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Thread: Thomas Pynchon

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    Exodus's Avatar
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    Default Thomas Pynchon

    I oscillated on his type, but I am fairly sure now. You can consult Wikipedia for more information, but I'm more interested in your impression based on the writing style. I will say it reminds me of Catch-22, above all.

    Another link from Wikipedia on the typical characteristics of his writing.

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    I just finished Mason and Dixon. I agree, brilliant. One of the best writers I've read. I'm curious, what type do you have in mind?
    IEI subtype

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    I had decided on ENFj, but ENTp seems possible too. Certainly Fe > Fi. It's funny that I'm getting a response from an INFp; the only other person I know who is familiar with Pynchon is an INFp.

    I finally finished V. and I plan to read Gravity's Rainbow.

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    Bump.

    Still not sure about this. Any guesses? Have people read his books?

    Maybe IEI is better.
    Last edited by Exodus; 03-22-2024 at 04:07 PM.

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    ...
    Last edited by pinkcanary; 06-10-2017 at 01:46 AM.

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    He is indeed absolutely brilliant. And I can totally understand why a LII appreciates his style of writing, both extremely complex and "risky", yet flawlessly calculated.
    The vast amount of topics involved, metaphors and reflections.

    His way of writing makes me think alpha NT, but the topics and his personal life are very beta NF. Looks extroverted on those pictures.

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    Didn't know korpsey wrote a book.

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    I'm 100 pages into gravity's rainbow. SEE
    4w3-5w6-8w7

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    he's a good example of so/sx writing style

    soc/sx: The word “fantastical” comes to mind. Lots of virtuosity and trills, and often removed from the real world. One is whirled away by the dazzling fairies of their colorful imagination. Can be too rich in imagery for their own good. Sustained dramatic power due to their knowledge of interpersonal dynamics.

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    INTj

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    Here is a good article that makes some observations about his personality:

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/inhe...nge-your-life/

    In the pure sense, Pynchon is a historical novelist, setting almost all his books in pre-contemporary periods associated with great transfers of power.

    What unites the time periods in which the novels are set – and forms one of Pynchon’s most characteristic running themes – is the repression of a counterculture or a vision of freedom.

    ...we might call it the little guy against the Man.

    Pynchon is no starry-eyed old hippie (or not entirely) but his novels ache with a kind of thwarted nostalgia for alternative Americas that never came to pass

    "There is no avoiding time," Pynchon writes in Inherent Vice: "the sea of time, the sea of memory and forgetfulness, the years of promise, gone and unrecoverable, of the land almost allowed to claim its better destiny, only to have the claim jumped by evildoers known all too well, and taken instead and held hostage to the future we must live in now forever."

    If the settings are historical, though, the register definitely isn’t: swinging ad lib between slangy slapstick and imposing gravitas

    No Pynchonian hero or heroine is free from these musings; the author’s genius is to muddy the waters by making them all batty paranoiacs as well.
    Other points:

    -highly reclusive
    -(deliberately?) makes his novels complicated and difficult
    -they are temporally complicated, weaving together many different strands: "the threads multiply, the outcomes unspool, and the reader who hopes to draw them all together may usually find herself in a paranoid stew as thick as the ones that obsess the protagonists"

    IEI seems most likely.

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    IEI.

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    I lean more towards ILI, definitely Ni base.

    he worked as a technical editor for boeing. hard to imagine a type with Te as vulnerable function choosing such a career.

    "From the Vulture article about Pynchon's life prior to the publication of Bleeding Edge, Pynchon was described as ornery on the job. He was apparently not a guy who talked much but some coworkers were discussing a book they'd read and he jumped in at that.

    According to various sources, Pynchon was hired by a friend to work at Boeing as a technical writer, writing safety articles and stuff about the Bomarc missile system."
    my ideas about socionics:

    https://soziotypen.de/thoughts-on-socionics/

    the section will be updated ever other month or so.

    this is a VI thread with IEI examples

    https://www.the16types.info/vbulleti...-(IEI-edition)

    and this is a thread with EIE examples

    https://www.the16types.info/vbulleti...s-EIE-examples

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    he looks ESI

    I've only read The Crying of Lot 49 and found it most unpleasant, almost as if one had become complicit in the exacerbating dissection of someone else's mental illness

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    Quote Originally Posted by Exodus View Post
    Here is a good article that makes some observations about his personality:

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/inhe...nge-your-life/



    Other points:

    -highly reclusive
    -(deliberately?) makes his novels complicated and difficult
    -they are temporally complicated, weaving together many different strands: "the threads multiply, the outcomes unspool, and the reader who hopes to draw them all together may usually find herself in a paranoid stew as thick as the ones that obsess the protagonists"

    IEI seems most likely.
    That article -- wow. Often I think I'm hallucinating when I read other people's impressions of Pynchon, and while I like Pynchon's writing, I've never understood why the sort of people who like Pynchon like him, or why he's a popular author at all. Describing his writing as expressing "a thwarted nostalgia" seems really strange to me -- yeah, he writes about American culture a lot, but it's not good things that he writes. And sentences like "...the appeal of Pynchon’s own fictions, which are planetary in size and scope but always anchored, inevitably, on the individual human" is just -- what the heck. Almost all his characters are miles from anything like a believable human -- because, as I think should be pretty clear, the focus is not on "the individual human" but about the society they live in. I guess a charitable interpretation of the article is that he's trying to say Pynchon shows flashes of humanity while making light of dark ideas.

    I've always read his writing as A) fundamentally political, and B) deeply cynical. He writes in a playful way, sure, but the actual subjects he writes about are very dark. The "psychologist who can kill people by making faces" didn't appear because Pynchon thought that would be a fun and wacky idea -- he was representing, among other things, intelligence operations like Paperclip and MKULTRA, which Pynchon had learned about long before they became public knowledge, and which clearly disturbed him. Characters are not "batty paranoiacs" for no reason either. Oedipa (and the reader) may not know the truth, but she knows, with justification, that something dark is going on, and she has reason to be paranoid. Oedipa's experience and thought process is supposed to inspire a reaction in the reader, because Pynchon can't come out and say what he knows; he and others have been silenced by Yoyodyne.

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