I want honest opinions from those who managed to complete the entire meme trilogy

I've read Ulysses multiple times, Gravity's Rainbow twice, and read half of Infinite Jest before I ever browsed Veeky Forums. I took a Joyce seminar that covered Dubliners, Portrait, Ulysses, and some Wake. It was a sweet introduction, and I got way more out Ulysses after that than I ever did before (but then again, I'd never read it that seriously before).

Why is Infinite Jest in there? Joyce and Pynchon are great, DFW was a pseud.

Having read all three, I'd say Infinite Jest is the only one worth reading. Gravity's Rainbow is only good for the paedo scene, and Ulysses is just trash.

I used to think this when I was a pseud but then I realized meme magic chose Wallace for a reason and read him in a new light. He is a genius but not in the way you (a pseud) expect

If he's so smart why did he fall for the psychiatry meme and then kill himself over the imaginary "disease" of depression after agreeing to be given electrocution induced seizures to try to "treat" it?

People are too hard on DFW, IJ is not a masterpiece but I think it is an interesting book, I mean, at least he TRIED to give this generation a little something in the same way Joyce did to modernism and Pynchon did to POMO, he tried to use his IQ to compensate his lack of talent

How do you know it's imaginary? Wouldn't the fact that drugs work to fix it suggest that it is, in fact, not imaginary?

>drugs work to fix it

No. Heroin makes you feel good, that doesn't mean heroin is treating a congenital lack of heroin in your bloodstream.

Because as much as you resist it sometimes ideology gets its tendrills into you and there's only one way to escape. I am amazed he had enough sanity and intellect hidden deep down to get out while he could

>Wouldn't the fact that drugs work to fix it

Holyshit, who let reddit in here

Yes.

And but so a screaming comes across the porch, from the stairhead, Tommy bearing a bowl of lather on which a pinecone and a toy rocket lay crossed—he sits on the steps surrounded by heads and bodies of characters never to be created, Wallace having quit and thrown himself upon his belt, ha-ha o my, Tommy thinx, don't throw rocks at the thrown, ha-ha.

Yes, except there's no problem heroin fixes,, unlike depression. Why do you care so much? I'm perfectly happy to accept that brain chemistry can get out of whack and make you depressed. I've known schizophrenics who're perfectly fine on medication, and completely nuts without it. If your brain can make you think that the KGB turned all the clocks in your apartment back, I don't know why it can't make you very sad and hopeless.

You're so spooked its embarressing.

>your brain can make you

It's not like you're a spirit being acted upon by a brain. Do you also say "your brain made you" eat breakfast in the morning or "your brain made you" watch a movie?

but heroin is known to cure many things, such as "suicidal ideation" "caused by major depressive disorder"

Ulysses isn't hard to read beyond the references, you're just autistic.

Because your dumb KGB example is based on an actual irrational proposition.
There is nothing irrational about wanting to kill yourself because life is awful, and using drugs to "fix" yourself is only undermining your own ego in favour of what ideology prescribes you as the norm

You're a fucking retard.

Sure, opiates are good in some situations where there's an underlying condition. What's your point? Aren't you just admitting that depression exists and can be treated at least partially with opiates?

Why can't you irrationally believe that life is awful in the same way you irrationally believe in KGB plots? You're just imposing your own norms about what is and isn't rational.

No it isn't since depression is a total social construct to frame a wide variety of people who happen to have a superficially similar libido.
If you think all people who are disgnated with so called depression are simply experiencing a chemical disbalance you're a retard

Are they "worth it"?

Well, the secret is they are all fairly amusing which is one in the eye for people who think important literature has to be serious. Even IJ's pretentiousness is of the playful variety.

I never felt they were too long or a particular effort to get through.

If you have to slog through them, while its true some work requires a bit of attention and thought to be invested, hey certainly aren't worth it. No work of fiction is.

Ulysses is better than any american novel.

How do you know that depression is a social construct? I don't think that all depressed people have a chemical imbalance, but I think some definitely do.

Christ you are dumb, I never said it was normal or abnormal to believe life is awful.
The difference between the two is the belief your empty plate contains a mushroom and a person thinking mushrooms taste awful

Gravity's rainbow have good prose in many parts.

the belief that depression exists doesn't make psychiatry any less a scaringly arbitrary ideology than it has been up to this moment in history

and no, that guy is not a retard. get a grip on your life, you fucking passive consumerist faggot

Massive slippery slope problem with this line of thought. This is exactly how an antipsychotic (abilify) became the number 1 bestselling drug in the US. Or how the "ADD epidemic" got started. It's not a great idea to treat mental states as though they were illnesses, particularly when psychiatric diagnoses are made based on opinion and not through any sort of physical diagnostic tools.

They can both be the mushroom. You said it wasn't irrational to believe that life is awful. It certainly can be rational.

I dislike all three.

Think about both of the statements you just made.
There is no underlying cause for depression, two people may be lead to be described as depressed for widely different reasons.
In the same way there is no underlying sympthons, two people commonly described as suffering so called depression may be seen to have wildly different experience and behaviour.

Thus with no common causation or sympthoms there is no legitimate pathology at play, its pure bracketing of a wide variety of people into a convenient ghetto for treatment and discourse. Thus is criminally reductive and in need of firm rejection as result by anyone claiming to call themselves a critical mind

>a cynic's bible to spiritual and political liberation
pls elaborate on this. I can't get the book out of my head since I read it and this phrase stood out

Just because we're bad at diagnosing mental illness and overdiagnose as a result doesn't mean we shouldn't try.

> ulysses is next to impossible to comprehend
why do plebs say this so much? Like all big books, parts of it are harder than others. Overall it's moderate difficulty if you just put in the time and effort

also pls suck me

>bad at diagnosing

We're not bad at it, it never had a real underpinning in the first place. It's not like it's possible to measure how many people diagnosed with "depression" have "real depression."

This user gets it. The Psychologists pathetic desire to grab the coat tails of medicine has led them to abandon any ontological floor for their discipline

Sure, but we might be able to one day. It's not like we knew the exact mechanism of antibiotics when we first came up with them.

There are symptoms that are associated with depression, though they may vary from person to person. What's so hard to understand? Why does a disease need to exhibit itself the same in every patient?

They are all of their times and this is why they are thought to be interesting books.

People hammer DFW because there isn't enough distance yet. But he wrote the right novel for the 90s. Nobody had any business writing a book like Ulysses or Gravity's Rainbow at that point (and DFW should know, he'd tried rewriting The Crying of Lot 49 already).

In the future people will be a lot kinder to DFW than we are. The things people hate about it are things we hate because they are just the wrong period of time behind us. Whiny? Self-indulgent? Ironic? Thats what the 90s was about son, he isn't lying to anyone.

If nothing else, DFW is taking the piss out of archetypes which still haven't died out yet and probably fairly accurately identify the Veeky Forums demographic anyway. Hal wouldn't have liked it either.

Because they're casually associated not contingently associated you mouth breathing troglodyte

If an antibiotic works, you can tell because the person who took it stops having bloody diarrhea. If an antidepressant "works" it's because someone has the opinion that "it works."

What are you, some loser who just took his first philosophy course? That still doesn't make me wrong or depression any less real, btw.

If depression were real it would be treated by neurologists. Note that Axis Three of the DSM explicitly exists for psychiatrists to *rule out* real physical causes like brain tumors.

Yeah, you can also tell an antidepressant works when a person stops feeling depressed. I don't know why we should privilege physical confirmation that much.

>There are symptoms that are associated with depression, though they may vary from person to person. What's so hard to understand? Why does a disease need to exhibit itself the same in every patient?

You don't seem to have the mental capacity to understand venn diagrams but I'll try explain it anyway. When you have people with a given set of sympthoms associated with depression and one with a given set of causes associated with depression and you have individuals diagnosed as depressed who don't fit into either set then there is no unifier.
If there's no unified core of what depression is its not a disease, its at best an emotional description. If not you might as well throw in chickenpocks as a form of depression because why the fuck not

>I don't know why we should privilege physical confirmation that much.

Because physical phenomena have the benefit of being objectively verifiable by more than one party. Would you want to be convicted of a crime on the basis of something you didn't physically do but that someone believed you did because it was "real in her mind?"

Which antidepressent? Works in what sense? On who?

Of course there's a unifier. Nobody gets diagnosed as depressed out of thin air.

We take subjective (eyewitness) evidence in trials all the time. We just don't weigh it as much as physical evidence.

>Nobody gets diagnosed as depressed out of thin air.

Literally anyone who goes to a doctor and asks for abilify gets diagnosed with depression. How do you think it became the number one best seller out of all drugs (i.e. not just psychiatric drugs, ALL drugs)? If you see a commercial about depression and ask for the drug the commercial was selling you will get that drug.

Absolutely 100% sound reasoning, up until the point when we question what exactly has first given you the idea that you should even think about these matters in terms of "patients" and "diseases".

And of course the answer is probably that you simply picked it up at an earlier age from some well-meaning people who told you that that's how it is, and you just accepted it axiomatically.

In other words, for better or worse, it's an ideology.

>Nobody gets diagnosed as depressed out of thin air.

Except they do
Can't be bothered to get out bed and do work? You have ample grounds to be diagnosed
Go to work every day but feel like shit? Grounds for diagnosis
X chemical disbalance? Grounds
Reckless self destructive behaviour? Grounds for diagnosis

So on and so on. I challange you to actually define me this core definition of depression, there is none

That's a flaw of performing the diagnosis, not of the diagnostic standards. Standards exist and just because patients lie and doctors don't care doesn't mean that the disease isn't real.

Go to bed Zizek.

None of those things you described are thin air, user. They're just vague and easily faked and misinterpreted.

Still waiting to hear what that "standard" is fucky

>just because patients lie and doctors don't care doesn't mean that the disease isn't real

Except there's not any meaning to "lying" in this context because there isn't any sort of objective standard for physically identifying "true depression" vs. "fake depression." You can't run a test afterwards and say "this guy had it for real, but this other guy was just faking it." It's all imaginary.

Why are you so combative, you dumb faggot? Does psychiatry trigger you this much? Just go look at the DSM.

psnpaloalto.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Depression-Diagnostic-Criteria-and-Severity-Rating.pdf

>yea IJ was okay I guess. Some things happened and some people said some stuff. Beach read/10

Not being able to identify something and that thing being imaginary aren't the same thing. We may well in the future be able to run a test, who knows?

>can't present a counter-argument
>"Go to bed Zizek."
wow i can see that obviously you truly are at an as uncompromising quest for hard scientific knowledge on this matter as you present yourself to be

The day you can run a test and identify an actual brain problem is the day you're no longer talking about a psychiatric condition. You cited the DSM here:

And the DSM includes Axis III specifically to rule out physical causes. If a patient has a real brain problem, they get treated by a real brain problem doctor (neurologists).

>an amalgomous list of vague casually correlative descriptions

You've really came nowhere since your original statement

Yeah in the meantime why don't I claim your brain is infested with AIDS-Goblins, I only have some sympthoms to base thaf on but not being able to identify something and that thing being imaginary aren't the same thing. We may well in the future be able to run a test, who knows?

Exactly, this is the kind of thinking that leads to men receiving state funded medical treatment of getting their testicles surgically excised because they have "female brains."

>lit suddenly hates infinite jest
What the fuck happened?

Ulysses - definitely
GR - yes
IJ - no

...

Please remember to use Don react pics sparingly. They really pack a wallop.

contrarian counter culture because it's the easiest of the 3 to read and criticize. plus DFW is just a meme in general,more so than pinecone, joyce or gaddis.

I hate all three. I only read Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror and books that actually teach me things. I don't have time to be bogged down with overlong nonsensical texts that some liberal dope will spend his life analyzing and pretending this is one of the greatest books ever or some shit.

>I only read Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror and books that actually teach me things
you're a pleb, in other words.

IJ is just not in the same class as the other two

>t. a pseud

i dont know. everyone turned into a contrarian all of a sudden. i thought the book was fucking great tbqh.

Ulysses is great, if you can stomach it.
Infinite jest, I could see why someone wouldn't like it, but it's one of my favourite books.
Haven't read GR yet. Should I?

This is great, well blended.

B8.

yes

>Haven't read GR yet. Should I?

Yes. Is like Infinite Jest but better and more difficult.

Yes, but Proust, Man Without Qualities by Musil, and Gaddis would make a far better trilogy of books to read.

Surely you're talking about Finnegans Wake? And, even in that case, one can puzzle out the majority of what is going on.

>No. Heroin makes you feel good, that doesn't mean heroin is treating a congenital lack of heroin in your bloodstream.

Heroin works great on depression. For a time.

Proust, absolutely. Swann's Way is an achievement of human expression far beyond Ulysses. However, Man Without Qualities is fucking dull. I've read it twice. Two translations. Not worth it. OP's three books deserve more attention than Robert Musil.

think about how many people hate the current political state of affairs, but have no way to actually argue it, propose a solution, and there's no guidance/monolith to act upon. See this election cycle, both how the republican platform was shattered, and now how we see these protesters mobbing streets, but there doesn't seem to be an end game; they're not looking up to any person or idea. Dissatisfaction without understanding. We're in the age of apathy. Gravity's Rainbow was written in, some argue, the age of paranoia, thus it acts as some kind of guiding tool towards discontent. While the wordplay, structure, and modes (Pynchon's fucked up and playful grammar, parabolic timeline, fantastical mathematical realism) de-materialize the argument, it's still grounded. It's the apex of anti-establishment. Liberate yourself from apathetic discontent.