for soemone who wanted to write more 'sincerely' and directly about actual issues - why does he waste so much time on 'postmodern' wankery and dumb humor?
this goes back to infinite jest too. if you watch his interviews on the book he presents a very different image than you'd get from reading the novel. he explains it like a very sad, straightforward cultural commentary. then you read it and you end up getting a shotgun scatter of quirky scenes that need to be decoded and spend half your time reading about all these characters' silly hobbies and obsessions.
and it's very much the same with the pale king. even in a book with no real aim at doing anything but discussing the 'real issues' it's like david shys away from engaging them and instead does some silly author insert story and flips through characters like the one armed ass biting surrealist and the guy with useless ESP. all these things feel so beside the point to his writing.
for someone who criticized dumb entertainment he sure seemed a slave to it, especailly in his wriitng.
Actually the po-mo stuff in this book supports the central theme of the book, which is that valuable work is often boring, tedious and apparently without purpose. The legal shindigs with the authorship and the chapters full of IRS terminology is designed to place you, the reader, in the seat of an IRS employees whose work is mind-numbingly boring but is nonetheless (so his thesis goes) valuable and in a way heroic.
Tl;dr
But Wallace is keeping with a long literary and philosophical tradition of saying one thing and giving another when he had your attention.
Whitman
Kant
Proust
Heidegger
McCarthy
Your conflating sincerity with honesty
>>8216501
but he doesn't do this! he never really explores boredom in this book. it's just one big joke or tragedy after another
the closest he comes is exploring the idea of exploring boredom
>>8216523
But he does. He has the edgy guy turn up accidentally to an accounting class and reconsider how he saw the Christian girl and how the most virtuous guy in the group is a quiet beta guy who listens to others and who is the only guy the most beautful girl at the firm is willing to talk to at the bar when there' a thunder storm outside and the dude is levitating one inch from his seat as she talks.
>>8216414
Because to make a show of being direct or 'just telling it like it is', would still be posturing, especially in a modern context where such things are so charged with other meaning to basically be just tropes. As far as I understand, DFW uses the postmodern stuff to try and capture how he's actually thinking about it, maybe a similar idea to stream of conciousness
He wanted to be famous.
>>8216550
Dis
>>8216414
re: infinite jest
http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/brooksdaverman.htm
