I want to begin the second meeting of the Infinite Jest Online Appreciation Society and/or Book Club with some shout-outs to other IJOASa/oBC members who have already posted some great stuff to their blogs. Maria led the way with a couple entries, including an especially nice one highlighting the poetic qualities of DFW’s prose. Meanwhile Laura has accomplished the impressive hat trick of not only being from Tucson (allowing her to address the novel’s Arizonan settings), but also having attended the same MFA program as DFW, and being half-Canadian. (Which means that if we hear any squeaky wheelchair wheels, we’ll know it’s her. Har har, and so forth.)

Both Dan and Maria have written about encountering the book for the first time and how external circumstances affected their reading experience. I’m interested in this too, since tackling such a big book is inevitably going to impact one’s daily routine, and our memories make certain associations with our favorite books. (For example, I read it for the first time in the UK, and reading this Great American Novel overseas might have had some effect on the way I initially experienced it.)

Finally, I’m pleased to announce that Neil has started up a blog and added his voice to the fray. For some reason it bears a Blogger Content Warning, so I can’t wait to see what kind of licentious material Neil plans on putting up there.

Before I get into my notes on the next chunk of the book, I want to talk about Difficult Books and why we read them. Infinite Jest is undoubtedly a Difficult Book, but I would argue that it’s not unreasonably so. It’s just the right degree of Difficult.

Jonathan Franzen makes a distinction—in an old New Yorker essay called “Mr. Difficult” (abstract only; reprinted in his NF collection How to Be Alone) to which Burn refers on pp. 9-10—between “status” and “contract” novels. Status novels are books by the likes of Joyce, Gaddis, and Musil—books that Franzen feels are difficult for the sake of being difficult, as if their creation was fueled by some kind of authorial contempt for the reader. Contract novels, however, are difficult books that seek a connection with the reader, that reward the reader for sticking with them, that challenge but still respect the reader’s intelligence. Franzen categorizes Infinite Jest as a contract novel, and despite the possibility of bias arising from his being an old buddy of DFW’s, I agree with him (obviously).

Which isn’t to say a person could be blamed for beginning Infinite Jest, only to put it down after fifty or a hundred pages. It’s not an easy book to get into, and its first twenty (or hundred, or two hundred) pages are not immediately accessible.

I’m always interested in the various reasons people are or aren’t successful getting through this book, since for a while back when it was published, and maybe still today, whether or not you bothered with this book (or Underworld or Gravity’s Rainbow or the Recognitions or any of the other Difficult Books) was supposedly a barometer of your position in/on the Fraught State of Contemporary American Literature, not to mention a superficial indicator of your intellectual rigor and willingness to “engage” with a “text” and/or look like an “overserious” “douchebag” on the train in the morning.

I don’t worry too much about those things—I’m pretty confident in my ability to both engage with a text and look like an overserious douchebag in pretty much any context. I read (and re-read) Infinite Jest because it’s fun; it’s almost infinitely (GET IT?) entertaining. I wouldn’t waste my time with a difficult novel if it wasn’t going to be. Entertaining, that is. Despite my English degrees and love of reading, my patience for literature is finite, and I’ve put down a lot of Big Important Books I was supposed to read because people I either respected or feared told me I should. Read them, that is. So despite my best intentions and pretensions toward intellectual rigor, if a book doesn’t grab me right away, it doesn’t stand much of a chance. This is why I still haven’t read any Tolstoy, or made it all the way through Gravity’s Rainbow. When it comes right down to it, I’m a pretty lazy reader. So why have I succeeded in reading Infinite Jest four times when I’ve failed to conquer so many other books?

Like Franzen, I do believe there is a difference between Infinite Jest’s enduring reputation as a contract novel and certain other Big Important Books’ (possibly unfair) reputation as status novels. I heartily subscribe to the minority opinion that Infinite Jest is ultimately more accessible than many books a tenth its size. DFW takes a big, calculated risk by front-loading his novel with extremely scattered, dense material. He’s counting on you to tough it out for the first couple hundred pages, the implicit promise (or contract) being that if you can just do that, you’ll be rewarded. Around the 200th page, the book kind of levels out: nearly all its characters have been introduced, and we’re now revisiting narratives and characters with which we’re already at least glancingly familiar. The chapters get longer, the camera lingers a little longer on each scene, and the rewards begin to manifest themselves. If the book is a loop (and it is) then this is the point where the loop starts feeding back on itself. Or, in the Sierpinski scheme of things, we’re cutting small triangles out of bigger triangles we’ve already seen.

Maybe it begs the Russian-novel approach: i.e., “Please bear with us through these first few hundred pages of extremely dense prose and and unfamiliar locales and surnames with all but the first letter blanked out and two dozen characters with seven-syllable patronymics, and by page 300 or so you’ll be cruising. We promise.” (I don’t know why the voice became first-person plural there. Maybe I’m channeling the collective voice of all great Russian novelists ever, plus DFW.)

A few years ago I was on a long car trip with my brother. I was on my third pass through the book, and he was on his first, and he asked me what kept me coming back to the book, what it was I liked so much about it. You’d think I’d have had an answer to that question rehearsed and ready, but I hemmed and hawed and eventually just said, “It’s got everything.” I think I even raised the book in the air a little, sitting there in the passenger seat, as if its sheer heft were going to somehow prove my point.

But it does have damn near everything: it’s got humor, pathos, violence, romance, sex, ambition, avarice, intrigue, complex human emotions, self- and other-destructive behavior, drugs, alcohol, insightful pop-cultural and political commentary, wordplay, science fiction, science, giant feral hamsters, and tennis. And it address all of these things more artfully than any other book I’ve ever picked up. It does everything I want fiction to do and wish I could do if I ever wrote fiction, and also accomplishes a lot of the things I hope to one day do with nonfiction. It’s limitlessly appealing and, yes, addictive. I keep reading it instead of Proust or Dickens or Eat, Pray, Love because it keeps inviting me back.

So, with that, I give you pp. 49-135.

Before I even get to the chapter that begins on p. 49, I want to back up a little to the end of the previous chapter, on the top of page 49. Orin shaves “with south-to-north strokes, as he was taught.” South-to-north movement recurs in this novel in various ways: Himself fled his native Arizona in adulthood, using “tennis scholarships to finance places just about as far away from the U.S. Southwest as one could get without drowning” (63). And the U.S. sends its waste northward to Canada, as we will soon learn. Also, the cartridge which arrived at the medical attaché’s apartment originated in the southwest, with Orin possibly having something to do with its dissemination. This also mirrors DFW’s real-world trajectory when he moved from Arizona, where he did his MFA, to Harvard, where he did some PhD work in philosophy.

Anyway.

pp. 49-55. Another important introductory chapter re: Hal. This is the first we see of his pot-smoking habit. Secrecy and addiction to secrecy are an important theme here and throughout the novel. “Total utilization of available resources = lack of publicly detectable waste” (49) refers not only to Hal’s method of blowing the smoke into the exhaust fan, but also the science (fiction) of annular fusion, which his father helped pioneer and which ONAN now uses for its waste disposal. (There’s that waste theme again.)

This section is also the first introduction to most of the students at ETA (top of page 50). We get more description of ETA’s layout and the way its residents traverse it. The tunnels are laid out in such a way that, with the Pump Room, they look like “a kind of spider hanging upside-down” (52). Big themes here: spiders, lungs, and more secrecy: the inherent secrecy of tunnels. ETA’s tunnels are kid-sized, suggesting that Himself designed them to be a secret world for the young. Kind of like Disneyworld.

Finally, this section contains a great description of the way that ETAs and North Americans in general seem to be predisposed toward addiction of some kind, some way of “short[ing] out the whole motherboard” and “giv[ing] themselves away, on various levels” (53). It’s a sharp commentary on the postmodern condition in general and Hal’s condition in particular: “Like most Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he’s devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves” (54). Throughout the book, DFW uses Hal as a device to show how that drugs, achievement, ambition and entertainment have all aided and contributed to our desensitization—or self-anesthetization, millennial ennui, postmodern malaise, whatever you want to call it—and blunted our self-(and other-)awareness, to the point where we’re on autopilot, barely knowing why we do anything anymore.

On p. 54 we check back in with the medical attaché and his wife and their apartment, where shit’s about to get real. Or, rather, shit’s about to get all over the special recliner.

pp. 55-60. Gately! My favorite character in all of Western literature. This chapter’s a doozy, introducing us not only to Gately but also to a crucial link in the dissemination of the Samizdat. This is the point where Gately and Kite steal the cartridge from DuPleiss and accidentally kill him, setting off a chain reaction of both Québecois-Separatist-terrorist activity and Samizdat-dissemination. None of that, however, is ultimately as important as the character development Gately gets here, as we learn about the nature of his addictions, his unfortunate upbringing, and “the sort of hell of a deep-shit mess than can turn a man’s life right around” (60).

This chapter also advances the themes of speech and communication, or rather, the thwarting thereof. DuPleiss is unable to communicate with Gately and Kite due first to the language barrier and then the gag in his mouth. DuPleiss “passe[s] bluely from this life” (59) and the color blue has a way of turning up at key moments throughout the book, especially concerning matters of life and death. More on that later.

p. 60-61. A quick summary of technological excess from an unspecified narrative viewpoint, then we meet Jim Troeltsch, who is lying sick in his dorm room. This section ends with a reference to a “Turkish blanketish thing … glued to the ceiling’s corners, which billows, hanging, so its folds form a terrain, like with valleys and shadows” (61). This is the first of several references to a billowing shape—often but not always near the ceiling, of sinister provenance, arising in times of extreme pain, distress, illness, fear, depression, etc.

pp. 61-62. Unclear who the narrator is here. Could be Troeltsch, could be Hal. If it’s Hal, it means he moved into the dorms after living in the Headmaster’s house for the first five years of his residency at ETA, since he’s lived at ETA since he was seven but this chapter describes an almost-twelve-year-old’s (63) “first nightmare away from home and the folks” (62). Or it could be a generic/universal narrator representing all of the kids at ETA. Here we have the motifs of faces and teeth employed to literally nightmarish effect.

pp. 63-65. A lot of exposition concerning Himself and ETA. We get Himself’s résumé, basically, along with some of Avril’s. (Some chronology can also be puzzled out from the clues given here, but I don’t want to do that SPOILER? ALERT just yet.) Note that Himself pioneered nonflorescent lighting systems, which must have been popular in Québec after the ban on florescent lighting.

This section also contains JOI’s footnoted filmography, which is rife with pertinent information and hugely entertaining besides. For now, consider that Himself helmed four different production companies, one of which (Meniscus) is named after the little lunar symbols that divide some chapters of the novel; one of which (Poor Yorick) is a Hamlet reference; and one of which (Latrodectus Mactans) is the species name for the black widow spider—Avril being a prominent widow, and spousal infidelity being rampant both in Himself’s films and his marriage to Avril.

pp. 65-66. A hilarious Orin scene. Note that Orin is dressed as a bird and flying despite being afraid of heights and of falling from great heights; recall that he watched a bird fall from the sky into his Jacuzzi. Note that feathers are detaching from his costume, “peeling off and rising” (65). It’s all about the feathers.

pp. 66-68. A Big Buddy scene featuring Pemulis. Then a first-person section from Hal, about the recurring dream he has. Like Orin’s dream, it involves Avril and preys on Hal’s insecurities. In this dream Hal “never quite get[s] to see [his] distant opponent” (68). If a tennis player’s “true opponent … is the player himself” (84) then what does Hal’s “distant opponent” dream say about his self-awareness?

pp. 68-78. Kate Gompert! She of the life-imitating-art-imitating-life, litigation-triggering character name. From Burn, p. 71:

While most of the work’s early critics found something to praise in the novel, the most disappointed reader of the book was undoubtedly Katherine A. Gompert. Having played on the same junior tennis circuit as Wallace, Gompert was presumably less than happy to discover that she shared a name (and not a name, you would have thought, that might have occurred coincidentally) with a suicidal drug addict in the novel who admitted she was a “shitty lay” (p. 782). Shortly after the paperback release of the book, Gompert’s case was filed, and Judge James Ware summarized the circumstances as he issued an order denying an attempt by the defense to have the case thrown out in May 1998:

“Plaintiff was a successful junior and college tennis player and then competed on the professional tour … she enjoys a good reputation and has often spoken to younger tennis players regarding the importance of leading a drug-free lifestyle. Plaintiffs allege that David Wallace, the author, purposely defamed her to satisfy his own feelings of hatred and malice towards her. Mr. Wallace apparently participated in the competitive junior tennis world in which plaintiff was well known.”

Defamation-of-character lawsuits notwithstanding, Gompert is another fascinating character in the Ennet-House world of the novel. Along with Erdedy’s chapter, this scene makes great strides toward describing that which is ultimately ineffable: the feeling of being not only addicted to a Substance but also suicidally depressed, and the possible relationship between those two horrible states. While words can never fully describe either condition, Wallace gets as close in this novel as I think the English language can get. That’s all I can really say about that, at this point.

I also love the finely nuanced way DFW renders the doctor, with his extremely professional but ultimately maybe naïve sensitivity to Gompert’s condition. There’s something heartbreaking about the way he strives to do everything correctly, and still falls well short of being able to help Kate in any immediately meaningful way.

Note the recurrence in this chapter of the color blue: Gompert’s shoes (68); the gum chewed by the mental health staffer (69); Kate’s remark that a relatively innocuous, melancholy strain of depression is “a kind of blue kind of peaceful state” (73). Also the waste theme, with the room smelling of urine and medical waste (69). Infantilism or a regression to an infantile state is another recurring theme; here we see it in Gompert’s mother’s description of discovering her after her last suicide attempt: “flushed red and all wet like when I was a newborn … she hallucinated me as a newborn again” (70).

When Gompert describes her depression on p. 73, she says “every sound you hear all of a sudden has teeth.” Teeth are another big motif in this book, and they hardly ever accompany anything even remotely pleasant. Someting I hadn’t noticed until Carlisle pointed it out is that cages and locks are important motifs in the book (one of the triangles within triangles of the book’s Sierpinski fractal) and he notes that Kate’s “black bangs lay like a cell’s glossy bars across the visible half of the forehead” (68) while the door to her room’s bathroom has no lock on it.

pp. 78-79. We check back in with the attaché and his wife, who are both now well and truly fucked.

pp. 79-85. I love any scene with Mario in it. An informal survey of other IJ readers shows that they are almost unanimous in their opinion that Mario’s appearance on the page makes a reader’s face curl into an involuntary smile.

And I especially love this scene for its introduction of Gerhardt Schtitt. This chapter lays out a ton of information about Schtitt’s, Himself’s, and ultimately DFW’s philosophies regarding tennis, math, life, etc. It’s more than I can really get my head around, but here are a few key points, topped off with some sloppy mathematical pseudo-philosophizing on my part:

Schtitt’s eschewal of the straight-line-between-two-points school of thought (80) mirrors DFW’s narrative approach: for DFW, the traditional model of the linear narrative is insufficient; it doesn’t capture the spirit of his project as well as some other (recursive, cyclical, or parabolic) narrative trajectory, something approaching “Extra-Linear Dynamics” and the “Cantorian continuum of infinities” (82)—surely it’s no coincidence that DFW has written a book about Cantor and infinity (to this day, the one piece of DFW’s writing I have not read).

Schtitt’s discourse on American vs. East-German attitudes toward team sports and the State prefigures Infinite Jest’s exploration of the American Pursuit of Happiness (i.e. instant gratification), and the extent to which that pursuit is futile and only ensures greater isolation and misery:

Ach, but who can imagine this training serving its purpose in an experialist and waste-exporting nation that’s forgotten privation and hardship and the discipline which hardship teaches by requiring? A U.S. of modern A. where the State is not a team or a code, but a sort of sloppy intersection of desires and fears, where the only public consensus a boy must surrender to is the acknowledged primacy of straight-line pursuing this flat and short-sighted idea of personal happiness: “The happy pleasure of the person alone, yes?” (83)

I fucking love that.

Schtitt and Incandenza went beyond the conventional scholarship about tennis to examine the ways that the Cantorian concept of infinity might apply to the game, the way the “aleatory flutter of uncontrolled, metastatic growth” might allow a “diagnate infinity of infinities of choice and execution” (82) in the game and also make room for failure via “extremely lucid and elegant admissions of defeat in certain cases, hands thrown up w/complete deductive justification” (994). This allowance for and even celebration of failure is so counterintuitive to most Western athletics and their rhetoric of success and victory that it’s still anathema to most of the students and faculty at ETA. And yet defeat seemed almost liberating for Himself, “whose frustrated interest in grand-scale failure was unflagging through four different careers” (also 994) and whose ultimate and final defeat was apparently the failure to continue living.

But wait, my extremely poor grasp of theoretical math doesn’t end there. This is a stretch, and I can’t quite get all the way across, but bear with me: Schtitt’s refusal to consider a straight line the best route between two points, as well as his appreciation for artificial limits within his embrace of the infinite, is also a commentary on the constraints the two-dimensional plane places on our movements within it.

Let’s consider tennis as a geometrically governed two-dimensional game. This is how it’s often viewed by the students and coaches at ETA, especially when we learn that Edwin Abbott’s 1884 mathematical allegory Flatland is “inescapable at ETA” (281-282). Let’s also consider that televisual entertainment, so central to the cultural world of Infinite Jest, is a two-dimensional medium, and that the general cultural attitude toward TV is that it’s just plain bad for us but we watch it anyway, the very paradox of addiction that spells woe to the so many of this novels’ characters.

As we continue reading, consider the ways characters try to transcend not just the ill effects of both addiction and mainstream entertainment, but also the two-dimensional plane, both literally and figuratively. In a later scene not too far from now, we will see a chaotic moment of crisis as the flat, two-dimensional mapped world and the three-dimensional real world collide, literally and catastrophically, ultimately dramatized in the actual human penetration of a televisual monitor’s flat plane.

I’ll try and articulate this better, later. Right now I’m giving myself a headache.

pp. 85-87. Tiny Ewell, in whose name there is no jolly irony, is an alcoholic just emerging from the horrible early stages of withdrawal, and he is on his way to Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, where we will deal with him later.

pp. 87-128. This is an expansive section that covers a lot of geography, time, and characters. We cut between two key scenes: 1) Marathe and Steeply, meeting in the desert near Tuscon at sunset on April 30; and 2) Hal and the other students at ETA six months later. These two worlds are combined in one chapter and interspersed. They are related in dozens of ways, with many parallels: in both worlds, a character farts (Steeply and John Wayne). In both worlds, there is a physically compromised character (Marathe and Mario). In both worlds, men appear in drag (Steeply and Kr. Kent).

I can’t overstate how much I love the conversation between Marathe and Steeply, which runs for a total of 61 pages interspersed throughout the book. In it, they touch on virtually all of the novel’s themes. It’s easy to be intimidated by the political-spy-intrigue angle of the Marathe/Steeply thread, but I don’t feel like that’s ultimately as important as the emotional heft of these characters’ narratives.

I love the way the Marathe/Steeply section is narrated at the beginning by a third-person narrative voice that sounds like it’s been filtered through Marathe’s Québecois-inflected English, replete with malapropisms and awkward constructions. I love Steeply’s entrance on p. 88—possibly the novel’s most entertaining introduction of a new character.

Most of all, I love the way the two men’s shadows play over the landscape. (Laura, is it really possible for a person to stand on an outcropping near Tuscon and cast their shadow over the entire city? That’s fascinating to this Midwestern flatlander.) Once again, we see the importance of maps and landscapes. Consider that Marathe’s wheelchair casts a radial shadow; consider the importance of circles and loops. Consider that “Goethe’s well-known ‘Brockengespenst’ phenomenon” (88) casting shadows on Tucson is also a lighting effect that appears in Himself’s films. Perhaps the way these two men can cause a “premature dusk” to fall on West Tucson suggests the many instances in Infinite Jest when a single character’s actions (Gately, Himself, Hal, etc.) can affect a great number of people or even an entire populace.

On p. 90 Steeply says that the cartridge-copy of the Entertainment arrived “in the mail, without warning or motive. Out of the blue.” Several things happen out of the blue in this novel, and in nearly every instance they can be attributed back to Himself. My wholly unsubstantiated but hardly groundbreaking theory is that when something happens out of the blue, it’s Himself’s ghost acting from beyond the grave. Perhaps not directly or literally, but at the end of a long causal chain that originated with Himself: for example, Steeply says the Entertainment arrives at the attaché’s apartment “out of the blue,” an idiom Marathe misinterprets beautifully and appropriately when he refers to the Entertainment just a few lines later as “this blue dazzle”—perhaps inadvertently drawing on the blue’s connotation of things prurient or pornographic; i.e. the Entertainment is pornographically entertaining. The idiom appears elsewhere: the USS Millicent Kent is offered a spot at ETA when the Admissions lady calls out of the blue (124).

The sad quality of twilight is described in both the Marathe/Steeply thread (“the desert U.S.A.’s light had become now sad” [94]) and the ETA thread the following autumn (“It was @1900h., not yet true twilight, but the only thing left of the sunset was a snout just over Newton, and the palces under long shadows were cold, and a certain kind of melancholy sadness was insinuating itself into the grounds’ light” [121]). I like to think of these moments as indirect nods to Himself and the novel’s other deceased characters, since that melancholy twilight (in filmmaking parlance, the “magic hour”) might evoke reflective states and remembrance of the dead. This is another example of the way that Himself’s ghost seems to haunt the proceedings, symbolically at first and then, later, SPOILER? ALERT directly and literally.

Sorry. I couldn’t help myself.

pp. 127-128. Lyle! This section’s narrator is unnamed, but I wonder if might be Ortho Stice, given the importance of foreheads to this section and the central role that Ortho’s forehead will play in, like, 800 pages or so.

pp. 129-135. This is a really difficult section, both for its presentation and gruesomely violent ending. Like the Wardine chapter, it’s written in a vernacular. The nonstandard usage is mostly rooted in the spelling and punctuation, however, which leads me to wonder whether this is a direct transcription by the speaker, like a diary entry. Later clues will reveal that the speaker here is Emil Minty, who eventually parts ways with Poor Tony as they go down very different post-addiction paths in the wake of Bobby C’s untimely demise.

Once you penetrate the language and the dense exposition, you start to see lots of symbols in this scene. A dumpster plays a central role, returning us to the waste theme, along with Bobby C’s, um, evacuation at the moment of death. The color blue returns—in the crystals that Mr. Wo’s “subservants” removed from the Drano they used to lace the heroin, in the color of the “string at the back of the eye” when Bobby C’s eye pops out, and when Bobby turns “lightblue” upon dying (134). Meanwhile Poor Tony is stuffing his boa into Bobby’s mouth, which turns the boa’s feathers bloody so they’re red, just like the feathers from Orin’s cardinal costume. Completing the avian imagery here is Emil’s euphemism for heroin withdrawal, Kicking the Bird (135).

There’s also something almost chilling about the way this piece ends, as Emil’s garbled and frantic vernacular suddenly goes clear and becomes standard English: “to start to thearize on what to try and do after I could standup straight and walk upright again once more” (135). Does this indicate that Emil’s going to get clean and Kick the Bird? In a novel full of characters struggling to communicate and failing spectacularly at it, is this a transcendent moment?