Le I'm too stupid to read William Gaddis man

The only book in that list that I'd say isn't exactly the easiest read is "Naked Lunch" because of Burroughs' cut-up technique. Still a masterpiece of bizarro fiction

I was just confused about which version of Faust he apparently can't read, as there are multiple versions.

If is right and it's Marlowe's play then it's even more embarrassing, you can finish that in like four days reading it slow as fuck.

It's Mann you fucking tards

I think he makes some salient points about what we read fiction for, and I'm interested in what he calls literature of emergency though I don't know if I buy his conclusions.

>Being a writer without finishing Moby-Dick

Disgusting

>le

He's referring to Thomas Mann's "Doctor Faustus", often consider Mann's masterwork (by those who haven't read Joseph and His Brothers).
It's not excessively long but much too exceedingly specific about the circumstances of Leverkuhn's early upbringing that it bores you to tears, even though the tale is a beautiful allegory for the rise of fascism and a study on the nature of madness and its tie to genius
I have read Joseph and his brothers, magic mountain, even buddenbrooks in excess of three times each and still give up 1/3rd of the way into doctor faustus

>is "Naked Lunch" because of Burroughs' cut-up technique

the absolute state of Veeky Forums

That's what I thought. I was actually going to say Mann instead of Marlowe but second-guessed myself due to having only read second-hand accounts of Mann the cuck's ultimate work of cuckery against his own people.

>read all of Gaddis to spite Franzen after first reading this essay in 2002
>The Recognitions is probably my favourite work of all time
>he's absolutely fucking correct about J R, Carpenter's Gothic, and A Frolic of His Own
Recognitions is the greatest kunstlerroman ever created, the only glimmers I liked within his subsequent work were whenever he'd mention art or explicitly condemn the horrifying commodification of all things (rather than implicitly condemning it through 200 pages of nihilistic business-speak)
he's also 100% about Gaddis preaching to the choir
reading the recognitions made me want to be a writer more than anything in my life, but I don't think I ever came to any of his later works without already sharing his condemnation (and if Gaddis thought the measure of a work was the social change it wrought, how would telling people what they already believe change anything?)
also Agapé Agape is 10/10 and better than anything Thomas Bernhard ever wrote fight me irl

>Mann the cuck's ultimate work of cuckery against his own people
is this dude for real? or is this ironic /pol/ signaling

kinda funny that the genius who makes a faustian bargain in exchange for magnificent musical prowess is based on Schoenberg, who's greatest student would turn out to be none other than (((Theodor Adorno)))

Never posted on pol, but yes, Mann is a pathetic cuck who doesn't deserve to be celebrated.

I'm not him but Mann's classical humanism gets really tiresome
even in the Magic Mountain, Naphta is by far the most intriguing character. Settembrini, the author's self-insert and mouthpiece comes across as such a vain and magnanimous bourgeoise you can't help but revile him

Being a cuck and being worth celebrated aren't mutually exclusive. Just look at Joyce.

Settembrini is disjointed and pretentious, I didn't get that he was meant to be agreed with at all. If he was a stand in for Mann then he must have been p critical of himself.

I meant more that he can be appreciated but should be remembered as the traitor and cuck he was.

>tfw Peeperkorn anticipated Jacques Derrida 6 years before he was even born

reading atm because of this dumb thread. "failed attempts to sell out" hit hard.

For what, condemning the greatest atrocity of the 20th century? Please tone down your mindless edge, we're talking about literature.

Are you referring to the poorly documented "atrocity" that followed and was a response to the jewish genocide of tens of millions of Russians? Perhaps neither history nor literature are your strong points.

>the greatest atrocity of the twentieth century
but Thomas Mann died two years before Ayn Rand published Atlas Shrugged

Oh fuck off

...

No, you become less of a dumbass.

Holy fuck this essay is boring. I got to where he couldn't finish j r and I gave up. What a fucking pleb J R is hilarious. You can open the book to any page and get a laugh even if you don't know what's going on.

ironically, i stopped reading it about halfway through.

>Moby-Dick
>Don Quixote
c'mon. I literally read those when I was a high-schooler

I read this essay a couple years ago but have always had nothing but disgust for Franzen because he's a shitty writer that is lauded by a jewish literary establishment that promotes shit to dumb down the white reading populace. But someone remind me, doesn't his main thesis in this essay essentially just shit on literature as art and justify the writing of pop garbage like the stuff he produces?

Nigger. Go back and finish.

>The average American boomer

No, not at all.

I'm talking about the article, for clarity's sake.

I'm always glad to see Jew-guy show up in a thread. Also want to add that The man without qualities is definitely entertaining, it's just long.

>Jew-guy
>unaware-of-the-jew-guy
You as the latter are the odd man out these days.

no, the essay was probably too nuanced for you.

Sure that's why everyone reading it because of this thread keeps saying it's shit.

did you literally just appeal to the majority...of lit? A board that demonstrates lacking conceptual reasoning on a daily basis? A board that frequently admits to commenting on pieces and works that it hasn't read? The point of his essay wasn't about justifying pop garbage, his point was that the literary establishment has crawled so far up its own ass that it has failed to realize that its original intention of communicating with an audience has in turn alienated that originally intended audience because of how obscure and specialized it became. Franzen is basically saying that people who read nowadays (and he's talking about English major types who are professionals, not booktuber pseuds) don't have the time nor energy to parse out the difficulty of a Gaddis novel, whose message isn't all that relevant to them anyway. Franzen would say that the professionals have learned to grow up, while Gaddis had not and remained complaining about how everyone has failed to recognize his genius and the plight of the artist. Now, I vehemently disagree with Franzen, I want you to know that. But this doesn't mean that I can't sum up his argument on his terms. Crazy stuff

what a shame. moby dick is a strong contender for the best ending of any novel ever. i felt like my ears were ringing for a week afterwards

And are you literally presenting Franzen as a respectable intellectual instead of a mediocre writer of catlady tales? Never mind that. I said it'd been a while, which was why I asked in the first place. Your description actually made me want to read it again, which I'm about to, though I hesitate to acknowledge that and am sure I will quickly remember what caused me to think poorly of it in the first place.

t. Jonathan franzen

>If you're having a good time with a novel, you're a dupe of the postindustrial System; if you still identify with characters, you need to retake Postmodernism 101. William Gass, in his introduction to "The Recognitions," names the childish thing that it's time to put behind us: "Too often we bring to literature the bias for 'realism' we were normally brought up with." Gass's defense of difficulty complements Tabbi's, but with greater sophistry and alliteration. "If the author works at his work," Gass writes, "the reader may also have to, whereas when a writer whiles away both time and words, the reader may relax and gently peruse." Gaddis's fiction could have used fewer friends like this and better enemies. Even Steven Moore, a Gaddis scholar whose criticism is a model of clarity and intelligent advocacy, lets his enthusiasm get the better of him. "J R," for Moore, is a "lean and economical" book, because its inferential, all-dialogue form forces readers to supply missing descriptions and information; the purpose of a novel being, I suppose, to capture and efficiently store data.

>My small hope for literary criticism would be to hear less about orchestras and capturings and more about the erotic and culinary arts. Think of the novel as lover: Let's stay home tonight and have a great time. Just because you're touched where you want to be touched, it doesn't mean you're cheap; before a book can change you, you have to love it. Or the novelist as the cook who prepares, as a gift to the reader, this many-course meal. It's not all ice cream, but sauteed broccoli rabe has charms of its own.

>Difficult fiction of the kind epitomized by Gaddis seems to me more closely associated with the lower end of the digestive tract. His detractors refer to his "logorrhea," but it's more accurate to characterize him as retentive-constipated to the point of being unreadable, sometimes even unintelligible. Edmund Wilson, in his Freudian phase, identified the playwright Ben Jonson as a classic anal-retentive writer, obsessed with excretion, money, lists, seedy underworlds, arcane words, obscure references. Wilson suggested that the best writers trust their talents, and he contrasted Jonson's cramped output with that of his friend and rival Shakespeare, whose "open and free nature" Jonson himself praised. "The Alchemist," Jonson's peculiar play about a London con man posing as a transmuter of gold, reads like Renaissance Gaddis. Both writers stuff far too many swindles into their plots, and for both of them money is the world's shit (Recktall Brown!), at once fascinating and repellent.

I assume that's from "Mr. Difficult," which I just reread the first half of. I haven't reached the part where he lays out the main point but am actually enjoying it, not necessarily because I agree but because it reminded me of a larger idea. I much prefer difficult fiction to the simplistic junk people like Franzen write, but he's right that there is a considerable amount of bankruptcy among postmodern books/writers. I've heard others say that this acknowledgement from the subsequent generation writers like Franzen and (even more so) Wallace is representative of a longing for the structure and stability postmodernism helped destroy through self-indulgence, disconnect with the audience, etc., and I think that is absolutely true. I also think this, erm, recognition is a preview of what comes next.

Okay, I have changed my mind from when I read it a few years ago. It is quite a superb essay that uses Gaddis to highlight some of the problems stemming from postmodernism. It deserves merit for that alone, and as much as I think postmodern stylistics have benefited literature, he is right to say that there is something deeply flawed within the message. Where he fails is where Wallace also (I think) failed, which was in not diagnosing these phenomena as symptoms of the cultural rot leading up to, and spiraling out of control during and after, the 1960s. He is right to use Gaddis as a representative of those cultural machinations but is ultimately uninformed about and thus misses (((what))) links these things together and caused them to flourish.

>totalitarian states
>genocide
>the atomic bomb
>the shift from mass industry to mass consumption
>the exponential expansion of mass media
but sure nobody was ever reacting to these things, it was actually just the joos, you fucking dipshit.

>not-very-good-writer brags about not-reading

faustus is better htan joseph dont kid yoruself

Those things in and of themselves were not responsible, idiot. Nor were their manifestations and the reactions to them purely organic. The jew is an alien revolutionary that encourages others to engage in his type of iconoclastic behavior. The jew is who was responsible for stirring the pot and over many decades cultivating the nihilistic conditions that led to postmodernism, its institutionalization within academia, and the resulting cultural chaos that is now in full effect, and he is lashing out and trying to shut down any who notices his subversive role. The jew was able to fool a generation with this nonsense but it's starting to come back on him tenfold as more realize the societal destruction this desert gypsy hath wrought. This always happens but the jew never learns because he belongs to a tribe of psychopaths within whose disgusting being the truth does not dwell. "Never again" will become the white man's mantra when we expel this sick group of swindlers for the last time. Time is ticking, Moshe.

Yes I'm sure that specifically for the 20th century we can make the ahistorical exemption that the political, economic, and social forces which have always influenced thought and history have actually ceased and for that century alone it's all actually a massive conspiracy by a minority which was nearly exterminated and largely cares more about bagels and crosswords. These /pol/ stereotype sambo dolls are getting so ridiculous they're starting to look believable.

slit your wrists

You're talking about events that are not going to in and of themselves change the cultural framework or outlook of a people, and no one is going to buy your poor little jews spiel so just stop. These negative cultural changes have occurred symbiotically with the jewish rise in cultural influence that stemmed from the jewish media's control over democracy (and other factors) slowly wearing down the aristocracy previously in charge of keeping jews out of power for these very reasons. Jews are hostile outsiders. Given power they are not going to promote a healthy culture and well-being among the populace, they are going to promote inanity, mediocrity, and cultural sickness -- and that's exactly what they have promoted and what white societies have thus received. It's not even that complicated to understand, so these bullshit decoys you're using to dissuade people from realizing the problems your band of lunatics causes is only going to work on the stupidest of goyim.

My Jewish friend who bowls and plays overwatch with me isn't very hostile I'd say. Nor is my other Jewish friend from high school who's too busy being stressed out over vet school exams to do any cultural brainwashing or whatever.

>they are going to promote inanity, mediocrity, and cultural sickness
Yo you might like this philosopher named Adorno he had the same exact concerns you do.

Unfortunately, your anecdotal experiences are not reflective of how the greater world functions, and the sooner you realize that the better off you'll be, friend.

You misunderstand by a considerable margin what jews like Adorno were focused on doing.

>they are going to promote inanity, mediocrity, and cultural sickness
>he says this while scapegoating his entire problems on a whole demographic
Also why do you /pol/tards write all with the same boring fake highbrow tone?

I've never posted on pol and jews are not scapegoats, they are open and active participants in events that cause harm to western society and culture, and can thus be easily connected to such things. If you're too lazy to look into this stuff yourself there's not much I can do for you, amigo.

>I've never posted on pol
Came straight here from /r/t_D?

I've never posted on reddit and capitalists are not scapegoats, they are open and active participants in events that cause harm to western society and culture, and can thus be easily connected to such things. If you're too lazy to look into this stuff yourself there's not much I can do for you, amigo.

Never posted on reddit either.

Cute. But "capitalists" are not the problem; they are an amorphous entity that's easy for stupid people to blame while they continue to not look into or understand the jewish problem.

Cute. But "Jews" are not the problem; they are an amorphous entity that's easy for stupid people to blame while they continue to not look into or understand the capitalism problem.

Your methods are childish and lack the effect you think they do.

>tfw I dislike Franzen as a person but I also enjoyed Freedom

What do I mean by this?

That anons method is childish yes but that last one is pretty effective

>Liking Freedom
What's to like? Some guy goes birdwatching while his wife blows Chad for 500 pages.

t. Jonathan Franzen

Ironically he's hating the postmodern novels that represent the articistic and cultural expression of the pomo/poststructuralist politics and critical theory that this board claims to hate, ie I think some of you lads are a wee bit confused.

Why is there such an uproar about this? I'm sure that there's famous and great writers who weren't that well-read but just had natural affinity for writing
I mean the guy's probably a fag for other reasons but this isn't a great reason to shit on him

.My small hope for literary criticism would be to hear less about orchestras and capturings and more about the erotic and culinary arts. Think of the novel as lover: Let's stay home tonight and have a great time. Just because you're touched where you want to be touched, it doesn't mean you're cheap; before a book can change you, you have to love it. Or the novelist as the cook who prepares, as a gift to the reader, this many-course meal. It's not all ice cream, but sauteed broccoli rabe has charms of its own.

While his opinions on aspects of postmodernism are alright, his reaction to this is honestly horrifying.

>Chad
Sorry to hear about your chronic virginity, bro.

The perfect picture of a white American family: the plot

naphta is way better, but it's pretty clear at the end that settembrini has failed in his vision of using humanist literature to better the world. he is unable to complete his encyclopedia and now that naptha is dead, S has fallen into a depression because he only has value as an opponent to nihilism and without a worthy intellectual rival, he is nothing.

i think the ending of magic mountain is really a BTFO of every character and their belief system throughout the novel. despite all the ways the characters propose to live life and improve society, war and disease kill them all. hans castorp floated through adherence to the different "religions" of bourgeois comfort, joachim's german discipline, liberal humanism, scientism, and the romanticism of peeperkorn, but in the end the only identity he internalizes is that of the soldier at the start of WW1. he leaves all his attempts at personal betterment behind only to die as an anonymous grunt in a nameless battle

You know I'm a real person right?