Infinite Summer

Year: 2009

  • Infinite Summary – Week 10

    And welcome to week 10.

    Milestone Reached: 738 (75%)

    Sections Read:

    Page 666 The Tunnel Club searches the catacombs under E.T.A. for rats.

    Page 673: Thierry Poutrincourt joins Steeply and deLint in watching the Hal Incandenza v. Ortho Stice match.

    Page 682 – 14 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Matty Pemulis, prostitute and brother to E.T.A.’s Michael, recalls sexual abuse at the hands of his father.

    Page 686 – 11 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: After the Stice match, Hal first runs into deLint, then spends the evening watching his father’s films.

    Page 689 – 14 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: On the way to Antitoi Brothers’, Poor Tony Kraus considers snatching the purse of the two women in front of him.

    Page 692: Geoffrey Day ruminates on how male Ennet residents have names for their members, and fond reminiscences about Lenz’s “Hog”

    Page 692: A general discussion of depression, alternating between Kate Gompert (thinking about her Ennet House friend who is addicted to train sets) and Hal (watching The American Century as Seen Through a Brick).

    Page 698 – 14 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Newer resident Ruth van Cleve leaves E.T.A. in the company of Kate Gompert; P.T. Krause follows, eying their bags.

    Pages 700-701Five brief vignettes:

    • Jim Troeltsch prepares to narrate a wrestling cartridge in his room.
    • Michael Pemulis moves a panel in the ceiling with a handle of a racquet.
    • Lyle sits in his usual spot, atop the towel dispenser in the weight room.
    • Coach Schtitt and Mario “tear-ass” down the road in Schtitt’s BMW.
    • Arvil Incandenza calls a “journalistic business”.

    Page 702: While Hal watches Blood Sister: One Tough Nun, other E.T.A. members invade the common room. Joelle attends a cocaine Narcotics Anonymous meetings, hears about a man who walked out on his wife and child.

    Page 711: Blood Sister: One Tough Nun conclusion.

    Page 714: P. T. Krause gives into temptation and snatches Kate Grompert’s purse.

    Page 716 – 14 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Lenz, meanwhile, high on cocaine, plans to rob two Asian women.

    Page 719: The Wheelchair Assassins search Antitoi Brothers’, looking for The Entertainment master copy.

    Page 719 – 14 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: P. T. Krause flees Ruth van Cleve.

    Page 721: How the Wheelchair Assassins came to center their search on the Antitoi Brothers’ shop.

    Page 723: Fortier and his prosthetic legs.

    Page 723 – 14 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Joelle Van Dyne worries about her teeth, dreams of Don Gately.

    Page 724: Fortier goes to the Antitoi Brothers’ shop, where an Entertainment cartridge as been found. It turns out not to be the master, however.

    Page 728: Lenz robs the Asian woman and hides out in a back alley.

    Page 729: Marathe arrives at Ennet house.

    Characters The characters page has been updated.

    Sources consulted during the compilation of this summation: JS’s Infinite Jest synopses, Dr. Keith O’Neil’s Infinite Jest Reader’s Guide, and Steve Russillo’s Chapter Thumbnails.

  • The Biblical Experience of Reading Infinite Jest

    Avery Edison is in transit today, so Nick Douglas is subbing in. Nick Douglas is the editor of Twitter Wit: Brilliance in 140 Characters or Less, a collection of witty tweets, which was released earlier this week.

    I’m an atheist – if I were in AA, I’d get on my knees with far less openness than Don Gately. But until I “deconverted” in the summer after my sophomore year of college, I was a Christian. A Creationist, even. (That made it easier to switch all the way at once, actually.)

    At least twice, I tried to read the entire Bible. I failed both times. I hear that once you get through the grueling books of law, it gets a lot more interesting and things start clicking.

    So first let’s tick off the obvious similarities: Infinite Jest is big. It’s hard to read. There are many characters. It has a cult of followers, and it’s best read with bookmarks in several spots so you can go back and piece everything together.

    But that’s trivia. What matters is, the story of IJ is deeply Biblical. Kind of. So far. (I’m on page 533.)

    An evil threatens to destroy the world, and an insignificant person is called to become a hero to protect it. This is the most pervasive theme in the Bible: The smallest, weakest hero must face the mightiest forces of evil, because God has called him to. Joseph Campbell organized this archetype into the Hero’s Journey, a prototype for western hero stories. It’s the story of nearly every memorable Biblical hero.

    When God calls Moses, the exiled Israelite asks, “Who am I, that I should go unto Pharaoh, and that I should bring forth the children of Israel out of Egypt? They will not believe me, nor hearken unto my voice: for they will say, The Lord hath not appeared unto thee.” Judeo-christian scholars think Moses was a stutterer. Imagine that, a hero who can’t communicate.

    The “judges” who repeatedly rescued the ungrateful nation of Israel from its military enemies were all similarly unimpressive. Gideon, whom God told to lead Israel’s army against the Midianites (spoiler alert: he does; they win), was the weakest man in the weakest family in the smallest tribe of Israe. He also made God prove his identity by performing little miracles with a sheepskin before he’d even listen to the plan. Samson’s enemies didn’t know where he got his strength – so the man couldn’t have been visibly muscle-bound; he was just a normal-looking guy who could overpower a lion and topple a building. The warrior/judge Deborah was a woman, which in ancient Mesopotamia usually relegated you to making babies, taking showers on the roof, and having poetry written at you.

    Okay, here’s where things get complicated. Because while plenty of the Boston AA members are heroes in their own personal stories, there’s one character who really strikes me as a weakened hero like the above: Marathe.

    Like Moses (or the opening-scene Hal Incandenza) he has trouble communicating, since his English is still shaky. He comes from the most pathetic province (the one stuck downwind of the Great Convexity) of a conquered nation (though the Israelites, who at one point complained that things were so bad under Moses they’d rather go back to being slaves, seem a lot like IJ’s America). He faces temptation and speaks with his counterpart on a mountaintop (like, you know, Jesus). I don’t know what to make of his rejection of his holy mission. But he’s certainly the disadvantaged hero, what with having popped his legs off in a game of beat-the-train-just-barely, and he’s the character most likely to change the whole game here while musing about the nature of choice and freedom.

    The book is Biblical in structure too. Marathe’s conversations with the devil Steeply are an example of the meditative dialogs, monologues, and thought experiments with which David Foster Wallace chops up the “story” part of the story, mimicking the Bible’s tendency to hop from history to lawbook to poetry. (The Bible can also seem terribly self-indulgent, especially around the descriptions of temples and bloodlines. But hey, what editor is going to call up God and ask for him to tone it down? He’s got a fucking verse in there condemning anyone who changes a word of it to hell. Must be a real headache for the copy editors at Zondervan.) As in the Bible, there are letters printed verbatim, oral histories being codified – like the rules of Eschaton.

    The Eschaton breakdown is another great Biblical section: The end of the world foretold. That happens in more than the book of Revelation. The prophets Ezekiel and Isaiah make end-of-times prophecies in their books. An assistant at my youth group once convinced a group of us to go around the table reading the entire book of Daniel (a talented Israelite academic serving with his three friends in the Persian king’s court) in one sitting. I don’t think he knew that this book included a big-ass prophetic passage about the end of days. Well it does, and it’s really boring to read aloud. A lot less fun than Eschaton’s breakdown.

    But so the last similarity really is a stylistic trivium, but it’s my favorite: I know of one other author who begins this many paragraphs with conjunctions, and that’s the Apostle Paul. Most of the Bible verses that sound so profound because they begin with “For,” “So,” and “Therefore, brothers,” are from Paul (a lawyer, kinda) in the middle of a letter to some church or another, in which the whole thing is one long train of thought and every paragraph builds on the conclusions of the last. A structure like that probably helps the author justify to the editor that he keep absolutely everything in, even as it glosses over all the goddamn digressions.

    So I think the lesson from all of this is that the author is God, the author can do no wrong, and anyone – is Pemulis listening? – who tries to edit God while he’s on the job ends up in deep shit.

    Amen.

  • Irony, It Has Happened To Me

    Someone recently sent me an unpublished manuscript to read and while the book itself had many things to recommend it, there was one sentence that made me laugh. I won’t use the same context because I don’t want to embarrass the author, but the gist of it was something like, “It’s so ironic that you brought garlic bread because I made marinara sauce!”

    In other words the writer used the word “ironic” to mean “entirely congruous,” the exact opposite of ironic.

    Of course, people have been misusing the word irony for a lot longer than Alanis Morrissette has been writing songs, but this one tickled me in particular, creating as it did something of a set theory paradox–a use of the word irony that did not mean irony but was nevertheless an unintended example of it. Wallace would be pleased by the circular nature of that, I suspect.

    Several of these posts have pointed to Wallace’s expressed distaste for irony, but you never cease to find examples of people calling him an ironist. I’m sure this is related to his use of satire and especially metafictional techniques, which have long been associated with irony. But it’s hard to imagine anyone would read Infinite Jest with anything like a careful eye and not feel the earnestness with which it is written. Even when Wallace uses the word irony, it’s usually in a pejorative sense, either from the POV of the White Flaggers and their “irony free zone” or by a Canadian sneering at ironic Americans.

    The introduction to my edition of IJ was written by Dave Eggers, who is often compared to Wallace. That connection is usually made through Eggers’ use of footnotes in the front matter to A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which is a memoir not a novel. And like Wallace, Eggers is often used as the critical poster boy for irony, despite the fact that Eggers might just be the most earnest writer we have.84

    The truth is my generation, which is also the generation of Wallace and Eggers, has had irony imprinted on it. We grew up with Letterman and came of age with the Simpsons. In fact, with the 40th anniversary of Woodstock this month, it’s been amusing for me and others my age to watch the seriousness with which the boomers take their nostalgia. The popular music of our own youth was terrible and we know it, but we have this arch fondness for Men at Work85 or whatever because it still triggers these sense memories of being young and worry-free and gloriously hormonal. What you have in Wallace and Eggers are writers who have instinctively appropriated this ironic reflex and put it in the service of sincerity–the techniques other writers have used to distance the author from the text they use instead to engage the reader with it.

    On page 694, Wallace has a much more sophisticated take on the same idea:

    It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip–and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naiveté.

    The mask is stuck there even on Wallace, but he has found a way to put it to nobler use.

    I’ve seen people refer to this as post-irony, but that does nothing to clarify the issue (is a post-modernist not also modern?) and the issue needs clarification. Most people who have read neither writer (and some who have) still think they are leading contemporary examples of ironists.86 And the problem with that assumption is that everything they say then becomes suspect. Every time Eggers speaks, media-types and bloggers parse his words for the real meaning when the real meaning couldn’t be clearer.87 Wallace answers a simple question–What are ten books you like?88–and half the people don’t believe him.

    I don’t think anybody hereabouts needs one, but here’s an irony palette cleanser: Roger Ebert’s terrific essay this week in which he talks for the first time about his 30 years sober with AA. If you have time, I encourage you to read the comments, especially the varied reactions from other AA members (some are angry that Ebert has violated Tradition 11 by shedding his anonymity and talking publicly about the meetings). It’s an excellent companion piece to IJ.

  • Matt Bucher: The Anxiety of Influence

    Matt Bucher is the administrator of the David Foster Wallace mailing list and publisher of Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. He is an editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, runs a weblog about writer Roberto Bolaño and the novel 2666, and has read Infinite Jest at least three times.

    Infinite Jest is an original novel. I mean that in every sense of the word. Wallace has constructed an original novel that is imaginative and fresh; each storyline drips with his distinctive style. It also is the origin point for a new type of novel writing, a path others want to follow. Let me go back and repeat part of that: Wallace has constructed an original novel. The act of constructing a novel of this size and scope invariably involves some degree of borrowing bits and pieces–either from one’s own drafts and notebooks, or from the writing of others–and stitching together many smaller pieces.

    In addition to Wallace borrowing from his own work (c.f. Antitoi mentioned in his 1992 Harper’s essay “Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes” (collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments and available in PDF here), many of the details in Infinite Jest owe something to one or other of the thousands of novels Wallace had digested up to that point. Some of these references are homages, some are Nabokovian red herrings, most are just delightful. There are obvious references like Hamlet and Marathe/Marat, but the four influences I’ve chosen to focus on below might not be immediately apparent to the first-time reader.

    These influences will be familiar to the members of wallace-l and I give that community credit for unearthing most of these connections.

    1. The Liar’s Club by Mary Karr: The Bruce Green–Mildred Bonk scene early on (p. 39) introduces us to Tommy Doocey, “the infamous harelipped pot-and-sundries dealer who kept several large snakes in unclean uncovered aquaria, which smelled, which Tommy Doocey didn’t notice because his upper lip completely covered his nostrils and all he could smell was lip.” Compare that description with page 76 from The Liar’s Club (1995), (a memoir, by the way): “I knew a drug dealer once who collected [snakes] in glass tanks all over his trailer. He had a harelip that somehow protected him from the stink, but the rest of us became, when dickering over pharmaceuticals with him, the noisiest and most adenoidal mouth breathers. We all sounded like Elmer Fudd, so a coke deal took on a cartoonlike quality: ‘You weally tink dis is uncut?’ It was particularly hard to talk this way when you were tripping your brains out on LSD and had gone there only as a last resort to buy something to help you come down.” Now, Karr and Wallace were an item (per The New Yorker and The Washington Post), but there’s no telling if he picked that bit up from Karr’s book or if he himself went to one of those buys at the real Doocey’s place. Karr’s version is arguably funnier.

    2. End Zone by Don Delillo: It would not be unfair to call End Zone the biggest literary influence on Infinite Jest (at least the E.T.A. half). That is somewhat ironic since End Zone is only 250 pages long. Several key details from EZ show up in IJ, but the biggest is probably the concept of Eschaton. The main character of EZ, Gary Harkness, is obsessed with nuclear strategy. He repeatedly mentions the term eschatology. DT Max tells us that one of the original titles of End Zone was “Modes of Disaster Technology.”

      Some other similarities:

      • The militaristic coach in a tower looming over the field;
      • The players (football college rather than tennis academy) over-intellectualizing their roles and future success;
      • The widow of the founder is the president of the school;
      • The powdered milk.

      Wallace and Delillo both spent time in Texas (the setting for End Zone)–Wallace on a Lannan grant in Marfa (you can read more about Wallace in Marfa in Sean Wilsey’s book Oh the Glory of It All) and Delillo researching Libra in Dallas (Delillo’s wife is from Texas).

      There are dozens of other nods to Delillo’s other books throughout Wallace’s work (“The Broom of the System” is similar to a phrase in Americana, the M.I.T. Language Riots are mentioned in Ratner’s Star, etc.) and the Ransom Center in Austin owns a set of correspondence between Wallace and Delillo.

    3. Red Dragon by Thomas Harris: Consider these two passages:
      Red Dragon: “[The gun] was a Bulldog .44 Special, short and ugly with its startling big bore. It had been extensively modified by Mag Na Port. The barrel was vented near the muzzle to help keep the muzzle down on recoil, the hammer was bobbed and it had a good set of fat grips. He suspected it was throated for the speedloader.” (RD, p. 137)

      Infinite Jest: “The Item’s some customized version of a U.S. .44 Bulldog Special…blunt and ugly with a bore like the mouth of a cave…The piece’s been modified, Gately can appraise. The barrel’s been vented out near the muzzle to cut your Bulldog’s infamous recoil, the hammer’s bobbed, and the thing’s got a fat Mag Na Port or -clone grip like the metro Finest favor…It’s not a semiauto but is throated for a fucking speed-loader….” (IJ, pp. 609-610)

      Wallace was admittedly a big fan of Harris’s writing. And he confesses that he loved the technical details of Tom Clancy novels. In this list Wallace included two Thomas Harris novels in his top 10. (A lot of people think DFW was joking or something when compiling that list, but I’m telling you it’s sincere.) I think this is a place where Wallace needed a detail about a beefy gun and either remembered or came across this in Red Dragon and ran with it.

    4. Super Mario Brothers: OK, this seems like a stretch and it’s not literary, but bear with me. Mario Incandenza, the middle child, is a “small hunched shape with a big head” (p. 32), extremely short, but he has a big head, an oversized skull on a little body. He sort of looks like Super Mario. And then there’s this on page 42:

      “Remember the flag only halfway up the pole? Booboo, there are two ways to lower a flag to half-mast. Are you listening? Because no shit I really have to sleep here in a second. So listen — one way to lower the flag to half-mast is just to lower the flag. There’s another way though. You can also just raise the pole. You can raise the pole to like twice its original height. You get me? You understand what I mean, Mario?”

      For those of you who lived without electricity in Siberia during the late 1980s, the game Super Mario Brothers featured a character named Mario jumping up to a flagpole at the end of every level.

      Later, walking with Schtitt:

      Mario thinks of a steel pole raised to double its designed height and clips his shoulder on the green steel edge of a dumpster, pirouetting halfway to the cement before Schtitt darts in to catch him, and it almost looks like they’re doing a dance-floor dip as Schtitt says this game the players are all at E.T.A. to learn, this infinite system of decisions and angles and lines Mario’s brothers worked so brutishly hard to master: junior athletics is but one facet of the real gem: life’s endless war against the self you cannot live without.

      So, Mario’s brothers play a game, but now Mario, not Hal, is the focal point–these are Mario’s brothers. (With respect to the Incandenza brothers, another connection here is with The Brothers Karamazov. Timothy Jacobs wrote his dissertation at McMaster University partly on comparing the Brothers Incandenza with the Brothers Karamazov.) The connection between Mario Incandenza and Super Mario Brothers is by no means rock solid, but the short, dark-haired Mario concentrating on that flagpole sure does conjure an image worthy of it.

  • Oops

    Two months ago Matthew Baldwin told the Guides that August 24-28 would be devoted to guest posts and Kevin Guilfoile, who is a professional, wrote this on a calendar, and Matthew Baldwin, who is not, did not, and, long story short, Kevin doesn’t have a post prepared, so we’re running the weekly guest post today and Kevin will do the Friday slot, and all of this is pretty much 100% Matthew’s fault, although, to be fair, who expects people to write things onto calendars in this day and age, I mean really.

  • It Didn’t Make Me Happy but I Couldn’t Stop Watching

    As your least insightful and hands-down laziest guide, I fully admit that I’m 100 pages behind this week and I’m not even going to try to fake it. But I did spend a fruitful hour this morning browsing DFW reviews and interviews.

    This from Newsweek:

    NEWSWEEK: What’s your history with tennis?

    WALLACE: I played serious Juniors, but I burned out. I play twice a week with friends.

    And with 12-step groups?

    I went with friends to an open AA meeting and got addicted to them. It was completely riveting. I was never a member — I was a voyeur. When I ended up really liking it was when I let people there know this and they didn’t care.

    Was it therapeutic?

    At that point, I was paralyzed about writing, and I was watching too much TV. Here were these guys in leather and tattoos sounding like Norman Vincent Peale, but week after week they were getting better. And I’d go home and work. Going to coffee houses and talking about literary theory certainly hadn’t helped any. Have you read the book?

    I haven’t had the chance, but our reviewer just finished.

    My hat’s off to him. Tell him Excedrin works best for eyestrain.

    From The Chicago Tribune, a surprising claim about DFW’s familiarity with the Internet:

    The research reaped personal as well as professional dividends. “If I hadn’t gone to a bunch of AA meetings, I wouldn’t have gotten rid of my TV, because I started to realize the TV didn’t make me happy, but I couldn’t stop watching it,” he said.

    Still, he’s been fascinated by some reader reactions so far, including some who liken its jump-cut style and information bombardment to cruising the Internet. “I’ve never been on the Internet,” he said. “This is sort of what it’s like to be alive. You don’t have to be on the Internet for life to feel this way. . . .

    “The image in my mind — and I actually had dreams about it all the time — was that this book was really a very pretty pane of glass that had been dropped off the 20th story of a building.”

    Here Wallace and the director Gus Van Sant have a delightful phone conversation about Good Will Hunting and it makes me think about the similarities between Will and Hal Incandenza:

    DFW: …The thing that interested me about Will — and of course this is like a stroke movie for me — is you’ve got like a total nerd who is incredibly good looking, can beat people up and has Minnie Driver in love with him, so I’m, like I saw it twice voluntarily. Most of the serious math weenies who I’ve met, and I’ve met a few, like who’ve graduated from college at 12 and stuff, they’re not all that smart in other areas. I’ve like never met any who’ve had photographic memories with respect to stuff like agrarian social histories of the American South or legal precedent in the American judicial system and stuff, and so he seemed as if he could almost have done anything that he wanted to do and that math was almost a kind of accident.

    GVS: That’s the way we thought of him. But I always felt that his memory was something that was kind of like a bonus. And that mathematics was something that he had done when say he was alone as a child.

    DFW: Uh-huh.

    GVS: And he had learned and he had become very advanced but that his memory was maybe separate — the memory was like the trick part. So he remembered certain things that he had read in different books his retention was so phenomenal but it was almost like a trick so when he is defeating the guy in the Harvard bar by quoting from text books this sort of capitalist versus socialist…

    DFW: Which trust me is every bonehead kid’s fantasy of being able to do that. (Gus laughs) Fuckwad with a pony tail in a Harvard bar, I’ve met that guy. The girl I went and saw the movie with first thought that the guy was like too icky and villainous to be realistic and I hastened to disagree with her.

    And this is just funny, from an online chat Wallace participated in with a random sampling of users who had a lot of trouble staying on topic:

    dfw: A carbuncle’s fucking HUGE, esse. Like an eggplant or something. Actually life-threatening — it can apparently explode like an appendix and spread toxins throughout your bloodstream. A small but riveting history of cases on death-by-carbuncle is avail

    Marisa: I could beat Keats up if I wanted to.

    dfw: able in back issues of “Mortality and Morbidity” magazine.

    Keats: Oh well, in that case, dfw, I should not have made the comparison.

    Keats: Since what I have doesn’t approach the gravity of a carbuncle.

    Keats: I think I’m just going to ignore Marisa. She’s one of those live-chat troublemakers.

  • Else { Default }

    As details emerge about The Pale King, it’s becoming clear that the 2005 commencement speech David Foster Wallace gave at Kenyon College is something of a bridge between Infinite Jest and his final, unfinished novel. Michael Piesch, Wallace’s editor, goes so far as to call “This Is Water” (as the commencement speech is commonly known) “very much a distillation” of The Pale King’s major motifs.

    But if you look closely, you can see a lot of Jest in that commencement speech as well. Take, for instance, Wallace’s repeated references to our “default settings”:

    Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth…

    Please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being “well-adjusted”, which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

    Don Gately reminded me of this quotation, around the time he reverted to his default setting and beat the holy living shit out of them wayward partygoers.

    Gately had been portrayed so sympathetically that his abrupt reversion to type feels almost like a betrayal. And in any other novel the transformation would have been shocking. But so much of Infinite Jest (as with nearly everything Wallace wrote) is about our perpetual war with our default settings, that it’s unsurprising that his characters lose a battle once in a while.

    And this was not the first time I noticed the “default settings” undercurrent in Infinite Jest. The Eschaton set piece, in particular, struck me as something of an elaborate analogy for civilization’s struggle against primacy. Here stand dozens of teens in close proximity, armed with buckets of denuded tennis balls, playing at negotiation and diplomacy. But you know those tennis balls are eventually going to fly. There’s never any doubt. The reams of rules and elegant complexity and Extreme Value Theorem can stave off the descent into mayhem for a while, but cannot hold it back forever.

    Of course the kids really have no incentive not to start lobbing warheads, and one gets the sense that Armageddon is the unspoken point of Eschaton. But in real life the consequences of surrender are considerably more dire (as Gately is presumably going to learn). Wallace makes it clear that the struggle against our genetic heritage–against territorialism and aggression and intoxication and passivity– isn’t easy. But he at least seems to believe that it is possible, if only barely.

    And he clearly thinks that it’s something worth fighting for. Perhaps the only thing worth fighting for.

    That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

    Misc:

    Hooked: During the roundtable I confessed that, while I enjoy the novel and love reading Wallace’s writing, “I don’t find the narrative to be particularly engrossing”. That is no longer true: I am now dying to know what is going to happen to Gately after his startling metamorphosis. Will he be forced to drift from town to town, letting the world think that he is dead until he can find a way to control the raging spirit that dwells within him?

    The Stars Are Right: Also during that roundtable, I predicted that the Bostons of H. P. Lovecraft and David Foster Wallace would eventually intersect. And:

    ‘But on this one afternoon, the fan’s vibration combined with some certain set of notes I was practicing on the violin, and the two vibrations set up a resonance that made something happen in my head … As the two vibrations combined, it was as if a large dark billowing shape came billowing out of some corner of my mind. I can be no more precise than to say large, dark, shape, and billowing, what came flapping out of some backwater of my psyche I not had the slightest inkling was there.”

    Yeah, well, called that one.

    Lost and Profound: I’m slightly behind because I somehow managed to misplace my copy of Infinite Jest. I’m going to wear a button that says, “I Lost 12 Pounds–Ask Me How!”