u/Puzzled_Thing_6602

sorry for basic dfw-posting, but i just finished a re-read of the pale king. fair to say that some of the best stuff he's ever written is in tpk, and it can be read as such a culmination of—and play on—themes and style. but then, it also pushes form in such crazy, unexpected, thrilling ways; i always think about what he would've cut out, what he wouldn't have wanted us to read. it's imperfect, but also a masterpiece. it's very...free, in a lot of ways.

"something to do with paying attention" is obv a high point. but the final few sections (i'm thinking specifically of toni ware's final scene at the quik-e-mart and then dewitt's hallucinogenic questioning about the picnic iced tea) to have some of the wackiest, most poetic of dfw's prose. just fabulous.

what are your favorite subsections?

i just finished re-reading the final chapter of Mimesis, which concerns woolf's To the Lighthouse but also auerbach's thoughts on modernist works generally, and their unique reality-depicting possibilities (mostly woolf, proust + joyce - and mann + flaubert as precursers). some of these excerpts are so beautiful, and so astute about the specificities of modernist technique (especially as related to the conditions under which auerbach wrote the text), i had to share. long quotes incoming...

>Similarly we are not taken into Virginia Woolf’s confidence and allowed to share her knowledge of Mrs. Ramsay’s character; we are given her character as it is reflected in and as it affects various figures in the novel…In our passage this goes so far that there actually seems to be no viewpoint at all outside the novel from which the people and events within it are observed, any more than there seems to be an objective reality apart from what is in the consciousness of the characters. Remnants of such a reality survive at best in brief references to the exterior frame of the action…

>The ideas arising in consciousness are not tied to the present of the exterior occurrence which releases them. Virginia Woolf’s peculiar technique, as exemplified in our text, consists in the fact that the exterior objective reality of the monetary present which the author directly reports and which appears as established fact…is nothing but an occasion (although perhaps not an accidental one). The stress is placed entirely on what the occasion releases, things which are not seen directly but by reflection, which are not tied to the present of the framing occurrence which releases them.

>This shift of emphasis [to incidental, allusive, or anticipatory narrative stakes instead of long chronological sequences of exterior ‘important’ events] expresses something that we might call a transfer of confidence: the great exterior turning points and blows of fate are granted less importance; they are credited with less power of yielding decisive information concerning the subject; on the other hand there is confidence that in any random fragment plucked from the course of a life at any time the totality of its fate is contained and can be portrayed.

>But to return to the modern writers who prefer the exploitation of random everyday events, contained within a few hours and days, to the complete and chronological representation of a total exterior continuum—they too (more or less consciously) are guided by the consideration that it is a hopeless venture to try to be really complete within the total exterior continuum and yet to make what is essential stand out. Then too they hesitate to impose upon life, which is their subject, an order which it does not possess in itself. He who represents the course of a human life, or a sequence of events extending over a prolonged period of time, and represents it from beginning to end, must prune and isolate arbitrarily.

>Life has always long since begun, and it is always still going on. And the people whose story the author is telling experience much more than he can ever hope to tell. But the things that happen to a few individuals in the course of a few minutes, hours, or possibly even days—these one can hope to report with reasonable completeness. And here, furthermore, one comes upon the order and the interpretation of life which arise from life itself: that is, those which grow up in the individuals themselves, which are to be discerned in their thoughts, their consciousness, and in a more concealed form in their words and actions. For there is always going on within us a process of formulation and interpretation whose subject matter is our own self...We are constantly endeavoring to give meaning and order to our lives in the past, the present, and the future, to our surroundings, the world in which we live; with the result that our lives appear in our own conception as total entities—which to be sure are always changing, more or less radically, more or less rapidly, depending on the extent to which we are obliged, inclined, and able to assimilate the onrush of new experience. These are the forms of order and interpretation which the modern writers here under discussion attempt to grasp in the random moment—not one order and one interpretation, but many, which may either be those of different persons or of the same person at different times; so that overlapping, complementing, and contradiction yield something that we might call a synthesized cosmic view or at least a challenge to the reader’s will to interpretive synthesis.

>At the time of the first World War and after—in a Europe unsure of itself, overflowing with unsettled ideologies and ways of life, and pregnant with disaster—certain writers distinguished by instinct and insight find a method which dissolves reality into multiple and multivalent reflections of consciousness. That this method should have been developed at this time is not hard to understand...There is in all these works a certain atmosphere of universal doom: especially in Ulysses, with its mocking odi-et-amo hodgepodge of the European tradition, with its blatant and painful cynicism, and its uninterpretable symbolism—for even the most painstaking analysis can hardly emerge with anything more than an appreciation of the multiple enmeshment of the motifs but with nothing of the purpose and meaning of the work itself...And most of the other novels which employ multiple reflections of consciousness also leave the reader with an impression of hopelessness. There is often something confusing, something hazy about them, something hostile to the reality which they represent. We not infrequently find a turning away from the practical will to live, or delight in portraying it under its most brutal forms. There is hatred of culture and civilization, brought out by means of the subtlest stylistic devices which culture and civilization have developed, and often a radical and fanatical urge to destroy. Common to almost all of these novels is haziness, vague indefinability of meaning: precisely the kind of uninterpretable symbolism which is also to be encountered in other forms of art of the same period.

>Yet what realistic depth is achieved in every individual occurrence, for example the measuring of the stocking! Aspects of the occurrence come to the fore, and links to other occurrences, which, before this time, had hardly been sensed, which had never been clearly seen and attended to, and yet they are determining factors in our real lives. What takes place here in Virginia Woolf’s novel is precisely what was attempted everywhere in works of this kind (although not everywhere with the same insight and mastery)—that is, to put the emphasis on the random occurrence, to exploit it not in the service of a planned continuity of action but in itself. And in the process something new and elemental appeared: nothing less than the wealth of reality and depth of life in every moment to which we surrender ourselves without prejudice. To be sure, what happens in that moment—be it outer or inner processes—concerns in a very personal way the individuals who live in it, but it also (and for that very reason) concerns the elementary things which men in general have in common. It is precisely the random moment which is comparatively independent of the controversial and unstable orders over which men fight and despair; it passes unaffected by them, as daily life. The more it is exploited, the more the elementary things which our lives have in common come to light. The more numerous, varied, and simple the people are who appear as subjects of such random moments, the more effectively must what they have in common shine forth. In this unprejudiced and exploratory type of representation we cannot but see to what an extent—below the surface conflicts—the differences between men’s ways of life and forms of thought have already lessened. The strata of societies and their different ways of life hav become inextricably mingled.

<3

"ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for Les Miserables on its side blocking his view, but Price who is with Pierce & Pierce and twenty-six doesn't seem to care because he tells the driver he will give him five dollars to turn up the radio, "Be My Baby" on WYNN, and the driver, black, not American, does so."

re-reading this for the first time in about 15 years. propulsive, truly shocking, truly disgusting. so, so funny. masterfully observes its time and place, but (obviously) still feels so timeless. implicates the reader in a way that i think is still unrivaled and so daring. speeds along at a breakneck pace, almost lulls you. then will hit you with some formally weird moment or sleight of hand. i don't really know what people think of this book anymore. i know the shards got a lot of love (rightfully—it's also amazing). bret easton ellis rocks.