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Paul Bryant's Reviews > Infinite Jest
Infinite Jest
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That's it, I'm demoting this one back to the TO-READ shelf - my pal Nick recently said he's changed the status of some intended time-consuming jobs from "when I retire" to "when I'm reincarnated" - maybe I'll read IJ in the next life, although as I intend to be a mighty elm tree in my next life that may prove difficult, but maybe you don't get to choose what you are, you just line up like at the bank or the post office and you go to a middle aged woman behind a wire mesh and she says "Okay honey here's the Form 27B, fill it all in, front AND back, and take it to the Next Life section over there - you've been assigned to CRUSTACEA - how do you like that! Enjoy! Wiggle wiggle!"
Anyway, I wasn't really reading this, I was just picking it up and sighing and putting it down. So it was slightly useful because otherwise I do very little physical exercise.
By the way, what's with the Beatle quote on page 32? (Hah, see how far I got?)
"I want to tell you" the voice on the phone said, "my head is filled with things to say"
"I don't mind," Hal said softly, "I could wait forever."
I hope you all spotted that one!
********
There's a whole essay on the literature of endurance to be written, maybe someone has considered this somewhere, all about those famously-difficult-but-brilliant books and their readers. How we love and loathe them. Or maybe just loathe them because we have this obligation laid on us by ... who? ... the Illuminati of Deliberate Unpunctuation? the Knights Templar of the Ten-Page Paragraph? Which are these books, aside from IJ?
- all of Samuel Beckett
- Finnegans Wake (some would say Ulysses too)
- Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage sequence (does anyone anywhere EVER read that one?)
- the three late great brainkilling Henry James novels (Wings of the Dove, Ambassadors & Golden Bowl)
- Marcel Proust and his 40 page sentences (although some on this site clearly find him easy peasy lemon squeezy and they present their arguments with vim and panache)
- all of Thomas Bernhard, that's a personal choice
- Marquis de Sade, 120 Days of Sodom
And this is also very true of movies too - there's a whole raft of films which I'd class as the Cinema of Endurance too such as
- Irreversible
- Funny Games
- Passion of Christ
- Cannibal Holocaust
- Texas Chainsaw Massacre (at the time anyway)
- Exorcist (I'd say still up there)
- Antichrist
- Pasolini's Salo (film version of 120 days of Sodom)
- Martyrs
- I Spit on your Grave
- Fellini Satyricon and others because of the extreme boredom levels
and you could extend the idea into the Music of Endurance with stuff like
- Metal Machine Music, Lou Reed
- Trout Mask Replica, Captain Beefheart (personally I like it, but I can see some wouldn't)
- The Ring Cycle
- anything by Big Black
- anything by Celine Dion - no, seriously, I think the Music of Endurance is a much harder concept because very clearly one woman's wild salmon over young leeks softened in oil, garlic and basil with grilled zuccini garnished with fresh pear, pickled daikon and cucumber broth is another man's turkey twizzler.
What say you? Do you resent being obliged to endure?
Anyway, I wasn't really reading this, I was just picking it up and sighing and putting it down. So it was slightly useful because otherwise I do very little physical exercise.
By the way, what's with the Beatle quote on page 32? (Hah, see how far I got?)
"I want to tell you" the voice on the phone said, "my head is filled with things to say"
"I don't mind," Hal said softly, "I could wait forever."
I hope you all spotted that one!
********
There's a whole essay on the literature of endurance to be written, maybe someone has considered this somewhere, all about those famously-difficult-but-brilliant books and their readers. How we love and loathe them. Or maybe just loathe them because we have this obligation laid on us by ... who? ... the Illuminati of Deliberate Unpunctuation? the Knights Templar of the Ten-Page Paragraph? Which are these books, aside from IJ?
- all of Samuel Beckett
- Finnegans Wake (some would say Ulysses too)
- Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage sequence (does anyone anywhere EVER read that one?)
- the three late great brainkilling Henry James novels (Wings of the Dove, Ambassadors & Golden Bowl)
- Marcel Proust and his 40 page sentences (although some on this site clearly find him easy peasy lemon squeezy and they present their arguments with vim and panache)
- all of Thomas Bernhard, that's a personal choice
- Marquis de Sade, 120 Days of Sodom
And this is also very true of movies too - there's a whole raft of films which I'd class as the Cinema of Endurance too such as
- Irreversible
- Funny Games
- Passion of Christ
- Cannibal Holocaust
- Texas Chainsaw Massacre (at the time anyway)
- Exorcist (I'd say still up there)
- Antichrist
- Pasolini's Salo (film version of 120 days of Sodom)
- Martyrs
- I Spit on your Grave
- Fellini Satyricon and others because of the extreme boredom levels
and you could extend the idea into the Music of Endurance with stuff like
- Metal Machine Music, Lou Reed
- Trout Mask Replica, Captain Beefheart (personally I like it, but I can see some wouldn't)
- The Ring Cycle
- anything by Big Black
- anything by Celine Dion - no, seriously, I think the Music of Endurance is a much harder concept because very clearly one woman's wild salmon over young leeks softened in oil, garlic and basil with grilled zuccini garnished with fresh pear, pickled daikon and cucumber broth is another man's turkey twizzler.
What say you? Do you resent being obliged to endure?
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Kristi
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Dec 08, 2009 07:09PM
I'd be interested in your opinion after you've read this book.
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Me too! I'm reading an 800 page whopper at the moment, and I want to read 2666 also, another whopper, and I don't want to end up reading only 3 novels in a year...!
Well, I'm giving it another 100 pages perhaps - so far it's been virtuosity without passion. Nabokov does a better job, I think.
The one I'm reading is also just a little too good to stop but not good enough for 900 pages, so far. But heads will roll in a hundred pages, I'm pretty sure of that, since it's about the French revolution. Heads do not roll in a tennis academy, so I'm not sure what where is to look forward to in IJ.
I haven't hit the AA meetings yet - in IJ or real life :). There's always time, though.
The difference between 2666 and Infinite Jest is, that Bolano does his utmost to suck you into the book, whereas Wallace raises one artificial barrier after the other. When Infinite Jest gets going, after say 250! pages, it gets indeed very good, but to get there ...
Gravity's Rainbow, for sure. I've read it twice and it was as crazy, wonderful, difficult and infuriating both times. I think Ulysses counts. I still don't really know if I can say I read it. I certainly didn't understand it. I'd throw in The Waves, Moby Dick and all of Gertrude Stein. Proust trains you how to read him, if that makes sense. It's not that it's not difficult, nor that it becomes "easy," but it becomes a new type of normal.
I think your movies equivalents are way off. Actually, I think they're are utterly wrong comparisons. They're tests of endurance in horror, and formally only vaguely challenging, whereas all of the novels you've mentioned are extremely formally demanding, and not necessarily stomach churning or pushing the endurance of what you can imagine.
The novels you mention force you to change the way you read. They brake all the preceding novelistic rules which still dominate writing and novels. The movies you mention are relatively formally inventive, but not on the same level as DFW, or Proust, or James, or Bolano. The movies you mention brake rules, but their structure is still roughly three acts (Salo is somewhat of an exception, as is Irreversable but they pale in inventiveness next to other films.)
Basically, we're talking about modernist "texts" and most of the movies you mentioned (esp. The Exorcist) are decidedly pre-modernist.
That said, I have equated Texas Chainsaw to Blood Meridian in many talks. (I think Texas Chainsaw is a brilliant film.)
Better movie equivalents would be Godard's Week End, or even better, his 80s movies; Tarkovsky's non-sci-fi movies, Theo Angelopoulos' movies, Kiarostami's movies, any of the Taiwanese New Wave, Jordowoski, the crazier Czech or Japanese New Wave films, Sweet Movie, Pasolini's Teorama, etc.
I think your musical equivalents are way off as well.
And I despise endurance if it's just for endurance. There has to be more than that. I love Gravity's Rainbow; I think it's the South Park of literature. Proust changed the way I experience the world. I loved Bernhard and Moby Dick and both were a chore to get through. I still don't get Ulysses but it had great parts. I love Beckett and don't find it hard to read. I love James, but haven't read the books you mentioned.And out of those movies, I like or love them all (except for Funny Games and Irreversible) but don't think they're similar.
Hi Troy - as I listed my endurance films I noticed that the type of endurance required was completely different, as you noted, and I thought of Andy Warhol's Sleep and Empire, but that would be also not comparing like with like because those movies really are endurance-for-the-sake-of-it. There is no pan-artistic comparison to be made here but there is, I think, a thin and insistent thread of a) giantism in post modern novels, and b) yet more cranked-up gruesomeness in movies. And both of these are challenging the audiences directly - can you take this??I think it's easier to compare grandiose audience-testing in music, and my examples were very slapdash.
Our experiences are very different - I always loved Moby Dick, read it twice, loved Ulysses, didn't want to touch Finnegans Wake with a bargepole, I think the late HJ would be too much effort for too little reward, Pynchon also always repelled me for reasons I'm not quite sure I understand and Proust is a one-day-for-sure thing. And 2666 is on my to-read shelf right now.
But when you've got a couple of concepts in your brain, Ulysses isn't especially difficult - stream of consciousness, Homeric parallels, radical textual disruption, parodies of this, that and the other thing - it even has a happy ending!
Troy wrote: "The novels you mention force you to change the way you read. They brake all the preceding novelistic rules which still dominate writing and novels. The movies you mention are relatively formally inventive, but not on the same level as DFW, or Proust, or James, or Bolano. The movies you mention brake rules, but their structure is still roughly three acts (Salo is somewhat of an exception, as is Irreversable but they pale in inventiveness next to other films.)"I really like the idea that Proust trains you read him. A Shakespeare/medievalist friend of mine says that about Spenser, too.
I think any book that can use a companion book fits my version of your criteria. I still feel like I need a companion book (or someone to hold my hand) while I re-read Ulysses. All of the books we mentioned are completely hermetic and weave a personal language, structure, grammar, writing, and world, whereas 99.9% of novels just weave a personal world.
I think several movies fit those criteria, more so than Warhol's stuff. Out of recent movies, Bela Tarr, Syndromes and a Century, Goodbye Dragon Inn or Kiarostami's Ten, all "re-write" how we watch movies. They are all endurance fests, but on every level, not just the gross-out level.
Another endurance writer: William Gaddis!
Tristam Shandy?
Gargantua and Persifal?
Most people would put Blood Meridian on the list.
Surprisingly, I think Kafka, a paragon of modernism, and Borges, a paragon of post-modernism, are agreed by most to be easy to read.
Moira, an old professor of mine said roughly the same thing. He compared Spenser to the novels we're talking about (I think that's a pretty fair comment on In Search of Lost Time, Gravity's Rainbow, Moby Dick, Ulysses, etc.
Personally my all-time Endurance Read is Clarissa. That sucker is something like 1600 pages long. Or there's Miss McIntosh or Dance to the Music of Time or Pamela or The Man Without Qualities and those are just my personal ones. I really want to read Proust but um, doubt I will at this point unless I devote a year to it or something and I'm not doing that without a book deal.Troy wrote: "Most people would put Blood Meridian on the list.
I know I'm in the minority but I find him almost completely unreadable. His writing completely grates on me - I just find it lumbering and pretentious. And not in the fun way. (Then again I think Finnegans Wake is really funny - probably because my dad read Joyce to me aloud as a kid. Joyce is v funny when read aloud.)
Surprisingly, I think Kafka, a paragon of modernism, and Borges, a paragon of post-modernism, are agreed by most to be easy to read. "
Well, they're both in translation....but I would agree with that. Marquez seems to be another one like that. Italo Calvino, too.
Troy wrote: He said that The Faerie Queene is so full of information and complexity that it demands dedicated individual scholarship (which, of course, doesn't mean school).That's AWESOME. I really like that! There's so much emphasis on reading in school - like it doesn't count unless you're going for a degree or doing it with a thesis in mind or under the guidance of a professor - just one person reading a book can be scholarly, too. That's great. Who was the prof?
Forgot about Musil. Mann supposedly should be part of this group (I wouldn't know; I've only read shorts).Dave Hickey is the name of the prof. Ridiculously smart guy. And funny. And a damn good writer. Damn it. Check out his book Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy.
I lovelovelove Blood Meridian.
Was thinking: Moby Dick and Proust teach you how to read them, whereas Gravity's Rainbow and Ulysses assume you come at the book with a great deal of fore-knowledge. Joyce
Troy wrote: "Forgot about Musil. Mann supposedly should be part of this group (I wouldn't know; I've only read shorts).ohmyfuckinggod I love big long European novels and every time I looked at the 2 huge volumes of Man Without Qualities in the bookstore I just withered like an unwatered plant. I think I've met two people in my life, total, who've read them.
And a damn good writer. Damn it. Check out his book Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy.
Ah, cool! //wishlists it for later
I lovelovelove Blood Meridian.
I doooo not know what it is. Some authors I just can't read at all. Annie Proulx is another one.
Moby Dick and Proust teach you how to read them, whereas Gravity's Rainbow and Ulysses assume you come at the book with a great deal of fore-knowledge
That's interesting - do you think that has anything to do with post-Modernism? Pound's Cantos are like that, too, all those allusions (and thefts), and of course the Wasteland. Woolf is more like Proust to me - something like To the Lighthouse teaches you how to read it. It might be a matter of the dread quality 'accessibility' (which I hate, as it's usually either a whipping post for works that are too 'obscure' or an apology for popular crap). And then there's emotional 'accessibility' - Austen would be described as readable by many people but I couldn't get into her at all until I was at least in my early thirties (I don't mean, I didn't like her books - I couldn't _read_ them, they made me squirm).
I reject The Faerie Queen from the list of endurance tests, not because you don't need great amounts of stamina - you do - but because the same might be said for any work written a sufficient time in the past - for some, ben Jonson, Marlowe, Pope, Dryden, all of those fellows - wordy Wordsworth and his 100 page poems - all of that would be an endurance test. But they weren't meant to be... whereas I can't think that William Gaddis (great choice) didn't know exactly what demands he was laying on his readers.Joyce was a complete cheat, by the way - he ghost-wrote his own explanation of Ulysses with his friend Stuart Gilbert - it was published in 1930, before most people could get hold of the actual book.
Well maybe this information will prevent you from innocently renting it one evening.
The problem with IJ is that you really do have to give it 200 pages before deciding. The first 100 pages alone just leave one baffled. Then around page 150 everything starts to clear up, and it's a completely different experience from then on (not plain sailing, but not frustrating).
David, over the years you have proved yourself one of the most trustworthy, dependable and right-thinking people it has ever been my privilege to encounter (this may be because you always seem to have the same opinions as me!) so I will give this IJ beast 200 pages.... although it's got to take a back seat at the moment because of Ulysses and the The End of the Party (subtext: the British general election).
The Bible and the Koran were the most difficult endurance reads for me.
I'm impressed - did you review the Koran?
No reviews. There's too much to say for a Goodreads review because there's too much to say about those religions, religion generally, etc.
Moira wrote: "That's interesting - do you think that has anything to do with post-Modernism?" Well, Pound, Eliot, Woolf and Joyce are the consummate modernists, so no, I don't think it has anything to do with modernism/postmodernism.
What my old prof said is that certain writers (and artists) cram their works with a certain density. Some of those writers refer to external 'texts' whereas other writers create a self-contained world, a text where no other is directly needed. Pynchon, Eliot, Pound, Joyce, and others fall into the first camp, and definitely require knowledge of external texts, whereas Melville, Proust, Kafka, Bolano, Marquez, and (oddly enough for such a literary guy) Borges do not require external texts, and create self-contained worlds in their texts. (Of course, for all of those writers, the reading experience is much richer if you're well-read.)
That said, I don't think Melville is more accessible than Pynchon, even though Gravity's Rainbow demands a great amount of familiarity with external texts, whereas Melville gives you enough information in Moby Dick to allow you to read the book without necessitating picking up another book.
Of course, that's all way too vague, and even as I write it, I can see a ton of holes in my argument.
Paul wrote: "I reject The Faerie Queen from the list of endurance tests, not because you don't need great amounts of stamina - you do - but because the same might be said for any work written a sufficient time ..."What my old prof claimed is that The Faerie Queen required, for the time, an expansive knowledge of external knowledge in order to fully understand it. He compared Spenser to someone contemporaneous (Shakespeare? Ben Johnson?) who didn't require expansive knowledge external to the text. It might have been Shakespeare because I think he said it was assumed Shakespeare's viewer already knew a lot of the stories, or at least their templates.
Maybe. ... It's been awhile and I also haven't read anything before 1850 in a long while.
Ya know, I need to work on that.
God, I hate the new goodreads formatiting so much it makes me want to throw things. In what possible universe was it deemed more user-friendly? Anyway, sorry to hear it's being taken off the active pile. I sympathize - there are particular problems with IJ that contribute to actual physical discomfort, not just its hefty heft but the necessity to keep parallel progress markers in the text and in the endnotes. I've actually been re-reading DFW's other stuff since finishing IJ, including the difficult (for me) "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men". But I've simply had to come to terms with the fact that I am never going to read Proust in this, or any other, lifetime. I can read the same freaking paragraph about hawthorn bushes over and over again and it just washes over me, not in a good way. Like trying to chew pretzels and marmite with your jaw wired shut.
SF SQRL wrote: "Faerie Queen is DULL DULL DULL"Barbarian!!
I like this, Paul. And you could write a book - The Art of Endurance - and include all your examples. I liked DFW's two books of essays, but I haven't worked up the "endurance" to re-tackle IJ just yet.
I can endure (and indeed love) some of the books you mention -- Proust, Beckett, pre-Finnegan Joyce, and Henry James -- but I think there are too many newer authors who aren't bringing much more to the table than the extra pounds.
I wonder if reincarnation would be like an Infinite Jest. I'm dying to find out.
You forgot the sprig of fresh dill for the salmon...
Yes, I do - bit is endurance a form of masochism, and is patience really a virtue?
Patience is a virtue but I don't have the time.
Wow - Mark, do you mean John Cale (ex Velvet Underground) or John Cage (notorious avant gardist) ?As an example of how perverse I can be, I read and almost enjoyed The Pale King! I know, ridiculous.
Oh I've got the time but my virtue is limited.
I didn't know Mr Cale was so challenging live. I saw Nico live once, she was also pretty uncompromising. But good. Here's my favourite John Cale song. I think your wife would like it!http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5YHqW...
The problem might be post modernism and metafiction. I think Beckett, particularly his plays should be taken off your list. Agree with the comments above re films and music. Most of what you listed was garbage but not in a challenging or overly long. Surprised you didn't mention Renaldo And Clara with the films.
Your description of picking it up, sighing, and putting it down is what I did with my copy until last year when I finally read it. And I have a first edition I bought when the novel came out, so it took me over 15 years? I MADE myself read 50 pages per week, and while it took me 6 months of occasional teeth-gritting, it was worth it. Got tired of my husband cracking jokes every couple of years when he'd see me attempting to read it. The book's been with me longer than he has.
I doff my Trilby to your perseverance. After IJ the solo trek to the South Pole doesn't seem too unreasonable now, hmm?
I douse this review with kerosene.Yay for Troy's endurance-films! I also thought of Godard and Tarkovsky (try Stalker on for size!), as well as Antonioni.
I do not mind my review being doused with one of my favourite ever songs.
You actually turned me on to this very song!
I got as far as page 55. I'm afraid I missed the Beatles quote on page 32. I must have been glazing over at that point. To answer your question: no, because I no longer feel any obligation to endure what I consider to be an author's self-aggrandisement.
Paul said; "So I'm not sure what where is to look forward to in IJ."
What has thus far been restricted by the Depend Adult Undergarment?
Actually, despite otherwise unanimous GR opinion, the first few hundred pages are the best part of the book and the 7 page opening scene in the Deans' office is basically repeated metaphorically for the rest of the way with tangential asides. So, defacto you have read the book.
And I missed the Beatles quote and still don't know what song it was in .
What has thus far been restricted by the Depend Adult Undergarment?
Actually, despite otherwise unanimous GR opinion, the first few hundred pages are the best part of the book and the 7 page opening scene in the Deans' office is basically repeated metaphorically for the rest of the way with tangential asides. So, defacto you have read the book.
And I missed the Beatles quote and still don't know what song it was in .
Paul wrote: "I didn't know Mr Cale was so challenging live. I saw Nico live once, she was also pretty uncompromising. But good. Here's my favourite John Cale song. I think your wife would like it!
http://www.y..."
Here are two by John Cale. I thought that he was both a Velvet and a notorious avant gardist. He wrote these in the voice of Andy Warhol.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzwY7...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGtzn...
My life's disappearing; disappearing from view.
http://www.y..."
Here are two by John Cale. I thought that he was both a Velvet and a notorious avant gardist. He wrote these in the voice of Andy Warhol.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzwY7...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGtzn...
My life's disappearing; disappearing from view.
yes, a god, but intermittently, you know, like a twinkling star, remote and friendly but casting light only fitfully.
I like hiking so I’ll endure. BTW Trout Mask for the win!
Films: Celine and Julie Go Boating. Music: John Coltrane’s Ascension. I haven’t “enjoyed” or “understood” either btw but suspect Ascension may be worth the effort.
