SO isn't this trying to be Ulysses but with Latinate

>>9575617
not really. It's DeLillo's demented humor with Gaddis' prose and vision of America (and still DeLillo's too) with Dostoevsky's characters and belief in the power of the novel. Kafka and Freud are the dead fathers of the novel (obvious shakespeare allusions notwithstanding) while Derrida is the novel's theoretical antagonist. A lot of shit is going on here. Some will say "where's pynchon?" but as someone who has been reading a lot of DeLillo as of late this book is the hallmark of early-mid DeLillo which is also fairly pynchonian for that matter though

>>9575749
I should also add Barth with Derrida as the antagonists

what is infinite jest trying to recreate brick by brick? boston? a tennis academy? the inner psyche of a well-to-do white kid in the 20th/21st century?

it's a cry for help.
part of the joke is that if you enjoyed it while DFW was alive you are either a murderer or an utter pleb

>>9575749
>Gaddis' prose
Yoooooo what?

should I read Faulkner before Gaddis or are they separate enough worlds that the influence would be negligible

>>9575617
It's not really trying to be Ulysses. I think it's obvious DFW's biggest influences are Delillo and Pynchon though this work is very like Delillo.

What Underworld is for baby boomers, Infinite Jest is for Gen X and Millennials.

>>9575854
All of the above.

>>9575866
this may have been hasty but the waterfall of words and extreme attention to voice and dialogue draw me to Gaddis. He also says in a certain interview that he models his prose after Gaddis, so take that for what you will

>>9575881
Sorry for formatting but here (1/2)

Among novelists, Dostoyevski's importance is paramount. "How are
we to write / The Russian novel in America / As long as life goes so
unterribly?" Robert Frost asked with uncharacteristic obtuseness in his
poem "New Hampshire," written about the time Gaddis was born.
Life proved terrible enough by the 1950s to produce in The Recognitions
the most "Russian" novel in American literature. Gaddis's love for
nineteenth-century Russian literature in general crops up in his novels,
his letters, and in his few lectures, where references are made co the
major works of Dostoyevski, Tolstoy (especially the plays), Gogol, Turgenev,
Gorky, Goncharov, and Chekhov. Gaddis shares with these authors
not only their metaphysical concerns and often bizarre sense of
humor, but their nationalistic impulses as well. William H. Gass reported
a talk of Gaddis's in Lithuania where Gaddis insisted "he and
the earlier Russian writers had the same target, and that he was attempting
co save his version of an acceptable country as they were
endeavoring to redeem theirs. "20In each of his novels, moreover, Gaddis
pursues what Edward Wasiolek has called "perhaps the most distinctive
trait of Russian fiction, to trace our the extreme, but logically
possible, reaches of a human characteristic. "21
Among western European writers, briefly, relevant works include
Sade'sJustine, Goethe's Faust, Rilke's Duino Elegies,Rimbaud's A Season
in Hell, Broch's Sleepwalkers,Hesse's Steppenwolf,Silone's And He Hid
Himself, some Ibsen, and Dante. Kafka's The Castle is alluded to in
J R, and Gaddis once admitted that when he first read Kafka in his
early twenties he was so stunned by what Kafka could do that he "sat
down and wrote some very bad Kafka, though I thought of it as good
Kafka then. "22 He also read Gide's Counterfeiterswhen young, but
doubts it influenced his own novel about counterfeiters. He has never
read Robbe-Grillet (though parallels have been noted), nor Proust's
vast novel beyond its "overture," but read Montherlant's Bachelorsand
apparently The Girls tetralogy. He keeps up with many middle European
authors and, among Third World authors, has spoken highly of
Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard and, in Carpenter'sGothic,
quotes V. S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men.
The range of relevant British writers is much greater, extending
from Langland's PiersPlowman and the medieval passion play Harrowing
of Hell through most of Shakespeare (As YouLike It is his favorite)

>>9575946
(2/2)
and other Elizabethan dramatists, Donne, Restoration and Augustan
satirists, to a number of twentieth-century writers. Forster and
Waugh, mentioned in the letter to Eckley, are discernible in Gaddis's
mordant social criticism and use of foreign locales; he seems co have
read and relished the bulk of these novelists' work. Rolfe's name is as
surprising as it is little known, but in the unique writings of the selfstyled
Baron Corvo can be found anticipations of the virulent satire,
haughty elitism, and outlandish erudition so prevalentin TheRecognitions.
A more obvious influence is the work of Ronald Firbank, whose
unexampled novels were enjoying a revival when Gaddis was at work
on his first novel. From these witty, outrageous novels Gaddis may
have learned how to use elliptical dialogue-especially for effects usually
achieved only in traditional exposition-and perhaps how to have
campy fun at Catholicism's expense. (Gaddis may have learned from
other masters of the novel in dialogue-especially early Waugh and
late Henry Green-but Firbank's example is the most apparent.) Other
British writers alluded co in Gaddis's writings include Charlotte Bronte
(whose Jane Eyre made it into Carpenter'sGothic as a last minute substitute
for Lost Horizon, which James Hilton's estate would not allow
Gaddis to use), Butler's The Way of All Flesh, much Conrad, some
Wilde and Kipling, Norman Douglas's South Wind, George Borrow's
nonfiction, C. M. Doughty and T. E. Lawrence's classic books on Arabia,
some Huxley and Maugham, much Robert Graves, and Sillicoe's
The Lonelinessof the LongDistanceRunner. Among the poets, Browning,
Tennyson, and Yeats are the most often quoted after Eliot

I don't think all the influences are really "the point," not that they are not useful to notice. Wallace was well-read and he used a lot of different writers' plots and themes, but the book is trying to recreate

(brick by brick)
>>9575854

the inside of just one guy's head. That's why it's so similar to Ulysses, or The Recognitions, or the good parts of Gravity's Rainbow, or Moby Dick, or even (ick) House of Leaves: IJ is one man's white whale. The point of a Great (American) Novel is that it's its own point. self absorbed sure but it's by necessity and at least he was sort of aware of it.

>>9575946
>>9575952
nice effort anon, but booze and uppers at the same time -- though it makes YOU feel literary -- does not have the same effect on others, i've learned.

cool recommendations tho

>>9575749
Awful post.

Why do people like DeLillo? I just read Omega Point and it was awful.