Hamlet in IJ?

What does Hamlet even have to do with this book? Aside from superficial similarities -- How unlikely! Two literary characters holding skulls -- Wow! Hal and his two brothers have troubled relations with their father, just like the Brothers Karamazov and Hamlet! -- what does Hamlet have to do with this book?

Who's there?
Allusion for allusion's sake is

[sorry for new ij thread...]

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I haven't read IJ (don't lynch me you fags, I'm still going through the 19th century russians), but isn't the title literally a reference to a quote from Hamlet?
>Hamlet: Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy;

Consider passivity versus action in regards to entertainment and drug use/abuse.

The reference is a reference to something really important in the plot called infinite jest...

A character named it infinite jest.

If you don't know why the character bothered to name it that you are hopeless

Slap your wrist, please.

duh
Hamlet is equivocal, not lackadaisical. The connection hadn't escaped me, but hardly seems integral.

A bunch of his films were also produced by "Poor Yorick Ent." or something like that (pretty sure it isn't Ent.)

Again, hardly integral. Virtually all of Dickens' works allude heavily to Shakespeare, but what sets Bleak House apart as high art is direct and essential relation between Macbeth and Lady Dedlock.

Pat Benetar thought Gravity's Rainbow was a cool name for an album, that doesn't make the allusion essential.

Is this very subtle, casual shitposting?

I think it is.

Who even told you that IJ's meant to have anything to do with Hamlet, lol, you got b8d.

A this very overt, idiotic shitposting?

I think it is.

This rabid DFW fanboy not realizing the title is from Hamlet proves OP's point.

Who cares if the title is from Hamlet? That's just a superficial relation. Is there anything about IJ that has a depthful, artfully done parallel to Hamlet? Or does DFW just namedrop Hamlet through le subtle references?

not OP, I'm also interested in this. The question would be: will a reading of Hamlet enrich the experience of reading IJ? Or just knowing the title reference is enough

Hal's relationship to his father and the outside world as a whole. Hamlet and Hal are both stuck inside their own head dealing with the ghost of their father

What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?
Shakespeare operated on level 2, sometimes level 3 of irony. DFW, like the title indicates, operated in infinite irony.

Asked myself the same question years ago. The best I could come up with was that it must have been a way of attracting the attention to what JOI might be doing throughout the events. Small metatextual frame to help the reader with his piecemealed plot, something like that. Still seems no less gratuitous than every other limpdick's fishing a title out of Shakespeare.

Here you go OP:

etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_file?accession=csu1409079425&disposition=inline

Didn't mean to quote there.

>In a February 1996 radio interview about Infinite Jest with Boston’s WBUR, David Foster Wallace declared that,

Dropped

>a title from Shakespeare, I mean, talk about pretentious

Hal's family situation is similar to Hamlet's in that his dad died under strange circumstances and his uncle shacked up with his mom almost immediately after that.

Also to be or not to be and all that shit.

It's not a retelling of Hamlet by any means if that's what you're getting at. Pastiche inclusion of Shakespearean themes isn't superficial, the only superficial thing could be the title, but I think it works much more than other possible titles (i.e. Poor Yorick). Just because it shares the title with Hamlet doesn't force it to be a retelling and it doesn't make the parallels less interesting (the father son relationship, Freudian complexes, the inclusion of the ghost as a hysteria inducing character, the role of entertainment in revealing things, scholars vs. soldiers binary, I mean the list goes on and on OP).

Just because there's a Hamlet reference, you don't have to look at every scene as Shakespeare based. It's equal parts Borges, McElroy, Barth even in some areas.

OP are you by any chance a college freshman?

>>OP are you by any chance a college freshman?
Did you perhaps not attend?

No one suggested IJ was a retelling of Hamlet. The question is whether Hamlet bears any essential relation to the work.

When Joyce calls the readers attention to Hamlet, he's inviting drawing attention to the notion of consubstantiality and the relation of author to his text, both ideas subordinated to the central question of overcoming the ego through another - ideas thematically woven into the fabric of Ulysses and bearing an integrated, essential relation to the work as a whole.

When Dickens surrounds Lady Dedlock with allusions to Macbeth, he's making a point about social pressures binding hands and splattering them with blood. Again, essential to the work as a whole. This is what separates Bleak House from works like Little Dorrit - integritas, consonantia

This is in contrast to someone like Taratino who alludes for the sake of allusion. The parallels between Beatrix Kiddo and Lady Snowblood are endless, but it's hardly necessary to point them out.

The human mind can always make analogies, but only the poet bends those analogies toward the artistic expression of a single will.

My question is, is DFW a poet? Hamlet and Hal both had daddy issues. So what?

>> IJ’s countless interconnections has left me unable to see the trees for the forest

Seems what all DFW criticism does. I only skimmed this (I'll read it more thoroughly on my lunch break), but it just seems like a laundry-list of parallels. Who wants to look at intricate, beautiful glass work after it's been dropped from a 200 story building?

That said, the idea that IJ is DFW is equivocating about Bloom's anxiety of influence (called upon by the ghost of Shakespeare to avenge the loss of literature in TV obsessed America) is worth some reflection. Thanks, user.

It is, actually.
Footnote 24, the filmography. "Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited". Not Limited like Latrodectus Mactans or the others were, IIRC, but Un-Limited.

Aren't there some good Veeky Forums pastas about this already or what?

Is this OP? Because this a much different question than asked before with the 'allusions for allusions sake' bit, which any bit of critical understanding would derail that thought from ever happening. The fact that there's two or three prime examples of paralleled understanding between these works makes this thread useless, filled with people who have read neither or just one trying to make their opinions on it. The contrast of Joyce and DFW's inclusion is interesting, one is obviously more profound, but he is also simply a more profound writer. Joyce's poeticism on the subject brings us to the character's struggles with ego death and the modality of language. DFW's attempted poeticism borders on the encyclopedic dawn of the Information Age and the state of entertainment. Maybe not as timeless as Joyce or maybe it just hasn't hit its stride yet. But to answer your question, DFW's poetry is through research, his attempts at creating the maximal novel after 30 years of the mega-novel losing steam (save for Women and Men and Darconville's Cat. It's also interesting to see the amount of mega-novels being written in tandem to DFW trying to kickstart it, I suppose everyone was with the large novels of the 90s and the one's we're seeing in the last few years pop up). So his brand of poetry isn't about daddy issues, it's the threads of entertainment woven between: sport, war, disillusionment, revenge, future passivity, power dynamics. To DFW entertainment is as much a part of epistemology as memory is, focusing on the all too apparent daddy issues would be a disservice for someone who seems to have a good understanding of literary history such as yourself.


Also, while we're at it, Tarantino operates on a level of retelling, not just allusion for allusion sake. He's obsessed with a retell parody of many of his favorite movies, The Killing + The Dollars Trilogy in Reservoir Dogs, very different origins but he's interested in their coalescence in a different setting, I'm not a Tarantino fanboy but I find what he does a little more interesting than simply allusion for allusion sake.

First thought is to go back to Joyce. Also encyclopedically overstuffed with minutiae, always in danger of writing just a journal (not a danger I'm convinced he always avoids), but ultimately integrated. The components of Infinite Jest seem to bear no more relation to each other than items in a newsfeed - related solely through their arbitrary placement next to each other.

But from what I'm gathering, that's the point? Encyclopedia inherently centerpess. Points to Hamlet because it's central role in the canon even as its central character suffers from sudden and radical decentering. "We wish our fathers would come back - but what's wrong with us? Are we pussies?"

Not bad. Still not convinced DFW pulls it off - a timeless theme mired by excessive reference to "the present age" (like Tolstoy said, only small minds think man changes from age to age) - but not bad. Ya'll are making me reconsider this book. Thanks!

Me again. I'm not exactly the biggest fan of IJ, I think when its good, it's really really good, but so much of it is marred by self-help, over-explicit political diatribe, and YA-ish scenes. Maybe Pynchon pulls of Hamlet fusion to the modern day better with a TCoL49.

I think the reason DFW chose Hamlet, even though he goes on record saying Shakespeare usually "doesn't do it for him", isn't because Hamlet is center-stage in the canon, but because of the Mousetrap scene, it perfectly captures the role entertainment plays in epistemology, Hamlet had trouble believing his senses after the opening scene but the Mousetrap play solidified his knowledge of the situation. These power structures, meta-entertainment, revenge, etc. are all a part of IJ as well.

In a way I think there's an element of performativity between the DFW that wrote IJ and the DFW that wrote TPK. IJ a tedious book about entertainment, TPK an entertaining book about tedium.

I agree with that Tolstoy quote which is why I'm still hesitant to believe IJ will be as important in a decade or two, but I'm excited to see how it ages.

Thanks for honest discussion. I'd give more thorough reply, but I'm at work. See if thread still alive after.

I think you and I have discussed IJ before in another thread where I accused the book of lifting too much from Brothers K. If not you, then good to know Veeky Forums has other thinking people.

Definitely going to give IJ another shot next time a copy comes into my hands. I agree it hardly seems timeless, but we'll see.

Does he reference the Mousetrap very often? I haven't read IJ in quite a while and surely some of the Hamlet references went over my head, but I don't remember DFW pointing much to that particular scene. The Yorrick references were obvious enough (stray thought: highlighting the "absolute knave" in that scene might've better suited his attack on irony), and the father-son parallels are also ubiquitous.
It seems like as solid a reading as any -- Hamlet finds himself in the mirror because he looks seldom, Hal loses himself in the funhouse. -- I just don't know if it would sustain close textual analysis based on allusions actually in the text (I mean 'I don't know' in the non-argumentative sense of I can't speak to it more than a vague feeling motivated probably more by a desire to dislike Wallace).

If that reading were intended and intended deliberately to fail a close-reading, then Harold Bloom possibly didn't understand the book. One can still be talented while serving a bad or false master. Then again, maybe talent is just a matter of choosing the right ideology.

I don't go on here a lot anymore, I've found Goodreads to be a lot more productive in certain circles but its good to see some good conversation on here still. I'm not sure if I'll ever read IJ again very soon in its entirety, some sections I do love to gawk at though (Eschaton, JOI movie endnote, yrstruly, other quality sections).

There isn't one moment that parallels the Mousetrap completely, in IJ. It's that the Mousetrap is a perfect symbol capital-E Entertainment and all of its multifarious influence and capabilities. Entertainment as a way of knowing (Hamlet observing his uncle/JOI's Medusa and the Oblique), as revenge (Hamlet's intentions/Orin's vengeance on his mother's love-interests), as hedonist enjoyment (the crowd in Hamlet clearly remembers the days of Yorick and the enjoyment of a court jester/the effect of the samizdat on people's cognition), as creating something beyond yourself to stand the test of time (Hamlet+IJ as a book+IJ as a movie are all magnum opuses that the creators pride themselves on), microcosm of war (the Mousetrap showing treason intended to parallel the soon to come overcome by Fortinbras/ Tennis+Eschaton+Samizdat as microcosms of war with the onset of the AFR coming to reclaim the Great Convexity and wage war).

The Mousetrap is one of those moments in literature that is so sublime in its ability to target an entire cultural topic in a timeless moment, one of the many reasons why Hamlet is such a masterpiece.

Bloom I believe most likely enjoyed the ideas in IJ, but found the prose to be insufferable. Purposefully or not, the prose can be insufferable, the only sublime moments are the ideas as a whole in IJ, unfortunately DFW's prose is never able to hit that sublime moment like you get from Melville, Joyce, Nabokov, Proust, Faulkner, Gaddis, Gass, Barth, Coover, Pynchon even. DFW wasn't a troubled genius as much as he'd like us to think he is, he's much like a lot of us, like Delillo even, just a very thorough technician who has good ideas but for whatever reason the prose itself never shines enough, I think The Pale King had potential to get us there, if it was going to be the 3k pages it was intended to be, it'd be sublime just as a physical object.

Poor Yorick, more like poor us.