Well, that sucked.
What was the point?
Why did she care about the play? Why would the reader care about the play? Who was the secret bidder at the end and what would it have mattered?
Even writing about Metzger running away with the underage punk groupie would have been a better story.
I guess you got Pynch'd, user
I did, I want my time back.
I've read Inherent Vice as well and it was mediocre. Is he truly a meme?
Someone you recommend while suppressing your own laughter?
Oedipa is a bored housewife desperate to find meaning and connections within the superficial and unconnected. She's like those people desperate to believe crackpot conspiracy theories, because wouldn't it be really fascinating if this weird thing was how the world really worked? People like this are desperate to cling to anything as evidence.
And is this an account of how boring these kinds of people can be?
She didn't seem phased at all when her husband lost his mind on LSD, cheated on him easily, wept on the death bed of a man she'd spoke to a handful of time. Was she even bored or just plain paranoid?
Senpai Pynchman himself has a character say that the whole thing could have been the dude who left the will having hired a bunch of people to play a huge meme.
You ought to read Mason and Dixon, it eschews much of the silly tropes with which he's often associated, probably by dint of being a story rooted in reality (to a degree). There are still absurd moments to be had, of course, but it's counterbalanced by glimpses into the sublime.
He is phenomenal but he isn't for everyone. IV is seen as one of his weakest novels. If you didn't like The Crying of Lot 49 based on because you didn't fully comprehend it, that's fair. It's all quite conspiratorial and dense, despite it's short length.
I'd maybe suggest coming back to Pynchon at a later time.
What Pynchon would you recommend to someone who thought the whole "there is no meaning to be found!" ending to be complete bullshit? Is there any point in me reading anything else or is there any actually interesting themes explored in his other works?
Read it again and read it more carefully and you'll understand.
Why do you think that is bullshit?
Because how different is it to ending a story with "it was all a dream!". Pynchon invalidates a big part of his story. I wouldn't have prefered a twist ending and I do see the point of the story as touching on the theme of paranoia but I feel that both The Crying Of Lot 49 and Inherent Vice had inconclusive endings with little substance. Both are journeys where paranoid and confused characters struggle to find meaning in loose pieces of clues, ultimately ending up just as confused as when they started. I don't find Pynchon funny and I don't find Inherent Vice or The Crying Of Lot 49 interesting at all. Maybe I'm being a bit harsh but my previous experiences have been disappointing but I would like to be able to appreciate him as greatly as most people seem to
Bleeding Edge I think might be the best starting point for Pynchon, it's very fun and you'll get way more of the cultural references.
I don't know. I love the Pynchon I've read so far and can't wait to read more. He's not for everyone though
>Pynchon invalidates a big part of his story.
How? One of the biggest parts of the novel are the hermetical difficulties one faces in the modern world and the novel ends with her being unable to resolve those difficulties. It doesn't invalidate it, it is a natural and fitting ending for a novel about such a thing.
Grav's Rainbow. Pynchon illustrates the world of that novel at ground level and keeps you pleb throughout. The symbolic imagery of the novel is rockets above crashing down on people below who themselves are so grounded in the pleb world that they have no way of affecting their circumstances.
It's a good way of making you realise your quest for truth and meaning is a fool's errand.
Oidipa represents you trying to find the "point"
Why not just read Ready Player One, there are much more cultural references
I love TCoL, read it a week ago. It had been a long time since literature felt so much fun to me. I wish Pynchon was my older brother. Some questions though:
Is the conclusion that it doesn't matter whether the conspiracy is real or not because it wouldn't impact her life in any way anyways? She's making herself crazy in this quest for a (higher) meaning that is unobtainable.
What was the point of maxwells demon? An illustration of how people try to relate actually unrelated things like they do with conspiracies?
Why did she barely react to her husband turnin into a LSD-loon? Purely because she is so obsessed?
Good ol' Tommy boy is redpilled, he is showing how terribly awful the modern woman is, partly because they are Milfs (Oedipus), all the meaning in the world is because men want to fuck women, and these crazy slits have to run around like there is some grand meaning, there has to be more than that, there has to be more than that....well honey, im (hardly) afraid not.
>Because how different is it to ending a story with "it was all a dream!
>The only reason I read hundreads of pages is the last one!
>The Journey is never the destination!
>It is never about the good times and good friends we made along the way!
>I dont know what art is!
You dont doubt that he could have easily made a coherent ending, like the millions of other crime and mystery novels, he has the 2s +2s for out, he could have within the last pages said =4 ! for you, but he didnt, and it is hardly partly that, of what makes the book stand out.
I've read both Crying Lot and Gravity's Rainbow, and both made me ask exactly what you asked. "What was the point, and why should I care, cause I don't know and I don't."
Some people like him but I don't recommend you to dig any further.
>why should I care about humanity's existential predicament, including its bizarre forms of intra and interpersonal suffering, it's tendency to transform this emptiness, this void of meaning, into a place of fear and fighting and deception rather than a place of humane, compassionate decadence. Why should I care?
Fuck Pointsman...
That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them.
Maybe one day the spark will be ignited in you. You might speed up the process by perhaps emptying your life of some of the pointless distractions. But in the end it is most likely real suffering that you need.
Most of pynchon's novels require at least a second reading -- and the curiosity to dig deeper. Just because the meaning of something you've read isn't readily made apparent to you doesn't mean it lacks worth. And just because you or someone else doesn't enjoy a work doesn't mean it lacks worth either.
Despite frequenting this forum for months, I only looked into what separates modernism from post-modernism a week ago when I read this very book. So maybe this isn't at all accurate, but to address your explicit question about the ending:
I think a modernist would say yes, the conclusion is left open-ended because it doesn't make a difference now that she's resolved to look into it.
A post-modernist might say that the book doesn't have an ending because no good ending was going to enhance the novel beyond what it already was. This is debatable, but I think it's 's point. Rather than force an ending onto a book that wouldn't improve what was already written at all simply because convention is that books have an ending, the rest of the work is allowed to speak for itself. I think this is more compelling than to say that the very last bit of written text was somehow important to the book or exceptional, because to my mind it isn't. And I don't think it's fair to say that not having an ending reinforces themes better than a memorable ending that reinforces the theme of inconclusiveness - just look at The Pale King, or even Broom.
Either of these explanations, though, only guess at what the author was thinking and are largely irrelevant; it's best just to agree as most people here seem to that just what is written on the last page is not very consequential. Whether what is left out is or is not is hard to say.
The point of Maxwell's Demon is that everyone should know about Maxwell's Demon.
Right after Oedipa finds out that she's not a sensitive - that she can't information to order in a piston - she surrenders herself into "this freeway madness" among all this heat and moving cars, and information flows into her all evening. Entropy, I think, is relevant to modern life and is sort of a physics analogy to Oedipa's quest for meaning, and I wonder if just having the thought in your head prepares you a little for the coming chapters.
*Can't convert information to order in a piston
>100 pages of Mason trying not to fuck 13 year old girls
No its definitely Pynchon.
i was flipping through this in the shitter today (read it a long time ago) and something jumped out at me: how does oedipa end up at vesperhaven in ch. 4? i can't recall if she's tipped off about thoth or figures it out somehow. why does she stop there?
>in the shitter
>in
>not on
>in
Gross, you must have poop all over your doop, boop.
...shit
Looks like an accident. She stops there because Inverarity had owned the property. She was trying to execute the will, and not investigate anything.
Thanks for the elaborate answer man
How did you improve your understanding of the book like this? Rereads and essays?
I had no idea that Maxwells Demon is actually real. Truth is stranger than goofy madcap fiction I guess.
Not him but I only read it once and found it pretty straight forward. Once I had read enough of books that require greater hermeneutical skills than the simply interpreted Veeky Forums starter pack tier I found it greatly improved my ability to understand more complex works, or works that cannot be interpreted with the same methods.
there is no definite meaning of the investigation of Oedipus, because the author of the will had died. Its a story about the death of the author
I'm not that big on Pinecone but it's clear you read like a #pleb. Talk of themes, endings, substance, clues.
Just read with imagination and intelligence. Narrative as it is aesthetically grasped is all that matters. All the muh meaning, looking for a message, some big 'payoff' or illumination at the end-- nonsense m8. That all comes on its own once you aren't #pleb
>That all comes on its own once you aren't #pleb
Exactly, the text is the world, you are human tasked at discovering what you can about it and yourself, look around the world at the differences between people and what they have discovered about themselves and the world.
>Oedipus, because the author of the will had died. Its a story about the death of the author
And also its as if she as the author of her will died?