On Infinite Jest
"Good literature makes your head throb heartlike."
That is the single line that I kept reflecting on throughout my reading of Infinite Jest. A very long novel that I have picked up and given up on numerous times over the past several years. I always wanted to read and finish Infinite Jest, which is already a somewhat embarrassing idea to admit. That you wish you could complete a book that didn't grab your interest may say more about your false attempts at grandiosity and shows of intelligence than actual enjoyment derived from the book.
It is hard to remember when I first heard of David Foster Wallace, but around my early college years, I became enamored with reading quintessential modern classics, or recent works that had received much acclaim. More honestly, I became enamored with the appearance of reading the aforementioned classics. DFW thankfully wrote many essays during his life, and I was able to quench my thirst for high-brow literature through his short non-fiction pieces and still feel like a brainiac. His trademark bandana style made him the all-time coolest in terms of literary assholes that had managed to grasp the lofty expectations placed on them.
I can actually make it even more embarrassing. I, on at least two occasions, lied by telling people that I had not only read Infinite Jest but went as far as saying I "loved" the novel! One of the instances was actually a feeble attempt at impressing someone. Until, naturally, I was asked what the book was about. At the time, I had read about 100 pages of the over 1000-page tomb several years past, and even at the time I was left with more "what the fuck is this" rather than any insight if what I read was good, bad, or interesting. It was simply a long book with a lot of praise written by a troubled man that I could list on my intellectual resume. Damn right, those 100 pages were listed on my resume, but how was I to say I loved the first 100 pages of a book?
So I stammered and said it was about addiction. Notably, only really recapping a very brief portion of the book that features a man waiting for a drug dealer. Ken Erdedy is in a cycle of addiction, desperately wanting to stop smoking marijuana. He has to buy new paraphernalia each time he smokes, as he goes on weekend-long binges and then throws everything away afterward. Ken doesn't even enjoy smoking any longer, primarily due to his craving to consume an entire 200g of marijuana, or as Ken estimates about 200-300 bong hits per day before the weekend ends and he has to go back to working life. Ken's story ends with him torn with indecision between answering a phone from a colleague and answering the door for the presumable drug dealer.
Beyond that, I had no clue what the book was about. And that short riff only took up about 8 pages in Infinite Jest, only for Ken to never show up again. Obviously, the joke was on me as I was limited to a defense that the book was "very dense" (or something similarly pretentious). Honestly, consider the brief synopsis to follow as an exercise to store this into memory.
Even when I finally returned to finish the novel a few months ago, there was no Hal Incandenza, the story's main protagonist, in my recollection. Until re-reading the first tenth of the book, I forgot about the titular videotape that is so damn good it causes viewers to feel so emotionally connected to it that they fail to want for anything else and continue to waste away sitting in front of the film.
Hal's father, James Incandenza, was an avant-garde filmmaker/director of a tennis academy that took his life via microwave oven before most of the book. James Incandenza created many films that were neither critically nor commercially successful, and his biography is entirely contained in the novel's footnotes. Here's one of my favorite examples:
"The Joke" - B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Audience as reflected cast; 35 mm x 2 cameras; variable-length; black and white; silent. Parody of Hollis Frampton's 'audience-specific events,' two Ikegami EC-35 video cameras in the theater record the 'film's audience and project the resultant raster onto screen - the theater audience watching itself watch itself get the obvious 'joke' and become increasingly self-conscious and uncomfortable and hostile supposedly comprises the film's involuted 'anti-narrative flow. Incadenza'a first truly controversial project, Film & Kartridge Kultcher's Sperber credited it with 'unwittingly sounding the death-knell of post-poststructural film in terms of sheer annoyance.' NON-RECORDED MAGNETIC VIDEO SCREENABLE IN THEATER VENUE ONLY, NOW UNRELEASED
James Incandenza also directed the aforementioned eponymous film called Infinite Jest, labeled by most only as "the Entertainment" and never released for consumption. That MacGuffin – one of a movie creating a physical dependency of its viewers, drives the main narrative and serves as the closest semblance of resolution the reader can hope to glean from the sprawling work of fiction.
In DFW's novel, the President of the U.S. is a presciently written character similar to Donald Trump, only if he possibly had a room full of advisors just like himself. President Johnny Gentle strikes a deal with Canada to become President of a more prominent Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N.), but only if Canada accepts a portion of the Northwest U.S. that has become toxic from heavy pollution. A rogue group of Canadians (Quebecois Separatists) learn of the film Infinite Jest and plan to use it to infect the U.S. to gain revenge and independence. The Canadian terrorists, or Assassins Fateuils Rolents (wheelchair assassins), all lost their legs in a La Culte du Prochain Train – a game in which four Canadians wait, standing before a train track and attempt to win by jumping to the other side of the track as close as possible before the oncoming train passes.
The Assassins Fateuils Rolents attempt to infiltrate the Incandenza family to find a copy of Infinite Jest. In the aftermath of the patriarch filmmaker's death, they are left to investigate his three sons and widowed wife: Hal, his brothers Mario and Orin, and his mother, Avril. Like Catch-22, which I was frequently reminded of while reading with similar humor, writing, and narrative style -- this book shines with strange characters. The depth that 1000 pages allow for DFW to explore a range from hilarious hysterics to valleys of despair in a very natural manner – the characters are all incredibly exaggerated but always remain true.
Take Orin Incandenza for instance, oldest Incandenza brother. After a successful youth tennis career that he parlayed into a Boston University scholarship offer, he renounced the sport and walked on as a punter for B.U. He ends up becoming the best punter in the history of the N.F.L. and develops an unhealthy sex addiction in which he cannot receive any pleasure and views the women he sleeps with as "subjects." He becomes increasingly close to the main narrative as the novel continues, notably near the end of the book. Throughout, he appears deeply dishonest but also familial and (to some degree) considerate. It felt entirely earned when I grasped Orin's prominent role in the inner workings of the narrative in the last few pages.
A separate main saga intertwines the Incandenza and Canadian Separatist tales about Don Gately, a former drug addict that staffs a halfway house. This storyline probably confuses some – I was confused – but absolutely congeals itself in the end with the connection between Orin and the P.G.O.A.T. (prettiest girl of all time), who conceals her beauty with a veil. The sections on Gately, drugs, addiction, and recovery take on bounds of weight with the knowledge of how DFW passed, hanging himself from a rafter after a year without taking his anti-depressants, along with years of use of marijuana and other drugs.
DFW writes a lot about drugs throughout the novel, including many encyclopedic footnotes on various recreational drugs. Drug use and recovery play essential roles in both DFW's life and nearly every character in Infinite Jest. In 1989, DFW spent time in a hospital after a suicide attempt following years of alcohol and marijuana addiction (his terms) and then spent time at Granada House, a halfway house for addicts. The access to the interior lives of recovering addicts gives the Gately sections a notable feel of authenticity. The location, residents, and halfway house rules such as forgoing to a higher power and a requirement to find low-level work are derived from the time he spent at Granada House. Even Don Gately himself was drafted after a Granada House supervisor.
"At the end of 1989, David Foster Wallace was admitted to McLean Hospital, the psychiatric hospital associated with Harvard University, for substance addiction. He was twenty-seven years old and increasingly desperate for help. He had already experienced literary fame with his college novel, "The Broom of the System," and sunk into obscurity with his postmodern short-story cabinet of wonders, "Girl with Curious Hair" (twenty-two hundred copies sold in hardcover). His most recent stop, as a graduate student in philosophy at Harvard, had lasted only a few weeks. His private life was hardly less uneven. He had attempted suicide the year before, in his family home, and had also gone from being a marijuana addict to an alcoholic, mostly drinking alone and in front of the television. Most dreadfully, he felt that he could no longer write well. He was unsure whether the problem was lack of focus, lack of material, or a lack of ambition. Granada House was to be the improbable solution to this problem, altering his approach to his work and putting him on the road to producing, in remarkably short order, his masterpiece, "Infinite Jest."
Between all the main narratives (there are many other side-narratives), the only one that does not seem overly self-referential is that of the tape Infinite Jest and O.N.A.N. politics which, for the most part, seem to mostly aid in pushing the narrative forward and magnify the larger points on creative work and drug use (even Infinite Jest the tape acts as a drug). The Tennis Academy and Halfway house storylines feel personal and raw in hindsight, but I wonder if readers were able to grasp the role tennis and drugs played in DFW's life when Infinite Jest was released in 1996. The authenticity of DFW shines through every page and really might be the single most crucial factor for the success the novel had on me personally.
DFW was a great satirist and possibly a really shitty human being. Credible accusations came out after he passed related to stalking and abusing author Mary Karr, charges that have been corroborated by DFW's biographer. I haven't read his biography yet, but Mary Karr's retelling is bad enough. Infinite Jest and DFW already have a poor reputation as favorites of misogynistic younger men. I can't speak on DFW, but Infinite Jest does have some misogyny. The two main female characters, Avril Incandanza and Joelle Van Dyne, are written through the lens of male characters and have very stereotypical negative female characterizations. I wouldn't say they're the most misogynistically written female characters (probably no worse than Stephen King) and DFW does have an "out" here, as it could easily be read that the characters within the novel are all flawed, and many sexist. Notably, Joelle has many redeeming moments, but of a book with nearly entirely male characters, they were by far the weakest, with little reflection for either beyond their impact on the males.
Infinite Jest has a problem with gender and sex and is a male-centered story. It's a bit racist as well (holy shit, the awful Black dialogue). I do disagree with the detractors on whether that makes the novel bad, while at the same time acknowledging that women do not largely enjoy the novel for good reasons. As a whole, I thought Infinite Jest was a great read. The vocabulary is incredibly diverse, the experiences at times painfully self-referential, and the humor is second to only maybe Catch-22 -- I believe this is one of the funniest novels of all time. The characters of Infinite Jest are incredibly flawed, just like their progenitor. And like that progenitor, they predominantly suffer from drug addiction and mental illness. You may not like Infinite Jest, but there is a lot to learn from that amount of satirized introspection.