So I am just past the third week’s milestone in my first reading of Infinite Jest and I have Pynchon on my mind. If you haven’t read that far, don’t worry. I won’t put any spoilers here. This post is more about my reading method than anything in the text.

I got through my first significant chunk of Infinite Jest on a flight to Australia. I was seated on the aisle next to a Russian woman and her twelve-year-old son who was continuously airsick. Sleep was not much of an option for me as the woman got up to dispose of the neatly packaged vomit and stock up on fresh airsick bags about every hour and I had to get up to let her out. The flight was packed. There was nowhere to go.

Headphones in to block the sound of retching, reading light on the Kindle, I dove in. In fact, I couldn’t put it down. I can’t wait for my return flight for another long reading session, but I do hope to have less effluent seat-mates next flight. It is certainly a book that favors dedicated reading time.

As I was reading, I kept thinking of Pynchon, specifically of Gravity’s Rainbow, his “unreadable, turgid, overwritten and obscene” novel from 1973. Surely DFW was influenced by this work, but was I falling into a mode of literary post hoc, ergo propter hoc? After all, it is like Pynchon on one level, but it is hard to explain. On the other hand, it is definitely different. Similar, like the fact that there are numerous characters just dropped into the narrative without transition or immediate relevance. There is the scatological humor. There are the various episodes that only start to show connections as the readers presses on. It just feels a lot like reading Pynchon, but different…

So after arriving in Australia and collapsing into 40,000 winks (equivalent to 12-13 hours of comatose sleep), I decided to do a little research on the connection. It turns out that the comparison was a bit of a sore subject for DFW. The block below is from a February, 1997 Interview with the Minnesota Daily.

So now we see Pynchon scrambling to keep up with the techniques that television stole from him. Pynchon’s another one whom I regard as really kind of old-fashioned. I like early Pynchon. I like The Crying of Lot 49. I like Gravity’s Rainbow. But the Pynchon of Slow Learner and Vineland, which I didn’t like very much, seems to be making the same tired jokes — ‘look how shallow and superficial the culture is.’ All right — I’ve been told — TV itself now tells that to me. It just seems like more of the same. I’m not as big a Pynchon fan as some other people are. The word Pynchon is on every one of you’re book covers as a comparison. Does this drive you crazy? Pynchon was important to me when I was in college. The first book that I wrote, Broom of the System, some reviewer for the New York Times said it was a rip-off of The Crying of Lot 49, like that I hadn’t read yet. So I got all pissed, and then I went and read The Crying of Lot 49, and it was absolutely, incredibly good. I think a certain amount of this is marketing, and, you know, the fastest way to tell what something is like is to compare it to something else. And having read Gaddis and having read Pynchon and DeLillo and Coover and McElroy and Sorrentino, I can see that the kind of stuff that I do or like that Bill Vollmann does or that Richard Powers does is certainly more like that than it’s like, you know, Irwin Shaw or John Updike. Writers are bad to ask about this though, because we’re all egomaniacs, and we all want to be utterly unique and, you know, not like anybody else, and so there’s a certain amount of bristling about it, but after a while there’s just no way to help it. Gravity’s Rainbow is a great book, but for the most part Pynchon kind of annoys me, and I think his approach to a certain amount of stuff is kind of shallow, to be honest with you. So I get uncomfortable about that, and when people ask it over and over again I get the sense that they’re saying they think I’m ripping him off or just rehashing stuff he’s done, in which case I get pissed, but if that’s how they’re seeing it, it means I’ve failed. I mean if my stuff’s coming off derivative of somebody else, it means there’s something that I’m doing that isn’t right. But I find myself doing it all the time. I’ll see a movie, and I’ll really like it, and I’ll recommend it to friends, and I’ll say, well, it’s sort of like this combined with this. I mean it’s such a convenient shorthand. And nobody likes to have it done to them. You don’t want to have a friend say to you, ‘You’re just exactly like this other guy we know.’ You say, ‘No, I’m not. I’m me.’ But we do it to each other all the time.

And this one is from a 1997 Interview with Zachary Chouteau of American Booksellers Association.

BTW: You’ve been compared to Swift, Pynchon, and Barth. Who do you think your writing might compare to? DFW: That’s a tough question. The Pynchon thing really annoys me. I haven’t read him for so long. I get tired of it, pissed off by it. BTW: What writers have influenced you? DFW: There’ve been so many different ones during different stages of my life. In college, Donald Bartheleme had a big impact on me. More recently Cormac McCarthy — who did “All the Pretty Horses” (Vintage) — has sent shivers up and down my spine. Manuel Puig is another writer that I really admire. William Gaddis, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Wolfe…

Notice the lack of Pynchon in that final list.

So what do we make of all this? It is dangerous to take an author’s words as gospel. DFW even says all authors are egomaniacs. But he also validates the comparison as a way of talking about his work, using Pynchon as a cultural reference instead of an analog. They really aren’t that much alike, but they are different from a lot of other writing in similar ways, if that makes any sense. It is like saying “the experience of reading DFW is a bit like the experience of reading Pynchon, even though their works are completely different.”

That last point is where the comparison becomes important. It makes no difference whether DFW was influenced by Pynchon or not. A definitive answer would not provide some key to the meaning of the work. But I do think that readers of Pynchon (or Barthelme, or Coover, or Doctorow, etc.) will have an easier time with this work because we have learned to read a certain way that is conducive to tackling works like Infinite Jest.

So what lessons can readers of Pynchon bring to reading Infinite Jest for the first time? (remember, I haven’t finished the novel. This can all turn out to be bunk, but it seems to be working.)

• Don’t sweat the characters: Gravity’s Rainbow has over 400 characters and they are introduced in what seems to be unrelated narratives. It will all come together as you keep reading. All the necessary information is revealed; just be patient. You will figure out how they are all related and who are the major vs. minor characters as the narrative progresses.
• Don’t sweat the seemingly unrelated narratives: See above. It will all come together and discovering the connections is a big part of the fun. Just read it.
• Remember, it’s funny: You just can’t take everything seriously. The complicated stuff is really meant to be absurd. Call it mimesis. Life is absurd. Look for puns.
• Don’t go deep: The text won’t let you. The work resists meta-narratives, keeping you engaged with the construction and evolution of the actual narrative. If you are asking yourself “what does it mean?” make sure you mean “what does it mean to the narrative?” not “what kind of great philosophical point am I missing here?”

That’s enough insight for tonight. I need to take my Kindle down to the bar and get some of that wonderful (and cheap!) Australian Shiraz.

tags: Books | david foster wallace | fiction | infinite jest | Infinite Summer | reading