Alas, poor Wallace: A Review of Infinite Jest
by rsbakker
Aphorism of the Day: Particular people are narrow people precisely because they always know what they like. Accidents, guesses gone wrong, uneaten entrees: these are what make us whole.
Aphorism of the Day II: There’s no better punchline than missing the punchline–unless you happen to be the punchline.
In a 1997 Charlie Rose interview, when asked about the hundreds of footnotes scattered through Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace claimed that he needed some way to disrupt the linearity of the text short of making it unreadable, that writing requires “some interplay between how difficult you make it for the reader and how seductive.”
Like lovers and assholes (and reviews), books sort readers.[1] I would argue that books like Infinite Jest identify you–your affiliations, your beliefs and values, your politics–with the same degree of accuracy as monster truck rallies.[2] “When I was younger,” David Foster Wallace explains in a 1996 interview with The Boston Phoenix, “I saw my relationship with the reader as a sort of sexual one. But now it seems more like a late-night conversation with really good friends, when the bullshit stops and the masks come off.” Books sort people the way conversations sort people: the talk you have with your mom on Saturday morning is not the talk you have with your boss on Friday afternoon, and certainly not the talk you have with your best buddies on Saturday night. All of our relationships have a conversational mode appropriate to them, a manner of communication tailored to the expectations our audience. We like to tell ourselves that we’re ‘just speaking our mind,’ but in point of fact we’re conserving/cultivating a certain kind of social persona, one intended to facilitate our various relationships: to make our mom proud, to impress our boss, and to crack up our buddies.
This is as true of novels as it is shooting the shit or obligatory familial phone-calls. A novel is, first and foremost, a mode of communication, a kind of relationship between a actual writer and a certain number of actual readers. And as with any communication, judgments concerning propriety will be inextricably bound to who is sending and who is receiving under what circumstances.[3] It makes no more sense reviewing a novel absent its particular communicative context than it does evaluating conversations with your mom, boss, or buddies. The success or failure of any human communication depends on the adequacy of the how and the what to the who–something which is especially true of modes that purport to challenge notions of adequacy.
This is the whole reason why publishers are keen to plaster testimonials on the cover of their books: to milk our authority and social proof biases. Infinite Jest is literally festooned with blurbs from a galaxy of authoritative sources: It arrives literally armoured in literary authority. We are told by a variety of serious people (who are taken very seriously by other serious people) that this is a seriously serious book. There can be little doubt that as far as the 1996 literary ingroup was concerned, Infinite Jest was a smashing communicative success.
Which should be no surprise. “I come to writing from a pretty hard-core, abstract place,” Wallace explains in The Boston Phoenix interview. “It comes out of technical philosophy and continental European theory, and extreme avante-garde shit.” Given who he was, and given he saw this as a conversation with good friends, and given that the seriously serious readers likely shared, as good friends often do, the bulk of his attitudes and aesthetic sensibilities, it’s easy to see how this book became as successful as it did. Infinite Jest is the product of a ingroup sender communicating to other ingroup receivers: insofar as those other receivers loved it, you can say that as a communication Infinite Jest was a tremendous ingroup success.
The problem is that one can say the same about the Turner Diaries or Mein Kampf.
I don’t pretend to know what literature is any metaphysical sense, but I do think that it has to have something to do with transcendence. What distinguishes literature from fiction in general is its ability to push beyond, beyond received dogmas, beyond comfort zones, and most importantly (because it indexes the possibility of the former two), beyond social ingroups. This is why communicative success and literary success are not one and the same thing. And this is also why outgroup readers generally find ingroup estimations of literary merit so unconvincing.
Make no mistake, Infinite Jest is a piece of genre fiction: something expressly written for a dedicated groups of readers possessing a relatively fixed set of expectations. It just so happens that this particular group of readers happen to command the cultural high ground when it comes to things linguistic and narrative. One of many cynical tidbits I came across pulling this ‘review’ together is how Little and Brown ultimately decided that the size of the book, some 1079 pages, would contribute to its sales by turning it into something that could be bragged about. As with any other ‘elite’ subgroup, literary practitioners are prone to self-identify according to perceived competencies, especially when those competencies dramatically exceed those of the hoi polloi. The most difficult missions are reserved for the special forces–those with specialized training–not the regular army. “I’m somebody who can’t even own a TV anymore,” Wallace confesses, “because I’ll sit there slack-jawed and consume enormous amounts of what is, in terms of art, absolute shit.”[3]
What we have here is a good old-fashioned authority gradient, one indexed according to a perceived hierarchy of difficulty. At the top stands, to use Wallace’s phrase, ‘extreme avante garde shit,’ and at the bottom, ‘absolute shit.’ It is the ease of the latter that allows the difficulty of the former to so effectively sort individuals according to certain kinds of competencies. Of all the reviews of Infinite Jest I read, my favourite has to be Lisa Schwarzbaum’s in Entertainment Weekly. In a truly wonderful piece of ironic prose, she admits defeat, “with one crabbed hand gripping the cover like a claw and the other raised like a limp white flag,” deferring to the opinion of “more disciplined” reviewers with a culture-serf’s eye-rolling genuflection, saying, in effect, ‘Well, I can’t read it so it must be a masterpiece.’
Schwarzbaum found herself sorted into the ‘absolute shit’ pile, “longing,” as she puts it, “for an unedited Joan Collins manuscript.” A true ‘White Flagger,’ to use the book’s idiom. Even Bob Wake, the Wallace fan whose site has the best selection of reviews, puts scare-quotes around ‘critic’ when referring to her. Apparently she’s not one of us–not really.
How could she be when the joke flew over her head?
But what if this isn’t the case? What if Schwarzbaum, the superficial pseudo-critic, turned out to be the most perceptive of all? The most serious thing in Infinite Jest, after all, is the most silly thing: Entertainment. And surely Schwarzbaum–a reviewer for Entertainment Weekly no less–should be the acknowledged authority.
Which brings me, at elliptical last, to the book itself. This selfsame authority gradient, it turns out, comprises the very keel of Infinite Jest, and not just metaphorically. The story orbits two groups of people: the denizens of The Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House at the bottom of some Bostonian hill, and the young residents of The Enfield Tennis Academy at the top. Where the bottom-dwellers struggle to regain the basic competencies of life, the top-dwellers struggle to master the competencies that will take them to the Show. Wallace’s digressive style, which often numbed me with its mania for trivial detail, makes the book seem thoroughly postmodern at the outset, where scenes and characters arrive in fragmentary collages rather than organized according to traditional story-telling logic. But this turned out to be a kind of scale illusion: Wallace inundates you with so many details that the narrative arc is several hundred pages in shining through. Early in the book we are introduced to something called ‘the Entertainment,’ a video cartridge reminiscent of the old experiments allowing monkeys to directly self-stimulate their brain’s pleasure centres: apparently it’s so entertaining that it robs viewers of every desire except to continue watching. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that the Entertainment is in fact a ‘lost film’ made by James Incandenza, the alcoholic founder of the Enfield Tennis Academy, either entitled Infinite Jest IV or Infinite Jest V.
Just about everybody (with the exception of poor old homodontic Mario) is looking for redemption. There’s the Incandenza family, which has found itself imperfectly sutured around the suicide of James. The mother, Avril, whom others regard as unforgivably loving and attentive, and whose insatiable nocturnal sexual appetite looms like a peripheral shadow throughout the text. The oldest son, Orin, a pro-football kicker who is obsessed not so much with seducing married mothers, as ruining their capacity to find fulfilment with their husbands. The physically and intellectually disabled middle son, Mario, who oddly functions more as semiotic gap than as a character, and who was closest to James even though he is likely the incestuous child of Charles Tavis, Avril’s half-brother and present administrator of Enfield. And the youngest son, Hal, a world ranked junior tennis player, who possesses a perfect lexical memory in addition to his father’s strangely dissociated personality.
Then there’s the Ennet House ‘family,’ which has found itself imperfectly sutured around their multiple addictions. Of these many characters, Don Gately is far and away the most prominent, a petty criminal and pharmaceutical narcotic addict, who has miraculously found himself first at Ennet House rather than prison after a botched burglary led to a homeowner’s death. At first Gately’s connection to the Incandenza clan is tenuous: he finds himself in Ennet (initially as a resident, then as an employee) rather than prison because the dead homeowner, who was Quebecois, was believed to be related to the Entertainment by federal investigators. Eventually, however, he begins falling in love with a new resident, a recovering crack addict named Joelle van Dyne, who, aside from being the radio personality known as Madame Psychosis, is Orin Incandenza’s former girlfriend, as well as confidante of Orin’s father James–the principle actor in, you guessed it, Infinite Jest.
The world of Infinite Jest is secondary–a caricature, a representation of our world with certain problematic processes, personages, and institutions ontologically exaggerated (in a manner commensurate to their significance)–much like the maps you find at amusement parks. He depicts a faux near-future dominated by the politics of ‘experialism,’ the need to divest power and territory in order to eschew responsibility for the phantasmagorical wastelands produced by the book’s primary novum, annular fusion, which generates waste products (transported via skyline-dominating catapults) that destroys organic life only to spur monstrous regrowth. A kind of binary logic dominates Wallace’s humourous worldmaking: the wasteland, the Great Concavity (formerly known as New England), is home to monstrous hamsters and gigantic feral infants. And Canadians, who seem to be concentrated in frightening high-crime ghettos (intimidating decent Americans with their beards, suspenders, and flannel), constitute America’s greatest terrorist threat, none moreso than the dreaded Wheelchair Assassins, an Extreme Quebecois Separatist movement who hopes to use the Entertainment to so damage the United States that Canada will be forced to expel Quebec from Confederation to save face.
To be honest, I found most of these gags too whimsical to be all that funny, especially given the tragic backlighting. Reality is a function of detail: the information lavished on narcotics and pharmaceuticals, for instance, anchors what is a bloated, cartoonish future to what is a relentlessly miserable here and now. At so many turns I had the sense that the absurdity of his world wasn’t so much a critique of our world as a description, as if his illuminating disproportions were calling attention to a lunacies that Wallace thinks we cannot avoid.
Another place where I found myself out of step with the apparent critical consensus is Wallace’s portrayal of drugs and addiction. Although many of these sections contain some of his most penetrating and beautiful prose–particularly his (borrowed, I’m told) analysis of AA as a form of anarchic fascism–I found myself bumping into artifice at least as regularly as profundity. Perhaps because of my own history, I really had the sense of a 33 year-old possessing personal–but ultimately passing–familiarity with addiction and addiction problems trying to be raw and authentic. I was also troubled by what struck me as a sordid voyeurism: at times Wallace seems to wallow in the miserable life stories of various addicts for the sake of… [substitute rarified rationale here]. More and more, it seemed to be a kind of ‘loser porn,’ almost as if the systematic (and quite interesting) suppression of sexuality in the book (‘fucking’ is typically referred to as ‘X-ing’) needed to be systematically released in gratuitous descriptions of drug-related abjection. Instead of grinding orange bodies we get convulsing grey ones.
One of the greater ironies of this Ennet/Enfield authority gradient is that no matter where they stand, everyone is a loser, only in inverted ways. You have the AA testimonials, ‘lectures’ that compel the listeners to Identify with lives that the well-heeled, hyper-educated reader can only pretend to fathom, with stories of almost cartoonish abjection–that revolt as they entertain. Then you have the Enfield lectures, the parsing of tennis into formal abstractions, the clinical explanations of DMZ, annular fusion, and so on–topics and idioms bled white with absence of passion. The reader is successively dragged back and forth, not simply to Ennet House and Enfield Tennis Academy, but through as well, alternately whipped breathless through various pivotal plot points (such as Joelle’s suicide attempt, or Don’s confrontation with the Canadians), then left to crawl through mountains of trivial information, the dreaded ‘info-dump’ of science fiction shame. From act to fact, drunkenness to sobriety–just like the Concavity, which cycles between wasteland and jungle. At times Infinite Jest actually seems to be semantic version of the waste that is continually catapulted in the background, at once a herbicide and a fertilizer, making a Concavity of the interior of the reader’s skull.
The Gradient, in other words, is everywhere, including the reader. Images can be found within either geographic pole, almost always expressed on the field of language–vocabulary in particular. So in Ennet House you have the culture conflict between the educated and the less educated residents. In Enfield, where almost all the teenagers seem implausibly intellectual (and less interesting and engaging for it), you find it either represented by, or represented in, the films of James O. Incandenza.
In the opening stages of his breakdown (the becoming incompatible of his interior and exterior), Hal finds himself watching, Small Clever Rooms That Utilize Every Centimeter of Available Space with Mind-Boggling Efficiency, forwarding to the art instructor protagonist’s “climactic lecture” about the desertification resulting from something called the “Flood”–a figure which could mean the explosion of cultural production in the digital age–and the “absence of death as a teleological end”:
The art-cartridge critics and scholars who point to the frequent presence of audiences inside Himself’s films, and argue that the fact that the audiences are always either dumb or unappreciative or the victims of some grisly entertainment mishap betrays more than a little hostility on the part of an ‘auteur’ pegged as a technically gifted by narratively dull and plotless and static and not entertaining enough–these academics’ arguments seem sound as far as they go, but they do not explain the incredible pathos of Paul Anthony Heaven reading his lecture to a crowd of dead-eye kids picking at themselves and drawing vacant airplane- and genitalia-doodles on their college rule notepads, reading stupefyingly turgid-sounding shit–‘For while clinamen and tessera strive to revive or revise the dead ancestor, and while kenosis and daemonization act to repress consciousness and memory of the dead ancestor, it is, finally, artistic askesis which represents the contest proper, the battle-to-the-death with the loved dead–in a monotone as narcotizing as a voice from the grave… (911)
Of all the mise en abymes you will encounter in this book, none are quite so dense as this–narrative frames stacked upon propositional attitudes. The way James O. Incandenza’s art internalizes the antagonism between his art and his community. The way the critics, in the course of pointing this out, overlook the pathos of the instructor–the way his passion transcends the ingroup insularity of his lecture. (Wallace, in the same Charlie Rose interview, singles out David Lynch’s Blue Velvet as the transformative moment in his writing career, the point where he realized that authors connected by being ‘true to themselves’). Here we have the classic image of the Gradient, the classroom, where all the institutional cards are stacked in the specialist’s favour, the instructor weeping, speaking with a dead authority about the relationship between the cultural producer and their ancestors to an anaesthetized outgroup (you can almost imagine Schwarzbaum checking her texts). If the reference to Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence wasn’t clear enough, Wallace gives us a footnote to tell us as much. The problem, as Wallace seems to frame it, is the disconnect between the poles, the death of artistic authority (a disconnect that could be attributed to Bloom’s clinamen, the way literary normative traditions, in a constant state of self-reinvention, migrate further and further from the sensibilities of the masses). The instructor references kenosis, emptying, as occluding the tradition, and Wallace describes the students’ doodles as “vacant.” Everyone is dead in this image (as perhaps ‘social efficiency’ demands). Only the weeping is alive.
In a sense, this image unpacks the meaning of the Shakespearean allusion that gives Wallace his title, Hamlet’s famous meditation on death and entertainment: “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest…” Hamlet recalls the love he bore him, and the joy–the entertainment– but now finds himself nauseated (a symptom Wallace continually attributes to depression). The pendulum has swung to death, the implacable teleology, away from comedy to tragedy, the intellectually privileged mode–the depressive mode.
Infinite Jest may be set in the future, but it is–as Wallace is–a creature of the past, something plucked from the grave and pondered, the skull of something once beloved, once entertaining, but now dead. It is a skull, a memento mori–and I cannot but feel that Wallace wanted us to be nauseated. At times you think it’s about redemption in simplicity, the beggar’s humble wilfulness to be healed, but not so. Everyone is stranded in this book: the fact of so many hands reaching, for me, simply makes it all the more stark, even perhaps horrifying. Wallace’s vision is relentlessly cynical and pessimistic–and read in the historical shadow of his suicide, bent.
The book Infinite Jest (Literature? or ingroup entertainment?) is set up as the antithesis of Infinite Jest the art film (Entertainment? or death?), but in the end they are ultimately the same, just as the ‘addicts’ at the top of the hill mirror the addicts below. It’s like the difference between wet and dry trash. A nimbus of pointlessness shadows everything that transpires–even the apparent redemption people find in AA. James O. Incandenza, we are told, committed suicide because he could not bear sobriety. In his case, drinking literally kept him alive. And the same seems to the case with Hal, who literally splits in two–a flat-affect interior and a hysterically emoting exterior–when he abandons pot. Maybe Gately is our point of egress–or is it regress, once his ersatz gallantry is illuminated by his thoroughly sociopathic past, one where ‘kindness’ is the accidental byproduct of disinterest. Does merely lacking the will to harm others make him good? The book, remember, ends with a murder.[5]
And this is what makes me think that Schwarzbaum’s review in Entertainment Weekly is perhaps the most incisive of all. She alone is clear-eyed enough to see how tribal the book is, how entangled it is with its ingroup community. She alone gets the joke. I had refused to read any supplementary material while reading the book, hoping to follow the footprints it left in fresh snow. I had known about his suicide, of course, and the catastrophic bouts of depression that precipitated it. And at first, I thought the almost palpable sense of self-loathing and class shame I found in the text were simply an expression of this knowledge: suicide is too dramatic not to become an ‘alternate ending’ unconsciously appended to a dead author’s work. But the details kept piling up, so that at times I was convinced that Wallace was actually voicing a version of my own critique of intellectual culture. There was the bankruptcy of Hal and Pemulis (not to mention James O. Incandenza himself), not so much immovable as imperturbable, able to quantify over all possible worlds given their mastery of language and form. Or the AA’s demand–worse, healing’s demand–for utter intellectual passivity. The vocabulary games, and the way they sorted and alienated. The cliches. And on and on, a perpetual–sometimes even nasty–critique of the very constituency that had made him king.
No, I told myself. It couldn’t be. I was a man with a hammer, so of course I was seeing nails everywhere I looked.
When I finally finished, I began with the Charlie Rose interview, and found that I recognized him. You could just smell it: Wallace was one of those inward souls who despised his own pretensions–in interviews you almost see him grimacing beneath the runaway weight of his own vanities. Listening to him, you had this sense that he hated what he had become, hated the artificiality of what his culture was making of him.
I realized that Wallace actually was the kindred spirit my reading wanted to make of him, that he wasn’t interrogating, as so many reviewers assumed, the problem of community in the canonical way, which is to say, as something that only ‘art’ or ‘intellect’ could save. No. He suffered depression, a malady that some evolutionary psychologists think was selected precisely because it allows us to see past our hard-wired tendency to self-aggrandize. “It seems to me,” Wallace says in his Salon interview with Laura Miller, “that the intellectualization and aestheticizing of principles and values in this country is one of the things that’s gutted our generation.” He’s arguing something far different, far less flattering to his class: that art and intellect are simply another addiction, another Substance, choosing our incommensurable friends, organizing our incommensurable activities, determining our incommensurable vocabularies. (‘Madame Psychosis,’ remember, is a performance artist and a narcotic). All the drugs he references, each of them possessing dry consumer product footnotes, are simply part of a continuum, a line running from the Entertainment to DMZ to Joelle’s veiled face (the book’s primary MacGuffins). Everything has become a drug in his world, something tagged, concentrated, and atomized–unnatural. Especially those things–as Gately’s hospitalization reminds us–that purport to cure or to save us.
Nowhere is this more clear than in Wallace’s narrative and theoretical meditations on Alcoholics Anonymous. The AA experience, Wallace tells Salon, is “hard for the ones with some education which, to be mercenary, is who this book is targeted at. I mean this is caviar for the general literary fiction reader.” He say’s ‘caviar,’ but he could have just as easily said ‘crack.’ He knows full well who he’s representing the AA to (the special forces). “The idea,” he says, “that something so simple and, really, so aesthetically uninteresting … can actually be nourishing in a way that arch, meta, ironic, pomo can’t, that seems to me to be important.”
Simplistic. Cliche. Sentimental. What if these things held the communal key? What are we to make of the chasm between the glowing, effusive testimonials on the book, and the dark and sordid testimonials within? “If an art form is marginalized,” Wallace tells Salon, “it’s because it’s not speaking to people. One possible reason is that the people it’s speaking to have become too stupid to appreciate it. That seems a little easy to me.” The other alternative is that the people speaking have become too self-absorbed to be comprehensible. The AA is a place of retreat in the full sense of the word: a retreat from the world, Out There, certainly, but a retreat from the complications of life as well. A return to the most basic touchstones, those things too worn with use and reliability not to be mocked by those keen to signal their intelligence and entitlement. Make no mistake, the AA is another ingroup, possessing norms and values that Wallace charts with fascinating detail. But unlike intellectual culture, it only sorts people according to need.
“Think Beckett, think Pynchon, think Gaddis,” Sven Birkerts writes in his Atlantic Monthly review, naming the group, anointing Wallace as a celebrated member of his tribe, the Great Ironists. Compare this testimonial to what Gately observes at his AA meetings:
The thing is it has to be the truth to really go over here. It can’t be a calculated crowd-pleaser, and it has to be the truth unslanted, unfortified. And maximally unironic. An ironist in a Boston AA meeting is a witch in church. (369)
A witch in a church–something antithetical. What does it mean to live in a culture where the art most celebrated has become, not simply irrelevant, but antithetical to those most in need?
Isn’t this a tragedy? A glaring symptom of societal breakdown?
It’s here that we see the significance of the divided Hal (the one that so horrifies the admissions committee at the beginning of the novel and so puzzles his friends at the end). He becomes the very emblem of the millennial USA: an anhedonic soul and an infantile face. A society jammed by its communicative contradictions, sorting its populations according to intellect and sentiment, and cloistering them in artificial communities (like Enfield, where the sound of weeping is never far), allowing them to congregate, to interact and so counteract each other’s excesses, only in the garbage heap (like Ennet House, where humanity reigns at once hobbled and supreme).
But the sad fact is that Wallace, by writing so thoroughly for the literary caviar set (adopting their tricks and tactics and sensibilities), made it impossible for them to see past their gratification.[6] Rather than communicate first-order commonalities, he made them the second-order objects of the very ingroup aesthetic he claimed to critique. If reviews count for anything, he renewed their faith in their moribund, ‘gouging’ simulacrum of literature. Small wonder he was so dismayed by the reception: He had failed to escape Enfield after all.
In a sense, the real tragedy of this book is this book.[7] It is simply too entertaining–too mercenary–for the specialists. No matter how they trumpet this or that little intellectual buzz, they come away from Infinite Jest both confirmed and affirmed. Even the AA segments of the story (where Wallace often tries to trick the reader into laughing at events that cause the recovering addicts to Identify) generate little more than a gratifying, paternalistic cramps of empathy. The caviar eaters are ‘moved,’ but only so far–and certainly not so far to ask any of Wallace’s fundamental questions. Infinite Jest, they believe, is a pure instance of their ‘Substance’–which simply means that Wallace, contrary to his ambition, failed to step on his drugs enough. He thought he was poisoning the pill, when in reality he was simply spiking it–feeding the ‘Spider.’ And in this sense, Infinite Jest literally enacts the isolating compartmentalization of modern, media-driven culture that it rails against. The empty, formal soul (intellectual culture) detached from the thoughtless, infantile face (popular culture) with only drugs to connect them, if not through the high, then through the levelling misery of recovery.
The idea behind this review was to look at Infinite Jest, not as a computer chip (or a pill), something isolate and discrete, packed with forms, but as something wrenched out of the electronic gut our society, wires hanging, connections sparking. The idea was to review Infinite Jest as an instance of itself. So perhaps it should come as no surprise that I see it as something faulty, broken, dysfunctional.
I first became interested in Infinite Jest after learning that David Foster Wallace was a fallen philosopher like myself: I became curious because I wondered whether I could identify with him. But for all the moments of miniature joy I experienced, it was labourious, sitting like a wart, ugly with meaning, on the arm of my reading chair for week after week. The experience was primarily one of tedium, and a kind autocannibalistic tedium at that, insofar as I realized that Wallace was intentionally playing the tedious and the difficult against the exciting and the facile. As much as its themes resonated, as much as the puzzles intrigued, I found the effort disproportionate to the reward. The fact is, I believe in story. For me, defections from narrative expectations are simply too easy: anyone can break the rules. For me, the truth of fiction lies in the AA meetings, where stories simultaneously connect socially disparate individuals and spark potentially life-changing insights. This is where Literature–understood as a living event, not as something resembling the canonical skeletons displayed in the museum–happens. In this sense Infinite Jest is more an intricate bauble than a work of art, something that identifies and ornaments more than it challenges or transforms, something far too clever to be truly profound.
Always intelligent. Sometimes funny. Rarely touching.
Wallace is the compelling character here, the weeping teacher, reading something that some hear too well to truly listen, and that others hear not at all. The real tragic story. The true literary moment. For me.
The rest is just dirt and bone.
Notes
[1] As readers of Three Pound Brain well know, the interplay between audience alienation and seduction is a primary theme of my cultural criticism. For about a decade now, I’ve been arguing that any contemporary writer vain enough to harbour literary aspirations (such as myself), needs to become self-conscious of the social and technical conditions of their work, at the risk of merely catering to ingroup expectations–‘singing to the choir’–under the guise of challenging received norms and values. I literally think–contrary to, well, pretty much everyone–that the blame for our present cultural straits lies more with the social-psychological dynamics of contemporary arts and academic culture than with (as so many seem to assume) the socio-economic machinery of late capitalism. Not only are humans hardwired to identify themselves, by means fair and foul, over and against other humans, they are also programmed to rationalize those identifications in extravagant fashion. Thus the tribal self-glorification of the Bible, the nightmarish logic of National Socialism, the absurdity of high-school pep-rallies, the popularity of the ad campaign otherwise known as Apple. Thus. Thus. Thus.
[2] All you need do is let the bolus of semantic and normative associations belonging to ‘monster truck rallies’ linger on your palette, and you should taste the complexity and profundity of the social judgements involved, things typically summarized and dismissed with a snort or a smile–so quickly to be all but unconscious. The human brain is a stereotyping machine, designed by evolution to find and to recognize patterns. Since the finding is far, far more labourious (metabolically speaking), it is far more geared to recognizing things ‘already known’ than it is in discerning anything new. Human cognition is literally designed to ‘judge books by their covers’ first, and to only engage in the hard work of actually reading with the utmost reluctance–and it does this regardless of intelligence or education.
[3] One can adopt a solipsistic, semiotic attitude, treat the novel as ‘text,’ as something abstract existing in abstraction, and so pretend the novel exists for them alone. One can also do crossword puzzles sitting on the toilet.
[4] This quote reminds me of the old joke about the three snobs, the first claiming he doesn’t have a television, the second claiming he doesn’t have windows, the third claiming he doesn’t have eyes–the joke being, of course, the absurdity of touting a kind of blindness as a mark of social superiority.
[5] Of Gately’s criminal cohort, ‘Fax,’ or truth, who makes a comedy routine of simply repeating “It’s a goddamn lie!” in response to everything Gately says.
[6] Because it has to be cognized, the genuinely ‘new’ is all but impossible to recognize. As a result, institutions rhetorically dedicated to originality find themselves in a peculiar bind. On the one hand, the new has to take the form of the old to be even come to attention: any number of generic concessions must be made. As a result, the ‘new’ tends to look an awful lot like the old–to appear rather unimpressive when viewed from a distance. On the other hand, when an institution makes this rhetorical commitment–when they fetishize originality and demonize conventionality–they are doomed to drift ever further from the normative sensibilities of the communities that sustain them. The ‘newish’ might be incremental, but telescoped over time the process gradually rewrites more and more normative expectations, rendering them more and more incomprehensible to mainstream culture. Eventually they find themselves in the peculiar position being neither new nor recognizable–which is to say, artistically interesting in any universal sense or socially relevant anywhere outside of their particular ingroup.
Thus my critical stance toward contemporary literary culture: it seems designed to seize upon and lionize works like Infinite Jest, to universalize what I fear amounts to little more than ingroup self-congratulation.
[7] As I think Wallace feared.
Three Pound Brain 
Maybe we’re just lucky to have been born middle-class. You get to skip the paroxysms of class guilt and shame, the corresponding pretensions and depressions. You get to point at the in-group status affirmations and say ‘that’s stupid’, but best of all you get to connect to the largest audience. Get to say “I am one of you” to the largest crowd in the room.
I’m not entirely unconvinced that Wallace wasn’t completely aware of the criticisms leveled here. I always thought they contributed to his suicide, as if in the end he endeavored to be his own critic, the most harsh and unforgiving, the most perceptive and honest.
One persons life, another persons lesson. I don’t like it. Feels spiteful.
I agree. Culture in a nutshell, if you think about it.
while i don’t agree entirely, i thought this was an excellent review.
i suppose what i disagree with has to do with individual differences – i didn’t find reading the book tedious, i found it fun (or at least, that’s how i remember it – it was quite some time ago).
maybe this will help see more of the fun in it:
http://video.nytimes.com/video/2011/08/22/arts/music/100000001008114/calamity-song-by-the-decemberists.html
(as an aside, i’m also a fan of duncan black’s eschaton blog – which was named after the element of infinite jest depicted in the video).
what i most liked about the review, and the book, was the notion that being smart will not always help (the “witch in church” notion). you can’t think yourself out of a prison comprised of your own self-destructive thoughts. wallace seems not to have.
I think the idea is that thoughts are the symptom. The depression he seemed to suffer is the one they use the deep brain implants for now. Could you imagine DFW with a brain implant?
I might have found it more enjoyable under different circumstances, but I don’t think it would have blunted my primary criticism, which is that it’s an example of the very insularity it condemns.
As is my review, for that matter!
At least we’re entertained!
Snark aside, have you read Wallace’s http://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf? The amount of self loathing and contempt for the aesthetic in group that lionized him practically overflows from the page.
oops I borked the comments. That’s “E unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” There’s a few pdfs floating around on google.
my primary criticism, which is that it’s an example of the very insularity it condemns.
How easily depiction tumbles into endorsement?
If that wasn’t his intent, then you have to read it with his actual intent, don’t you?
Sorry, little acidic there. Seems a fitting to the guy to cut to the chase, though.
I’m idly wondering about that insularity, in terms of the joke. Is it really just for the literary? Is it also a joke on the average Joe who might try to read it, think it’s just wank and put it down (sounds like I’d have put it down, anyway). How much the literary lap it up for entertainment, how much the…I dunno, other? How much the other spit it out for lack of entertainment? Some sort of joke made about the primary goal sought in both camps? Even if both reactions are different, still the same goal put first and foremost in either case?
Very good. I found this, being a concrete example, made your argument more powerfully than some of the previous posts. I was interested, though, that in summing up your case against IJ, you said it was “never honestly touching”. My question is how that ties in with your larger critique of contemporary literary fiction. Surely when we find an imaginary scene deeply moving, that’s when we’re likely to be confirming our existing norms, and therefore, on the given terms, the least literary moment?
If the needle has actually skipped to a new position, a new norm, the norm being confirmed is actually a new norm (hopefully recognised as a new one, not just seen as the same as before as that isn’t true), then that’s the most literary moment. To carry the heart over to a new path (not just the intellect).
Maybe. And should I use the word ‘most’? Bah, just pretend I was drinking when I wrote this, that’ll be my excuse for comment on my unqualifieds! I’ll regret latter…I was caught in a swoon, I tell ye…
Or it could just be manipulative. This is the problem. The idea that emotional impact is an indicator of insight or profundity. That’s why I’m wondering how Scott fits it into his larger theme.
I don’t do a good job setting apart the ‘immanent’ part of the critique: where I think DFW fails to reach his own goals. Otherwise, I’m really only saying that it didn’t touch me all that much. He felt like another literary tourist writing about the afflicted underclass, this time using a satiric aesthetic as a kind of disguise – for me. Which is understandable, given that I grew up in the world he tries to reach into. Don Gately struck me as an upper class projection through and through, literary wish-fulfilment: who I would be, were I caught in the horrific circumstances of his poor-poor underclass life.
This weekend The Globe gave ‘Large Marge’ a big spread to make her case: She talks about all of us writers ‘drawing from the same well,’ then goes on to argue that her water is better water, that literary fiction isn’t genre. “I don’t care what you call it as long as you make clear that Nineteen-Eighty-Four (sic) is not the same kind of book as The Time Machine.” I know that human cognition is ‘thingly,’ that it simplifies events and processes by reifying and essentializing them, so I know I’m swimming against the intuitive current, but this is precisely the kind of cartoon I aim to replace. Literariness is not a property pertaining to isolated things. It is a consequence of certain brains in certain circumstances decoding certain communications. 1984 is no more stuffed with literary fairy dust than The Time Machine is an empty box. The former may be noted for the frequency with which it occasions ‘literature’ in certain (often ‘artificial’) circumstances, but this in no way makes it intrinsically or essentially ‘better.’ Depends on who’s reading it where and when – which is a no brainer, I think.
The ‘literary ghetto’ is actually an apt term, given that the same kind of cognitive shortcomings that rendered the original Jewish ghettos intuitively plausible – if not obvious – are at work here.
The manipulation is inevitable. Otherwise it has to be a certain kind of emotional impact, one that disconfirms and unsettles more than it confirms and reaffirms (as is the case with sentimentalism) for a meaningful number of readers. Since everyone is as deep as deep, ‘profundity’ will be statistically relative to different classes of readers, although insight asymmetry (or tendency to think we see ‘deeper’ than others) makes everyone think otherwise. Me included.
It’s a small point, then, but “touching” is a misleading word here… To say IJ is “never honestly unsettling” would have been less confusing (for me). Thank you for clarifying, though.
I would criticize the “line of sight” on the book. You came to it suspicious of the patterns you recognized in it (because: ” I was a man with a hammer, so of course I was seeing nails everywhere I looked.”), but those patterns WERE explicit and not seen because of bias.
At that point your analysis becomes more about the way you think the book was received and less about the “personal” reaction. That kind of meaning (of self-loathing) is one I recognized, I saw and understood viscerally all contradictions and self-doubts in the text. Perceived is as a suffering, authentic, text. So I got that part and wasn’t fooled by the surface of gratification. I’d also say that the majority of people who have the patience to go through the book understand that point. I don’t think it’s “rare” to get it from that perspective.
Maybe it wasn’t the work of god. It wasn’t a book that worked for 100% of its readers and got its message understood, but I doubt that this so relevant. IT WAS a book that targeted its ingroup audience to tell something true and unsettling about them. Whether EVERYONE who got the book in their hands understood this or not is something that sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy. There’s always someone who won’t get it, or hate it as the worst thing ever done. Is this relevant? Is really Infinite Jest to be judged on the fact that it didn’t CHANGE THE WORLD? Your books are failing in similar ways, if so.
The important aspect in this specific discussion (because I think IJ is deep, and you continue to discover it in the long term, so you can’t reduce it to an handful of themes, and what at some point appeared as trivial or tedious may become the most important part of the book when you come to it from a different angle or state of mind) is that DFW tried to do the same as you do: target an ingroup and talk to them in their own language, telling the things they can relate to.
You say that this ultimately failed, in this specific case, because IJ, despite the self-consciousness, is still too enamored of itself (feeds the spider), and so, like ballast, it can’t “fly”. But the REAL point (which I’m quite sure you actually understand) is that you CAN’T SAY ANYTHING RELEVANT if you are outside the system you speak to. As that inside joke about addiction as a way to survive, you can’t say anything relevant if not by FEEDING the spider. It’s not a matter of balance, that he feed the spider more than starved it, in the end you acquire consciousness of the horror by being within that horror. Like the annular motions.
That said, it comes to me a superficial idea, if you want (not “truth”, but a perspective): DFW was indeed trying to find “redemption”, and reading IJ can become a positive experience because it is (or trying to be) one of healing. Maybe not for everyone, or healing everything, but it’s the way I see it. While sometimes an impression I get from your work is that you’re trying to shatter everything and destroy (I’m not intending to bring back that discussion about nihilism). DFW’s spiked food is compassionate (for example it’s impossible for me to “hate” even one character of the book, I love them all), yours seem vengeful and unforgiving. And, especially, compassionate without being consolatory.
But the point I want again to underline is that what you see as the source of failure is the very thing that gave the book value. He could have stripped all the added pieces and only left a touching story about AA and lives within, only “the real”, but that one is not his true perspective and the lens is not his own. A writer provides a personal perspective, without the bias there’s nothing. DFW pushed it as far as he could, but its strength is in the lens he used (like JOI movies). In the end he is “aware” that his lens is crippled, in a way, but you can’t fix it by trying to exit it. He has, essentially, only his own head. He can say relevant things as long he’s in there, self-aware, but not trying to pretend being elsewhere. And the strength of IJ is more in its stark honesty than in its functional intention.
Like I mentioned in the reply below, I don’t think I did a good job keeping to two tangents of my critique discreet. I do think it’s clear that assembled all the ritual and reliquary of his ingroup in an attempt to deliver a black mass, and I also think it’s clear that his ingroup saw it as a confirmation of their values and an affirmation of their identities – a holy sabbath – and to this extent I think he decisively failed (just as I have in my work, only in an inverted way). As far as the personal goes, his characters – almost without exception – felt contrived. I’m not so sure DFW was searching for ‘redemption’ so much as success, and I’m not so sure the ingroup/outgroup divide is as stark as you make it: he wasn’t doomed to fail before he started, he was simply too esoteric. With IJ, he out performs his fellow ingroup performers, which is why they lifted him on their shoulders and carried him to the Show – but I’m not convinced this necessitated him convoluting and baffling his critique to such an extent that it could not only be overlooked entirely, but transformed into a tonic for the very self-aggrandizing norms that so worried him. (In a sense, this is the nub of the argument against me when it comes to the question of feminism in my books. My only defense, really, is that I’m not done yet!)
You make “stark honesty” sound like an intrinsic feature of the text – which I don’t understand. I appreciate that it characterized your reading. He still came off as a young tourist to me. The Enfield characters where supposed to come across as hollow, I get that. But I think he really wanted the Ennet House characters to resonant with a contrary (and ultimately critical) pathos, which simply did not happen (for me). I think it was jam packed with artificiality and class prurience, caricatures for the edification of well-heeled peers. I can go on and on why I think I had this reading – but ulitimately (and I think this comes across in his interviews) he was most concerned with making everything ‘interesting’ in the very specific, intellectual sense with which literary specialists use this term. I feel as though I wage battle (and often lose) against this urge in my writing all the time. Reading IJ, I decided that DFW really wasn’t fighting at all, which contributed to the almost universal misreading of his ‘intentions’ by his peers. He was the son of a university philosophy professor in the end.
Nah, i disagree there.
You make it seem as if DFW is 100% absorbed by the audience he’s writing to and the way the book will be perceived (and it seems a bit too convenient for the point you want to make, by assuming so). I just don’t believe this perspective. The visceral feel I get is that he speaks to the ingroup as far he IS the group, one mere consequence of the other. The dialogue and self-doubt is internal, and the journey a personal one. You see it whole as a “function”, as what it can achieve, the way it can impact and the success it can deliver. I see it instead as a desperate work of a broken person who’s trying to carry on.
The cultural “success” of IJ the book is irrelevant. I really don’t care the way he or the book is perceived on a general level, and I don’t think that IJ was written with a functional purpose targeted on the outside. It’s stuff outside his control and it’s unfair to judge his work because of it.
In the end I speak for myself and can say that the book reached me emotionally and was honestly touching on a personal level (and, oh, what a great experience reading it). It gave a sense of achievement finishing it, but I don’t consider myself a better guy because I can read and appreciate the book, feeling on top of other idiots who are below me. Quite the contrary, I always recommend the book because I hope people will find in it the same things I did, and if they don’t I’m sad because I can’t share. But there’s very little of “status satisfaction” or exclusivity involved. The book is a gift that you aren’t forced to receive or appreciate.
The failure you see in the book appears to me as conveniently fabricated (and so the failure as the result of goals that YOU set and that DFW didn’t). You define contrived what I recognize as honest, remote what I consider direct. It’s true for example that all the kids at Enfield are “implausibly intellectual”. I’m probably writing something very trite here, but DFW is all his characters and so his characters aren’t strictly realistic and true: they don’t try to be (and he wasn’t trying to write them that way)! The same way his description of the setting is a caricature like a theme park. It’s internal landscape, he describes the world seen from his lens. The sense of truthfulness is not in adhering to reality outside, but to the internal, personal one. Which is why his characters aren’t viscerally realistic (while also clinging desperately to HIS stark truth, they aren’t wish-fulfillment fantasy).
I mean, I LOVE all the characters in there but I NEVER got the impression that the book chased “realism”, or tried to portray factual, objective reality. So the intellectual implausibility of the kids was, for me, definitely not an unwanted effect of a writing shortcoming. DFW never fought against that, and it was never his purpose doing it (and, I add, he wouldn’t have achieved anything worthwhile doing it).
Maybe that’s the disconnection between you and him. You perceive communication like a kind of trick or deception. You infiltrate it in order to disrupt it. But it’s your own intent that I don’t think DFW shared. Your and his pattern are the same (in self-awareness and criticism), the final purpose is different. And you seem to judge his work by your own stick/purpose. I mean: IJ is not intended as a terrorist attack on the status quo. But you seem to criticize it on the fact you didn’t see the fires.
Yes, probably DFW was a kindred soul, shared a lot of the background and sensibilities, but he wasn’t set on the same mission.
Hey, maybe he arrived first, and you can arrive big.
I think the interviews cut against your interpretation here. At different junctures, he confesses the extent and locus of his ambition – that he’s writing a kind of ‘cavier’ for a very particular palette.
“I see it instead as a desperate work of a broken person who’s trying to carry on” – I’m not sure this is incompatible with anything I’ve said.
“The cultural “success” of IJ the book is irrelevant. I really don’t care the way he or the book is perceived on a general level, and I don’t think that IJ was written with a functional purpose targeted on the outside. It’s stuff outside his control and it’s unfair to judge his work because of it.” Irrelevant to your personal interests? I get that. Not written with a functional purpose? Again, the interviews shout otherwise. But more generally, I find the whole ‘private language game’ approach to literature to be, well, conceptually convenient. It is communication we’re talking about here, and I just don’t know how to make sense of communication outside considerations of social function.
Otherwise, you’re the one who invoked ‘honesty,’ Abe! Honesty to what? The ‘real’? The ‘human condition’? All I said is that a kind of intellectual dishonesty taints all of his characters – even the one’s he seems to pitch as ‘compassionate.’ Are you saying he wasn’t trying to be ‘honest’? Personally, I think the ‘trying’ ultimately got in the way. As he says in his interviews, he wanted to pose the ‘truth’ of the AA against the pomo sensibilities of his caviar eating audience. I’m saying he ultimately ended up catering to those sensibilities instead. I think this is obviously problematic, don’t you?
I don’t perceive communication as ‘trickery’ at all (though trickery is often a component of communication). What I don’t share with DFW is his point of origin (or his talent, for that matter). His mistake was that he thought he could work his way out from the inside, whereas mine has been to think I could work my way in from the outside. Otherwise, many of the concerns he expresses in his interviews only hazily approximate my own. What we share is the worry that modernity is re-tribalizing culture along different, ultimately destructive lines, so that you ‘either’ find yourself pinched (as you and I do) at the interstices of largely incommensurable language games, or innured and blinded within. My simple argument is simply: literature happens most frequently when fiction attempts to reach out as opposed to reaching in. It shouldn’t take something as extreme as AA or Ennet House to deliver us to each other.
The consequences for culture are very real. Intellectualism has become antagonistic social marker, particularly in the US, and I think you could argue that it won GWB both of his elections. In the 90’s, you could have these concerns yet still pretend that the lines of communication were robust enough, the competing ingroups porous enough, to argue that the status quo only required tweaking. I don’t think so, which is why I want to see literary culture burned to the ground, the specialists cast out into the communities that make them possible. I know this makes me sound like a manque more often than not, but all I can hope is my writing will prove otherwise, eventually. Otherwise, how can anyone argue against as a social authority gradient that prioritizes the cultural ubiquity of literature, one that embraces and celebrates all genres of cultural production? How on earth can all these ingroup pigeonholes be a good thing? especially given the crazy futures lurking on the horizon.
DFW most certainly wanted IJ to be attack on the status quo, just not in terms as specific or as dramatic as these.
“But I think he really wanted the Ennet House characters to resonant with a contrary (and ultimately critical) pathos, which simply did not happen (for me). I think it was jam packed with artificiality and class prurience, caricatures for the edification of well-heeled peers. I can go on and on why I think I had this reading – but ulitimately (and I think this comes across in his interviews) he was most concerned with making everything ‘interesting’ in the very specific, intellectual sense with which literary specialists use this term.”
That part. You know what it directly reminds me?
Countless discussion with those who criticize Erikson because he uses too much magic and absurd stuff that in the end disrupts the “pathos” he strives for (and so all the claims of unrealistic characters, cardboard cutouts and cliche). That it reads like a D&D fanfiction of overpowered characters that just can’t be taken seriously, and that it was always written to groom that kind of audience and expectations.
And many say that if he dropped all that ballast and decoration he could have written something decent. Or the other: drop all pretense of “seriousness” and drama and just write something fun without all the philosophical and bleak drivel.
In my own work I’m continually interested and amazed and dumbfounded by the way various tropes and tactics fracture audiences. But the fact is, SE is enormously successful at reaching a very eclectic audience: so much so that I’m inclined to see these debates as a kind of proof that he’s anything but ‘another entertainer’ (something which I have no problem with, actually).
Another aspect:
When writing to Bakker I always feel like writing to someone who’s ahead of me and so I have the suspicion that everything I wrote above he already considered, but I can agree, understand, or see the perspective of everything he wrote here as well. The part where I really “disagree” is where he says the book is tedious and filled with trivial detail (or that he only experienced miniature joy, but that’s subjective).
I’m convinced that the only “noise” that can be found in the book is the one shaped by the reader in order to reduce the complexity. Stuff that you label as “trivial detail” in order to focus on other aspects you care about at the moment. DWF described the book as fractal, which is fitting. Every little loop in that fractal isn’t superfluous, but an essential part of the system.
As it was pointed out, all the setting of the book has a function. I’d consider trivial detail descriptions or ideas that are unhinged or unlinked from the rest, but in this book every tiny detail is perfectly linked, and is never superficial. As in the fractal, the smallest shape both builds and returns in the bigger one. DFW said that the book suffered from the fact that many parts were cut, and some of that work happened outside his control, so the fractal isn’t as “perfect” as he conceived it, or strove for. But I don’t think it should be labeled as “trivial”.
He’s also said that it would be a lie to say that everything is a tessera, a piece in some grand design – that much of it is noise, which he finds himself imposing intention on after the fact. And he’s said that the book probably should have been trimmed more.
Part of the wonder of the book is how the ‘postmodern’ cloud he begins with is winnowed into narrative or ‘quasi-narrative’ significance: the book felt like a funnel to me. But the vast bulk of the material is textural or simply iterative.
I’m not seeing it that way. My only reference (beside my own experience) is this:
http://web.archive.org/web/20040606041906/www.andbutso.com/~mark/bookworm96/
While it’s not all preplanned and controlled, it still not random or noise:
I mean I don’t sit down to try to, “Oh, let’s see: what — how can I find a suitable structural synecdoche for experience right now?” It’s more a matter of kind of whether it tastes true or not.
And Michael Pietsche, the editor, said — I think that he got like the first four hundred pages — and he said it seemed to him like a piece of glass that had been dropped from a great height. And that was the first time that anybody had ever conceptualized what was to me just a certain structural representation of the way the world kind of operated on my nerve endings, which was as a bunch of discrete random bits, but which contained within them, not always all that blatantly, very interesting connections.
And it wasn’t clear whether the connections were my own imagination, or were crazy, or whether they were real, and what were important and what weren’t. And so I mean a lot of the structure in there is kind of seat-of-the-pants, what kind of felt true to me and what didn’t.
Which may reinforce the idea that not everything is a deliberate piece. But he also says:
I worked harder on this than anything I’ve ever done in my life and there’s nothing in there by accident and there have already been some readers and reviewers that see it as kind of a mess, and as kind of random, and I just have to sort of shrug my shoulders.
There’s NOTHING in there by accident. So what you say he says about random pieces/noise are not part of the “book”, but part of the WRITING of the book. Of the journey before the finished thing. Of the grasping of meaning, and search for authenticity that will always involve fumbling.
Also read the rest if you haven’t because I think you’ll find it kind of interesting. For example:
I think a lot of the avant-garde has forgotten that part of its job is to seduce the reader into being willing to do the hard work
Anyway, arguing by quoting interviews as a kind of authorial backup is kind of silly. My point is that what Wallace explains here is both the gut and intellectual feeling I got from reading the book first hand and without directions. You say the vast bulk of material is texture, and for me that claim is entirely absurd (based on my own experience).
But again, why the yardstick? It still seems to me you are judging DFW work by your own goals. I am GRATEFUL for his work, as I’m grateful for yours. I don’t need to define a superiority of one on the other. Nor they have to agree or be measured on a functional purpose and their impact on Culture. I actually DO believe in genres and their use. If anything I’m against prioritization, as in establishing the one relevant and the one that isn’t.
So I kind of understand your arguments but I find them (some of them) far from my own experience.
Silverblatt also says something that I feel as well:
Well, the pleasure about the book, Infinite Jest, is that it does feel like a book that invites the beginning of a conversation, that the book is long enough, involved enough, rich enough, deep enough, and moving enough to begin to feel like a dialogue. That you could go back and talk to the book in the form of reading it again.
Why any yardstick? DFW seems to be waving them around – as do you… As for DFW labouriously sweating every detail making sure it had it’s place… It’s an authorial myth, exercising that control, and he knows it, which is likely why he contradicts himself elsewhere. Otherwise I’m still not clear exactly what you’re criticizing in my review.
And, for god’s sake, you were the one who said:
I still think there’s too much unmotivated interiority in The Prince of Nothing, points where I wallow in this or that perspective for the sake of exploring this or that nuance of character–nuances, which, frankly, strike all but the most careful readers as bald repetition.
So you should know that where a reader sees just repetition or noise there could be MUCH more. Or that if something doesn’t say anything of value to you then it doesn’t necessarily mean that it has NOTHING to say at all.
Nuances in IJ are important, as the book hasn’t just a linear, simple message. It is a dialogue and it is articulated. That complexity isn’t for its own sake, but in service to the rest.
But I can well understand that with so much noise as you say one would find it soporific.
In that quote, you fail to recognize that I`m the reader`s side, so I`m not sure it bolsters your case. Sometimes noise is the point. Do you really think every little detail has some kind of meticulously mapped out articulated semantic function ascribed to it by DFW, or do you think he`s making a point about how fact-excessive and noisy our culture is? The former strikes me as very implausible. I didn`t like the noise so much because I think noise is an old and tired point, for one, and that he had many other ways of making it.
Here`s a question: whose reading do you think DFW would have found more problematic, mine or yours? I`m not saying there`s any answer to this, only that the difficulty answering it says something about the kind of image you`re painting of what he – as far as I can tell – often thought was a flawed book.
Otherwise, how did this book challenge you? Did you find it arguing for you, or against you? Whatever the difference between Entertainment and Literature is, I think it has something to do with this distinction.
Do you really think every little detail has some kind of meticulously mapped out articulated semantic function ascribed to it by DFW, or do you think he`s making a point about how fact-excessive and noisy our culture is? The former strikes me as very implausible.
Huh, I’m not following you. For me the former is obvious and neither surprising nor exceptional.
Writing is not like taking a picture, where you may be interested in an element but still capture lots of stuff around it. The act of writing is, usually, deliberate. If you describe a room you operate a selection and put on the page that part of the observation that you deem as meaningful (which is essentially THE act of putting meaning into things, since the meaning is not there on its own).
Observing already IS a selection. You could fill 100 pages describing a single room and still missing lots of stuff, and different people looking at it would see it their own way. DFW writing style has an aspect of “maximalism”, but it’s not “stream of consciousness”, where the focus is the flow. Maybe it’s the opposite (and it’s more obvious in the short stories), where time slows down and almost freezes. Because EVERYTHING is truly relevant.
Take Pynchon and the way he LOADS his texts with obscure cultural references. Without a guide I take 2% of them, the rest is noise. But it is noise for *me* and I’m certain that Pynchon put them there deliberately. If one puts effort into it and digs he’ll find plenty of stuff that is relevant and links on all thematic levels. One could say it’s really not worth the effort, or that it’s just a cold intellectual exercise. But that kind of effort WAS put into the book. Those words aren’t “random” or superfluous in a structural way.
The same can be said for DFW. He was one of those who rewrote stuff obsessively, you can imagine that if a word was left unchanged it was because he thought it thoroughly, second-guessed it to the extreme. In fact this is what usually turns off people, that the text and ideas are convoluted and that the effort of extricating them is not worth it.
So IT IS laborious, but because it is too dense, and not because it is shallow or diluted. Which I imagine you should know very well (and playing games with me, I guess). And it’s not weird as I feel the same way about your work. Are there random/noise parts in Disciple of the Dog? It doesn’t seems so to me, it’s written quite tightly.
It’s not a case that writing takes A LOT more time than reading. The reader will only take a fraction of what’s there. Communication is always extremely lossy. But there’s still plenty of relevant stuff in a deliberate message. You never know how much will pass, you can only try to reach.
Literature and entertainment are semantic problems. I read IJ on my own will, replying here to you on my own will, so it is “entertainment” in a way. I judge the discussion worthwhile to have and so decide for it. If I have to draw a line, it’s between entertainment and everything else. So “literature” is characterized by “effort”.
IJ is certainly an effort (you say it’s laborious). You can’t read it if you are tired or sleepy, you can’t read it absentmindedly. I agree with that quote: “to seduce the reader into being willing to do the hard work”.
IJ made me believe that the heavy work was worthwhile. I don’t care if this makes it “literature”, but it makes it worthwhile for me. It made me think long and hard, and in the end I don’t feel like I’ve wasted my time. I think the book is a treasure. Usually “entertainment” is “easier” and requires less effort and dedication. Stays less with you and you don’t have to dig as what you need is mostly on the surface. You can have “entertainment” even after a day of hard work and you are very tired at home.
Is IJ “antagonistic”? In certain ways it is, as reading IJ didn’t simply “confirm” ideas I already had or felt myself flattered through it. It wasn’t redundant for me that way.
But I’m not sure that I share this perspective of yours: that something is truly worthwhile only if it’s antagonistic, hostile and threatening. You certainly rise the stakes that way, but it’s as if you’re saying that everything below that level is erased.
We’re obviously at cross-purposes here. I’m not sure where you’re reading things like ‘shallow’ and ‘random’ into my criticisms, or that “something is worthwhile only if it’s antagonistic.” Regarding the former, part of the problem I think has to do with our basic understanding of the writing process. I obsessively rework and rewrite, layer in detail after detail, and I have many, many ideas floating through my bean as I do so – but what I don’t assume (and would be truly amazed if DFW assumed) is that this is ‘deliberate’ or analytical or anything other than the soupy, hazy, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants exercise that it is. Many times, you forget or out and out mistake your original intent while rewriting (or just plain change your ever-fucking-fickle mind), so that you end up with crazy hybridizations, things you don’t understand, but you like. Many times, the amount of work you put into the text actually diminishes the sum of deliberate meaning.
So I think you’re giving DFW both too much credit – and too little. The ‘fit’ is a gestalt thing, not a puzzle box thing, save for those focal elements that find themselves worked and worked. All I’m saying that noise was his point. As was iteration. As was whimsy. I’m sorry, but I think this is obvious.
Ease and entertainment are no more synonymous than difficulty and literature – I actually think this is one of the more damaging equivocations you find in literary culture. A good way to look at ‘literature’ (understood nonformally, which is to say, not according to resemblances) is as a special kind of communication, one that manages to remain stable while cutting against trust calibration and background consistency conditions typically required for stability. A kind of identity and belief challenging instability (which is different than patience testing and comprehension defeating!). Since these are reader relative, literature is reader relative. What literary types like to do is take works that are – for them – very stable (belief confirming, identity affirming), then judge them against the yardstick of readers (Ideal Philistines) for whom they would be unstable, were they to read them (which they almost never do). This is why I think IJ pretty much amounts to ingroup entertainment.
Well, fine, let’s disagree 😉
1- Yep, I’m still persuaded that DFW convoluted writing is deliberate and dense with meaning. From reading it I get that feeling of “anxiety control” or awareness that for example is also very evident in that famous commencement speech DFW gave. It’s a kind of impossible type of control, as it can’t reach the totality. It’s a delusion. But it becomes more possible in a world you create and control (writing). Even there I don’t believe he had 100% control, but the analytical mind was always there. I can feel it (and he both fought and nourished it).
2- You say that DFW “maximalistic” writing style is simply an intent of mimicking “how fact-excessive and noisy our culture is”. I don’t agree. All DFW stuff is like that and you can find it even in his interviews. He thinks like that, a mind that tries to overreach. But in general maximalism isn’t an attempt to mimic noise (that would be indeed shallow), but an attempt to include all relevant stuff within, and then close the system. Make the book a world with its perfect internal rules. Or, the way I see it, it’s a way to mimic the meaningful complexity, and NOT the useless noise. The noise is the point in the sense that it hides the meaning within. Maximalism is not garbage collection.
3- It’s still semantic. And I’m thinking you’re better off creating a new term, because I seriously doubt that your idea of “literature” is going to become more conventional or immediately grasped. I get the whole background you come from, but you seem to stay too much on the word, when the word is in service of its practical use. So, stable or fluid, it simply depends what’s your point in using it. I understand that by this definition IJ isn’t “literature enough” for you, I disagree on the fact that the one you set was his goal.
Aside from (1), I’m just not sure what we’re disagreeing about, Abalieno! Are you?
(1) From The Boston Phoenix interview: “You do what you do, and then afterwards you think up why you did it, so there’s an element of bullshit about any explanation.” This is authorial (as well as empirical) honesty. Given this, I can’t make heads or tails of what you’re saying. Percentages? Percentages of what? What you’re ‘seeing’ belongs as much to your brain as his, don’t you think? I guarantee you that DFW would confess that the book means different things to him at different times! Or that he catches himself making inconsistent claims. Or that this or that detail just ‘felt right at the time,’ but not anymore. I say this because he seems to possess epistemic humility in spades, and all of us – as a matter of empirical fact – suffer these (many, many other) foibles.
(2) You seem to be using a pretty conventional (and metaphysical) representationalist notion of meaning, here, like it’s something that actually exists outside of brains. As a result, you talk as though Infinite Jest were a kind of container filled with all these wonderful things that DFW put in there and that I’m missing – that there’s a ‘semantic fact of the matter.’ Step back from this, and I think what you’re saying looks a lot more like what I’m saying: that Infinite Jest is something that DFW is attempting to do to others. Something social. Something communicative. Something necessarily messy and treacherous as a result. Since this book is about communication and society, I think the question of whether it avoids or runs afoul its own critique is, well, obvious. And I still can’t find anything in your criticisms that engages this. I apologize for my prevailing tone of puzzlement, but we are most definitely talking cross purposes, and this strikes me as a likely reason why.
(3) I don’t think the transition of looking at literature according to what it does instead of what it resembles is either revolutionary or difficult. The word has suffered and enjoyed many a swing in historical meaning. The big question I have, is why you think it should be judged according to what it resembles?
I’ll focus on (3) because for the rest I feel I’m going in circles.
Literature the way you intend it is not intuitive as one thinks that literature is a kind of permanent status. The Ulysses is literature today as it will be literature 100 years from now (one expects it to be). And in a similar way, you’d recognize something as “literature” even before it’s pushed in the wider world, before you can see the way it is received on both the short and longer term. So, usually, literature as an air of timelessness about it. Literature is the whimsy ideal of immortality (of the author, leaving something of himself for the ages).
On a similar level, if you want to push things that way, I believe that the totality of experience happens in the mind, and the mind is made of language. So the totality of possible experience is comprised in language. Which makes possible the idea that a written world is a thing on its own, with life on its own and with its own rules. Completely closed and independent and “real”.
If now you decide that literature is about what it does, then it completely depends on its effects. So it’s a changing definition. It becomes volatile and subjective (to the whims of times).
If you put literature against entertainment, then I tend to focus on entertainment, since “literature” is more blurry in my mind. So I tend to define literature as opposite of entertainment, and so I tell you that literature requires “effort”, whereas entertainment works on the surface level and is shallower.
For what YOU intend to do, literature HAS to have that specific meaning. Because that’s your focus, and, in my opinion, you wrongly criticized IJ because you caged it within that specific vision. While I think IJ does that, but not as its only and all encompassing goal. It’s not that single-minded.
That said, you (writer) are interested in the way IJ was received as it may relate to the stuff you intend to write and the way you expect it will be received. This kind of statistical impact is something that, I suspect, only interests you specifically, being a writer. Because the “readers” in general couldn’t care less the impact that a book has outside their own experience. The book either works for me or not. It’s a failure for me or not. The value is to be found in a specific case and not in a statistic representation.
So, in general, I couldn’t care less about what IJ did to “literature”. And I’ll never define IJ a “failure” based on what it did to literature. I’ll judge it a failure or success based on my own experience with it. The goals it set and those that reached, limited to my own experience.
What would happen if you read IJ right as it came out, before you could prop your thesis with links to other reviewers’ reactions?
“Literature the way you intend it is not intuitive as one thinks that literature is a kind of permanent status. The Ulysses is literature today as it will be literature 100 years from now (one expects it to be). And in a similar way, you’d recognize something as “literature” even before it’s pushed in the wider world, before you can see the way it is received on both the short and longer term. So, usually, literature as an air of timelessness about it. Literature is the whimsy ideal of immortality (of the author, leaving something of himself for the ages).”
Posterity, huh. The singularity (or whatever you want to call it) is about to make short work of that.
So the meaning kind of hangs in this timeless realm somewhere? How about writers pinching piles of code that strike readers this way and that over the course of centuries. Some get ‘canonized,’ which is to say, swaddled in social decoding strictures (‘there’s something wrong with you if you don’t recognize x’), and as such tend to occasion a higher frequency of ‘literary’ readings for students and the like.
“On a similar level, if you want to push things that way, I believe that the totality of experience happens in the mind, and the mind is made of language. So the totality of possible experience is comprised in language. Which makes possible the idea that a written world is a thing on its own, with life on its own and with its own rules. Completely closed and independent and “real”.”
This smells like Luhman. Any time you see the phrase ‘totality of possible x’ it’s time to crinkle your nose. Here’s an empirical fact: a mere trickle of the information processed by our brains finds its way to conscious experience, aka, the Mind. This means (best case scenario) that our concepts are horrifically synoptic, certainly too much to warrant any exclusive commitment to this or that system/assembly outside the natural sciences – notwithstanding our myriad cognitive shortcomings otherwise (as typified in this list). Language is a great example: we only experience a mere fraction of it.
This is why I’m so suspicious of formalisms. Once I bought into the idea that we instrumentalize ‘theory’ for social reasons, on the one hand, I began to see formalisms as potential social ploys, ways to secure ingroup prestige, cognitive rights to given domains, tenure, and so on. On the other hand, once I realized that humans (as a matter of empirical fact) are theoretical incompetents, I decided to err on the side of people.
All these ‘structures’ and ‘forms’ and ‘rules,’ I now think are little more than heuristics, useful ways to talk about certain things, but very problematic if taken too seriously. ‘Rules’ don’t hang out there in some magical phase space, they’re simply a convenient way for us to generalize over the real expectations of real readers with real personal histories. But as soon as you grant them ontological autonomy, you can conveniently cover up all the real world implications of your domain, and tinker with it as if it were some kind of ideal machine. I think contemporary economics is a frightening example of what happens we start confusing our (incredibly simplistic) theoretical notations for the super-complexities of the real thing.
“If now you decide that literature is about what it does, then it completely depends on its effects. So it’s a changing definition. It becomes volatile and subjective (to the whims of times).”
And this is a problem because…? And if it isn’t a product of our brains, then what is it? If it’s something independent, how do our brains access it? And why, given all that we now know about human cognition, could (let alone should) we even begin to trust this access? The problem isn’t just the spookiness, it’s also one of cognizing this spookiness. The dilemma is both ontological and epistemological.
The cartoon I’ve fastened onto is simply this: books are heaps of code that initiate storms of processes in my brain of which I experience a mere sliver. Most code reinforces the way my brain processes information, whereas some code, rarely, transforms it. I tend to experience the latter as ‘literature’ those times I’m conscious of the transformation.
“If you put literature against entertainment, then I tend to focus on entertainment, since “literature” is more blurry in my mind. So I tend to define literature as opposite of entertainment, and so I tell you that literature requires “effort”, whereas entertainment works on the surface level and is shallower.”
‘Surface level’ and ‘shallow’ are great examples of two words I once thought I understood and now think I had no bloody clue what I was talking about. Entertainment is more prone to engage our implicit assumptions, to confirm and affirm, but there’s nothing ‘superficial’ about this. I think more ‘simplistic’ and ‘sycophantic’ are the terms I would use. My complaint against IJ is that it is the latter: it’s a book ultimately designed to gratify the expectations and sensibilities of ingroup specialists.
“For what YOU intend to do, literature HAS to have that specific meaning. Because that’s your focus, and, in my opinion, you wrongly criticized IJ because you caged it within that specific vision. While I think IJ does that, but not as its only and all encompassing goal. It’s not that single-minded.”
How is your positive evaluation any less bound to your particular understanding? ‘You wrongly praised it because you caged it in your specific vision.’ Otherwise, I nowhere stated that my review was in any way shape or form ‘exhaustive’ – the whole blog is devoted to pricking holes in this illusion!
“That said, you (writer) are interested in the way IJ was received as it may relate to the stuff you intend to write and the way you expect it will be received. This kind of statistical impact is something that, I suspect, only interests you specifically, being a writer. Because the “readers” in general couldn’t care less the impact that a book has outside their own experience. The book either works for me or not. It’s a failure for me or not. The value is to be found in a specific case and not in a statistic representation.”
Actually, you’re likely wrong about ‘readers in general.’ Research in ‘music appreciation,’ for instance, suggests that social proof is the single biggest factor determining which music people like. I think it’s fair to guess that our literary evaluations are pretty similar (thus all the blurbs). Social considerations play a tremendous, and quite often unconscious, role in our explicit evaluations – which we then tend to rationalize post hoc, unto confabulation in many cases. There’s some dismaying research out there.
“So, in general, I couldn’t care less about what IJ did to “literature”. And I’ll never define IJ a “failure” based on what it did to literature. I’ll judge it a failure or success based on my own experience with it. The goals it set and those that reached, limited to my own experience.”
Then what’s the argument between us? Otherwise, I would just suggest that you are every bit as susceptible to the considerations I’m raising here as everyone else. That far from being sealed in a monadic relationship with IJ, you found yourself participating in a thoroughly social exercise, one engaging all your social wiring and experience (and as such should be interested in them insofar as you’re interested in being self-critical).
That said, if you reread my review, you’ll see that I was as explicit as could be about the point and approach of my review.
“What would happen if you read IJ right as it came out, before you could prop your thesis with links to other reviewers’ reactions?”
I probably would have hated it through and through, since in the mid to late nineties I had come to despise postmodern fiction (even as I had come to love post-structuralism). Everything I read simply seemed to explore twists on the same tired formal points.
This is why I’m so suspicious of formalisms.
I’m not a formalist. I’m more a constructivist. Or as far I understand these terms. I’m not academia, I know this stuff in very broad strokes and I’m not really able to sustain a complex conversation on this. I barely know where to “hang” certain ideas and their basis. If you check this blog post of mine you can see where my train of thoughts currently is: http://loopingworld.com/2011/09/27/beyond-post-modernism/
Maybe there are some ideas in there you consider interesting. Luhmann and Wittgenstein I tend to interpret in the wake of constructivism.
I don’t believe in your theory of social purposes leading everything as a omnipresent form of hypocrisy. It sounds like a waste of energy.
If conscious experience is a trickle: it’s still what we have. Or you are saying we have a lot more to use? In the same way you say that nothing out there “exists”, I say that we only have what’s on this side. You can’t whine because you aren’t given enough. A trickle is still EVERYTHING. And so Luhmann: observations can only exist within the system as self-observations, self-referential, autopoiesis and all the rest.
But the more we complicate this discussion and the more I’m lost because your stuff is mapped on a system that I don’t know. You are radical in your views but I don’t have that “frame” to hand them on. So I guess the discussion can only become divergent.
‘Rules’ don’t hang out there in some magical phase space, they’re simply a convenient way for us to generalize over the real expectations of real readers with real personal histories.
And this is interesting because the book by Ernst von Glasersfeld “Radical Constructivism” (that I was reading in Google Books) begins with his personal biography, since he says his theories wouldn’t be founded otherwise. So it’s a method that is built from that premise.
But then constructivism is heavily “formal” and precise.
(I’m also reminded of this piece of Von Foerster where he criticized Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” because he “published” his thoughts for the others, and so that line is meant communicatively for “others” as well. Becoming: “I think, therefore we are”. And he says: “in its appearance, the self-referential nature of language generates the consciousness of the self; but in its function, in including the other, language is the origin of conscience.”)
I’m also lost when you say that we only experience a fraction of language since language is artificial/digital and it’s not “out there”. It’s the stuff that WE CAN know with some certainty.
(also, on “concepts being synoptic”: that’s the POWER of the mind. Not truth, but an useful tool to frame it. See the game of GO.)
(also, von Foerster plays with and overturn your “Darkness That Comes Before”. He says: “Is the world the primary cause and my experience its consequence, or my experience is the primary cause and the world its consequence?” And then: “Many are convinced that it’s the world to be the primary cause of experience, and refer to said experience believing they’re talking of the world, they have been seduced by the persuasive appearance of language: their speaking is a monologue. They are those who believe to be separated from the universe, that they observe in its unveiling.”
And then he goes full Kellhus mode (but without superpowers):
“When I ask myself: ‘Is my experience the primary cause and the world its consequence?’ I answer: ‘Sure!’, therefore I decide here and now not only what the world should become, but also who I will be. I’ve taken this position as it ties my actions to my responsibilities.”)
Not sure where this all leads and you are more suited than me to make sense of it or dismiss it. I only wonder: why are you certain that the right thing to do is to row in the contrary direction?
This is the weird sense of antagonism I perceive. You want to take down the house and I’m not sure: why the house is so bad, and how you think it should be built.
One usually takes down things to prepare for something else.
And as you can see, this discussion is about your stuff. IJ touches on some aspects of it, only overlaps here and there. It’s worthwhile to discuss all this, but I simply don’t agree that it determines IJ as failure or success.
On ‘You wrongly praised it because you caged it in your specific vision.’ I tend to find utility in people who find things more than people who find nothing and are blind. A critical review is interesting when well articulated. But I’m usually interested to find and feel the same things that the hugest fans find and feel. It’s THEM telling me something interesting. It’s THEIR experience that I want to share. It’s the presence of value that has an higher priority than the absence of it.
As with “genre”. Things have value within their niche and I find that value after carving my way in. From the outside people dismiss “fantasy”, but from the inside you see how much good stuff is in there. Maybe I’m weird because I don’t find my identity in a niche and swap them constantly. I want to be in all niches. Which, I guess, in the end is just a glorified way to say I’m not sated and trying to find pleasure in every field possible, maximizing it and adapting my mouth and taste to all types of spoons. What does this tell about me?
I guess plenty on nasty things. But at least it made me someone without prejudices, who isn’t easily grossed or outraged and who is rather tolerant.
I appreciate all this. Just appreciate that the constructivist sensibility you’re taking as your baseline was once every bit as radical and ‘odd sounding’ when it first came into vogue. Let me begin with a question: Where does all this ‘construction’ take place? Wittgenstein, btw, is quite clearly a contextualist, not a constructivist.
Why do I think reforming literary culture is important? In the shadow of the singularity, I think we need as critical a culture as possible. Somehow we’ve managed to devise a network of institutions that are bent on shunting as much criticality away from mainstream culture and at itself as possible – and then blame that culture for its lack of criticality. The internet, with it’s genius for bringing likeminded people together, I fear is simply making things worse. Check out the Future of Lit article in the essay.
As for hypocrisy and my apparent pessimism regarding human nature, I recommend you check out You Are Not So Smart on the blogroll. It’s realism, I’m afraid.
But now that I’m seriously curious you can’t cut it like that 😉
This stops being about IJ as it goes on another level. But even back to IJ, this conversation reveals the oddity of your critics. Most of it (the conversation) was about clarifying the semantics through which you defined “failure”, or my own, like the way I consider “noise” or “connectedness”.
This discussion on semantics reveals WHY I think IJ is a masterpiece. You basically told me: “your idea that everything in IJ is connected and meaningful is a lie, as it’s just impossible to achieve”. You say it’s impossible in all cases including this one.
So, for me, IJ is a masterpiece accordingly to my experience, and in comparison to other stuff I read. It’s a relative judgement. So my instinct, when you say that IJ isn’t quite revolutionary and isn’t literature enough is: “what’s better, or more?”
What’s in your opinion a work that is deeper, more interconnected and dense with meaning? What’s the scale you measure IJ with, and what are the other works that you believe surpass it?
That’s why I just cannot be convinced that the “elegant complexity” of IJ is not there. That there are so many connections everywhere to form a staggering whole that is a delight to explore and feel never ending. You can argue my semantics here, demonstrate me it’s not so perfect as I see it, but where’s the alternative that surpasses it? The alternative that makes you say this isn’t AS good AS?
But let’s draw a line there since it’s the aspect that is less interesting for me now, care to explain YOUR point of view? I’m referring to that article on Math and russian dolls. That’s so dense and technical that in many cases it’s downright ambiguous for me, and not in a good way since I simply don’t understand the phrases.
I’m less interested in literature and more about the “frame” you hang literature on. So whatever you say about literature depends on your vision of the whole. So that’s the part that is interesting.
My position to judge from the distance yours is still relatively “secure”. It seems to me that your point of view is detrimental. Every dialogue and every theory is a self-serving game, so you start from the premise it all LEADS to a delusion and a joke (that by the way is all exquisitely post-modern, as it is about the mocking of rules). If conscious thought is a crippled, disabled fragment, then you have no hope of obtaining any control. Even trying to do it would be vain. So why the effort? Why going against the flow if you /technically/ have no chance? Why antagonism against fate?
There’s the part of mathematics that I want you to explain more because I’m not sure I grasp it. Saying that “we make mathematics happen” appears to me as a quite revolutionary idea. But in that article it seems that it’s THAT ONE the idea you are fighting against. As if you’re saying that we grasp so little of what we are that saying that “we will” anything consciously is a huge delusion.
But saying that you imply that mathematics is once again “objective” and “real”. Intending “objective” = not dependent on mine or your intention. So “external”, somewhat constant and independent. Maybe not reliable, but the best anchor we have.
But it doesn’t stop there as you imply that there’s nothing out there, including math, but math is “projected” from a structure that is still internal but outside our control: the thalamocortical system. Is math, in your idea, the “shadow” of that system?
So, let’s be clear, are you implying that math is the image of god?
Because that’s what you are saying if I read you correctly. There are only two possibilities. Either the the thalamocortical system is the result of random evolution, or there’s a willed intention that lead it with a sense of purpose (god or whatever).
In the first case you’re better off sticking your head back into the ground. Because, huh, it’s ugly, and it doesn’t get better if you look outside. Let’s stay cozy in the shared illusion and participatory universe.
In the second case you are the will of the god, and there’s an “intention” why you are built so limited and “lacking”.
Can we continue this discussion?
I’m saying that IJ is ultimately an ingroup exercise, written by specialists for specialists – and a tremendously successful one at that. I’m also saying that ingroup communicative success does not literature make, and that appeals to ingroup cultural authority are vacuous. I’m saying that IJ is an particularly poignant example of a social institutional failure (literary insularity) because it is, in many respects, about this very social institutional failure. You never actually engaged me on this issue.
You kept appealing to all the great things you thought were in the book, and all I said, is that there’s nothing in the book because books aren’t things like lunch boxes. You kept appealing to DFW’s genius and semantic mastery, to which I simply pointed out (what DFW already recognized) that we humans just ain’t all that, and last I checked, DFW was human. You kept insisting that the reading experience is self-contained, to which I simply replied, no, the evidence suggests it’s anything but. At which point I urged you to check the science out for yourself. I think much of your reasoning is bound to an empirically mistaken assumption of who you are as a reader and who DFW was as a writer. I’m not going to rehash it all here. The thing to remember is this: odds are, almost all the speculation you’ve read regarding the human soul and all its ‘faculties’ is prescientific, which is to say, the result of speculation unconstrained by empirical investigation, simply because the brain, until recently, remained a black box. That speculation, in other words, has the status that ‘natural philosophy’ had before the institutionalization of science. Where is natural philosophy now? Gone. The subject matter of intellectual history. The same thing is about to happen to all the speculation you find in the humanities: since it’s based on theoretical guesswork, and since humans are theoretical incompetents, all things being equal, we can assume that the vast bulk of it will fade into history. This is tragic, perhaps, but it’s also incredibly exciting because it means we have an opportunity to contribute to the new humanities that will replace it, to explore the new speculative implicatures suggested by the kinds of findings I reference here. It isn’t the end of speculation – not at all – it’s the beginning of an entirely new era: quite literally, a New Enlightenment.
The thalamocortical system is a youthful product of evolution, which is to say, a mess of half-measures – which is something that dovetails quite nicely with the findings of cognitive psychology and neuroscience. This is the new ‘scene’ of the human, the frame we need to take to the galaxy of topics and domains you find in the humanities. Many will ignore it for as long as they can, clinging to an authority based on an eroding credibility, but they’ll have no choice but to come around sooner or later: that or become historians. Personally, I think science is our doom, but there’s a reason we give it pride of place in our courtrooms and government budgets and corporate balance sheets. The shit is powerful, man. Wherever it finds traction, it takes over, and I can’t think of any reason why the old discourses of the soul will fare any different.
DFW wrote something that was semantically fecund and unstable for certain audiences, particularly those with specialized training. I never argued once argued against your first-order reading, only the cloud of second-order assumptions and assertions that you attached to it while attempting to press your reading as canonical. I’m just not sure where we can take this until you’ve had a chance to check out some of this stuff for yourself.
I’m saying that IJ is an particularly poignant example of a social institutional failure (literary insularity) because it is, in many respects, about this very social institutional failure. You never actually engaged me on this issue.
It is because I understand your reasoning and I essentially agree on that point of view. But agreeing with you on this still doesn’t diminish the value the book represents for me (or the “fun” I had reading it at the time). I said it reached me emotionally, so it already went further than it did with you, and then, even as strictly caviar, it has good caviar qualities.
Since I just watched the “You Are Not So Smart” book trailer, maybe enjoying the book wasn’t good for the future me, but it was for the present one. As non-literature and entertainment it was great, as literature it wasn’t, but I’ll say again that I don’t know anything else that is better.
Let’s agree that it was some awesomely good caviar that failed on its true function, but at least IT HAD targeted a good function. It tried hard (as concerned to DFW, he worked hard on the book and with a correct perspective).
Meaning that IJ failed, but not for lack of wanting. And, imho, that is still HUGELY praiseworthy.
If you judge human endeavors on a ABSOLUTE scale then everything turns to utter crap, doesn’t it? It’s all a pathetic failure. The poor lad never works as hard as he COULD(should). Let’s be a little more forgiving.
odds are, almost all the speculation you’ve read regarding the human soul and all its ‘faculties’ is prescientific, which is to say, the result of speculation unconstrained by empirical investigation, simply because the brain, until recently, remained a black box.
Yes sure, but you postulate that empirical investigation is authoritative. That “it comes before” (or outside, impartially, objectively) subjective experience and so it can debunk the other speculations. But those speculations are at least theoretically unassailable. Meaning: the two theories can only be equal as BOTH pretend to include the other within themselves. They share the same level of plausibility and I know of no way to determine that one should bow to the other.
So, for ME, this means that I have to juggle both balls till I have a proof that one should be discarded. So I’d like to know better YOUR perspective as you side with it with some certainty, and so put away and dismissed that ball I’m still juggling with.
Why you dropped that ball? Why you believe scientific investigation isn’t another complex delusion that is actually pushing you AWAY from truth (through a chain of other delusions), instead of closer to it?
Reading experience. IJ was a remarkable reading experience for you.
Theoretically unnassailable? Empirical investigation shares “the same level of plausibility” as theoretical speculation? Trinity began with three men and a blackboard, remember.
Why was the rate of technicological transformation so slow prior to the institutionalization of science? Because humans are theoretical incompetents – it took us some time to develop the social and individual practices required to see our way past our cognitive shortcomings. Science is the pivotal accomplishment in the history of human civilization, the Great Without Which. We must respect it before we can properly fear and hate it.
In evolutionary terms, our theoretical incompetency makes quite a bit of sense: for one, false positives are far more friendly to survival and reproduction than false negatives; on the other hand, since the truth-value of truly theoretical claims have no survival value, it would make sense that theoretical claim making was selected for on the basis of non-cognitive factors, such as display or social cohesion or what have you.
“Why you believe scientific investigation isn’t another complex delusion that is actually pushing you AWAY from truth (through a chain of other delusions), instead of closer to it?”
here, from small press authors you’ve never heard of because they didn’t yet exist. but now they must (have), right?
“It has been said that Christians would rather have Hel exist than not, and it has been said also that they (and all people) choose their reality’s construction and bounds, each of them, and each creates a universe around their decisions for themselves to live in. This is based on two premises, namely that K: Reality external to one’s self is not as it may appear to some who, for instance, see other individualities as existing in equal type and measure to one’s own autonomy. i.e. One is special. To restate this argument in the inverse take its opposing assertion: The universe must be equally under and out of the control of all humans, equally and relatively, for one to be in a world in which, for instance, humans other than oneself are not actors or facets of oneself or God’s identity or aspects of an illusory dream. If one can really ‘manifest’ their own universe then one has to accept that those who surround one do not share this ability, otherwise one would be forced to, against one’s will or against and in the face of one’s supposed ability to ‘manifest’, live in a universe of other uncontrollable beings, hence, in an uncontrollable universe. How then can one ‘manifest’? J: All sentient beings (including animals of course, etc; basically- anything that perceives…(~)-possibly…) are in fact universes and thus we exist in a constantly shifting relation of parallel dimensions and interrelating and interacting universes. In this, physical reality may exist but regardless… even if it does one lives shuttling up and down and in and out of interaction with aspects of different beings who exist on gradients of consciousness. A person you know is only who they are as long as you remain within the universe you were in when you first met them. Otherwise they become the being they must be inside of the universe you go to after becoming more than you were, or, after traveling to a dimension where aspects of that person have also risen to, leaving behind aspects of themselves, as you also did when you ascended or descended. This leaves behind possibilities that you could have been. These possible yous continue to exist in parallel dimensions and continue from other possible actions you might have chosen. In this it follows that there are near infinite yous who exist along the near infinite paths of every possible possibility. The same for every other perceptive capacity too. Reality is what exists when more than one being interacts with each other, a vast multidimensional grid of possibility, within which you can only experience one possible reality at a time though all possibilities are happening anyway, simultaneously, in infinite or near infinite alternate dimensions.”
“‘In order to clear the field of these miserable thoughts, it is worth the effort to remember a few things. There are not two worlds, ours and theirs, and even if, to be absurd, they did exist, how could they be made to co-exist? There is a single world, the world of authority and money, of exploitation and obedience: the world in which we are all forced to live. It is impossible to pretend that we are outside. This is why we cannot allow ourselves to be indifferent, this is why we cannot manage to ignore it. If we oppose ourselves to the state, if we are always quick to seize the occasion to attack it, it is not because we are indirectly molded by it, it is not because we have sacrificed our desires on the altar of revolution, but because our desires cannot be realized as long as the state exists, as long as any Power exists. The revolution does not distract us from our dreams, but rather is the only possibility that allows the conditions for their realization. We want to overturn this world as quickly as possible here and now, because here and now there are only barracks, courts, banks, concrete, supermarkets, prisons. Here and now there is only exploitation, while freedom, as we understand it, does not really exist. — This does not mean that we give up on creating spaces of our own in which to experiment with the relationships that we prefer. It only means that these spaces, these relationships, do not represent the complete freedom that we desire for ourselves and for everyone. They are a step, but not the final one, much less the definitive one. A freedom that ends on the threshold of our occupied house, of our “free” commune, is not enough, it does not satisfy us. Such freedom is illusory, because it frees only as long as we stay at home and don’t leave the confines that are imposed on us. If we don’t consider the necessity of attacking the state (and there is much that we could say about this concept of “attack”), then, by definition, we can only do what it allows us to do at its convenience, forever, limiting ourselves to surviving in the little “happy isle” that we will build ourselves. Keeping our distance from the state means conserving life, confronting it means living.’”
“When at times coincidence hints disastrously at solipsistic actuality to explain what one experiences if even half the weird shit one experiences can be believed to be even half true it is good to remember that other beings, (read- other bodies), exist independent of oneself and are and contain identities that are at least as independent as one sees oneself as being. In this then it is good to tell oneself that other people suffer, so as not to act in ways that forget the possibility of harm and thus to tend to care. It may not be true, (and if intention is judged this hardly matters yet more), but it hardly matters if it is true or not that they exist (x2); one gets to the point when beliefs are not as important as principles for behavior. The fact that then one moves yet further out of and past the solipsistic stance to once again reorient in the light of truth statements or fact only goes to show. It is not ‘fake it till you make it’, not exactly. More like, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” – Matt 5:48 NIV The very fact that this is impossible makes it the perfect catch-all. Nietzsche even may have been willing to assent to such a command/statement’s ability to fling one past all half-efforts and mediocrity.”
Damn, I forgot a part:
– In many, many cases, the trivial details are plot-related. For example one would completely miss Orin being described as “punter extraordinaire, dodger of flung acid extraordinaire” at page 223. The brain parses that line, the link is not there yet, so those definitions are lost or labeled as superfluous. Or try to figure out who’s sending the Samizdat everywhere, who’s the sender? There are plenty of puzzles in the text that are “fun” to solve. Even the whole year gap is a puzzle that you have to solve by extending the trajectories of the plots that are in the book. So A LOT of the trivial details are actually essential hints that help you to solve the puzzle, if you have the patience or interest doing it.
And on the other side there’s depth in spades, as the trivial details are plot-related as they are fundamentally thematic and recurring. Where the redundancy is essential to see similar patterns under different perspectives.
The details aren’t trivial, they are /pivotal/. It’s the reader that in order to purchase ground will have to divide it (between stuff relevant and stuff superfluous). The book is simply too large to be grasped fully in one go.
having not read the book, nor your review, i’ll just comment on commentary.
the charlie rose interview: Gah!
the worst and most moving jump right out at you.
seeing such a sensitive pallet wince about taste when otherwise – ‘always the fucking hunger for more. always starved. always incarcerated.’
but G.D. to rope oneself into that much alienation in an effort to…
at that point writing for an in-group is the same thing as in all sub-cultures formed from the alienated: protective of one’s allies, desperate, desperate, or wrothful.
he tried to (he thought {?}) protect his own from themselves.
if he had had more rage the better then…
better than hate. Good God at least it tastes better.
he had the shit to spit out his tongue in the end. gotta give it.
(maybe could’ve thought of a better way to show more of his own how to spit theirs out too first, but Gah!)
Wow, this does show how you can tie up intelligent minds though.
I guess it’s because the review rests on assertion the authors goals were failed. And because were used to dealing in assertion, instant melee!
I mean, you could run some sort survey test of a sample of a thousand people of, I dunno, a literary nature, seeing who had a Lisa Schwarzbaum responce and who had a caviar responce. Show all the details of how the survey was conducted, for scrutiny, and that’d either be a great “No, he forfilled his goals” or “Actually, dang, guess your by and large right” evidence.
Perhaps the review could note this – currently it cites a very, very small test sample and a sort of feel for how others in literary circles reacted to it. Personally I think the hypothesis would probably show up as being correct, but right now does assertion simply start a cycle that ties up intelligent minds? Actually, I guess I have no large pile of evidence for that myself…I wonder how I’d go about crafting a test for that…?
This review needs more footnotes.
My editor forced me to cut them out…
I watched that Charlie Rose interview (yeah, I commented before without looking at links – as if that wasn’t going to happen!). Man, Wallace seems a self flagellant!? I can practically see him beating himself at points, right to the core. And when posed with the idea he wants respect, the head weave (another blow) and then the “Can you see it in my face?”. Most people, me included, would atleast have some tone of “bullshit!” in there if asking, even when genuinely intellectually seeking an answer. He didn’t appear to – it was like instant inquisition, initiated by the subject of the inquisition himself.
I’d almost consider what would happen if you chucked him on a deserted island with enough food for a month. Just to create an issolation chamber from inquisition triggering events. Would it have made a difference, perhaps? For us to help him would have been to get him away from us?
That or did nobody notice you never saw him and Axl Rose from Guns n’ Roses in the same room at the same time…think about it…
‘Principal actor’, my dear.
“you seem to judge his work by your own stick/purpose. I mean: IJ is not intended as a terrorist attack on the status quo. But you seem to criticize it on the fact you didn’t see the fires.”
Guhguhguhguhguhguh Gah!
sh–, TV on the Radio said it in ’04. track one. something about a wasted point or directional accountability or something
swhy i love David Bazan so much.
“‘Surface level’ and ‘shallow’ are great examples of two words I once thought I understood and now think I had no bloody clue what I was talking about.”
yah yah. 2 true. that shit’s embarrassing.
and this is coming from a Revolutionary Solipsist, (which is kind of like Revolutionary Socialist in terms of terminology excepting that one leaves out provisional governments in fantasy and uses anti-authoritarian tactics in social interaction. and freaks out constantly and will loose their bowels when chips hit the fan.), so i would probably really relate to Wallace if i read his giant book. (i’ve now read the review, beautiful and tough. stomach churning thinking about the unholy consult… can’t wait.) i have that thing from Transmet. where the kid can’t cross the street until God says to. some dis-ease or something…
what else but self-hatred and wroth can wake up such an omelet-eater in the morning…
i mean, and i say this with respect, does one really want to be able to read anything into Here Comes Your Man by Pixies (’89):
‘outside there’s a box car waiting
outside the family store
out by the fire breathing
outside we wait ’til face turns blue
i know the nervous walking
i know the dirty beard hangs
out by the box car waiting
take me away to nowhere plains
there is a wait so long (So Long, So Long)
you’ll never wait so long
here comes your man’
no.
one story or another, brother.
‘I’m gonna take liberty
And I’m tellin’ you to take it too
‘Cause it’s right there in front of you’
burn it to the fuckin ground.
{i’m sure i didn’t leave out enough words for this to be always correct.
am i, though, sure… … at least i didn’t use the word ‘deep’. what’s deep about blood. only those hanging off the bottom of the world below. that’s rock-solid.
for s(ome) it is a choice brother.
i love it, then. i love it. i love it. burn it to the fuckin ground.}
so funny man. so funny.
“the horror is that this is freedom. the horror is that freedom is this.”
If I remember correctly its about the plane boxcar that dropped the atomic bomg fat man on Nagasaki.
I pick one phrase I find interesting from the mass of interesting phrases in this debate:
“there’s a reason we give [science] pride of place in our courtrooms and government budgets and corporate balance sheets.” To me, those are also good examples of how science can be made to mean whatever someone wants it to mean – science as a tool of those who already have power. I do share your enthusiasm for science over all other ways of deciding a question, but there is a potentially totalitarian streak to these arguments which makes me nervous, and may be one reason to cling to pre-scientific notions like morality and beauty, none of which exist independently of people’s opinions but which we would be poorer without, no?
Science seems to readily become something people follow. Which is bad, because science is a tool, a means to possible endings – it’s like supposedly following a hammer that’s in your hands. Is the hammer smashing something? Well, we just follow it as it does that all by itself…when really the tool is enacting desires (in a field where, in evolutionary terms, it has zero experience). Treating science as a direction grants a kind of ouija board effect. Which I think probably is totalitarian, but more a delusion thats become totalitarian. May as well call it a new god.
You should be nervous. I’m describing the stage of a horror show.
All the more reason to tear the humanities down, replace it with something not quite so inclined to turn its back on science. Two things, though: science cannot “be made to mean whatever someone wants it to mean” – that would be speculative theory. Big tobacco lost. Big oil has required (directly of indirectly) billions to merely fight it to a standstill. And this, seen in the context of human history, is nothing short of miraculous. Science is a human institution, and as such ugly, raucous, imperfect. But it is the only theoretical claim-making institution humans possess where disputants regularly agree on what will change their mind. It’s an endless regress of interpretation everywhere else.
I probably imagine seeing your limit when I’m seeing mine, but: “it is the only theoretical claim-making institution humans possess where disputants regularly agree on what will change their mind”
Doesn’t that sound as supremely convenient? Meaning: fabricated and self-serving?
To this Luhmann gives an explanation that is so straightforward and anthropologically correct. Religion was born in order to build a “society”. And this need was a basic human need in order to draw “meaning from chaos”. In order to AGREE on something, or we would be just islands with no connection and we would have died.
What religion does, from the first human tribes, is to build dogmas in order to structure the society. It’s not important in which direction as that there IS a direction. Just pick one, and everyone else agrees. In order to make dialogue possible by reducing uncertainty in language (because without dogmas you can’t decide anything, everything is ambiguous and people can’t find a way to organize in a form of communality).
From this point of view “science” is just a modern and glorified god that works no different than the gods and religions of the past. The purpose is always the same: build agreement, build consensus, find a shared ground. And stop the stream of questions with no end. Give answers.
What I mean is that the process has been honed, but it has not CHANGED. And one should be suspicious of religion as he should be of science.
When Scott justifies science to me it seems always self-serving. I don’t understand if he means it, or if it’s just a step in his train of thoughts leading somewhere else.
One absurd idea I was fiddling with is: there is no god, AND there is no world. The universe is participatory. Men create the universe by unconsciously projecting it. What happens is what people believe. The interesting part of this idea is that reality is probabilistic. What happens is what people agree it will. Science is then a method that builds consensus, artificially, but “rightfully”. People in science do not “discover” it as they unconsciously CREATE it. Elaborately working with their peers to build a shared idea, as illusory “external” as possible in order to fashion it as the god I spoke of above. A dogma of practice. An idol. This essentially because reality is produced ONLY if we freeze its quantuum/probabilistic space into a fixed, shared one. Men as the shapers of the world, and that world is holographic, shifting.
Why then we are not “aware”? Because it’s a castle of cards, and if you are aware reality shatters. It can only “happen” as long you believe you are part of it, trapped in. Its whole existence DEPENDS on being blind. Being blind is not the limit, it’s the foundation.
Now, when I say that a theory is “unassailable” I mean that the specific theory INCLUDES AND EXPLAINS every other phenomenon. That there are no theoretical contradictions that oppose it.
This doesn’t make the theory true. But it makes it possible (if you don’t like “plausible”). That’s why I doubt of Scott there, he seems as dogmatic as some religious people. He cut some rightful branches of the tree of possibility without a real motive, if not to reduce the possibilities to those that he sides with. He’s not willingly to go elsewhere. And, in that, he’s not “literature”, as it seems he only goes down the path he chose and only “reads” the stuff that expands and confirms his belief.
Take that as a provocation, but in what are you any different?
“From this point of view “science” is just a modern and glorified god that works no different than the gods and religions of the past.”
Abalieno, you can’t heat up your soup with the Bible, but you can with a microwave. You can’t listen to Casey Kasem on the Koran, but you can on a radio. The Bhagavad Gita won’t keep a diabetic from going into a coma, but insulin will.
I am surprised that any of this needs to be said.
Actually, not really. But then this is the speculative strategy, isn’t it? To define What Science Is, then to argue some kind of conceptual authority: to trump their commitment to empirical claims (which have transformed the world we live in) on the basis of a prior commitment to various speculative claims (a particular lottery ticket that we have a ‘good feeling’ about). This is what I used to do too: get things backwards. The ‘purpose’ of science is not only to confirm and reaffirm as you say, it’s also to disconfirm. That’s the glaring difference, one that finds it’s most dramatic expression in the difference between the Trinity of Christianity, and the Trinity of Alamogordo, New Mexico.
That’s the difference you need to explain. The difference that is modern technological human civilization. If science is ‘just another language game or social construct,’ then what makes it so tremendously powerful? Until you come up with a way to explain that away, people are just going to assume that Truth (whatever the hell that is) has something to do with it, and simply ignore you and your boutique speculations. That certainly seems to be state of affairs now, anyway.
As to whether people ‘discover’ or ‘create’ scientific fact, who the hell cares? For that matter, just where is this ‘unconscious projection machine’? If it’s on the screen with everything else, how does it project anything?
Ok, I understand.
In the clash of two gods, you side with the one who gets things done. Your god is POWERFUL and so you’d rather be on his side (but pointing out that this god is “dead” and so void of specific interest, so also liable to misuse etc…). So you’re saying that the superiority of one on the other is not one of “theory”, but one of function. The gods may be theoretically on equal footing but one shows you its power while the other is constantly empty handed and looking miserable.
And considering that men suck at making theories (both theories), you side with the one that has at least shown some kind of result, no matter how horrendously it was gamed. While believing that also the current idea of science and mathematics is only a cartoon of whatever it actually is.
I’m not sure what I could argue about that.
Only a clarification:
In evolutionary terms, our theoretical incompetency makes quite a bit of sense: for one, false positives are far more friendly to survival and reproduction than false negatives; on the other hand, since the truth-value of truly theoretical claims have no survival value, it would make sense that theoretical claim making was selected for on the basis of non-cognitive factors, such as display or social cohesion or what have you.
THIS you are saying coincides perfectly with the way Luhmann explains things. The idea that science is “the same” is my own speculation. I just wanted to point this out.
My theory shortcoming, not his 😉
Pretty much. We don’t know what ‘Truth’ is in any metaphysical sense, but there are a number of things we tend to associate with ‘what’s true’ as opposed to ‘what’s false’: cognitive virtues such as practical applicability, consilience, cogency, falsifiability, fecundity, and so on. For better or worse, science is the gold standard taking this approach.
It’s been a long, long time since I looked at Luhman. One of his books on time, if I recall…
Oops, wait. I may misread.
What those “false positives” stand for?
You seem to make a distinction between “things” that are selected for survival, and things selected for other factors, like social ones.
What Lumann says is that all of them are (evolutionary) selected for “survival”. Actually, “theoretical claim making” is a recent activity, as the nature of dogma existed in order to PREVENT it. What was important was establishing (ultimately survival-directed) patterns that wouldn’t be argued or contrasted.
Depends whether you mean the survival of the organism versus the survival of genetic information. It all comes down to survival in the latter case.
You still haven’t told me where all the ‘construction’ happens!
I can’t suggest anything on Lumann since the only book I have appears also on the wiki entry but as “Teoria della società”, which probably means that this book only exists in Italian.
The good thing about it is that it’s 400 pages long, but the actual theory in the first 100 pages and the part on language, religion and evolution is just 30 or so. I may as well give a summary on the blog, at some point.
You still haven’t told me where all the ‘construction’ happens!
Well, I’ll have to read this book by Von Foerster. It starts about language (and Wittgenstein) and then goes to the nervous system to ground its ideas so it may be a more lucid explanation of the theory.
The part that leaves me doubtful is the “dream argument”, or how easily can we be tricked in believing in dreams when we are in there. That’s one factual example that, right in that moment, there IS a secondary world ideally as complex to our eyes as the real one (in this case the secondary world is the real one, while we are trapped in the dream one). So how can you even measure yourself if that’s also outside control? The mind fools itself, you don’t know if there’s a hidden kernel even there and what powers it may have.
Every crazy theory already happens in that limited state. It is projected, perfectly closed and it follows rules that aren’t codified in mathematics.
Also, the Kabbalistic theory is very close to your idea of mathematics. The shadow and the kernel. That’s an image they use:
pag 25 of the pdf: http://files.kabbalahmedia.info/files/eng_o_ml-sefer-kabbalah-for-the-student.pdf
Instead of kernel and shadow they use the “seal” and its imprint in the sand. But it’s pretty much the same concept.
The difference between you and “them” is that their idea of nature and evolution is not “random”, but driven and absolutely perfect. The point is: this is also one possibility you can’t readily dismiss. You only have a “cartoon” (the shadow) of the kernel, so you don’t know if that kernel is driven by a purpose.
I’d even suggest to watch this movie: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi_%28film%29
Same director that become recently very famous with “Black Swan”.
Pi rocks. Black Swan sucks. Aside from the empirical fact that the universe exhibits self-similarity across vast differences of scale, I don’t see the connection. My image of the brain as a ‘Recapitulation Machine’ is actually quite different from the image of Immaculate Representation you quote. Recapitulation unwinds resemblance into process, and happily trades lossiness for efficiency.
I always hoped Aronofsky would have a chance to redo Pi as a feature.
Aphorism II: You’re misquoting the first rule of the Jeff Spencer sense of humor- the funniest joke is the one only you get.
Bakker: Just picking out a sentence or two from The Debate above.
“Why do I think reforming literary culture is important? In the shadow of the singularity, I think we need as critical a culture as possible.”
I was just reading this review of Kurzweil’s latest book. http://www.philosophynow.org/issue86/The_Singularity_Is_Near_by_Ray_Kurzweil
I had to laugh. It took reading you to realize that Kurzweil is such a ridiculous optimist. I think if you two met you would annihilate one another and convert into pure energy.
That “Transcendent Man” documentary on him is pretty damn good. One of the more poignant blends of character study and big idea exposition I’ve ever seen. He comes across as thoroughly tragic by the end.
[…] “Infinite Jest” with my friends, I come back home and find out Scott Bakker had posted a review of the book. From there, a you can see in the comments, spawned a long discussion between me and him (mostly) […]
Scott: “All the more reason to tear the humanities down.” I’m not sure this follows at all. I’m talking about the fact that science can so often have its findings taken out of the lab and turned into an ideology – “here are three papers that show a tendency to selfishness, so let’s cut welfare because it’s contrary to human nature.” You seem to be saying, burn down the fiction libraries and replace them with neuro-science lectures, these lessons will protect us better. But if science is the thing being manipulated, then it is a little circular to argue for more of that as a solution. People will simply be taught the ideology. “Yes, people are selfish, so it was right to abolish welfare.” Or, “people are naturally sharing, so it was right to abolish free trade.” Having less to read is not going to help, either.
That’s what Hume says! But not me at all. The fact that science is at once so powerful (due to its partial (and quite unique) immunity to interest) and susceptible to the distortions of interest simply mean that we need a humanities that engages it, not dismisses in the name of pursuing esoteric speculative interests – don’t you think? Look at what happened with economics.
Ah! Ok… you mean something different by “tear down” than what I thought you did. Fair enough, that sounds reasonable. Not read Hume, but quite proud to have duplicated a famous thinker! There’s hope for me yet.
“Science is our doom.”
DOOOoooooooooooooooooomm DOooooooooooooooooooom
Our doom will not come with a whimper or a bang, but with snazzy jazz music. Can you imagine hooking this shit up to one of those brain-interface devices they have now?
Other recent stuff in the news you may have missed:
– somatic nuclear transfer shown to work in humans (clones coming soon probably, if they can figure out the whole triploidy thing)
– successful malarial vaccine trial in children (50% protected)
That’s all I have in my little bag of horrors for now.
No womb plague yet. Working on it.
😉
Sufficiently advanced jazz is indistinguishable from magic?
And science doesn’t kill people, people tweak people into cyborg brain eaters…
Scary. Probably because I don’t even know what I’m looking at…
The point at which we become our entertainment consoles is the precise point where science murders humanity with triumph.
Abalieno,
Religion was born in order to build a “society”. And this need was a basic human need in order to draw “meaning from chaos”. In order to AGREE on something, or we would be just islands with no connection and we would have died.
Counter hypothesis – no, we weren’t going to do, or perhaps due to diversity of practice, more likely to live. What actually happens is that religion (which wasn’t made to do something, it just came about as a mutation) simply had the strength of the mob on its side Vs the individual. That’s why religion continues to exist, as a parasite meme.
Before that’s contested, could we both agree it’s possible for a parasite meme to exist, even if your not going to agree with me it’s the case here? I’m pretty sure we could socially agree on that to some degree, so I’d like to signpost it early.
This is where I have my chips, more or less. The assumption also is that religion is one thing.
The kind of self-aggrandizing collective self-identification you find attached to it is a different story, I think.
In my opinion, for what it’s worth, I’m not sure that DFW’s authorial goals matter much. His intent for the book lost its footing when first another set of eyeballs touched it. That’s true of any creative work. And furthermore I don’t think it’s fair or necessary to enjoy fiction as the author intends, much as it may terrify authors to hear this.
IJ for me was a wonderful experience. And I did find it touching. Don’s struggle with pain, Hal’s feeling of disconnection and self-doubt, Joelle’s feeling of helplessness to her condition, the way each of their stories play like parables against one another, all dealt with great humanity when it would have been too easy to make an ironic statement.
And I don’t believe the world is secondary. ONAN provides a context for the story (and there is a story here). I agree at fist glance it seems cartoonish but it doesn’t really do anything but extrapolate from real world concerns. I don’t think that anyone can seriously disagree that the US is a consumer culture. Nor is it too far over the line to suggest that we are addicted to entertainment. Steeply and Marathe are our gateways into the politics of the world and they seem ridiculous constructs as well until you consider a guy like J. Edgar Hoover or the numerous terrorist cults that are more than willing to sacrifice their lives (or legs) for their cause. ONAN itself has a precursor in NAFTA. Johnny Gentle extrapolates from Reagan and Perot, David Duke and other larger than life political personalities that came to the profession from other worlds. The book imposes as sense of constriction, a feeling of shrinking ability to really shine individually.
In IJ’s world, and increasingly our own, distractions fragment our sense of reality. There’s a feeling that forces within and without us are driving inexorably into greater madness’s. This is contrasted with the very insular worlds of Ennet House and Enfield, places of purpose and where personal growth is recognized. These are places where the addictions are different, more focused but nonetheless extreme. The drug addict strives to replace his addiction with platitudes and finds that it works by not allowing pretentiousness interfere with his progress. This is important to note when a book is being characterized as being pandering to some “incrowd” or “cynical and pessimistic”.
The point, as I see it, is there’s a sadness to life that can’t be overcome by consumption or cleanliness or war or peace or even family bonds. It’s a sadness without a language. It’s the sadness Hal feels is inescapable as he lies on the viewing room floor, or Gatley feels he can conquer as he struggles moment by moment in agonizing pain, or Joelle feels she can leave behind by taking a massive overdose, or Orin can heal by being the center of affection, or Avril can dispel by tailor making herself wonderful for everyone she encounters, that Himself could vanquish if only he could communicate with his son.
IJ is a stunningly forthright novel, not difficult at all aside from it’s length. It was so jarring to me the first time I read it that I couldn’t really place it into any literary tradition. It borrows heavily from Shakespeare, from Dostoevsky, from Gaddis, from DeLillo, but at it’s foundation it lacks the teeth present with those authors works. None of the irony is meant for us, only for the characters. The authors voice is there but the voice is on our side instead of trying competing with our intellect.
I’m sorry you didn’t enjoy it. Reading your critique I was disheartened and hoped that it wouldn’t scare anyone off of reading it because for me it was really worthwhile. In any case, I’ll have to check out your books now instead of scanning by them as I look for Banks. So you’ve got that going for you, which is nice….
Oh dear, I apologize for the terrible grammar, spelling, and missing words. I wrote the comment between many other things and failed to proofread it properly.
The funny thing is I pretty much agree with everything you say, TNT.
The book is, however, self-consciously difficult (not compared to The Recognitions, but compared to most all commercial fiction), and self-consciously written for his literary ingroup – an example of the very fragmentation you speak of! So if you take DFW at his literary word, you have to say that IJ is part of the problem, not the solution.
I hear what you’re saying but it just doesn’t resonate with me. The ingroup must be referring to Wallace’s friends and contemporaries whose work would include The Corrections, White Teeth, The Virgin Suicides, Everything is Illuminated, The Liar’s Club, et al… none of which have any sense of the complicated world of IJ. In so far as IJ is contained in some sort of movement, it’s more likely to have begun that movement than a cog in some feedback loop of literary praise. The man wrote a mathematical philosophy book for goodness sake.
Infinite Jest won no major awards. It didn’t initially receive much attention for being “great” or a “work of genius” but has gradually earned that reputation. It’s pretty clearly unique amongst it’s peers.
And since we’re paying particular attention to Wallace’s words, I find this quote enlightening as to the purpose of IJ in relation to another book on US consumerisim, American Psycho:
“If what’s always distinguished bad writing–flat characters, a narrative world that’s clichéd and not recognizably human, etc.–is also a description of today’s world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then [Bret] Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.
Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving. There’s some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who’s come to love his cage… The postmodern founders’ patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years.
We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent.
You burn with hunger for food that does not exist.
A U. S. of modern A. where the State is not a team or a code, but a sort of sloppy intersection of desires and fears, where the only public consensus a boy must surrender to is the acknowledged primacy of straight-line pursuing this flat and short-sighted idea of personal happiness.”
And finally this one, Wallace’s thoughts on the purpose of his fiction:
“There’s something kind of timelessly vital and sacred about good writing. This thing doesn’t have that much to do with talent, even glittering talent…Talent’s just an instrument. It’s like having a pen that works instead of one that doesn’t. I’m not saying I’m able to work consistently out of that premise, but it seems like the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies somewhere in the art’s heart’s purpose, the agenda of the consciousness behind the text. It’s got something to do with love. With having the discipline to talk out of that part or yourself that can love instead of the part that just wants to be loved.”
If this is “part of the problem” than I must solidly belong in the “ingroup” you’re talking about and quite proud of it.
You’re actually dead wrong about it’s initial reception, TNT. Check out Bob Wake’s site (linked in the review) if you don’t believe me.
What you quote seems only to bolster my reading, which makes me think you’re misconstruing my thesis. Cultural compartmentalization (the way in which modern social mechanisms exploit our hardwired tendencies to be ‘groupish’) is a very clear target of DFW’s in IJ. And I don’t see how the book does anything other than exploit it.
One you step out of the formal mindset, look at books as the social mechanisms they are, then it becomes very difficult to argue that they don’t sort people – because that’s what they do. This is an ingroup intellectual exercise, bemoaning the consequences of ingroup intellectualism. This book isn’t written for Christian evangelicals. It isn’t written for Cato Institute policy wonks. And so on, and so on. Of course, the target members (the ‘caviar set’ that DFW alludes to), will do the same thing the members of every ingroup do: universalize their values. ‘If it’s good for me, then it’s good for civilization.’ Since every group does this, I think it’s fair to assume that they are all full of shit – which is what I do.
So, I’ve noticed that in all the supplementary I’ve read on IJ, everyone has a very particular take on the cultural critique offered up by IJ: strangely enough, it’s always the other guy (aka, the System) that’s the problem. In fact, the Entertainment Weekly review was the only remotely mea culpa thing I read! The lone outgroup reader – apologizing! For me this is really the most illuminating interesting part of the book: the fact that something so damning of the Ironists, could so effortlessly be stitched into their self-aggrandizing flag.
“One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism. And so he trashed everything he’d been lauded for in the ‘Tractatus’ and wrote the ‘Investigations,’ which is the single most comprehensive and beautiful argument against solipsism that’s ever been made. Wittgenstein argues that for language even to be possible, it must always be a function of relationships between persons (that’s why he spends so much time arguing against the possibility of a ‘private language’). So he makes language dependent on human community, but unfortunately we’re still stuck with the idea that there is this world of referents out there that we can never really join or know because we’re stuck in here, in language, even if we’re at least all in here together. Oh yeah, the other original option. The other option is to expand the linguistic subject. Expand the self.” – David Foster Wallace
False dilemma.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard Bakker use the word “pretentious” but it does seem to me that it amounts to saying that. The problem is that whenever someone goes in that direction, it’s much more likely that they just didn’t understand what the writer was doing. And so it’s like announcing to everyone that you were too stupid to get it. And trying to claim it was really just the writer putting on airs.
Truthfully though, if you look at the “critiques” on amazon. The majority of times the word “pretentious” is used, it’s used by people who were clearly just too stupid to get whatever book they’re trying to review. Not saying that’s the case with Bakker. But it’s something to bear in mind, which I’m sure Bakker was already doing.
Like to see books being reviewed BTW. I’m not convinced here though. But then I was never convinced enough by a positive review of Wallace to bother reading him.
I take accusations of pretentiousness to be a good indicator that a writer is doing things right, simply because it’s a good indication that his or her books are actually working ingroup/outgroup boundaries, rather than locking the church doors. It’s one of those words – as you imply – that identify membership in certain groups, to the extent that it refers to a certain kind of impropriety. To accuse someone of being pretentious is to either say, you are one of us pretending to be one of them, or you are one of them pretending to be one of us.
Save for the rare posers, I actually think that literary culture is the only pretentious thing, insofar as it assumes a cultural authority that it is no longer entitled to (and perhaps never was).
[…] interesting aspect is that the book addresses the problem of “science” as we discussed it. Why believe in science? Because it works. That’s one of the postulates that sustains […]
I could say you don’t have the station to be so dismissive, I could say that you yourself are the biggest beneficiary of mein kampf-like ingroup success, I could say that your not being ‘touched’ by how Hal would womp his baseball glove and mock out a scene with the moms for the benefit of Mario is more demonstrative of your inability to be touched than anything endemic to the novel itself, but I won’t, I will simply reiterate that the world is very old.
dc
I’m glad you refrained from saying all that. But I’m curious: What specific ingroup are you not talking about? From my vantage, everybody seems to be on your tippy boat… All I seem to do is piss people off, typically in direct proportion to the degree they style themselves ‘self-critical’! Otherwise, how do you manage to transcend the petty predictabilities of human groupishness?
As I said on the fb, if to your mind ‘all you do is piss people off’ then you are at least taken by a modesty that belies your recognition and support. I don’t chide because you’re wrong on this point, I chide because you are right and guilty of it whether you understand yourself to be or not (much as Wallace is guilty of it whether his corpse cognizes that guilt or not).
dc
You have to admit, it is fascinating the way people are prone to take offense at criticisms of things they identify with. To my mind, what makes ‘Alas Poor Wallace’ interesting is the fact that it is thoroughly critical, when the vast majority of reviews and essays seem bent on sewing the novel like a patch or badge of rank on their sleeves. The irony, of course, is that this is the very thing DFW despised – the very thing he set out to critique in IJ. In this sense, it becomes a Jest played on those who extol its virtues. What’s supposed to ‘touch you’ aren’t the myriad scenes of manufactured sentimentalism (that’s simply the cheese) but the image of Hal at the beginning and at the end, with an anhedonic soul helpless behind a hysterical face. What’s supposed to touch you is the way you have been divorced from the community that made you possible, to the detriment of you and your community. What you’re supposed to feel is the abject self-loathing that DFW himself felt. IJ is about the way elevation degrades and degradation elevates, to the ruin of us all. It is literally a book that has to be hated to be understood.
On this I agree, though I don’t think the sentimentalism ought to slide – at least personally I’d read that and feel crushed in the possibility of constructing scenes so beautiful, it was the first book to shut me down with its autonomy and culmination. Vonnegut, Kundera, Gombrowicz, Miller, they inspire me with their incompletion, like a song that I could play a few lines to, even Gravity’s Rainbow had some pauses where I’d think ‘I could write something out of that.’ Infinite Jest made me feel like writing was done, why bother. Precisely the culmination you describe when ingroups ceasely, tirelessly, and oftentimes arbitrarily defend their own.
It is a dirge, I grant you that. For ‘We, the artificial.’ Hal is Hal.
Personally, I just couldn’t extract the sentimentalism from the image of Mario: it all felt pulped and prosthetic and pathetic with incestuous artiface of the very kind that doesn’t fly in AA.
Well, I was going to write something really acidic (I guess I kind of did, anyway, oh well; that’s the wonder of literature — you can come back to the beginning and tie up loose ends if you want a circular storytelling narrative.), but decided against it, as my more genteel cultivated wit advises against it (There are a few words, though, you should really learn how to use before using them – for instance, “gray” instead of “grey,” if you don’t want to seem like a pompous twit; it leads one to believe you’re one of the pompous you seem to take such great pleasure and Nazi-level zeal in excoriating.).
Here’s one for ya: I grew up poor as dirt, mother a sharecropper, father’s family shooting rabbits to feed them, and I “rose” to the level of the literary cadre you take such great joy in skewering, pretty much on my own, without much of any formal schooling. Thank god. It was the only thing I clung to as a young boy – this insightful yet joyful intelligence, that just by its sheer existence often made me weep. In other words, intelligent lit. Not until I encountered Infinite Jest a few years ago after the tragic suicide of its author was that sense of discovery renewed for me, after a hiatus of having to suffer the truly elitist writing of people like the Entertainment Weekly reviewer, after having completely given up on the truly tedious (like your review) fiction and writing coming out of the “oh so burdened with their intelligence” set, who really aren’t all that smart or with it to begin with (hampered at birth, I would say). It’s finally works like Wallace’s that struggle to bring to light intelligence in a darkened world, somewhat like the expressionism of Germany did during Hitler times. Your writing characterizes National Socialism much more than Wallace’s, yours is the voice of a Heidegger, the voice of a serious, isolated soul who has given up on the noble fight (Freud also comes to mind, transmogrified into Jung) that in the end is looking for a majority to represent who will applaud it giving it accolades and recognition. I do feel sorry for you, but not to the extent that I don’t recognize you as the enemy, and one who has to be confronted under every stone you’ve scampered under.
You have characterized AA completely wrongly, characterized the literary completely wrongly, and finally missed what is there in Infinite Jest, truly, a celebration of thinking and language and yes, finally, feeling. Human feeling, there on every page. It is books like this, dare I say “ironically,” not to suffer your ire directed toward such horribly insensitive types that would ever see anything this way (Swift comes to mind – did Swift care about the suffering of the poor in England when he wrote his immodest proposal you think? Did it have an effect, you think?), that helped to bring me out of my isolation all those years ago when the thugs were controlling the truly poisonous environment around me, beating into submission anyone with an ounce of quickness about them, and the industrial mentality of those trapped equally by the forces of advertising that Wallace skewers in his book (a proper skewering I would say that would do Swift proud) were kept docile and ineffective by buying all the garbage spewed at them and polluting the environment around them.
Your writing reminds me of the dullard wits I grew up with, in your case, simply wearing fancy clothes. Thank god for the Wallaces of the world, alas, that we don’t have more like them. And please, fewer like you, oh god, please! it is because the serious literary people of the world who finally ascended to university tenure in this country in the sixties and then turned around and sold out in hordes like you apparently have, working for some conglomerate or another (Who’s supporting your “mission?”) that the Humanities have fallen in such disrepair. In the end, the wrong people always hang themselves.
So then why was Wallace so critical/conflicted about ‘literature’ (not to mention the kind of syncophantic reverence you seem to have for him)?
By the way, cstc student, don’t listen to this inflated idiot (I swear . . . people who control blogs . . .) – there is writing being done out of Infinite Jest, completely inspired by it. See Gately’s Negative Capability when it comes out. I really enjoyed others comments on here, seemed sincere and caring.
Sycophantic. I’m trying to get something by flattering a dead guy. The greater question is why does someone like you, who has a blog, all kinds of self congratulatory shit about himself all over it, pictures, little quips like you’re looking into the soul of wisdom or something, why does some shit like you attack a guy who’s been dead for a few years and who isn’t here to defend himself and whose writing has obviously deeply affected a lot of very intelligent readers all over the world, from academics to the guy in the back row of the AA meeting, from a friend of mine who doesn’t know shit about literature to guys like me who are just sick and tired of reading bullshit from pretenders to some kind of philosophical scrutiny that goes beyond any little cadre of thinkers like their some kind of master mind when in fact what they are are simply little jealous snots who just don’t have the talent of a fingernail of a writer like Wallace?
That’s the real sycophantic ruse. Your spewing your swollen little ego’s effulgence like a jet steam of vaporous nonsense. Well, I suppose you have your little cadre of followers, too. Just don’t expect anyone with any degree of discernment to not call you out. Really. What pisses me off most about what you wrote above about Wallace is that you have done it four years after the poor bastard killed himself. How much sensitivity to the human plight does that display? Why don’t you just call Shakespeare a Nazi, too, and be done with it? I suppose he’s just a genre writer, too, since the people who go to see his plays today are largely university educated. Doesn’t matter than perhaps they went to see their first Shakespeare to get away from the brutal reality of their lives outside the theater. No, not for someone as egg headed and guilty of the very accusations you make of others as you are.
Try driving a taxi. Maybe you do. If not, try it for a while. Do you good.
Then what are you trying to get? Prove you have a bigger yardstick? Better taste? Four pounds of brain?
You don’t get it, do you? Since you don’t now, you won’t in the immediate future – but, there’s hope for us all. I know that because I was the kind of asshole you are at one time. Smart ass little quips, etc. Good luck, really. I think there’s room for all of us on the bus, if we do become sincere about our motives. That’s what I liked about Wallace; the goddamn struggle. It was all right there – the struggle, always. But, the thing that I nearly worship about him is the genius he left behind. Too many aphorism to mention (I see where my little brained friend [that be you] has a couple hundred plus readers – Wallace, millions – and they’re all smart people! Amazing!) but basically they sum up what people go to him for – other worldly talent (I believe you used the word transcendent in your diatribe. Transcendent is truly what Wallace’s writing was / is.)
Anyway, not trying to get anything – just read your postmortem attack and was really pissed off. Now you’re just another asshole. Really no affect, really.
Good luck, truly. I’m not coming back to read your thoughts anymore. Not pissed off anymore, no reason to – (by the way, I have responded to a blog exactly two times before this. Exactly. That’s how much your rantings pissed me off. But, you’re just another asshole trying to get yours, which makes you one of the pack. So, good luck, best.)
I’m a gnat. Sure. Fame is the only proof that matters. Funny thing is, I always thought DFW was against the mass market millionaires, those prone to aim accusations of ‘loser’ at others rather than themselves. Either way, you pretending not to come back was what this was all about all along, I’m sure.
“Too clever to be profound” coming from BAKKER? Dude. I’m still trying to figure Kellhus out. Which is exactly the point I’m sure. Btw the wait is killing me and like everyone else on the aSoIaF forums. Just so yah know.
Oh and kill Kelmomas. He scares me. But not his schizoid sister, she’s my favourite.
The point of the book is to be “an example of the very insularity it condemns.” the book is called infinite jest. it has a somewhat annular structure.
I’m convinced this was DFW’s compositional intent as well. Your point being?
My point is simply that the joke worked too well. The only way to ‘get’ the jest, is to fault the book, which, like all depression, orbits about self-loathing. To crow about this book as some form ‘great literary achievement’ is to become the butt of the joke, to miss the point, to buy into the very network of conceit and folly it attempts to ruthlessly expose and dismantle. For the vast majority of readers this book failed, inevitably perhaps. But it failed nonetheless.
Isn’t that the joke though? I mean sure you’re doing exactly what Wallis was talking about but that doesn’t mean the book failed. Not if you realize it. Not if you’re knowingly crowing your ignorance. Which I assume is what most people do. But maybe that’s just the optimism of youth.
And if people don’t get it is that a failing of the book or of the reader? Which just adds to the metaness of the joke.
I suppose… if you think books somehow ‘mean things’ in a way independent of the actual readings they receive. To me this is just, well, spooky. There’s the author, a heap of ink, and a bunch of readers. If being systematically misread, if being communally touted as the very thing it excoriates, if sparking self-congratulation within the very ingroup it attempts to shame, if all this doesn’t warrant the conclusion of failure, then I fear I’m at a loss as to what does. It’s certainly how I judge my own books! Just take a big IJ-DFW google tour and you’ll find a never-ending stream of people using IJ to congratulate the very bankrupt literary culture it attacks. Everywhere. And you’re right, it is hilarious, for a handful of dissenters like us. But in terms of social impact? IJ is another brick in the wall. It reinforces the status quo far far more than it undermines it.
[…] writing that jumps the tracks, that somehow, someway, finds itself in the wrong hands. The rest, as DFW would say, is fucking Entertainment. More […]
I’ve read this review and the comments at least a dozen times and each time I find something new to think about. For me, this is one of the best literature related posts on the blog. Thank you Scott!
You’re a wanker.
That’s the point.
This is a bit late, but there are some interesting excerpts from ‘Every love story is a ghost story’, a biography of Wallace written by D. T. Max. From chapter 6:
It was also in keeping with Wallace’s insistance that the sotry not be so amusing that it re-create the disease he was diagnosing. It must not hook readers too easily, must not allow them to fall into the literary equivalent of “spectation”.” Infinite Jest had to be, as he subtitled it, “a failed entertainment”.
Also in chapter six:
Pietsch also hesitated to put the words “A Failed Entertainment” on a book people were supposed to buy. Wallace suggested it might go on the “frontispiece” instead. Pietsch objected that the problem with calling Infinite Jest “A Failed Entertainment” anywhere was “it’s not,” and it quietly disappeared from the manuscript.
Published in 2012, it seems relevant to this review.
Totally doesn’t surprise me. Thanks for the tidbit, Callan. It’s pretty crucial.
Wonderful review, I come very outside the bubble you talk about, so it’s very interesting to hear from the prospective of someone who knows what the bubble is like, if you will. I come from a lower class background, and this book, even though it took great effort to read and to stay focused upon really kinda helped me with trying to make sense of life, or my place in it, or whatever. Its hard to describe, but yeah, I think coming to this book from a non-educated background maybe strips away some of its flaws.
[…] it. Why bother writing stories with progressive values for progressives only, that is, unless moral entertainment is largely what you’re interested in? You gotta admit, this is pretty much the sum of what passes […]
Found this review on my own IJ-DFW Google tour and found it refreshing after all the unabashed fawning. It spelled out certain intuitions I had about the book but couldn’t flesh out on my own. Almost as entertaining and interesting were some of the commenters who reacted so violently to your criticism. Thanks for writing it up.
Not sure where else to share this so hear goes: President Johnny Gentle around pg. 350 or so bears an uncanny resemblance to Donald Trump.
A performance artist has found a new (better?) use for Infinite Jest, she’s literally consuming the book.
http://www.avclub.com/article/woman-has-been-slowly-eating-infinite-jest-year-256801
Jesus man, can’t you just say that you didn’t like it
Jesus, man, that wouldn’t be much of a review, would it?