP)
>swung to the other fence
Plot is fairly important to understanding GR and it does not take all that smart of a person to understand. Interpretation wise it is a novel with two plots in a frame story, one is reality and one is Slothrop's hallucinatory world; the line between them is not as clear as it seems at first glance but the clues are all there and not that difficult to find. Once you figure out the two plots and see how they work with the frame story, everything falls into place.

It is pretty much the same structure as V. but Stencil is made the main character and his story is integrated into the whole with more subtly. This is the basic structure of Pynchon's novel's, he expands and develops it and plays with it a fair amount through his career but it is always there.

>>24694508
It’s not isolated to a single moment. It’s generally realized that the narrator in BM only describes things, but the judge shows us how to engage with the narration. In a way it’s like the narrator and judge are both working to create a perfected idea of what we would take for granted as normal narration.

When I read AI prÖse my heart bursts into full gallop and my adrenal glands vents their entire cortisol supply. I go completely apeshit. It's completely heartless. Like an Asian diasporic's HR email. Kill yourself.

>>24694447 (OP)
>it's a cognitive payload delivery system
What are you a fag? Stfu and wash my car

>>24694512
>M&D
most everything is unknown and explained by God. What little is known simple tangible things but we are starting to figure things out and we learn that just because it looks like a duck and poops like a duck, does not make it a duck. But this newfangled knowledge is mostly a hobby of the well off and/or insane, no biggie, God can sort it out when he sees fit too.
>AtD
Whole lot of stuff is known, everyone is in on it. The unknown is just something we haven't named yet or something we have not invented yet. Anything is possible, we are our own Gods.
>GR
We know almost nothing, mainly because so much knowledge that we had to special and invent ways to deal with it all that no one can comprehend anything more than a tiny bit. The known has become the unknown and the world is once again beyond understanding, guess it is time to make new gods, hopefully the can sort out this mess.

>>24694447 (OP)
>Its purpose is to simulate, at a neurological level, the experience of living within a totalizing, incomprehensible system of information—to induce the state of apophenia and intellectual vertigo that defines the post-war consciousness.
I don't understand the purpose of using art to approximate experience in this way. We already know how it feels; we live it. Then the merit becomes whether it replicated a general experience somewhat precisely. If it did, you go "Yeah I guess. Anyways..." I see many other emotions as being more worthy of induction.

AI slop

>>24694817
Decent but a little to tidy, makes your reductions seem not reductive. Also, learn to proof read.

>>24695409
lol

>>24694447 (OP)
ai cope

>>24694447 (OP)
You all laugh but this is actually what "academics" think about Gravity's Rainbow

>>24695658
Have you read a lot of secondary literature on Pynch? I've read the companions for GR and 49 and LMAO they are so dumb.

>>24695683
He has not read any. Also, learn the purpose of companions, they are not meant to explain the book and they are not even meant to help in interpretation.

>>24694508
It's kind of a 4th wall break. Why would the most educated man in the book deliver those speeches in that manner to a party of criminals and illiterates only to hear himself called crazy for the umpteenth time? It's clever, not subtle. The kind of book Mccarthy foregrounds it to be hides some very blatant things he has been doing since the start.

The first draft of the book (pic related) was quite unapologetically a metafiction

I don't read Pynchon for the plot. I read him for language games, puns, songs, amusing character concepts, and humorous takes on subjects that I find interesting like history, physics, mathematics, and 20th century pop culture.

>Pynchon bombards you with acronyms, equations, historical detritus, and obscene limericks not for you to meticulously decode and file away, but to overload your analytical faculties.

I don't care why he does it. I just think it is fun to read. Maybe it helps that Pynch wasn't my first foray into pomo nonsense. I read GR when I was an engineering grad student, so when he starts bringing up the Navier–Stokes equations, it was right in my wheelhouse. I minored in German, so long blocks of German text were fun to translate. And I spend a lot of my free time reading about history, so his historical allusions are fun to spot. Pynchon is just fucking fun. He matches all of my interests.

>>24694447 (OP)
>The book is not a narrative; it's a cognitive payload delivery system.
My coworkers would laugh at me if I said this IRL.

>>24694479
Blood meridian is a filter for cognitive intelligence. It's one of the clearest examples of a book of that sort, post-Kafka

>>24695787
Did not expect an effort post from a BM shitpost on a GR thread. Maybe not a real effort post in your point of view, since you just read/understood the book. But appreciated nonetheless. Thank you!

>>24694447 (OP)
Nice post.
Your thoughts on the dodo bird hunting part?

>>24695787
What about that do you think is metafictional?

>>24695908
Read the first passage

>>24694447 (OP)
I gave up looking for structure after burroughs and arundathi Roy. I don't miss it.

>>24694447 (OP)
not, but, not, but—not, but. Biggest problem with AI is that it can't escape this sentence structure. You can even tell it explicitly not to use these words and it will still do it, or some very similar variation of it.

>>24695949
I was giving you the benefit of the doubt, I see I was wrong to do so. Second person is not inherently meta and breaking the forth wall does not make something metafictional. We need to know who "you" is before we can decide if it is meta and we need to see the meta being relied on for interpretation before we can call it metafiction. That page does not demonstrate that and hints towards a more clearly defined narrator than metafiction. But it could just be a an artifact of his drafting process, playing with things, following whims, seeing what happens and worrying more about getting it down on paper than picayune details that are trivial to fix.

Also, the "kind of a 4th wall break" you speak of is metatextuality and not a 4th wall break at all; really it is just supertext, the opposite of subtext.

>>24695949
Christ, did you mean first paragraph and not passage? If so, you are even more retarded than I thought.

>>24694447 (OP)
>The book is a filter. Not for intelligence, but for a specific kind of intellectual vanity—the need to solve, to map, to declare mastery over a text. The moment you pull out a character chart or a plot summary, you have been successfully 'filtered'. You've chosen the map over the territory. The true reading of the book is the experience of being lost within it.
By writing this aren't you analyzing it and therefore being filtered? Also what makes wanting to understand things "vain"? If humans didn't develop their reasoning skills we would've never left the caves.

>>24694447 (OP)
>—to induce the state of apophenia and intellectual vertigo that defines the post-war consciousness.

Boomer Nihilism and Hedonism were the only reliable solution(s) to Soviet Active Measures.

>The real question is: at what point during your reading did you abandon the pretense of analytical observation and simply surrender to the data stream? Or are you still LARPing as a literary critic, trying to connect dots that were designed to remain scattered?

Schroedinger's Wank.

>>24694447 (OP)
>Pynchon bombards you with

Material that makes one question why and how it ever passed NSA censors and the wisdom of removing The Georgia Literature Commission in hindsight of the Venona decryptions.

>>24695480
Those are not theme, they are the structures that anon I replied to was talking about, the two plots and the frame story, at least I think they are. Still reductive since these structures branch and fracture and interact a fair amount and I reduced the frame story to a god metaphor, but the tidiness is because structure is tidier than theme, not because I was being overly reductive with theme.

The proof reading was lacking, I started out doing them as greentexts and then decided it didn't really work and did not do the best job of reformatting, some of the greentext grammar survived.

>>24696145
>Material that makes one question why and how it ever passed NSA censors and the wisdom of removing The Georgia Literature Commission in hindsight of the Venona decryptions.
This is new to me.

>>24696145
Was Pynchon working for USSR?

>>24696056
You're retarded. The narrator corrects his story while telling it. Read the sentence about irish schoolteachers. Second person was not it, retard.
>>24696060
Hopefully not a samefag but just as retarded as the retard above.

>>24696056
It's "fourth", retard. Of course, a pynchon reader is retarded. Nothing new.

>>24696056
>Also, the "kind of a 4th wall break" you speak of is metatextuality and not a 4th wall break at all; really it is just supertext, the opposite of subtext
Better you understand what these words mean before you write them.

>>24696568
Thats not metafiction... Also nta.
>>24696571
Accusing him of samefagging when he was obviously correcting a possible oversight of his and then samefagging about a typo as a way to "be right," is not helping your case.
>>24696573
Explain how he is wrong. Your not samefagging, right?

I recognize your serial posting style, years ago I had you seething for a few days. Believe it was a Suttree thread.

>>24696056
>kind of a 4th wall break" you speak of is metatextuality and not a 4th wall break at all
Good lord you don't have a lick of reading comprehension lol. I specifically said that it is a fourth wall break precisely because the actual presentation in the book is made absurd because of the in-narrative audience. It's a 4th wall break for a discerning reader, which you don't seem to be. And I already know you are going to needlessly waste everyone's time over your definitions of what these words mean (most of which are probably too shortsighted and wrong).

And it's subtext, not supertext. Google supertext, dumbass. It's not what you think it means. It relies on readers' ability to follow cues, which is the basic bitch definition of subtext.

>>24696581
>nta
Lol sure. Google metafiction. You're too retarded to explain anything to.

>samefagging again
You don't know what metafiction means. What oversight retard?

>>24696581
>pynchud poster has been mad about McCarthy for years
Lol the insecurity.

>>24696586
You literally said "It's kind of a 4th wall break," lol.
>>24696589
samefag.
>>24696592
samefag.

>>24696596
>>24696581
>>24696383
>>24696060
>>24696056
Samefagging and insecure pynchud fan lol.

>>24696596
I wrote a whole post after that line exactly what that meant. But you're retarded to get it. Supertext lol.

>>24696599
I'm trying to find that thread between us from a few years ago, I will post it if I can find it. You seethed anytime I used any literary term and I wasn't even getting near anything like metafiction, you had a 3 post rant after I mentioned rhythm.

>>24696604
Maybe because you are retarded and don't really understand what words mean. There is an example in this very thread. Supertext lol.

>>24696606
I never said anything about supertext, just said that it was not metafiction.

Question, been seeing you post for years and got into it with you a few times, why three? I have always wondered this; why do you post in triplet so often? Sometimes you go fewer but generally when some disagrees with you it is threes, I have never seen four or five.

>>24694447 (OP)
Midwit take. Feeling lost is a part of the experience but you can't reduce any of Pynchon's work to this aspect. Pynchon's endeavor is mostly about cryptically revealing the entire history of the post-WWII American deep state. The conspiratorial elements of his stories isn't a gimmick or a theme, it's a form of journalism.

>>24696611
Why do you make shit up in Pynchon threads constantly? And why have you been seething about McCarthy for years? You're the same ESL retard who was prescribing shitty grammar books when questioned about prose. High time you read them yourself.

>>24696611
You couldn't even follow what sentences were supposed to be metafiction. Sit tf down, ESL.

>>24695683
I have read Weisenburger's companion for GR and I think it is good. Weisenburger dodges the interpretive trap described in >>24694447 (OP) by reading and understanding the book. Picrel is also good.

>>24696631
I like McCarthy, and never seethe about him. In the thread I am trying to find I just asked you to elaborate on a post you made and then when I asked a followup you started seething in triplet.
>>24696635
Are you fighting the urge to make a third post? I am genuinely interested in this and not shitting on you for it or anything.

yep, I guess Deleuze was right about everything once again

>>24696647
>le nta
Yeah and I am batman.

>>24696653
Excluding my exchange with you and my supposed exchange with you, which posts itt are mine?

>>24696145
Gotta love it when Tom "Tommy" Pinecone posts in one of these threads. Only 33 more sleeps til Shadow Ticket!

>>24696612
>>24696612
>Pynchon's endeavor is mostly about cryptically revealing the entire history of the post-WWII American deep state.
Yeah maybe, that and encouraging his readers to pick up a harmonica, go for a walk and talk to a tree

>hehehe I will expose le deep state by writing high brow novels with limited popular appeal, couching everything in multiple layers of irony and absurdism, heheheh it’s the last thing they’ll expect
Pynched again by the Pynchmeister!

>>24696654
>supposed
Your facade not very convincing, you know that right?

>>24696612
I agree. While I do think you should feel lost at some point in The Zone, I don't think that is "the point". With as postmodern as Pynchon is, I don't think any of his novels are about "the point". These books are timecapsules of phenomenology and that is interesting. Gravity's Rainbow is WW2 in a way that it could have been experienced.

>>24694447 (OP)
>>24694479
Lack of brevity is the hallmark of low IQ.

This book is Psued drivel.

>>24697642
>Experienced WW2
You mean being super saturated by propaganda and tricked into fighting a war to protect the international bankers and arms dealer cartels or actually fighting int the war and watching all your friends die?

Or are you talking about the woman's perspective where you just got the right to vote and immediately installed a socialist government that killed off an appreciable portion of the males in your life while forcing you into the workforce to tank wages and break unions?

>>24699622
>being super saturated by propaganda and tricked into fighting a war to protect the international bankers and arms dealer cartels

Mostly this. There is a little bit of the horrors of the violence of war in itself when describing the V-1 and V-2 bombers attacks on England in the very beginning of the novel as well, but GR has a lot to say about propaganda and doing the bidding of shadowy institutions. All Pynchon works have something to do with conspiracy. On the propaganda front, there are several pop culture references to The Wizard Oz and King Kong. The book is kind doing an inb4 on it's own existence as a type of propaganda, since a book can never give you the raw truth of uncovering insidious plots against everyday people for yourself.

I mean.....Slothrop literally dawns a cape and becomes a superhero named Rocketman later in the book. I'm sure you can see some of our American mythologizing of the war in that symbolism.

I like the part with the dog society

>>24696612
>Pynchon's endeavor is mostly about cryptically revealing the entire history of the post-WWII American deep state. The conspiratorial elements of his stories isn't a gimmick or a theme, it's a form of journalism.
Good description of a significant bulk of his corpus, but leaves out Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day (although you can obviously view them, in part, as revealing Pynchon’s interest in historical forebears or possible roots of this gargantuan sinister System of today/especially post-WW2 of the West and America, and set in the same universe as his other books). It also leaves out Pynchon the Aesthete, interested in literary beauty in an almost quaintly pre-postmodern way at times, even Pynchon the Mystic or Pynchon the Metaphysician at other times. At minimum, Pynchon the Philosopher and Social Critic.
It’s definitely true and well expressed though, Pynchon’s works of fiction also often function as investigations of history, and as investigative journalism about various cover-ups, conspiracies, crimes. In a way it’s as if his fiction is a better way of portraying some of these truths than a cut-and-dry, (allegedly entirely) nonfiction piece for the NYTimes could ever be.

>>24696662
Based, exactly a good example of some of Pynchon’s other intentions.

>>24696732
>high brow

>>24697642
GR is about Vietnam, retard