version's Thomas Pynchon masterclass

[IdleRich]

Yes that's what I understood. I was saying that it's conceivable you might have mixed up the comparison that someone else made. I'm not implying you don't know what book you read.

 

[version]

How can he know that from hearing someone say GR is like Corrections/Recognitions?

Because he read The Corrections.

 

[version]

I wouldn't be surprised if someone compared it it to Pynchon tbh. You get people who lump all those big, "difficult", American books together and Franzen was friends with David Foster Wallace and used to be a Pynchon fan. I've never gotten the impression he's actually anything like Pynchon though.

 

[IdleRich]

For Version.
Martin has heard GR compared to The Corrections
Martin has read The Corrections
He did not like The Corrections
But... I posit that maybe he GR was actually compared to The Recognitions not The Corrections (which might be total bollocks anyway) - this does not change the fact that he read the book about the family and the fact he read the book about the family does not change what book GR was compared to

 

[IdleRich]

Am I not saying this properly? Does that make no sense.

 

[version]

He said it was compared to the book he read, so you can work out which book it was compared to by working out which book he read.

 

[martin]

I know it definitely WASN'T 'The Comforters' by Muriel Spark, 'cos I read that earlier in the week and enjoyed it.

 

[IdleRich]

He said it was compared to the book he read, so you can work out which book it was compared to by working out which book he read.

No he said it was compared to A book and he read The Corrections. I'm saying that it may have been compared to... forget it, I'm probably wrong anyway.

 

[IdleRich]

I know it definitely WASN'T 'The Comforters' by Muriel Spark, 'cos I read that earlier in the week and enjoyed it.

But it could have been. How do you know if you haven't read GR?

 

[version]

Anyway...

🤣

What I got out of GR was a better grasp of how history operates, plus a load of interesting information and subjects to look into. It's also really fun and the prose is great.

 

[martin]

Anyway...

🤣

What I got out of GR was a better grasp of how history operates, plus a load of interesting information and subjects to look into. It's also really fun and the prose is great.

I was intrigued after you wrote (in another thread?) about the Kenosha Kid coincidence. Think I might let my guard down.

 

[version]

I find his politics pretty convincing too, the way he talks about markets, colonialism and whatnot. I also like how fractured the book is and the way he blends fact and fiction, introduces fantastical elements. You get gigantic angels appearing during RAF bombing raids, Nazis doing seances and communicating with ghosts and all sorts. It's kind of pulpy at times too, you get the "serious literature" thing alongside slapstick comedy, dick jokes etc.

 

[version]

I was intrigued after you wrote (in another thread?) about the Kenosha Kid coincidence. Think I might let my guard down.

Yeah, he's a bit like Joyce in that he makes so many connections and throws in so much you regularly stumble across things which somehow connect to what you've read. It lives almost as much outside the text as it does inside it.

 

[linebaugh]

What I got from GR is a teleological veiw of history leading to postmodernism. He finds a way to interlock varying schools of thought into a picture of his (and maybe still our) current moment. The occult, the greeks, structuralism, psychedelia, low culture/high culture etc. The guy is an enyclopedia, you learn alot. And I mean postmodernism as a episteme, not just a place holder for the 1950's and on. Metaknowledge is a central topic

Whats fun is it feels like a living thing. For instance the book predicts what associations the reader might be making and toys with you through them. Harold Bloom said the whole book carried kabbala over him like a carrot on a stick but it wasn't until around 700 page mark that the book confirms the hunch explicitly. Theres more to be said here, and probably all good works of art can be said to be living organisms, but I think GR makes concerted effort to lean into that, through tricks like the aforementioned one.

Its also just beautiful. Amazing prose.

 

[version]

The bit where Enzian's munching speed, riding through The Zone on his bike, and starts wondering whether the rocket might not be the "Real Text" is one of the more memorable sections, imo.

There doesn’t exactly dawn, no but there breaks, as that light you’re afraid will break some night at too deep an hour to explain away—there floods on Enzian what seems to him an extraordinary understanding. This serpentine slagheap he is just about to ride into now, this ex-refinery, Jamf Ölfabriken Werke AG, is not a ruin at all. It is in perfect working order. Only waiting for the right connections to be set up, to be switched on... modified, precisely, deliberately by bombing that was never hostile, but part of a plan both sides—”sides?” —had always agreed on... yes and now what if we—all right, say we are supposed to be the Kabbalists out here, say that’s our real Destiny, to be the scholar-magicians of the Zone, with somewhere in it a Text, to be picked to pieces, annotated, explicated, and masturbated till it’s all squeezed limp of its last drop... well we assumed—natürlich!—that this holy Text had to be the Rocket, orururumo orunene the high, rising, dead, the blazing, the great one (“orunene” is already being modified by the Zone-Herero children to “omunene,” the eldest brother)... our Torah. What else? Its symmetries, its latencies, the cuteness of it enchanted and seduced us while the real Text persisted, somewhere else, in its darkness, our darkness... even this far from Südwest we are not to be spared the ancient tragedy of lost messages, a curse that will never leave us... . But, if I’m riding through it, the Real Text, right now, if this is it... or if I passed it today somewhere in the devastation of Hamburg, breathing the ashdust, missing it completely... if what the IG built on this site were not at all the final shape of it, but only an arrangement of fetishes, come-ons to call down special tools in the form of 8th AF bombers yes the “Allied” planes all would have been, ultimately, IG-built, by way of Director Krupp, through his English interlocks—the bombing was the exact industrial process of conversion, each release of energy placed exactly in space and time, each shock-wave plotted in advance to bring precisely tonight’s wreck into being thus decoding the Text, thus coding, recoding, redecoding the holy Text... If it is in working order, what is it meant to do? The engineers who built it as a refinery never knew there were any further steps to be taken. Their design was “finalized,” and they could forget it. It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted... secretly, it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology... by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the energy-burst of war, crying, “Money be damned, the very life of [insert name of Nation] is at stake,” but meaning, most likely, dawn is nearly here, I need my night’s blood, my funding, funding, ahh more, more... . The real crises were crises of allocation and priority, not among firms—it was only staged to look that way—but among the different Technologies, Plastics, Electronics, Aircraft, and their needs which are understood only by the ruling elite...

Yes but Technology only responds (how often this argument has been iterated, dogged and humorless as a Gaussian reduction, among the younger Schwarzkommando especially), “All very well to talk about having a monster by the tail, but do you think we’d’ve had the Rocket if someone, some specific somebody with a name and a penis hadn’t wanted to chuck a ton of Amatol 300 miles and blow up a block full of civilians? Go ahead, capitalize the T on technology, deify it if it’ll make you feel less responsible—but it puts you in with the neutered, brother, in with the eunuchs keeping the harem of our stolen Earth for the numb and joyless hardens of human sultans, human elite with no right at all to be where they are—”

We have to look for power sources here, and distribution networks we were never taught, routes of power our teachers never imagined, or were encouraged to avoid... we have to find meters whose scales are unknown in the world, draw our own schematics, getting feedback, making connections, reducing the error, trying to learn the real function... zeroing in on what incalculable plot?

Up here, on the surface, coaltars, hydrogenation, synthesis were always phony, dummy functions to hide the real, the planetary mission yes perhaps centuries in the unrolling... this ruinous plant, waiting for its Kabbalists and new alchemists to discover the Key, teach the mysteries to others...

And if it isn’t exactly Jamf Ölfabriken Werke? what if it’s the Krupp works in Essen, what if it’s Blohm & Voss right here in Hamburg or another make-believe “ruin,” in another city? Another country? YAAAGGGGHHHHH!

Well, this is stimulant talk here, yes Enzian’s been stuffing down Nazi surplus Pervitins these days like popcorn at the movies, and by now the bulk of the refinery—named, incidentally, for the famous discoverer of Oneirine—is behind them, and Enzian is on into some other paranoid terror, talking, talking, though each man’s wind and motor cuts him off from conversation.

 

[version]

Whats fun is it feels like a living thing. For instance the book predicts what associations the reader might be making and toys with you through them. Harold Bloom said the whole book carried kabbala over him like a carrot on a stick but it wasn't until around 700 page mark that the book confirms the hunch explicitly. Theres more to be said here, and probably all good works of art can be said to be living organisms, but I think GR makes concerted effort to lean into that, through tricks like the aforementioned one.

Yeah, it also feels like you're forever still reading it. It lodges itself in your head and keeps talking to you.

 

[martin]

Yeah, it also feels like you're forever still reading it. It lodges itself in your head and keeps talking to you.

OK, that, and what Linebaugh said, are really selling it to me. That's all I want out of a book really.

 

[catalog]

I had quite a similar experience reading GR as i did ulysses. Its no doubt a slog in parts, and some stuff passed me by, but the ending is brilliant, just very good storytelling combined with interesting pulling together of very disparate things. Dont wanna spoil it too much in case you do read it. And like version said, theres some musings on history/colonialism that are just very insightful and make you think.

I keep meaning to read another pynchon at some point, but i did find his writing style a bit unattractive, for me, personally. Its a bit arch and i get the feeling he thinks hes really funny but those parts, like the massive sex party with all the wordplay, i found a bit turgid.

 

[Mr. Tea]

I've just looked at this thread for the first time since yesterday and the last couple of pages read like a conversation in a nursing home.

 

[IdleRich]

I'd definitely say that if Pynchon is kinda like a cubist, fractured modernist literature that tells the story from weird viewpoints and eschews realism to give a truer picture of the subject, then Franzen is kinda like someone coming along and saying "Hang on now, what about proper draughtsmanship, why can't you just draw a person that looks like a person?" and then he does do that pretty well but it's hard not to see it as a backwards step.
In this analogy I guess Gaddis would be Cezanne with little cubic apples that threaten cubism but don't quite deliver it just yet.