/lit/ - Literature

Welcome to /lit!

One thing you'll notice is that we aren't google search.

If you read the first word of each page it actually reveals itself to be a book of jokes.

The color blue.

>>3429946
Of course. We can skip the formalities and get straight to it.

The Novel's title is taken from Hamlet, but it is the name of a film within the book that makes people have to keep re-watching it, right? That's about all I know about the book, without daring to read further into the plot lest I spoil it.

So is this actually good or is this one of the troll fads that have been circulating around for a while? Like Hitler Youths and SS is bad for you.

>>3429978
I'm 650 pages in. It's good. Some of it's dull and some of it feels like it's trolling but the overall picture is that this book is excellent.

I haven't read it but I hear there's lots of dinosaurs involved.

>>3429987
How many pages is it? Door stopper?

>>3429996
1100

>>3430001
Is DFW a trolly author or something? I don't understand his rep.

>>3430007
He's not really a troll. He just tried very hard to make his works contort to some academic idea of what "good literature" is.

Because of that, all his books come off as totally inauthentic to anyone above age 18 or so.

Three words: Tennis, Drugs, Suicide.

>>3429978
It is unfortunately not aboutthe mvie but about addictions of different kind.

>>3431224
More importantly, its about the feelings that people used drugs to escape from and how they deal with those feelings as they are forced to confront them once again.
A very good book, but I thought it was incredibly unnecessary in parts of it...the precision with which he describes all of the different pharmaceuticals for example.

>>3430065
I'd say Tennis, Drugs and Cartridge.

>>3430007
IJ falls into the hate it or love it category. The books is excruciatingly long, ambitious and arguably different from the average good novel in the same category.
DFW poored his soul into the book, it shows, it "feels". He has a particular way of showing his intelligence and culture, people in the hate clan get buttmad at him for that. Lovefags suck his dick for the opposite reasons.

Hatefags typically hate the experimental aspect of his book. (the notes). He plays with it and he wanted you to know it (notes within notes etc..).
Loads of differents scenes and characters, mingled and mixed through time and place of action. IJ makes you laugh, cringe, manly tear etc..

The meta approach, the funny scenes and the truckload of cultural references (from mathematics and wargames to Aztec mythology) guarantees an obsession for his author.

Also note 99% of the arguing is about the author and not the book. That explains why you don't really know about the book. DFW was an insufferable depressive faggot who wrote interesting books to say the least, read them to form an opinion.

The book is about loneliness, like most of Wallace's writing.

If the book's about anything, it's about the question of why am I watching so much shit; it's about me. Why am I doing it? And what's so American about what I'm doing?

I wanted to do something that was very, very much about America. And the things that ended up for me being most distinctively American right now, around the millennium, had to do with entertainment and about some kind of weird, addictive.. wanting to give yourself away to
something. That I ended up thinking was kind of a distorted religious impulse. And a lot of the AA stuff in the book was mostly an excuse, was to try to have – it's very hard to talk about people's relationship with God, in any book later than like Dostoevsky... Plausibly realistic characters don't sit around talking about this shit.

Why are we – and by “we” I mean people like you and me: mostly white, upper middle class or upper class, obscenely well educated, doing really interesting jobs, sitting in really expensive chairs, watching the best, you know, watching the most sophisticated electronic equipment money can buy – why do we feel empty and unhappy?

That there's more just this sort of desperate hunger, enormous hole to be filled. And a real
inclination to look outside, for consumer products mostly of various kinds, to fill it.

>>3430007
This is an example of what I mean

>>3433337
>...and she be cry.

I think we found out why the bloke killed himself.

If you can take the band Mindless Self Indulgence seriously, then Infinite Jest might be for you.

>>3433337

I love how much people post the handful of pages this section represents in order to try and discredit the other 1069 pages.

>>3429943
It's about tennis

>>3433681
>Don't judge a book by its content guise

>>3433700

I'll be the first to admit that section is tedious. But, hey, I guess Moby Dick isn't worth reading because of those sections on whale anatomy and behaviour, right?

>>3433706
> But, hey, I guess Moby Dick isn't worth reading because of those sections on whale anatomy and behaviour, right?
Those sections were the best part of the novel. Go die in a fire, you're a worthless shit posing as a human being.

>>3433706
those are amon the most important sections of the book...

>>3433706
some of those chapters are the most important of the book...

>>3433724
>>3433727

......

Yeah, that's the point I was making.

>>3433681
I love how you completely fail to read the thread (I said that some sections feel like trolling, and others are excellent) then extrapolate information from nothing.

Some sections are dull as shit, like a lot of Lenz is just ph my god. Then the 30 pages of tennis can fuck right off. The Poor tony story is great but when he's the narrator it's barely readable but important enough you have to read it.

>>3433337

It's like this little masterpiece, but subtler and more racist.

>>3433733

Well, no shit. That's obvious to anyone who's read the novel.

But why say it feels like trolling when everything is so obviously in there with a purpose?

>>3433789
What is the purpose of that small chapter? To piss you off, Tao Lin style? Fuck that.

And there is a lot of redundant shit in this book. It needed to be edited better.

>>3433791
>What is the purpose of that small chapter? To piss you off, Tao Lin style?

Well, firstly sections like that are supposed to be mimetic.

Secondly, the novel is deliberately hard to read in places. That's part of what the novel is about - IJ criticises passive entertainment. So is it a surprise that DFW wrote the novel in a way that forces the reader to be active?

>And there is a lot of redundant shit in this book. It needed to be edited better.

What's the redundant shit? The book was edited very finely. It lost about 600 or 700 pages. It wasn't just handled over and printed.

no, it's not a 'troll book'
dfw didn't spend 7 years avin a laf at how little money he would make off the book

>>3433877
The section I pointed out. It was stupid, it wasn't related to any other story really and it was really fucking racist. Making a novel deliberately hard to read doesn't immunise one to all criticisms of the writing style no more than making your novel sound like a retard's prose does (Tao Lin). Some sections were long, went off in stupid tangents that took forever and detracted from what was actually being said. I don't need to hear about every single hit on the court of a tennis game. It takes ages to explain it all and adds absolutely nothing.

>>3433886
>It was stupid, it wasn't related to any other story

Clenette does feature later as a minor character and the section does feature drug abuse.

In my own opinion it is a section that looks at the problems of communication (prevalent throughout the novel) whilst tying it in to various forms of abuse.

>it was really fucking racist

Debatable. I mean, the characters are never described as black or any minority ethnicity. How can you say the people in that section are talking that way because they're black? Is it not conceivable, given the broken individuals the novel focuses on, that maybe it's not related to mental problems, abuse of one sort or another, or something else?

And have you not read Wallace's essay "Authority and American Usage"? It's pretty clear there (and should be even if you haven't read it) that Wallace is very aware of usage and dialect and knows exactly what he's doing. So, this section isn't just for shits and giggles. And would someone as liberal as Wallace really set out to be so obviously offensive, and would his publishers, who edited out several hundred other pages, not cut this too if they didn't think there was good cause for it to remain?

>Making a novel deliberately hard to read doesn't immunise one to all criticisms of the writing style

Quite right and Wallace was the first to admit this. When interviewed about IJ he often talked of the need for a sufficient pay-off for the reader in order to motivate them to make it through the harder sections.

Whether or not you felt it was worthwhile enough to make it through the difficult sections is up to you. But lets not kid ourselves, this section in particular is a page and a half long. It's not a big deal.

>I don't need to hear about every single hit on the court of a tennis game. It takes ages to explain it all and adds absolutely nothing.

That was Wallace's world and that's what he tried to communicate on the page. Too bad you don't like it, but it's there for a reason.

>>3433886
>>It was stupid, it wasn't related to any other story
Roy Tony shows up at an AA meeting near the end of the book, in that great scene when Ken Eredy refuses to hug him.

>>3429943
Some of the things it's about:
>tennis
>boarding school
>drugs
>film-making
>entertainment
>addiction
>AA/rehab
>terrorism
>trash/waste
>god/religion
>crime
>politics
>dysfunctional families

>>3434095
To what extent would you class it as a modern-day Ulysses (I found Ulysses quite funny to be quite honest with you)

>>3434106
I haven't read Ulysses (I know, I know, sue me.) But I can tell you that IJ is big, sprawling, funny, heartbreaking, confusing, tedious, frustrating, and ultimately satisfying. I've read it maybe half a dozen times and it remains one of my all-time favorite books.

when you get to hal's dads filmography, god damn that was funny

the most complete book ever

dfw came in, came out and took the building with him. the haters are just sad that after IJ, they can't live in a box anymore

>>3434106
Nothing at all like Ulysses. IJ is stupid as shit, dry, and pessimistic. No interesting diction, fluency, etc.. Sometimes he writes in ebonics which makes you want to vomit. Instead of calling the year 2003 or something, he'll say "Year of Dove soap" or something stupid like that in some vague critique of our economics situation or the power corporations yield; it reeks of kitsch. Go for it if you want to put yourself hundreds of pages of middle class banality. No discernible talent

>>3434193
heh

>>3434193

Y'know, maybe you should read the book one of these days instead of believing those 1 star reviews on Amazon.

>>3434387
>opinions that don't match up with mine are clearly invalid.
I like the book too, but shut up.

>>3434387
Not that guy, but I'm really getting tired of the "you dislike Infinite Jest, so you obviously never read it" bullshit argument.

It's not even an argument.

>>3434392

Except it's usually true given most people who trash the book have no good arguments for why they don't like it. Most of the time it's just, "Oh it's really shit and doesn't need to be that long and really boring anyway." No attempt to talk about any particulars within the novel. I don't see how they can be taken seriously when they have nothing substantial to say.

>>3434416
You are being blinded by Infinite Jest's length. When people come on here and say the exact same 'critique' for anything else (lacking just as much substance), nobody ever really accuses them of having not read the book.

>>3434416
But he specifically stated why it was bad. He said it is 1000 pgs of middle class banality.
That being said, I think that is specifically the reason it's important.
I haven't read the book yet, so it may be fair to say I don't have a right to comment, but it seems to me that Wallace was trying to comment on how our middle class world (which is most of us, plus everyone we know and interact with) festers in a sort of drugged-up limbo where any thought of artistic merit is repressed or pushed aside in favor of the comforts of daily life.
I would really appreciate it if someone who has read the book would comment on this and tell me if I'm right, and their thoughts on Wallace's thesis.

>>3434488

This is long winded (so DFW-like) and apologise in advance, but here are my two cents:

That's not exactly the picture Wallace paints. He's not too concerned about artistry or the comforts of a modern Western society, just that materialism is the background for the novel.

The book is excellent because it works on several levels. So, yes, on a surface level it presents an exaggerated view of advanced capitalist economies; and, yes, it's a book about addiction. But what it's about on a deeper level is WHY individuals in Western societies are addicted to whatever they are.

As the author said, “The world that I live in consists of 250 advertisements a day and any number of unbelievably entertaining options, most of which are subsidized by corporations that want to sell me things... I use a fair amount of pop stuff in my fiction, but what I mean by it is nothing different than what other people mean in writing about trees and having to walk to the river to get water a hundred years ago. It's just the texture of the world I live in.” So, the commercialized world is the just the background setting.

And yet Infinite Jest is not even about addiction to drugs or television or addiction to sporting success and what that requires. The drugs or the IJ tape itself are only metaphors for the addictive continuum Wallace perceives that we're in. The novel is more about addiction in general and why “We're absolutely dying to give ourselves away to something. To run, to escape, somehow...” What is it that we're lacking, what is the void that we feel the need to fill with this extraneous addiction?

And secondly, why “Are we... doing really interesting jobs, sitting in really expensive chairs, [and] watching the best, you know, watching the most sophisticated electronic equipment money can buy – why do we feel empty and unhappy?” So, why does the addiction not fulfil us?

>>3434639

On a different level entirely the novel, the void we're trying to fill, is arguably about god and religion. “[The] wanting to give yourself away to
something... I ended up thinking was kind of a distorted religious impulse. And a lot of the AA
stuff in the book was mostly an excuse, was to try to have – it's very hard to talk about people's
relationship with God, in any book later than like Dostoevsky... Plausibly realistic characters don't sit around talking about this shit. You know?”

“Drug addiction is really a form of religion, albeit a bent one. An addict gives himself away to his substance utterly. He believes in it and trusts it, and his love for it is more important than his place in the community, his job, or his friends. ”Thus, it can be said that novel is about a spiritual crisis in the Western world.

But one can see that on another level below that the novel is about something else as well. To me, fundamentally, the novel is about loneliness, the problems of communication and it's “about what it is to be a fucking human being.”

As Wallace himself said: “I had no idea that 90 percent of what I was getting out of books I really loved was this sense of a conversation around loneliness. ” Furthermore, he also added that “ [What's] the interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anaesthetic against loneliness.”

This is all seen most clearly with Hal and it's the heart of the novel for me. At the chronological start of the novel Hal is effectively dead inside and uncommunicative.

“Hal himself hasn't had a bona fide intensity-of-interior-life-type emotion since he was tiny; he finds terms like joie and value to be like so many variables in rarified equations, and he can manipulate them well enough to satisfy everyone but himself that he’s in there, inside his own hull, as a human being — but in fact he’s far more robotic…inside Hal there’s pretty much nothing at all, he knows.”

>>3434645

This couples with what Hal's father says of his son later in the book:

“[The Dad] had been so terribly eager to see the and hear and let him (the son) know he was seen and heard, the son had become a steadily more and more hidden boy... and no-one else in the boy's nuclear family would see or acknowledge this, the fact that the graceful and marvellous boy was disappearing right before their eyes. They looked but did not see his invisibility. And listened but did not hear the [Dad's] warning... He spent the whole sober last ninety days of his animate life working tirelessly to contrive a medium via which he and his muted son could simply converse.”

So, yes, the film version of Infinite Jest is made so that Hal and his father can communicate properly. THAT is what it's all about.

And what happens when Hal re-orientates himself? When he quits drugs, by the end of the novel he finally starts to communicate:

“I'm not a machine. I feel and believe... I could, if you'd let me, talk and talk. Lets talk about anything... I could interface you guys under the table.”

However, the rather sad thing about this ending is just as Hal opens up – 'Please don't think I don't care.' - “I look out. Directed my way is horror. I rise from the chair. I see jowls sagging, eyebrows high on trembling foreheads, cheeks bright-white.”

People are shocked and disturbed by Hal's voice and communication. They are freaked out by it, highlighting what, at its core, the story is really about.

>>3434652

Perhaps what the novel is really about is more nuanced. Based off of Wallace's essay, “E Unibus Pluram,” the novel is perhaps about sincerity of communication. That, all right, we communicate, but it's in such a fake, mediated way that it's the real sincere, caring, kind of communication we need and lack; and that, like in “E Unibus Pluram,” is going to be the new rebellious thing. That perhaps is what is different at the chronological end of Infinite Jest, and it's that which scares the faculty members.

In summary: there are lots of things you can take away from Infinite Jest and, yeah, that's why I think it's a great novel, despite some hard parts and the occasional tedious section (not to say that it doesn't have far more many amazing sections that lift it above the average anyway).

Can anyone give an example of a well written sentence in this 1100 page book?

>>3434654
>That, all right, we communicate, but it's in such a fake, mediated way that it's the real sincere, caring, kind of communication we need and lack

But this seems so redundant when Kierkegaard did the same things 150 year beforehand with tenfold wit and style.

>>3429943
sci-fi bullshit

>>3434667
There are a myriad of brilliant "scenes" in this damn book.
I couldn't find the Eschaton, my favorite.

But fear no more, I nevertheless found something of the utmost literary delicacy.

http://pastebin.com/2F6AZJXj

Just so you know,one of the strong points if IJ is the total absence of a regular style in the writing. There texts from journalists, student's essays, characters thoughts, etc..

This, I believe is a journalist.

>>3434667
If you look at it as scenes rather than just sentences it's great. Partially why it's so long, it takes the time to explain it.