Footnotes Galore Edition

Infinite Jest
by David Foster Wallace

I will be the first to admit that when David Foster Wallace killed himself on September 12th of last year I only vaguely knew of his name. And if you were to have asked me then if I had heard of Infinite Jest I would have most likely said probably not.

After reading the obituaries of Wallace I became intrigued, not just because he was only 34 years old when Infinite Jest was published in 1996 (which, by all accounts, was proclaimed a towering masterpiece) but because so many people wrote about how his writing style was so polished and so unbelievably smart. Wanting to judge for myself, I picked up Consider The Lobster–a compilation of essays and articles he had written–and within twenty pages I knew first-hand what the praise was all about and why some people were utterly torn apart at the news of Wallace’s suicide. The first essay is about the AVN awards show in Las Vegas (AVN stands for Adult Video News, also known as “the porn awards”) and it was unlike anything that I read before. It was engaging, thoroughly truthful, smart, and written with a voice of someone who, above anything else, wanted to get to the heart of this awards show^[1]. The essay is almost fifty pages long and I was never once wishing it would end already. A later essay in the collection is about the politics of dictionary writing and is filled with footnotes and interpolations that never once made me run for the hills. I knew right then and there that if someone could write a large essay about descriptive writing vs. proscriptive writing and my attention never waivered that that person was worth investing in. I purchased Infinite Jest almost immediately after finishing Consider The Lobster.

Infinite Jest, Wallace’s second and, ultimately, last novel, is a towering piece of work^[2] that explores (sometimes in tedious detail) why we seek out the pleasures that we do and what this says about who we are and the culture that we are a part of. What separates those people, as is so adeptly and profoundly asked late in the novel, who are the stars of a TV sitcom and the rest of the non-speaking extras, relegated to sitting in the background and having to like pretend to talk and be emotive, all while actually doing and saying nothing? What, fundamentally, is the difference between the budding teenage tennis player who plasters his wall w/ posters of tennis pros and dreams of making it to The Show, and the man who takes painstakingly careful steps to acquire marijuana, calling in sick at work for a week, then painstakingly incorporates himself into an obsessive-compulsive routine in which to get high? The two are not as dissimilar as one may think.

*INTERPOLATION
IT IS DISCUSSED WHY BOOKS THAT ARE OVER 1,000 PAGES
LONG ARE SEEN AS DAUNTING TO MOST READERS, AND
TWO EXAMPLES AS TO WHY THIS INSTINCT MAY BE FOUNDED
IN GENUINE CONCERN. IT IS ALSO DISCUSSED WHY 1,000 PAGE BOOKS
ARE SOMETIMES SEEN AS PRETENTIOUS AND SELF-IMPORTANT, OR
SOMETHING THAT FALLS INTO THE REALM OF THE BOORISH ENGLISH
LIT-TYPES WHO STEREOTYPICALLY WEAR SWEATER VESTS AND THE LIKE.

Reading a book that lies in the one thousand page range can be daunting. The very fact that the book in question is that large presupposes to the prospective reader that the author has a lot to say and that the author will hold back nothing in the way of being as descriptive as possible, sometimes to the detriment of the readers’ enjoyment of said book. The themes are most likely complex and indicative of the kinds of things that our brain likes to register as Important or Real or Socially Challenging. There is also a chance that the book is so well-constructed and well-written as to be “life-changing.”

War And Peace is not simply about the events leading up the War of 1812 and Russian society within the Napoleonic Era. It is about the infallability in trying to figure out why things happen; it is about the desire to understand history in spite of our tendencies to ultimately give way to manufactured half-truths; it is about searching for the meaning of life; it is about why countries go to war; it is about the irony of Russia’s upper class slowly but surely trading in their heritage while they allowed the French language (and army) to infiltrate their society. But, mostly, it is an outlet for Tolstoy to wonder aloud how little we know about the actions of men, be it the man who belongs to the military or the man who belongs to history. The following quote (which arrives at almost exactly at the midpoint of the book) best sums up one of Tolstoy’s major themes throughout War And Peace:

“…When an apple has ripened and falls, why does it fall? Because of its attraction to the earth, because its stalk withers, because it is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing below wants to eat it?

“Nothing is the cause. All this is only the coincidence of conditions in which all vital organic and elemental events occur. And the botanist who finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissue decays and so forth is equally right with the child who stands under the tree and says the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it. Equally right or wrong is he who says that Napoleon went to Moscow because he wanted to, and perished because Alexander desired his destruction, and he who says that an undermined hill weighing a million tons fell because the last navy struck it for the last time with his mattock. In historic events the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself.

“Every act of theirs, which appears to them an act of their own will, is in an historical sense involuntary and is related to the whole course of history and predestined from eternity.”

Additionally, Atlas Shrugged is not merely a commentary on Capitalism or why Rand’s greatest fear is that the American way of life is slowly becoming Communist in its outlook and execution, which is further compounded by the fact that we are blind to it (in her view). Atlas Shrugged is a sweeping, didactic story that Rand wrote as a means of furthering–and clarifying–her Objectivist philosophy in one final swoop (she would never write fiction again after this book). The book covers every conceivable angle of a world wherein people come to see money as the root of all evil, where people find banks and companies to be vile, where innovators are expected to sacrifice themselves in the name of a good that the public arbitrarily decides, where people simply take ingenuity for granted because its inventors–its motive power source–are treated with contempt. This world is turned on its head when John Galt, Rand’s ultimate manifestation of Objectivism, goes from innovator to innovator and convinces them to just give up, to stop being slaves to a public that treats them like Zeus treated Prometheus. The following quote is from John Galt’s radio speech:

“[...] You have heard it said that this is an age of moral crisis. You have said it yourself, half in fear, half in hope that the words had no meaning. You have cried that man’s sins are destroying the world and you have cursed human nature for its unwillingness to practice the virtues you demanded. Since virtue, to you, consists of sacrifice, you have demanded more sacrifices at every successive disaster.

“In the name of a return to morality, you have sacrificed all those evils, which you held as the cause of your plight. You have sacrificed justice to mercy. You have sacrificed independence to unity. You have sacrificed reason to faith. You have sacrificed wealth to need. You have sacrificed self-esteem to self-denial. You have sacrificed happiness to duty.

“You have destroyed all that which you held to be evil and achieved all that which you held to be good. Why, then, do you shrink in horror from the sight of the world around you? That world is not the product of your sins; it is the product and the image of your virtues. It is your moral ideal brought into reality in its full and final perfection.

“You have fought for it, you have dreamed of it, and you have wished it, and I—I am the man who has granted you your wish.

“Your ideal had an implacable enemy, which your code of morality was designed to destroy. I have withdrawn that enemy. I have taken it out of your way and out of your reach. I have removed the source of all those evils you were sacrificing one by one. I have ended your battle. I have stopped your motor. I have deprived your world of man’s mind [...]“

Needless to say, whittling down either of these novels into a 400-500 page book would be quite a task.

On top of all of this, you have the prospective audience. Like the arthouse movie of questionable repute that nonetheless receives rave reviews from the underground voices or the sprawling mainstream movie that seems like it would be too much to sit still for over three hours through, a 1,000 page book has an inherent flaw that most people cannot get over: it is going to have sections that are destined to be boring. It is hard for a 300 page book to hold our undivided attention let alone one that exceeds the 1,000 page barrier. Which leads me to my last point: 1,000 page books have a natural reputation as being stuffy or pretentious. While I was reading War And Peace, Atlas Shrugged, and Infinite Jest, I am sure there were people on the train who thought to themselves, “Look at this guy; he probably thinks he’s sooo smart.” And, at the end of the day, there is no counter-attack to this. People are going to think what they will. Somebody thinking that I’m a pretentious snot for reading War And Peace is, at the end of the day, no different than myself thinking that the person who thinks Metal Machine Music by Lou Reed is an important album is a grade-A tool. Everything comes full circle I guess.

So, with that said, Infinite Jest is not merely about tennis, addiction, and a movie that turns its viewers into people who become monomaniacal in their desire to only want to keep viewing said movie. Infinite Jest is about addiction and its many, many splinterings: why do people succumb to addiction; what causes addiction; what causes people to seek out normal pleasure; what causes people to seek out harmful pleasure; are “normal” and “harmful” pleasures mutually exclusive; should something like Alcoholics Anonymous be required for everyone to go to (even stone-cold sober people); why do cliches about overcoming addiction work; by virtue of the fact that cliches about addiction hold weight, does this then make the person who’s trying to overcome an addiction feel more or less insane; why does suicide (or, to use the book’s own idiom: eliminating your map) become a viable option for some people; why are people blind to the notion that non-drug-related addictions are just as harmful as drug-related addictions.

Infinite Jest is also primarily about tennis which, on the surface, seems like an odd foundation to build upon alongside the themes of addiction, pleasure, familial dysfunction, and other tertiary oddities such as Subsidized Time^[3] the Quebecois secessionist group The Wheelchair Assassins, and everything else involved within the O.N.A.N. (Organization of North American Nations) world that Wallace has created. Tennis actually provides the perfect contrast to drug addiction and Wallace is more than capable of writing about tennis as he was a highly-ranked junior player when he was younger growing up in Philo, Illinois.

Tennis and drug use are both very solitary acts, regardless of how many other friends of yours are in the same room. Tennis is a sport that offers you no caddy, no in-game access to your coach, no roar of the crowd to soak in after a point has been won (the official will kindly remind everyone to be quiet once you are about to serve or return a serve), no access to call a timeout unless you are hurt or sick. You are on an island with nothing but your racquet, and your ability to return shots that are hit at you at roughly 80 m.p.h., and you must make sure that, at the end of the day, your serves and your return shots fall inside the in-bounds boundaries of the court–and above the net–more times than your opponent. And, unlike a golfer or a batter in the batter’s box or a football kicker waiting to kick, the tennis player must constantly move in between return shots because to not move is to concede defeat by giving up all available angles for which your opponent will choose to hit against you, forcing you to over-exert yourself but ultimately failing because you were not constantly moving back to the mid-point of the baseline after each shot. Tennis is all about angles and opportunities to exploit angles. So, too, is drug use.

Drug use (be it marijuana, cocaine, alcohol, amphetamines, or prescription drugs and/or whatever) almost always starts as an escape that is disguised–inwardly and/or outwardly–as an accidental pleasure. So, too, does serious sports-participation. It is not that there is a one-to-one correlation here <em>fundamentally</em> but, abstractly, the alternate universe that Wallace constructs here sort of posits seemingly surreal disparities as things that are not always mutually exclusive. Exhibit A: the Wheelchair Assassins.

The Wheelchair Assassins^[4] are a Quebecois separatist group that seeks to take revenge on the O.N.A.N. government that in effect green-lit the policy of launching waste^[5] into the former Quebec province. The name ‘Wheelchair Assassins’ stems from the fact that a few decades ago (pre-O.N.A.N.) many Quebecois teenage and early-’20′s males (female participants were rare) would engage in a game wherein two groups of people lined up on opposite sides of a train track and the goal was to jump across the tracks at the last possible minute before a train vroomed by and either A) killed you or B) took off your legs. Thus, many Quebecois males lost their legs as a result. Fast-forward some years later and you have these militant, separatist Wheelchair Assassins looking to take their revenge on everyone by getting hold of a movie^[6] that the late James Orin Incandenza made called Infinite Jest. This movie, once the viewer watched it, would cause a person to become essentially paralyzed and want only to re-watch the movie over and over again. The A.F.R. planned to locate the master copy of this Entertainment and broadcast it to everyone, thus, effectively gaining back control of their motherland again.

*INTERPOLATION
IN WHICH IT IS EXPLAINED IN SOME DETAIL WHO THE INCANDENZAS ARE

One set of main characters in the book, the Incandenza family, require some separate explanation. The Incandenzas are James Orin Incandenza (father), Avril (mother), Orin (oldest son), Hal (middle son), and Mario (youngest son). James–who goes by the nicknames Himself, JOI, The Sad Stork, and The Mad Stork–founded the Enfield Tennis Academy, which serves as one of two main settings in the novel. All three of his sons have been a part of the E.T.A.; Orin has already graduated but did not follow his tennis career through, instead opting to become an NFL punter; Hal and Mario are still enrolled at the E.T.A., Hal as a highly-ranked player and Mario as a jack-of-all-trades-type A/V helper and assistant at the academy. Mario’s Macrocephaly (i.e.-a deformity in which his head is abnormally large) prevents him from playing tennis and his presence in the book is, in some ways, like Prince Myshkin in The Idiot, though not anywhere near as tragic or wraught with situations in which his kind-heartedness ultimately results in the people around him being ensnared in larger and more complex problems. Other than that, though, they’re practically identical…

Himself is also an avant-garde filmmaker and his works include such titles as Fun With Teeth, Various Small Flames, The Machine In The Ghost: Annular Holography For Fun And Prophet, The American Century As Seen Through A Brick, Blood Sister: One Tough Nun, and Baby Pictures Of Famous Dictators. Himself also created Infinite Jest, which, when viewed, causes the viewer to only want to watch the movie over and over again. James Incandenza eventually commits suicide (in The Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar) by rigging his microwave so that he’s allowed put his head in it while it’s running.

Avril–also known as The Moms–is a Canadian-born woman who, along with her stepbrother Charles Tavis, run E.T.A. after Himself’s suicide. Avril seems to be the only person in the family who can communicate effectively with everyone but ultimately, like the rest of the family, is detached. The kids seem comfortable talking to her (mostly because Himself is normally detached when he’s not drinking but then becomes weirder to be around when he is drinking) and, because of her strict grammatical usage, the scenes involving her interacting with anyone are usually fun to read but you still ultimately feel cold when you think about how she interacts with people. She is intelligent and to-the-point but she also seems devoid of exuberance. Avril is also having an affair with John “Not Related” Wayne^[7], one of the top-ranked tennis players at E.T.A.

Orin is kind of the de facto stenographer of the book as it pertains to the history of the Incandenza family. For whatever reason, he seems to be the only one of the three sons who remembers most of his childhood and growing up w/ the Moms and Himself. Throughout the book, Orin reminds Hal of things that happened in their lives. Orin is also the only person in the book who wasn’t on good terms w/ the Moms and Himself. Before Himself committed suicide, Orin’s relationship with his father was strained when Orin started to date Joelle Van Dyne (a.k.a. The Prettiest Girl of All Time, a.k.a. P.G.O.A.T.), the woman who Himself would eventually start to use in his movies and who is prominently featured in the craze-inducing Infinite Jest.

Hal is the first Incandenza we meet as the book starts off with him and Charles Tavis and E.T.A. coach Aubrey deLint at a university in Arizona, interviewing with a couple of Deans regarding Hal’s possible acceptance into this universtity via a tennis scholarship. Hal is the psuedo-protoganist of the novel in that he is a central character but his very essence is untrustworthy because he can’t seem to remember anything about his childhood and, when a majority of the scenes that take place at E.T.A., Hal usually becomes a background character to Ortho “The Darkness” Stice, Michael Pemulis, Trevor “The Axhandle” Axford, and the other E.T.A. students. A fascinating side to Hal, though, is that he enjoys smoking pot, but he’s mostly addicted to the secrecy of smoking pot more than the actual lighting up and inhaling of pot. He goes to semi-ridiculous lengths to step aside from his friends, pack the weed and numerous toiletries (to conceal all evidence) along for the journey, go to his secret spot, and then, finally, smokes pot. Hal kind of represents the type of person who has no real discernible idea who he is or what his identity is. The fact that he goes through such laborious steps just to smoke pot (and, that he doesn’t consistently crave it like a normal addict would) seems indicative of someone who is, at the end of the day, trying like mad to figure out who he is but, ultimately, suppressing the desire to like actually go down the road of self-discovery.

Mario may or may not be C.T.’s son and not Himself’s, neither possibility is ever concretely verified though. When Himself became a film auteur, Mario followed him around and helped him out in every possible capacity that was asked of or volunteered. Himself was very fascinated with technology behind and manipulation of lenses and rasters and the effects that could be applied to both. Consequently, Mario became interested in many of the same things that Himself did with film. Mario even did a re-creation of a Himself film about the O.N.A.N. government, except Mario used puppets instead of actors, which is played every Interdependence Day^[8] at the E.T.A.

So, on the surface, the very idea of the Wheelchair Assassins is absurd. If they want to get back at their government why don’t they just revolt against them? Their main problem is with Alberta, the home of pre-O.N.A.N. government in Canada, why not just focus on them? Why try to bring everyone down, Americans included? Besides searching for the master copy of Infinite Jest, the A.F.R. also engage in such things like erecting temporary road-length mirrors along certain New New England interstates so that the drivers wouldn’t realize until the very last minute that they were driving off the road and to their deaths. Why is there a consumption of time and energy even amongst nihilists?

Infinite Jest has more questions than definitive answers, unfortunately. Or maybe not unfortunately. For all of the frustration that the novel can lay on your lap^[9], it is ultimately something that can probably best be described as awe-inspiring. “Mental workout” was the term I used to try to explain to a co-worker when trying to sum up this book succinctly. When I finished the book I needed at least twenty four hours to digest the ending, as I was becoming afraid that I had missed every point leading up to it. The following day at work I asked a co-worker who had read the book a few years ago if what I thought the book ultimately meant was in any way similar to how he thought of the book and how it ended and here is how the conversation went:

‘Q.’
‘Oh, man… it’s been like four years since I’ve read it.’
‘Q.’
[Long pause]
‘Yes, I think so… Yes, I remember that now.’
‘Q.’
[Rolls finger through his hair, pauses]
‘No, I think you’re right. I totally didn’t see the ending coming either.’

So, at the end of the day, is this book worth reading? I honestly have no clue. I completely understand those who are completely mesmerized by it and I would completely understand those who would either give up after 100 pages or, upon completion of reading it, launch into the angriest of diatribes bemoaning the time wasted upon this Piece of Crap. I fall into the Mesmerized category. This is a book that will abstractly always haunt me because it threw me off so many different tracks and I was never able to finger exactly which direction the book was going to go into. I’m totally confident that I will need to re-read this book at least 3 more times before I die so that I can chip away and chip away at its meaning and one day Get It completely. This may be the irony in all of this, considering the title of the book and of the Entertainment in the book (though I don’t think I’ll ever wind up like the medical attaché). I will leave you with three things to chew on w/r/t to this novel and to David Foster Wallace in general.

First, in the foreword to the edition that I bought that was written by Dave Eggers, Eggers ends his foreword with the following sentence: “So he [Wallace] is normal, and regular, and ordinary, and this is his extraordinary, and irregular, and not-normal achievement, a thing that will outlast him and you and me, but will help future people understand us–how we felt, how we lived, what we gave to each other and why.”

Second, just read this excerpt from the novel itself and parse it and soak it in: “[Himself's movie] The American Century As Seen Through A Brick‘s main and famous key image is of a piano-string vibrating–a high D, it looks like–vibrating, and making a very sweet unadorned solo sound indeed, and then a little thumb comes into the frame, a blunt moist pale and yet dingy thumb, with disreputable stuff crusted in one of the nail-corners, small and unlined, clearly an infantile thumb, and as it touches the piano string the high sweet sound immediately dies. And the silence that follows is excruciating. Later in the film, after much mordant and didactic panoramic brick-following, we’re back at the piano-string, and the thumb is removed, and the high sweet sound recommences, extremely pure and solo, and yet now somehow, as the volume increases, now with something rotten about it underneath, there’s something sick-sweet and overripe and potentially putrid about the one clear high D as its volume increases and increases, the sound getting purer and louder and more dysphoric until after a surprisingly few seconds we find ourselves right in the middle of the pure undampered sound longing and even maybe praying for the return of the natal thumb, to shut it up.“

Finally, for as long as this review is, it has not really scratched the surface of what Infinite Jest means nor contains. I have not really even touched on any of the scenes regarding abuse and drug addiction^[10]. But if you’ve made it this far along without running for the hills, you may be game for trying to tackle David Foster Wallace’s writing. If not Infinite Jest then perhaps his non-fiction essays and articles. The next review on this site will be his 1997 compilation A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.

[1] One of my favorite excerpts from this essay, which is titled “Big Red Sun,” and which perfectly sums up Wallace’s adept ability and describing something objectively yet humorously is:

“The adult industry is vulgar. Would anyone disagree? One of the AVN Awards’ categories is “Best Anal Themed Feature“; another is “Best Overall Marketing Campaign-Company Image.” Irresistible, a 1983 winner in several categories, has been spelled Irresistable in Adult Video News for fifteen straight years. The industry’s not only vulgar, it’s predictably vulgar. All the clichés are true. The typical porn producer really is the ugly little man with a bad toupee and a pinkie-ring the size of a Rolaids. The typical porn director really is the guy who uses the word class as a noun to mean refinement. The typical porn starlet really is the lady in Lycra eveningwear with tattoos all down her arms who’s both smoking and chewing gum while telling journalists how grateful she is to Wadcutter Productions Ltd. for footing her breast-enlargement bill. And meaning it. The whole AVN Awards weekend comprises what Mr. Dick Filth calls an Irony-Free Zone.

“But of course we should keep in mind that vulgar has many dictionary definitions and that only a couple of these have to do w/ lewdness or bad taste. At root, vulgar just means popular on a mass scale. It is the semantic opposite of pretentious or snobby. It is humility with a comb-over. It is Nielsen ratings and Barnum’s axiom and the real bottom line. It is big, big business.”