Which do you prefer ?

Which do you prefer ?

GR, but J R is better than both.

>"there are a few books that over the years have changed the way I’ve thought about literature and what it can do and just changed the way I think generally, Gaddis’s JR was one of them, Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition was another, Gravity’s Rainbow too, and McElroy’s Plus joins that list"
I think this quote gets me closer to what I'm trying to say. There's no doubt GR and JR have changed the way I see and think, but The Recognitions speaks directly to my heart, because it's everything I ever wanted from a novel, what it can convey and accomplish.

It's great, but I don't really agree. It runs afoul of a few pitfalls as a result of Gaddis's inexperience and being intermittently written over the course of seven years.

J R Is a lot better than both of those. but pynchon has nothing on gaddis. pynchon is like "gabba gabba hey!" and gaddis is like all smart and stuff.

The Recognitions becomes preachy as hell only seventy pages in. It's tedious and grating.

Gaddis is nothing compared to Pynchon.

The Recognitions is overrated and people force themselves to like it.

Gravity's Rainbow is difficult but once you finish it you become obsessed with it.

JR is Gaddis' only good book. Pynchon wrote many masterpieces.

Its Gravity's Rainbow just a cluster fuck of stories and characters, or will actually read something insightful/learn something from reading it?

What makes it so good?

/thread

>The Recognitions is overrated and people force themselves to like it.
This is wrong, because I haven't forced myself to like it, and enjoyed it so much I'm going to get around to rereading it soon. I think it's not just great but even underrated. There's a vogue with modern authors like Franzen, Ozick, Gass, DeLillo, Wallace, etc..., variously giving shout-outs to Gaddis and directly praising The Recognitions, but nevertheless Gaddis has gotten nowhere near the critical attention he deserves even yet. A Frolic of His Own is a great book, JR is a great book, the Recognitions is a great book. Agape Agape is a very minor work but still has a great style, and I can't speak for Carpenter's Gothic yet but I still have high expectations for it considering everything else I've read by him has been great.

Anyway, as for the OP, I actually prefer The Recognitions, although I'll admit GR was more of an important and influential work; if you've read both, though, you can see how much of Pynchon's style is itself cribbed from Gaddis's in The Recognitions.

Part of the reason for the lack of critical attention (I think) is because his works are genuinely difficult, and also very abrasive; he makes fun of the very reviewers and critics and literary scene he would've done better to kiss up to, if he wanted greater acclaim (as Gass points out). I mean, shit, Gass loves the book. It's well-written and very moving, even if darkly cynical and even hilarious a lot of the time.

I'm a girl and within seconds of meeting a guy my age I can tell whether or not he has read The Recognitions and whether, consequently, he is someone I want to spend my time with. I meet a guy, he's quiet, reserved, he stutters and stumbles over basic sentences. He doesn't smile, he laughs politely and rarely, he wears clothes that are either too tight or too baggy and which look as if they were picked from a thrifstore clothesrack by his mother back in 2008. When I ask a question his answers come in "yes" and "no"s, when I begin talking about a subject he has expressed (mild) interest in he simply agrees with what I say and smiles the way a small child does when praised by his aunts at Christmas. In short this guy is not a reader. Instead of venturing out in the world, instead of asserting his will and demanding that the world yield to whatever demands he may have, instead of turns inward, his will is inverted, he would prefer to plummet than ascend. Rather than reach overcome his anxieties and mental peculiarities through empathy and conversation, he allows them to entirely dominate his perspective and disposition, to make themselves so much at home in his distorted psychology that the disorders and peculiarities and paranoid distortions themselves eventually become the essential substance of his character. I'd buy him a book ticket myself if I thought he had the courage to use it.

????

I wanted to agree with you but then you had to go and say something retarded like
>Agapē Agape is a very minor work

>There's a vogue with modern authors like Franzen, Ozick, Gass, DeLillo, Wallace, etc..., variously giving shout-outs to Gaddis and directly praising The Recognitions,
> he makes fun of the very reviewers and critics and literary scene he would've done better to kiss up to, if he wanted greater acclaim.

Gaddis posters, everyone.

Gadiss my fav writer for sure because my fav thing in books is arcane literary allusions, sadistic gags, jokes and assholey behavior, and his books are full to the brim of it. Every novel is like one of those stupid social experiments, you walk around the corner & POP you get a face fulla fist and you fall back screaming. The mad mind, the crack genius, to do it! and then you think hmmm whats he gonna do next, this trickster, and you pick yourself back up and BZZZZZZZZZZ you get a shock and Hahahahahah you've been tazed again by the old social experimenter, challenging all your preconceived notions about life in America, that card. "Did that hurt your Willy?" he says, laughing yukyukyukyuk. Watch him as he shoves his hands onto nails and crusifies himself to joke about the attempt to scientifically quantify the nature of christianity by testing how a human body would actually look like hung by nails to a cross, wouldn't it need straps to hang up there or could nails support the body?- "you like dis? Do i look handsome???" And you're on your ass again laughing as he exits stage right, bearing his cross.

heh

Gaddis is top

Also Recognitions is better than JR

I'm confused. Are you saying those authors are the reviewers who are given two weeks or under to review significant-looking books when they come out and give brief, usually shallow reviews of them for the newspapers they write for? Are you implying they're part of the literary scene Gaddis made fun of for being obsessed with psychoanalysis literary and not, thinking they're cool for drinking and going to parties, and who are mostly unoriginal and like to parrot each other?

It's literally what he said already in The Recognitions and JR condensed into a 100-page stream-of-consciousness rant that makes almost no pretense at separating its consciousness from Gaddis's himself, it's a mouthpiece for his ideas, explicitly cribbed from Walter Benjamin. Anyway, you can't please everyone, but I think I was even too laudatory of Agape Agape, it's mostly a thick web of allusions and ranting with none of the emotional impact of his earlier works, no interesting characters to speak of.

dat reheated pasta comes through with a quickness

>it's a mouthpiece for his ideas, explicitly cribbed from Walter Benjamin
Holy shit, did you even read J R? You're just as bad as the critics who cited his "clear" Joycean influence.

Gravitys Rainbow deals with some extremely weighty themes, its up to you to decipher them my friend.

Agape Agape is the novel that Jack was writing, mate-o, about art in the age of mechanization... by Walter Benjamin. Who uses the same metaphor of the player piano used by Gibbs and in the novel.

>novel
Sorry, work, I haven't read it in a while, he doesn't say it's a novel explicitly.

They're both memes--the left egregiously so--and so neither

>another work on the same topic existing means he was aware of it
No. Gaddis was actually working on the player piano piece since the 40s. An early, shortened version was published in a 50s issue of The Atlantic at one point as "Stop Player Joke No. 4". He just put unpublished bits of it into J R as a book Gibbs was working on.

The whole joke with the "plagiary" bit in AA was that Benjamin and a couple of others preempted him without him even realizing it until someone later mentioned it to him under the assumption that he'd already read them and was aware of their work on the same topic. It's the reason why he turned AA into a dramatized monologue instead of sticking with his original nonfiction piece. Because it was already done as a nonfiction piece years before he even started his without him realizing it.

Thanks, I remember this now but had forgotten it since I hadn't read both in a while, that's actually it. What I meant to imply is that there's a metafictional/intertextual allusion between the two, a piece about "player pianos" and art in the modern world as it relates to this in JR and then Agape Agape being a piece about just that. Anyway, thanks for clearing it up. I still don't think A.A. is quite so significant or great as his other works, though, but that's just a matter of opinion.

It's a matter of perspective. Another connection to J R is that this was a lifelong obsession of his that he collected heaps of reference materials for over the course of several decades and like Bast's music, it kept being scaled down over and over until the only thing he was able to finish directly relating to that topic was a 90 page monologue.

stirner pls

Tommy pls go

What's with the The Recognitions trend lately?