Categories
Aesthetics

And So But No

Infinite Jest is a train-wreck of a novel but quite deliberately so. The problem is that it is also a train-wreck of a consciousness-raising gesamtkunstwerk generated as a negative form by the narrative narcolepsy of that novel.

Its attempt at giving the reader an imaginative lifeworld to render beyond the novel, the same as, you know, any other novel, by self-consciously not actually doing that is trivial and grating. It