What was Pynchon trying to convey with Gravity's Rainbow?

just telling a fun story nigger. you're thinking about it to hard.

Eh, I don't read Gravity's Rainbow for the satire. I'm pretty uninterested in that. It's got plenty more to offer besides that. And really it's a shame people on this site portray Pynchon as some kind of cerebral writer. He's really not. His books can hit you in the feels just as well as anyone else.

I'm sure all the intricacies of the plot and characters and dialogues are all to "tell a funny story nigger"

Man, you sure convinced me that you've read the book with that post!!! Are you Harold Bloom??

And as another user said:

>Is there anything more intellectually and artistically lazy to do than to... mock?

Provide substance my man

was it not funny?

dude are you really attempting to make grand, sweeping, generalizing statements about gr and reducing it to a purely satirical work? have you even read the book?

also yeah i agree comedy and satire is shit. lol who even likes that stuff. sarcasm is also bottom of the barrel gutter trash. really profound stuff user really makes u think

wtf dude stfu lmao

god damn you sound fucking annoying

Downvote the troll with kindergarten bait

Is baiting on Veeky Forums the highest form of art? Is there anything more intellectually and artistically lazy to do than b8 dumb niggers wasting their life away on this site? It's not a coincidence that the worst dumpster-fire, mongoloid, humorless virgin-frogs, attempt to grandstand and make profound statements as if they are fact and can't navigate themselves out of their parent's basement much less out of the plebeian/patrician false dichotomy.

So one of the things Pynchon does in every novel is a kind of strategy of information overload. This isn't just him being a dick (well maybe a little bit). But more importantly, it works as part of a strategy of forming a polyvocal history; a history without a hegemonic narrative, but with an infinite series of individual voices that overlap and contrast in a ways that resists being summarized into a single story. This might explain the purpose of slang and the divergening plot lines.
I'll be able to address a lot of this stuff by answering this question: what is the defining trait of post-modernism?
This actually isn't that easy. The two main figures here are Lyotard and Fredrick Jameson. We'll stick with FJ since he kinda adapts Lyotard in his big ass work: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. He basically talks about Postmodernism as a product of Late Capitalism (this is kinda complicated, but think globalized capitalism, where stuff gets made in China and sold in the US and you'll be on the right track) But we don't need to go into that too much. The two main traits he identifies are pastiche and depthlesness. The first describes a work that combines the styles of other works in a way that is not a satire or parody (unlike, say, Joyce's Ulysses, which combines a lot of other styles but does so to make fun of them). You can see this in Gravity's Rainbow when he combines ideas of partical physics, economics and Hebrew mysticism without much differentiation between the fields. Why does it do this? Well that's part of its second feature, depthlesness. FJ says that superficiality is the defining feature of PM. You might have noticed this experience when your reading yourself: Pynchon will use terms and signifiers in a way that seem really significant, only to leave you wondering "did any of that mean anything at all?" He does this for a number of reasons. One of them is his opposition to hegemonic narratives mentioned above: he won't allow you to go "oh this is the 'real' story". Instead he forces you to recognize the constructedness of logic, how the language we use can itself be very superficial. It's a strategy of undermining political control, a control that lies in the notion of a single, absolute truth. For Pynchon at least, I think that's what Postmodernism is all about.

This is a great post user

I'm sure it was a groundbreaking book in its day but it has lost its shock value because we live a very Pynchonian world now. Think about the obsession with Harambe or even Trump becoming president.

I second this...great work user

Trump presidency is Greek mythology tier

eyuck

i think pynchon deserves better than cheap metafictional allegory and postmodernist readings. gravity's rainbow is a book about violence, war, the state, the market, history, sex, death, spirituality.

i don't think it has any thesis that clicks its disparate elements together, but just because it is chaotic doesn't mean it's being coy about what's being discussed. to disappear up the academic asshole and make it about playing with narratives is to ignore what's in front of you in its parables of control, its depictions of violence, torture, genocide, its explorations of christianity, scientism, capitalism, fascism, and communism as moral compasses, new gods.

yes it is experimental, yes it is funny, but it is a wicked reflection on the atrocities of the 20th century in a very concrete way, and you people make it about fucking narratology. yuck yuck yuck

I don't disagree completely. But if there's any book you want to apply the reading techniques of postmodernism to, surely it would be the literal ur-text of the movement.

Bad post

Why is this a bad post user?

circular reasoning. i suggest you take logic 101 sir.

that is not pomo

admiring work as just weird and shit, and dismissing it as nothing but "i dont know" is something else. not to say it isnt conjuring for the future titles of theory, but its not an arguement

>also yeah i agree comedy and satire is shit. lol who even likes that stuff. sarcasm is also bottom of the barrel gutter trash. really profound stuff user really makes u think
Gave me a giggle.

Jameson doesn't adapt Lyotard, he critiques him. Jameson is a fairly orthodox Marxist. For Jameson, people like Lyotard and Pynchon are not revolutionary at all, but are in fact merely reflecting how the means of production have shifted toward a more global and financialized system. Think about what employers look for nowadays. You need to be flexible, open-minded, well-rounded, easygoing, cooperative, and so on and so on. These are, more or less, the same qualities that a Pynchon novel encourages.

B A C K
T O
/ S C I /
K I D D O

I took the book to be about entropy and the cost humans pay for it and also im not sure how to put it into words but sort of the happiness imagination can provide in tough times? Thats one reading of the title I know, gravitys (gravity as in hardship or serious situation, ww2) and it's possible rainbow.

troll'd

right, which is why you'd apply it to someone actually trying to work within postmodernism like barth or gaddis, not pynchon who is coming out of the traditions of beat fiction, surrealism, and american modernism

>flexible, open-minded, well-rounded, easygoing, cooperative, and so on and so on
> the same qualities that a Pynchon novel encourages
I don't see how at all. Does every novel that vaguely includes counter-cultural elements without screaming bloody revolution encourage disactivism to you?

But Pynchon is far more exemplary of postmodernism than those writers. People do literally consider Gravity's Rainbow to be Postmodernism:the book

people believe a lot of things

It's a quick summary of Jameson's belief that one must always historicize. Go read the Political Unconscious and his Postmodernism book if you want a complete explanation.

...

This is interesting. Is this all found in logic of l.c?

"Bazinga" came from this book, so whatever he was going for was successful.

Y'all are forgetting japes. Japes are a core part of Gravity's Rainbow get it together guys

The book is about death and how it is useless to resist, no matter how hard you struggle. Everyone is controlled and caught up in some way by a system that is bigger than them. Some people try to find some meaning or closure in that system (and most of the people that tried ended up failing), and some of the people in the book end up celebrating death. This pretty much comes together in the ending where the narrator straight out tells you that there's nothing left to do but to sing. It's a pretty nihilistic book desu

You don't know what nihilism means. Also:
>Pynchon
>nihilist

but that's wrong and a stupid, safe academic interpretation

u wanna go m8

Kek

>You might have noticed this experience when your reading yourself: Pynchon will use terms and signifiers in a way that seem really significant, only to leave you wondering "did any of that mean anything at all?" He does this for a number of reasons. One of them is his opposition to hegemonic narratives mentioned above: he won't allow you to go "oh this is the 'real' story". Instead he forces you to recognize the constructedness of logic, how the language we use can itself be very superficial. It's a strategy of undermining political control, a control that lies in the notion of a single, absolute truth. For Pynchon at least, I think that's what Postmodernism is all about.
in other words, it's like a chef in a fine restaurant squatting down and dropping a fat turd on your plate in opposition to the traditional western narrative that restaurants must serve food, provoking questions about whether human shit can qualify as food, and if this new 'anti-dining' experience is fully captured by the turd in isolation, or to be fully enjoyed must also feature the chef's hairy asshole churning over your plate, among myriad other interpretations put forth by literary "scholars" and their "criticism"

where do you guys go for some juicy essays on books like gr and other great works?

am about 1/8 of the way through GR and finding it a challenging read. how do you guys stay focused when the narrative throws you off into confusion? love the richness of the language so much but i get a weird half anxiety around long books (read lot 49 in a couple days for obvious reasons!)

What would you say Pynchon is then? I don't really know much about nihilism desu, but Gravity's Rainbow seemed to me to have a rather bleak message.

jstor

a memeing comes across the sky

just plow through it & don't get stuck & use the guide after you read a few portions

it's not for everyone but it does get you in a state of wondering what happens. This book was really disorienting on a mental plane for me and I love disorientation and the plights of some of the characters were really powerful, this book threw more concepts at me than any other book I've read and even though the plot wasn't always great I'd still reccomend this book to people because there's a lot to it and I feel like most people who read it walk away with something that's entirely different from what someone else would walk away with it with. Any book that's like that is worth reading.

didn't know about the guide, that's useful advice thanks !