The End Again

"What Wallace liked best about the essay (and what I, undoubtedly for that reason, have come to like best myself) was its defense of Infinite Jest’s ending. The book’s “lack of resolution” was the subject of a disagreement with his editor--one of the only ones, Wallace recalled, upon which he held a hard line. “And it has indeed caused bitter gnashing of personal teeth,” Wallace wrote, “that so many reviews hated the end. So your essay -- which has a slightly different take on the function of silence and restraint than I did, but is very, very close (plus complimentary about it, which makes you I think the first person to be so in any kind of print), made me feel good, real good. I hope readers other than you can see what the end’s at least trying to do (whether it succeeds is, I’ve accepted, not for me to judge).” I hope other readers see it too."- Excerpt from the introduction to a thesis paper on IJ by Chris Hager.

Here is a link to the thesis: http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/thesisb.htm

And here is what DFW approved as being an interpretation of what the end of his novel was attempting to accomplish (in the process of putting it all here, you get most of the essay linked to above):

"The prevailing early critical take on this novel -- ‘This book is very long, frequently brilliant and frequently confusing, and it totally lacks closure’ -- suggests unsurprisingly that, while its traditional qualities are evident to everyone (including qualities of a postmodern, experimental tradition), whatever is original about it is nothing if not mysterious. Sven Birkerts, the lone diagnostician of Infinite Jest’s relevance to American literature, claims the novel takes the ‘next step’ in fiction because it has “internalized some of the decentering energies that computer technologies have released into our midst” (108), and several subsequent writers have in turn quoted his conclusion. Birkerts in fact is wrong, but he is on to a little something -- Infinite Jest’s structure does internalize something of late twentieth-century technological energy, but something remarkably ‘centering.’ The text inscribes a parabolic curve (diving into an engaging world & plot, then turning and pulling out of that world and lumbering towards a close as gradual as any novel’s beginning), oriented symmetrically about a vertex (a crucial point, though different from a climax) located at the novel’s precise mathematical center. And, as with most parabolic curves nowadays, Infinite Jest’s text functions rather like a satellite dish: the resolution that reviewers complain the novel lacks isn’t in the text, but sits chronologically & spatially in front of the novel proper, which, as a satellite dish, serves to focus myriad rays of light, or voices, or information, on that central resolution without actually touching it.

Birkerts’ assessment is meanwhile woefully incomplete: he fails to ask (and answer) the question, Why write a formal analog of late twentieth-century communication -- something which, by its very nature, needs no elucidation (the state of communication in the late twentieth century is: everybody has a terminal hook-up to everything and to endless information)? The answer is that the text’s structural ambition is a necessarily speculative organizing trope for a narrative of speculation -- speculation on the notions of ‘author’ and ‘character,’ on the nature of fiction after postmodernism, on the limits of language and on the novel’s own boundaries."

...

"Infinite Jest’s particular profound void is a great chronological gap, and its untouched and untouchable focus (the absence which has raised reviewers’ ire) is a seminal crisis that occurred in the gap. It concerns Harold Incandenza and Donald Gately, the two major characters. Hal Incandenza narrates the novel’s first seventeen pages, which comprise a kind of prefatory epilogue to the novel proper: most of the subsequent thousand pages take place in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, one year before the novel’s beginning (Year of Glad), and never catch up⁴. The first seventeen pages reveal that some crisis has occurred, but it occurred some time after the novel’s next thousand pages.

Our proof that something noteworthy has happened is that, in those first seventeen pages, Hal Incandenza -- during an interview at the University of Arizona for admission & a lucrative tennis scholarship -- has a mysterious seizure, and looks to all present to be only borderline homo-sapiens. Mysterious, because Hal is narrating the novel at this point -- his mental faculties appear, to readers, intact -- and because throughout the subsequent (chronologically anterior) novel, Hal will be not just functional but absolutely brilliant. His account of this fateful interview at Arizona coincides with his later (in the novel) / earlier (in his life) quirky, precocious intelligence: his observations of his surroundings are meticulous, his awareness of his own being, extraordinary, and extraordinarily peculiar. “62.5% of the room’s faces are directed my way, pleasantly expectant,” as he looks around. “My chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it. I compose what I project will be seen as a smile” (5). For the first ten pages, though, he says nothing aloud, his coaches & teachers from the Enfield Tennis Academy his champions. “I’d tell you all you want and more,” Hal says to readers, as university officials grill him about a low SAT score, “if the sounds I made could be what you hear” (9) -- and can anyone hear sounds precisely as they were made? one must wonder. When finally he must speak aloud, we readers hear Hal say the influence of Kierkegaard on Camus is underestimated, say the kinds of things only a prodigious eighteen-year-old mind could say. Those present hear only “subanimalistic noises and sounds” (14).

The calm of Hal’s narrative wavers not a bit during the eloquent statement that is to all the world a seizure, not even when university officials take him to the emergency room -- a routine to which Hal seems accustomed: “There are, by the O.E.D. VI’s count, nineteen nonarchaic synonyms for unresponsive, of which nine are Latinate and four Saxonic” (17). Hal’s heard them all, apparently, from all manner of ER physicians, none of whom presumably thought Hal could understand any of them. “I am in here,” Hal says on a few occasions during this section, a mute defense that he lives within his tennis-prodigy’s body, even if his prodigious mind is trapped by a tragically literal inability to communicate with those around & unlike him, “who use whomsoever as a subject” (9). Within pages, a year-younger Hal will be demonstrating incomparable intelligence, formidable tennis, and full communicative function; as for what brought about the change, Hal ‘says,’ “Call it something I ate” (9). At least a few of the novel’s many threads of plot suggest what Hal ‘ate,’ but Wallace never depicts the eating. The plot lines that best promise cataclysm concern the novel’s two life-threatening material entities."

...

"Early in Infinite Jest, Michael Pemulis, Enfield Tennis Academy student and friend of Hal, has lately obtained DMZ, a rare hallucinogen. DMZ, Pemulis tells confidantes & fellow recreational drug-users Hal & Axford, is something like LSD multiplied by something exponential. It was “used in certain shady CIA-era military experiments” (in Infinite Jest’s 21st century, the CIA has long-since given way to the Office of Unspecified Services) to the end of “getting the enemy to think that their guns are hydrangea, the enemy is a blood-relative, that sort of thing” (28). Whether these facts come out because Pemulis has done genuine research or just read Great Jones Street is a little hard to say, given that Pemulis is an eccentric among eccentrics, with a poster of someone called ‘the Paranoid King’ over his bed and a “habit of looking first to one side and then over to the other before he says anything. It’s impossible to tell whether this is unaffected or whether Pemulis is emulating some film-noir-type character” (211). Pemulis, Hal and Axford plan a foray into this drug’s recesses of potential for a few weeks hence.

Shortly before his death in the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad, Hal’s father, James O. Incandenza, completed work on a film, Infinite Jest -- an entertainment so hideously perfect it prompted Jim’s grisly suicide involving a microwave oven⁵. The movie more or less died with J.O., who left behind instructions that it be buried with/in (or perhaps in place of, given the details of his death) his head. It comes to our attention, and to the attention of 21st-century America, only because a copy of it shows up in a conspicuously unmarked package at the home of an important Arab-Canadian in Boston, who watches it… and watches it… and doesn’t stop watching it. The curious and the would-be rescuers who come to his home each in their turn become catatonic before the transfixing movie they encounter in his living room.

With these two hazards lying in wait, it’s no wonder something happens to Hal. It’s the novel’s ambiguity regarding which one is responsible for Hal’s transformation that has inspired complaints of lack of resolution. (One reviewer writes, “It takes a special kind of nerve to write a book with roughly the mass of a medicine ball and then end it so abruptly and unsatisfactorily that the poor reader perversely finds himself wishing it longer” [Kipen, 1].) The ‘poor reader’ indeed is left speculating: maybe when Hal was trying to kick his marijuana habit and Mike Pemulis was telling him that his body would always need a Substance, some substance, just maybe a less metabolism-discombobulating substance than marijuana, Hal turned to the incredibly potent DMZ, one dose of which left him un-addicted & physically able but spastic & uncommunicative; maybe a copy of his dad’s movie finally made its way to its rightful audience (James Incandenza began work on Infinite Jest to combat what he saw as his son’s retreat into solipsism) and Hal, somehow transcending the entertainment-hungry people dropping like flies in Back-Bay apartments watching the thing, managed to watch it without dying, eking out a private existence but unable ever again to communicate; maybe a Quebecois terrorist group organized a mass distribution of the movie and all America’s seen it and, after the initial widespread death, managed to turn a catatonic, entertainment-hungry existence into a semblance of a functional life and now see Hal, the one person who resisted the temptation to watch it or who could transcend its effects, the one remaining real human being, as some kind of freak; maybe Hal can communicate in some mystical way, maybe just with readers or with the ghost of his father, who has visited him and spoken with him and taught him to communicate in a language-transcendent supernatural way that only works with ghosts or readers; for that matter, maybe Hal’s been called on by a ghost to avenge his father’s death, and his inability to communicate is the result not of entertainment-hungry catatonia but of paralysis and guilt and a maladjusted relationship with his adulterous mother.

The reason the novel doesn’t tell you is that it doesn’t matter what ‘happened’ to Hal, because the novel conveys the unspeakable relevance of what did happen -- the ‘literary object,’ in Sartre’s terms -- far less ambiguously, and can do so only thanks to the ambiguity of discrete events. With the parabola as structural trope, that curve’s mathematical properties can indicate the significance of what happened to Hal (not the real event that is the cause). It is the ethereal focus of the text’s parabolic curve, the thing that happened to Hal, and whatever did happen lies at the intersection of every character’s and event’s narrative vectors -- vectors the novel notes but doesn’t follow through all the way to intersection -- vectors which, if they do not move towards a center by chance, are drawn there by their author: not Dave Wallace but James O. Incandenza, the optical wizard whose inventions and cinematic work with special lenses surely at least once employed a reflective parabolic curve."

...

"And at the curve’s outer edges -- just after the beginning and shortly before the end -- another pair of mirror passages offers the greatest hint readers get as to Hal’s (and Don Gately’s) fate. En route to the emergency room during his seizure, Hal remembers a scene that takes place in the chronological gap between the novel’s end & beginning: “I think of John N.R. Wayne, who would have won this year’s WhataBurger, standing watch in a mask as Donald Gately and I dig up my father’s head” (16-17). More than nine hundred pages later, Don Gately (who never meets Hal, during the novel) “dreams he’s with a very sad kid and they’re digging some dead guy’s head up and it’s really important” (934). If Gately dreams forward to the same moment Hal remembers, that moment seems a likely candidate for Intersection of Vectors, Focus, &c.; but as tantalizing as the revelation of that moment is, it’s still pretty ambiguous. We don’t know how Don Gately & Hal Incandenza ever teamed up, and we don’t know whether they find Infinite Jest in Hal’s dad’s head or whether Quebecois terrorists have already seized it in their apocalyptic plot to undermine the United States. In Gately’s dream, the movie’s not there, in the head -- but it’s only a dream. From Hal we learn that fellow tennis-player John (‘No Relation’) Wayne would have won their upcoming tennis tournament, but something went wrong -- certainly something did for Hal, too -- and, of finding the film and not finding it, we can only speculate which is the worse fate. We don’t know whether Hal & Wayne & Gately end up watching the lethal film.

And we didn’t know, when we read Hal’s account of that episode on page 17, who Don Gately is, who Hal’s father is, or why anyone might want to dig up his head; when Gately dreams the same scene, it’s as significant as Hal’s description was gibberish, to readers. That accrual of information can suggest to the reader a simply linear narrative, but the novel’s ending’s much-touted ‘lack of resolution’ is a relentless reminder that this narrative is no mounting line of plot & progress of data, and that all those ambiguities are vitally important. Near the novel’s end, passages revealing new information concerning the novel’s intricate plot of Quebecois terrorist conspiracy become fewer and farther between, and the closing passage doesn’t even take place in the book’s present tense, but years before, in Don Gately’s memory. In the last sentence, a drugged Don Gately (who’s long recovered from his Demerol addiction, we’ve learned in the novel) comes to, “flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out” (981).

The effect of this ending (evidenced in part by reviewers’ near-unanimous disgruntled dwelling on it) is to leave the reader as beached as Don Gately, the narrative tide run out and taken all it might yet have held for readers with it. As in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, the tidal imagery here at the end of Infinite Jest reminds readers (and ought to have reminded reviewers) that the repeatable never resolves, nor certainly does it end, except to regenerate or reincarnate. Infinite Jest maps the ceaseless tidal crescendo & decrescendo with the parabola, the descendant of gravity’s rainbow (the map of rocket flight), and it is not,

as we might imagine, bounded below by the line of the Earth it “rises from” and the Earth it “strikes” No But Then You Never Really Thought It Was Did You Of Course It Begins Infinitely Below The Earth And Goes On Infinitely Back Into The Earth it’s only the peak that we’re allowed to see, the break up through the surface, out of the other silent world, violently… (Pynchon, 726)

The great and infinite ellipse breaks not only the earth’s surface, but another illusory boundary: as Pynchon envisions the parabola coming from a “silent world” into what is visible, the parabolic text of Infinite Jest breaks from the ‘undifferentiated silence of inspiration’ (Sartre) into visible language, cut off to readers at its breaking & re-entry points. Calling for ‘resolution’ here is tantamount to calling for a novel utterly disconnected from its inspiration, its substrata; for a novel that ruins the speculative richness of its ambiguity with the stultifying precision of data."

...

"And it seems to be working, J.O.’s labor of love for Hal; as everything around him is increasing strange (especially Ortho Stice’s visitation), Hal begins thinking in the rhetoric of his father’s pleas that he ‘get out of himself,’ care for something, anything, outside of himself, producing a paragraph that unifies all the novel’s characters’ addictive pursuits -- drugs, tennis, entertainment, and the writing and reading of novels. Here near the end of the novel, Hal has begun narrating again:

It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately -- the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly…. Stice asked whether I believed in ghosts. (900)

Hal might not himself believe in ghosts just yet, but everything is pointing towards a time when he will -- when, perhaps, he will understand the extent & nature of his communication with them (one, in particular) and turn wholly out of himself, to connect with them, to the detriment of his outward appearance’s conformity with social protocol."

...

"The appearance of the wraith, though, makes such expression suddenly and immensely possible for Gately (if only to one, ghostly reader -- but also, of course, to all readers of the novel), and the novel’s last two hundred pages feature far more exposition of his history than the first eight hundred did. Having heard the penance-narratives of Ewell, Day, et al., he’s been exposed to a kind of literary tradition, which he can emulate or to which he can respond, mediating it through his own history. The only thread of narrative that seems to wax during the novel’s last hundred pages (central plot lines like Quebecois conspiracy are fading fast) consists of Gately’s memory of the period of his life shortly before he ‘Came In’ to AA, and got sober; and it’s this narrative that ends the novel, with Gately coming out of a horrific interval of drug use, his waking on the beach signifying that Gately has also awakened to history, confronted and begun to serve time for his history; and that this is another reason the novel ends without ‘resolution’ -- it ends precisely when Gately finishes, when the telling of it is no longer part of his penance. Infinite Jest has an unmistakable introduction: en route to the ER, Hal Incandenza predicts that “It will be someone blue-collar and unlicensed, though, inevitably -- a nurse’s aide with quick-bit nails, a hospital security guy, a tired Cuban orderly who addresses me as jou -- who will, looking down in the middle of some kind of bustled task, catch what he sees as my eye and ask So yo then man what’s your story?” (17). Infinite Jest does begin as Hal’s story, but it makes no promises of remaining so; it’s Gately’s story by the end, and just as Hal opened the book explaining What Has Happened to him, Gately will close it once he’s made the same explanation about, and for, himself."

...

"Assuming Don Gately can’t actually remember ‘the wobbly blur’ through which he looked up out of his crib, his dream has a direct hook-up with Jim Incandenza, here. So while Gately’s pretty clearly seeing some variant, at least, of Infinite Jest, he might well be seeing some non-lethal version, the unimpaired artistic vision from which J.O. began, his mind’s intent, as he meant Hal to see it; for probably the most interesting thing we learn about the film from Don Gately’s dream’s report of it is Death’s one-word closing proclamation: Wait. Which, ironically, is precisely what viewers of the actual film refuse to do, lending the film its awesome power -- they insist on watching again, immediately, at all costs. Their essentially solipsistic desire for continued gratification is the impulse J.O. sought to combat in his son, sought to replace with a willingness to wait, to forbear addictions and endure the ineluctable pain of sobriety, isolation, of years before Death will set you free and be your mother, years spent committed to things outside the self, concealing that the only persistent, and ultimately selfish, desire is for Death’s liberty -- concealing an innate self-loathing, a guilt-ridden fear that you’re ever only the sum of your lusts (‘However truly you believe there’s a sickness to existence that can never be cured, if you’re depressed you will sooner or later surrender and say: I just don’t want to feel bad anymore’), for which you must always do penance.

Hal Incandenza’s and Don Gately’s penance might consist in saving the Continent from disaster, and if Infinite Jest failed to reach Hal, it at least reached Don Gately; and if Don Gately (spurred on by his dreams from J.O.) enlisted Hal’s help in a last-ditch effort to save the Continent, he perhaps accomplished what Jim had envisioned: to engage Hal in the ‘black miracle’ of caring about something. If Hal, a chronic analyst who could give Hamlet a run for his money, refuses to hear his father’s ghost (“It’s always seemed a little preposterous,” he muses, “that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt, never once doubts the reality of the ghost [900]”), then it’s left to Don Gately as grave-digger to unearth some gravely significant head; and if he can only get Hal to begin, ‘Alas, poor Yorick,’ then Infinite Jest and all that Wallace has given the phrase to mean will also have to exit his mouth, never again mute. Ultimately, it’s unclear whether J.O. or Gately is the real author of Hal’s transformation, and ultimately, it makes no difference."

Ghosts in Postmodern Literature

Also to expand upon something we didn't really get a chance to talk about last week because we were so wrapped up in the implications of Marathe and Kate's conversation, what is with the wraith?

In class Tim said that ghosts are pretty common in postmodern literature, and while at first I didn't see it (and admittedly I have a rather narrow set of postmodern texts to draw from), I did start to see a more generally paranormal sort of theme. For instance in House of Leaves you have the haunted house whose dimensions do not conform to the laws of physics, and which seems to be inhabited by a kind of evil presence which could be characterized as ghost-like.

I found this wikipedia page on magic realism, a genre of modern literature that has some magical or unbelievable elements set in an otherwise realistic setting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_realism

Teeth Dreams

Although we addressed this in class (thanks to Tim's computer) there is a lot of literature online about teeth dreams, and just to recap and add a couple other common symbols teeth are seen as when present in dreams: hopeless and helplessness (because teeth are seen as a symbol of power, or because of the powerlessness the dreamer feels when her teeth are being lost), fear of change, fear of aging, fear of loss of attractiveness, fear of being lied to, fear of giving away secrets, representations of anxiety or humiliation, a representation of an inability to nourish or more abstractly support yourself, insecurity and fear of abandonment, fear of failure, fear of having something that needs to be hidden, anxiety over how other perceive in you, fear or rejection, fear of sexual impotence, difficulty expressing yourself and fears of not being heard.

There are probably infinitely more possible interpretations, but you get the idea.

Quest for sense

As I near the end of Infinite Jest, I can tell it's not going to stop haunting me for a long time. My tendency when haunted is to delve deeper and deeper until I've made some sense of things, or on the contrary, until things become so complex and misleading that I abandon all interest as a defense mechanism ("if I can't see it it's not there": a you're-safe-under-the-covers approach).

Some materials I intend to peruse in the coming weeks (some of which I think may have been mentioned in earlier posts or in links), and which some of you may also find helpful, if anyone else is torn up, include:

- Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest by Greg Carlilse. According to reviews, this book includes an outline of the 28 "chapters" in the book, derived from the total 192 sections, and a description of how to read the book in chronological order, as well as other little details like character lists and a map of ETA and the surrounding area.

- David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: A Reader's Guide by Stephen Burn. Cheaper and significantly shorter than the aforementioned study. According to reviews on Amazon it sounds appealing for its restraint and avoidance of an exhaustive analysis, while nonetheless providing an enlightening perspective on the more difficult aspects of the book.

- Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace by David Lipsky. A lengthy interview from the final leg of DFW's promotional tour for IJ, as well as commentary on his life and death by the celebrated Rolling Stone contributing editor. This appeals for its personal approach and apparent sensitivity to DFW's concerns about the dangers of biography.

(Sidenote: What's the deal with A Reader's Companion to Infinite Jest by William Dowling and Robert Bell? It doesn't sound very elucidating, and the only copy for sale on Amazon is going for $2,499.99... plus $3.99 shipping. Also includes a disconcerting picture of Shakespeare as an orchid or some other exotic flower on the cover.)

Finally, I'm currently borrowing from a friend This Is Water--a transcript of DFW's 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College. I haven't read the whole thing in its proper order but if my memory serves me, the joke at the beginning is also included in IJ (albeit more vulgar in the latter):

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning boys. How's the water?"

And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"

The end of the speech is really moving but I'll refrain from including it here because it's surely less impressive in isolation. But I will say if you haven't read the speech, it is definitely worth it (and probably somewhere easily accessible online). As far as its relevance to Infinite Jest: even though we've already recognized the dangers of equating an author's fiction with some key element of his own soul, it's not hard to see in this speech's plea (for us to appreciate and familiarize ourselves with our analogue to a fish's water) a more personal and didactic version of IJ.

How to Read Infinite Jest

"4. Physically, Infinite Jest is a large book: 2.2 inches thick and, according to Amazon.com, has a shipping weight of 3.2 pounds. Some readers have found it useful to rip the book in half for easier reading on the subway or on the beach. If you do this, you also need to tear the footnotes from the back half and tape them to front half. This technique has the side effect of giving you the appearance of A Very Serious Reader of Infinite Jest, which will either keep onlookers' questions to a minimum or maximum, depending on the onlooker."

I was looking for more links on the end, found this first draft of a preface for last years infinite summer project, written by Jason Kottke, and I thought this particular piece of advice in his series of "how to read Infinite Jest" was hilarious. Why didn't we all do this?! Would have made our bags a lot lighter when we had to carry this book around all quarter. And when I plan to continue carrying it around. Because who knows when you'll need it.

http://kottke.org/09/07/how-to-read-infinite-jest

untitled...

I thought it would be nice to post an article praising DFW's work. Although I don't feel the same about the book like how it made me angry or questioned why DFW wrote the character the way it is..but I guess when you're done with the book. You'll either enjoy it or hated it. However, we can all agree that the novel itself was interesting on another level. I hope you will enjoy the article! Or maybe everyone has come across it already. :)

http://www.observer.com/2008/arts-culture/d-f-w-r-i-p

The End

Herb: Is there no “ending” to “Infinite Book” because there couldn’t be? Or did you just get tired of writing it?

DFW: There is an ending as far as I’m concerned. Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an “end” can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such convergence or projection occurred to you, then the book’s failed for you.-Live online with DFW

http://www.badgerinternet.com/~bobkat/jest11a.html

So here are some links about the end of IJ. They do contain spoilers!
And the main thing that I got out of all of them was: How did you all read IJ in the 2-14 days you claim to have read this gigantic novel in?!?!

This tries to explain how all the plot aspects of the end come together:
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ijend

An entire review of IJ that is pretty interesting:
"In some ways Infinite Jest is one very extended metaphor, then, for the cultural logic of the later-than-usual (for the year is 2018 or so) capitalism, but that is not Wallace's main point. His main point is radically unsophisticated, unlike his prose and his narrative momentum, and it goes something like this: we need to learn some simple things, for instance, how not to wank ourselves to death in a world full of steamy intoxicants, and how to become ordinary people instead. Mercifully, Wallace is no new age fundamentalist trying to reeducate his junkies. He's a terrific prose writer who is just trying to answer some pertinent, pressing questions. He does not quite reach his destination even after 1100 pages, but we can recognize his meanderings, his pain, his hopes, and his questions as disturbingly familiar. Good questions, those. "-Piotr Siemion
http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/postapocalyptic

Focus Passage Week 9

Just one week and 131 pages left! (Everyone give yourselves some kind of self-congratulatory gesture)

This week I thought there was a lot of interesting commentary on love, choice and the intersection thereof in the first portion of the reading, and then a lot on Gately, which took up the book's earlier theme of being trapped unable to communicate with anyone.

Focus Passages: 774-782 (Kate and Marathe on love), 829- 855 (loosely, there are a couple small interruptions in the Gately text here, basically I just wanted to touch on the wraith- who he is, what he is doing here, etc.)

Funny: p. 795-808 Hal's "NA" Meeting

*Note another teeth dream on 770

*Also note also that there are two semi-important (for plot) passages in this section that are in the endnotes and 332, on Mike Pemulis.

And also note, 758-759 when Mario and Chu are speaking we see a nod to E Unibus in the way that Mario talks about Chu "acting natural" and the interesting way in which Chu is a subject of the camera, but trying to interface with Mario, who is essentially only focused on Chu as a object, rather than engaging with him.

David Foster Wallace Didn't Have Internet?

An interview via snail mail with DFW:

http://www.believermag.com/issues/200311/?read=interview_wallace

Teaching Infinite Jest

I was looking for some inspiration to guide discussion, and stumbled upon this, a small passage by a colleague of Wallace's teaching a class on Wallace post-suicide.

http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/content/teaching-infinite-jest

Focus Passage Week 8

This week I have been a little bit at a loss as to what to put down for the focus passages (unlike last week, I didn't just forget...). Unfortunately there were no conveniently located blatantly philosophical/social commentary passages from Marathe and Steeply to discuss. And so I was left with more nebulous feelings that there really is a lot going on in this Week's 100+ pages, but what is happening is not easy to pin down, and the questions this week's reading raises are not easy ones to answer, or even address.

One theme in the text that I found interesting is featured primarily in the first 50 pages, the idea of what it is like to live in a goal drive culture, when we do or do not attain or goals. What does it mean for life to have meaning? What happens when the meaning we thought we had assigned, or independently existed, turns out not to be there- when we get what we want and don't know what to do with it? Particularly this came into focus for me in this week ideas of "occurring", being erased (terminated p.687), as well as Hal and Kate's discussion of anhedonia and psychotic depression (p. 692-698).

I also really enjoyed the light shed on the Incandenza family by Joelle (particularly p. 736-747), especially as that analysis of the family was coupled with Hal remembering his father and his father's work and trying to glean some kind of understanding of the man Himself. The idea of the feeling in Jim's work is something that both Joelle and Hal seem fascinated by, and so we the readers get a lot of examples of Jim's films in this section, which seem rife (at least to me) with emotional significance, more perhaps than Hal at least is willing to grant the films. And this idea again brought up the lack of ability to communicate that the Incandenza family members have with one another, also brought sharply into focus by Joelle, and I thought, "There is something more significant here than merely the Kafka-esque tragedy of failed communication in people who are close to one another, and who inevitably reach a variety of bad ends". This made me remember reading a short story of Wallace's (which I may have already mentioned on this blog or in class) Good Old Neon which had as one of it's primary focuses the idea that what is truly happening, particularly the content of the conscioius self, cannot be fully related by the inadequare vehicle of language. At first reading this I wasn't sure that I agreed- but afterwards I undertook a series of personal experiments trying to describe linguistically what I was really thinking and feeling- it was simply impossible. I kept longing for some kind of Vulcan telepathy, so that I could just touch someone and express accurately all those vague ideas circling around my head for which there are no words. Maybe you know what I'm talking about, not because of my own specificity and rich description, but simply because you can Identify. I hadn't really thought of this concept of the relative destitution of language in the context of IJ, but perhaps that is at least part of what the Incandeza family is meant to represent...

On another note, I found the first section for this week really darkly beautiful, if perhaps not terribly conceptually significant, Day's violin resonating horror (648-651).

Focus passage week 7

Marathe and Steeply's conversation (not surprisingly, I'm sure!); Steeply's father's M*A*S*H obsession: pp. 638-648.

A few thoughts:

- Steeply refers to his dad's unhealthy obsession with the M*A*S*H as an "unbalance" throughout the conversation. This description seems relevant to the debate we've brought up multiple times about at what point dedication to entertainment (be it drugs, TV, etc.) becomes problematic. It seems that indulging a little (i.e., maintaining a balance) may not be hazardous, but addiction becomes essentially a sacrifice of one's very life. What was wrong with Steeply's dad's relationship to this show, and why did he develop the obsession? Why couldn't he resist? Why him?

- Comparison between the nature of a) Steeply's dad's addiction to M*A*S*H, b) drug addiction and c) psychosis, especially paranoid psychoses. All of these share common characteristics. What are the commonalities and what might this similarity suggest?

- Why does Steeply's mom get therapy to cope with her husband's prolblem instead of he himself getting help? Does this scenario seem realistic? What if his addiction were to a substance rather than a TV show--would his wife still seek therapy, or would he be more likely to? Would she force him to get therapy in that alternative situation? Perhaps since TV watching isn't considered as much of a taboo as drug use, it would be less acceptable for her to criticize or discuss his obsessive viewing as a problem, whereas drug addiction is considered a "Disease," not as commonplace or "harmless" as say 6 hours of TV a day.

- In regards to Marathe's summary of the story about Steeply's father: "His unbalance of temptation cost him life. An otherwise harmless U.S.A. broadcast television program took his life, because of the consuming obsession. This is your anecdote" (646). It seems that we see TV programs as "harmless," but how do we view drugs? How much culpability do we attribute to objects themselves? Is it the TV itself that is inherently bad? Are drugs inherently bad? How do we choose our evaluations of objects, and when do we decide that the responsibility lies with the person? Based on my own experience I would argue that our culture views drugs as inherently negative and dangerous, rather than regarding our own decisions about drug use as the problem. On the contrary, TV seems to have a positive connotation and its our own indiscriminate use that we tend to blame for its nuisances.

Remember Lyle's maxim "Don't underestimate objects"? I noticed there was a passage immediately preceding M & S's conversation in which Stice tries to telepathically will a tomato to move in his salad bowl (c. 636), which was also reminiscent of Lyle's motto.

Hal's dream

On page 449:

"Hal had this horrible new recurring dream where he was losing his teeth, where his teeth had become like shale and splintered when he tried to chew, and fragmented and melted into grit in his mouth; in the dream he was going around squeezing a ball and spitting fragments and grit, getting more and more hungry and scared."

I find this passage to be very interesting because I once had a dream that was something like this. But instead mine were falling out instead of it being splintered and whatnot. Can this dream be a warning to him about his drug use...or something else that hes worried about in his life?

Poetic Justice

"...good literature is disturbing in a way that history and social science frequently are not. Because it summons powerful emotions, it disconcerts and puzzles. It inspires distrust of conventional pieties and exacts a frequently painful confrontation with one's own thoughts and intentions."-Martha C. Nussbaum

I started reading Nussbaum's book Poetic Justice this week, a short work on the novel's importance in developing moral faculties and informing political and social policy. As we've been reading Infinite Jest critically, some of the things which we've been doing really resonate with the importance that Nussbaum sees novels as having. Many of the things that Wallace asks us to confront in IJ are disturbing and unpleasant, but they challenge us to look at ourselves, the novel and society in new ways. Anyways, if you are an avid reader and have not read Nussbaum's book and have some extra time this summer or in the far distant future, I recommend it- I think her work articuates the importance of the novel that avid readers intuitively feel.

Mario: My ongoing fascination

"Mario had fallen in love with the first Madame Psychosis programs because he felt like he was listening to someone sad read out loud from yellow letter she'd taken out of a shoebox on a rainy P.M., stuff about heartbreak and people you loved dying and U.S. woe, stuff that was real. It is increasingly hard to find valid art that is about stuff that is real in this way. The older Mario gets, the more confused he gets about the fact that everyone at E.T. A. over the age of about Kent Blott find stuff that's really real uncomfortable and they get embarrassed. It's like there's some rule the real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes of laughs in a way that isn't happy."-IJ p.592

On suicide

I found this article on suicide (by The Stranger's Brendan Kiley) compelling and somewhat relevant to our discussion of Infinite Jest, given the prevalence of suicide in the novel ("destroying one's map for keeps"), and of course in relation to DFW's own death as well.

The article begins with a description of the imminent construction of a fence on the Aurora Bridge in Seattle, which it turns out is the second most popular suicide landmark in the U.S.:

But this spring, the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) will erect more than a mile of suicide fencing on either side of the bridge. The project comes after years of debate pitting concerns about construction noise and fence aesthetics against the danger of bodies plummeting from the sky and landing on houseboats, cars, or passersby.

The author's sensitive discussion of the debated human right to suicide reminded me of our frequent discussions about free choice. It goes without saying that all humans possess the freedom to terminate their own lives, but is this an acceptable choice? Who decides the morality of such a choice? And what impact does a fence like the one on the bridge truly have, other than providing comfort to potential witnesses of the misfortunate jumpers and steering them elsewhere? ("You can't jump; not here anyway!") What figurative fences do we construct to guide behavior, be it suicidal or otherwise? In relation to the book, is it suicide to knowingly choose to watch the Entertainment? What about the choice to use drugs and risk addiction or overdose--does that resemble suicide at all?

Incidentally, the content of the article immediately reminded me of DFW's style. The author's inclusion of unnecessary yet charming and poignant details especially made me think of the tangetns in IJ; for example, the possibly apocryphal woman who jumped from the Eiffel Tower, only to survive landing on the roof of a car whose driver she later married. I really want that story to be true.

Hal's toothache

Assuming that the references to Hal's persistent toothache throughout the book are too frequent to be incidental, I've been paying attention to any details that may indicate its significance. So far I haven't had much luck with just my imagination despite having noticed the references over and over again. The exchange between Marathe and Steeply around p. 429 seems like it might be revealing though. Steeply refers to "the little kid who'll eat candy all day because it's what tastes best at each individual moment." Marathe adds, "Even if he knows inside his mind that it will hurt his stomach and rot his little fangs."

As for a reference to choice and agency, Steeply says:

"You can't induce a moral sensibility the same way you'd train a rat. The kid has to learn by his own experience how to learn to balance the short- and long-term pursuit of what he wants. [...] He must be freely enlightened to self."

Has anyone else been pondering the toothache?

This is somewhat unrelated, but another thing I've had on my mind is whether Hal is a hero. I remember thinking he sounded heroic because of something Tim said a couple of weeks ago although I can't remember the description well enough to articulate it myself!

Something interesting...

I am not too sure if everyone visited this site yet but it contains a lot of helpful information regarding the important characters in the book and etc. But beware... it contains a lot of spoilers.

http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/dfw/ij-notes-and-speculations.html

Focus Passage Week 6

*First see post below about some passages from the end of week 5 we'll want to look at, particularly the Marathe and Steeply passage.

p. 470-475, 489-490, 507-508 Marathe and Steeply

p. 459 Inner world discussion Shtitt

p. 466-468 Gately cake AA analogy, understanding v. doing, success through letting someone else make your decisions (continuation of theme on choice)

Diddling

Today I was discussing some of DFW's word choice with a fellow DFW enthusiast. The particular word choice we were discussing was Wallace's use of the word "diddling" in several instances when describing various forms of sexual abuse. For instance the term "daughter diddling" was used to describe the sexual abuse of some of the daughters of former alcoholics (pardon the lack of a page number). Wallace's word choice bothered me a little bit, but also confused me. It bothered me because it made me feel as though the issue of sexual abuse, especially of children, was being treated as though it were kind of inconsequential and almost amusing. I mean the word diddling just sounds funny. I definitely does not seem congruent with words like "rape" or "incest", which immediately bring to mind all kinds of terrible thoughts and imagery.

So why would Wallace use that word? Ingra Shellenberg, the DFW enthusiast I was speaking with, said that in an unconscious effort never to think poorly of Wallace she has assumed that the word "diddling" was chosen deliberately to provide a stark contrast with the gravity of the issue of sexual abuse, by using an inconguously pegorative word.

I thought of this issue even more looking at the section on Randy Lenz p. 538-548. In this section Lenz's sadisitic animal torture is laid out for the reader with a lack of any kind of judgment. The narrator just tells us the facts, what Lenz kills, how he watches it die, how he hides his penchant for animal torture. There is nothing emotionally charged about this passage, except the emotional interpretation that the facts lends themselves to. And again I thought how could Wallace just put this animal torture out there, just describe it point blank, and then move on like its no big deal. Like, oh and 10 page side note, one way to deal with addiction is to watch cats suffocate in plastic bags you capture them in.

Wallace was known as a really empathic, caring and morally concerned person. So what are these passages trying to tell the reader? How do we make sense of them in the context of what Wallace wanted to reader to get out of the book?

More Important Passages From p.321-442

So in class I talked about the fact that last week's hundred pages were pretty much chock full of important passages, so here are some others to check out which will be important for discussion during week 6:

p.418-430 Marathe and Steeply on philosophical foundations of America, American choice and The Entertainment.

Eric Clipperton passages: 407-410, 430-434, a little 436

p. 411-418 Hal's description of the fall of television advertising.