Which is harder to comprehend: Gravity's Rainbow or Ulysses?

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I'm about to start Gravity's Rainbow after just finishing Ulysses (which I didn't find all that difficult) and I'm frightened of getting completely lost. During the couple chapters of Ulysses that I found confusing, I was able to use Cliffs Notes to explain things, but there is no such device for GR.

And while we're on the topic, is Finnegan's Wake even readable, or...?

― bob george (Lee is Free), Monday, 24 April 2006 23:45 (twenty years ago)

this is the sort of question that would have excited me way more a couple years ago

there's a good notes for G's R - look around themodernword.com, it's linked from their pynchon section. does all the herero and german for you.

it depends what you mean by comprehend. there are more sections which you need to look carefully at paragraphs in in ulysses: by contrast pynchon's prose is pretty surface-level readable. (perhaps more mutable.) (h kenner argues remarkably convincingly that joyce doesn't actually have that many styles- )

ulysses is perhaps more pregnant with meaning or whatever. i find i am working towards a fairly idiosyncratic reading of gravity's rainbow which i will probably be most of the way to after my fourth reading. whereas joyce i dunno that i have a holistic reading of. although i am meant to be writing a paper on it.

― tom west (thomp), Monday, 24 April 2006 23:57 (twenty years ago)

I don't think Gravity's Rainbow is difficult to comprehend. It is packed with hundreds of characters, some of whom disappear for hundreds of pages at a time, but as tom said the prose is really not hard to follow the way Joyce's can be.
Similarly to Ulysses, though, it can be a terribly immersive experience if you allow it to be.

― wmlynch (wlynch), Tuesday, 25 April 2006 04:14 (twenty years ago)

Ulysses is harder no doubt. GR is a lot of fun just all by itself but there really is a phenomenal amount of stuff that'd be practically impossible to catch without some kind of reader's guide to accompany it.

― Dan I. (Dan I.), Tuesday, 25 April 2006 05:03 (twenty years ago)

I think the first few pages of Gravity's Rainbow throw people off! It's not all that indecipherable once you get into it and realize the best way to read it is the same way one would watch the Three Stooges.

― Dan I. (Dan I.), Tuesday, 25 April 2006 05:05 (twenty years ago)

No such book as Finnegan's Wake, but there is one called Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, and it is unreadable (or was to me as I only managed about five pages, and I've read Ulysses and Gravity's Rainbow and not foud them too difficult...just keep going through the tough bits until you come out the other side).

― andyjack (andyjack), Tuesday, 25 April 2006 11:27 (twenty years ago)

It seems to me as though Joyce, in the more difficult parts of Ulysses, is intentionally trying to be obnoxious and annoy the reader--to get the reader to tell him to fuck off while staying interested enough to keep reading. I never got this feeling from anything in Gravity's Rainbow. Pynchon doesn't seem to want to antagonize the reader like Joyce does. He just kind of wants to take you on an amazing trip through his imagination.

― horverstead, Tuesday, 25 April 2006 12:54 (twenty years ago)

I think there are books named "Finnegan's Wake".

I have read more of FW than U (or GR), and enjoyed it much more (though I like U) (GR was OK). I haven't finished any of them but that's fine.

― Casuistry (Chris P), Tuesday, 25 April 2006 15:44 (twenty years ago)

Which is harder to comprehend: Yet another thread about Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow or yet another thread about James Joyce's Ulysses?

― Jeff LeVine (Jeff LeVine), Tuesday, 25 April 2006 16:01 (twenty years ago)

but which of them did you comprehend the most, chris

― tom west (thomp), Tuesday, 25 April 2006 16:01 (twenty years ago)

FW was the book that taught me that comprehension is not the point! So I feel as though I comprehended that the most, in a fashion.

― Casuistry (Chris P), Tuesday, 25 April 2006 17:18 (twenty years ago)

i wonder if people aren't underrating the difficulty of making sense of the tortuous (nb: not torturous) abstractness of some of pynchon's prose.

― Josh (Josh), Wednesday, 26 April 2006 02:23 (twenty years ago)

Hey I just now learned the difference between the words tortuous and torturous!

― Dan I. (Dan I.), Wednesday, 26 April 2006 04:50 (twenty years ago)

there's a recording of joyce reading a chapter of FW and it actually makes a lot of sense! not perfectly but you can pretty much understand what he's getting at most of the way through. it's too bad he couldn't do that for the entire book.

― J.D. (Justyn Dillingham), Wednesday, 26 April 2006 06:40 (twenty years ago)

He's also got a very pretty voice.

― remy (x Jeremy), Wednesday, 26 April 2006 20:02 (twenty years ago)

three weeks pass...

you say "there is no such device for GR."

I read GR concurrently with "A Gravity's Rainbow Companion" by Steven Weisenburger (ISBN: 0820310263) and truly believe I would have been utterly frustrated without it. As it stands, I enjoyed the read very, very much. It is an incredibly rewarding, rich, not totally unreadable, and fucking hilarious book.

― carson blaker (carsonb), Saturday, 20 May 2006 04:23 (twenty years ago)

A few years before she died, I had a conversation with Louise Bogan--NYer essayist and reviewer and poet--and Joyce eventually surfaced in the conversation. [She was one of the 1st Americans to review FW.]
"FW is just a long joke. It doesn't deserve its reputation of complexity."
I think one of the facts orbiting around FW's reputation is that some of the 'jokes' are not only very funny but very complex. To tell a great joke--or write a great novel--take similar kinds of skills and Joyce, I believe, had them in abundance. Look at "Dubliners" or the Ulysses in Nighttown" section.
Everyone who has read anything Joyce wrote will have an opinion. It could be, however, that it doesn't bear taking seriously.
"Ulysses", to my ear, is very lyrical and more than passing profound.

― Norman, Monday, 22 May 2006 15:17 (twenty years ago)

Though I prefer it because of the refreshing sensibility it conveys, sentence by sentence, Gravity's Rainbow was much more difficult for me to comprehend than Ulysses. By "comprehend" I don't mean fully understand all the allusions and whatnot, I just mean figure out what the hell's going on on the most superficial diegetic level. Joyce's narration can be wildly abstract, but the set-pieces framing whatever's going on are at least comprehensible, whereas a lot of the time in Gravity's Rainbow I have no clue what is it I'm reading about, only that I'm reading another amazingly-worded sentence. This could be the trickle-down result of all the critical apparatus set up around Ulysses, but then again GR is closer in time, and as an American, less alien to me, pyschologically (thhough it is set mostly in post-WWII Europe) than the 1904 (1914?) Dublin of Joyce.

― david foster vollman, Monday, 22 May 2006 15:46 (twenty years ago)

Is there a preferred edition of GR?

― Docpacey (docpacey), Monday, 22 May 2006 21:20 (twenty years ago)

if you have the blue-covered, blue-spined penguin or one of the viking editions, your page numbers will be the same as everyone else's. at the moment i'm not actually sure about the recent brown-covered penguin.

apart from page numbering i think it's just down to taste.

i have the bantam paperback lying around somewhere, or leant out to someone. it's kind of weird to hold, reminds me of much less weighty novels i used to read when i was a teenager.

― Josh (Josh), Tuesday, 23 May 2006 06:16 (twenty years ago)

Thanks Josh.

― Docpacey (docpacey), Tuesday, 23 May 2006 19:13 (twenty years ago)

three weeks pass...

[Digression: Norman, wasn't Bogan the poetry critic at the NYer before Alice Quinn? That's a big deal! How'd you meet her?]

― Roque Strew (RoqueStrew), Wednesday, 14 June 2006 07:10 (nineteen years ago)

--Let me, said he, so far presume upon our acquaintance which, however slight it may appear if judged by the standard of mere time,is founded, as I hope and believe, on a sentiment of mutual esteem as to request of you this favour. But, should I have overstepped the limits of reserve let the sincerity of my feelings be the excuse for my boldness.

Happy Bloomsday everybody

― Docpacey (docpacey), Friday, 16 June 2006 19:04 (nineteen years ago)

CLEVER, VERY

― Casuistry (Chris P), Friday, 16 June 2006 20:18 (nineteen years ago)

The curmfurt of the Rift vallee.

― Shadow of the Waxwing (noodle vague), Friday, 16 June 2006 22:26 (nineteen years ago)

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