The Wordability highlights of 2008, Number 2
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, Back Bay Books/Little, Brown & Co, 2006 [1996].
Since I’ve now read its 1079 pages twice since early October, and November around here was pretty much a write-off, it has obliterated all memories of other fiction. Old news for DFW’s many readers. What led me to read it was his death earlier this year, one of the sorrier literary events of 2008.
Infinite Jest contains two different kinds of novel wrapped around one another, like a chocolate with a hard centre. The sweet layer – sweet at least for readers tuned in to the genre, Wallace’s contemporaries – is one of those daffy, deliberately creaky postmodern plots. The action takes place in an alternative near-future in Boston. Commercialism now extends to the calendar: years have sponsors and are known by product names, as in Year of the Trial-sized Dove Bar. The problems of waste and pollution have become overwhelming. On every street there seem to be as many dumpsters as cars. The US has fixed its landfill problem (remember those ships cruising down the eastern seaboard looking for a place to dump the trash?) by first ceding a good chunk of New England to Canada, then hurling the crap into it with giant trebuchets. It is the President himself (an insane ex-crooner) who comes up with this magnificently perverse solution.
The action itself centres on a film. In a last effort to make something entertaining (or a last spasm of irony) James O. Incandenza, an experimental film-maker ( Baby Pictures of Famous Dictators, Fun with Teeth) makes Infinite Jest, a film so entertaining that anyone who watches it forgets to eat or drink or go to the bathroom or even move and so eventually dies in place, malodorous, blissfully watching to the end. Word of the film’s lethal power reaches both a Quebec separatist groupuscule (membership restricted to legless people in wheelchairs) and the US Office of Unspecified Services. These two groups embark on a search for the original, copiable version – the few in circulation are read-only – and there is much rather Chestertonian cloak-and-daggery, picturesque mayhem and incidental satire.
This postmodern framework might tempt some readers into a postmodern reading, sliding signifiers, indeterminacy, self-cancelling perspectives and so on. Actually it’s suckerbait. As a writer of his place and time and bent, the postmodern was the obvious container for a polymath like Wallace, a man hyper-conscious of the philosophical problems of representation. In fact, he had a beef about postmodernism and the habits of mind it tends to encourage, the giggles, the irony-trumping games, the fundamental tedious unseriousness. Infinite Jest is an attempt to tunnel out of the prisonhouse.
The gravitas of the book is the hard centre, a counter-narrative, an only-too-realistic study of addiction and the addict’s struggle to get straight and stay straight. (It is a mistake to say, as some have, that the novel is ‘about’ depression: yes, some characters suffer from it, some use drugs or booze to relieve its pain, but the character most clearly and clinically depressed is, precisely because of her condition, unable to free herself, and stumbles from one addiction into something worse.)
This narrative is about two main characters at opposite ends of the social spectrum, the upscale Hal O. Incandenza (oh those postmodern names) and the streetwise Don Gately. Hal is a senior at a Tennis Academy which combines schooling with training for the pro circuit (‘The Show’). Gately, recovering from a heavy addiction to narcotics, has a staff job in an AA halfway house. Both Hal and Gately submit themselves to an ironclad system of control. The aim of AA is to develop the capacity to live completely in the present, in the space between breaths, so that the privations of living without drugs can be endured moment by moment and thus rendered bearable. At the Academy, the head trainer tries to develop in his players the capacity to remain completely inside the game, the possibilities of life reduced to the court, the lines, the opponent, while all that is not-game – the heat of the day, the crowd, the moods, the sun in the eyes – is eliminated from the field of consciousness. He tries, as well, to make them impervious to success as well as failure, to live without his or anyone else’s approval, to want only the goal and to treat that when reached with equanimity. It is very like the training of a samurai.
Gately (we learn gradually) is a pretty serious criminal as well as addict – two murders, GBH, burglary. But he is also presented as a man capable of decency, and given a break, capable of learning fast, with a strong will and immense courage, moral and physical. The long account of him, severely-wounded, in dreadful pain, unable to speak, fighting off the doctors’ attempts to give him pain relief, is an extraordinary piece of interior monologue.
Gately, to use a Christian phrase, is trying to work out his salvation. So , with far less self-awareness, are Hal O. Incandenza and the woman we meet first in her late-night radio show persona of Madame Psychosis. All three characters come from toxic families. But, as the experienced people at AA keep insisting, so what? The way out of addiction is to concentrate on where, not why. Wallace rejects the idea that we are hapless victims, mere functions of discourse or circumstances. In this book, at least, the possibility of a good life begins with acceptance of responsibility in freedom, complete responsibility in complete freedom. As the AA veterans say, “Tough shit, but you still can’t drink.” Any other approach (they say) winds up with you back out on the street talking to parking meters.
All this plot-theme-character talk is probably not the way to go about persuading someone to read the novel. The joy of Infinite Jest comes from the telling.
But an account of that will have to wait a while. I have written too much already, and too formally, and the beach is calling.
