Infinite Jest: Hype and Postmodernism, wha?

[Never_Scurred]

1. I didn't know anything about this David Foster Wallace guy before stumbling upon an article about him a couple weeks ago. Read the comments section and everyone was falling over themselves praising him and this book in particular. Been on a reading streak lately, feeling confident after finishing some of David Mitchell, J.G. Ballard and Luke Rhinehart and was curious to see what all the buzz was about.

2. Everyone was throwing words around like "Postmodernism", "existentialism" and a bunch of other terms I know nothing about because, well....niggas don't get philosophy degrees or shit like that(Yeah, I know I am setting myself up-YOLO- but the smartest niggas I ever knew were doctors, convicts, pharmacists, and lawyers and even they don't use words like that)
Going down the hole that is Google produces no clear cut answer to what exactly these things are. By clear cut answer I mean,-explain it to me like I am a 10 year old.

3. Why do people worship Wallace so much? Dude looks like a unshaven cunt (not talking about his personality, looks like a nice guy up close but all his faceshot photos look like '70's hairy white girl pussy from a distance), and after almost 200 pages into his book i'm like, "I don't get it". Its amusing so far, but I am expecting some high-level genius mindblowing shit here from all the accolades (hell, 20 or so pages of the book as well as most of the backside is all praise.) It just seems like a bunch of rambling and shit.

4. The fact that he offed himself was compelling, and knowing that kinda adds weight to some of what I have read so far, but it seems silly to kill yourself after achieving such great success. I would think a person that depressed for that long of time wouldn't have bothered trying to do anything substantial like becoming a literary giant if suicide was always an option.

5. What is postmodern writing? Is it rambling on and on, filling up pages with detail or are there some greater ideas I am supposed to be picking up here? Cloud Atlas was another one of those "postmodern" works of literature hyped all to fuck, while I love the book to death, I don't get what is supposed to be postmodern about it? Is it the structure? The use of language? This and IJ kinda have those things in common, both authors can drag ass with the needless detail and tangents. Then again, I don't know what exactly is "postmodernism".

6. I am definitely gonna finish this book, at least to say that I did it. Without spoiling anything, what did you guys who read this thing get from it? Liked it, hated it?

[drboom]

I was a philosophy student for four years and loved lengthy tomes with some sort of intellectual bent - read a ton of Sartre's novels and plays, read all of Celine's, tons of JG Ballard and TC Boyle and tried Infinite Jest back before he offed himself and though it was crap. I used it to prop up an end of my couch for years. It seems like poeple want a modern day James Joyce and thought he was it. I certainly didn't think so.

[andsuchisdeath]

Uhh I have it and stopped reading after a few pages.

I've always been too intellectually scrubby to clear books though, so I can't say my failure to commit was exclusively the product of a distaste for the few pages of content I troubled myself to process.

I guess I've been content in remaining an unread slob. I never wanted to be some poseur with a large shelf of books blindly compiled through a poor sense of my needs as a reader. Hype generated by those who can't articulate what's behind it certainly don't make things easier.

[sjewkestheloon]

Ok bear with me, I'm going to make a fair number of generalisms here so I don't go on too long.

So my take on postmodernism is thus:
The realist novel was and is the most commonly written type of novel, with a neat beginning, middle and end, usually with a moral purpose or a strict intent. Modernism questioned the veracity of the realist format, and questioned if it actually expressed anything real. Life is not neat, there is no narrative and denouement, and people can't reveal themselves through well wrought realist dialogue that is completely unlike real speech.

Following this chain of thought, modernist writers played with techniques, using stream of consciousness styles and other complex ways in which to, quite often, attempt to present the totality of a subject. The focus tended to extend to a faith in language, and an attempt to very skillfully manipulate language in complex ways to reflect the complexity of being. For example, Joyce's Ulysees takes up just one day in a normal Dublin, and follows three characters. Each chapter is written in a style suiting the subject matter, and almost everything in the day is linked to the others by fragments of thought that break into the text, the meaning of which isn't clear until you have absorbed the book as a whole, a task I'm not sure is even possible.

Postmodernism, with regards to literature, I read as a reaction against what modernism claimed to be able to do. It presents a mistrust in the ability of language to communicate reality, and separates language from reality; they are two separate things and our ability to comprehend is hampered because we can't relay experience into words accurately enough to satisfy the need for expression.

This led down a number of different routes, and therefore postmodernism is incredibly nebulous.

Beckett is often called the last modernist, or the first postmodernist depending on who you ask. His late prose rejected the usual trappings of narrative altogether and instead focuses on a character looking at his life, with failing memory, and with a mistrust of what he is able to remember. It deals with the urge to write, the urge to communicate, but with the acknowledgment that there is nothing worth saying and that every attempt is destined to fail if you don't know what is wanted of you.

Another influential writer of postmodernism is John Barth, especially in Lost in the Funhouse, which attempts to deconstruct the form of the story, and break the reader/author relationship down. The authorial voice highlights why certain things are as they are, and mocks his own constructions. In one story the author justifies his character's misery by his own, and makes the character promise to construct other narratives to communicate his own woes, to infinity.

Another key feature found in postmodern works is the meta techniques, falsifying and adding layers of meaning to a text, or bringing them into questions. Danielewski's House of Leaves is about a film, and we experience the film through a critical document talking about the film's history, written by a blind man. Another character then comes across the manuscript and prepares it for print, incorporating information about his own life into the text as footnotes and appendices.

That's a start. I've not read DFW yet, beyond a few essays, but I want to. If you have any questions ask away and I'll do my best, but 'm no expert and I have a lot of problems with postmodernism as a catch all term for very different works by very different authors, and results in the collecting together of such disparate writers as Borges and Pynchon.