you reckon? iirc he says he felt a lot of the contemporary pomo stuff (in the 90s) was written for critics to wank over and he found it unfun, maybe he settled on a style to avoid that?
I hate to borrow from a brocialist heartthrob who handwaves pogroms perpetrated against Romani, but Zizek once said something like, "We feel free because we lack the words to convey our lack of freedom." I think that more than any other of the "high" postmodernists, this phrase is acutely applicable to Wallace's work.
The footnoting in Jest, for example, provides a great vehicle to talk about how contemporary society fragments thought and prevents the formation of (I use this only in a metaphorical sense) existential narratives. Instead it just sort of breaks up the narrative and doesn't efficiently perform its aesthetic and philosophical purpose(s).
If a teen came up to me and said, "Citoyen Karakand, I'm on my way home to read Infinite Jest!" I'd look around for unmarked police vans, then put on my best marxoteen face and say, "Just read Society of the Spectacle instead kid, you'll thank me later."
