Let's Smoke Pot And Tour The Beach

Thomas Pynchon – Inherent Vice

Pynchon’s preview on youtube for this novel – it’s voiced by him and everything.

MORE Pynchon, I know. I am definitely obsessed with this author, and though I only got to grips with him this year, he is quickly becoming a favourite of mine. However, Inherent Vice is certainly not a work I would characterise as a favourite for several reasons. The first of which, and it is a bit nit-picking really, is that I got the impression that a lot of the scenes in the novel were written with it’s being made into a movie in mind. Sure, there is the bracing hilarity present in this novel, along with the ridiculous characters, but a lot of the tangential pieces of usually brilliant prose that seem to often set aside reality for the moment seem strangely absent.

                One thing that did impress me about the novel, however, is the wonderful dialogue. One of the trademark aspects of Pychonian writing is the very idiosyncratic speech – which, in Gravity’s Rainbow was brought about by various ticks, different vocabulary and a general bleeding of these idiosyncrasies into the narrative itself – so that the reader often got the impression that the narrative represented, in part at least, the thoughts of the character on whom we were currently focussed. In Inherent Vice, this is largely seen in the dialogue itself, which is witty, complex and very interesting in places. Even in the first Chapter, we are given a tantalising sense of Doc’s history with Shasta:

“Call me or something.” [said Doc] “You never did let me down, Doc.” [said Shasta] “Don’t worry. I’ll-” “No, I mean really ever.” “Oh… sure I did.” “You were always true.” Inherent Vice, Chapter 1

The dialogue here is simplistic, sure, but it really tells us a lot about the two characters. The first thing to notice here is the lack of “he said, she said.” I have put the speakers into square brackets (not that it isn’t obvious) just to emphasise that the speakers are, in fact, Doc and Shasta. I’m sure there are more eye-opening pieces of dialogue in the novel, in fact, but this was a section that really stood out in the first chapter (especially after I saw the adaptation of the first scene on youtube). Their history is right there in the dialogue, Shasta is referencing an apparently long selection of intrigues. Further, Doc’s responses reveal him to be professional, despite his don’t-give-a-shit/pot-smoking demeanour, and perhaps a little worried about his rep there deep down. He is also a tremendously unpretentious man. One of the interesting things about this novel, is that it actually contains no pretentious-sounding characters. Usually Pynchon’s pretentious characters will be scientists or mystics with only a bit a wackiness presumably to bring them back down-to-Earth. However, even the doctor who works below Doc’s office is an friendly guy.

                Some of the scenarios with which Pynchon weaves what little wackiness (I’m going to use that term from here on in, I think – it seems the best adjective to suit Pynchon’s trademark stuff) he puts in with semi-plausible explanations. We get little by way of visions or extraordinary revelation in the novel – there is some which comes courtesy of a little drug trip. This is disappointing – for me personally, it is far more interesting to see a character go through what could be described as a genuinely religious experience, rather than have him simply come upon a revelation through the use of narcotics. But that’s really the kicker isn’t it? What I didn’t like about Gravity’s Rainbow, despite how generally masterful it was in other regards, was the fact that it promoted the use of drugs as a vehicle for comedic situations. It’s not that I don’t “get it, man”, it’s that it’s just not terribly funny is all. I know Pynchon could have been a little more intelligent about this.  

               

Penguin Balloons

William Gibson – Zero History

The Twitter Logo (see below for relevance [not commented on however is the fact that Twitter seemed to enjoy more of a reputation as a revolutionary communication tool from media, than it actually received from participants of the internet])

PERHAPS I was a little cruel when I criticised Gibson’s characterisation in Idoru. There was just a certain naivety about the work, and not just that of his absurd technological predictions. Gibson’s bleak prediction of a cyberpunk future seems to me very much a product of its time. So where does that leave Zero History – a novel published in this decade? Certainly it is too late to be looking forwards to a world where we all jack into the internet in full virtual reality. Where does this leave a writer like Gibson, famous for his technological predictions?

                For one thing, I thought that Gibson’s naivety really worked in Idoru: the future was a bleak one, corrupt and dark, but it was a backdrop from which he could explore humanity from a dual perspective: dark and naive at the same time. Zero History seems to have this built into it as well. The novel takes place, for the most part, in London and Gibson certainly puts a lot of emphasis on the famous surveillance of the city, and there is a plausible link between it and the media (which isn’t explored to its fullest extent). The naivety in the novel is reflected in the main character’s way of dealing with technology. For instance, he is advised to communicate with an American Secret Agent by way of Twitter:

The Neo [his telephone] rang while he was still trying to grasp Twitter. He was registered, now, as GAYDOLPHIN2. No followers, following no one. Whatever that meant. And his updates, whatever those were, were protected. Zero History, Chapter 18 ‘140’

Here, rather than a naivety about the way technology will develop, or from an adolescent character (who was nonetheless tech-savvy) we have a mid to late twenties guy trying to figure out a piece of web-technology of complete simplicity (even its jargon is self-explanatory really, who, reading a sci-fi novel won’t be savvy enough to work it out/know already). We have a sense of fish-out-of-water-ness about our protagonist, which seems more a reflection of Gibson’s own feeling than one that should be realistically attached to the character. Further, there is a touch of sexuality towards the end of the book involving convoluted reasons for having the male lead and a subsidiary female character sleep in the same bed (almost buff) and shower together. Gibson’s treatment of this is shockingly puerile to say the least – what I was keen to pass off as a masterly representation of teenage sexuality in Idoru seems completely out of place here.

                Aside from this, the plot features elements like secret-brands, marketing balloons and the idea of having temporary complete knowledge of the market. The former idea, secret-brands, is an interesting one, and I found myself thinking it would be an interesting idea if it was true. However, what possible commentary on commercialism does this offer to the reader? Gibson could have dealt with hypocrisy and desire in sellers and consumers any number of times in the novel – he doesn’t. He talks merely of the mistreatment of models in the fashion industry (as motivation for a few characters starting their secret brands), but this seems to imply that the secret-brand business structure is a return to un-corrupted commercial values, and this is simply not true. Sure, the Art Industry works on the idea of the uniqueness of its product – but fashion is not the same, Art works because it can be purchased as an investment with the potential to last centuries if well preserved (and should overall, only increase in value as it gets more scarce/art gets more in demand), fashion products don’t work in this way, they have a very limited lifespan that is simply part of their nature. Maybe I’m being an idiot here and there are such things as Secret Brands – in which case, I’d like to know how they work financially and at what point they cease to be allowed the adjective (and is the latter the aim). Marketing balloons and knowledge of the market kind of link together here: the point seems to be simply that marketing has become absurd, to the point where it wouldn’t be entirely strange to have a strange floating penguin going through the streets, or was the point that it was so strange as to become invisible, like Gibson’s ugly T-Shirt that cannot be picked up by CCTV.

                Ok, perhaps I’ll admit that there are some very nice ideas here, and it seems that the majority of the characters in the novel are repeats from an earlier book in the same trilogy – no problem – but it seems that these ideas don’t seem to quite gel together right. Also, the ending, with its fairly high-octaneity seems a little sudden. I would have liked to have seen something a little more subtle. Overall, I definitely enjoyed the book – what I disliked was the seeming abandonment of what I perceive to be Sci-Fi’s main aim – to explore the relation between humanity and technology (what it means to be human in the post-technological world). Also, the twitter/iPhone/dongle stuff was rather misapplied – I felt it would have been far more congruous to simply have them stuck into the plot as an element. These technologies have hardly sprung up overnight – sure, if I think back even just a decade, it would be hard to imagine how much they have penetrated society – but these things, mobile-phones-as-computers, web 2.0, dongles (which have been around for ages) represent the culmination of a long process of development which saw more and more applications (Mp3, Video, Touchscreen) being slowly incorporated into phones, the ability to comment online moving slowly from message-boards, to articles, to then whole sites of just commentary, and dongles – well dongles are old, man.

Isolation and Loneliness

Ernest Hemingway – Islands in the Stream

A picture of the sea, chosen for its vastness (implied) - taken from the Arabic Wikipedia page on the sea via. google.

LONELINESS was definitely the most palpable feeling I experienced when reading this novel. Even during passages such as when Thomas Hudson’s children were around, even during passages when he was conversing with other men and women (mostly the latter) - it felt as if Thomas Hudson was completely isolated. I don’t feel like this was actually literally expressed in the text so much as, once again, felt.

            Picking a passage of description at random, from anywhere will yield definitely beautiful prose, and probably will be tinged with this loneliness:

           

Where Thomas Hudson lay on the mattress his head was in the shade cast by the platform at the forward end of the flying bridge where the controls were and Eddy came aft with the tall cold drink made of gin, lime juice, green coconut water, and chipped ice with just enough Angostura bitters to give it a rusty, rose colour, he held the drink in the shadow so the ice would not melt while he looked out over the sea. Ernest Hemingway, Islands in the Stream, Bimini, p.73

Here, the main feature on display seems to be the cold way in which Thomas Hudson relates to his world – the way he perceives it, Id est: the run-on sentence which (takes up the entire extract) only obtains some semblance of order and punctuation when an alcoholic beverage is described. The sea and shade here (which connotes the sky and sun, perhaps) are undeniable symbols of vastness – what are they contrasted with? Necessarily Thomas Hudson, who is, throughout, described with an isolating aloofness that necessitates his full name being written out each time, also Eddy who is here and elsewhere as vague a character as can be achieved. Here, in fact, Eddy is described as essentially being the bearer of the drink, so much as the drink actually takes up half of the sentence. Which is to say, isolation contrasted with alcoholism.

            There is the question as to what the alcoholism of Thomas Hudson is in aid of. Sure, towards the end it is Thomas Hudson’s way of avoiding the reality, or perhaps passing through the reality of, the demise of his children and the departure of the various people he has cared about:

For years he had kept an absolute rule about not drinking in the night and never drinking before he had done his work except on non-working days. But now, as he woke in the night, he felt the simple happiness of breaking training. It was the first return of any purely animal happiness or capacity for happiness that he had experienced since the cable had come. Ibid. p.176

Here, in fact, this is made explicit. However, it does not seem to be a case of “drinking to forget” in the conventional sense. Rather, here, however, we see that Thomas Hudson drinks to satisfy what he describes as an “animal happiness or capacity for happiness”. What is the animal aspect of this emotion? Thomas Hudson seems a man, if his eventual demise at the hands of war is to be considered (along with his apparent capacity for making the difficult decisions concerning war/his crew’s lives would suggest), is a man of discipline and duty – or at least, a larger part of him considers these things to be important on a grander scale than “indulgence”.

            Even in his closing moments, it is the battle which concerns Thomas Hudson first and foremost. While on this subject – and as a change of subject which doesn’t have an end insofar as the novel is just that consistently rich – the ending line of dialogue: “You never understand anybody that loves you” taken out of context could seem like a generic piece of philosophy which invites the reader to perhaps reconsider what it is that makes Thomas Hudson’s life resonate so: certainly it is not the (not quite overbearing) masculinity of the protagonist (50% feminine readership, potentially), certainly it is not the experience of profound loss (which is not, I hope universal). Realistically, it is perhaps a combination of the effortless prose’s simplicity and terse evocativeness – it is the actually universal feeling of having to deal with bad things.  

Unconventional Post-Colonialism

David Malouf – Remembering Babylon

The cover of the Vintage edition of the novel. 

REMEMBERING BABYLON is a short , but intricately written novel which I read in order to assist a student of mine. As an aside: It has been a while since I have gotten down to nuts and bolts of a text, and looked at it with a kind of closeness that only seems to occur at certain levels of education. It strikes me now, that the detail and closeness with which texts are looked at near the end of Higher Education seems to eschew a wider understanding of the text as a whole, and the text in its context – especially when students are told that they are going to be looking at “a selection from the following extracts.” Similarly, in Further Education, students are encouraged to find a theme, and then find their own extracts to support it – at this level, I think students miss some of the subtleties of the text and pass over some important themes.

Remembering Babylon is a somewhat atypical post-colonial novel about a white boy who grew up with aborigines in Australia and his return to white “civilization”, with that word being up for debate. Unfortunately, by and large, I find myself totally uninterested in that theme for the very reason that the text is written to represent a very specific viewpoint, it would seem.

Ordinarily, PC novels will write from a perspective of the colonized/marginalized – and from this angle, the colonizers/marginalizers will be subjected to analysis/scrutiny/criticism. And that’s all very well and good. Malouf himself stated that he couldn’t write from any kind of perspective than his own, and thus the text essentially tells the story of a “blacked-up” white boy. Obviously the words I have used here, highlight the potential offensiveness of this approach – that the position of Gemmy, our protagonist, is a perspective with as much artifice as the ordinary PC approach, and further, that Malouf’s approach would have pretensions of verisimilitude. The other effect of this very strange approach is that the text is not so much simulating or stimulating a dialogue between two cultures, but is rather a single culture criticizing itself.

For me however, I do not feel so much a case of whatever the reverse of White Man’s Burden is. Certainly, as much as it wasn’t The White Man’s Burden to education the savages, it certainly isn’t The White Man’s Burden to atone for the former. The persecution of Aboriginals is something I personally just don’t know anything about – so what is the dialectic operating in the novel for me? Self and Other? The novel is set in the late 19^th Century. The novel is about Scottish people whose dialogue is written in such a way that I have to read phonetically:

“For God’s sake, man, Ah’m no’ gonna hit ye. Ah jist want t’ tell ye again, ye’d better no’ follow the bairns aboot – Ah’ve telt ye a hunner times….” David Malouf, Remembering Babylon, Chapter 3

I’ll grant that it’s not difficult, but it doesn’t particularly inspire identification in this reader. Sure, I have criticized other texts on here for, shall we say, identification problems, but surely Scottish-Australian is a limited enough set of people as it is.

Is it a case of deliberate Alienation? Probably – the point being that we are to feel as alien with our “own people” as Gemmy feels amongst both the Whites and Blacks. Which, once again raises the problem of whether we are in fact (A) a party of said people [Identification) and (B) responsible for said actions [Burden].

As a final note, I’d like to add that the novel certainly wasn’t bad by any means. Racial “Politics” is not something I have a particular or vested interest in. It was certainly well written with some really beautiful metaphorically dense descriptive passages, which were both subtle and articulate. 

Black and White Stones

Yasunari Kawabata – The Master of Go

A photo of the author in 1938, Yasunari Kawabata, aged 39.

THERE is something strangely compelling about this text, despite the dryness of the subject matter (in my opinion). Go is certainly an interesting looking game and before starting on this novella, I made sure to familiarise myself with the rules. It’s one of those games of infinite complexity, where the number of permutations in a given game must be almost numberless. The game looks, to me, as interesting as chess – for instance – but I had my doubts before reading as to whether or not the efforts I had gone through to make sense of the text before reading it would prove fruitful. Certainly, it still seems to me a lot to go through for a text that is finished in less than 140 pages – diagrams and all. Furthermore, the novella, I’ve read, is adapted from a series of actual journalistic articles which Kawabata (his family name seems to be appended to the rear in this particular convention) published for quite major Japanese newspaper. To me, these points had counted against the text before I’d even started.

                I determined that the novel could thus only be estimated in two capacities: how engaging the historical background of the text was, and how effective the style of the prose was. In the former, the eponymous Master and his opponent spent something like six months playing their game. While this was partially down to ill health, there is something quite wonderful about the idea of two intellectuals entirely focussing themselves on something for this length of time. This actually ties neatly to the style of the writing itself. By this point in his career, Kawabata had decided to only write elegiac texts – texts of mourning and sorrow. While the novella deals with the death of the Master, really it deals with a theme which the other Japanese writer with whom I am familiar, Yukio Mishima (actually part of his social milieu), namely the decay of Japanese culture.

                The Master’s deliberate, yet steady pace and thoughtful focus (perhaps obsessiveness) haven’t escaped Kawabata’s notice as very Japanese traits. Thus, the play at 130 with which the Master secures his own defeat marks the downfall of traditional Japanese values and the rise of the New Japanese style. In this way when the Master says “Suppose we finish today” in Chapter 40, the journalist-author-protagonist tells us:  

The faithful battle reporter, I felt a tightening in my chest at the thought that after more than half a year the match was to finish today. And the Master’s defeat was clear to everyone.             It was also in the morning, at a time when Otaké was away from the board, that the Master turner to us and smiled pleasantly. ‘It’s all over. Nothing more to be done.’ The Master of Go, 40

The sorrow that we are moved to feel here is really intensified by its seeming inevitability. The reader also knows at this point that the Master’s loss was what essentially caused his death – giving the term Last Game a rather more morbid meaning, perhaps. One of the more subtle effects of the text here, is that there are a lot of layers of meaning at work here – different tensions played out with the two players and their “styles” – that the reader really determines which of the meanings is the most important one by his or her own perspective. For instance, for me, I feel that the idea of Go as a game really limits its importance. However, apparently the text is commonly recommended for younger players to pick up and read, just to demonstrate the importance of the game in the culture of Japan. Looking at it in this way, it is difficult to determine what the text is actually about.

                Looking at post-WWII Japanese fiction, particularly from an author who was affected by the war (he lost his family in Hiroshima actually), it is tempting to portray these new and old cultural modes as having differing values and then assigning them to East-West mentalities respectively. Certainly, the text is more complex than this. At one point the protagonist plays a good number of matches against an American on a train journey. He is depicted as being friendly and eager to play, but seemingly uncaring about whether he wins or loses. Is whether or not the haste and waste with which he plays is reflected at all in Otaké’s style, or indeed, the Master’s style as he slowly loses power? Certainly the American’s attitude is neither representative of the younger player’s attitude, which still seems very situated in Japanese values, yet it lacks still the scientific rigour of the new-style rules with which the Master has such difficulty attending to.

Hot Air Balloons, Cowboys, and Anarchists

Thomas Pynchon – Against the Day

An edited (obviously) version of a fake photo of St. Mark’s Campanile collapsing in 1902. 

ABSOLUTELY fantastic is the first thing I have to say about this book. As I was nearing the conclusion of the novel I realised that this is probably one of longest novels I’ve read – certainly it’s shorter than some of the Chinese classics – but unlike Gravity’s Rainbow, I didn’t find the narrative got bogged down at all, despite the ridiculousness that went on at various points. Perhaps Against the Day was more accessible than Gravity’s Rainbow, the language was easier to follow and the plot less fragmented and less interwoven with paranoia.

                The novel certainly made use of “Pynchonland” a lot more than the other novels I have read – there was free use of alternative/discredited scientific theories to make sense of the world, ghosts and tarot appear within the world without anybody kicking up a fuss, unreal locations like Shambala and the inside of the world’s crust (Hollow Earth). Of these things the Quaternion theory and the tarot cards stand out strongest. Lew, a gumshoe who works in various places in Europe and America, is introduced to a way of reading the tarot whereby the cards are arranged to present a picture of his life, with the various Major Arcana, each representing a separate real person in the text.

“Admittedly, ours is an odd sort of work… There is but one ‘case’ which preoccupies us. Its ‘suspects’ are exactly twenty-two in number. These are precisely the cadre of operatives who, working in secret, cause – or at least allow – History upon this island to happen, and they correspond to the twenty-two Major Arcana of the Tarot deck.” Going on to explain, as he had times past counting, that the twenty-two cards of the Major Arcana might be regarded as living agencies, positions to be filled with real people, down the generations, each attending to his own personally tailored portfolio of mischief cheap or trivial, as the grim determinants appeared, assassinations, plagues, failures of fashion sense, losses of love, as, one by one, flesh-eating sheep sailed over the fence between dreams and the day. “There must always be a Tower. There must always be a High Priestess, Temperance, Fortune, and so forth. Now and then, when vacancies occur, owing to death or other misadventure, new occupants will emerge, obliging us to locate and track them, and learn their histories as well. That they inhabit, without exception, a silence as daunting as their near invisibility only intensifies our challenge.” Against the Day, Part 2 “Iceland Spar”

This, the triangular layout they are arranged in seems similar to the Tetractys that the T.W.I.T. members worship (aside from the twelve extra points, with the Arcana that appears at the apex of the triangle being the ultimate obstacle,  seems suggestive of some slightly hidden structural rule. The 5 parts that the text is split into has been suggested to be linked to the five terms of the Quaternion theory too. Looking at these three ideas, the Tetractys, Tarot and Quaternions, it would seem that they are each incompatible. However, it is implied that Vectors, which is the major competitor to Quaternions in the text, and perhaps a more linear way of charting movement (as I understand it), would suggest that compatibility can be found.

                With the Major Arcana, one would be tempted to count the number of characters in the novel, however, with the idea that some characters are “doubled”, Renfew being the counterpart of Werfner, the Chums of Chance on the Inconvenience being the opposite numbers of their Russian counterparts, Lewis having possibly been doubled at some point (as well as the Earth itself at one point), as well as the idea that perhaps certain characters do not occupy a Tarot card, this becomes a pointless and impossible task. With the Tetractys, it would be possible to either reduce the numbers on this shape to fit the Arcana, or perhaps, adding other dimensions to the shape to make this work -  however, once again, without knowing the what fors and whys of this task, it also becomes difficult and impossible. The easiest fit, is of course the five terms of the Quaternion theory fitting with the five sections of the text.

                I feel I should posit a final theory here, without actually working anything out, or just make a suggestion. The 22 Arcana could correspond to different characters in different sections, or different characters in the different arcs of the story, or could correspond to different characters depending on who the text is focussed on. The way the Arcana are arranged does suggest an expanded Tetractys anyway, and the Quaternion theory could relate to both the sections of the texts and be expanded to four dimensions to correspond to the various parts of the text with -1, the last part, thus having no Arcana.

                What we have here is nonsense. Nonsense that reduces to -1 essentially. This, as a final note, corresponds to a major theme of Gravity’s Rainbow, which is getting beyond the zero. It also corresponds to a major Pynchonian theme, which is that nothing is reducible to anything but nonsense and secret schemes with are unfathomable.

Drugs, Tennis, and Wheelchairs

David Foster Wallace – Infinite Jest

A poster supposedly inspired by Infinite Jest by Cody Hoyt. The novel is definitely not that much of a mindfuck (a term I consider derogatory and indicative of puerility) 

FOR a long time I have been hearing nothing but high praise for Infinite Jest. It’s supposedly one of the major masterworks of post-modern fiction. By reputation, it’s a leviathan of a novel, has ridiculous footnotes and is a huge drug-fuelled mindfuck. How much of that is actually true though? The book took me a good three weeks to get through and was certainly absurd in places, but I didn’t find it a difficult read, or as absurd as it was made out to be. One of the design features of the novel is its “cyclicality”, that word being in quotation marks because I’m not sure how to approach it in that regard. In a television interview with Charlie Rose in 1997 – a little after the book was published, Rose and Wallace seem to agree on the fact that the novel was meant to be read through several times and that Wallace had designed it with that in mind.

                The ending in particular, as well as the details of what happens after the novel end (found near the beginning of the novel) are the things that remain persistently on my mind having left the book now for a little over a month. I could easily just wax lyrical about the quality of the novel, which, frankly, was superlative in almost every way – absolutely a joy to read, and I most certainly will read it again at some point. However, I am going to talk about the ending here for the most part, so, unlike in my other posts, I will warn potential readers that they might stop reading this post here if they don’t want to spoil it for themselves.

The last rotating sight was the chinks coming back through hthe door, holding big shiny squares of the room. As the floor wafted up and C’s grip finally gave, the last thing Gately saw was an Oriental bearing down with the held square and he looked into the square and saw clearly a reflection of his own big square pale head with its eyes closing as the floor finally pounced. And when he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out. Infinite Jest, “20 November   Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment Immediately pre-fundraiser-exhibition-fete Gaudeamus Igitur”

The last scenes of the novel are mostly comprised of Gately in a hospital bed, reflecting on the last days of his pre-on-the-wagon days, the above words, the very end of the novel, are from that reflection or dream. There is a lot to look at in this section – the symbolic reflection within the reflection, which obviously links back to the cyclic nature of the text, there’s the differences in the way that Gately refers to the characters in the last scene and how that bears on his attitudes to them, whether this is a sign of his distancing himself from this dream sequence. The most interesting part of this for me though is its very nature – all I, as the reader, wanted at this point was for some resolution to the story, not because it was going on a bit, but because I wanted to see how the characters turned out. The subtitle to the date – unusually followed up with information on the specific time of day gives a sense of penultimacy. The fact that this section is pre- the fundraiser raises the readers expectations that there will be a conclusion at a later point, while the Latin “Let us rejoice” perhaps leads us to hope for a culmination. However, all we get here, and all we have been facing for a while in the text is a Gately struggling in his hospital bed and the ghost of the protagonist’s father seeming to desperately urge the two story arcs to join together. This is where the theme of the figurant seems to come into play, we get a sense that Hal’s struggle with drugs and addiction could be helped greatly by Gately’s experience and even solve the problem of the Infinite Jest tape itself. However, our helplessly mangled protagonist is unable to get out of the bed or even get into present tense. I even got the hint, due to the way that he drifts in and out of his dream/reality that the main body of the text could easily be contained within a hallucination, dream or vision from Gately’s drug days than it could the other way.

Either way, the reader is not given a satisfying conclusion to the story. There are details within the first thirty pages of the novel as to what happens to Hal and Gately, that Hal resolves his drug-problem and acquires a new one, perhaps worse, with his ability to communicate, and that the two of them dig up Hal’s father’s head and perhaps find the tape. However, there is an enormous lacuna here and the reader is left desperately struggling to find resolutions that simply don’t exist. This is where the infinite part of Infinite Jest comes in to play however, the reader is then left to read and reread the text over and over until he shares a similar fate to the viewers of the tape – I just realised I meant cartridge all along here.

In the same interview quoted above Wallace said two things of pertinence to this. The first was that he wanted to make the novel enjoyable enough that a reader would want to reread it, the other is that he thought that Post-Modernism as a movement was finished by the time Infinite Jest was published. However, if we look at techniques of similar longer Post-Modern works, we can see a similarly employed device. Consider in Gravity’s Rainbow some of the minor characters that get introduced near the opening of the novel and then are revisited later in the text as they become pertinent to the story again – in fact this is a very Pynchonian device. In Infinite Jest, and I should say I’m probably the millionth reader to compare the two texts (is that good or bad?), the reader is introduced to the various inmates of Ennet House through little vignettes as the novel progresses, with some characters not coming into the story until much later. This fragmentation differs in Pynchon in that it is entirely within the bounds of the plot’s chronology, whereas in Wallace the fragmentation is far more artificial, it breaks from the chronology of the plot. For me, that would make the latter the most fragmented. The lack of resolution, the inability for things to come together, would seem to be one of the key features of post-modernism as far as I’m concerned. The question raised is how much in the text is fragmented to the point where it can’t be repaired, and how much is expected of the reader to repair it? There are elements of absurdism and surreality in Pynchon that simply cannot be resolved: crawling down toilets after harmonicas, landing on counter-earths, human-bone cigarettes, buildings shaped like golden-fangs erected in a single day. These things are as much designed to break the reader’s suspense of disbelief as they are to fragment the reader’s conception of the text’s reality, to make it less solid, workable or believable even within the realms of its own laws. However, while surreal things do occur in Infinite Jest, they seem to fit with the internal logic of the novel, and the reader is perfectly able to assume and theorise the whys and hows that the text leaves out.