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quote:B.I. #51 11-97 I just finished Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Some of the stories were downright arduous, but writing like ^that kept me going.
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Nov 10, 2009 03:07
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A thing that has struck me as extremely curious about Pale King was how full of what I'd call 'pastiche' it is. It's uncanny and I'm not really sure what to make of it. Maybe y'all can help me complete the picture. I can think of phew, several authors whose styles DFW appears to be mimicking -- The first chapter is strongly reminiscent of Danielewski's Only Revolutions, Toni's character appears to be ripped straight from a Palahniuk novel, complete with matter-of-fact explanations of revenge techniques, the strange moment of instant grace that whatsisname realizes that love is a challenge that he can face is Flannery O'Connor, Meredith Rand has obviously been possessed by Dorian Grey, the everyone got dosed section with the mosquitos -- needles with wings -- is Hunter S. Thompson. Also, I will talk anyone's ear off about Infinite Jest. For example, Hal cannot speak in the first chapter of the novel because the author has been exorcized from the text in what I'd call a Derridean way. Also also, I absolutely adore the way that DFW incorporates the form and function of the book as a material object and a compilation of ideas. Flipping back and forth for the footnotes is literally like playing tennis with the book, as explained by Schtitt. You send away your thoughts and return with new insights. If you are not as good as the book, the game cannot be played.
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May 9, 2011 03:04
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A joke about Orin is that he failed at tennis, the sport where you go back and forth with the Other, so he goes and punts a football one-way instead. Phew. I'm not entirely sure if I can do this justice all at once, but I'll try. I'm going to not mention Derrida for now because you've read the book and hopefully I can explain this clearly enough without having to invoke literary theory. If anyone has any questions about plot points or oddities of the novel, feel free to ask. I have pored over this book and love talking about it. So basically, by the first chapter of the novel, which is chronologically the last chapter of the novel, the author Himself has been 'exorcised' from the book. Maybe this isn't the best word, but it's what I've got. The exorcism doesn't happen in the space of the book, it happens somewhere between the last page and the first page. Going on the book as physical metaphor I mentioned before -- If you lay your book out on a table and flip a page, you make a 180 degree arc, right? So then, if you flip past the back cover in order to flip the front cover, you can see that there are a whole other 180 degrees to the book that are inaccessible to a reader. The climax of the story happens outside of the readable space, and is only alluded to by Hal as/before/around the time he's seizing -- he transmits the memory of he and Gately exhuming his father's corpse (see below about revenants, check the wiki). Let me back up a step. The author Himself = JOI = the creator of Infinite Jest =a revenant. He literally stalks the novel and possesses/speaks for the characters -- uhh, so do you remember the especially difficult-to-read chapter early in the novel narrated by YrsTruly with the guy dying from the poisoned heroin? That's Gately right before he goes into recovery, before he is possessed by JOI. In that chapter, he is in the bookspace but he is not yet part of the story. When you see him next, he has taken on a new persona -- most apparent by the change in his manner of speech. This becomes more apparent as the book goes on when you catch Gately speaking about things or using words that appear to be way over his head (this is subtle at first and if you're not looking for it you may read over it, though I think he comments on wondering where some of the words came from)-- it's slap-in-the-face obvious when JOI is standing over his hospital bed talking both to and through him. So anyway, this all works to suggest that JOI-as-author is a character capable of possessing other characters. He also possesses Ortho, probably Mario too. K, so the state that Hal is in in the first chapter. It is my opinion that he's been dosed with DMZ or dosed himself. If you've ever had a hallucinogenic experience, it seems pretty clear that he's tripping face. The thing in the later part of the novel that indicates that he's started tripping is that all the sudden, he's able to address himself in the first person, which up until that point he hadn't been able to. So either because he's tripping face and has exorcized JOI, or he's physically gone and exorcized JOI with Gately, Hal has rid himself of the author/itative voice and finds himself, as a consequence, unable to speak; in some respects the words weren't ever his, as the story is not his story. Evidence is that 1. He isn't even able to tell you who he is, he has to be told by the Admissions dudes (who pretty much are supposed to be the three Fates: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moirae) "You are Harold Incandenza, eighteen, etc..." and to reinforce that point, he can't even tell you the story about eating the mold -- he has to relate it to you in the frame of Orin. 2. Hal looks up at an EXIT sign and translates it as HE LEAVES. 3...I'm sure there's a 3 but I only have the first eight pages of the book in front of me, thanks Amazon. Oh, and then there's this, cited a few pages back: 'But it transcends the mechanics. I'm not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting. I could, if you'd let me, talk and talk. Let's talk about anything. I believe the influence of Kierkegaard on Camus is underestimated. I believe Dennis Gabor may very well have been the Antichrist. I believe Hobbes is just Rousseau in a dark mirror. I believe, with Hegel, that transcendence is absorption. I could interface you guys right under the table,' I say. 'I'm not just a creatus, manufactured, conditioned, bred for a function.' I open my eyes. 'Please don't think I don't care.' I'm going to get back to work now. Madame Psychosis fucked around with this message at 20:22 on May 10, 2011 |
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May 10, 2011 20:11
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I like to think it's a little more than bullshit and a little less than truth. I know I don't have it 100% but I feel like I'm sniffing on the right trail. Just one woman's interpretation, though. Hm, other fun parts: If you anagram Otis P. Lord, you get "Idol Sport" If you're even vaguely familiar with CG Jung's concepts of Anima/Animus/Shadow, the conversations between Marathe and Steeply (or S&M, "Remy (Me)" & "Hugh" (You), the dudes on the Muppet Show making lame jokes about everything that's going on) get pretty intense. There's even a cute little moment where Steeply walks up behind Marathe and their shadows intersect. DFW dresses Steeply in drag to illustrate how utterly ridiculous their otherness is towards each-other is, they are both so human.
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May 10, 2011 20:51
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drat girl! posted:-- I don't mean "complete bullshit" in a flippant way. I read your post a couple more times and thought about it, and there are a few questions I have about some of your supporting facts. I also don't have the book in front of me. None taken! I may be way off-point and I appreciate, you know, conversations. quote:You state that in the first chapter Hal is tripping on DMZ. I had always assumed that the state he was in was basically the way he was since the events at the end of the book, a continuation from the decline he faced after that first (inadvertent?) dose of DMZ hits him. I believe his academic decline is mentioned. Do you think that's right or wrong? I'm not sure what the nature of your question is, I think that the academic decline is a consequence of the trip; I think that even leading up to the trip (see, around the Eschaton, when the map v. territory dichotomy totally breaks down and a childish game about war becomes childish war), Hal begins to question the nature of all the things he has been unquestioningly systematized to do -- attend a tennis academy run by his folks, eat the poo poo tons of regimented food and drink the fake powdered milk that is provided to him, wake up early for drills, excel in his classes because going to college or the pros is how his path has been laid before him, and the like. PopZeus posted:Possibly stupid question about The Pale King. Are we supposed to take the "DFW is talking to us" chapters as true? He says in the "Foreword" (which is Chapter 9, ha!) that most of the book is true and based off real people (the Irrelevant guy, for instance) and has pretty detailed stuff about his own experiences in Peoria. Is this actually true or just some crazy meta stuff and it's all fictional? I'm only on chapter 25 so maybe this is cleared up later, I don't know. To be perfectly honest with you, I am still di-jesting Pale King. I have not yet applied enough coffee + green to the book, or read it twice. I will say that very little is explained I would venture to guess that it's meta-stuff insofar as it is meta but also seems to see through itself, even though it seems to fit DFW's life pretty closely? Pfft. Guess I should read again. Something that struck me about that section is that he mentions 'tittytwisting (or pinching?) when talking about what the author could be doing to you? Uhhh, this is all kinda vague, but he definitely does it a couple of times throughout the novel, and the first place it happened is Tony Ware's story where she's just being led around by her crazy mother and the crazy dude is driving. It's this weird taking-advantage-of that you get to endure when you're traveling with a complete stranger that also seems to fit when you're talking about an author + reader relationship Madame Psychosis fucked around with this message at 21:29 on May 10, 2011 |
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May 10, 2011 21:17
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Do'hble post. Thought I hit edit.
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May 10, 2011 21:29
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drat girl! posted:I'm just wondering if you have any thoughts on the artistic intent behind having a dead figure literally speaking through the characters he inhabits. Hm, well put. I like it a lot. I am reminded of the end of Broom of the System, when massive spoiler: when the author soundlessly departs mid-sentence. I don't know about this artistic intent business, but Rogue Elephant may have struck on something solid t w/r/t irony. I highly recommend E. Unibus Pluram, the aforementioned essay about TV and Irony. It kind of broke my relationship with the world. Phew, I don't even know. I got a half-assed English degree at a public university with no particular focus on anything. My favorite class was called Television Theory, heh. I've been a pretty voracious reader (of books and people) all my life. I had a professor introduce me to Ludwig Wittgenstein, who DFW is certainly familiar with (read Broom of the System and it motorboats you.). I've never really read much of the longer Derrida but I can tell you that there's some good stuff in Derrida's shorter essay-type works. His formulation of the idea of Pharmakos has IJ written all over it: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmakos#As_a_Derridian_term). In the same work that that essay is in, there's another essay about Archives (maybe it's even called Archive Fever...) that brings the footnotes to light. What else? Uhhh, Roland Barthes wrote a great essay on 'The Text as Play' and another on 'The Death of the Author' that are lovely. There's also this book written by some dude whose name I cannot recall called 'Finite and Infinite Games' which appears to be a re-write of Wittgenstein's 'Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus' that fits well into IJ. I read that one after I finished IJ the second time and was surprised at how they fit together. There's clouds on the front cover of that one too. Weird. Also I've done a bunch of drugs and watched people around me be addicted to things. I've watched people protect their addictions with more tenacity then they'd protect themselves. I've watched people who thought that they had to follow a track in life realize that they didn't actually and what the gently caress do they do now? I am a firm believer in the idea that there are some books you cannot begin understand until you've lived more. I don't know when I'll be old enough to read the lengthier Joyces and I'm almost old enough to finish Gravity's Rainbow. Madame Psychosis fucked around with this message at 23:44 on May 10, 2011 |
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May 10, 2011 23:23
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Oh drat, I almost forgot William Blake. Big ups to that guy, he broke my mind right open. DFW alludes to Blake's Four Zoas near the precise mid-point of the book (which is significantly ~1080 pages long, herp derp), when he talks about false dawns and the piercing of veils. @Abalieno, I think your reading is extremely simplistic and I am not all that compelled by it, but it's certainly true that things are left open-ended and ambiguous. You've reminded me of another idea that I had when reading all those books, which is the idea of a completed text being complete/perfect and therefore, in some sense, 'dead'. I posit that DFW leaves the text 'unfinished' and ultimately open to any number of interpretations to keep conversations like these going. I would have to sit and think about the artist's intent, but I spent most of my work day here, heeeeeh. Maybe in the near future I'll take a stab at it. I need more info for you about when Hal has stopped smoking but hasn't dropped DMZ. The total awareness and dilation of time are pretty much standard side effects of taking hallucinogens. He stopped being good at the things he was good at when he started questioning them and why they even mattered and ultimately decided that they weren't important. He's casting off all of his dad's expectations and control of what he should be.
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May 10, 2011 23:41
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drat girl! posted:Madame, I really hope your class was actually called "Television Theory, heh" I mean, pretty much. The professor was kind of a jerk; the readings were a fantastic recap and history of the proliferation of the dominant media form of the 1980-2000s, but he taught the class with the attitude that the class was a joke and that TV was obsolete, which is also patently false. Am I being trolled?  Hal is totally shown on DMZ, but there's no way a character as secretive as Hal is going to admit it. You see over and over again how obsessive he is about hiding his smoking habit, right? Hal's definitely NOT on it when he tries to find the AA meeting and finds the Inner Child meeting instead, but he's certainly on it at any moment in which his perspective shifts dramatically into the first person; when he wanders around at night and finds Ortho stuck on the window; when he's no longer in control of his facial expression and starts laughing inappropriately in front of the two janitors; when he decides to lay around in the TP room thinking about the flatness of it all; when Pemulis comes in and tries to talk to him about the DMZ; when he's watching all of his father's movies (notably Blood Sister and Accomplice! and thinking about them critically with his own brain). But I can't prove that to anyone who hasn't had a hit of LSD in their system at some point in their life, because they don't understand how characteristic all of those experiences are, I can only suggest it and back it up with the most evident aspect, which is that Hal never refers to himself as I or ME at ANY other point in the novel. Leading to the thing with John Wayne? What thing? John Wayne accidentally dosed himself because Struck kept stealing from Pemulis' stock of Benzos and keeping the Benzos with his sinus stuff. A large reason that Pemulis got kicked out was because he threatened Avril when he posted the note that asked: "How many times can 17 go into 56?" which alludes to him walking in on Avril and John Wayne's affair -- and this pretty much does him in. The poor fool's hung. Madame Psychosis fucked around with this message at 00:56 on May 11, 2011 |
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May 11, 2011 00:51
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Abalieno posted:Is it not Pemulis who has the DMZ? And why would Hal steal it and do it alone without telling Pemulis? And why risking doing it on a normal day when he would be caught? I see. I got out of the habit of doing this a few years ago, when I realized how silly it was -- I think a problem with this line of questioning is that you are asking questions about things that didn't happen and asking me to be DFW and explain why?! -- I'm making statements about things that are evident in the novel; I could flip through my copy and cite everything I've mentioned, probably in much more compelling detail.
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May 11, 2011 01:07
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quote:"E Unibus Pluram" is really a wonderful piece, as cultural criticism, as a challenge to artists, but also as a statement of purpose that clues readers into the themes that DFW would spend a lot of time exploring in his later work I feel like all of his other works are like larger, more investigative footnotes to IJ. Kieselguhr Kid posted:My memory might be lapsing on me, by I'm pretty sure yrstruly wasn't Gately but either Bruce Green or Randy Lenz. I remember a line ~3/4 of the way through the book which pinned one of the two as the narrator of that section (something like "[character], aka. yrstruly"). It was around the whole subplot about Lenz torturing animals. Ohh, you're absolutely right. I suppose that weakens my points but I think the idea of JOI being a possessive figure still stands on the other evidence. Man, what was up with Lenz? What a monster. Has anyone read Oblivion?
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May 11, 2011 16:45
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knees of putty posted:I remain unconvinced by the idea that Hal took the DMZ on the basis that generally we know what Hal is doing, or has done, either as part of the narrative or because it's relayed to us. To then have Hal steal the DMZ and for the act to be hidden from us seems inconsistent. In this case, the straightforward explanation that he's depressed without the crutch of his addiction seems more likely. I think there's a lot of evidence could be put forth about Hal being a secretive character. Off of the top of my head: in one of the early segments of the book JOI laments that his son will not talk to him; even though everyone seems to know he's a stoner, Hal has a pretty solo-type ritual surrounding his Hope addiction (goes into lung room hits the one hitter pops the dip finds the sneakiest way to get to the showers washes before anyone can notice); he finally admits to Mario that he smokes and that he has an interior and it hurts (I think that's in the 'tripping' section, but I'm not sure. linear time gets really disjointed post-Eschaton and some sequences are indeed out of order). In fact the only time that I think that he's super "honest" -- and I say this with HEAVY quotes, is when he's talking to Orin. Which reminds me -- There are multiple accounts of JOI's death scene, and they are inconsistent. I read Hal's account and was suspicious as hell of him because his account didn't match Joelle's or... there was another account I guess. I suppose Joelle could be a liar too, that's totally plausible, but I don't recall any specific instances of lie -- except that she may have been involved with JOI and denies it all along. Who nose. ArgaWarga posted:Unless I'm misremembering I had always viewed Hal's bizarre behavior as more of a depression or existential crisis than him tripping. Other than his pot use, which DFW goes out of his way as describing as something secret which Hal likes having as a secret, Hal's drug use was always pretty social (again, unless I'm misremembering). So it seems odd to me that he'd be doing all these solo activities whilst tripping balls, and I just don't think it was a delayed effect of the DMZ which he presumably took in a scene outside of what the narrator relates to us. To be fair, I've never been really into drugs but did have a pretty lengthy existential crisis, so it very well may be that we read into it what we're each familiar with. I addressed the secrecy bidness above, and I really appreciate the way that you've acknowledged that we read into it what we're familiar with, because it's a totally true and a plenty valid point that I think DFW acknowledges with all the reading-as-tennis metaphors. I too have had existential crises, and I could totally relate with Hal on both fronts. Kate Gompert too. Sigh. Rogue Elephant posted:I've seen the theory advanced that Pemulis either knowingly or accidentally dosed Hal. This is why he comes to Hal to talk about it. I just re-read the part where he seems to start the trip, and there are parts about having pseudo panic attacks, strange perceptions about space, and colors appearing especially vivid. This is in contrast to the description of Kate Gompert having a feeling of horror and that every cell in her body was about to throw up.... Nice, thank you for your help in drawing this together. On another note, I think Pemulis is a fascinating character. There's one really great description of what he's wearing that mark him pretty clearly as a Fool, if you want to get all Shakespearean about IJ. He seems to be really good at all the things JOI was good at, and has access to JOI's super-fancy optics lab. meanolmrcloud posted:I think the [spoiler]tripping debate is largely inconsequential, although I personally do not think he is. A large part of the book is devoted to explaining how consciousness and associated feeling are effected by other things, like drugs or depression so the weather or not Hal was intoxicated dosen't matter to me, he was under severe pressure and tension with heavy depression and withdrawal to boot, which was enough to alter his consciousness, probably (as DFW might argue) as powerfully as a psychedelic. I will admit that large parts of him laying flat on his back going on and on do closely resemble a psychedelic experience. Fair enough. I just like the idea of him tripping and finally being able to confront/overcome the influence of his father. What else is fun to talk about... Oh, okay! Who's side was Marathe on? What the hell is up with that ragtag gang of hooligans (that appears to contain Avril and JOI?!) that dose Gately up with Sunshine and set him on his rebirth?? trip? Is the late 'Veals' of Viney and Veals a nom de plume for JOI? Is it appropriate that if you anagram 'Veals' you get Slave? Are AMI and JOI perfect for each-other because they are complete opposites?
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May 12, 2011 04:19
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mith posted:As another poster mentioned, DFW was quite vehemently against the literary elite circlejerk that modern fiction has become and that is the main reason I think your analysis is merely over analysis. I think you found what he was trying to make fun of and instead took it as the point. I kinda resent the implication that you think I'm being elitist -- all I really wanted to do by posting was to reinvigorate a dead thread by putting my ideas out there and letting you guys play with/rub against/smash them as you wanted. Also Harold Bloom is a total tool. I'm also happy that this undergrad dude and I share ideas about Himself, and that DFW at least considered explicitly stating that Pemulis dosed Hal.
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Jul 28, 2011 01:55
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Look Under The Rock posted:My recent favorite wackadoodle theory about Infinite Jest is that JOI is a robot. I kinda like it insofar as it provides a space to talk about a punny/literal deus ex machina.
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Jan 11, 2014 08:42
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