Is this a misanthropist manifesto?

>>9919142
How?
I'm half-way through and don't see it

More like the autism manifesto
>dude 90% of the book is pointless wacky shit lmao

>woah, Pynchon is so deep, fuck war amirite

>dude circular structure lmao, absolute madman! XDXDDD

>poop!! loooooooooooooooool genius

>>9919142
There are definitely more misanthropic pieces of fiction but GR is certainly in the genre of American misanthropic fiction.
>>9919198
literally how? The opening quote of the book should put you on immediate notice. Not only is Pynchon spitting in religion's face, he's also telling you about the real purpose of the book, to expose the fact the "the powers that be" give no shits about sides in a war or whatever is portrayed in history books.

Wats a misanthropist?

>>9919142
Don't be fooled why would he even write a book for us if he didn't love humanity. Read with yourf heart, padawan.

>>9919267
I thought that misanthrope meant a hatred for mankind. Pynchon, as far as I can tell so far, has a hatred for a lot of things but I really don't see how stuff like this could be labelled misanthropic:

>But on the way home tonight, you wish you'd picked him up, held him a bit. Just held him, very close to your heart, his cheek by the hollow of your shoulder, full of sleep. As if it were you who could, somehow, save him. For the moment not caring who you're supposed to be registered as. For the moment anyway, no longer who the Caesars say you are. O Jesu parvule, Nach dir ist mir so weh...So this pickup group, these exiles and horny kids, sullen civlians called up in their mdidle age, men fattening despite their hunger, flatulent because of it, pre-ulcerous, hoarse, runny-nosed, red-eyed, sore-throated, piss-swollen men suffering from acute lower backs and all-day hangovers, wishing death on officers they truly hate, men you have seen on foot and smileless in the cities but forgot, men who don't remember you either, knowing they ought to be grabbing a little sleep, not out here, performing for strangers, give you this evensong, climaxing with its rising fragment of some ancient scale, voices overlapping three and fourfold, up, echoing, filling the entire hollow of the church- no counterfeit baby, no announcement of the Kingdom, not even a try at warming or lighting this terrible night, only, damn us, our scruffy obligatory little cry, our maximum reach outward- praise be to God! -for you to take back to your war-address, your war-identity, across the snow's footprints and tire tracks finally to the path you must create by yourself, alone in the dark. Whether you want it or not, whatever seas you have crossed, the way home....

it's an anarchist manifesto by someone skeptical of anarchism

>>9919473
Elaborate if you will

>>9919198
Wait till episode 4.

>>9919267
> Not only is Pynchon spitting in religion's face

Not at all. I bet you think Pynchon unironically believes in Kabalah or Tarot.

>>9919142
Pynch doesn't hate people, only authority

>>9919601
>lit missed the point of the epigraph, the first line of the novel

You sincerely don't believe that Pynchon is mocking religion? Never mind his mysticism, but he's mocking 60s religious sentiment fairly clearly by using a quote from an engineer who worked for Hitler early in his career and then worked for US government later. You probably think GR is about something other than the wests hunger for self erasure

>>9919646
NiBBa...
The point of the opening line was to show how the threat of the V2 rocket was transformed into the nuclear threat of the cold war. Von Braun was a nazi scientist who was recruited by the U.S. after the war to help build rockets for the spacerace, which was basically just an excuse to create better missile technology for the cold war. The quote wasn't put in because religion, but because the idea of rebirth is reliant to how the nazi "spirit" lived on through the USA and USSR after the war

>>9919696
Was ment for >>9919675
Whoops

>>9919696
We're actually saying the same thing other than a quibble about pynchons take on religion in the book.

>>9919142

Real talk: how come no one talks about Against the Day? GR is great and whatnot but AtD is probably the best work of fiction written in the last twenty years

>>9919587
it's ironic man, far out...

>>9919142
More like an anarchist manifesto, an assault on conventional epistemology exploring order v disorder and what it means (or doesn't mean) to be a part of that system (or non-system).

I don't think it's misanthropic at all.

>>9919675
>Never mind his mysticism, but he's mocking 60s religious sentiment fairly clearly by using a quote from an engineer who worked for Hitler early in his career and then worked for US government later.

I completely agree with this. However, I don't think he's mocking religion wholesale. I think he's saying Von Braun was both wrong and right. Wrong to think he can justify his religious feel good impulse while making death machines, but right in that there may be something that exists beyond the zero, whether it's conditioning, an after-life. It also speaks to the mathematics used to manage rockets where you need to come very close to dividing by zero, or something. Math isn't my thing. And to feedback systems used in cybernetics as well. Trying to see if you go beyond the conception of information and entropy.

But I'll be clear that Pynchon is by no means dismissing religion or Christianity wholesale. In a very small section there's a priest who basically says "kill the technocrats" and there's no way to not read it as a stand-in for Pynchon. Also, I strongly believe Episode 4 is meant to force the reader into a spiritual stance towards what is happening in the world.

And finally, Pynchon was a practicing Catholic while studying at Cornell. Von Braun was a Lutheran who then converted to Evangelical Christianity in America.

I see Pynchon like Joyce. Irish Catholic heritage, who maybe fell out with the church at one point but never stopped reading a page of Aquinas a day.

>>9919696
This isn't wrong either.

>>9919587
it's a novel in which war is inseparable from the state, the state is inseperable from global economies, and modern man is a pawn of authoritarian power, propaganda, mental conditioning, 24h surveillance, etc and the communists, or at least the soviet union are made out to be no different, part of the same military industrial cartel, or Raketen Stadt. the moral or utopian center of the novel can be found in squadolizzi's anarchists and the counterforce one whichs sells out one which proves entirely ineffective. even slothrop by the last third of the novel has bought into the anarchist dream but it's never really anything more than that, nowhere along the way does pynchon suggests the rebels of Gravity's Rainbow stand any real chance against the combined powers of world governments and international corporations like shell and IG.

>>9920117
It's not misanthropic but highly pessimistic. He doesn't express hatred for individual humans yet catalogues all the ways in which they prevent themselves from living in a just world.

>>9920149
>doesn't express hatred for individual humans
So expressing hatred for individuals is misanthropic, and for groups it's not?

>>9920548
but where's the hatred? it's more a look at humanity as grand tragedy. humans as victim of inhuman systems.

blicero and marvey are maybe the only characters vilified throughout entire novel, even Pointsman is made to be sympathetic more or less.

>>9920792
that is to say, the nazi party, the soviet union, the british government, these are not seen through a nationalistic lens, they do not have evil heads of state, they are inevitabilities, self perpetuating outgrowths of technology and economy