Category: Books

Infinite Jest: Part One

Matthew Eilar1 Comment

Year of Glad

The familiar panic at being misperceived is rising, and my chest bumps and thuds.

I am not what you see and hear.

There’s an amazing moment in the 1997 Charlie Rose interview that I’ve embedded above (transcript). Rose and David Foster Wallace have been chatting about academia and balancing writing with teaching, and Rose suggests that the reception of Infinite Jest has given Wallace the literary respect that he has been seeking. Wallace is visibly uncomfortable with that suggestion, and after ambivalently disagreeing for a couple of minutes, says “A lot of people hadn’t had time to read the book yet. So the stuff about me or interesting rumors that developed about the book and all that stuff getting attention — I found that — I didn’t like that very much just because I wanted people to write — to read the book. I’m sorry that I’m essentially stuttering.” To which Rose responds, ” No, you’re not. You’re doing just fine.”

That essential fear of communication, of desiring so much to express oneself to another while being paralyzed by the possibility of misunderstanding, is the central dynamic in this first section. The overwhelming horror that the three admissions officers have towards Hal’s personal statements are so over the top that the section becomes a darkly comic piece of absurdity. I think the episode in the interview shows that this “familiar panic at being misperceived” was something familiar to Wallace, and it’s hard for me not to read this section as Wallace’s personal nightmare. It also makes me think of my first times being under the influence of, say, alcohol. Because the self-control of intemperance was something new to me, I was paranoid that, even though the people I was with could hear and understand the words I was saying, nobody was understanding what I wanted to communicate. Social situations, especially new situations, give me some anxiety at being misunderstood, but it’s rare that it approaches the level described by Wallace through the eyes of Hal.

I think this section has some broad social implications as well. In the past couple of years, as internet communication has become more democratized, we’ve seen countless episodes that play out this conflict between communication and misunderstanding in public. Teenagers spreading embarrassing texts and pictures of each other. The ACORN video. Shirley Sherrod. NPR’s Vivian Schiller. Digging up politician’s college theses for provocative statements. And this has given rise to a whole industry trafficking in false communication speaking a false language. Politically incorrect public statements and emotionally neutral non-apologies. David Letterman interviewing Paris Hilton. Press releases apologizing for a star’s transgressions. We have more venues for wide-spread and instantaneous communication than ever before in human history. But with this freedom of communication comes a greater fear of one’s words being taken out of context. This can lead us to withdraw, to stop trying to communicate for fear of misunderstanding. At that moment, our more advanced communication tools actually impede true communication and human connection.

Stray Observations

  • Hal’s narration is clearly stylized and not-naturalistic. His vocabulary is absurdly tortured and his syntax convoluted (though probably grammatically correct). It throws off my perception of the character. Hal’s uncle is unquestionably presented as a buffoon, and yet all of that character’s linguistic tics (“And let me say if I may that Hal’s excited, excited to be invited for the third year running to the Invitational again, to be back here in a community he has real affection for, to visit with your alumni and coaching staff, to have already justified his high seed in this week’s not unstiff competition, to as they say still be in it without the fat woman in the Viking hat having sung, so to speak, but of course most of all to have a chance to meet you gentlemen and have a look at the facilities here.”) are also present, to a lesser degree, in Hal.
  • I’m going to interpret Hal’s annoying use of “de moi” to be a sign of pseudo- something.
  • I’m not sure how to take Hal’s characterization of the Director of Composition as “effeminate.” That word is almost always used as a pejorative, and frequently as code for gay. The effeminate academic cowering and jealous of the independent, masculine writer is a trope from Hemingway to Bukowski to Mailer. It just doesn’t seem to jibe with what I know of DFW.
  • At one point, Hal mentions that he thinks that Dennis Gabor is the Antichrist. Wikipedia tells me that Dennis Gabor was the inventor of hologram technology. This delights me to no end. Of couse Gabor would be the antichrist in a setting in which holographic transmissions are the dominant media form! It’s one of the early example of DFW world-building and differentiating the setting of his book from our own present.
  • Hal makes reference to a retired Venus Williams coming to watch his match the next day. Wikipedia sleuthing tells me that Williams was 16 at the time that Infinite Jest was published. That’s an impressive bit of prophecy on Wallace’s part.

new Vocabulary:

  • Wen: a boil or sebaceous cyst.
  • Kekuléan: refers to Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz, the organic chemist who discovered the chemical structure of benzene. He supposedly came upon this structure after seeing a ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail.
  • Lapidary: a phrase engraved in stone or of suitable for engraving.
  • Presbyopia: farsightedness caused by loss of elasticity in the lens. Usually presents in middle age.
  • Parquet: wooden flooring made by geometrically arranged blocks.
  • Enfilade: a volley of gunfire directed in a straight line, end to end.
  • Espadrille: a light canvas shoe with a plaited fiber sole.
  • Martinet: a strict disciplinarian, especially in military context.
  • Etiology: the cause or set of causes of a disease or condition.

Infinite Jest 2011: Prologue

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Infinite Jest is the first book that I’ve encountered that has its own reading conventions. In the same vein as someone introducing their friend to bringing props to a midnight screening of Rocky Horror, David Foster Wallace’s fans will tell you that if you plan on reading the book in print form, you’ll need two bookmarks (one for the endnotes). You might consider splitting the book in two, but if you do, make sure that you tape in the endnotes. Get post-it notes for quick reference to pages with vital information. For these and other reasons, beginning Infinite Jest seems more like starting a project than reading a book.

I have a tendency to rush to (and through) things. It can be an asset–it helps me to think quickly on my feet, and my ADD-like need for new information means that I learn new things throughout the course of my day–but it’s definitely something that I constantly need to be aware of and try to control. In its more negative incarnations, it means that I have a hard time finishing things, I don’t give myself enough time to fully work out thoughts, and I absorb knowledge and experience in a more superficial way. It’s my goal to really work through Infinite Jest, to take my time, to reflect. There’s a strange futility to writing about a work that so many others have written about–in the same medium, no less–but writing responses to a work as you read it is completely different than responding after finishing. You can’t help but to go down rabbit holes that lead nowhere. It also means that the constant assessment that the reader has of the author, the reader deciding whether and to what degree to trust the author, is done in public. In the interest of making this reading project as complete as possible, I want to talk about what I’m bringing to the table before starting reading.

The David Foster Wallace I know is not a fiction writer, to the extent that I know him at all. That is to say, I haven’t read his fiction, and what I know of him is really a pastiche of four almost unrelated people.

The first David Foster Wallace is not really a person, but a collection of achievements. I know that he was a nationally ranked tennis player while in high school. I know that he was tremendously intelligent. I know that he was one of those mythical people with intuitive knowledge of literature and human experience (he majored in English and had an amazing command of the literary canon) and mathematics and logic. I know that his undergraduate thesis became his first novel and was commercially published. I know that his command of philosophy was such that he contributed book reviews to scholarly publications. Yet this is also the man who covered politics for national publications and wrote a book on rap lyrics at the forefront of academic interest in rap as poetry.

The second David Foster Wallace is a journalist. I haven’t read many of his articles, but his voice as a writer is so distinctive that I immediately understood how this man could amass a cult. His articles are afire with honesty and subjectivity. Reading Wallace’s articles is like stepping into another person’s brain, understanding his experience as one’s own. But his articles are also full of restraint. The classic objection to subjective journalism is that the convention of writing with an objective, impersonal voice is that it allows (or perhaps forces) the writer to include all facts and information, even that which would contradict the narrative being constructed by the writer. It would be too much to say that Wallace refrains from constructing narratives, but his idiosyncratic footnotes and thought processes constantly undermine them. His casual mixture of the highbrow and the lowbrow–making reference to esoteric postmodern philosophy as easily as to television shows–has become the dominant tone of the internet, but there are few who have had such curiosity about popular culture and such comfort in the halls of academia.

The third David Foster Wallace is that encountered in interviews. A tangle of contradictions: laid back, intense, brilliant, unsure. The thing that strikes me about the interviews are the questions that he brings. The frustration that he has with American society and culture resonate deeply with me, and yet he always maintains a curiosity and measured optimism about the direction that the culture will go in. There’s something holy about him. I don’t mean to suggest that he’s somebody to be venerated, but there’s something refreshing about how much he truly cares about the issues that he raises.

This leads directly to the fourth David Foster Wallace, a dead man. Wallace’s suicide changes everything. Because of the questions he was preoccupied with, because of the way that he thought, knowing that his final choice was suicide colors my perception of his work in a way that is completely different than almost any other artist. Zadie Smith, in an essay published after his death (I’ve linked to it on my Infinite Jest page), writes movingly about Wallace’s preoccupation with humanity, why we think the way we do, why we behave the way we do, why we have ordered our lives in the way that we have done. These are his questions. His answer was suicide.

This is what I bring to the table. I’m looking forward to meeting another David Foster Wallace. I’m looking forward to reconciling that person with the others.

Infinite Film Fest

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For today in hyper-specific blogs, Poor Yorick Entertainment, a Tumblr dedicated to graphics inspired by the corporate apocalypse in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, as well as film posters for the imagined filmography of James Incandenza.

Infinite Summer

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It looks like one of my summer projects will be trying to complete last summer’s failed read-through of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. The book represents one of my most personally embarrassing acts of hubris. I had heard that there were bloggers a few summers ago that read through the book in a group. I read that there was a lot of attrition in the group, and like a fool, assumed it was because professional bloggers lacked the mental energy and sustained focus to read the 1000+ page book.

I made it to page 66.

To be fair, that number does not include the copious endnotes that pepper the book. In fact, it was one such section–a catalog of the fictional films of James O. Incandenza, Jr.–that led me to give up. I knew that I wanted to read the book well (ex. reading every word/every page) but it reminded me of the (and here I’m showing that I’m a Reed College student) catalog of ships from The Iliad.

I’m reading the book mostly on my phone, and it struck me how perfect e-reader technology is for Wallace’s fiction. The endnotes become much less annoying when they’re hyperlinked across the document. Wallace’s fairly catholic vocabulary can quickly be decoded with the built in dictionary and Wikipedia functions.

The Hunger Games Trilogy

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1. i am getting old

I’m only 20 years old. That makes me 3 years out of high school, 7 years out of middle school. Although it feels like ages ago…it really wasn’t. And yet I found out about the Hunger Games phenomenon from the A.V. Talk podcast, which is only one or two steps away from finding out about teen culture trends from Newsweek or The New York Times. Their opinion of the book (they were discussing the third in the trilogy, Mockingjay) was that it was grimmer than any other YA series that they had encountered before. I was intrigued, so I picked up the first book.

Aside: I’m really not in a position to know how popular these books are in the middle/high school set, but there must be someone interested, because the Wikipedia page on The Hunger Games universe is absurdly detailed.

2. plot & reading experience

Wikipedia has a perfectly adequate summary of the trilogy’s plot.

What it doesn’t tell you is that the book is super fast paced, even though it doesn’t always avoid the YA sins of simultaneous over- and under-explanation, characters that grasp the situation they are in far later than the reader does, and character interactions that read like stalling for time (Don’t worry. It’s no Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows). It reads like crack. I waited a couple of days after buying the book to start reading it, but from the time that I opened the cover of the first book, I didn’t stop reading until the end of the third book. I don’t live close to a bookstore, so I ended up buying a Kindle edition of the second book rather than waiting a day to get a physical copy or go to the library. Thankfully, my sister owned the third book.

3. the truly unique

Probably the strongest feature of the novel, as well as its most original element, is the character of the protagonist, Katniss. Her character incorporates features common in female (“mother” to younger sibling, knowledge of healing plants, in the position of choosing between two males, deep sense of responsibility and affinity with community) and male (physically dominant, ideologically pure, angered by injustice) YA protagonists, but something about the mixture of them within this character feels…fresh. Katniss’ cynicism (which I’ll talk about later) that develops throughout the trilogy works within a tone that usually falls outside YA literature–I can’t think of another book that has anything like it.

Everything else kind of falls into the category of “things I’ve encountered elsewhere.” The elements certainly haven’t been assembled together like this before, but each one taken separately is like a paraphrase of another work. The prose is workmanlike and otherwise undistinguished. Moments of cynicism feel earned, moments of grief are unconvincing.

4. a brief detour through nerd city

One feature of the book that never ceased being ridiculous is its worldbuilding. Yes, I do understand that it sounds like the most cliché complaint ever (demographics of magic families in Harry Potter? thermodynamics of The Matrix?) but seriously, the worldbuilding in this series is wack. I don’t even need to nitpick; some features of this world are so patently stupid and dysfunctional that I was almost convinced that the book was meant to be allegorical. Some easy examples: Demographics: The book explicitly states that it takes place in the land of the former United States of America, that has been divided into a Capitol state and thirteen Districts (Get it?! How about now?!). District 12, where our protagonist is from, is supposed to be in the former Virginias, yet the entire population of the area fits in a single town square (I think the figure 8,000 for the district is thrown out, yet I can’t be sure) and lives close enough by to get there easily for a district meeting. Other districts are mentioned as being bigger, however even if you allowed for districts many orders of magnitude bigger than District 12, that would put a population the size of Connecticut throughout the entirety of North America. Politics: The government within the world is so lazily sketched out that it’s almost not worth mentioning, but it seems to be at different times dictatorship, constitutional democracy, and China-style central committee controlled. It doesn’t make sense in any plane of reality close to ours. Economics: the entirety of the Virginias only produce food for their district and coal. All of California produces food for their district, fish and seafood. It’s stupid.

But surely this doesn’t matter, right? I’ve already said that the writing was like crack, and none of these details affect the main plotline. Well, yes, except that the central character motivation that drives the plot is that this is a completely evil system that must be destroyed. And it’s hard to take that motivation seriously when it’s obvious that the system would destroy itself in about two weeks.

5. but what does it mean?

One thing that I found myself asking as I read these books was what does it mean that such a dark, cynical dystopia appeals to such a mass audience of teens. Some teen tropes–like the love triangle that this series has in common with the Twilight series–are fairly easy to understand. But if this series is escapism, I’m not clear on what its readers are escaping from, or to.

I can understand the desire for your life and decisions to have greater meaning. I think that’s probably why I enjoyed so many books where children are put into life and death situations when I was younger, from Gary Paulson’s Hatchet to Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. And that element is certainly present in the Hunger Games book; Katniss is fighting not only for her sister, not only for her community, but for the whole of the society.  I don’t know what it means that the society that Katniss lives in is cartoonishly evil (at one point it’s established that the evil President Snow’s breath smells like blood). There are some superficial attempts at contemporary social satire, from its character’s beliefs about class dynamics to it’s presentation of an obsessive media culture.

Are young readers resonating with the depiction of rebellion against the social order? Do they believe that our society is that diseased, that unbalanced? Is it simply a desire for a simpler, more good-and-evil world to live in, to escape the unsatisfactory choices that most of us make in a world where almost everything is at least partly evil and partly good?

Of course, it could be that young readers just like a good yarn, but it seems like there is a pretty passionate fanbase, and fans usually don’t become passionate for a work that only has a good plot.