Listening to some DFW interviews

>why does Enfield Waste Department get rid of the garbage by loading it into catapults and throwing it into the concavity?

To very seriously highlight the dangers and seriously dangerous and scary heights these people would go to, to do something so ludicrous that you would even go so far as to call it funny,

Ulysses is packed with humour

Close. Real close.

At the intersection of vainglory and smug, we find a novelist who thinks he has offered a special solution to the post-modern problem of who is the narrator, but he buried it under so much frivolous decoration that nobody got it. He could never believe that he sold so many copies to so many people, including professional critics, none of whom got it.

They still don't get it. Between spelling it out, which he almost but never really did, and all his baggage from everything else fucked up in his life, he chose exit over explanation, and turned IJ into a thousand page suicide note.

"its NOT funny!!!!!!!!!!!" - dfw

That's just critics that didn't bother to read it. "Infinite Jest? Yeah it's really funny, next paycheck please."

i read perpetual holiday and laughed sometimes but was never sad once... even the story of the whore carrying around her stinking dead fetus he told in a side-splitting way

he actually said in an interview that he made brief interviews with hideous men unrelentingly morbid because he was mad people laughed at his endless joke masterpiece book. he siad "nobody is gonna escape the fact that this is sad."

he didnt want to make people laugh anymore. he wanted to be very serious.

Don't forget the Divine Comedy.

It's not really "ha ha" funny, it's more droll, but I think DFW knew that there were jokes in it. How could he not have?

I think he pushed this "new-sincerity" to the point of being disingenuous. That is, he knew the book was funny and ironic in parts, but he felt the need to deny it in order to appear sincere. His "all time favourite books" list is another example. The man was obviously well-read in the classics but he fills his list with Tom Clancy etc. It's a statement of sincerity which is at its core rather insincere. That's the paradox of DFW and of new-sincerity in general.

i kinda see where he's coming from... i'm confused as to why the first word people would use to describe IJ is "funny"..

because even when hes trying to be sad, hes funny.

wallace was funny, but i cringe every time i know he was trying to be sad. like with gately as a kid misunderstanding cirrhosis of the liver as "Sir Osis of Thuliver" (which was a bugs bunny joke before wallace tried to make people cry with it) and riding around on a broom or something.

wallace always said his generation was petrified of real emotion and sentimentality - but i think it was just his problem. i think he was a real sentimental guy who was ashamed to be, because the scenes that are supposed to be moving in his fiction are pretty sentimental.

but he acted like writing a moving scene was some kind of courageous act... meanwhile, all around him, professional novelists were doing it. when did novels STOP provoking the emotions of readers? never, not even for one year.

i don't think anywhere in IJ is there a specific sentence or scene or page where he was trying to be sad.. but overall to me, the book is sad in a cynical, guarded way

Basically this.

He saw it (or at least wanted it to be) a book that transcended the detached, shallow pop-irony of the 80s and 90s in a new way that went beyond what had been done before. His "vision" for it was a format where tragedy and comedy were meant to blend together in a way that elevated the emotional resonance of the total experience rather than just being something to giggle about or get depressed over. Critics at the time saw it as smart but soulless while it was later reappraised as moving and funny but still not totally revolutionary the way DFW wanted it to seem. He wasn't even that satisfied with how it turned out years after the fact so he eventually realized he was aiming for something that wasn't entirely possible for anyone, least of all him. DFW's entire career was a futile and self defeating effort where he constantly tried to become something he wasn't.

Maybe he's jesting in the interviews? It is infinite, after all.

youre onto something big

keep going

who am i? dont worry about it

*wind picks up and a banana lands on your face*

The only sincere choice on the list was screwtape letters. Its pretty funny that there's thousands of people that list IJ as a favorite novel without even reading it, let alone understanding it, while the author lists Tom Clancy and Stephen King as his favorite books.

That list is a goof and not a goof. He knew the list solicitors were looking for a literary list, but he gave them a pop list instead. He did like all those books. I think he also just wanted to be different. Another example is if you read the 2012 bio when he got the teaching job at pomona he met with a bunch of profs at one of their houses; they talked about favorite books and everybody said really lit stuff lime the fairie queene but he talked about "a bestseller." I think he had a genuine love for bestsellers but displayed it in calculated ways. I think he was also put off by literary people; he talked in an interview once about hating the poets at his college.

In sum wallace was sometimes an embarassed lover of literature. Or he loved the books but hated their fans.

that list is cringey

Also re: the narrative issue, JOI basically spells out his goals of making sure no one was just an extra, figurant, or setpiece by having their inner experiences show through or giving them at least one scene where they're the center of attention even if they're minor figures at best by conventional narrative standards. The exact outcome of everything is left ambiguous because it was supposed to be about this supposedly new way of conveying experiences and emotions rather than telling a story. It ultimately failed on that front because it was too abstract a goal and DFW wasn't willing to really go the distance with it because he understood that no one would read something that didn't try to be conventionally entertaining on an at least intermittent basis. He was going for something like a blend of Joyce, Pynchon, Gaddis, and Hawkes but better which was always an arrogant and impossible task.

*better and more accessible

I don't understand why a man obsessed with sincerity wrote massive postmodern novel in the first place? Genuinely would like an explanation for this.

If you believe what he says, he grew up reading 50s-70s avant-garde lit and came to enjoy that style but didn't like where it ended up going by the 80s and 90s. The stereotype of postmodernism as an ultra-detached movement where everything is coated in 20 layers of irony or autistically academic and boring to pander to the highbrow crowd comes from what it became once it was adapted for a more mainstream audience on one end and a strictly academic one on the other.

And yet you understand what he was trying to do, and it worked on you as an audience.

Where you seem to lack faith in DFW isn't in *your* understanding of him, but in everyone else's understanding of him.

I think your isolation lacks in your assumption that most of his audience is going to be too stupid to read it.

I've found that the book gets better every time I read it, and on some level more accessible. It feels like The Entertainment itself. It's hostile to the audience, but ultimately consumes their attention.

Down the road I think more and more people will get it and it will enter the canon of "greatest literature."

Even if it doesn't I think it'll remain appreciable as an exploration of addiction and consumer culture for years to come.

As for the whole "1000 page suicide note" thing, he killed himself 12 years after releasing the book. If that's a suicide note I'll eat my shorts.

>too stupid to read it.
I meant
too stupid to *get it.

budumtss

The kind of people who put Dostoevsky and shit in their OKC profiles. I feel him.

There is a massive artistic movement against "intellectualism" and "pretentiousness" these days. That sort of thing flows in and out of popularity cyclically. George Lucas

I think he was a harbinger of that sort of thing.

I wish he had lived to see the election of JGFC in 2016

I had an incomplete thought there. I meant to mention that George Lucas was a reaction to the drug-fueled auteur cynicism of 70s cinema. Star Wars in a way was meant to be a return to sincerity and innocence, and a direction reaction to things like Taxi Driver and The Godfather, etc.

Lucas was an auteur against auteurism and in a way he resembles wallace's new sincerity. However he became way more commercial and he reacted against his own sincerity with the commercial "darkness" of the prequels.

You obviously have far too healthy of a misunderstanding of the lifelong impulsivity of suicide. Franzen, for all his MFA pretensions, explained it as well as anybody ever has. Read him on the topic:

newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/18/farther-away-jonathan-franzen

You can skip the travelogue circle-jerking paragraphs.

I understood what he was going for and recognized his own in-text explanation for it but I don't think it actually worked the way he intended it to. He had high-minded, overly-ambitious artistic goals but also wanted to be popular and a crowd pleaser. He just wanted way too much, so failure was inevitable. That's also why JOI's film career was considered so marginal; on some level he recognized that he was aiming for the impossible even if it took him a long while to fully process that.

thanks user, interesting link and a good read

btw is Franzen worth reading in general?

You faggots have ruined Veeky Forums with this meme dickery.

t. someone who hasn't read IJ

>btw is Franzen worth reading in general?
Not at all. His prose is dull and his plots are effeminate trivialities about quirky families. You get the idea that he's never put a hand to a woman's neck during sex.

I agree with Franzen is bland as fuck and downright insufferable. He thinks he's a highbrow artiste but he's really the Stephen King of literary fiction.

I actually have the book in your pic and some other shit like the magnificent third rail lying in my book stacks. Still haven't read them though.

>sardonic humor