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/lit/ - Literature

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7249693 No.7249693 [Reply] [Original]

did anyone else notice how often characters are introduced multiple times and jokes are used multiple times? A character is introduced one very specific way and then nearly the exact same description is given a few/tens of pages later to re-introduce the character again.

or the joke about scrubbing your brain clean is re-hashed a few different times as if it's the first time it's being said. There are other instances of this.

It feels sloppy and weird and I've never noticed it in any other books of similar length. Was he expecting people to read it out of order or forget about characters or read only 10 pages every other week or something?

>> No.7249707

>>7249693
weed, tbh.

>> No.7249785
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7249785

>>7249693
dude, he literally reuses whole chapters. That one about Lyle advising people not to try to pull down more than their own weight. Incidentally, i imagine Lyle to look like pic

>> No.7249798

I always felt like the re-use thing was meant to illustrate underlying similarities/connectivity between people and things.

Notice, for instance, Lyle's advice about making sure whatever you're lifting is not heavier than you and the incident with the bricklayer and the barrel of bricks.

>> No.7249802

>>7249798
true.

>> No.7249812

>>7249693
Is that Taylor Swift?

>> No.7249866

>>7249812
It's Katherina Gompertovina, russian tennis superstar.

>> No.7250143

>>7249693
Where do I buy this edition? Can't find it on Amazon.

>> No.7250152

>>7250143
Fuck, sorry guys just saw that it was from a cover contest. I didn't know it wasn't the same publisher.

>> No.7250867

>>7249812
Naw, that's Paddy.

>> No.7251446

I don't think it was intentional. He also described hot weather like being in someone's armpit in both the State Fair essay and the 9/11 essay. And there's a few other examples of this I used to be able to recall but now forget.

>> No.7251623

>>7251446
So how do you write such a complex thousand page book that goes through who knows how many copy edits and no one tells you or you don't notice that you're amateurishly repeating yourself by accident? It's really strange

>> No.7251831

>>7249812
No, it's Infinite Jest.

>> No.7251841

>>7249693
Catch-22 does it too.

>> No.7251851
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7251851

>>7251623
Or you're just witty enough to come up with an artistic defense for a lot of the things people think are mistakes.

Imagine writing a book of ~1400 pages (DFW said in one radio interview on YT that the original draft before it got to an editor was considerably longer (this should really be a footnote)), you probably try to be 'done' with that shit as much as possible, rather than go through 3 years of close edits.

>> No.7252094

>>7251851
but he's a literary genius

>> No.7252161

On artistic defenses, i think a lot of the high-concept stuff about ij, like why it's jumbled up and disorienting (because to be unlike commercial entetainment) was just him trying to account for the fact that he's a short story writer and ij is just a massive collection of scenes. The broom of the system and the pale king are written in the same way and theyre not about commercial art, and the rest of his fiction is short stories, where, he admitted in an interview, his training was. The whole 'you put it together, to prove you're better than tv' stuff i think was just a cerebral way to justify his being more of a great short story writer than a novelist.

>> No.7252495

>>7251623
He wrote the entire thing in a manic episode, and he just likes phrases so much that he uses them repeatedly.

Ex. howling fantods

>> No.7252498

>>7249812
I was thinking the same thing

>> No.7252504

>>7252094
Yes, clearly an infallible literary genius! Geniuses cannot make mistakes EVER! There is always a point. I know you were being sarcastic

>> No.7252544

Repeating character traits isn't amateurish. That's how you establish character, through repetition.

>> No.7252619

>>7249693
>Badminton racket

>> No.7252642

>>7249812
No, it's Becky.

>> No.7252653
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7252653

MICHAEL SILVERBLATT: I don't know how, exactly, to talk about this book, so I'm going to be reliant upon you to kind of guide me. But something came into my head that may be entirely imaginary, which seemed to be that the book was written in fractals.

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE: Expand on that.

MS: It occurred to me that the way in which the material is presented allows for a subject to be announced in a small form, then there seems to be a fan of subject matter, other subjects, and then it comes back in a second form containing the other subjects in small, and then comes back again as if what were being described were -- and I don't know this kind of science, but it just -- I said to myself this must be fractals.

DFW: It's -- I've heard you were an acute reader. That's one of the things, structurally, that's going on. It's actually structured like something called a Sierpinski Gasket, which is a very primitive kind of pyramidical fractal, although what was structured as a Sierpinski Gasket was the first- was the draft that I delivered to Michael in '94, and it went through some I think 'mercy cuts', so it's probably kind of a lopsided Sierpinski Gasket now. But it's interesting, that's one of the structural ways that it's supposed to kind of come together.