Tag: infinite summer

I realized that I was going to have to sacrifice my goal of blogging about each section as I read it to the larger goal of finishing the book this summer. I’m hoping to still check in with a post every week or so. This post covers through roughly page 86.

In this section of the book, I’m starting to get a little bit of a sense of a larger-scale plot. Just glimpses at the fringes: periodic reminders that the doctor is still paralyzed before the mysterious cartridge, the emergence of some character interactions, glimpses of a metafiction.

I’m also constantly awestruck by how many variables DFW juggles in delivering his story. Sometimes the struggle of really reading the texts prevents me from truly appreciating how ambitious a project it is. It’s not just the chronological games he plays, or the vocabulary, or the large stable of characters. It’s also that he’s writing in a variety of tones, modes of writing, degrees of formality and reality. He’s almost always funny and careful, but there’s a tremendous difference between the realism of, say, the Tiny Ewell introduction and the patent absurdity of Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents. It’s actually quite the trick, that he’s able to derive humor from both patent absurdity and from closely-observed detail.

Stray Observations:

• The mysterious cartridge that traps viewers into watching it forever reminds me greatly of Ice-nine from Cat’s Cradle.
• Inability to communicate continues to be a theme; the novel almost contains a taxonomy of the different ways that we can fail to be understood. The death of the Canadian official in his home contains many: he is attacked by his robbers because of language barrier, he cannot get help from the person that calls at the door because of the tape across his mouth, and he cannot get help from his wife because of distance.
• I’m enjoying the flashes of metafiction that we get: we’ve had repeated and unrelated references to Toblerone and Byzantine erotica.

Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment I

Thinking back, he was sure he’d said whatever, which in retrospect worried him because it might have sounded as if he didn’t care at all, not at all, so little that it wouldn’t matter if she forgot to get it or call, and once he’d made the decision to have marijuana in his home one more time it mattered a lot. It mattered a lot.

In the same Charlie Rose interview I embedded in my last post, DFW is asked what he thinks about the reception and accolades that Infinite Jest was getting. He responded that he was surprised that so many people focused on how funny the book was. It seemed to me like Wallace was uncomfortable by people focusing on the humor of a book that really contained his heart and soul, like a mob laughing at a statement of truth.

If there are many more sections like this, I’m not sure that he had cause to worry. This section is both deeply funny and deeply dark. As it’s basically the stream-of-consciousness ramblings of an addict (repeating the mantra, “Where was the woman who said she’d come.”), it’s extremely closely observed, DFW leads us deep into oversharing territory. As a reader, I felt a strange and conflicting mixture of identification, reactionary disgust, and amusement. There are some of the narrator’s insecurities and coping mechanisms that feel so true, or that I experience to a different degree in my own life, that I can’t help but to identify with him. That feeling is counterbalanced by the part of me that can’t imagine living the way that the man does, in a world of self-delusion completely lacking in perspective. It goes beyond a voyeuristic disgust, I actually find it somewhat scary. And to top it off, it is also witty and funny.

Given what we know of DFW’s struggles with substance abuse and alcohol addiction, and the extensive self-help library he owned, I think it’s probably safe to say that some of the emotional and behavioral truths in this section contain some reflection of Wallace himself. And so you could easily see why he would be threatened by a public that seemed to not even acknowledge the true blackness of some of his writing. Like Hal, he knew the futility of the question, “So yo then man what’s your story?”

Stray Observations

• In the quotation above, the narrator of the section shows that he too, like Hal, obsesses over the potential of language to betray communication.
• Throughout the chapter, the narrator refers to a small insect, possibly a manifestation of his insanity (or addiction). One of the things that I love about it is that it pops up casually, like a non sequitur.
• I imagine that DFW smoked some weed in his lifetime.
• First appearance of a footnote.
• Other potential DFW-ian character traits: a strange mixture of optimism and pessimism. A great amount of self-knowledge, coupled with a paralysis that prevents him from acting upon that knowledge.
• The idea that perhaps the best way to treat a weakness by overindulging seems to be significant to the narrator on a personal level, and also perhaps apply to the broader culture. The way that the narrator treats weed and and entertainment are strongly linked: The moment he recognized what exactly was on one cartridge he had a strong anxious feeling that there was something more entertaining on another cartridge and that he was potentially missing it. He realized that he would have plenty of time to enjoy all the cartridges, and realized intellectually that the feeling of deprived panic over missing something made no sense.

New Vocabulary

• Rapacious: aggressively greedy or grasping.

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.