/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.12498738]

Is this worth the read, considering it is incomplete?

[Anonymous No.12498955]

>>12498738
I'd say so, yes. It works well as it is. I even suspect DFW would have ruined it had he finished it.

[Anonymous No.12498975]

if ya like the davemeister then yes

[Anonymous No.12499011]

Apparently DFW took accounting classes for around a decade to properly understand the subject matter. The reason he chose the IRS in my opinion is that he needed to find something which represented both a vital aspect of society without which it could not function, which was also incredibly boring, thankless (i.e. having little prestige, beyond a wage).

The book is in essence an anti-Infinite Jest, which was a study of entertainment and its negative affect on a society wherein entertainment, personal pleasure, addiction, selfishness, over-stimulation etc had become rampant. This book, on the contrary, is a study of boredom, tedium, asceticism and selflessness. It's one of my favourite books, and one I read just after graduating before taking my first job. The ideas expressed are ones I've struggled with a lot, namely that in order for a highly-developed and intricate society to exist, one that allows for a human being to be healthy, relatively wealthy, safe etc, a great deal of selflessness is required in order to organize and sustain it.

On a stylistic level, the novel is at times extremely boring, overtly hostile to the reader's desire to be entertained via fast-moving narrative, humour, bizarre situations etc (as in IJ). Instead we have entire paragraphs of dense legalistic writing focused on obscure tax codes and their peripheral relevance to a very loose plot. DFW is here daring us not to avoid something superficially enjoyable but ultimately harmful (pleasure), but instead to embrace something which is superficially harmful (boredom) but ultimately virtuous (selfless service).

Cont...

[Anonymous No.12499050]

The 1980s and perhaps 90s were a period when in the US a great deal of the mainstream culture involved attacking anything considered mainstream, square, uncool, old-fashion etc. The idea of sticking it "the man" became a staple of culture, specifically youth culture which had by that point become the main player in the cultural marketplace. And while DFW had urged his readers to avoid the pitfalls of a culture supersaturated with cheap humour, addiction etc, he had perhaps prior to TPK failed to offer anything conspicuously positive, practical or life-affirming.

The book in many ways foreshadows the current crisis of masculinity among young men, many of whom were raised in broken homes etc and are really struggling to overcome their resentment, aimlessness and lack of self-discipline and really grasping for anyone (e.g. Peterson) willing to fill the paternal role and deliver some needed home truths. TPK explicitly condemns the notion that the heroes of modern society are the celebrities, the conspicuously heroic, the 'Great' men and women well-remembered by history (and US cultural history especially, in the form of self-destructing rockstars, cowboys etc). Instead he posits that the "drone" so widely mocked by hip America is actually a figure of great importance to society, one which guarantees its longevity not by heroic acts or widespread influence, but by innumerable sacrifices made without expectation of acclaim or praise (esp. by the hip mainstream, of course).

Cont...

[Anonymous No.12499086]

(And fuck niggers)

Cont...

[Anonymous No.12499096]

>>12499086
a post like this woulda made wardine be cry lmao am i right fellas

[Anonymous No.12499099]

My hunch is that DFW became a little bored with writing characters who were overly absurd or satirical (the sweat-licking guru from IJ comes to mind, and most characters in BOTS). In terms of his novels, W's career can be interpreted as a long struggle towards a realism he was comfortable articulating, which is one that allowed both the tender, narrow depictions of every day life and also the cerebral meta-analysis of society and culture which he couldn't do without.

His aim in part is to humanise the aforementioned "drones" of society, the suit-and-tie stick figure so loathed by his hip contemporaries who in reality benefited themselves from living in a society that said drones helped prop up without demanding the praise or status demanded by W's hip peers. If you've ever seen the movie Slacker (1990), you'll get an idea of the dominant perspectives of young people in the US at the time, the wealthy Gen X generation who rebelled against their boomer parents but ended up drug-addicted, aimless yet incapable of properly taking part in a society due to their having criticized it for so long. In that sense, TPK is a conservative novel (W was as I understand it a Republican with conservative values, but that's by-the-by).

The way he humanizes these drones is to portray their journey to becoming IRS agents, which is not a journey defined by a lifelong adherence to society's expectations and a sycophantic attempt to sell-out for whatever reason, but instead a gradual realization that a life of poverty (in the case of the trailer park woman), nihilism (in the case of the character David Foster Wallace), sexual allure (in the case of the hot IRS woman) were not lives that the characters ultimately saw as worthwhile or sustainable. The obviously "good" characters tend to be rather meek, ascetic, selfless individuals (the guy who manages to levitate about a quarter of an inch in the bar being one) who are symbolic of what the IRS itself represents: a quiet, mundane loyalty to the notion of organization, discipline and selfless service.

Cont...

[Anonymous No.12499112]

>>12499011
>>12499050
>>12499099
Please continue I love DFW
>>12499096
fucking kek

[Anonymous No.12499115]

>>12498975
Why did he leave us? :(

[Anonymous No.12499135]

Finally, the first chapter of the novel (not sure if W intended it to be so) comprises careful study of a rural setting before the plot properly gets under way. While it may appear to be a simple display of writing skill, the chapter manages in about three pages to neatly summarize the novel as a whole. We witness the mundanity of the natural setting, with horses continuously grazing with their heads meekly bowed, etc, with the most important image IMO being that of an overturned rock which reveals a colony of insects "all business all the time". He therefore directly compares the natural state of animal life to the natural state of life lived by human beings. In the animal kingdom there is little room for nihilism, ironic detachment, vainglorious behaviour and so on - instead there is a great understated effort to remain alive and secure the livelihoods of those who are part of one's species. There are more obvious examples of this kind of thing when he describes a rural region as resembling "blacktop graphs" used in urban planning etc. He includes a sentence at the end of one passage which represents exactly the king of thing DFW loathed and shied away from, which is sincere, vulnerable human expression: "We are all of us brothers."

I definitely recommend the novel. and regardless of how it's formatted in terms of which chapter being where, it's actually rather Pessoan in this sense, with the themes and gentle arguments made in the book coming to light regardless of any strict plotting or whatever.

[Anonymous No.12499142]

>>12498738
IJ = self-centered, showy, boomer DFW
PK = benevolent sage DFW

[Anonymous No.12499149]

>>12498738
DFW seems like a fascinating specimen to me. A man who aimed to be a mogul. juggling so much at once, trying to combine it all into a single symphony. Sorry, sounding pretentious here. He just seems very eclectic is all. His psyche is quite interesting to, all his insecurities and so forth. What is your overall evaluation of him? Was he a genius of his time? A sincere man? Was he a kind person? Also, did he really sleep with and use his female students? Who was this man named David Foster Wallace?

[Anonymous No.12499150]

>>12499115
Massive depression and having a spotlight shone upon his introverted life.

[Anonymous No.12499204]

>>12499149
He was a highly intelligent, analytical, sensitive, self-conscious, manic guy who at the same time was deeply self-involved, callous and impatient. That's the impression I get from the biography. I think his upbringing and intelligence definitely prevented him from being "humble" at a younger age, but also allowed him to produce the precocious Broom of the System and to really go overboard with the word games and analytical, highly theoretical lit which became popular in the 1980s at the expense of a more subtle, localized realism. After writing that stuff I think his sensitivity and sense of childlike vulnerability prevented him from appealing only to lit nerds and grad students, and so he forced himself to write something more mundane, humble and selfless which dealt more with everyday lived experienced, even if it involved him having to stop sneering at society in order to make his dough and to actually engage it and learn from it and turn from critic of its ills into an advocate of its virtues. A complex guy, but can you really expect people who produced such great works of art not to be complex and flawed etc?

[Anonymous No.12499239]

>>12499150
Why didn't he take the medication?

[Anonymous No.12499254]

>>12499239
There could be any number of reasons.
Speaking from personal experience, I suffer from clinically diagnosed massive depression. Was medicated for most of my formative years, and stopped when I realized I was living in a fog of medicated apathy. It's not easy to manage, but when I have good days they're my good days. Same reason I don't smoke or get drunk; it'd just make me feel like a hypocrite.

[Anonymous No.12499292]

>>12499239
Gay side effects maybe. Done with being a slave to shit meds maybe.

[Anonymous No.12499294]

One of my suspicions is that the greatest writers are like canaries in a mine shaft, meaning that whatever subtle cultural changes are taking place affect them more extremely than they would the average citizen (at first anyway). That doesn't make them at all superior to the citizen other than in their vulnerability and childlike impressionability (lol that's a word?). While addiction, nihilism etc became more commonplace, DFW was already in and out of rehab, a pot addict, a TV addict, a suicidal nihilist etc, and therefore his work has great impact because he's warning in part of what's to come or the rest of us. It's not like he's just detached, observant sage who warns against dangers without succumbing to them himself; he has to be the fool guy and experience stuff to the point where he desperately pleads with others not to make the same mistake. TPK makes a similar appeal for people to be empathetic, selfless, willing to accommodate boredom and obscurity, etc.

[Anonymous No.12499310]

>>12499135
I liked this summary anon
I bought TPK about a month ago and haven't gotten around to reading it yet but now it's moving to the top of my list

[Anonymous No.12499316]

>>12499310
I recommend reading the first chapter a couple of times and dwelling on it for a while. There really is a lot to get from it. Good luck man.

[Anonymous No.12499347]

Does anyone have the link to the thread from ages ago where that poster said he was planning on writing a PhD thesis on the actual meaning of the pale king (a suicide note basically). He went through each chapter and how each one constituted a reference to DFW's own plan to take his life. And is main argument was that the book was very much in a "finished" state and should be remembered as such instead of the "unfinished novel" it has been marketed as.

I would love to read it again and would also like if

>>12499204

got the chance to read it because I would be curious to hear your thoughts on it after your write up there (which I enjoyed reading).

I thin the pale king & oblivion should be taken together as Dfw's best literary achievements but often I feel they live in the shadow of some of his easier material (ij and essays).

[Anonymous No.12499375]

>>12499347
To be clear I don't know as much about DFW's writing as many here, i.e. I haven't even read IJ just a ton of information about it. So take my musings with a pinch of salt desu.

Have you read Conversations... ? I liked it.

[Anonymous No.12499392]

>>12499347
sounds very interesting, anyone find the old post?

[Anonymous No.12499420]

>>12499310
Same here, more or less. I found a copy at goodwill last weekend, and I might read a couple shorter books first because I just got through Gravity's Rainbow and I'm almost done with David Lynch's doorstopper of a biography, but TPK is definitely going to be a sooner-than-later read.

[Anonymous No.12499454]

>Fucking spammers further ruining this board

To answer your question, yes, its worth a read. I read it in Cuba. Seeing the back and forth between his own personal experiences and the pseudo imaginary ones was a real treat. Now, I want to read it again.

[Anonymous No.12499463]

>>12498738

Absolutely yes, it's very beautiful.