Mmmyellow. Happy In(ter)dependence Day. E Unibus Pluram, and so forth. Greetings and welcome to the first online meeting of the Infinite Jest Online Appreciation Society and/or Book Club.

The IJOASa/oBC will be a loosely-constructed fellowship of people posting semi-regular updates to their blogs containing their notes about the novel, including observations, theories, questions, problems, and questions about the book, with links to online reading resources and to each others’ blogs, Tumblrs, Twitters, Flickrs, Bebos, BoingBlurgs, TopChefs, BarackObamas, and Zeitgeistrs.

THE NATURE OF THE PROJECT

For my own part, my posts will take the form of notes I’ve taken during this and previous readings of the novel. This time around I hope to focus on the themes and emotional resonance the book has for me, moreso than its cleverness or plot contortions, although there’ll inevitably be ample discussion of that, too.

Contrary to the buzz the novel received (and continues to receive) and David Foster Wallace’s earned reputation as a really smart smartass, Infinite Jest is at its heart a profoundly sad book. Wallace once said that when he began writing Infinite Jest his goal, having written some absurdly comic stories and his first novel, was to plot a different emotive course with nobler ambitions:

I wanted to do something sad. I think it’s a very sad time in America and it has something to do with entertainment. It’s not TV’s fault, it’s not [Hollywood’s] fault, and it’s not the Net’s fault. It’s our fault. We’re choosing this. We are choosing to spend more time sneering at hype machines, [while still] being enmeshed in them, than we are living.

My secret pretension … I mean, every writer wants his book to change the world, but I guess I would like to know if the book moved people. I assume that the future the book talks about, while it might be amusing, wouldn’t be a fun future to live in. I think it would be nice if the book could maybe make people think about some of the choices we are making, about what we pay attention to and give power to, so maybe the future won’t be quite that … glittery but cold.

I think he’s succeeded in “do[ing] something sad,” though that tends to get lost in the noise. And don’t get me wrong; there are still some really fucking hilarious things in this book.

SECONDARY SOURCES

In my posts I’ll be making some references to secondary and tertiary sources. These include the extensive discussions, essays, dissertations, and compendia archived at the Infinite Jest section of The Howling Fantods—an excellent resource for me the first time I read the book and in the decade since.

In the print realm, there’s Stephen Burn’s excellent reader’s guide, part of the Continuum Contemporaries series. It’s a slim volume that packs in a surprising amount of analysis. I had this one at my side the last two times I read the novel. It’s probably best for second (or more)-time readers who are already familiar with the basic plot, and Burn is a genius when it comes to unpacking themes and pointing out Lost-ish coincidences (the French significance of Jim and Avril’s initials [AMI and JOI], the importance of November 8, nifty mythological parallels like Gately=Heracles/Marathe=Peracles) and the masterful ways he traces the dissemination of the Samizdat and successfully maps out the book’s chronology.

To the extend that time and stamina allow, I’ll try and dig up and refer to some of the articles and critical essays that Burn cites toward the end of his book, and most of which I’ve never read before. (I’m particularly interested in Tom LeClair’s “Prodigious Fiction of Powers, Vollman, and Wallace”, Frank Louis Cioffi’s “‘An Anguish Become Thing’”, and Timothy Jacobs’ “American Touchstone.”)

This time around, I also have Greg Carlisle’s Elegant Complexity, published last year. This one is a scene-by-scene analysis, and as such, is over 500 pages long. Much of it is merely summative, and therefore ideal for the first-time reader, but also contains some ideas I hadn’t yet considered. Its main contributions are probably 1) the nifty map of the ETA grounds, rendered by Kyle Ware and based one what must have been exhaustive and exhausting study of the text’s references to the geography and layout of the academy; 2) Carlisle’s formulations of the novel’s plot and themes into Sierpinski Triangle, a fractal that Wallace himself has said inspired the novel’s structure; and 3) Carlisle’s ordering of the novel into roughly equal units, chapters, and section—no mean feat for a book with no table of contents and seemingly (but not actually) capricious use of chapter titles and section breaks, and incredibly useful for breaking the book down into more digestible chunks and citing scenes during discussion:

I. Chs. 1-15: main text pp. 3-181 and endnotes 1-59
II. Chs. 1-21: pp. 181-321 and notes 60-119
III. Chs. 22-24: pp. 321-489 and notes 120-207
IV. Chs. 25-26: pp. 489-619 and notes 208-256
V. Ch. 27: pp. 620-808 and notes 257-336
VI. Ch. 28: pp. 809-981 and notes 337-388

Even just glancing at this, I can see how elegant Carlisle’s breakdown is, and it reinforces a few things I’ve always believed about the novel’s structure: the almost-impossible-to-overstate importance of p. 489, for example, or that the novel really does wind down in two extremely long (about 200 pages each) chapters. My own citations will probably still be primarily page numbers, but I’ll make references to Carlisle’s breakdown where appropriate.

I’d be happy to lend either Carlisle or Burn to any book club members who are curious, except that I’m pretty sure there are approximately zero members residing in the same city as I am for the duration of the club.

Speaking of which:

THE PARTICIPANTS

Joining me in the endeavor will be a handful of friends and colleagues who have committed, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, to discussing the book via email and on their blogs. This distinguished array includes but is not limited to Joe, Aden (Aden: you need to give me your blog address. Also, you need to start a blog), Andrew, Dan, Toby, Sonya, Laura, Maria, and of course Neil:

From: Neil
Subject: theyearofglad
Date: June 23, 2008 1:26:48 PM CDT
To: Jake

attached is my homework assignment. I don’t know if you’re giving extra credit for handing in things in early. if you want, you can correct my essay in red pen and email a scan back to me. or not. whatever.

someday you might be an English teacher and I assume you would make some effort to teach on this book. just thought it would be fun to see what you thought was important and what you feel I should be getting out of this reading.

(click to enlarge)

From: Jake
Re: theyearofglad
Date: June 23, 2008 11:48:12 AM PDT
To: Neil

I started reading the first chapter this morning, and it was like re-watching a really great Simpsons episode. A great, dystopian, 1100-page Simpsons episode.

Your essay is brilliant, and exactly the kind of work I like to see from my students. A++++ (”Most institutions do not even have grades of A with multiple pluses after it.”) plus extra credit for turning it in early.

I’ll pass it along to Jill Allen.

(click to enlarge)

From: Neil
Subject: Re: theyearofglad
Date: June 23, 2008 1:56:48 PM CDT
To: Jake

cool. my parents say they’ll give me $5 for every “A” I get this semester. I’m saving up for a boombox that can record music from CDs.

SPOILERS

I am going to try my darnedest to avoid revealing spoilers, making as few references as possible to things in the novel that haven’t happened yet. This will be more difficult than it sounds since, given the book’s nonlinear nature, it’s hard to tell what’s a spoiler and what isn’t, or what future information would truly spoil a first-time reader’s enjoyment of the novel. But I’ll try to keep it to a minimum all the same, or at least give adequate warning (something along the lines of [SPOILER? ALERT] or [S?A]) when I’m about to reveal something that might be construed as a spoiler.

SO, LET’S GET STARTED, SHALL WE?

My first round of notes covers the first 49 pages, or the first six chapters in Carlisle’s formulation. I hope to tackle bigger chunks in future posts, simply because if I don’t, this will take fucking forever. (Do the maths.)

Chapter 1: pp 1-17 This opening chapter introduces us to Hal, of course. It’s the Year of Glad—as in trash bags, as in the things we put waste into. Waste (especially shit, often contained by the Depends Adult Undergarment) being one of the book’s big themes.

“I am in here,” Hal says on the first page. Not just in the room, but in his body. This is more than a statement of the obvious; it’s a plea to be heard, by his interlocutors and perhaps by his father. It’s also a reassurance that, contrary to all outward signs, Hal is sentient, just like another popular fictional character named Hal or, rather, HAL.

On p. 11 we get the flashback to Hal eating the mold, one possible explanation for his freakout in the admissions interview during this chapter’s main action. About 900 pages later we’ll learn that around the same time Hal ate the mold, Gately fully gave into Substances and dropped out of high school.

Then of course at the end of this chapter there’s the reference to digging up the head of Hal’s father (James, or Jim, or JOI, or Himself), one of many overt references to Hamlet. Not to mention Hal shares a name with another Shakespeare character.

Heads, both literal and figurative, are a recurring motif. Characters are catapulted to greatness by their own genius, which ends up being their undoing. People (JOI, literally) and institutions (Enfield Tennis Acadmy, figuratively) are decapitated. Even the ground on which ETA sits was once a hill until its stop was shaved off to build the academy. Gately later speaks of wanting to be brainwashed; of wanting his brain literally washed.

Chapter 2: pp 18-27 The scenes with the addicts are by far my favorites in this book, and the ones I’ll probably be reading closest this time around. Only 18 pages into the novel we get a very real, harrowing portrait of someone in the grip of addiction. This scene is not immediately accessible, owing mostly to its extreme interiority and also to the big blocks of dialogue-free text—some of the paragraphs run on for pages—but on the whole it’s a pretty coherent picture of the incoherence that addicts might experience in moments of desperation.

The bug in/on Erdedy’s steel shelf is the first of many appearances by insects, with some clear analogies between Erdedy and the insect and also between the insect and Erdedy’s addiction.

Erdedy is a classic portrait of the “thinking addict,” and will figure into later scenes that explore the unique perils that addiction presents the intellectual: there’s the AA slogan that “your best thinking got you here” (i.e. into addiction); academics and others who make their living with their brains (like James Incandenza) nearly go mad when they find they can’t bring their intellectual firepower to bear on a problem (addiction) that transcends the cerebral realm. Erdedy’s thought-paralysis is just a glimpse of this paradox.

The chapter ends in a moment Carlisle describes as “chaotic stasis” (35), borrowing a term from Wallace (IJ 996), meant to underscore the cripplingly paralytic indecision of the drug (especially pot) addict. But it’s also kind of slapstick: I picture Erdedy being stuck between the door and the phone, equidistant from each, unable to get to either, in a kind of Wile E. Coyote tableau of futility. Slapstick and physical hyperbole are employed throughout this novel, often incongruously within otherwise grave circumstances, as if to undercut the gravitas and amp up the macabre.

Chapter 3: pp 27-31 Readers of DFW’s first novel, The Broom of the System, know how much the man loves his unattributed dialogues. This is as good a place to mention this as any: Wallace’s approach to quotations is the inverse of the standard American formatting; i.e. he uses single quote marks for dialogue and double-quotes for quotations within quotations. I’ve always attributed this to his idiosyncracies, a little quirk or homage to the British was of doing things, like the way he formats his dates (e.g. 3 July 2008). But another forehead-slappingly obvious explanation, which nonethless didn’t occur to me until I read it in Carlisle just last week, is that the quote marks are set up this way because the entire novel is being narrated by some larger, external, super-omniscient narrator. This, of course, introduces even more textual uncertainty and narrative unreliability than the ample instances throughout the work. Goddamn it.

As the heading clearly states, this scene takes place on April 1, exactly five years to the day before Himself and the microwave. April Fools Day is already a kind of sinister holiday (at least, I’ve always thought so) and a lot of heinous shit goes down on that date in many of the novel’s years—April is an extremely significant (and cruel) month in the world of Infinite Jest (second only to November, when most of the main action occurs). So of course the Incandenza family’s matriarch would be named Avril.

This chapter gives us more insight into Hal’s prodigious intellectual gifts; at age ten, those talents are still pretty unrefined and he presents as a snot-nosed brat.

Fathers and Sons could almost be subtitle for this book, as countless generational legacies can be traced between its male characters. Himself’s ghost obviously looms large over Hal’s family and the world of ETA. The Incandenza family suffers from a patrilineal curse of silence: Himself resented his detached, silent father, whose own father was absent from all but the final and most diastrous of his son’s tennis matches. Himself himself presides over a prodigious filmic ouevre (”all this light and noise” [31]), expressing himself in myriad ways, only to have a son who he claims will not speak to him, to have “spawn[ed] the same silence.”

SPOILER? ALERT Himself’s babbling at the top of p. 31 about the grapite compound in his own cerebrum is pretty opaque, but one theory about the location of the Samizdat’s master copy is that Himself had it implanted in his skull before he demapped himself, and that Hal and Gately are digging it up under the coercion of the AFR (with J[NR]W working as an agent for same) in Hal’s flashback at the book’s literal beginning/temporal end. A corollary to this theory is that Himself had an antidote to the Samizdat implanted in his skull instead of or in addition to the master copy, and that Hal and Gately are working for Steeply/ONAN, racing to obtain an antidote before the AFR can stop them. This theory doesn’t explain why J(NR)W would be there, though neither does the other one, entirely, really.

Chapter 4: 32-33 This is a neat little scene that introduces Mario and the world of the dorm room he and Hal share, where the brothers Incandenza have all their important conversations (Hal and Mario in person; Hal and Orin on the phone).

But it’s also a foreboding scene when one considers all of the sinister thing it foreshadows. It takes place in May, just a little over a month after April Fool’s Day and the first known dissemination of the Samizdat into the population.

SPOILER? ALERT Orin’s phone call to Hal, in addition to containing a clever reference to a Beatles lyric, might be Orin’s way of warning Hal that the dissemination has begun, and that Orin had something to do with it. After Hal says, “I don’t mind. I could wait forever,” the next line in the lyrics to “I Want to Tell You,” unspoken by Hal, is “I’ve got time.” Could Orin’s next line of dialogue, “That’s what you think,” be a response to this unspoken part of the lyric? That Hal doesn’t have that much time at all before—well, before what?

The chapter ends with Hal telling Mario that Orin is “no one you know, I don’t think,” hinting at the familial strain that Mario represents for Orin, since he (Mario) might be a the product of one of Avril’s infidelities.

Chapter 5: pp 33-37 Another eerie chapter, considering what even the first-time reader can figure out is probably going to happen to the medical attaché. His political importance and relevance to the Incandenza family will become apparent later on, but at first blush this is another pretty dense chapter that hurls a lot of information at the reader. For now, let’s just consider that “the medical attaché’s particular expertise is the maxillofacial consequences of imbalance in intestinal flora” (33), and that Hal once ate some mold and, at least during the U of A admissions interview, apparently loses control of his maxillofacial muscles that control his facial expressions. Could this be part of the reason for Avril’s apparent link to the attaché?

I also like how the padded cartridge mailers so strongly remind one of the red envelopes of Netflix, which hadn’t been invented back when DFW was writing this.

This is as apt a moment as any to mention the paradoxical nature of the technology in Infinite Jest. The difficult task before any writer of speculative fiction is to accurately but interestingly predict what technology and society in general will be like at the point in future history where s/he has set the story. The main action of Infinite Jest takes place during an undetermined (but easily determinable) point in the early twenty-first century, a point at which we are now living, but about which DFW was speculating way back in 1992-1995, when he was working on this novel.

Now, this is purely speculative (ha ha) but I would assume that DFW was/is savvy enough about technology to predict, even in 1992, that the disk-based data-storage and -retrieval systems so prevalent throughout late-20th-century computing would eventually give way to more streamlined and less tangible methods of media storage, as hard drives got bigger and online connection speeds got faster. For example, no one carries floppy discs around anymore; we can now store most if not all of our documents, apps, music, movies, etc. on our computers’ hard drives with plenty of room to spare. Should we have to transmit some data, we can send it via wireless signals or high-speed network connections.

So why, in the hi-tech future where Infinite Jest takes place, are people still fussing with cartridges and floppy discs? I refuse to believe that DFW inserted these anachronisms due to sloppiness or ignorance about technological trends. I prefer to think of them as quaint little touches that enhance the portrayal of the characters using these technologies, most notably with clumsy Otis P. Lord’s rolling cart of monitors and floppy discs (which becomes integral to the plot developments during its deployment).

Indeed, while DFW is very scientifically exact about nearly every technological aspect of this novel, from optics to annulation to computing and everything in between, I think he purposefully allows this science to be elastic and full of gaps. I am not a futurist or a computer scientist—or even remotely scientifically inclined, for that matter—so I’m not really qualified to debate the technical validity of the technologies in this novel. But perhaps some of my more knowledgeable peers could?

So anyway, that’s the first appearance of the medical attaché.

Chapter 5: pp 37-38 This chapter is difficult for a number of reasons. First of all, it introduces several new characters, with virtually no context or prefatory information. It is a monologue, told from a perspective other than the narrator(s) we’ve heard from so far. Finally, it is written in a vernacular, presumably a black vernacular. This is a major problem for some readers, who lament that DFW would try to approximate the vernacular of a culture from which he’s so far removed. Being situated very ethnically and culturally close to DFW, I can’t help but cringe a little and worry that this prose experiment on his part risks becoming a caricature, like some mediocre stand-up comedian’s mid-90s riff on Ebonics. I’m really not qualified to say how “authentic” his approximation is here, and I vacillate between giving him the benefit of the doubt—assuming he did his linguistic/cultural-anthropological homework just as thoroughly as he researched the rest of the novel—and wondering if this is the rare example of DFW being out of his depth, succumbing to the kind of white-academic cluelessness to which he cops so evocatively in his “Tense Present” essay for Harper’s five years later.

Anyhoo, this chapter takes place in the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, so it’s temporally removed from the main action. Wardine, Roy Tony, and Clenette (the chapter’s narrator) will become integral to the book’s plot later.

Chapter 5: pp 38-39 The sad tale of Bruce Green and Mildred Bonk. Green’s importance to the narrative will also become apparent later, but here I think this is a nice little vignette, another hint, along with Clenette’s monologue, at the “other half” of the novel’s characters: the ruined, drug-addicted, disenfranchised Bostonians who contrast the upper-class, privileged, well-educated, but no-less-addicted-or-fucked-up denizens of ETA, the AFR, the OSS, and ONAN’s government.

It’s not immediately apparent why these three narratives—the attaché, Clenette/Wardine, and Green/Bonk—are folded into the same chapter. But then Carlisle went and blew my mind with the forehead-slappingly obvious that “later in the novel, a female character will appear who is veiled like theh attaché’s wife, who has scarred flesh like Wardine, and who is fatally pretty and a drug-user like Mildred Bonk” (45)

Chapter 6: pp 39-42 The first of several wonderfully rendered dialogues between Hal and Mario. The flagpole analogy that ends the chapter is particularly apropos for Avril, being as tall as she is. Himself was also tall, but tended to slouch, while Avril carries herself upright, a model of fortitude surrounded by chaos.

Between this section and the next one we check back in with the Medical Attaché, who is “still watching the unlabelled entertainment cartridge” (42).

Chapter 6: pp 42-49 Our introduction to Orin. God, do I love Orin, precisely for how miserable he is. I feel like Orin is the conduit for DFW’s most direct and abject writing about just how miserable an attractive, well-educated member of the upper class can be. He’s also one of the few characters who isn’t addicted to some kind of chemical Substance, but he has other addictions, as we will see.

Note the allusion to Hamlet when “a bird had all of a sudden fallen into the Jacuzzi” (44) echoing Hamlet’s line in Act V, Scene 2: “Not a whit, we defy augury: there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow” (219-220). So, what is this falling bird auguring?

Also, Orin’s “special conscious horror” (45) about roaches will come into play later in the novel, in a major way. Consider the deployment of a person’s worst fears in order to torture that person, as in the CBC documentary that Orin’s developmental-psychology-grad-student Subject is watching, which documentary bears some resemblance to the JOI film The Man Who Began to Suspect He Was Made of Glass (989). Nearly all of the novel’s characters suffer from some paranoia, some of it fully justified, much of it exploited by adversaries who learn their “special conscious horror[s].”

Another motif is masks: Halloween masks, masks worn as legitimate disguises, and more metaphorical or psychological masks donned by various characters. Masks are, quite literally, faces superimposed on other faces, which also describes the Oedipal nightmare that Orin has on pp 46-47. The idea of faces-on-faces dovetails with another motif of maps, specifically maps superimposed on other maps (not for nothing is map a slang term for face in the vernacular of Infinite Jest).

This book, for all its exacting, enyclopedic, and scientific attention to detail, allows for a lot of hyperbole and slapstick, as I’ve already mentioned. It’s also rife with urban legends, the first one being the story on p. 45 of the infants in New Orleans having their eyes attacked by flying roaches, along with the bodies exhumed and transported by the rains and floods in Chalmette LA. This latter story makes a neat and gruesome parallel to the real story of the real Enfield MA, which in 1939 was intentionally flooded when the Swift River was dammed to create the Quabbin reservoir and provide water to Boston—an operation required the bodies from Enfield’s graveyards to be exhumed and relocated (Burn 55). This historical detail also mirrors the ONAN Reconfiguration and the development of the Great Concavity, sacrificing most of New England in order to rid the rest of the country of pollution and provide it with renewable energy.

Another fun device DFW employs with what must be impish glee is intentionally mixed metaphors, and this chapter ends with a great one, as Orin considers calling Hal and opening “that whole Pandora’s box of worms.”

So. That’s the end of this chunk. I refuse to believe anyone’s made it this far in my post. If you have, shame on you. Isn’t there a big important book you should be reading instead?