DFW's: The Brothers Incandenza

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

On Fri, 30 May 1997, Unknown User wrote:

> doesn't seem to have similarly effected others here, tho perhaps many of
> them kicked the habit before it really latched on.

A lot of the others here probably fell into the same trap I nearly did
when I was about, I don't know, 400 or so pages into it; I was expecting
something more like Pynchon, conspiracies on more of a grand scale,
something that captured a bit of that "greater," but what I had in my
hands was a personal novel on a small scale.  Sure, it tapped into that
"greater," but in a way so markedly different from Pynchon that had I not
reworked how I was reading it as I was reading it I would've missed the
"greater" completely.

What that "greater" is is something infinitely more complicated to say, so
I'll leave it at this; when I read my horizons expand, because I'm allowed
to take a passive role in the imaginative efforts of the author, but when
I read something that taps into that "greater," my horizons expand
exponentially because I'm forced to actively participate in that author's
imaginative workings.  I'm not sure if that made much sense . . .  

> addiction and addiction-to-addiction theme(s) of ij remind me of naked
> lunch, which wsb and others testified (literally) to be concerned with
> addiction to control.

Perhaps I'm a bit of a geek, but what I got of NL was the discipline
necessary to piece together a work that'd been deliberately, but randomly,
torn apart.  For that drastically improved reading comprehension I thank
Willy S., but I still don't feel qualified to talk about NL, because I
think I did a piss-poor job of piecing . . . 

Scott Kaufman
skaufm1 at tiger.lsu.edu