The Prose Stylist

Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
"(the explosion feels unimpeachably realistic, and yet falls short of viscerally reconciling modern audiences to a horror that recent generations have tried to wish away)"
 
V

version

Well-known member
Clinamenic said:
Gravity's Rainbow is full of this, where the couple hundred characters seemed like pawns in this sprawling and playfully conspiratorial chessboard theater, where the author's motivation seems to be to drive these characters' stories in order to engender as much colorfully complex content as possible, in order to have more fun material to manipulate with more complex formal techniques - all of which can be read as an artifact of literature's evolution unto postmodernism.
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Seems a particularly uncharitable reading of what's going on in the novel. You've reduced a wealth of political and historical content and context to stylistic choices for the sake of style.

It's a book set during WW2 and written during the 60s and 70s dealing with the way individuals are pushed, pulled and used like pawns by technologies, systems and institutions. What you're describing as some sort of indulgent flaw on the part of the author is precisely what he's trying to illustrate. It's not some cynical exercise, he's describing the world as he sees it.

Granted, it's an incredibly pessimistic book, but that was obviously his state of mind at the time, watching the disintegration of whatever he'd hoped the movements of the 60s were going to achieve.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
(on Napoleon)
The film, while technically superb, feels like it wins several battles but doesn’t entirely qualify as a success in terms of the overall war.
 
Clinamenic

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
version said:
Seems a particularly uncharitable reading of what's going on in the novel. You've reduced a wealth of political and historical content and context to stylistic choices for the sake of style.

It's a book set during WW2 and written during the 60s and 70s dealing with the way individuals are pushed, pulled and used like pawns by technologies, systems and institutions. What you're describing as some sort of indulgent flaw on the part of the author is precisely what he's trying to illustrate. It's not some cynical exercise, he's describing the world as he sees it.

Granted, it's an incredibly pessimistic book, but that was obviously his state of mind at the time, watching the disintegration of whatever he'd hoped the movements of the 60s were going to achieve.
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Oh yeah I didn't mean to frame this as indulgence or vacuity on behalf of Pynchon, I actually think its an excellent expression of the postmodern zeitgeist in general. I guess I was more calling attention to the fact that characters arcs aren’t really appealing to empathy, at least not in the traditional sense, but are all seemingly treated more as objects, as threads in a larger tapestry. Almost done in a generative sense, which is what I was trying to get at, IE these are all very singular characters, some cartoonishly so, and I think much of the brilliance of the book is what happens to emerge when these characters coexist and collide long enough in the mind of the author.

I definitely think it’s a brilliant book, i just don’t think most of it (maybe with some exceptions like the Pokler bits) was written with the intention of getting the reader to really invest in the characters, pathos-wise.
 
V

version

Well-known member
"A stylist creates a foreign language in their own language... to burrow a foreign language deep within language and to carry all language to a kind of musical limit. This is what it means to have a style."

 
Clinamenic

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
version said:
"A stylist creates a foreign language in their own language... to burrow a foreign language deep within language and to carry all language to a kind of musical limit. This is what it means to have a style."

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Yeah in this sense I didn't get much of a private language vibe from Pynchon (only read Lot 49 and GR), at least not compared to folks like Deleuze or Joyce (just got a copy of the Wake, and looking through it is pretty ridiculous haha, in possibly a great way).
 
mixed_biscuits

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
Clinamenic said:
Yeah in this sense I didn't get much of a private language vibe from Pynchon (only read Lot 49 and GR), at least not compared to folks like Deleuze or Joyce (just got a copy of the Wake, and looking through it is pretty ridiculous haha, in possibly a great way).
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ChatGPT is good at Finnegan's Wake style, if you want to translate your website into it. Just realised why there are fewer angry aesthetes: dwindling stocks of testosterone population-wide.
 
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