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Comment by 7thaccount | Hacker News Reader

I've never understood what the author intends to convey in books like this. Maybe I'm just a simpleton.

I've noticed that a lot of people expect books like this to be a puzzle, but they really aren't.

When Pynchon writes about Slothrop naked in a barn getting attacked by a witch's owl you can just laugh at it, you can just be disgusted by Captain Blicero, etc. No mystery solving required.

It is definitely a book I would dread having a test on after reading it.

I think its status as "serious literature" does it a disservice in this regard. School teaches us that literature must be carefully scrutinized in order to not miss the obscured meaning packed into each and every passage. But treating Gravity's Rainbow with this level of scrutiny leads only to madness.

Yeah, the idea that great literature is great because it has a bunch of secret messages encoded in it is as crazy as Gravity's Rainbow and kills a lot of people's interest in literary fiction.

Funny enough GR does have a bunch of secret messages (Tyrone Slothrop -> Sloth Or Entropy), but they aren't why the book is good (closer to why the book is bad) and aren't necessary to enjoy it.

It's verbal jazz, or literary expressionism. Riffs and tone poems. Look for recurring themes and symbols.

We aren't taught (in American schools, anyway) a lot of how to ingest these genres of media. Hence the refrains (about abstract art, e.g.) "my 5 year old could paint that!"

Postmodernism is definitely taught at the college level but it’s for reasons like this most people aren’t familiar with it.

Correct

explodes your mind tbh, if you give it a chance it will that is. A lot of great art does ask a lot from the reader, viewer, listener. I would usually agree that's not all that fair and artists' are asking for too much, but when something is such a consensus pick for words like "greatest," "most," "best," I can many times eschew my own self give much benefit of the doubt/have lots of patience. It has been very very rewarding for myself, as in I have a lot of fun trying to figure out why people liked Charlie Parker or Captain Beefheart or Twin peaks.

Books like this are deeply immersed in the political and culture and subculture of their day, so are hard to approach out of context.

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