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Anonymous06/20/25, 05:00No.24481005
Why isn't Pynchon as major a figure among true, serious literary types in the same way Joyce, Proust, and Tolstoy are?
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Anon06/20/25, 05:06No.24481018
>Crying Lot 49 is his level
>Gravity's Shitschmear was a fluke
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Anon06/20/25, 05:06No.24481019
No idea, I found him to be a much better writer than Tolstoy with his dull realism.
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Anon06/20/25, 05:19No.24481035
Because postmodernism is contentious and it’s not settled yet. Give it til after WW3 cracker
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Anon06/20/25, 05:33No.24481056
>why isn't this genre writer held in the same esteem as some of the greatest writers in history
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Anon06/20/25, 05:58No.24481084
Cuz he’s ugly. No good writer has even been outright ugly
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Anon06/20/25, 06:09No.24481100
All he does is play games under a veneer of shlock. The greats play games but they also give you a fulfilling thing on the surface.
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Anon06/20/25, 06:27No.24481116
Joyce, Proust, and Tolstoy came about at a time when there was a more serious intellectual environment, now the only people with any concern about literature arent really concerned at all and only use it as a vehicle for their own egos. It started to become that way after WWII, and has sort of completely consumed what once was, which is why the only recent literary figures of note are DFW and McCarthy.
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Anon06/20/25, 07:10No.24481176
Gravity's Rainbow is on that level
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Anon06/20/25, 07:59No.24481227
Pynchon used to be everywhere on this board 10 years ago.
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Anon06/20/25, 10:05No.24481376
Because he's basically disclosing what the CIA has been doing for the past 80 years. Which is why he's basically reduced to 'le goofy reclusive author who writes about paranoia XD'. Few people try to understand what he's actually doing.
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Anon06/20/25, 14:19No.24481786
Because he's still alive.
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Anon06/20/25, 14:27No.24481806
because that PoMo stuff is anti-classic.
it's too tied up with its own contemporary reference that it becomes anchored in a place in time instead of becoming timeless like the classics.
same goes for stuff like DFW's Infinite Jest.
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Anon06/20/25, 20:43No.24482808
He is still alive
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Anon06/20/25, 21:08No.24482875
He is just not as good as them.
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Anon06/21/25, 02:50No.24483665
because he wrote bleeding edge
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Anon06/21/25, 03:02No.24483693
Kind of crazy how low in esteem he's fallen. I wonder if it's a result of postmodernism being less exalted.
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Anon06/21/25, 08:38No.24484266
serious literary types are too stuck up to find fart jokes funny which is what 90% of pinchon's books are made of
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Anon06/21/25, 12:18No.24484598
I think he's gotten more mainstream since the Inherent Vice movie.
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Anon06/21/25, 14:12No.24484867
Like others mentioned, he never managed to break into the european scene like other americans did, Faulkner or Hemingway for example, plus there's the issue of his primary target demographic, middle class american boomers dying out both as academics and critics, and as an audience.Later generations find his style and themes very passé. For lefties he's too old, white, and male, and nowhere near radical enough politically, for chuds and especially younger chuds raised in the aftermath of the hippies and the 1968 movement, he's just an icon of everything wrong, embarrassing, and disgusting about the boomer ethos. And no other groups besides these two are autistic enough to bother with maximalist postmodern literature seriously.In short, he's a living fossil.
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Anon06/21/25, 15:39No.24485107
Because normalfags hate spergs and don't understand their mental artistry
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Anon06/21/25, 16:24No.24485193
I used to like him until I read Bleeding Edge
He makes all these non-sensical or surface level references to things, which makes me question what he talks about in some of his other books
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Anon06/21/25, 16:49No.24485244
Joyce was moreso in the same position Pynchon is in the sense that his only readers included faggots who competed in intellectual circlejerks.
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Anon06/21/25, 17:02No.24485277
In what respect? Papers published? I just think time will tell with this kind of thing when it comes to prestige. No modern author is as esteemed as like... Jane Austen despite quality being comparable imo.
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Anon06/21/25, 17:21No.24485324
I brought him up in my class once and talked about his depiction of colonialism in Africa. I tried to explain how he handled it with so empathy and grace. Instead of everyone being taken with him this one girl started discussing white man savior complex and how we need to uplift marginalized voices to talk about their own experiences. Pretty much everyone agreed with here even the professor. Also I consider myself a leftist so I couldn't voice disagreement with her.I guess what I'm saying is he's on the left but he's not really left enough in the current environment and it's never going to go back. He comes across as an old-school New-Deal-white-man-only-leftist that doesn't appeal to the current generation of leftists.
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Anon06/22/25, 07:15No.24486834
What are you talking about? He has one of the most popular subreddits of any literary fiction writer.
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Anon06/22/25, 20:14No.24488207
By what metric? I consider /lit/ as much of an authority as any other literary group and he is an all star here.
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Anon06/22/25, 22:21No.24488490
>chuds, white
Grrrrr
>chuds, non-white
Yaaaas queeen slaaaaayWhy are lefties like this?
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Anon06/23/25, 01:50No.24488891
It’s almost insulting to mention his name in comparison to Joyce (PBUH).
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Anon06/23/25, 09:41No.24489527
I'm not an Anglo but isn't Pynchon held in high regard by all those techbros types?
>inb4 techbros don't read
Modern ones don't, the ones who actually laid the groundwork for Sillicon Valley's success obviously did read a lot. He always struck me as a geek-adjacent writer
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Anon06/23/25, 11:50No.24489669
Only americans consider him seriously because they lack good writers compared to Europe.
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Anon06/23/25, 13:35No.24489793
because no one talks about post war literature
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Anon06/23/25, 14:54No.24489970
Thoughts on Against the Day :
------------------------------The problem with "Against the Day" is that it places an undue burden on the reader. Quite simply, there are too many story arcs, way too many characters, too many obscure references and too much blending of the real and the imaginary. The reader is forced to either gloss over the story or to spend an inordinate amount of time tracking down these references.I see a strong simularity in this respect to Gaddis' work where the stylistic narrative choices purposely made by the author needlessly overcomplicate and detract from the story. In Gaddis' case of not identifying the speaker and in Pynchon's case over use of characters, obscure references, and overall zanieness.It's almost like the author is saying, if you want to understand, you must meet my brain and my fantasy world creation on MY terms and I will not accomodate you. Even though both authors have insightful things to write this level of arrogance is off putting. Finally, it introduces difficulty where difficulty shouldn't be. "Blood Meridian" and "Europe Central" are arguably just as complex, but they don't suffer from these types of distractions of having to read, re-read, and visit supplementary guides to figure out what is happening.
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Anon06/23/25, 21:00No.24490845
People got too self-aware about deciding classics and stuff after like the 50s. He's about as close as you get, but people have trouble taking stuff without the mystery of antiquity as seriously. It's not as novel.
Also he's not as good as like Gaddis or whatever so knowers don't pick him for the highest level anyway.
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Anon06/23/25, 22:05No.24491028
I'm going to read GR next month with that reddit group. Should I research anything going in?
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Anon06/24/25, 24:20No.24491311
cus the nigga trash bruh
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Anon06/24/25, 02:51No.24491588
>entire book is dedicated to setting up a joke in the end
>the joke is not funny
I hate this nigga with a passion
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Anon06/24/25, 04:41No.24491822
I rank him as the best American writer of his generation and he's certainly the best American writer still alive, but I do think he made some "mistakes" or he just "missed" being a canonical great. And I find it interesting, even if tangential, that he was born too late to be classed with the Beat generation and born just too early to be classed with the Boomers. Like, he was 32 in 1969 and probably really trying to relate to all the younger people around him in California and my assumption is he struggled. Also highly probable he actually was one-shotted by some sort of MK Ultra LSD experiment or something and, in another timeline, he actually was a canonical great and, back in this one, he was just so mega-talented that even after being one-shotted he was able to produce all he produced. He came from an extraordinarily old family, by American standards at least, but I never got the impression that he resented that fact nor America itself and that he was more disturbed by the changing world and the changing America around him that, again, I suspect, he actually really liked. Whereas the boomer hippies did not like America and their parents and he mistook their rebellion as a mere critical call for change when in fact they were really just assholes rebelling for rebellion's sake. I think if he never went so far with the weird character names and had slightly more focused plots, even conspiracy plots and even allowing for extremely large doorstoppers, it would have had him resonate more historically and more popular. I also get the feeling that the rocket ship of McCarthy's success post the No Country for Old Men movie really bothered him which is why we've only seen Bleeding Edge since, because I think he also really believes he is the best of his generation (and, again, he is) and that he would agree with me that he just slightly missed it. Like, everything was there, and I mean everything was there for him to go take it, and he just missed like the one final thing that he couldn't grasp. Anyway, I'm really excited for Shadow Ticket.
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Anon06/24/25, 06:45No.24492022
Because he writes slapstick comedy instead of fart-huffing (literally in Joyce's case) self serious shit
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Anon06/24/25, 07:00No.24492050
Pynchon’s my least favorite writer for sure, because my least favorite thing in books is goofs, gags, jokes and rambunctious behavior, and his books are filled to the brim with this. Every novel is like one of those novelty snake cans, you open the book and POP you get a face fulla snakes and you wince silently. The faggot, the redditor, to do it. And then you think “what’s he gonna do next, this shithead” and you pick the book back up and BZZZZ you get a shock and “chrissake” you've been pranked again by "the old Pynchmeister", that loser. “Did that Pynch?” he "sez", laughing “yukyukyukyuk”. Watch him as he shoves a pair of plastic buck teeth right up his mouth and displays em for you – left, right, center – “You like these? Do I look handsome?” Pulls out a mirror. “Ah!” I wish I was exaggerating. And you're in physical pain cringing as he snaps his suspenders, exits stage right, and reappears hauling a huge golden gong
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Anon06/24/25, 07:42No.24492106
Because his entire career is predicated on making art which is offputting to midwits. It’s very easy to like Pushkin and Twain and seem intelligent without having to offer an original opinion on their work, much harder with Pynchon because his work is blatantly making fun of traditional literary styles and there isn’t really a scholarly consensus for them to parrot yet. Take Blood Meridian as an example. Before the wendigoon video no one in the internet-weird-guy-who-watches-too-much-anime-from-the-90s clique had ever heard of it and as such if you liked the book you had to have not only read it but also come out with some kind of meaning from the book which wasn’t spoonfed to you. Now, you can just get your opinions from a youtube video on it and look smart without the work involved. Academia is 99% redditposting middle-manager midwits and they don’t really have the capacity to form their own frameworks of meaning.