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2QuentinTom
I finished it last night. Well, I read the last pages last night, but I don't think that can be said to be any kind of ending.
I'm following sutpen's suggestion and reading the first 30 pages again.
Everything at the beginning is making much more sense now. The whole book is a loop, like the Entertainment.
I'm following sutpen's suggestion and reading the first 30 pages again.
Everything at the beginning is making much more sense now. The whole book is a loop, like the Entertainment.
3absurdeist
Yes yes yes - a loop, a circle, an entrapment, a "you can check out any time you like/but you can never leave":hence, another aspect in the "Infinite" of "Jest" in which the very act of reading it truly has no end.
Might the tru ending (hint) be somewhere in the middle (or in the notes?) Just a thought, based on careful observation and analysis.
I've mixed feelings myself about the ending, wherever it really is....
I'm in the early 200s, though I'm not as steadfast in my reading as I know I ought to be. I promise to do better.
Might the tru ending (hint) be somewhere in the middle (or in the notes?) Just a thought, based on careful observation and analysis.
I've mixed feelings myself about the ending, wherever it really is....
I'm in the early 200s, though I'm not as steadfast in my reading as I know I ought to be. I promise to do better.
4Sutpen
I think the ending (ie the last scene in the book) serves its function perfectly, but it's definitely unconventional.
5absurdeist
How so Sutpen? Would love to hear you elaborate on that.
6anna_in_pdx
I think I am about 200 pages or so from the end.
7LizzieD
I'm watching Mario's puppet show film on I-Day. That's 33% into the book, whatever that amounts to in page numbers.
8Sutpen
5:
Let's see...things I like about the ending...(SPOILERS, obviously)
First of all, it's gorgeous. I'm big on endings, and IJ's ending really delivers hard, aesthetically speaking. "And when he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out." I'm not quite sure why it works so well for me...the stuff leading up to that last line is surreal and wild, and about five or six things are happening at once, and the second-to-last sentence has a lot of subordination going on, grammatically speaking, and then you get this last sentence, and it's paratactic, and there's almost nothing happening at all. It's like it's meant to be whispered. When I first read it, I wrote down that it reminded me of the way the crazy piano arpeggios or whatever (forgive me, I don't have much musical training) resolve into that thunderous strings/piano melody at the very end of Rhapsody in Blue. Later I heard someone say it reminded them of that final piano note at the end of the Beatles' "A Day in the Life," which is a better analogy. So anyway, aesthetically, the end of IJ is a homerun, for me.
Structurally, I think it does two things, and they're sort of contradictory, but they're both important. First, it's kind of fun to try and puzzle out the parts of the plot that aren't made explicit in the text. By ending the book in a flashback, Wallace invites people to do so. Of course, some people just stomp their feet and whine that they didn't just get *told* the whole story, but that's the kind of symptom Wallace is diagnosing, isn't it? And the other thing the ending does is it reinforces that, yes, there's been this pretty exciting story about the AFR and President Gentle, and something crazy is happening to Hal, but what's really important is THIS. Gately's bottom. What should stay with you is an awareness of our culture and what it's doing. And what is required for us to free ourselves. And that it's possible. Gately struggles daily. Hal's new ability to feel genuinely has made him appear grotesque and incoherent to everyone else. Refusing to wrap things up forces the themes and the characters into the forefront, where they belong.
That was a little jumbled, but that's the gist of why I like it, I think.
Let's see...things I like about the ending...(SPOILERS, obviously)
First of all, it's gorgeous. I'm big on endings, and IJ's ending really delivers hard, aesthetically speaking. "And when he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out." I'm not quite sure why it works so well for me...the stuff leading up to that last line is surreal and wild, and about five or six things are happening at once, and the second-to-last sentence has a lot of subordination going on, grammatically speaking, and then you get this last sentence, and it's paratactic, and there's almost nothing happening at all. It's like it's meant to be whispered. When I first read it, I wrote down that it reminded me of the way the crazy piano arpeggios or whatever (forgive me, I don't have much musical training) resolve into that thunderous strings/piano melody at the very end of Rhapsody in Blue. Later I heard someone say it reminded them of that final piano note at the end of the Beatles' "A Day in the Life," which is a better analogy. So anyway, aesthetically, the end of IJ is a homerun, for me.
Structurally, I think it does two things, and they're sort of contradictory, but they're both important. First, it's kind of fun to try and puzzle out the parts of the plot that aren't made explicit in the text. By ending the book in a flashback, Wallace invites people to do so. Of course, some people just stomp their feet and whine that they didn't just get *told* the whole story, but that's the kind of symptom Wallace is diagnosing, isn't it? And the other thing the ending does is it reinforces that, yes, there's been this pretty exciting story about the AFR and President Gentle, and something crazy is happening to Hal, but what's really important is THIS. Gately's bottom. What should stay with you is an awareness of our culture and what it's doing. And what is required for us to free ourselves. And that it's possible. Gately struggles daily. Hal's new ability to feel genuinely has made him appear grotesque and incoherent to everyone else. Refusing to wrap things up forces the themes and the characters into the forefront, where they belong.
That was a little jumbled, but that's the gist of why I like it, I think.
9QuentinTom
well said, all of it.
10dchaikin
At some point I'll have to go back through all these threads again an actually read the posts with spoilers...
I'm at about page 400.
I'm at about page 400.
11theaelizabet
I'm back reading again after an unavoidable break. Only at 200 or so, but enjoying it.
12anna_in_pdx
OK! I am finished! Wow. What a book!
I just loved how towards the end he kept having actual events mirror JOI films. I kept referring back to the filmography endnote to confirm. And I agree with Sutpen that the ending was just what it should have been and the last line was wonderful.
I just loved how towards the end he kept having actual events mirror JOI films. I kept referring back to the filmography endnote to confirm. And I agree with Sutpen that the ending was just what it should have been and the last line was wonderful.
13absurdeist
8> thank you for that Sutpen. Works for me. Especially like the Day in the Life analogy.
10,11> keep truckin' you're almost (but not by a long ways) there.
12>Didn't notice what you speak of, events mirroring JOIs cinemas. Would it be too much to ask for you to list a few (or preferably itemize each one)?
Have you read Gravity's Rainbow or The Recognitions, Anna? You've got the check next to Ulysses, and now next to Infinite Jest...or how about Underworld? or The Public Burning or The Man Without Qualities?
What tome is up next for you? Will you be reading Proust in June? Don't mean to (actually, you know what? I probably do mean to) hijack the thread with these questions.
10,11> keep truckin' you're almost (but not by a long ways) there.
12>Didn't notice what you speak of, events mirroring JOIs cinemas. Would it be too much to ask for you to list a few (or preferably itemize each one)?
Have you read Gravity's Rainbow or The Recognitions, Anna? You've got the check next to Ulysses, and now next to Infinite Jest...or how about Underworld? or The Public Burning or The Man Without Qualities?
What tome is up next for you? Will you be reading Proust in June? Don't mean to (actually, you know what? I probably do mean to) hijack the thread with these questions.
14A_musing
I have no idea. I read the first 100 pages sequentially. Then I began reading randomly.
At some point I want to go back sequentially and fill in some blanks.
It's all damn depressing. Why are we reading this? You can read right through that he's not a happy camper, and I hadn't realized how clear this was before. I had fun reading it the first time. The thing reads like a Russian suicide poem. Let's read suicide poems next. Here's Mayakovsky's:
As they say,
"the incident is closed."
The love boat
wrecked by daily life.
I'm all even with life
and nothing would be gained by listing
mutual hurts,
troubles,
and insults.
. . . .
Don't think I'm a coward. Seriously, it could not be helped.
I like Esenin's better, written in his own blood:
Good-bye, my friend, good-bye.
My dear one, you are in my breast.
This predestined parting
Promises a meeting ahead.
Good-bye, my friend, without hand, without word
No sorrow and no sadness in the brow.
In this life, dying is nothing new,
But living, of course, isn't novel either.
I want to read something cheerier next, like Clarel.
At some point I want to go back sequentially and fill in some blanks.
It's all damn depressing. Why are we reading this? You can read right through that he's not a happy camper, and I hadn't realized how clear this was before. I had fun reading it the first time. The thing reads like a Russian suicide poem. Let's read suicide poems next. Here's Mayakovsky's:
As they say,
"the incident is closed."
The love boat
wrecked by daily life.
I'm all even with life
and nothing would be gained by listing
mutual hurts,
troubles,
and insults.
. . . .
Don't think I'm a coward. Seriously, it could not be helped.
I like Esenin's better, written in his own blood:
Good-bye, my friend, good-bye.
My dear one, you are in my breast.
This predestined parting
Promises a meeting ahead.
Good-bye, my friend, without hand, without word
No sorrow and no sadness in the brow.
In this life, dying is nothing new,
But living, of course, isn't novel either.
I want to read something cheerier next, like Clarel.
15detailmuse
ack, still only ~p130. A reflection on my month of March, not IJ, which I still have infinite interest in.
16bokai
I'm in the same situation. I took a break from the big reads for a bit there to charge up again, but I have been in the mood for some real lit and the brick is beckoning me.
Of interest to this group perhaps: http://kottke.org/10/03/david-foster-wallaces-archive-acquired
Of interest to this group perhaps: http://kottke.org/10/03/david-foster-wallaces-archive-acquired
17Sutpen
12:
Glad you liked it, Anna. Wallace's writing is more important to me even than most of my friendships, so I go pretty warm/fuzzy when I hear somebody else saying nice things about it.
Something else that may be of interest: The wallace-l listserv is doing a group read of Girl With Curious Hair right now, so I'm re-reading Wallace's novella-length takedown of Barth, "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way," and I'm reminded of how much harder it is than anything else he ever wrote. Here's part of one of its sentences:
As mentioned before—and if this were a piece of metafiction, which it's NOT, the exact number of typeset lines between this reference and the prenominate referent would very probably be mentioned, which would be a princely pain in the ass, not to mention cocky, since it would assume that a straightforward and anti-embellished account of a slow and hot and sleep-deprived and basically clotted and frustrating day in the lives of three kids, none of whom are all that sympathetic, could actually get published, which these days good luck, but in metafiction it would, nay needs be mentioned, a required postmodern convention aimed at drawing the poor old reader's emotional attention to the fact that the narrative bought and paid for and now under time-consuming scrutiny is not in fact a barely-there window onto a different and truly diverting world, but rather in fact an "artifact," an object, a plain old this-worldly thing, composed of emulsified wood pulp and horizontal chorus-lines of dye, and conventions, and is thus in a "deep" sense just an opaque forgery of a transfiguring window, not a real window, a gag, and thus in a deep (but intentional, now) sense artificial, which is to say fabricated, false, a fiction, a pretender-to-status, a straw-haired King of Spain—this self-conscious explicitness and deconstructed disclosure supposedly making said metafiction "realer" than a piece of pre-postmodern "Realism" that depends on certain antiquated techniques to create an "illusion" of a windowed access to a "reality" isomorphic with ours but possessed of and yielding up higher truths to which all authentically human persons stand in the relation of applicand—all of which the Resurrection of Realism, the pained product of inglorious minimalist labor in countless obscure graduate writing workshops across the U.S. of A., and called by Field Marshal Lish (who ought to know) the New Realism, promises to show to be utter baloney, this metafictional shit…
Glad you liked it, Anna. Wallace's writing is more important to me even than most of my friendships, so I go pretty warm/fuzzy when I hear somebody else saying nice things about it.
Something else that may be of interest: The wallace-l listserv is doing a group read of Girl With Curious Hair right now, so I'm re-reading Wallace's novella-length takedown of Barth, "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way," and I'm reminded of how much harder it is than anything else he ever wrote. Here's part of one of its sentences:
As mentioned before—and if this were a piece of metafiction, which it's NOT, the exact number of typeset lines between this reference and the prenominate referent would very probably be mentioned, which would be a princely pain in the ass, not to mention cocky, since it would assume that a straightforward and anti-embellished account of a slow and hot and sleep-deprived and basically clotted and frustrating day in the lives of three kids, none of whom are all that sympathetic, could actually get published, which these days good luck, but in metafiction it would, nay needs be mentioned, a required postmodern convention aimed at drawing the poor old reader's emotional attention to the fact that the narrative bought and paid for and now under time-consuming scrutiny is not in fact a barely-there window onto a different and truly diverting world, but rather in fact an "artifact," an object, a plain old this-worldly thing, composed of emulsified wood pulp and horizontal chorus-lines of dye, and conventions, and is thus in a "deep" sense just an opaque forgery of a transfiguring window, not a real window, a gag, and thus in a deep (but intentional, now) sense artificial, which is to say fabricated, false, a fiction, a pretender-to-status, a straw-haired King of Spain—this self-conscious explicitness and deconstructed disclosure supposedly making said metafiction "realer" than a piece of pre-postmodern "Realism" that depends on certain antiquated techniques to create an "illusion" of a windowed access to a "reality" isomorphic with ours but possessed of and yielding up higher truths to which all authentically human persons stand in the relation of applicand—all of which the Resurrection of Realism, the pained product of inglorious minimalist labor in countless obscure graduate writing workshops across the U.S. of A., and called by Field Marshal Lish (who ought to know) the New Realism, promises to show to be utter baloney, this metafictional shit…
18dchaikin
Sutpen - Just posting to compliment you on message 8, which I just finally read. Very thought provoking, and eloquently stated.
19dchaikin
SPOILER WARNING - more on the ending
Thinking about Sutpen's post 8, it occurred to me that the beginning and the end are both bottoms. The end is, of course, Gately's, whereas the beginning is Hal's. Also, they are sort of flipped from what could be there correct positions in the book. The opening section on Hal is actually the end, it's almost an epilogue. Where as the end, on Gately, is sort of the beginning - it's the point where Gately begins to turn around to become what he is in the rest of the book.
I've been thinking about how important someone bottoming out is to this book. I think DFW was looking for truths and hidden truths, and I think he found a piece of truth in drug-addiction recovery - or, if you like, after someone's really hit bottom. This could be the point of the whole AA section (and may explain part of why he spends so much time on Poor Tony, to look at one character that doesn't try recovery, but just keeps going down). I'm wondering how this plays into other themes.
Thinking about Sutpen's post 8, it occurred to me that the beginning and the end are both bottoms. The end is, of course, Gately's, whereas the beginning is Hal's. Also, they are sort of flipped from what could be there correct positions in the book. The opening section on Hal is actually the end, it's almost an epilogue. Where as the end, on Gately, is sort of the beginning - it's the point where Gately begins to turn around to become what he is in the rest of the book.
I've been thinking about how important someone bottoming out is to this book. I think DFW was looking for truths and hidden truths, and I think he found a piece of truth in drug-addiction recovery - or, if you like, after someone's really hit bottom. This could be the point of the whole AA section (and may explain part of why he spends so much time on Poor Tony, to look at one character that doesn't try recovery, but just keeps going down). I'm wondering how this plays into other themes.
20absurdeist
Rather than send out invites to everyone, if you're interested in pursuing Infinite Jest in a setting devoted solely to IJ and its author, do join us over here: http://www.librarything.com/groups/infinitejesters
