> "This is another paradox, that many of the most important impressions and thoughts in a person’s life are ones that flash through your head so fast that fast isn’t even the right word, they seem totally different from or outside of the regular sequential clock time we all live by, and they have so little relation to the sort of linear, one-word-after-another-word English we all communicate with each other with that it could easily take a whole lifetime just to spell out the contents of one split-second’s flash of thoughts and connections, etc. — and yet we all seem to go around trying to use English (or whatever language our native country happens to use, it goes without saying) to try to convey to other people what we’re thinking and to find out what they’re thinking, when in fact deep down everybody knows it’s a charade and they’re just going through the motions. What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny littepart of it at any given instant."
It seems like Hemingway addresses this criticism by suggesting that if we portray characters doing things rather than trying to describe how they feel, the reader will be able to understand how they feel through sheer empathetic brain-power rather than through the conveyance of words.
>>7359854
i guess maybe if we see an author trying to describe the state of another human being's mind as sincerely and accurately as he can, as doomed an attempt as it is, the same principle would apply?
Show, don't tell, in a nutshell.
>>7359868
It can't be sincere if you're knowingly describing it in a way that is inaccurate.
And DFW will never think at all.
>>7359897
Well memed, friend.
This is actually pretty good support for bloom's statement that he cant think. He repeatedly wrote about the feeling of being unable to communicate (another ex is the opening of IJ), because that's what he experiencrd himself: a linguistic constipation that he dealt with by making diarrhea, desperately overwriting, throwing everything he's got at the page, hoping that somewhere in the mess he gets his point across. He was always trying to write his way out of not being able to write. That's why bloom was right: he can't think, he can't write, there's no discernible talent.
>>7359971
This is truly the dankest meta meme.
>>7359971
I agree with bloom.
>>7359840
I kind of do. I am an idiot besides this and am not much of a writer but I am constantly making observations and apposite connections between things. Its like my autism superpower.
>inb4 somebody has to shit on me for no reason like a Jewish midget castigating a trumpet player
>>7359840
that quote is such pseudo-intellectual drivel, oh god wallace is a hack
>>7359971
agreed
that's why people get the sense that he's this genius
because he writes like someone who's thinking and talking a mile a minute
but since when was that considered good writing
there are no elegant sentences in dfw, not a one
>>7360987
>but since when was that considered good writing
Says the Anon who doesn't capitalize and who forgets to use basic punctuation marks.
>>7359971
Listen here son, I wrote a 1000 page book! I deserve respect!
Language isn't about expressing yourself, you fools. It's about making OTHER people think or do. The very act of expressing your thoughts requires the you that speaks to be separate from the you that thinks.
>>7360995
>he hasn't read beckett
So, he's an intuitionist who puts more stock in intuitions than in explicit, abstract reasoning
Nothing you couldn't find elsewhere in academia, even if it is well-worded
