/lit/ - Literature

Why is it that when incels write novels they nearly always end up at 1000+ pages?

>>11898392

>>11593171

>>10894024
>tfw my mom has read this novel
She recommended it to me when I was still in high school. I don't think either of us knew at the time that I would one day become a pretentious NEET fuck-up living with his mommy. I suppose I should just embrace it like Ignatius and at least stop cowering in self-hatred, but Lord it is hard... I can't read the book now because it fills me with such shame and embarrassment

This article
https://themillions.com/2018/03/david-foster-wallace-david-lynch-and-the-horror-of-neuroscience.html
argues that DFW's later fiction was characterized by a materialistic despair in the ability of people to truly change and direct themselves and their attention (to "forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race"), to sort of tune their consciousness towards something disciplined and meaningful as he suggests in This is Water, or to ever effectively and totally articulate how they feel. It's a very determinist disappointment in being a human being

The writer describes Oblivion in particular as "neurohorror" in that it concerns itself with the inescapable pain of being conscious and, IMO, having a mostly unchangeable defective personality. At one point DFW actually quotes Cioran, just to give you an insight into his state of mind at the time. Supposedly The Pale King was intended to be the antidote to this pessimism, but we all know how that worked out.

Anyways by saying the soul is not smithy the title seems to me to either express doubt that the conscience of DFW's race, Americans I guess, can be forged, or to say that its forging has to take place somewhere other than the soul, the individual self.

Also I wonder if its a sort of stealth pun, "the uncreated 'conscience' of my race," the narrator of course being totally unconscious in a literal sense of everything happening around him. So conscience not meaning necessarily a moral sense of right and wrong but just awareness in general, though I suppose DFW must have thought the two things to be very similar.

show me a rarer photo of DFW

go on, try