As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’m a freelance legal
videographer by trade, so I travel a lot, see a wide range of people, and have
a lot of down time waiting for witness and attorneys to arrive, breaks to end,
and for time between depositions to pass.
It is in those slots of time that I get the lion’s share of my reading
done, so I carry whatever paperback I am currently reading with me to all
jobs. A book the size of Infinite
Jest is readily noticed by others, so I was not surprised to get a lot of
questions about the book when the conversation lulled. Of course, the main question was “What’s it
about?”
I never found a satisfactory way to answer that seemingly simple
question. For the first 300 pages, I
would simply say that I didn’t know yet.
There was a tennis academy in the Boston area, I would say, three
brothers who appear to be central to the story, an anti-confluential filmmaker
who was the father of the three brothers and also the founder of the academy, a
halfway house just down the hill from the academy that housed a number of
people recovering from various addictions, and it all was set in a
not-too-distant future in which something happened to a whole swath of New
England and Canada that renders that area unlivable, a future in which the US
and Canada and Mexico have merged into one nation but in which a group of Quebec separatists
want to break that connection. When I
was about two-thirds through the book, I would answer that question by saying
that I wasn’t sure, but the book appeared to be about addiction and our desire
to seek pleasure and flee from pain.
While that answer was succinct, it made the book sound humorless and
like the kind of book I would typically steer way clear of. And when I tried to include the detail of the
film that is so entertaining that people will do anything to keep watching it,
the looks of confusion would only multiply.
I have caused many an eye to glaze over trying to explain what is
between the covers of this book and what the story and themes are. What the hell was David Foster Wallace’s
elevator pitch for this tome?!
How do you capture this book with any kind of economy? How do you explain that there are passages that
brought you to tears with laughter because of its absurdity and others that
made you cringe with disgust? How do you
explain that it is fiercely intelligent and referential and simultaneously
colloquial and low-brow? How do you
explain that every sentence is polished to brilliance but that there is nothing
self-congratulatory and stuffy about it?
How do you explain that it is realistic and supernatural and
absurdist all at the same time? How do you explain all the
narrative layers from the author to the narrator to the footnotes and all the voices that
seem to work their way into the novel?
How do you reduce the hundred some characters into only a few and cull
the subplots down to a manageable number?
How do you answer the simple question, “What is it about?”
Knowing that any reduction of the novel is an injustice, I will
attempt to answer that last question now that I have finished the novel and have had time to ponder over it.
The novel is about our need for connection and what substitutes for that
need when we can’t fill it (and we usually can’t fill it). The book is filled to its margins with broken
families and broken people, mothers and fathers and sons and daughters who fail
each other and miss each other in the darkness of their lives. We flee from that pain and that fear into the
arms of something that can make us forget, which, for most of the characters in
the novel, is an addiction of some sort.
The main tool that allows us to connect is conversation, open communication. The last eighty-some pages of the novel
bounce back and forth primarily between Hal’s narration of November 20th
and the events at Gately’s hospital bedside. I
did not expect the novel to end with Gately in the hospital being visited by
Ennet House members, wraiths, and memories.
For Gately, the most terrifying and frustrating part of his hospital
stay was the intubation tube down his throat preventing him from talking or
responding to his visitors. He is in a
state of being present and invisible, a witness but not a participant, a
one-way radio that can only receive signals.
His descent into possible madness (i.e. his visits from Himself and an
astrally projected Lyle) is directly paralleled, both structurally and
narratively, with Hal’s final day in the novel.
We know from the first chapter, that Hal will be entirely cut off from
open communication with people, and we watch the building of that condition
through the last 80 pages of the book.
Hal cannot control his facial expressions, others seeing hilarity on his
face when he feels disturbingly nothing.
It is no coincidence that James Incandenza’s wraith says to Gately that “[a]ny
conversation or interchange is better than none at all, to trust him on this,
that the worst kind of gut-wrenching intergenerational interface is better than
withdrawal or hiddenness on either side.”
The theme is completed by Orin’s final scene of torture within the
tumbler cage, unable to clearly hear or speak to his torturers. The worst fate that any of Wallace’s characters
can meet is a one-sided separation from the world around them, being trapped
behind their own eyes and in their own head.
Leading up to these final scenes of separation, Wallace gives us scene
after scene of characters talking at cross purposes and tale after tale of parents
failing their children, of fathers failing their families, of friends failing their
friends. Once we have our ending and Himself’s
plea to Gately, we can see that all those failed attempts at communication are
at least something; they are horribly executed, but at least there is some exchange that denotes an effort,
and with that effort, hope. It is in the
context of these disastrous relationships and hope that Hal’s fate is all the
more disturbing. When he accidentally
attends the 12-step program for passive aggressive men who need to get in touch
with their inner child, Hal hears Marlon Bain’s complaints and the narrator
says, “Hal finds he rather envies a man who feels he has something to explain
his being fucked up, parents to blame it on.”
Indeed amongst all the painful stories, and even though Hal’s family is
broken in countless ways, Hal is himself seemingly untouched by those
traumas. Knowing from the first chapter
where Hal was destined to go in the story, I was on the lookout for what would
bring about that state while I read.
When Pemulis and Hal plan to take the DMZ, or Madame Psychosis as it is
also called, at the Whataburger tournament in Tuscon, I thought I saw the
climax of the book. Orin and Hal could
be brought together for a climactic scene and the DMZ would irreparably destroy
something in Hal’s brain. Since the DMZ
didn’t really fulfill any plot purpose, I can only imagine that the
misdirection was purposeful.
Surprisingly, nothing is at
the root of Hal’s descent. He does
not suffer a bad drug trip, he does not
experience side effects from the Bob Hope he stopped taking, and his drop comes
on gradually without a physical explanation.
The best explanation we are afforded is from the wraith of his father
who claims to have seen his son slipping away since puberty.
Of course, when Incandenza first showed his worry at the beginning of the novel,we thought that was madness on James Incandenza’s part, not
prescience. And the point I think Wallace
is making with Hal, at least in respect to connection and disconnection, is
that connection is a fight and a struggle under any circumstance, not just
because of something that was done to us in our youth.
Had I time enough to write out all my thoughts and questions about the
book, this post would be ridiculously long and nigh unreadable. Instead, I’ll
just mention a few things that my brain is tangling with as I think
about the novel:
I love the connection
between annular fission and addiction, the cyclical relationship between need
and reward fueling more need and reward.
There are a ton of annular structures in the novel that can be teased
out and uncovered.
I love the
investigation into 12-step programs, the way that we fight and accept the
world and the thin line between trite statement and world-bending, capital-T
Truth.
I love the dystopic world and the
way Wallace uses it to create macro-level parallels of micro-level
relationships, mapping the increasing social scene from individuals to families
to groups to cults and academies to nations to international relations.
I love the way Wallace uses Incandenza’s
films for absurd humor and as a possible guide for reading the novel. In thinking about his father’s films, Hal
observes, “Himself had apparently thought the stilted, wooden quality of nonprofessionals
helped to strip away the pernicious illusion of realism and to remind the
audience that they were in reality watching actors acting and not people
behaving. . . . Himself had no interest in suckering the audience with illusory
realism.” Wallace himself, of course,
never permits his readers to succumb to “the pernicious illusion of realism.” And when the wraith Incandenza discusses his
attempt to do away with figurants in his films, the reader cannot help but think
about all the voices in Infinite Jest and how few characters leave the novel
without having some presence and voice.
The only thing that marred my experience of reading Infinite Jest
is Wallace’s treatment and portrayal of black Bostonians and trans women. Clenette’s blackness is made clear by the
dialect and spelling that Wallace uses, and it feels cheap and out of place to
me. While he has characters misspell and
mispronounce words all the time, they are all pretty singularly voiced, thin
disguises of Wallace’s own voice. His black characters, however, are treated entirely
differently, and it feels to me like they are represented unfairly. I was uncomfortable reading those
scenes. Similarly, Poor Tony’s
crossdressing is played for laughs and bathos, just has Steeply’s change into
Helen seems simply ludicrous and little more than cheap laughs that are at the
expense of people with genuine gender dysphoria. In a novel that seeks to bring all human
beings under the umbrella of the human condition, Wallace undoes his own work
by creating otherness in his portrayal of these minority characters.
Infinite Jest is indeed a thought-provoking masterpiece that is
beautifully written and thrilling in its complexity and richness. While the writing is easy to read, there is
nothing easy about navigating and digesting this major work. It took me four months to make my way through
it, and I don’t regret a single sentence of my experience.
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