authors under the influence

[Daniel Julius]

Joseph, yer dead-on in yr account of his characters' interiority.  He has
said in interviews -- like this _Believer_ one from a couple years ago;
here's a partial transcript that someone nicely posted on Wallace-l: <*
http://www.believermag.com/issues/200311/?read=interview_wallace*> -- that
one of the central roles of the author, for him, is to try to bridge the gap
between disparate psyches.  That the human condition of subjectivity makes
one so caught within their own perception, and thus often so lonely, that
the primary goal of his writing is to give the reader access to another
person's feelings/senses/thoughts/etc.  In the moral sense, I'd guess you'd
call this empathy, but just literarily, I think I'd call it incredibly rich
characterization.  So yeah, he intentionally dwells on interiors, yer right;
whether that's a detriment or not I guess is just the reader's particular
taste.



I have a feeling, though, that you'll find a pretty different inner-world in
_Infinite Jest_.  _Oblivion_ is the most recent of his fiction (I'm sure you
already know), and so there's a more distilled type of isolated
characterization there, like, a more intense version.  Though _Jest_ has
probably the best images of what you're talking about -- a man in a hospital
rendered totally incapable of communicating because of an incubator tube
down his throat, an adolescent trapped within his body because of some
(debatable) form of chemical ingestion -- these scenes are the novel's
bookends, and the big center has a much more wide-ranging scope.  And there
is much trading of fluid.



I think the Pynchon connection is apt, you know, only to a point, but I
still can't understand the animosity I feel that Pynchonites seem to have
towards DFW.  I used to think it was b/c he was written up as some young
gun, an inheritor to the P-throne, but recent posts on this list have
changed my mind.  Someone (help me out) brought up the poetry in Pynch, and
I think that that is an incredibly good observation that doesn't get
mentioned enough, and DFW really does have a more kind of tossed-of,
improvised feel in comparison to Pynch's incredible layered density and
careful description.



OK, this is too long.  Is DFW really hated?



--

Dan
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