Infinite Jest, the novel - discussion (spoilers)

[midnightpulp]

"It's always a bit of a cruel shock when I'm reminded that postmodernism isn't just self-referentiality gimmickry, it's got something to do with (among other things) the uniquely fcked-up way we relate to information, and to our relationships."

I love IJ, and you're obviously way more knowledgeable about DFW than myself, but I usually disagree with the common opinion that IJ is a "post-modern" novel.

Superficially and stylistically, IJ is definitely post-modern, but as you read through it and penetrate those layers, you find a very structured (like you said in another post) and conventional story, filled with emotion, strong characters (so many characters in POMO literature function as types), and deep insights into the human condition. Most POMO authors are so concerned with irony and being clever or shocking, they never allow themselves (or don't have the ability) to actually write a story where they grab real emotion. It's all facade and hip posturing.

Even DFW shys away from the "post-modern" label. I think it was in an interview with Laura Miller of Salon.com, he said that academia is too quick to catagorize a work as POMO, or even deride a work as shallow or gimmicky, if it contains references to pop-culture, when all he is doing is writing about the world he lives in. I think he said he considers himself a "realist." He also said in another interview that many writers of his generation don't approach their work with honesty; that they're more concerned with being innovative or clever for its own sake, which I think is the problem with most of the new POMO. Danielewski, anyone?

Anyway, great stuff, Mike. IJ will surely stand the test of time.

[Mike Pemulis]

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"It's always a bit of a cruel shock when I'm reminded that postmodernism isn't just self-referentiality gimmickry, it's got something to do with (among other things) the uniquely fcked-up way we relate to information, and to our relationships."

I love IJ, and you're obviously way more knowledgeable about DFW than myself, but I usually disagree with the common opinion that IJ is a "post-modern" novel.

Superficially and stylistically, IJ is definitely post-modern, but as you read through it and penetrate those layers, you find a very structured (like you said in another post) and conventional story, filled with emotion, strong characters (so many characters in POMO literature function as types), and deep insights into the human condition. Most POMO authors are so concerned with irony and being clever or shocking, they never allow themselves (or don't have the ability) to actually write a story where they grab real emotion. It's all facade and hip posturing.

Even DFW shys away from the "post-modern" label. I think it was in an interview with Laura Miller of Salon.com, he said that academia is too quick to catagorize a work as POMO, or even deride a work as shallow or gimmicky, if it contains references to pop-culture, when all he is doing is writing about the world he lives in. I think he said he considers himself a "realist." He also said in another interview that many writers of his generation don't approach their work with honesty; that they're more concerned with being innovative or clever for its own sake, which I think is the problem with most of the new POMO. Danielewski, anyone?

Anyway, great stuff, Mike. IJ will surely stand the test of time.

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midnightpulp--

I see what you're saying. My point, really, is that I agree with you about so much of that--the emotion, the structure, the strong character--but don't think that makes the book un-postmodern. That's the shock: it reminds me that questions of self-referentiality and reference in general, of the various problems and unreliabilities of narration, of looking to several genres and fields of knowledge for answes... all of that stuff came about because of very real urgencies and can exist organically in a book so full of real stuff. I wouldn't say that IJ isn't postmodern any more than I'd say that Pride and Prejudice isn't a comedy of manners.

But I definitely hear what you're saying. Debates over literary classifications won't get us very far. I'd definitely say that lots of postmodernists would strongly dislike IJ, and that a lot of the criticism the book gets is from people who would like it more if it were more "typically" postmodern. And that there's an essential sincerity about the work that's, depending on your view, either uncharacteristic of or downright anti-characteristic of the genre.

~Mike

[Mike Pemulis]

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I thought "Girl with Curious Hair" was better, particularly the title story and "My Appearance." "My Appearance" is brilliant analysis of David Letterman's comedic style and is absolutely hilarious.

Am I the only one who thinks that maybe DFW is afraid to write another novel? Since IJ received heaps of praise when it came out and is regarded as modern classic, whatever he writes is almost guaranteed to be a disappointment. He's certainly done a lot of writing over the past decade, so I don't see an excuse for not at least having another novel in the works.

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whoiam,

Obviously a lot of the short story stuff comes down to personal taste. I was simply floored by the titular pieces of Brief Interviews, and also "The Off-Broadway Playwright...Begs a Boon." This might have something to do with the fact that Brief Interviews was the first DFW I'd ever read, and DFW couldn't write about fabric softener without entrancing me, so this might just be the initial DFW-spell talking.

I do think that Curious Hair is very very good.

~Mike

[tuq]

MP,

Heh, I'm glad you posted in ATF so I could link you to this thread. Your points are very good and I spent some time this morning digging around my closet looking for the massive, dog-eared book to crack open again.

I'm not going to explain this very well, but I was guessing that he wrote Gately that way in an attempt to get us to sympathize with a simpleton murderer.

[0.5_tuq_0.5]

If I read, say, half, of the book, would I get anything out of it?

[tuq]

0.5,

Yes. Roughly half.

[midnightpulp]

Two great interviews with DFW:

www.centerforbookculture.org/interviews/interview_wallace.html

www.salon.com/09/features/wallace1.html

[DJ Sensei]

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Also, for whatever it's worth, IJ is highly highly structured. I'm not accusing you of uncareful reading or anything, but whatever disappointed you about the last part of the book really could not have been the fact that there wasn't any structure going on at all.

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Yes, I supposed non-structured was a poor choice of words. I think by the end of it I just didn't have as much energy to read it thoroughly, but was more focused on getting through it, presumably to reach some grand finale that brought everything together. When that finale never really came, I was mildly disappointed, but I probably shouldn't have been surprised.

[Mike Pemulis]

So I couldn't sleep tonight*, and of course this calls for some Infinite Jest, which is especially attractive because I've been waist-deep in Plato and Kant recently, so I was sort of glad for the unplanned schedule-gap I could fill with DFW.

Of course, my rereading had taken me to page 412 so far, so what I got wasn't a whimsical or touching passage but a particularly creepy and true-ringing one, in the Interdependence Day book-chunk, where we get a catalogue of cranio-facial-pain-inspired art concepts and some time with Hal.

I posted a ways up in this thread about how relatively rare it is to get J.O. Incandenza information that isn't business-card-ish or suicide-referential. With Hal the situation's obviously way different, but it's worth pointing out, I think, that given the marijuana addiction and the various isolations that both (partially) cause and are enhanced by it, we don't get direct evidence of Hal relating to other people very often.

There's the (to me) overwhelmingly moving scene near the front of the book where Hal and Mario are in bed well after dark and Hal tries to explain Avril's behavior after JOI's suicide to him. (And speaking of uncharacteristic behavior, this scene is just exponentially more moving, and sadder, once you know just how rosy-eyed Mario's worldview is, and how much and how unconditionally he loves his family, and how terribly significant it is that he would even question the propriety of his mother's mental states.)**

So anyway, at pg. 413 we get (in a break from the substantial description of events in the advertising and TV-network industries) a quick bit about Hal, who I guess wrote a paper that discussed the advertisements that (a) killed the channels they ran on but (b) were wildly effective so (c) the relevant companies were willing to pay tons for:

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...From a historical perspective it's easy to accuse the Network corporations of being greedy and short-sighted w/r/t explicit liposuction; but Hal argued, with a compassion Mr. Ogilvie found surprising in a seventh-grader, that it's probably hard to be restrained and far-sighted when you're fighting against a malignant invasive V&V-backed cable kabal for your very fiscal life, day to day.

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It might not seem like much, but let's remember that this is a character so isolated that at least one Internet theory pegs Hal as autistic. I think that's problematic (read: wrong) for a ton of reasons, but the point is that for as sharp as his analytic skills are, he spends remarkably little of the book actually being compassionate, and that one example of this is, I think, telling. (Also note that this is compassion (a) with something that isn't a human but a corporation, and (b) in a competitive/economic situation. Says something about where Hal's wiring is densest, I think.)

Oh, and I also posted about Gately a while back. All this stuff about JOI and Hal makes me realize that yet another reason we love Gately is that in IJ-world (and, I guess, the real world), it's remarkably rare to see a character trying hard to figure out what's going on in another one's head, and really relate/Relate for non-exploitative reasons. A while back, in a thread that isn't this one, tuq pointed out that everyone in IJ is addicted to something or the other--it's really something that so few of the addictions are to other people, or essentially interpersonal. Of course addictions are generally isolative things, but even the mental states that aren't so strictly addictions--tennis obsession, for example--are highly solitary things. (Compare ETA to, say, a really strict acting school or even to a really intense football training camp.)

Back to Plato,

--"Mike"

*I'm newly back to school, as a MA student in philosophy, and in New York no less, after having spent plenty of time recently in places like very-small-town Wisconsin (quiet, charming) and suburban Detroit (quiet, boring). So after two years of largely unscheduled time--in Tempe I went four days without noticing that the time zone I thought I was in was not the time zone I was actually in, that's how few outside-world appointments I had--this is a shock to my system. Add to this that I'm a big big fan of school and classes and generally of broadening my world, and that I'm in an un-air-conditioned apartment, and you'll be in a position to understand why at 5 AM I'm posting about an insomnia -> DFW session.

**I actually took a break from writing this post to skim through this section (begins on page 39) again. Good heavens. Turns out the third time is even way more affecting. And why is Hal speaking in circumlocutions he knows Mario'd have trouble with? And then this:
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[Hal:] "Now she's just an agoraphobic workaholic and obsessive-compulsive. This strikes you as happification?"
[Mario:] "Her eyes are better. They don't seem as sunk in. They look better. She laughs at C.T. way more than she laughed at Himself. She laughs from lower down inside. She laughs more. Her jokes she tells are better ones than yours, even, now, a lot of the time."

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[JMP300z]

Just read this section today and I feel like I should have something to add but my brain is pretty fried from school.

I wanted to comment that I am really enjoying this book after being kind of uninterested in the first couple hundred pages and continuing only b/c of how fantastic DFW's writing is. It has steadily picked up steam through more definitive characters, a semi-plotish more vivid history/reality, and more comedy ever since the Eschaton brawl (one of my favorite passages ever).

-JP