Let's be honest here: You guys have obviously all read at least some of his stuff or know a bit about him.
This guy was the very definition of prodigy and potential. I'm not trying to stroke the guy off, but in all seriousness, looking at his body of work, his achievements, he could have been one of the greats. I was just reading A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, and my god, everything sings. Everything is good.
Do you agree /lit/? Or was he a hack who hid behind irony like everyone here says he is?
kek-tier author
>>7370404
No discernible talent.
he was a certain reader's type of author for sure
>>7370447
Just like Dan Brown.
>>7370404
>Or was he a hack who hid behind irony like everyone here says he is?
His misguided, impotent flailing against the ironic edifice of contemporary intellectual culture only served to deepen the shared sense of that cultures embarrassment for him and for the ideals he championed.
Of course the pretenders to that culture left off and rallied around him, wanting his vision to be the reality.But that rabble has mostly dispersed, either falling back into undifferentiated thick or doing their best to reclaim a bit of the cynicism and detachment intrinsic to the persisting culture. A few kids on the come up, usually driven by their political school masters, try and shore up the abandoned rallying point but either grow quickly out of it, are forced to suppress it into a cloistered sense of the political, or follow it out the door and to into the bad lands beyond the purview of serious culture.
>>7370479
And there's something terribly sad and banal about that.
he keked himself with drugs and pussy
he's a beta
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again is his best work, OP, which is probably why you feel that way right now.
Infinite Jest is enjoyable in a very odd way as well, but Wallace was at his best writing non-fiction essays. He was a prodigy, but I think not at the thing he wanted to be (fiction).
I think he was a smart and interesting man, but I don't think he was a Literary Genius. I do think he was very dedicated to becoming a literary genius though, and he tried hard to be as creative, moral and enlightening as possible, with mixed but respectable results.
Personally I've always preferred his nonfiction to his fiction. His fiction reeks of effort, and I don't think he was ever totally comfortable with the performative aspect of creative writing. I also don't hear the same rhythm in his descriptions and sentences that I do in other writers. That casual skill with language which I believe defines true literary genius is mostly absent.
Potential -- I see that. Maybe if he stuck around for another twenty years he could have produced something truly transcendent. Prodigy? Genius? Eh. How about, "better than most".
>>7370508
>His best work
>Not Good Old Neon
>>7370989
>Not Smithy
:') u guise
>>7370989
How can an autobiography be someone's best work?
>>7371026
Cuz he wrote it before he cast himself upon th' belt.
>>7370999
Definitely not Smithy. Kind of obviously IJ.
>>7371033
Smithy shows far more potential for development as a more mature and serious author (there are snippets in Pale King as well but that's so damn hit and miss). I'm probably phrasing this wrong as i am drinking but that story really stood out as one that captures the root fear that runs through all of his fiction without coming of as pompous or angsty. Good Old Neon (every neet's favorite) just struck the right chord with his readers.. While it's not necessarily bad (I do definitely think he has an interesting view on death in that story with the straw analogy) It still has that adolescent "tortured genius" aspect that he needed so badly to move away from.
Definitely not a hack whatever you think about him. He wrote Infinite Jest when he was fucking 34! I really wish he hadn't killed himself. The Bo Jackson/Grant Hill/Bill Walton of writing.
>>7370438
go to bed Harold.
He was like a Michelangelo drawing high art anime. The best of his skill creating something meaningful, which though could have reached greater lengths if it wasn't stumped by his interests.
>>7370404
But he is one of the Greats, except we need quite a few more years since his death to be able to claim so without being bashed by memeposters and edgelords.
If he had the ability to not think about himself for one minute, he could've written something on the level of Ulysses.
>>7372097
>Ulysses:
The loudest book of the time
Pushing the current literary zeitgeist's boundaries to the limit
Long and quirky
Autistically designed, written for critics and other writers because it was in fashion
>IJ:
The loudest book of the time
Pushing the current literary zeitgeist's boundaries to the limit
Long and quirky
Autistically designed, written for academia and readers because it was in fashion
>>7372102
I don't want to speculate too wildly, but it's possible that Infinite Jest is a book in translation. What I mean by that is that although Infinite Jest is ostensibly written in American English, it is also so potent a work of literature that I suspect Wallace may have composed it first in a language of pure thought, a metaphysical language—a language of precision in which there is no ambiguity, no approximation of ideas, just the ideas themselves—and then translated it into English so that we could enjoy it. That's just a theory at the moment, but I think future scholarship will bear it out. Is it a little Out There? No. We're talking about the smartest man who ever lived. In a post-Wallace world, we have to be careful not to cling the old paradigm of possibility. I know that sounds overblown. I don't want to get carried away. I just think we should all keep in mind that we should read Infinite Jest because it's a good book, that's all, and because the fate of the universe depends on it.
He's second, if not third rate compared to the top 20th century authors. No prodigy, no. He worked hard I guess though.
>>7372127
That's from the reddit guy isn't it, lel.
I like how the guy can, despite his serious autism, enjoy books and find the motivation to write lengthy posts about them(or more like it, considering that he only writes about IJ).
IJ vs Uly comparison is accurate though, I rest my case.
>>7372097
So much fucking projection I can't believe it. He couldn't even reach that level by accident dude.
>>7372163
He's just taking a central idea and writing ad nauseum about it. He probably has kafkaesque fits of laughter when he writes them, delighting in how far he can take the whole thing and how slowly he can twist the knife.
>>7372179
Yeah how much of his stuff is:
>Something happened, and then things got crazy, and then things got even more crazy, and before anybody knew what was going on, things were going absolutely haywire, and it was pandemonium. But, in the end, something, about the sky, short clause.
>>7370404
Total Kekservative
>>7372127
kek
>>7372349
Nice content and post, my guy. DFW would be proud.
I think it is easy to fall into the Bret Easton Ellis camp of thinking which basic reduces his work to "I don't like that this long heavy book explores ideas and isn't a narrative"
I think if you track down a copy of his story "The Planet Trillaphon" which from memory is his first published work I think the rest of his work opens up.
>>7372390
also this story is genius
http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-1998-01-0059425.pdf
>prodigy
>dead at 46
Nah he offed himself because he was still a meme author by the time his voice should have matured.
>>7372412
In all honesty, have you read anything by him?
>>7372427
I read this is water and it sucked balls
He almost inspired me to become a writer in that I was certain and still am certain that I could be a better writer than he.
>>7372435
Kek
Nice meme onion then
>>7372435
Just the speech?
>>7372412
This.
I am drunk so ....no TLDR.
I have only read a couple of hundred pages of IJ. A few short stories, a handful of essays and watched most of his interviews on YTB.
I think he was trying too hard to be somebody influential. He wanted to be a sort of a cross between Nabokov and Pynchon and still be as engaging and culturally relevant as DeLillo. He could clearly see himself as a hack and his readers could not, which made him even lonelier. He did not want to be a 'meme' writer but people liked him for that. He did not like who he'd become, so he killed himself.
It's a bit like Dylan writing bad songs intentionally because he said he was fed up of keeping up his persona. Maybe DFW should've written something terrible on purpose.
>>7372450
>Abbreviating 'YouTube' as YTB
>2015
>>7372450
>Nabokov
?
fuck sincerity though.
>>7372163
Source?
>>7372468
>2015
>not being drunk
