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/lit/ - Literature

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File: 24 KB, 220x325, Vineland.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
7105448 No.7105448 [Reply] [Original]

Did anyone else who actually read this and Infinite Jest feel like DFW was attempting to show Pinecone "how it was done" after reading and hating it?

They both heavily involve drugs, TV, dysfunctional families, government hijinks, and constant flashbacks. Infinite Jest was more highly stylized with the effect flipping between the endnotes and main text had and the nonstandard presentation, but after reading both it felt like an attempt at redoing many of the same ideas.

>> No.7105475

>>7105448
I noted the irony of DFW making his statements about smoking pot and TV and then writing IJ. I don't know if its directly a response to it though or if DFW was just trying to be an edgelord and distance himself from pynchon
>Saying he never read pynchon in college
>attacking Pynchon's novel that had similar themes to the one he was thinking of/starting writing
>claiming he liked pynchon "about 25% of the time"
>all of this and then going on to obviously crib his style

>> No.7105515

>>7105475
Also some of the comments about smoking pot in Infinite Jest itself seem like they could be targeted at Pinecone. Like when Pemulis talks about knowing guys who just sit around smoking weed, grow manboobs and never feel like doing anything.

>> No.7105522

>>7105515
this could be targeted at most stoners brah

>> No.7105538

>>7105522
It sounds like it could but given DFW's one sided love/hate relationship with Pinecone, if he was thinking of any stoners in particular when he wrote that you know who the first one he'd think of would've been.

>> No.7105548

>>7105522
>>7105515
I mean, DFW literally went to rehab for marijuana...

>> No.7105571

>>7105548
It was also booze and other drugs so not really

>> No.7105576

>>7105548
He went for being edgy

>> No.7105606

>>7105571
What other drugs?

>> No.7105616

>>7105538
I actually haven't read either, to be honest

>> No.7105618

>>7105606
The most powerful drug of all: Sincerity.

>> No.7105624

>>7105606
He was addicted to other hard drugs like heroin and mescaline

>> No.7105700

>>7105571
It was primarily for booze. No one goes to rehab for marijuana lol.

>> No.7105703

>>7105448
It wasn't about "showing how it was done", it was about refuting the underlying ideology of it (and "postmodern" literature in general). Infinite Jest was essentially an attempt at destroying postmodernism from within.

>> No.7105742

>>7105703
Nah. People tend to exaggerate his "disdain" for postmodernism. He didn't want to "destroy" or "dismantle" it so much as make it more human.

>> No.7105745

>>7105618
>tfw DFW would unironically be a brony while ironically make a point about it

>> No.7105759

>>7105742
My understanding was that he admired the technical advances of postmodern lit (or at least thought it useless to deny them) but resented the implicit ideology of it.

>> No.7105816

>>7105759
I would say "was depressed by" more than "hated".

>> No.7105899

yeah kinda, it's like he took the Tubehead stuff and made a whole 3x as long novel about it

>> No.7106043

>>7105624

>mescaline
>hard drug

Most hallucinogenics are non-toxic at normal doses, non-habit-forming, and in fact have the potential to be used as therapeutic drugs for mental illness, including addiction to real hard drugs. They were banned only because the 60s counterculture extolled this stuff and the Man wanted to put them down. The More You Know™.

>> No.7106177

Infinite Jest definitely wears the mark of Pynchon's influence, but I don't think it was Wallace's attempt to "do" Vineland. IJ comes mostly out of first-hand experience: an exaggeration of his lifelong television addiction, his alcoholism, his marijuana addiction. And on top of that it adds the experiences of those he met and heard while he was in AA in Boston. This rehab episode was pretty much the only interesting thing that had happened to him. The rest of his life was 17 years of schooling and however many years of tennis. That's why the rest of the book is about school. The tennis academy stuff is like a summer-camp novel. Kids playing elaborate made-up games, exploring underground tunnels, playing pranks on each other. School and rehab was pretty much all he'd experienced by his thirties, and those are the subjects that dominate the novel. So he didn't borrow the themes from Vineland in order to execute them better; they came out of his own life.

What I *do* believe is that Infinite Jest is his attempt at Gravity's Rainbow. Now, obviously there are major differences. But it's the idea of Gravity's Rainbow that I mean. Pynchon published a masterpiece at 36. Gaddis published a masterpiece at 33. By age 36, Barth had published two big masterpieces: Giles Goat-Boy and The Sot-Weed Factor. Ever competitive, I think, despite his claims to the contrary, that Infinite Jest was ever meant to be his "masterpiece," I think nonetheless that that's what he had in mind. He wanted to get his big book out before he was 40. The big book with the manic prose style, the shifting narrative, countless characters, weird names, political intrigue, a dozen plot threads. Tragedy and humor. That's Gravity's Rainbow, and it's also Infinite Jest.

If you read Max's biography, you know that Infinite Jest in fact consists of lots of material he wrote during the '80s. It was taken out of storage and repurposed. Now, I like Infinite Jest, but I think it's quite obvious that it's uneven, and I would attribute this partly to Wallace's stuffing it with material in order to make it a big book.

And I think the big book he had in mind when he was writing his own big book was Gravity's Rainbow, published by the author whose photo was on his wall in college, who published it at 36. It's true, I think Wallace did struggle with Pynchon's influence on him, and that's why he was so mean to him in interviews. He's constantly negging him. People above already noted that he said he enjoyed him "only 25% of the time" and that he claimed to have not read Lot 49 before writing Broom of the System, when in fact people who went to college with him attest that he had. But he told another interviewer that, although GR is a great book, Pynchon kind of annoyed him, that he was "old-fashioned," and his approach to stuff was "kind of shallow." But despite his telling that interviewer that GR was a great book, he told another that it was "pop avant-garde."

>> No.7106205

I'm not saying that it wasn't based on his personal experiences, because it clearly was, but that the ways it parallels Vineland seem too direct to be entirely coincidental.

Even if a lot of it was written beforehand, I'd imagine it was heavily edited by the time it actually got published. That and even if it was the idea of a book as "big" and critically acclaimed as Gravity's Rainbow that he was after, the idea of "surpassing" Pinecone's best effort with an improvement on his worst one would've probably appealed to him.

>> No.7106226

>>7106205
Well, two things.

1. I shouldn't have said "lots of material." I don't think "lots" of Infinite Jest was written in the '80s. I don't know much; just some of it; a non-trivial amount. That's the impression I got from Max's book.

2. We could both be right. An author can have a lot of things in his head while he's writing a book. Wallace could have been thinking about writing his Gravity's Rainbow while also thinking that he could better deal with Pynchon's Vineland themes. In fact, that interview I quoted above, when he's talking about Pynchon being "old-fashioned" and "kind of shallow"—he's talking about Vineland. He'd read Vineland and thought Pynchon's approach to cultural criticism was inadequate. So he may have been showing Pynchon how Vineland could be done, while also trying to write his own Gravity's Rainbow.

>> No.7106453
File: 274 KB, 457x584, dfw.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
7106453

>>7105448
Wallace definitely had a bad case of influence anxiety over Pynchon, but I don't think he considered Vineland a big enough deal try to correct.

I'd say he wanted to complete the apocalyptic cycle of Gravity's Rainbow by having people sink into The Entertainment, i.e. giving themselves wholly over to the first-circuit infantile solipsism and ceasing to be complete human beings. This is in contrast to the implicit end of the world via superweapons and warfare (third-circuit territoriality and associated paranoia) combine with the transition to higher levels of awareness (circuits V-VIII [it's worth noting that there are circuits V, VI and VII in there if you like to puzzle over Pynchon titles]) sought by the White Visitation programmers and Blicero through metacognition programming and mysticism.

Basically he thought Pynchon's mystical vision of people leaving their humanity behind was outdated and that entertainment had the potential to drag a huge number of people down to their basest instinct by serving as a perfect surrogate mother, which would allow those able to resist or avoid the samizdat to do what they will.

>>7105475
Pretty sure Wallace himself was known to hit the doobie and hang out in front of the tube for a time. It's pretty common behavior for depressed people and he probably had quite a lot of self-loathing about this habit.

>> No.7107181

>>7105624
Fucking junkie

>> No.7107377

>>7106177
Shall I project a world?

>> No.7107965

this is so fucking retarded