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Apr. 26th, 2010 12:15 pmI'm about 400 pages into Infinite Jest, which is enough time to start sharing some impressions.
It's funny and amazing that a book so consciously post-modern, so obsessed with intricately constructed literary gadgetry, so off-kilter and hilarious, feels so old-fashioned and especially unironic, but that's how I feel about it. Even when the characters are explicitly exploring irony, there is a deep-seated sincerity at the core of these exchanges.
For example the scene where Orin and Hal talk about Himself's death by microwave, and the conversation is littered with wry jokes and silly irrelevancies and it seems like they're going nowhere. And you peel back a layer, notice some of the malapropism (Orin speaks of 'telemachries') and other structural features (Hal is naked and grooming himself throughout the scene) and realize that Orin and Hal are acting out Stephen and Buck's exchange about Mrs. Dedalus from the beginning of Joyce's Ulysses as a sort of second-degree farce. And I would have told you that such a tedious parody would obliterate any meaning from the original, which is itself a parody of the beginning of The Odyssey. But instead we have all of this lurking depth, two estranged brothers negotiating a reconciliation in the shadow of their father's suicide and their mother's unsavory affair. And the way they score points off each other is so perfectly written and... sympathetic. The chapter is hysterically funny, but the jokes aren't at Orin or Hal's expense. Which is more than we can say of Joyce's Telemachiad, which is perhaps compromised by the narrator's editorialization.
Unlike Joyce, where part of the fun is solving the puzzles and enigmas, which are ostensibly fair, Foster Wallace never requires you to play the games. Several times, in fact, he compromises the integrity of his own riddles by telling you the answer. My favorite of these is a chapter that concludes with him telling you that Don Gately farted, after making the originator of the flatulence a secret throughout the lengthy chapter. It recalls some of the jokes Wallace describes in Himself's apres-garde filmmaking, jokes that aim not only to subvert the audience's expectations but to humiliate the audience for having such expectations to begin with. My normal methods of textual exploration fail here. Wallace is forcing me to go along with the adventure on his terms. It's exciting and fresh!
It's funny and amazing that a book so consciously post-modern, so obsessed with intricately constructed literary gadgetry, so off-kilter and hilarious, feels so old-fashioned and especially unironic, but that's how I feel about it. Even when the characters are explicitly exploring irony, there is a deep-seated sincerity at the core of these exchanges.
For example the scene where Orin and Hal talk about Himself's death by microwave, and the conversation is littered with wry jokes and silly irrelevancies and it seems like they're going nowhere. And you peel back a layer, notice some of the malapropism (Orin speaks of 'telemachries') and other structural features (Hal is naked and grooming himself throughout the scene) and realize that Orin and Hal are acting out Stephen and Buck's exchange about Mrs. Dedalus from the beginning of Joyce's Ulysses as a sort of second-degree farce. And I would have told you that such a tedious parody would obliterate any meaning from the original, which is itself a parody of the beginning of The Odyssey. But instead we have all of this lurking depth, two estranged brothers negotiating a reconciliation in the shadow of their father's suicide and their mother's unsavory affair. And the way they score points off each other is so perfectly written and... sympathetic. The chapter is hysterically funny, but the jokes aren't at Orin or Hal's expense. Which is more than we can say of Joyce's Telemachiad, which is perhaps compromised by the narrator's editorialization.
Unlike Joyce, where part of the fun is solving the puzzles and enigmas, which are ostensibly fair, Foster Wallace never requires you to play the games. Several times, in fact, he compromises the integrity of his own riddles by telling you the answer. My favorite of these is a chapter that concludes with him telling you that Don Gately farted, after making the originator of the flatulence a secret throughout the lengthy chapter. It recalls some of the jokes Wallace describes in Himself's apres-garde filmmaking, jokes that aim not only to subvert the audience's expectations but to humiliate the audience for having such expectations to begin with. My normal methods of textual exploration fail here. Wallace is forcing me to go along with the adventure on his terms. It's exciting and fresh!
