Literally the greatest author of all time

J R is easy and straight forward though. You don't have to Google artists or religions or translate things lol

Yeah I'm a bit intimidated by JR as well. But I took the plunge with Gravity's Rainbow and loved it so maybe it'll be the same with JR.

J R isn't confusing guys. It's not hard. People say each other's names all the time. If you can remember 10 characters names you will be fine.

Thanks dude, appreciate it. Definitely going to read it soon!

I'm by the way

It could be this, I'm pretty obsessed with medieval renaissance art so I didn't have to research a whole lot, I followed this stuff easily, but stylistically I feel like The Recognitions is more forgiving. J R is, for all practical purposes, almost solely unattributed dialogue.

I also found Gravity's Rainbow to be easy, but it's a pretty traditionally written book even if it bends a lot of rules. I never finished J R but I look forward to whenever I feel like I have the energy to tackle it again.

Gaddis writes dialogue so well that if you guys showed me a sentence I could probably figure out which character said it after reading J R. Everyone has their own unique style. I could probably pick out J R or the principal without even reading the words lol.

The stuff of Gaddis seems quite hard to approach, so here are my questions:

1) How is this difficulty rewarding?
2) What's new with Gaddis?
3) Isn't he a matter of American pride rather than of pure literary interest (i.e. people ITT wouldn't care as much if he were Australian or Maltese)?

We'll I'm Canadian and I don't give a fuck where my authors come from. You wouldn't happen to be the retard that keeps posting "American Pomo trash" all over the board would you? He's not that difficult my man. Just the recognitions and that's not even hard to understand. You might have to Google a few random things like I mentioned before. I found ulyssess closer to the end much harder than anything gaddis has done.

>3) Isn't he a matter of American pride rather than of pure literary interest (i.e. people ITT wouldn't care as much if he were Australian or Maltese)?
What a bizarre question

Well, I didn't find him difficult, but somewhat tedious as English is a foreign language for me. But I didn't see at first sight if he was worth the effort or not.

Then I guess it wasn't for you. I found j r really funny. The recognitions was a blast although I still don't know exactly what gaddis was trying to say.

Who the fuck recommends J R before recognitions?

clearly has never read him

To me it sort of sheds light on poisonous ideology. It's such a deep character study of all these people who only really exist within a societal structure that is predicated on falshood and each of them are branching out within it in their own ways, ultimately reflecting and refracting falshood itself in their own concentrated manifestations of it. This is explored in just about every way that Gaddis could think of exploring it and he ultimately does an extremely good job at making you cringe at and condemn the characters and how they're conducting themselves in the world before showing you their humanity and in turn a reflection of yourself.

ultimately ending with Stanley finally performing a true genuine act and literally shattering the world around him (and ending the book) with it

This is just my (not super fleshed out) interpretation though, curious to know what others here think?

Me too, user.

I've read all his books and J R is easier. It's just talking. Take this for example Anselm cuts his nuts off. When I read it i knew he cut something off but I wasn't sure what until I checked the gaddis site. Something like that will never happen in j r. If you can't follow a conversation you are retarded.

But what about the reverend. He seemed legit and he get murdered? Wyatt is basically traumatized from his youth? What about esme? She seemed to be living a genuine life although she was addicted to heroin. Everyone gets fucked in the end. That's what throws me off. Max seems to be doing fine and making a good go of it. The ad guy knows he's a piece of shit but he's doing fine.

The idea was something like making a cheap imitation of creation leading to a cheap imitation of an apocalypse using simple materials commonly available at the time. It was probably his least ambitious book overall.

I don't really remember everything super clearly, so I can't comment on the Reverend and Max, but didn't Esme have some sort of miscarriage or something of that nature? It seems to me like she is using everything within her means to distract and dillude herself from her past trauma, and she opts for these relationships based on shallow nothingness rather than real effection. You can see the attempt at a real relationship with her and Wyatt but they are both so broken that it just ends up stilted. I would hardly say that she is doing just fine. She doesn't have an honest relationship with anyone in the world.

All this stuff is reminding me of Jordan Peterson and how he talks about truth and hell.

Yeah that's kinda true. She had lots of friends and I guess chappi was just her drug dealer.

>Vergil

kys

only on Veeky Forums could "ahem" and "holy..." be considered 'great dialogue'

Kys

Someone clearly hasn't tangibilitated their utilization potential.

i love it as his first dabble in the claustrophobic style that would be expanded in frolic and agape. i don't know what the criticism is like, but my interpretation was that it was an obsession with the tension between rigid structures and the entropy of human activity. that's why the carpenter gothic architectural style is used as the name: while on the exterior the building imitates medieval gothic in a more homey american style, inside is a nonsensical mishmash of rooms constructed only to fit the facade. all the characters' actions fit this mold somewhat, Paul and Rev Ude most obviously with their public relations campaigns to cover up greed and fatal negligence in the illusions of faith. all around the characters chaos spirals out of control as papers pile up, phone calls are missed and misheard, incorrect information spurs action, and so on. there is an abstract idea of truth in the novel, some hidden and far away that maybe in a more just or honest world we could really know what's going on, but in the end inertia wins out. it doesn't matter that beliefs or facts may be wrong, but that they move others to act. and it seems like the only action undertaken is because of falsehood, while the characters who have any commitment to truth (Liz with her attempt at writing and Mccandless with his claim that the african survey is falsified) are forced to stay silent and not act.

with the focus on entropy and movement, carpenter's gothic shares many formal similarities with J R, but ultimately i think gaddis ends it on a much more nihilistic note. while Bast may have had the opportunity to create a sincere work, and J R at least enjoys his business ventures, the characters of CG are completely hopeless, trapped in their own momentum and hating every moment of it, but unable to do anything else. whatever real impulses to truth or freedom or love we may have, they will be trapped in the strictures of society and made to oil the machine that breaks us all down at every moment. were we not confined, we could grow in every direction, but all we can know, all that our words are capable of describing, is the stricture itself

this may be distinction without difference, but im a marxist so im being a little dialectical when i say that i feel his point in the dialogue of this novel was to articulate the entropy IN structure, the absurdity that rigid structures (like language, exchange, the discursive structures we build with each other and are forced thereafter to inhabit like the one between Liz and Paul, which has its refrains and regularities and its insipidities and violences) force in upon themselves. so i agree with you on the content of the tension, but I think gaddis heightens the tension to a full on contradiction, in which the same thought (structure) yields opposite aesthetics simultaneously (order and chaos).

i agree completely with you on the fact/fiction play in this text, and i wonder to what extent that dualism is mapped on to inside/outside or the lines are blurred there too?

i get the nihilism too, especially when the really beautiful moments of privacy we get with liz are so brutally blunted in the end there. but i wonder if that nihilism wasnt always there throughout: if gaddis is being a cruel ironist with liz the whole time, turning his narrative eye on her alone time to mock her ambitions. i dunno. that would be a fairly misogynist reading, only somewhat palliated if you displace the judgment from gaddis onto "the house" as some principle, hidden narrator-figure, a thesis i remember toying with while reading the thing.

The difficulty in Gaddis for me isn't long and complicated prose, it's discerning the significance in certain events, characters and dialogue. That was the difficult thing for me even reading Gravity's Rainbow.

Oh I see. What I did for JR was wrote the characters names on the first page and their relations and it was all good.