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I'm interested into getting into some deep NPR level culture war.
No geopolitics, no woke-vs-not debates, no (not) Trusting The Science.
I want to talk about books.
Let me NPR whisperspeak overanunciate that: mmmmbbbboooOOOOkksszzzz
Is postmodern literature
To throw up some examples of what I mean;
I've never read Vonnegut, Heller, or DeLillo at all, but I know they are "canonical" in the postmodern genre.
I made it 100 pages through Gravity's Rainbow and was earnest convincing myself I was "getting it" before literally slamming the books shut and verbalizing "This is fucking unreadable."
Back in college, I did the thing and carried around the Big Blue copy of Infinite Jest so people could see I was reading it and I stuck pens in various places to show I was capital-R Reading it. I think I made it a little further than 100 pages, but I can't be sure because I can't remember a damn thing about it.
In my opinion, I think postmodernism pretends to be this ultra-layered "commentary" on a bunch of intersecting meta-themes. Something like socio-political philosophy but explained through dense plots and idiosyncratic characters.
But ... it isn't? Nothing actually holds together. The plot becomes a non-plot or endless branches of a single plot. The characters become weird disposable mouthpieces for the author talking to himself. The commentary, such as it is, gets so jumbled that you lose the point.
And so postemodernism reveals what it actually is; a heavily stylistic exercise, much like jazz, where unnecessary complexity is treated as "skill." Additionally, it's a pure signalling mechanism. People get to do that think when you bring up Infinite Jest or Gravity's Rainbow; "Dude, there's like SO MUCH in that book, right? Crazy, yeah, no, I loved it" Which isn't saying anything at all, but inviting you to be the one who makes a fool of himself by venturing something like, "I'm not sure I got it though" to which the other person gets to puff themselves up and retort with, "Hahaha, yeah, it's not for everyone! Definitely pretty dense, haha." With the snide implication being "But me and my big ole brain totally got it".
This is why I ask, first, "is it real?" The serpentine prose in postmodern literature seems to me to be a kind of forer statement; a reader can (literally) read anything into what's being written and arguments trying to pin down essential meaning are pointless because the point is there is no essential meaning.
I like books about ideas and can deal with density. But I think a novelist has the duty to respect his readers and put together a cohesive narrative. Blood Meridian is an Epic in the classic Homeric sense. You can re-read it 10 times and pick up new strands of thinking on the biggest of The Big Questions; life, death, judgement, heaven, hell.
And it's also a sick western. So you can read it at the level of "fuck yeah, they killed those comanches" and get a lot out of it. You do not need to (although you may want to) keep a notebook next to you while reading. You can just read and get a lot out of it.
I was reading Catch-22 on my subway commutes in NYC. Then 9/11 happened in the middle of it.
So I had this feeling of being at war, but not really sure who we were at war with. People randomly bursting out into tears sitting next to me. Overhearing some of the most jingoistic stuff ever. Huge delays because people were hallucinating suspicious packages and people everywhere.
The book felt velt very, very relevant. The absurdity of war and bureaucracy.
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You get kudos for reading any of those as far as I'm concerned. Last time I read any fiction my midwit ass was reading those paperbacks based on the Aliens franchise, with cool space marines on the cover.
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It's basically just literature that's very self-aware and meta about being fictional, like characters who break the 4th wall in a TV show to make fun of the show. Like you've got the old traditional classics that follow a structure, sometimes a very specific structure like the 3 volume novel, and often draw heavily on the same themes of greek myths and christian morals. Then you've got the modern literature, which blows up a lot of the old rules and is often kind of nihilistic in the wake of the world wars, but its still pretty readable as a novel with plot, characters, themes, etc. The post-modernist stuff assumes you've already read a lot of that stuff, and is sort of a meta-commentary. Like, catch-22 assumes you've already read a lot of war stories, both the heroic kind and the tragic kind, so it's just trying to show the madness and petty nonsense of war in a way that might not make logical sense. Slaughterhouse Five is similar, throwing in a weird time-travel plot that doesn't exactly make logical sense but does convey the madness. Infinite Jest is more about addiction and modern entertainment- what's the point of writing a novel when we're constantly being bombarded by other stimula that are way more entertaining? What's the experience of reading like when we're constantly being distracted? What do we remember, and what do we forget?
TLDR: it's any kind of literature that has blatant plot holes and it doesn't matter.
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I actually really liked IJ! Some thoughts on it below!
Infinite Jest is a book that is primarily concerned with the role of entertainment in American culture. The book explores this question on multiple levels. Firstly, through the three-pronged plot that follows the Incandeza family (the youngest son Hal mainly) at an elite American tennis academy, the recovering narcotics addict Don Gately at a halfway house, and a thriller sci-fi intrigue between the US government and Quebecois separatists over a rather ridiculous superweapon. But unlike many other novels, Infinite Jest also addresses its themes through its structure: the first 300 pages of the book are incredibly hard to read, and the copious amount of (rather important) endnotes does nothing to help the situation. I believe this was deliberate on the part of DFW, as it ties directly to the primary thesis: that we should be skeptical of a culture that only knows how to express itself through pleasure seeking and entertainment.
Background
I have a fairly long history with this book. I first tried to read it in the summer of 2018 with one of my friend from college, Billy, while we were both busy with our research. Billy finished the book, but I made it barely 200 pages due to the complexity of the plot and the fact that I was reading on a Kindle. This was the first time I had failed to complete a book because of its difficulty, and though I moved on to many other books, Infinite Jest stuck around in the back of my mind as a mountain I had not yet summitted. Six years later, I added it to my ten books to read before I die list. In the interim, I had fallen in love with David Foster Wallace’s work as an essayist and as a interviewee, and so when the opportunity presented itself to read the book with my philosophy book club, I leaped at the chance to tackle this book again.
David Foster Wallace was an English professor at Pomona College, novelist, and essayist, whose work focuses on how modernity makes it very difficult to be an individual with a grounded identity. Infinite Jest is his shot at grappling with this conundrum: it was published in 1996, right before the take off the internet, and the subsequent real acceleration in the strength of the dissolving power of our culture. DFW killed himself in 2008, more than likely because of the how reality seemed to match the worst of his prognostications.
I personally got three main things out of Infinite Jest: culture is not entertainment, drugs are bad actually, and postmodernism isn’t the devil it’s cracked up to be. More on each of these below.
Culture is not entertainment
I think one of the biggest flaws of modern American (or Western in general) culture is a deep-seated fear of engaging with one’s own life. On one hand we have the work-a-holics, who spend every waking (and sleeping in some cases) moment in pursuit of productivity. We see these kinds of people in Infinite Jest, at the tennis academy, where Hal Incandenza, his family, and his friends seem to dedicate their entire lives to excellence in tennis without ever thinking about why they are doing so, or about the other aspects of their life that might suffer as a result. On the other extreme, we have those who numb themselves with the stories of other people’s lives. Before the internet, the average American used to watch around 6 hours of television a day. With YouTube and social media it’s probably even worse. DFW addresses these kinds of people through the Hal’s late father, James Incandeza, who makes thoughtful but commercially unsuccessful films, various funny and on-the-nose anecdotes about media technology, and finally with the central premise of the book, a film so entertaining you can’t do anything else other than watch it.
Can we approach media differently? I have to hope that DFW thinks so: he spent his life as a novelist, which seems like a strange thing to do if one believes all media is bad. I think rather he would argue that there is value in literature, but not primarily in its entertainment value. Rather, literature is for helping us to understand how other people think and live their lives, so we can live our own better.
Drugs are bad, actually
The second big plot arc of this book revolves around Don Gately, an ex-addict who now works as a live in a halfway house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This meandering storyline explores how Gately came clean, and the depraved world of substance addiction through his interactions with other people at the house and at Alcoholics’ Anonymous meetings. The AA sections of this book came off extremely positively, despite Foster Wallace’s clear initial skepticism of the metaphysical claims the group makes. Those claims are extremely important to Gately’s continued sobriety, namely the existence of a moral power above one’s own desires.
Aside from the mild comedy at seeing marijuana portrayed as this world’s version of heroin (hyperaddictive and supremely damaging to one’s mental health), these were quite tough sections of the book for me to read. Although I have used a fair amount of drugs, they have always been in limited amounts, and in the safe, middle-class environment in which I have lived my whole life. Drugs for Wallace’s characters, and for many in real life, are a path to an underworld that eats people alive. In many cases, the drugs are an attempt to cope with something worse, but they never really end up helping.
This book has firmly convinced me that drugs are another example of what Charles Murray calls a failure of bourgeoises values. It might be okay for Elon Musk or Bill Gates to have a heroin or marijuana addiction, just as it is okay for those men to destroy their families because the monetary resources that both enjoy mean that they can recover from such setbacks. For the lower class, no such thing is true. Drugs are a road straight to hell (here on earth). I honestly think this is a huge flaw in libertarian thinking, and I wish there was more discussion around this topic.
Postmodernism is good actually (to a point)
I find it very frustrating how those on the Right (and also the Left) refuse to engage with the substance of what postmodernism is actually trying to say. A lot of this comes from a confusion on definitions. I would define postmodernism in two separate ways. The first in its purely literary sense: a work that uses its structure to reinforce its themes. My favorite example to turn to for this definition is the video game Dark Souls,which beyond the usual RPG levelling system has a mechanic of respawning you at the nearest bonfire after death with one chance to reobtain your lost “souls” and items at the spot of your defeat. This has the effect of reinforcing the theme of the loss of larger purpose due to repetition: it is very easy to forget the larger plot of the game when you’re so focused on making runbacks to the same boss.
Infinite Jest has the same relationship between structure and theme. We already discussed how the book suggests that it’s important to separate culture and understanding the world from mere entertainment. How does Infinite Jest do this? By being quite difficult (although rewarding to read). There are three main plot lines with innumerable side characters with various degrees of importance introduced within the first two hundred pages: the length of many shorter novels. It takes time to understand how these arcs fit together, and for me these two hundred (and to a lesser extent the next three hundred) pages were not fun in the normal sense of the word, although David Foster Wallace does happen to be quite a humorous writer. There’s also an endnote on almost every page, which requires flipping to the back of the book to read (to simulate a tennis match according to DFW). Yet the slow start and the footnotes both allow DFW to build a rich literary world deep in meaning that would not be possible to the same extent) in shorter and shallower fiction.
The second definition of postmodernism is probably closer to what people on this platform actually have a problem with.
From Hans Bertens:
I’m sympathetic to a critique of this kind of post-modernism taken too far. You can’t actually live (or at least live well) without a system of guiding values. Nor do people on the woke left actually live this way: they have merely replaced one system of values with another (worse) one. Yet I think the critics miss some important points about what postmodernism was (and is) trying to accomplish.
First, there is a clear misunderstanding of the primary targets of postmodern critiques. Postmodernism is a response to modernism, not the traditional faiths of the West (Catholicism) or the East (Hinduism, Buddhism). Postmodernism is primarily a critique of the cult of progress, which was born from the Enlightenment and the Reformation and is without a doubt destroying our world. And this is reflected in Infinite Jest. DFW doesn’t shit so much on Alcoholics’ Anonymous, a traditional Christian organization, but on the vapidity of the Tennis Academy, and the empty slogans of the reality TV show that is what has become of the US government.
Then, I think many people mistake critique for dismissal. Just because the representations of our ideals and values are flawed and corrupt, and exposed as such by postmodern critiques does not mean that those ideals are wrong, or that we should abandon those institutions. Rather, postmodernism exposes real flaws that need to be addressed in order for those institutions to survive. I’m thinking primarily here of the Catholic church and the child molestation scandals in the Northeastern United States, but this critique could just as well apply to the American electoral and university systems.
Finally, I think the curt dismissal of post-modernism fails to acknowledge the complicated nature of traditional faiths. The book of Job and Ecclesiates are both in the Bible, and if they were written today, they would surely be taken as post-modern critiques. The church itself has a long history of mystical and out-of-the-box thinkers, and even many of Jesus’ parables could not be less clear. To shy away from the issues raised by post-modernism is an act of cowardice, close-mindedness and intellectual dishonesty.
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I'm confused at the selection. Personally I find Vonnegut easy reads, and though I don't agree with him in the slightest about almost anything, I appreciate the propositions his novels create and the challenge they pose to my worldview.
Meanwhile Infinite Jest is... you have to have a motivation to read it because the book doesn't create the motivation to read the next page by itself. At least that's my experience. I like shorter essays by the author but Infinite Jest itself is a thing in itself. Like House of Leaves. What are you reading it for? To be one of those who read it.
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Slaughterhouse-Five and Catch-22 are legit, although I can't say the same for every work of postmodern literature.
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Oh boy, literature sniping, my favorite kind of geek-out.
So, what is art? You're right to observe that "If I like it it's good" is a shallow way to judge artistic quality. Clearly the purpose of art is not merely to entertain and enthrall.
On the other hand, "To increase collective well-being?" Shades of Fredric Wertham–all that is not wholesome, morally fortifying, and artistically meritorious should be thrown out! Art can be just a thing to entertain.
Art, in my opinion, is all the things people look to it for: entertainment, escapism, a display of talent and craft, a few moments of amusement, but also meaning, reflection, new lenses through which to see the world, education, enlightenment.
No book or other work of art, of course, is going to be all of those things. Some will be none of those things.
I am one of those people who thinks there is such a thing as "good" and "bad" writing and that there are, if not completely objective, then at least generally agreed-upon rubrics by which you can judge it. It's more than style (19th century classics would be considered "badly written" by modern stylistic standards) but it's also more than theme or symbolism or capturing some essential essentialness of the human experience or your place in the world or the current zeitgeist or whatever.
I'm going to take the very unchallenging centrist view that you can like high literature and comic books at the same time. You can enjoy both experimental postmodernism and Extruded Fantasy Product like Brandon Sanderson.
If you are incapable of critically examining what you consume (at least to the degree that you recognize, "Yeah, this is kind of crap, but it's fun") then you probably aren't getting much out of anything you consume but whatever time it takes you to consume it. But that doesn't mean reading things just to be entertained is bad in and of itself.
Of the works you mention, I have yet to tackle Infinite Jest (I read DFW's debut novel, The Broom of the System, and was so thoroughly unimpressed I've been putting off tackling IJ). I have read Thomas Pynchon, and while I still love The Crying of Lot 49, it's not a coincidence that that's one of his shortest novels. Gravity's Rainbow was an ordeal to get through, and I only finished it out of sheer determination. Like several other commenters, I would not categorize either Slaughterhouse-Five or Catch-22 as post-modern. Satirical and cynical, certainly, but post-modernism is not just irony and counter-culturalism.
I think, therefore, that you are completely wrong about post-modern not being "real" or there not being anything "there" (at least two of your books aren't post-modern at all, and they definitely do have clear themes and plots). Post-modernism is also not just a "stylistic" exercise. Post-modernist books are generally characterized by being "experimental" and defying the conventions of traditional novels–hence, non-linear storytelling, unreliable narrators, metatextual references, disregard for conventional plot and characterization, etc. But there are always ideas there, and I would argue most of those books do have a cohesive (if meandering and self-indulgent) narrative.
I'm bemused that you praise Blood Meridian (which is also one of my favorite books), as many people consider Cormac McCarthy very much a post-modernist writer, and if anyone can be accused of writing in an abstruse way as a "stylistic exercise," it's him. (He demonstrates both how you can break punctuation and sentence structure rules, and why they exist.)
The fact that what you love, someone else will hate, and what you find deep and meaningful, someone else will find cheap trash, is why it's very hard to arrive at any real consensus on artistic "quality." I've dunked on Brandon Sanderson plenty, but I have read a lot of his books, and I have seen people say that they got a lot of value out of his handling of various kinds of mental illness, etc. (To which I want to say, "read something better," but there I go again.) I both love and hate Cormac McCarthy and Thomas Pynchon (I'm 50/50 for any given book), and there are people who are fierce devotees and people who think they're both just orthographical prestidigitators.
The vast majority of writing is crap. This has always been the case, we just didn't have so much writing produced at such scale. People will argue that the likes of Charles Dickens and Herman Melville and Leo Tolstoy and Jane Austen and Victor Hugo and Miguel de Cervantes are only well-regarded today because they had comparatively less competition; this is true, but they also had a comparatively much smaller audience. They are admired today because in one way or another they captured something about their time and place and wrote about human lives we still find interesting and relatable today even if we are far removed from those eras.
But! All of them (except maybe Tolstoy, who was rich and also batshit crazy) were also writing for money! They were very much writing to their markets (Cervantes wrote the sequel to book one of Don Quixote because a rival was plagiarizing him!) And a lot of people dunk on all of them for being pedestrian or prosaic or culture-bound or just boring and consider them to have been the Brandon Sandersons of their day. (They had plenty of critics in their own time.)
I remember reading an interview once with Piers Anthony, the original Dirty Old Man of SF&F, who was once an enormously prolific bestseller before kind of falling out of favor with the fandom. He genuinely considers himself to be a Great Author who will someday be recognized alongside the likes of Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy. While it's hard to imagine the author of The Color of Her Panties being so remembered, who can say? It may well be that Brandon Sanderson is remembered as the great American fantasy writer of the 21st century. I think there is something to be said for telling literature snobs to get their heads out of their asses. At the same time, there is something to be said for telling Millenials whose literary horizons never expanded beyond Harry Potter and Twilight to Read Another Fucking Book. (But you could say the same thing to a lot of hippies and neckbeards who never read anything but Tolkien and Heinlein.)
The Broom of the System is... bad. In many ways DFW's later writing is reacting to a feeling that stuff like TBotS is the only kind of thing that you can write in the exhausted conditions of late postmodernism, and that just writing more novels like that but with minor improvements would be a complete waste of time.
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Is Catch 22 postmodern? Like it's definitely written from a position of irony but from my memories of reading it in high school it wasn't that complicated or byzantine
Postmodernism doesn't entail that it be byzantine and unapproachable. It's just often the nature of texts that see deconstruction as their main task.
Literary postmodernism is specifically "deconstructing" the form of the novel, the assumed nature of the text, etc.. Modernism has no shortage of stories "deconstructing" the idea that the World Wars were glorious affairs.
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So, uh, why are you reading? Like what are you reading for?
You should read what you like if it's for enjoyment. Whether that's Tom Clancy(RIP) or Jane Austen(also RIP), or in your case Cormac McCarthy(RIP again). If you're trying to become well read, then read Shakespeare. If you just want to blend in with a certain crowd, well, that's going to entail plenty of other things you wouldn't necessarily choose to do, I'm not sure why the modern equivalent of Dickens is a bridge too far.
I have never understood the appeal of Shakespeare at all and I’ve tried to grasp it. Although the one book I suspect that has a chance at making me like him I haven’t got around to yet.
Does this come from trying to read Shakespeare? I feel like Shakespeare is best enjoyed in performance form, and trying to enjoy his works from reading them is like trying to enjoy The Godfather from reading the script. There's enjoyment to be had, likely, but there's a lot to the experience that's missing, because the target audience for the script wasn't readers, but rather actors and directors and such, for the purpose of informing them on what to perform for viewers. Personally, my favorite Shakespeare experience is the 90s film Twelfth Night starring Ethan Hawke and Helena Bonham Carter.
The first time I ever enjoyed Shakespeare was in a tavern that served food and booze while putting on the performance. Can't recommend highly enough (no tomatoes thrown, alas).
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I don't like Shakespeare either.
But to give him credit, I'm sure he was exceptionally talented in his time. I think it's like criticizing Newton because he only discovered classical physics: we've progressed not only material and objective knowledge but changed taste.
Likewise, I read Lovecraft and his depiction of eldritch horrors is tame compared to what he inspired.
(Although unlike material and knowledge, whether our culture's taste "progresses" is debatable. Especially because sometimes "what's old is new again". I do think it progresses in that some concepts, like tropes, are discovered then always remain in style; at least until we undergo change as radical as an apocalypse that destroys material and knowledge progress.)
Part of the criticism I have for him lies on me. How can I say I don’t like him if I don’t understand what he’s about? I just don’t see the appeal at all. I’m not sure if Newton is a good parallel case. And actually in his case, Newtonian Mechanics still has a ton of practical applicability today, specifically in fluid dynamics.
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The first and only time I encountered Infinite Jest, it was the guy so dedicated to social climbing he became a gay black communist to pick up college-educated white chicks. And he had suddenly started talking about infinite jest without ever mentioning anything about infinite jest. I was just there when he reliably brought it up with the same lines in every interaction with a new person. He was 30 though and knew exactly what he was doing.
I was frankly confused as to why he was so obsessed with a book he wasn't actually reading and couldn't explain what he liked about it.
I like genre trash, and am not embarrassed about it, and I have very low tolerance for performative waffling.
I initially thought the first paragraph was a joke about you meeting Obama in his law school days.
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Keeping a notebook while reading Gravity's Rainbow is not how you should be reading it; you'll inevitably be bogged down. The jazz analogy is right, but perhaps not how you mean it: it's a kaleidoscope, and the fractured lack of a coherent narrative is itself what you're supposed to get out of it. It's an experience, not a textbook.
I'd also not overly index on Gravity's Rainbow as postmodern literature, just as it wouldn't make sense to overly index on Finnegan's Wake as modernist literature. You could just as well choose Pale Fire or the Name of the Rose as exemplars of postmodernism, and those are excellent and have a highly readable narrative.
As to their value, I enjoyed those two exemplars immensely; if they bring value to your life, then they have value. Gravity's Rainbow and Infinite Jest have the unfortunate status of being i-am-very-smart books, and if read as that, you're not going to have a good time or get any value out of them.
You are entirely correct that Cormac McCarthy is unsurpassed in 20th century literature, though.
The same thing with Infinite Jest. The first time you read it, just let it wash over you. Maybe keep a bookmark on the timeline chapter when that comes up. Don't sweat puzzling out the story too much - you can always read Aaron Swartz's theory afterwards - just enjoy (or "enjoy") the characters, atmosphere, style. Also, thanks for bringing up Pale Fire, somebody had to.
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What’s post modern about Name of the Rose?
I suppose the broadness of the term "postmodernism" is one of its weaknesses, but reasons I'd argue for it:
Several people replying to you point out that the traits that you cite as quintessentially postmodern have antecedents in literature prior to the postmodern era. As ever, there's nothing new under the sun. Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman is often called the first postmodern novel despite having been written smack-bang in the middle of the modernist era. Many of the techniques associated with experimental postmodern literature were first used in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67), if not earlier.
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The characters in the later parts of Don Quixote have read the first part of Don Quixote.
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So is The Lord of the Rings, or Dinotopia.
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Some of the earliest novels were epistolary novels, framed as a series of letters written by a fictional person. This would make it more premodern than postmodern.
Postmodernism is a historical attitude more than a rigid set of textual features, even if textual features point towards or away from a book being written in a postmodern spirit. The Voynich Manuscript is weird as hell, but it's not postmodern, and good luck drawing a line between modernism and postmodernism (and some even argue that we are now in a post-postmodern era, so good luck drawing that line too).
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Hoofprints in the snow might not tell you something is a horse. But then you see a tuft of shoulder-high fur caught in the brush, then a stirrup, and then, hey, it's Brunellus.
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I haven't read Infinite Jest, or Gravity's Rainbow, or White Noise. However I adore Catch-22, and find Slaughterhouse 5 perfectly fine. YMMV.
Gravity’s Rainbow left me feeling like I was intellectually nauseated and on psychedelics the entire time. Great book but it can catch you very off guard if you aren’t prepared for it.
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Yeah Catch 22 is great and I wouldn't consider it guilty of being overly complex or allegorical. You can read it pretty straight up as 'man beset by the system' and it works
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I really enjoyed Infinite Jest, it's definitely a slog in the beginning. There's a real plot there, but it's well camouflaged and you have to search it out in the references and clues left in the text.
I still think the part about masks and video calls is probably the single most perceptive observation of the coming culture of social media and I'm amazed that it was written when cutting edge social media was a geocities my first text web page.
Also Kate Glompert's description of depression is so alien to my experience (I was raised on a steady diet of Norman Vincent Peale). It's a very useful reminder of how different other people's mental experience are.
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I would say this is exactly what GR and IJ do. GR is commentary on technology and the systems of control growing ever-larger. Think Seeing Like a State mixed with some of Uncle Ted's critiques, but in novel form. It's also really, really funny. I've read it three times and it keeps making more sense. There is a narrative present and the plotlines converge, even if not explicitly.
IJ is commentary on addiction, technology, and alienation. Large parts of it are tedious and terminally unfunny. There is a cohesive narrative, although it's jumbled up. As someone who has dealt with many, many addicts, the parts about addiction and rehab are especially poignant.
I would agree that plenty of other post-modernist novels fit your critiques and are sorely lacking as novels. I got very little from Gaddis' The Recognitions for example, even with a reader's guide, and wouldn't recommend it (J R, though, is a good one).
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I'm literally reading Infinite Jest right now. Honestly it's a Skill Issue if you don't get it if you ask me. The more well read you are otherwise the more you'll get out of it. Blood Meridian was a harder read for me the Infinite Jest (though it's an amazing book as well).
Dude, you literally just became the imagined antagonist from my original post.
This is becoming one of themotte's great long-running arguments. I'm mostly in the Skill Issue camp, but it does forget the critical role that individual taste plays - I love Infinite Jest, but also put down Gravity's Rainbow. If you can handle McCarthy you can pretty much handle anything DFW throws at you (the main difference is IJ's nonlinear structure, both temporally and with the footnotes). You should consider picking up The Passenger/Stella Maris and seeing if you hate it.
Edit: my other advice is that you appear to have come away from Infinite Jest with pretty much the same critique of postmodernism that DFW makes in his essays on the topic. He Has Noticed The Bodies, and IJ is a kind of desperate thrashing against the limits of postmodern literature (the Pale King, too, and far more tragically). I think this is one reason that IJ is so long, because even with its postmodern style it's nearly impossible to finish the book without coming away from it with the kind of genuine love and care for its characters that postmodernism apparently forecloses. Every time I finish IJ, it feels like the end of a lengthy trip visiting good friends in a foreign country.
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This is an area where I find utilitarianism helpful. What’s the purpose of art? If art is to increase collective wellbeing, however indirectly, then a lot of literature is worthless. It’s endless yapping and bickering, shilled by a class of people with a high verbal IQ who are paid to professionally yap and have no interest in considering the longterm outcome of their recommendations, and yet somehow have authority on what people should read. The great cathedrals were built by men who had no concept of literature, and every horrible monstrosity of today was designed by some pretentious bespectacled architect who surely claims to love “literature”. All of my civilizational enemies are well-read.
I find your comment nonsensical.
You don't consider the bible "literature"?
The elite of both the red and blue tribe are well read, they just read different things and want to be known for reading different things. OP has good examples of blue-tribe reading, so here's some examples of red-tribe coded reading: the Bible, ancient greek plays, Shakepseare, John Locke, Federalist Papers, Heinlein, Tom Clancy, Little House on the Prairy.
There are similarities between the medieval approach to the Bible and literature, but the differences are too significant to usefully classify them together under the same umbrella term. A medieval Christian did not read the Bible for entertainment, but usually heard the text within a solemn (and multisensory) context with the specific aim of learning from God as sole authority. The normal context of digesting the Bible was distinct from that of literature, even among those who were literate, as they engaged in rich devotional activities. Among literate monks who were taught the Bible for the purpose of teaching the masses, the books were analyzed allegorically and tropologically, yet this was always oriented toward something of Christ or the moral life. Symbols in Isaiah were not considered in light of what an author had in mind, but in light of what God was saying about Christ and what Christ was saying about the urgently-important things which a man had to know and believe. There was no interest in discerning whether the text was written well (an early complaint against the Greek gospels was that they were written poorly, and the early church fathers did not disagree). They had no interest in dissecting the structure, plot, character development, authorial intent, milieu, or anything else which characterizes the modern appraisal of literature. The Bible was treated in a contextually and psychologically distinct way, and analyzed in a distinct way, from the modern treatment and analysis of literature. (Modern “Bible study” has a lot more in common with literature. But that’s an aberration from the medieval era. The master masons who built the cathedrals might have never read the Bible and instead kept a devotional book at home, and the monks who commissioned the cathedrals did not read it as literature in the sense in which we we understand the category).
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Specifically thanking you for this comment.
I wish people would dive to a deeper level of analysis rather than posting variations on "No, actually, I liked that book" - which is most of the other comments in thread.
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Catch 22, Slaughterhouse 5 and White Noise are genuinely entertaining and powerful books imo. I admit to giving up on Gravity's Rainbow and Infinite Jest, but I loved The Crying of Lot 49 and quite liked Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, so I am confident both David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon are capable of great things.
In summary, from my experience, postmodernism doesn't have shit to do with it. It's just that Gravity's Rainbow and Infinite Jest are stupidly long.
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I’ve read Catch-22 three times and Slaughterhouse-Five a couple. Both number among the best novels written in the 20th century. They are the seminal anti-war novels. Go read them, you will probably enjoy it! The former has a slow start, but picks up.
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Personally, I wouldn't even characterise Slaughterhouse-Five as postmodern literature. It's a very short and accessible novel which employs a sci-fi* premise in order to make a powerful anti-war statement. Other works in Vonnegut's oeuvre are far more overtly postmodern and meta (e.g. Breakfast of Champions), but Slaughterhouse-Five is remarkably straightforward.
*Although its author hates his work being so categorised.
Having read this for the first time around 10 years ago in my late 20s or early 30s, I generally agree. However, I must admit that I don't recall the book making an anti-war statement, powerful or not. I listened to the audiobook of All Quiet on the Western Front after I read Slaughterhouse Five, but looking back, the latter book reminded me a lot of the former, in describing the horrors of war in basic, matter-of-fact ways, i.e. the famous "so it goes."
I'll also add that, the scifi film Arrival came out while I was close to finishing the book, and it was kinda surreal watching that film and realizing in-the-moment that the core scifi concept was pulled directly from that book.
I'm not sure if all editions of Slaughterhouse-Five include Vonnegut's preface in which he describes a meeting he had with a Hollywood person who scoffed when Vonnegut told him he was writing an anti-war novel, telling him that he might as well write an anti-glacier novel. In light of that preface, my read ofhow the Tralfamadorians perceive time is that it's Vonnegut's critique of a particular kind of fatalism which sees war and conflict as inevitable and inexorable. If the Tralfamadorian mindset (that it's pointless to try to change the future, because it's predetermined) seems alien to us, then that is intended to shock us into a realisation about war and conflict in our world.
Arrival is a direct adaptation of Ted Chiang's short story "Story of Your Life". I love Ted Chiang, but this is one case where I think the adaptation is marginally superior to its source material. Villeneuve and his screenwriter are to be commended, not just for adapting a short story which is aggressively uncinematic and cerebral, but for doing so faithfully and in a way which is engaging throughout. I'd be curious to know if Chiang has ever read Slaughterhouse-Five.
Of course, the concept behind both these books could have been come up with independently by both authors, but given the time periods, the extreme similarities, and Vonnegut's stature, it would be truly shocking to me if Chiang had never read Slaughterhouse Five, or at least a summary of it. It'd be like some prominent author writing a successful story about a prince whose father is murdered by his uncle deciding to orchestrate a revenge plot never having read Hamlet by Shakespeare or a summary of it.
The Lion King is old enough that there could well be adults who've been inspired by it without knowing the work that inspired it!
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I certainly would not include Catch-22 either. More a comic late modernist novel. Huge inspiration to the postmodernists, though, you don't get Gravity's Rainbow without Catch-22.
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Catch-22 is both hilarious black comedy war satire, and highly quotable. I never really had trouble following the plot or parsing the time shifts. Can't speak for the rest.
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