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Bakker LVIII HITB: A Literalist Interpretation (Spoilers for all books)


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@.H.

see my answer to sologdin. Quintessence: Bakker was too young, too inexperienced to bring across all of his ideas and thoughts in an adequate manner. The 2nd Apocalypse is magnum opus territory and sometimes I wish he would start writing it now, with almost 50 and all the knowledge, wisdom and experience one accumulates with age.

Edited by Arakan
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2 hours ago, Arakan said:

The 2nd Apocalypse is magnum opus territory and sometimes I wish he would start writing it now, with almost 50 and all the knowledge, wisdom and experience one accumulates with age.

Sure, I mean, it's not perfect.  But I am not terribly upset with what we got.  I still think it is more interesting to me than most fiction I come across.  Still, I'm fairly sure even Bakker himself would say he wishes some parts came out better.

That's part of what makes the follow up series potentially interesting in their own way, since he admitted he would be treading something like new territory.  I get that there is plenty of reason for pessimism, but I do think he is writing and I think he's just had a rough Pandemic-time lately.  We can only wait and see though.

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20 hours ago, sologdin said:

It is over-analyzing and the text simply doesn’t justify it. It isn’t there or not to the extent that people thought it were 

am doubting the viability of over-analysis as an grievance.  under-analysis, maybe.

it's a bit odd to claim that something isn't there when people are actively discussing it.  the assumption is apparently that the text has things inside it, either inherently or placed therein by the author--and only those things may be there, which means that the reader has no creativity or agency--reading in this view is not a productive labor, but is merely consumptive.  that strikes me as an erroneous linguistics, and a fairly docile theory of how literacy functions.

i like the schopenhauer thesis.  it works with the adorno epigraph in one of the books, as the frankfurt school is paradoxically a schopenhauerian marxism, pessimistic optimists, or so.  crazy.

I think you're conflating thematic elements with story elements. I think especially given the author that thematic elements of philosophy are likely intentional. I think given the author it is also likely that there are a whole lot of inserted clues to things that do not actually exist and were deliberately put in to imply future existence knowing they would not actually pay off. 

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kal, sure, if we accept the notion that authors monopolize the meanings of their writings, which are containers filled intentionally with items to be discovered by clever readers. i don't accept that, and don't see any reason to do so, though i understand that reasonable persons disagree on the point.

that said, is the thesis that RSB was fucking with readers--that it's all a tolkienian/sadean rickroll?

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50 minutes ago, sologdin said:

kal, sure, if we accept the notion that authors monopolize the meanings of their writings, which are containers filled intentionally with items to be discovered by clever readers. i don't accept that, and don't see any reason to do so, though i understand that reasonable persons disagree on the point.

Again, this is less about meanings and more about actual story points and manipulation of them. To me this is somewhat like debating whether or not GRRM deliberately put in something that implied Jon's parentage. We know that this is the case. It's not something to be debated. 

Now, imagine he put those things in and then...never answered it. And never intended to answer it. 

50 minutes ago, sologdin said:

that said, is the thesis that RSB was fucking with readers--that it's all a tolkienian/sadean rickroll?

That's not just the thesis, that's the actual stated goal of RSB. 

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To me this is somewhat like debating whether or not GRRM deliberately put in something that implied Jon's parentage. We know that this is the case. It's not something to be debated. 

the author interprets the text that way, but we need not.  we can agree that the author believes that the text does this work, but whether it actually achieves this alleged goal is a different question.

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39 minutes ago, sologdin said:

To me this is somewhat like debating whether or not GRRM deliberately put in something that implied Jon's parentage. We know that this is the case. It's not something to be debated. 

the author interprets the text that way, but we need not.  we can agree that the author believes that the text does this work, but whether it actually achieves this alleged goal is a different question.

We can debate the efficacy, but the actual action isn't really up for debate, right? Unless you're interested in debating it epistemologically or something. 

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kal, that position works with a vessel metaphor: the text is a container that can hold things, and that someone can put inside and another can take out.  i don't accept that metaphor as descriptive of literacy.  no doubt authors write specific words in lieu of other specific words, and there's likely an intention in doing so that is surplus beyond the actual words selected--but the knowability of intention is something i respectfully decline, as is the importance of that intention.

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5 hours ago, sologdin said:

kal, that position works with a vessel metaphor: the text is a container that can hold things, and that someone can put inside and another can take out.  i don't accept that metaphor as descriptive of literacy.  no doubt authors write specific words in lieu of other specific words, and there's likely an intention in doing so that is surplus beyond the actual words selected--but the knowability of intention is something i respectfully decline, as is the importance of that intention.

I don't think that's reasonable as a human being, but to each their own. Mostly, when an author says "I'm going to troll you" I think it's kind of reasonable to say 'that's a dick move'. When a whole lot of the reason people enjoyed a story turns out to be a very large troll job with no payoff ever intended, only implied, that is a dick move too. 

I'm not saying you can't enjoy it in spite of that, or for some people because of it, but I don't think the trolling or the dick move are particularly up for debate, any more than debating whether being pranked on Punk'd means that you got pranked on Punk'd. It's a weird anti-tautology to insist otherwise. 

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kal--

it may well be prickish.  i have an appreciation for his books that has nothing to do with who he is or what he purportedly intended--this cross-examination is complicated the fact that he is said to have misled readers about his intentions--which set of allegations are to be accepted?

of course if others dislike him or his books because of his character or conduct, that's not for me to dispute.

assuming that he did rickroll everyone, and as i've written somewhere at some point, it makes him the stravinsky of the tolkienian set--working within the generic conventions but then confronting them with a disruption that prevents the discharge that the inertia of the text has come to owe readers. that's hall of fame right there.

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18 minutes ago, Relic said:

Can someone explain, in language simple enough for me to comprehend, what the fuck solo and Kal are talking about? 

Kal: Bakker set out to troll his readers and this negatively impacted his writing.

Solo: Quoth the Derrida, "The author is dead." Because you cannot ever truly know the intentions of an author (or indeed anyone else), you can judge the work by what is in the book and not by what you construe of the author's intentions outside of it.

Edited by Ran
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12 minutes ago, Relic said:

Thanks. Right, got that part, but how did Bakker troll anyone? 

I think Kal's views are most concisely found here, where he cited Bakker promising answers and payoffs to things that were not, in fact, answered and paid off, with the implication I think that Bakker was deliberately lying in interviews and forums.

Now, I can't recall whether Bakker later claimed, or whether supporters did on his behalf, that in fact the reader's efforts to divine deeper truths and developing grand theories was deliberately encouraged and ultimately thwarted by Bakker as a way to highlight a philosophical or thematic point regarding the biases of our meat-ware brains, trying to impose order and hierarchy on things where there are none. 

Per Solo, the opinions of Bakker and his supporters do not actually matter: that's like, their opinion, man, but it need not be yours just because they say it. 

 

 

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5 hours ago, Relic said:

Can someone explain, in language simple enough for me to comprehend, what the fuck solo and Kal are talking about? 

I haven't even read a single word written by Bakker, but I greatly enjoy reading how weird and intense the discussions about him get on this forum.

The vocabulary is part of the charm I guess :D I'll continue lurking from now on.

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39 minutes ago, larrytheimp said:

I believe the idea that Bakker was trolling everyone came from some of his responses in a reddit AMA?

 

 

 

Thats correct. 

 

8 hours ago, sologdin said:

kal--

it may well be prickish.  i have an appreciation for his books that has nothing to do with who he is or what he purportedly intended--this cross-examination is complicated the fact that he is said to have misled readers about his intentions--which set of allegations are to be accepted?

of course if others dislike him or his books because of his character or conduct, that's not for me to dispute.

assuming that he did rickroll everyone, and as i've written somewhere at some point, it makes him the stravinsky of the tolkienian set--working within the generic conventions but then confronting them with a disruption that prevents the discharge that the inertia of the text has come to owe readers. that's hall of fame right there.

Its not conventions of the genre he is subverting - its conventions of basic storytelling, anywhere. And it isn't subversive to plant hints and imply depth and not have any. Its very easy to put in things that don't go anywhere. 

The master of this kind of teasing was a short story I read back in middle school where a person on a train was listening to two lawyers talk about how these guys got away with murder - or almost did. The ending is of course that the tellers got off the train before he heard the climax. The whole point of that story was to lead you to that suffering. If that was bakkers intent, well, I suspect he did well in that regard. 

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3 hours ago, larrytheimp said:

I believe the idea that Bakker was trolling everyone came from some of his responses in a reddit AMA?

I assume it is this one, from August 2017. Here's an example of the sort of answer that I think people were not amused by:

Quote

I'm not sure I get your use of deus ex machina, since this refers to saving the day via arbitrary plot mechanisms. This is bad because it's lazy. The way you use it, it applies to all true-crime fiction, or any form of writing lacking conventional narrative 'closure,' doesn't it? And what's lazy about intentionally delivering readers to points that deny stable interpretation? It's hard bloody work, let me tell you!

Could it be you possess narrative instincts, the way we all do, that balk at the absence of closure? Some find it more difficult than others. And all this means is that you viscerally feel the problem of meaning more keenly than most.

The question is what do you do next. Do you rationalize, chalk your narrative frustration up to my failure, or do you open yourself up to a new kind of narrative experience. Either I've failed you, or I've shown you a new way to experience meaning. Although I totally understand why people opt for the first, I just don't see what they gain from it.

 

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dunno, kal. the series is named the second apocalypse.  the narrative just caught up to the title, is all. post-apocalyptic stories usually suck, kinda the same way that dystopian stories usually suck--though at least the latter have interesting settings, which is their point. post-apocalypse normally lacks even setting--everything is an undifferentiated menace, as in the road, say. but the historical moment of actual apocalypse might retain enough setting and feature enough story to be interesting--but because the apocalyptic in its incipient moment is the political state of emergency in ontological terms, it occupies the exceptional state wherein prior rules are suspended, a narrative justitium, to be roman about it.  that will be difficult for anyone to write, i think. i don't mind the narrative being suspended--that enacts in terms of literary form the significance of the content. if it remains unfinished, it'll mean that the suspension is indefinite.

'planting hints' means the expectation that chekhov's gun will be discharged? i suppose we can have a gun that is not chekhov's gun, though.  this means we have a readerly interpretation that bore no fruit in terms of where the plot went--a known problem with the lengthy time between serial installments. readerly expectation generates doctrine that something textual was a hint of more development that never came into existence--i suppose an iceberg tip or something that ultimately lacked all the underwater parts--an extratextuality, similar in function to authorial intention, but here generated by readers in down time between books.  idle phalluses are the inchoroi's workshop, maybe. this is still a matter of interpretation, and what one reader thought was a plot hint regarding things beyond the text might've turned out to be something simply regarding the setting or character or thematics or whatever.  it's difficult to discuss abstractly, though, without knowing what you thought were the markers that got lost--it's not obvious to me what people think is a dead end, you know?

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