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So apparently this book is now popular among normies (namely performative males).
How difficult of a read is it? On a scale of Haruki Murakami to James Joyce, where would you place Infinite Jest?
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>>25056755
It's not difficult on a sentence level, you'll never be confused what's happening at any given moment like you might with Joyce, but it's so long and packed with information that you *might* have trouble with stamina, keeping track of characters and plotlines, and synthesizing everything into something meaningful, but it's the easiest of the meme trilogy by far.
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>>25056755
I got memed into reading it from this board over a decade ago and recently reread it a few months back. Definitely better than Murakami, definitely worse than Joyce. Prescient about entertainment / Zoom video calling, faintly Puritan, sometimes tedious, almost always entertaining, worth the time to read. There's a long passage that's in AAVE lmfao. You have to read the footnotes. Always thought Hal Incandenza was vaguely embarrassing for DFW -- some kind of idealized self-portrait where DFW's halfhearted attempts to deflate his own "image" don't really work because of his incredible narcissism. otoh I love Don Gately, even though DFW leans heavy on the "this guy's a fucking IDIOT" characterization earlier in the book. Some beautiful writing in Infinite Jest too. There's a scene whereone minor character rapes another minor character to death with a broom handleand the part where theguy getting raped to death right before he diesstarts remembering ice skating on the pond with his brother that's shockingly moving, as weird as that is to type out.
>>25056771
is right. Infinite Jest isn't a "hard" book. The Sound and the Fury is hard. The Making of Americans is hard. Ulysses is hard. Infinite Jest is just very long and very detailed.
>>25056782
It's set in a weird future Boston MA. One narrative follows a group of high school tennis prodigies at a private tennis academy, the other narrative follows a halfway house full of recovering addicts, and there's a background MacGuffinesque plot about a movie that's so entertaining it kills you. (Specifically, it's so entertaining that if you see it all you want to do is watch it again and again -- you'll cut off fingers to see it again, shit yourself bc you don't want to go to the bathroom, not eat for a week because can't take eyes of screen, etc.)
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>>25056755
It's definitely harder than 1Q84 but it's definitely easier than Ulysses & FW. The sheer size of the book notwithstanding, it's probably in the middle, though probably slightly closer to Joyce since it's well known that DFW was a fan.
IF is just about information/trivia overload, any retard can get through it, it's just a matter of how long it will take you.
Meanwhile, Ulysses expects you to grasp many Dante/Shakespeare/Tennyson allusions, many Irish history references, the structural parallels to Homer, a decent understanding of several languages (particularly French, Latin and Italian) and of course, most importantly, the several styles, devices and techniques the book employes: catechism, interior monologue, parralax, scholasticism, allegory vs anagoge, dialectics and vignettes, etc.
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>>25056877
>The Sound and the Fury is hard. The Making of Americans is hard. Ulysses is hard.
Agreed.
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Any of you in the IJ is easy crowd want to demonstrate you did more than just finished it? Getting the strong impression you guys are judging difficulty based on how hard it is to finish instead of how hard it is to comprehend.
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>>25057056
Nah, IJ did not even make my top 25 >>25028142. I just feel like proving you guys to be retarded, not that anyone will meet the challenge.
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>>25056892
>Meanwhile, Ulysses expects you to grasp many Dante/Shakespeare/Tennyson allusions, many Irish history references, the structural parallels to Homer, a decent understanding of several languages (particularly French, Latin and Italian) and of course, most importantly, the several styles, devices and techniques the book employes: catechism, interior monologue, parralax, scholasticism, allegory vs anagoge, dialectics and vignettes, etc.
That's probably why Bloom likes the book so much. I think he was bullshitting when claimed that he could read 1k words per hour, but I do believe that he has read through entire library catalogues. A man with that much knowledge and intelligence requires an intellectual challenge
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>>25057098
he claimed he could read 1000 pages per hour, not words.
>>25057070
what exactly are you even looking for?
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>>25057035
Definitely Ulysses, it's a supreme masterpiece. The last 4 chapters are all utterly magnificent. But I also love Faulkner and Stein, mainly her poetry (Stanzas in Meditaiton is my favorite of hers) but Making of Americans is kino once you get adjusted to its repetitive style.
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>>25057174
Were you home schooled?
>>25057624
Gately finally confronted those things from his past which he had been avoiding. What is so difficult about it?
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>>25057629
I mean just structurally it ends in such an odd spot. I guess you might be right about how it ends for that character but it's where it ends that I was talking about. I just quickly reread the first chapter to get a fuller picture of what happened.
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>>25057659
I am feeling expansive so I will go on.
The core structure of IJ is Gately's story, every other character is following the same arc but at a different stage in that arc and is used to more thoroughly explore and develop the part of the arc which they inhabit. This is primarily accomplished through giving the same information about every character, all that changes is their unique context—that common information we get about each character, their past up to their point in the present or more accurately the part of the arc which they inhabit. This is essentially a slight tweak on the old Naturalist structure but made recursive and part of this recursion is that characters are used to directly explore and provide exposition on other character; we see this most in Marathe and Steeply's conversation which primarily serves to develop the ideas of the novel, but they are still characters on the arc.
The first chapter as the last chapter is primarily plot level but is also an explicit example of the structure's recursion, it is a blunt clue towards that structure.
>>25057689
lol. Just start looking at that common information we get for every character and things will start falling into place.
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>>25057728
You did say that, but you buried it in a bunch of limp justifications.
>>25057731
Not being able to take a moment to form your response before replying is not helping your case. Will there be a third response?
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>>25057562
It is. It's not necessarily complex aside for the gimmick of jumping back and forth between the main thing and the notes (get two bookmarks) but it's very dense in information so if you out it down and come back to after reading something else you risk forgetting stuff and find yourself lost
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>>25058104
And? Difficulty is never the point. Funny you brought up pynchon. Would pynchon be difficult if he actually bothered to contextualize all the hundreds of his transitional scenes and wrote something beyond cheap allegories? (is it also surprising that most of his carboard characters engage in zany hijinks which are set to muh theme? It's just a cheapening of the complexities of the real world and a respite no different from the kind genre authors take when they can't probe the real world beyond the landmarks known to them). His actual linguistic level, i.e. his talent with prose, is about the same as DFW.
DFW could have made IJ way harder to read but that accomplishes nothing and makes the book worse considering his project and aesthetic. Ulysses works because it justifies its difficulty; being largely a peek in the cluttered and private and marginalia-heavy mind of 2 dubliners. Ulysses is difficult because it aspires toward versimilitude that coincides with its themes and Joyce's project. It isn't good because it's difficult. Nor is Joyce a better writer for writing a hard book (afterall, FW is shit compared to Ulysses). As Lord Byron said, Hard writing makes for easy reading. You seem like a massive anti-art pleb.
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>>25058123
The OP is specifically asking about its difficulty, you fucking retard. Maybe pay attention to context when people say it's not that difficult compared to other books it frequently gets categorized with.
Idiot.
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>>25058134
You're clearly a tourist and a retarded one at that. Clear /v/ermin behavior from the way you take some sort of contentment from "putting down" something you don't like in whatever form possible. My response was not to the OP, retard. It was a response to your wormbrained idea that anyone could give 2 shits about which book is harder to read.
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>>25058158
nope but believe what you want i don't care
anyone with a pair of eyes can see you came in here dick out and angry about dfw being called 'easy' even though the context was that he's just easier than joyce which is what anon asked about
but instead of just saying whoops and moving on with your life like a normal person you doubled down
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>>25058164
The only one who cares about DFW being easier than Joyce is you, retard. You threw a hissy fit when someone chose not to acknowledge the difficulty question traditionally:
>>Someone's butthurt we don't think his favorite book is as difficult of a read as Joyce.
Sounds like a 15 year old on an old COD server
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>>25058179
>On a scale of Haruki Murakami to James Joyce, where would you place Infinite Jest?
like i said, there's always some bro in these threads who can't admit when he's wrong
i didn't call you butthurt but believe whatever you want. you're going to insist you're right anyway no matter what i say
this thread is a waste of time. i hope anon feels his question got answered - which is that dfw is easier than joyce - before you shat the place up with your intellectual insecurity
good luck to you anon
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Is it popular again? Great. It seemed like for awhile normies hated it because of #metoo. I guess it shows a novel of this quality will always win out.
>>25058123
Absolute truthnukes in both paragraphs, anon.
>orson welles clapping.gif
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should I read infinite jest or gravity's rainbow first
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>>25058123
>And? Difficulty is never the point. Funny you brought up pynchon. Would pynchon be difficult if he actually bothered to contextualize all the hundreds of his transitional scenes and wrote something beyond cheap allegories? (is it also surprising that most of his carboard characters engage in zany hijinks which are set to muh theme? It's just a cheapening of the complexities of the real world and a respite no different from the kind genre authors take when they can't probe the real world beyond the landmarks known to them). His actual linguistic level, i.e. his talent with prose, is about the same as DFW.
I don't think /lit is ready for this conversation.
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>>25058286
Samefagging. Always projection with you faggots.
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>>25057711
alright I'm awake and thinking again. I very much see where you're coming from. Gately's story feels by far the most complete, and honestly I thought the story ended with him dying until I reread the first chapter. My "wut" feeling was more for the total lack of plot resolution, it just sort of ends in the middle of things only vaugly pointing at an eventual climax, but I'm understand now that was the point and the rest can be more or less understand just from implications in the first chapter. It's like a 2000 page story where only the first 1100 were written.
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>>25058062
DFW is ultimately a technician and he had not completely figured out how to resolve that with his goals as a writer when he wrote IJ; he pushes it into the background and almost seems to be fighting his natural inclinations as a writer. He still gives us plenty but the primary mode of IJ is realism, he just extends the realist treatment of character to the narrator, which was no small feat. In TPK he embraces his nature and goes all in on exploiting his formidable technical skills and interestingly reconciles metafiction with his views of literature. Combine that with TPK being unfinished and have chapters ranging from very rough first drafts to finely polished and complete and we get a great deal of insight into his technique and his methods.
TPK does lack the emotional impact of IJ but I think he realized that in pushing away from the indirect methods of postmodernism he ended up doing exactly what he was trying to avoid, people fixated on the emotional content and missed the point in the same way many fixate on the techniques of postmodernism and miss the point. TPK finds a balance, figures out how to structure a novel around the metafiction without making it dependent on the metafiction.
>>25058660
Plot does resolve but plot is not the entertainment, plot is that recursive plot which is built off of Gately and every character is a part of. The whole intrigue line is just an extension of Marathe and Steeply's conversation, commentary on the plot, a way to explore the characters of the primary plot. That secondary plot also resolves but it is difficult to see how it resolves until you understand the primary plot.
One of the things which many miss is that the narrator is a character, a part of the recursive plot built off of Gately, we just interact with him through his job as a narrator instead of his life; the narrator has already "made it" and reduced his life to his job, performance, become the grim machine required to be a narrator at the top of their game. Compare the narrator in an early chapter like Erdeddy to the narrator at the end, stark difference, the insightful and empathetic narrator who understands every aspect of the scene they are narrating and how that information relates to the whole is gone, he struggles to even provide a narration of the literal events as they unfold.
The narrator is unreliable, he is falling apart at the seams and sees no point in any of it, its a paycheck to fund a life not worth living. All that stuff about performance and the show/making it that we get at ETA and Ennet/AA applies just as much to the narrator and everyone else. Easiest way to understand this all is to just strip away everything even remotely fantastical and write it off as the narrator just making shit up to fill in the gaps caused by his ceasing to care, focus on the main plot.
The first chapter is the resolution for the narrator, not Hal. Never forget about the narrator.
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>>25059009
>Plot does resolve but plot is not the entertainment, plot is that recursive plot which is built off of Gately and every character is a part of.
I guess you'll have to explain this to me a little bit more. I get that every main character is in some part of an addiction cycle (sans maybe Mario?) and Gately's is the most complete but I don't see it as the frame that the others are built off of. It seems more like that addiction is just a main theme of the book, not that addiction cycles itself are a plot. I wonder if you're using the word "plot" to mean "themes".
>One of the things which many miss is that the narrator is a character
I feel like this is very questionable, but I sort of see where it's coming from. The narrator changes a lot depending on who they're narrating. Erdedy's chapter early on is that detailed because it's Erdedy's perspective, time is moving slow for him because he's waiting for his pot and he's noticing every little thing around the apartment in slow motion. I don't think I agree that he breaks down in real time, and if anything that's an artifact of Wallace himself growing more tired as the book went further along. I don't see the empathy waning, and I absolutely don't buy that the supernatural stuff is just the narrator getting lazy.
It also doesn't explain Hal's POV switching between 3rd and 1st person once his mental breakdown starts. Hal is the narrator of his own life from the snowstorm morning on.
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>>25059109
For a great many characters we get insight into their family and upbringing and this includes characters who are not addicts and/or whose parents were not addicts, and those people who live lives untouched by addiction are not exactly living great lives. The book spends a great deal of time on this subject, probably more than it does on addiction and we are told over and over not to blame upbringing for addiction, right? Why do these characters fall into addiction, what purpose does it serve in their life? Does that tell us anything about the characters who are not addicts? are they using something else to the same ends? Every character is on the same path as Gately and we get his life story, we can hold every character up to his arc and plot theirs, fill in the gaps and understand them as fully as we understand Gately.
The narrator goes into the same level of detail for Gompert and the Medical Attache and many others in that first part of the book, the narrator has a well developed voice during the first ~third. The narrator's evolution is clear and well defined if you look for it, the use of free indirect speech slowly increases as the book wears on, narrator makes little mistakes which he often corrects after the fact, tries to explain away oddities in the narration, etc. Treat the narrator as a character and apply all that stuff on performance and what it takes to make it in the show or make it out there
Why can't a third person narrator, narrate a character in the first person? Couldn't the narrator simply and literally relaying a characters inner monologue in a predominately 3rd person novel be viewed as a degradation in the narrator?
>Wallace himself growing more tired as the book went further along.
And his accomplished and well respected editor just missed it over the two year editing process? and the book was highly celebrated despite this major flaw? Wallace did not write linearly from page one to the end and IJ went through major reworking from first draft to final product, it was originally 1700 pages with a short simple and linear story, the bulk was in the end notes. It evolved after he started working with his editor on it, bulk of the foot notes were moved into the main story and it was made non-linear. If this was just a result of Wallace running out of steam the degradation would not be linear, the narrator's voice would be a mess.
TPK gives a great deal of insight into Wallace's writing process, anything but linear.
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>>25056762
The nigger chapters are unendurable
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>>25059272
So if you believe this narrator theory, do you basically think the last 1/3 of the whole book just didn't happen?
>Why can't a third person narrator, narrate a character in the first person?
Why would he switch if he is supposed to be a separate character? Seems far more likely that the perspective switch is an indication of Hal's mental state changing, no?
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>>25059532
It has probably been a year since I last made any IJ effort posts. Post occasionally on other books but it is not often I can justify it these days.
>>25059632
>do you basically think the last 1/3 of the whole book just didn't happen?
How do you come to that conclusion? I have no idea how to respond to this, how would the narrator falling back on just relaying internal monologue verbatim, negate the events relayed?
>Why would he switch if he is supposed to be a separate character?
Because he is giving up doing his job? Relaying internal monologue verbatim requires nothing from an omniscient narrator, does not need to be observant or empathetic, just needs to relay the internal monologue.
>Seems far more likely that the perspective switch is an indication of Hal's mental state changing, no?
Why not both? After the Inner Infant meeting, Hal recedes into himself, offers little for the narrator to narrate because he is just laying about and doing nothing, thinking over his life and his father's life, watching his father's films, etc. Gately is not much different, just laying there doing nothing. That makes up 90% of the last third, most everything happening is in the heads of two characters.
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>>25059731
>How do you come to that conclusion? I have no idea how to respond to this, how would the narrator falling back on just relaying internal monologue verbatim, negate the events relayed?
I guess I misinterpreted what you were saying. You basically said he was making stuff up and ignore the supernatural
>Relaying internal monologue verbatim requires nothing from an omniscient narrator, does not need to be observant or empathetic, just needs to relay the internal monologue.
Hmmm, I get what you're saying. But I think the internal monologues simply grow more important for these specific characters as the story goes on. It's selective, not lazy.
>That makes up 90% of the last third, most everything happening is in the heads of two characters.
Which I think supports my narrative, too.
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>>25056755
It's not hard or obtuse, it's just long and makes you consult endnotes, which means you have to keep jumping back and forth, and this slows down the as is non-chronological narrative. It's a perfectly fine, entertaining novel. There's no point in making it a performance, because anyone who has actually read it will know it's not hard and anyone who hasn't has nothing of value to contribute to the conversation.
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>>25059776
I rolled my eyes so hard when I read IJ and got to that part because there was no subtlety to it. When I searched about it everyone on the dfw and ij sub-reddits explained how this theory was true and since I've only read it once I'm not as versed in the book as they were to disprove it.
And I'm not even saying it's wrong. But it's so glaringly obvious I can't help but think DFW had some kind of misdirection in mind. It just seems like in a book with a lot of unanswered questions and pieces you have to put together the whole Avril=Luria seems so out of place. Or maybe he just wanted it to be obvious because it had some deeper thematic function rather than plot.
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It's great to see some actual discussion on literature, but please remember we have tourists from /v/ here who get upset if you discuss anything beyond "it's hard" and "it's not hard" so can we please limit the amount of literature discussion?
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>>25059839
Media literacy tells me that if two characters are described as looking completely different, being in two different places doing two different things constantly, and share nothing in common personality-wise, they're probably not the same character even if they share a home town.
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>>25057132
>Alone, what did Bloom feel?
>The cold of interstellar space, thousands of degrees below freezing point or the absolute zero of Fahrenheit, Centigrade or Réaumur: the incipient intimations of proximate dawn.
And
>BLOOM: (wonderstruck, calls inaudibly) Rudy!
are two of the most beautiful moments I’ve ever read, for different reasons, Circe and Ithaca really are something else.
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>start infinite jest
>second chapter just drones on and on about a degenerate weedhead
is the whole book just "ive tried weed lol"?
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>>25060675
Like 50% of this thread is you sucking yourself off. OP's question has been answered and he's long gone, leaving just you. Since you have never read anything else, it's not like you can just go to another thread.
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>>25059761
I said to strip away the fantastical and focus on the main plot to figure it out, which will include figuring out the fantastical, you won't actually be able to strip it all away because it is more complex than shit the narrator made up; doing this will help you see that. When it comes to postmodernism and its descendants, narrator will often be more nuanced and complex than reliable vs unreliable and be used for more than narration.
I don't think I implied the narrator was being lazy? like Hal, he is having a crisis, dealing with things more important and that has repercussions on performance. It sounds like you might be confusing author and narrator? they are not the same and this is especially true with postmodernist and its descendants. Wallace digs into this in TPK, directly confronts the lines between author, narrator and character and does a great job with it.
Sure, this supports your view, question is that will your view help you understand the novel as more than just vague banalities about addiction being bad? That is all that really matters. Run with it. If you respond more fully to my posts instead of singling out points, things will get more interesting and productive even if you are unsure and have to reach, try and reconcile it with your views. Isolated points offer me no insight or challenge and you can see my interest fading with each post yesterday, I don't need /lit/ to expound my literary views, I come here in hopes of a return and anyone willing to try can offer me that return. I would rather run with and explore your ideas than reiterate my own, far more interesting and my posts are ultimately about trying to get enough out of you so I can do that.
>>25060796
I mostly see people saying they can discuss literature but they never contribute to any discussion I can see.
>>25060804
If you think you can understand what is fundemental and what is contradiction so early on into a 1100 page book, literature is probably not for you.
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>>25060781
I find it ironic too, how it’s the “coldest” episode of the book in a literary sense, what with the catechisms and the underlying melancholic implication that perhaps Bloom and Stephen were never really compatible, if only in the sense of the father/son relationship they were subconsciously searching for, it still has the most evocative and impeccably written passages in the whole book I believe.
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>>25060918
I guess I just don't get what you mean by "main plot", as if it's something different than the plot as it's normally understood. Again, themes and thematic patterning and plot are different things. I don't think I am confusing author and narrator, I'm just not sold on the idea that the narrator is a character itself and not just a way to convey information by the author. Is there any evidence we're supposed to treat the narrator as separate? Especially when we get Hal specifically changing from 3rd to 1st person perspective in which he becomes the narrator? Hal lying around doesn't give the narrator "little to go on", it totally shifts to his narration. And all narration in the book seems to be centralized on one character's perspective even if it's written in 3rd person.
I feel like I already understand it on a level deeper than "addiction bad".
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I'm about 250 pages in, and I know events are presented out of order, but does Hal have a kind of temporary involuntary muteness that comes and goes? The first chapter, which is late in the timeline, seems to indicate this (he has a perfect internal monologue of what he wants to be saying, but no one can hear him), and he has events like when his dad pretends to be a professional conversationalist when he was a kid to get him to talk, but then at the academy he seems to talk fine and even had his own group of younger followers that he teaches. Is this explained? There was a reference to eating a big chunk of mold, but that was presented as having happened as a child, so why does the muteness come and go? Does this get explained?
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>>25060995
The primary plot is the one that structures the novel, provides forward movement and carries theme, this is the generic cookie cutter plot that we see resolved most completely in Gately and every character provides their own instance of. Secondary plot is not really a plot, those three plots that are meant to converge but never develop past setup, their/its contribution to structure, forward movement and theme is superficial and why plotfags see theme as some vague thing about addiction.
Every character provides a complete instance of that generic plot and fully develops theme, considerable more complex than thematic patterning but the stage of the generic plot they inhabit in the novel could be viewed as thematic patterning providing more depth for that stage of the plot. Wallace provides us everything we need to fill in the parts of the plot we don't get for all of the characters; LaMont Chu is most likely going to follow Wayne's path or become a protector combined with all that stuff we get about what life is like for students after ETA for the driven, fill in the holes in LaMont Chu's plot and develops theme in context of LaMont Chu. We can do this for every character, there is often a few paths we can follow for a character but you can just pick one, with 100+ characters we will get plenty of depth but you can explore all possible paths if you want to.
I don't think I said the narrator had little to go on with Hal at the end and if I did there was more context that I provided, I gave an example of the narrator doing well with very little to go on. I gave examples of things which evolve in obviously intentional ways as the novel progresses, all you had to say about them was you thought that was just a sign of Wallace running out of steam as he wrote the novel, which is ridiculous. How am I supposed to respond when you don't address what was said? I have nothing to go on to improve my response, am I supposed to go through the entire novel with you with meticulously detailing this? You got to offer me something, make an attempt to comprehend what I am saying even if you disagree with it so I can see where the failure is.
>>25061681
Probably never, it does not sound very good. From what I was told by someone who spent time in his archives, the main story was pretty much just the parts with Hal and Gately in it, everything else was in the endnotes. The 1700 page draft also has good margins and is double spaced, so final product is possibly longer. He cut ~500 double spaced pages from it but he developed other parts more to make things work with the 500 page cut and new structure. But who knows, it may get released someday.
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>>25062659
I think what he might be getting thrown off with on the plot stuff is that Gately’s plot is not just the events in the story but Gately’s entire life? Not completely sure I agree with you on this but it is a better explanation than any I have seen, something just feels off about it. I will keep it in mind if I ever reread it.
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>>25056755
It's literally midway between the two.
Also it was always popular among performative males, there are memes from 2011 on the topic.
What I really hate about the internet is how every year it gets flooded by new young users who have to re-learn everything from the beginning and are extremely loud and uninformed in all of their opinions. Sometimes I think the young are a completely different tribe, and that their stupidity is engineered for evolution so that they try something different from their predecessors, which is good. On the other hand, it is extremely disheartening as an adult to see someone going through your exact same experiences while failing to listen each and every advice that would set him on a different path.
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>>25063585
I could be wrong but it works across 100+ characters so I think it is safe to say it is not an accident and there was intent, so I think if I am wrong it is in putting it all together, I could be still missing some pieces. You might be right about that anon, but I really have no clue, he just keep saying the same thing and never addresses what I said, makes it difficult to communicate.
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>literally
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>>25066782
Its important that LLMs dont infect the masses with trashy stream of consciousness
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>>25056755
I've never read Murakami, but in comparison to the bit of Joyce I have read (Dubliners/Finnegans Wake/Ulysses mainly, didn't finish any of those) Wallace is much easier imo. The footnotes do help to explain the plot & what's going on, shouldn't be difficult aside from looking up esoteric vocab words. For reference, I finished IJ from end of senior year of hs - first semester of uni.
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>>25069448
Most everyone getting a lit degree will use them or something which serves the same purpose. You are probably a bit on the retard side of the fence if you can't see the utility of such things, functionally literate at best.
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>>25056892Ulysses is not structured around Homer. That’s something Joyce said after completing it and realizing that it has the vague outline of “man goes on a journey while woman back at home stays and attempts to resist temptation.” Ulysses wasn’t actually written as a modern adaptation of Homer. That’s all a big fraud.
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>>25069553
es, Vladimir Nabokov believed that while James Joyce used Homeric parallels, Ulysses was not designed to strictly follow or rely upon The Odyssey. In his lectures on literature at Cornell, Nabokov dismissed the Homeric scheme as "pretentious nonsense" and argued that looking for detailed, sustained, one-to-one parallels between Ulysses and The Odyssey was a waste of time.
Key Aspects of Nabokov's View on Ulysses and Homer:
Rejection of Allegory: Nabokov considered sustained allegory "tedious" and argued that Ulysses should be appreciated on its own merits rather than as a "modern retelling".
"Vague" Parallels: Nabokov acknowledged a "very vague and very general Homeric echo of the theme of wanderings," but argued that the structure of the novel is not dictated by the epic, but rather by the "natural demands of the situation".
Focus on Structure and Details: Instead of the Homeric chapter titles ("Cyclops," "Calypso," etc.), Nabokov instructed his students to focus on the concrete details: the specific, minute-by-minute movements of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus across a map of Dublin.
A "Whim": Nabokov believed the mythological framework was an after-thought. In a 1937 conversation with Joyce, when Nabokov pointed out the use of Homer, Joyce reportedly dismissed it as a "whim" and a "terrible mistake" that acted as an "advertisement for the book".
Nabokov argued that the true brilliance of the book was its "splendid and permanent structure" of "ordinary" life, not the mythological underpinning
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>>25069553
“Man goes on journey while woman stays at home and a suitor tempts her.”
This is the ONLY actual relation between Joyce and Homer and if you believe there is anything beyond this plot outline connecting the two works you area pseud and are wrong
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>>25069721
So you admit there are structural parallels.
>Nabokov argued that the true brilliance of the book was its "splendid and permanent structure" of "ordinary" life, not the mythological underpinning
I agree. I never said or suggested anything to the contrary.
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>>25069541
Have you read it? The allusions to Homer are embedded into everything, take something like in Lestrygonians, Bloom walking into a restaurant and being disgusted by the people chowing down on meat so he gets a cheese sandwich instead, echoes the cannibalistic Lestrygonians attacking Odysseus before he’s able to escape their domain.
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