/lit/ - Literature

>>18979174
I'd have to reread it, but I have the feeling that might be the case. When I first read it six years ago it was mind-blowing, but in a weird way - i.e. as someone who had read relatively little literature it opened me to having attention for details I didn't notice before, such as structure and prose, and in general it made me more conscious of when a book tries to unite form and content. Beside, it made me really unafraid of doorsteppers, and now if a book is long, it's generally a plus. But I have to say, after having read more, IJ is beginning to sound less and less innovative. It is a book trying to do everything a "good book" of "high literature" should do, but almost everything it does is something we have already seen in modernist novels. It doesn't really make you see books in an entirely different way like Ulysses does, but it's good to start with if you want to get into serious literature, because in a way it's very close to our sensibility.

>>18979235
Discussion of literature is so ephemeral, isn't it?

>>18979235
I agree, I feel like there hasn't been any genuine innovation since the modernists. Not to say there hasn't been good books, just that we reached as far as the format can be pushed about 100 years ago.

>>18979174
Reads like bait when you give no examples, but most of the humor is fairly standard 90s humor, humor does not age well almost as a rule. No idea what you are on about regarding the characters, they are supposed to be embarrassing, they are the face in the floor.

>>18979285
The main character I found cringeworthy were the wheelchair assassins. I feel like in this and in Broom of the System DFW uses disabilities as a way to be 'quirky' which just feels weird. I don't mean that in an "its ableist" way I don't give a shit about disabled people, it just feels cheap? I feel the same way about the whole cross dressing aspect. And unlike a lot of people I didn't find the conversations between the Incandenza's very funny, again the humour just fell flat for me. It didn't ruin the book, it just made it awkward to read.

>humor does not age well almost as a rule
True, which is why I think great books should avoid overt humour. Things can be humorous of course, but the humour should arise from the circumstances rather than through 'jokes' - and much of IJ borders on joke-telling.

>>18979252
This. I'd like to see novels that push boundaries a bit more. I feel like the modernists did everything at the same time (Ulysses in particular), and sort of opened the way that literature can be written "in any way". Once you have that knowledge, innovation becomes less of a discovery of the possibility of the means and more of a discovery of the expressive potential of specific way of using it (if that makes sense). E.g. Bernhard in my opinion is an author that did this: he didn't, like Wallace, try to do a book that is like a great modernist masterpiece, but he did explore to the deepest extent a specific voice, namely, the voice of conceptual thinking, stressing out its power and weaknesses, and its expressive potential as a specific voice. It's as if after the modernists we are in this condition where we can say everything we want through literature, we just have to understand how to "say it" well

>>18979310
Have you read The Pale King?

I’ve not read The Broom OTS so haven’t seen what you’ve seen but I think the Wheelchair figures make more sense, and have more dignity as characters, when seen as the most explicit examples of a wider theme in Wallace of warped and specialised bodies, literally ‘over-powered’ or too developed in some areas, and paralysed in others. The pale King contains lots of talk about characters who warp their skeletons or acquire unnatural joint mobility through habit or compulsion. (There’s a kid who sets out to lick every part of his body, some areas take decades to reach but he eventually morphs into a sort of snake boy - there’s also a woman who can swallow her legs or something)

Then if you also think of the tennis academy in IJ, the asymmetrical arms they develop, or speaking of arms isn’t there a kid who’s athletic career is based on him turning up to matches with a gun? So there we have an athlete who’s bodily success hinges on an accessory, rather than muscle. There is the woman with the external pacemaker in her handbag, and so on. Do the wheelchair assassins not swing from the ceiling or something?

What is disability? I don’t think a single platonic human appears in DFW - everyone is shown to be divergent from a lost central point, most obviously in their habits (the guy obsessed with M.A.S.H., crack addicts, etc) but also in their idiosyncratic bodies

It came as a shock to me reading le LIT man modern magnum opus tour de force blah blah blah that all the settings and characters are abrasively anti-aesthetic in some way but hey, hang on, that is the point. Furthermore if you look at yourself, your body has probably got the hallmarks of degeneration from excessive modernity, your city is probably ugly or your countryside is polluted, your family members could be losing it or whatever - you yourself are deprived of aesthetic character and setting, so when Wallace takes a situation like yours and forges genuine humanity, sincerity, and sort of amputates aesthetic value from material realities, the possibility of that may be more easily detected in your life

>>18979310
Disabilities in IJ are not meant to be quirky. The AFR are metaphorical and are meant to show the ridiculousness of poltards, they choose to be disabled for their cause and they are fighting the paper invaders, if they win all they get is that the convexity becomes a concavity, they are a complete joke (see the discussion between Marathe and Grompert). People disable themselves through politics, they build it up to the point it is just a barrier. Cross dressing is pretty much one character and he uses his image the same way some use politics, his biggest humiliation during his withdrawal is having to wear mens clothes.

The conversations between the Incandenza's are not remotely funny. They are completely disconnected from each other, all they have is a sad banter built up over the years, they can not be honest with each other in slightest and as a result can not offer anything to each other. Take Orin's and Hal's conversation regarding Hal's grief counseling, everyone thinks Hal is getting better because he is getting depressed (grieving), but the depression is just because he feels he is failing grief counseling because he can not deliver the goods. No one every bothers to actually ask him, even Orin misses it despite Hal explicitly stating it, he just keeps harping on it being Hal grieving for Himself and how Hal's grief will help him in the interview with Steeply.

>True, which is why I think great books should avoid overt humour
There is not much humor in IJ unless you read it without empathy, empathize with every character and it becomes very depressing and the realization that you once found it to be humor just makes it all the more depressing because you see how you were the problem, as I said, the face in the floor.

>>18979310
Forgot to mention, Broom of the System is terrible.

>>18979310
This, plus the fact that there are almost no good female characters in DFW until the pale king. Most of the females he writes are some version of the dream manic pixie girls and saviours of various kinds (supposedly (un-)loving mothers, etc.) which is rather sad. He was very smart and keen to make you notice it, but somewhat lacking in psychological depth.

>>18979428
You missed the point of Avril, Joelle and every character in IJ, they all just fill societal roles as they were taught too and teach their children too, same as Himself does and every male character. Everyone but Mario is both victim and cause.

>>18979310
>the whole cross dressing aspect

Man I thought that was hilarious. The "woman and a half" description which makes her sound just fat, then the realisation that it's the CIA dude, and that he's built as fuck too.

>>18979252
I disagree. The later post-modernists like DFW and the way they reorganized the structure of the text was innovative. It's just that the books (House of Leaves, IJ, Savage Detectives) are on average worse than the high modernists and their experiments with voice.

>>18979439
I'm not really convinced. There are a lot of fully outlined male characters in IJ, from Hal, to Mario to Gately, but almost no female character reaches the same depth. Even Meredith in the Pale King, which is the closest he got to develop a full female character, still has to be beautiful and admired by everyone. It's a very tv-like way of making female characters. There are almost no women who are just normal women - i.e. normal people with individually defined characters and tastes that do not revolve around them being quirky or beautiful. This is where, I believe, television truly fucked with his brain: these are very common tv tropes he tries to bend in a meta-way every time, but from which he never seems to be able to fully escape. Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, Molly Bloom were all written by males. I would have really liked DFW to measure himself with them by outlining female character that was on that sort of level. He surely had the brain for it, but it's as if he never really went full out with the sensibility required to imagine such a character. There is a lot of fear of exploring these kind of feeling after the modernist, for some reason. I don't know why but for some reason it seems significant to me that Joyce forced Nora to shit in front of him and wrote Molly's character, while Wallace pushed Mary Karr out of a moving vehicle and his female characters all feel maimed to me.

>>18979503
I would have thought Toni Ware is the better character in Pale King. She doesn't monologue a whole chapter long, and obviously she's a trauma victim (maimed... but so are almost all of the men) but the descriptions of her childhood and how she appears as an adult are maybe the best writing he did.

>>18979503
Ahh, Joelle is considerably more outlined than Rand, there is not even a comparison. Rand is essentially just being institutionalized and a conversation, a simplified version of Joelle with a little of Gompert thrown in. It is just easier to see Rand as more fleshed out because you get her story all at once instead of spread out through 1200 pages. The courtship of Joelle and Orin is pretty much all about Joelle, too much fun, the conversations with Gately, Notkin's recount of Joelle and Himself, all of the MP stuff, on and on it goes. From a structural standpoint Joelle is the most important character, thematically she is the equal of Mario. Rand has a "thing," Joelle has a life and personality with all that entails.

Also, complaining about all the women being either perfect or quirky when all the men are freaks or damaged is a little silly and you are missing the point he was making with this. Hint, Mario and Joelle, Drinian and Rand.

whats with the medical jargon

>>18979174
>the quirky humour
>humor
Huh?

>a lot of the characters are incredibly cringeworthy
Everything is cringe now. We are all cringe, embrace the cringe. To say "cringe," even, is the most cringe of all.

Bumping this thread, makes me want to pick up DFW for the first time.

>>18979310
>great books should avoid overt humour
Obviously you haven't heard of ye olde meme trilogy.

>>18979174
Just finished reading it yesterday and would disagree on the humor aging poorly. I generally consider myself pretty picky with humor, i.e. I think most stand-up comedians suck, but didn't feel like there was much in the book that was cringy. I'll admit though that there wasn't a ton in the book I found humorous. Stuff like "the number of times 17 goes into 56" and the boyish interactions at the Academy were pretty funny. I also found Pemulis pretty funny and would like to hang out with him if he were real. That said, there was a bunch that was quirky without being that funny, but it didn't feel to me like he was really going for laughs.