Day 25: I confess - I Jest don’t get it.
This probably should just be posted as a response to Day 24, but I’ve been lazy and owe you two days, so I’m going to own up to my cluelessness right here in the open where everyone can read it most easily.
Aaron, I want to give DFW and IJ more credit, but am also sure that he knows how to manipulate his audience and it is, indeed, hard with this book not to feel sometimes like he’s forcing his ego on me page after page after page.
My completely honest thoughts on the book at the moment:
I feel like DFW is having fun playing games and that the chance of a reader empathizing with any of the characters or getting any entertainment out of the “plot” is deliberately avoided by obtuse writing and incidents made so outrageous that there isn’t anything to hold on to. Yes…greater metaphors… blabla… I get glimpses of the bigger picture here and there, but I’m old fashioned. For an investment of this much time and effort, I’d like a plotline or character I felt like I could sink my teeth into every once and awhile. Is there more to this book than cleverness for its own sake? If I viewed the thing with enough distance would it take on any shape for me? Right now I mostly see “amoebic blob.” Reading with a lack of background and, probably more importantly, confidence, I’m willing to accept the answer “You just don’t get it.” So okay, I don’t get it, WHAT IS THE POINT?!*
To return to the old food discussion, it’s been like eating… a lobster. Lobster is classy and tastes okay, but it’s a pain to get into and I’ll confess that, for the effort, I prefer the less sophisticated but still delicious crab.
Consider the Crab
*My desire to understand Infinite Jest IS genuine. Aaron? Billifer? Anyone? Maybe at the end of the challenge?
I for one rather enjoyed the book, so I can’t say much along that line. And, as an absurdist, asking me to comment on the point of anything is pretty futile too… But, I’ll try to help you out here, best as I can.
I’m guessing that you’re probably somewhere along the section where Randy Lenz has been having a little fun on his walks back from his meetings. You may have already passed that particular moment of drama, in which case I wouldn’t have to worry about spoilers. Since I don’t know, I’m not going to spoil it.
It’s true that you can go to Joe’s Crab Shack and get the critters for less than you’d spend for sea roaches at a fine dining establishment — and there’d be less attitude, too. At least, less snobbery. You’d have a different kind of attitude, though–one of anti-snobbery. By that, I mean that if you wanted to get something more out of the dining experience than just a meal, you’re out of luck.
There’s a type of literature called ergodic literature which comes from the Greek words for “work” and “path,” and basically it describes literature that you come to understand only after some investment in it. There’s certainly a difference between Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and The Great Gatsby. Likewise, there’s a difference (in effort required at least; only you and each reader individually can decide whether in quality) between The Great Gatsby and Infinite Jest.
When you started the challenge, I’m curious, what were your thoughts as you looked at the 1,000-page book with nearly 400 endnotes (and footnotes on endnotes)? Did you think, “Oh, I’ll read 35 pages a day and it’ll be just like doing it for school only I’ll have more time”? Like your desire to understand IJ, my curiosity is genuine (and not meant to be patronizing or condescending).
Although I’m a writer (still unpublished), at the time I started Infinite Jest it was the most ambitious undertaking of my own reading experience. I had read The Broom of the System the year before and I thought that would prepare me for IJ–but I couldn’t have been more wrong! Everything about his writing and even his attitudes changed between those two books.
My point is this: I wasn’t an English major or a literature major. Heck, I did computer science. I hated the “classics.” It wasn’t until I started reading the truly contemporary fiction that I actually discovered that I LOVE fiction. I made it through Infinite Jest, and so can you. It took me a lot longer than a month–and it might you–but you’ll make it.
I’m embarking on my own literary quest shortly into Gravity’s Rainbow, my second Pynchon novel (I read The Crying of Lot 49 just before IJ), and that will be a massive undertaking as well. I know how you’re feeling.
If you want to discuss more specific aspects of IJ, email me (you have my address from my comments). I don’t want to spoil anything for Aaron or others who might be following along or stumble across the blog in the future.
(God I hope all my HTML is well-formed since there’s no ‘Preview’ ….)
I initially went into this with NO expectations, but now they’re high. I hadn’t read anything else by David Foster Wallace and, though the title of the book was vaguely familiar to me, I couldn’t even remember it for long enough to buy the book without writing it down.
Things didn’t get off to a great start. The beginning was… discouraging. The experience improved immensely after those first few hundred pages, but that rocky beginning has colored the whole experience of the book for me. I feel like DFW owes me something now, which is ridiculous, but there you go.
It isn’t as if I dread reading it every day – I have genuinely enjoyed parts of it – but I’m just not sure I get what the big deal is… I do have hundreds of pages more to go, so I’m not making a final evaluation, but by the end I will have invested enough time and work into it that I’d like to feel like I got more out of the experience than the right to say “I’ve read this book.” I think that I may have had something to this effect a week or two ago, but some of my discomfort comes from the fact that I feel like I’m wandering around in the trees and can’t relax about it. There IS a forest, right? Excess for gain vs. destruction? To what ends are we willing to go to satisfy our (apparently insatiable!) desire for pleasure? Something like that? Yeah?
I can tell already that I’d get a lot more out of a second reading now that I have a better idea of what I’m dealing with (“Infinite Jest Challenge II – 2013”?) but first I’d have to be persuaded that I wanted to tackle it again. I’m honestly not sure yet.
Also, I think I’m at a pivotal point in the plot – being slightly behind, I think that I stopped last just after the “incident” to which you refer. Maybe I’ll have some new perspective on it tomorrow. And I might email you to discuss the specifics – but I guess I want to wait until after I’ve finished it first.
Am I being unfair to DFW and the book? Maybe I’ve built the book up too much without really knowing what I’m dealing with. I don’t know what’s a matter of personal taste and what’s a matter of plain stupidity. (I’m talking about my own here - I’m fairly certain at this point that DFW is not stupid.)
ramble ramble…
A reasonable a sincere answer. The beginning is discouraging—especially since you read exactly one episode set in Year of Glad and then everything else is in YDAU… You read about Hal and then are immediately snatched off to the pompous and paranoid Erdedy. (And then what’s up with “yrs truly”?!) But it’s that kind of thing that DFW has to do early on (like an undergrad weeder class) to make sure you know what you’re getting into.
Let me reiterate what I said on day 17: “Don’t get so drawn into the gravitas of Infinite Jest [that you] forget to laugh.” You still haven’t quite made it to the scene to which I alluded in that comment (although if you can hang in there, you’ll be there soon—you’re not far from the point where I was about to go gaga).*
An earlier one, though, is the murder of the Antitoi brothers. Think about it: All these legless men in wheelchairs… doing what they did… to such husky guys as the Antitois. And then—then—crawling all over the shelves of the their store like some kind of spiders or something, looking for the samizdat.
For me, reading IJ was almost natural because when I was younger, I was Hal. I could actually “ID” with him—to frame it in the AA context of the book. I suppose that if you can’t find some character somewhere with whom you can empathize, then it would be much harder. (What about JvD? Not even her?)
There is a forest, but there are a hell of a lot of trees. The book works in reverse, to a large part, because the “forest” comes more at the beginning during Steeply’s and Marathe’s overnight discussions than where it traditionally would in the denoument of a novel. You’re on the right track, though, with your thoughts on what that forest is.
When you do finish the book, you’ll scratch your head, you’ll say to yourself, “Oh, there’s no way that’s it,” and then you’ll immediately turn back to the beginning. When you do, you’ll find at least two key pieces of the puzzle that I guarantee you missed on the first reading. And then you’ll feel better about it. There will still be an unsettling feeling, and you (like me) may even feel a loss in your life for some time. But isn’t that the hallmark of not merely good but truly great literature?
* I should disclose, though, that I did read other books concurrently with IJ in order to reduce the brain strain. I had to take a break entirely to read Harry Potter 7, and I read probably three other novels while I was also reading IJ. It helps.
Hard to say. I’m generally a fan of books with plot as well, but when IJ kept talking about Himself’s whole Found Drama genre, I pretty much just resigned myself to the fact that there probably wasn’t really a nice neat story and I should just enjoy the book. Sounds like I was more into some of the characters than you are, though.
Also I read it when I as on a co-op work term, had just moved to a new city and the only people I had contact with were people 20 years older to me, working at a job that they all seemed to hate and worked overtime for the money-people I couldn’t really find much in common with, is what I’m saying. They were nice people, but I just felt ridiculously alone, which is a great time to read IJ (when else does reading 1000 pages not seem like a huge chore?). I read IJ; I felt less alone. As Billifer said, it was also has some pretty funny moments, so it would make me laugh in an “oh, that’s sad but true” kind of way. It’s only in talking to other people that I realize that I got way less out of the book than them. But I’m kind of content to just have gotten out of it what I needed at the time. And to just pick it up occasionally and re-read my favourite parts.
And I agree that reading it all in a month is probably overwhelming.
I’m never quite sure, now that I first finished it 5 years ago, if there’s maybe some kind of “wikifriends” effect going on where I read what other people say they loved about the book and then I decide “Yeah, I loved that part too!”, in light of which, I should probably stop talking and let you decide for yourself.
Consider the crab.
I love this comment by Colleen, especially the “wikifriends” part. Something about the book makes me always wanting to know what other people experienced when they read it. It’s why an Infinite Jest blog is such a good idea.
But, the same qualities (the book is dense, fragmented, tedius, long, etc.) that lead to this sharing of the experience, are also what make reading it on a schedule such a terrible idea.
It will all be over soon enough. Keep up the good work, and try to finish strong.
I love this project! I worked my way through IJ 10 years ago. I bought it in Durango, while travelling through Colorado. It took me 4 months to read it, and it was hard work, since English is not my native language. I always thought I missed the clue and would probably have to wait for the translation into Dutch, which never came. A Duthc translater worked on a translation of “Brief interviews with hideous men” a couple of years ago, but he gave up. Even though I have no idea what the clue of IJ is, I remember my own 4 months project as one of my best reading experiences. So maybe a good advice is: stop searching/hoping for a clue, just enjoy it.
Hillebrand is on to something — both in terms of reading the book and understanding the book: Stop searching for the answer, and just enjoy it.
(And Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is a hilarious, and much easier, follow-up to IJ. It isn’t related in any way thematically, but it’s a good reprieve when you’ve finished IJ but DFW hasn’t quite finished with you.)