At some point in Infinite Jest, around page 73, I abandoned my highlighter. There was simply too much to absorb on the first read, I decided, and I would save the markup for the second pass.
But last week, on page 389, Old Yeller rode again:
‘You burn to have your photograph in a magazine.’ ‘I’m afraid so.’ … ‘You feel these men with their photographs in magazines care deeply about having their photographs in magazines. Derive immense meaning.’ ‘I do. They must. I would. Else why would I burn like this to feel as they feel?’ ‘The meaning they feel, you mean. From the fame.’ ‘Lyle, don’t they?’ … ‘Perhaps the first time: enjoyment. After that, do you trust me, trust me: they do not feel what you burn for. After the first surge, they care only that their photographs seem awkward or unflattering, or untrue, or that their privacy, this thing you burn to escape, what they call their privacy is being violated. Something changes. After the first photograph has been in a magazine, the famous men do not enjoy their photographs in magazines so much as they fear that their photographs will cease to appear in magazines. They are trapped, just as you are.’ ‘Is this supposed to be good news? This is awful news.’ ‘LaMont, are you willing to listen to a Remark about what is true?’ ‘Okey-dokey.’ ‘The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.’
The conversation between LaMont Chu and Lyle–and the highlighted passage, specifically–was eerily familiar. About a month ago I read an article entitled Creating the Illusion of Accomplishment, in which a video game developer pointed out how easy it is to design titles that are addictive without being especially fun. “There’s a vital question that is rarely asked,” he said. “Does our game make players happy when they play, or just make them sad when they stop? This is a subtle distinction, and irrelevant to sales, but I think it’s very important. Medicine and heroin both sell for a high price, but I would sleep better at night selling one than the other.”
It’s more than just the similar choice of words that caused my spider-sense to tingle, of course. At the heart of Infinite Jest is an entertainment so alluring that people are literally unable to pull themselves away. In the novel it is (presumably) a film, which would have been a natural choice at the time the book was written. After all, the most compelling video game in 199460 was Donkey Kong County which, while fun, is not strap-on-a-dinner-tray-and-crap-your-pants addictive by any stretch.
But by the time Infinite Jest was released, 1996, the video game landscape was already changing. A little company called Blizzard Entertainment released Diablo, a near-perfect distillation of addictive video game elements. Eight years later Blizzard combined Diablo with another hit series and gave us the closest real-life analog to The Entertainment: World of Warcraft.
I am not making the comparison in (um) jest. Tales of people neglecting themselves and their dependence while playing World of Warcraft (WoW) are only a Google search away. And the game is notorious for wreaking havoc on marriages, friendships, employment, bank accounts, and hygiene.61
How did video games come to usurp television as entertainment’s most irresistible siren? Marathe could tell you the answer to that one: choice, or the illusion thereof. Television ladles out its rewards for free: excitement, romance, shock, horror. But you have to work to reap the same benefits from a video game, and that investment of effort (no matter how minor) amplifies the pleasure, because you feel like you’ve “earned it”. It’s a principle harnessed by everything from roulette tables to Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, but video game designers in particular have figured out how to hijack our innate risk-reward mechanism for their own enrichment. Or as David puts it in the Creating the Illusion of Accomplishment article cited above, “Many games use well-designed rewards to convince players that they’ve accomplished something important, even when they’ve only completed a trivial task.”
And this is one of the central themes of the Marathe / Steeply chapters. Steeply insists that choice is what makes a people free; Marathe counters that choice can be used as a tool to enslave.
There is, of course, an even quicker way of stimulating our pleasure centers: rather than simulate an experience that causes the production of mood-elevating substances, you injest chemical compounds that will stimulate the production directly. But as the members of Tough Shit But You Still Can’t Drink learned at cost, and LeMont Chu learned for free, what at first makes you happy when you have it may eventually just make you sad when you don’t. In fact, to hear Infinite Jest tell it, Lyle’s warning applies to nearly everything: drug use, success, entertainment, videophones. Even a family and the company of the Pretty Girl of All Time isn’t enough to prevent a head / microwave rendezvous.
I am no scholar of Eastern religions (or Western, for that matter), but I get a distinctively Buddhist vibe from Infinite Jest. That “attachment to a permanent self in this world of change is the cause of suffering and the main obstacle to liberation” (Thanks Wikipedia!).That the body and it’s cravings are just the map, and should not be confused with the territory. How else to interpret that only truly happy character in the novel is the one at E.T.A. who will never be in The Show, who doesn’t use drugs (as far as we know), and can’t even be said to at least have his health?
As for the rest, it seems that for every character that is grappling with their desire–be in Chu for success or Erededy for pot–there is another feverishly working to undermine the efforts.
Charles Tavis knows what James Incandenza could not have cared about less: the key to the successful administration of a top-level junior tennis academy lies in cultivating a kind of reverse-Buddhism, a state of Total Worry.
The truth will set our heroes free. But not until C.T., and NoCoat (purveyors of fine LinguaScraper applications), and the Spider are finished with them.
According to the NYT earlier this week, early cake mixes were complete in the box; housewives needed only to add water, stir, and let applied heat do the rest. Problem was, they didn’t sell. People preferred to do all the work of creating the cake as opposed to none of it. Then, a marketing breakthrough: change the recipe to require the baker to add an egg before stirring! After this simple change, cake mixes, well, sold like hotcakes and arguably changed the way we eat nearly all food forever. It wasn’t long after that processed-foods-in-boxes became the norm in the USA.
The key difference? The illusion of personal control over the process. In other words, from your post inspired by IJ: “that investment of effort (no matter how minor) amplifies the pleasure, because you feel like you’ve “earned it.”
According to the NYT earlier this week, early cake mixes were complete in the box; housewives needed only to add water, stir, and let applied heat do the rest.
KG, it’s interesting that you used the cake mix example and I can’t help but wonder if that choice, there’s that word again, was at least subconsciously influenced by Eugenio Martinez’s analogy of the Boston AA as a box of Betty Crocker Cake Mix (p. 467). Inquiring minds want to know!
Unfortunately, chances are slim, as I just hit page 88 today! Looking forward now to p. 467 even more than before, though…
I saw a documentary on World of Warcraft a few weeks ago and that is exactly what I thought. It’s The Entertainment. One guy said he stayed up for more than one week without sleep just to play the game (though I’m not sure anyone can survive seven days of more with literally no sleep). And then there was the kid who died playing Counterstrike back in 2002 or 2003 because he had been awake and at the computer for a number of hours. Crazy stuff.
I went to college at conservatory for performing arts, majoring in music composition. practicing and writing music was my life and i can tell you it only takes dedication and willpower to go long stretches of time without sleep. my record was nearly a month, but i can tell you that a week is nowhere near unheard of.
I want to say something that lets you know that I got what you are talking about and think it is brilliant but I can’t think of what else to say except: I get what you are talking about I think it is brilliant.
Also, probably exactly right.
The feeling I get from reading IJ is that The Entertainment being a video cartridge is telling us something about our undiscerning, passive consumption of media. But I guess in reality, passive entertainment methods tend not to be so pant-soilingly addictive, so immersive games are the best equivalent.
Awesome post — as an ex-Counterstrike junkie myself I totally know what you’re talking about. And the Donkey Kong Country reference takes me wayyy back.
I think the Buddhist analogies you pointed out are super-important for the book as well. I did a post on it awhile back (Ted Schacht, Zen Master), but I only brushed the surface and as you pointed out in this post, IJ is like suffused with Buddhism.
I think the flavor of Buddhism is particularly relevent is Zen, which draws a lot of its philosophical underpinnings from Taoism, which is also all over the place in IJ if you’re looking for it.
Another Zen association I think of is the simple Zen art of Enso (the painted circle), w/r/t DFW’s placement of “annular” all over the novel.
That article about WoW addiction was bang on. I can’t think of a better parallel to the Entertainment.
“How else to interpret that only truly happy character in the novel is the one at E.T.A. who will never be in The Show, who doesn’t use drugs (as far as we know), and can’t even be said to at least have his health?”
He also has no expectations on him. Anything he produces is gravy. Much easier to be Zen in that situation, I would think.
Although so far the DFW has told us very little about whether Mario has any expectations of himself, and that is a question that has kept me reading on, among other reasons. i get the feeling it will be another unanswered one, but i also know that generally creative individuals like Mario (or is he even “creative” at all? he certainly has an impulse to crate, but whether this is just puerile playing as Himself or whathaveyou remains, as well, to be seen) have pretty high expectations of themselves. has Mario ever been disappointed in his work? does he even consider his work to be work? perhaps all he cares is whether Hal and (to a lesser extent, perhaps) Avril continue to encourage him? i’m not sure, but i like to lean towards him having a sort of idiot-savant’s pleasure in knowing that his art is good, because he made it.
One of the things about video games, especially these multiplayer ones with a thousand different levels, is that it’s always possible (in theory) to top yourself. There’s this illusion of limitless potential for achievement that’s central to US culture and runs pretty counter to Zen philosophy. I guess the Entertainment makes it possible to achieve this ultimate experience of pleasure, but, as Lyle might ask, then what?
I also see buddhist or at least eastern infulence on IJ. Perhaps the Entertainment can be understood as a kind of metaphor for samsara (the cycle of craving, karma and rebirth–only to be escaped through enlightenment–and symbolized in buddhism as the endless knot). But how is the endless distraction and suffering found in samsara/the entertainment solved by this “zen” attitude different from not caring about anything? Isn’t that nihilism? And what can possibly be “heroic” about nihilistic passivity?
To clarify, nihilism (under however a serene guise)is the cure for the problems of contemporary life? Are we meant to believe that the ills of the world and the more difficult pangs of the human spirit will disappear if we all just cared a whole lot less?
Zen philosophy has always had a real thin line to tread between “detachment”, understood in some quarters as a dispassionate attitude toward the self and the world, and “nihilism,” which is basically not giving a shit about much of anything.
I think a Zen practitioner (which I am not) would tell you that ridding yourself of attachments doesn’t mean that you can or should rid yourself of compassion toward others. Compassion is the flipside of Zen (and more generally Buddhist) philosophy that’s easy to overlook in all this talk about self-transcendence.
In IJ terms, the part at the Port Washington meet where Ted Schacht was holding back Pemulis’ hair as the latter barfed into a ball bucket is one of the few instances of selfless compassion we’ve seen so far. Schacht is dispassionate about his tennis game, and in a sort of paradoxical way it is this detachment from his own concerns that allows him to show true passion to Pemulis, who at that juncture in the book is suffering in a little hell of his own making.
Oops — in last sentence above, please read “passion” as “compassion” — that was a typo and not an attempt to inject any sort of IJ slash into this conversation…
Very insightful post, Matthew! There is indeed a perfect relation between what Lyle says to Chu and the question of if “our games make players happy when they play, or just make them sad when they stop?”
It also interesting that many of the mechanisms of game addiction cited in “Creating the illusion of accomplishment” are appliable to many other contexts. Like book reading. Indeed, as I see, one of the main roles of “Infinite Summer” is to create this sense of accomplishment, the “100 pages – unlocked” thing. And so the same mechanisms can be used in a “good” way.
Am I the only one who found it amusing that “bing” is the name for microsoft’s new search engine?
wallace expands on this in ‘a supposedly fun thing,’ and that essay reminded me, too, of WOW: http://readernaut.com/jnonfiction/notes/1679/
Let’s not forget that Blizzard is also behind Starcraft, a game that has outright killed several people playing marathon sessions. What is it with that company?
Seriously — what’s with all the hating on Blizz and WoW? All good things in moderation, people. Warcraft is *not* the Entertainment, and millions of people manage to play the game and lead perfectly normal lives. Just as many abuse alcohol and become sadly addicted, others can have an occasional drink and not have it wreck their lives.
The thrust of IJ is an examination of how much of ourselves we choose to sacrifice for our entertainments. Your mileage may vary. But we shouldn’t start blaming the software developers before we take a look in the mirror.
[…] it, figuring I’ll be better able to say something once I’ve finished the novel. But Matthew Baldwin’s post over at infinite summer headquarters (as well as the general spirit of infinite summer, in which […]
And this is one of the central themes of the Marthe / Steeply chapters. Steeply insists that choice is what makes a people free; Marthe counters that choice can be used as a tool to enslave.
I can’t recall offhand where I read it/talked about it with someone, but they were talking about the downfall of man/society and how those things are portrayed in the works of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. That quotation, what you wrote there, reminds of the way the difference was described: That the downfall/end will come not because of what we are denied (Orwell), but because we will be given everything we want (Huxley).
I read this theory in Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, which is an amazing book that corresponds nicely with IJ. For those who don’t want to take on a new book while reading this one, you can find a nice little cartoon explaining the Orwell/Huxley thing here: http://www.recombinantrecords.net/docs/2009-05-Amusing-Ourselves-to-Death.html
Though – I don’t think one was more right than the other – I think both Orwell and Huxley’s interpretations of society are extremely relevant today. And also, this doesn’t even begin to describe all of the arguments that Postman posits, so I’d seriously recommend reading his book. I wonder if it influenced DFW. Here’s a quote:
“Today, we must look to the city of Las Vegas, Nevada, as a metaphor of our national character and aspiration… its symbol a thirty-foot-high cardboard picture of a slot machine and a chorus girl. For Las Vegas is a city entirely devoted to the idea of entertainment, and as such proclaims the spirit of a culture in which all public discourse increasingly takes the form of entertainment. Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.”
Can you posit an argument? I think that’s technically wrong. The MGM would have my head.
thanks for posting the enlightening/terrifying cartoon!
[…] a big book. What is it?” Me: (Assembling a winch to hoist it high […] Mrs. KennedyThat’s EntertainmentAt some point in Infinite Jest, around page 73, I abandoned my highlighter. There was simply too […]
High quality post.
Okay so I read the DFW tributes in the last or second last Brick and then I read Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and then watched a couple of DFW readings on YouTube and then hefted the Infinite. And someone asks the wife at work what Hub is doing this summer and upon hearing, tells her, “get him to Google ‘Infinite Summer’.” And so synchronicity hails you, oh fellow IJ travelers.
I scanned the reading schedule and see that I am having to blitz through 183 pages to meet the page-506-by-Friday mark. Plus read more of the great posts and get to know a bit more of the whole nexus here – so then, I don’t know yet what anything enhancing to post might look like.
But I’m like the Elves when they first landed on the shores of Middle Earth and decided to blow the long horns: here is someone new, someone new is here.
Interesting post, Matthew. But you misspell Marathe, leaving out the second “a.” Marathe (not a French surname), would, in French, be pronounced “Marat” (no phenome “th”). From the beginning, I’ve associated him w Jean-Paul Marat, the revolutionary Frenchman who said, “Five or six hundred heads would have guaranteed your freedom and happiness but a false humanity has restrained your arms and stopped your blows. If you don’t strike now, millions of your brothers will die, your enemies will triumph and your blood will flood the streets . . . And their bloody hands will rip out your children’s entrails to erase your love of liberty forever.” (Thanks, Wikipedia!) Is Steeply, then, the Marquis de Sade(Marat’s contemporary and eulogist), the “proponent of extreme freedom . . . unrestrained by morality, religion or law”? (thx again Wiki).
Speaking of French, why does DFW consistently misspell it, such as calling le Front de Liberation du Quebec (sorry — don’t know how to put in accents)le Front de la Liberation de la Quebec? He’s claimed all typos were intentional . . .
He’s claimed all typos were intentional . . .
As are mine.
Even the ones I correct when noticed.
Don’t forget to mention Second Life, where people abandon everything in their actual life to live in a simulated world and spend real money on simulated products for their simulated person, and even commit simulated crimes…
One last thing.
“At the heart of Infinite Jest is an entertainment so alluring that people are literally unable to pull themselves away.”
Does anyone else feel that same kind of pull toward the book itself? Because I definitely do. I guess it’s different, for obvious reasons, but I do feel irrationally attached to it, as if it’s a person.
Stephanie: I don’t know that I’d characterise my attachment in quite that way, but I am oddly pulled, compelled. Or, perhaps it’s more that I don’t want to admit that I’m sucked in.
I was talking with a coworker recently, one who’s opinion of reality TV is about as forgiving as my own (read: nearly nil), and he observed that he found it interesting that all the others we work with who are devotees of the “reality” style are completely compelled by them but tend also to make excuses for their adoration.
There was something I wanted to say in regards to Plato, but it’s a half-formed thought. It’ll keep.
Thank you also for posting that link to the item on “Amusing Ourselves to Death”. That was, in fact, the very thing that had prompted my comment. I’m now more interested than I had been in reading that book after I’m finished IJ.
I’m definitely feeling the pull – I find it hard to put the book down, I’m ahead of schedule and very attached to it. When friends or colleagues ask me what I’m doing this summer I start to gush on about the book and Infinite Summer and then realize that they just want to go back to watching their reality tv shows so I stop! I also want to thank Stephanie for posting the cartoon – I’m adding the Postman book to my list. And another big thanks to Matthew for adding the most recent comments sidebar to the main page that brought me back to this conversation after I’d originally read it!
I’m glad you guys will read Postman’s book! And Lonita, I’m glad you brought up the topic to begin with, because the more I think about it, the more sure I am that DFW must have been directly influenced by Postman.
I randomly read and loved Postman’s book a few months before I started IJ and was delighted to see the connections right away. I love when that happens. I also read a ton of Donald Barthelme in the interim and noticed a lot of parallels to Postman’s ideas.
[…] ranking is achieved). For these problems, ETA has its very own Dr. Delores Rusk, M.S. Ph.D., though anyone with any sense goes to see Lyle (p. 437). But when Hal says “The human head, sir,” there is something […]
[…] evacuation of the self and its desires is sometimes seen by readers as a uniquely Buddhist vibe or Zen moment, since the post-AA self is now better imagined as a contrivance of external […]