The Infinite Jest Challenge

Note: Due to some technical difficulties involving my computer’s complete rejection of the new Leopard OS, this entry was typed in the day’s postmortem.

I agree Liz, today’s reading was a nightmare. A full spectrum of the novel’s engagement with experimentation presented itself. The text diverged into more narrators than we collectively have limbs, DFW’s trademark footnotes (or as he likes to call them in his essays with the glee of a 14-year-old MMORPG player, FN’s) revealed an array of pharmaceutical and filmographical trivia, and the subsidized years which I once thought I had straight no longer make any kind of chronological sense. Most of these aspects still worked to varying degrees of success, except for one:

Courtesy of Google Images, not the private hoard of racist illustrations I keep on my hard drive 

After thinking about it the whole day, really trying to justify its means, I have come to the conclusion that I just hate the ebonics chapter with Wardine and Roy Tony. First off, it’s as if DFW took a chapter and processed it through Gizoogle. I understand the concepts of authorial fallacy and textual authority, but damn DFW if he didn’t challenge my notion of what a white middle class author is allowed to write. Judging from my little bookmark of chapter summaries, it doesn’t appear as if this narrator is returning either. This was a one off caricature and that pisses me off. The only other famous example of a white author taking on an African American dialect that I can think of is William Styron in The Confessions of Nat Turner. But I suppose Styron’s book is exactly the kind of realism that DFW stands stalwartly against. All attempts at a complete dissection of the English language aside, did we really need another depiction of black men and women hitting each other while they take haphazard care of their babies and go in and out of jail? Even a highschooler (Maya on Goodreads) can recognize this section as “cringeworthy.” C’mon, DFW!