This is the second of a five-part roundtable discussion with the Infinite Summer Guides.
Infinite Summer: Have you been sticking to the schedule?
Avery Edison: For the first time since the project started I’m sticking to the schedule. I had been catching up in 75-page burst the day before my posts were due to be written. It’s not a great way to read the book – the feeling that IJ was a homework assignment was only intensified and the fact that I didn’t have time to take breaks from the harder-to-read sections was stressful.
Last week I was getting through about thirty pages a day, and now I’ve decreased to around 15. I’m a little ahead of the schedule, which has added a nice, relaxed tone to my reading.
I mean, as relaxed as you can feel reading about something like the Eschaton game.
Matthew Baldwin: My trajectory has been the inverse. I was consistently ahead of schedule, by as much as 150 pages a few weeks ago. Then I stalled out for a spell.
The main thing that stymied me was the passage about Lucien and Bertraud, before the arrival of the Wheelchair Assassins. Every night I picked up the novel, read one or two paragraphs of that section, and gave up. It took me a literal week to get through four pages, 480-484.
Instead, I occupied my evenings reading everything else by David Foster Wallace I could furtively send to my workplace printer: the David Lynch profile and E Unibus Plurum and Host and The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing and two (count ‘em: one, two) long essays about tennis.
Also, at some point during that period I came down with a cold, and discovered that it is nearly impossible to read Infinite Jest (at least for me) when fatigued, even in the slightest.
AE: I’ve found totally the opposite – I make the most progress reading the book when I’m sleepy. Usually I read for half an hour to forty-five minutes just after I wake up and just before I go to bed. I think maybe my brain is still relaxed enough to let the words just wash over me, rather than allow me to interrupt myself by over-analyzing the book.
Kevin Guilfoile: I have actually never been behind, although a couple times the days have caught up to my bookmark. I’m enjoying the book so much, and especially now, that I’ve never not wanted to read it. Right now I’m about a week ahead, I think, which is probably average.
AE: Kevin, reading ahead doesn’t get you any extra credit. I checked.
IS: None of you addressed the Wardine / yrstruly sections. Care to do so now?
AE: I was upset by the Wardine section, but more by its content than style. It’s tough to get through, but both of those sections cropped up during my “read it all in one go” sessions, and so I just kept reading and tried to ignore the language.
Eden M. Kennedy: I guess the Wardine writing style didn’t worry me too much. Certainly DFW’s not the first white author to write in blackface, so to speak, and I think that whatever you as a reader bring to those sections will determine whether or how much you cringe when you read them. I got into the rhythm of the yrstruly section pretty quickly and just began to follow the action, rather than getting too hung up on the style. I’m just going to trust that there’s a reason for the radical style change that sets those sections apart, and that something will happen to bring everything together in a meaningful way later on.
MB: The Wardine section didn’t bother me a whit. For one thing, I never made the assumption that Wallace was trying to emulate an entire race’s locution, only that of a specific person. I mean, if he had every black character speaking in that style then there might be cause for alarm, but this section fell 30 pages into a 1000 pages novel–a little early to go all torch-and-pitchfork on the guy.
And I loved the yrstruly chapter. Very A Clockwork Orangeian.
AE: Yeah, the yrstruly stuff really pulled me in — the text felt more frenetic than cumbersome. I felt like I really was in the mind of an addict, although — as a middle-class white girl who tried pot just once and felt sick for two days after — that could say more about my perception of drugs users than it does about Wallace’s writing.
Have any of you been to Boston? Can you visualize the city as you read?
MB: I think this is the first fiction I’ve read about Boston and its environs that wasn’t written by H. P. Lovecraft, of whom I am a huge fan. So, while reading Infinite Jest, I keep waiting for E.T.A. to play Akham University, or a cult to be discovered holding rituals in the Ennet House basement, or Johnny Gentle to be unmasked as Nyarlathotep. I am pretty sure that Mario’s conception is going to involve the town of Innsmouth.
EMK: I lived on the east coast from the early eighties to the early nineties and had a few Boston boyfriends, so I feel like I can peg several of the locations he uses in the book, as well as the look of some of the people he describes, especially the Crocodiles and the ETA kids. And now that I think of it, I wonder if some of my ETA associations are tinged by other east coast prep novels, like Donna Tartt’s “A Secret History,” and the dozen others I’ve read over the years. I’m sure that’s a topic for a term paper, somewhere.
AE: My only exposure to Boston has been via. the film “Good Will Hunting”. I don’t think this affects my reading of the book too much, other than the obvious downside that – in my head – every character looks like Ben Affleck.
I’m still not sure how I feel about that.
KG: I grew up in the Northeast and my brother has lived in Boston for 20 years, so I’ve been there dozens of times and so I have a pretty solid picture of the city as I read. If the characters would just ride that little tourist trolley around a bunch, I’d be right there in my head with them.
MB, it also took me days to read the first couple pages of the Lucien section. It bored me so much I wasn’t really paying attention. I missed the squeak clues. I was as surprised as Lucien. I am convinced DFW fully intended to bore me in order to then shock me.
I lived in Boston for about 12 years, much of it in Oak Square on the Brighton / Newton border, which is about where Enfield seems to be. So it’s great fun picturing the locations exactly.
One of my favorite Boston-y bits is endnote 202′s description of Storrow Drive. I used to say that I wanted to make a video game out of it… you’re driving along, cruising and keeping the river on your right and then OH MY GOD I’M IN KENMORE SQUARE HOW THE HELL DID THAT HAPPEN? But his is much better:
As a frequent horrified commuter on Storrow, that endnote absolutely killed me. Spot-on.
I finally (after reading the initial argument [...discussion] over it a while back) finalized my position on the Wardine section:
Readers (at least some of whom, I would guess, are not used to hearing black dialect on a regular basis) slog through that section and are not only worn out by the mental energy it requires, but also are immediately able to identify the speaker as black even though she does not identify herself as black (I’m also assuming that the reader I’m talking about is your average white person, like myself). Guilt over making this subconscious association creeps in. The reader then begins to wonder, “Am I a racist? Is that how I think ALL black people sound?”
And because the national position on racism seems to be one of “If I close my eyes and pray real hard, it will go away,” and because we’ve made the leap in logic that the only way to avoid being racist is to avoid acknowledging race at all costs, the (average white) reader gets freaked out, and passes the blame on to Wallace, who was simply being honest about race (as I type this, “Consider the Lobster” is sitting immediately to my left, bookmarked on pp. 110-11, the middle-end of “Authority and American Usage,” where he is recounting his speech he gives to black students struggling with Standard Written English)–Wallace was, I think, probably the single most racially honest white writer of our time.
So the reader jumps to the unwarranted conclusion that Wallace was a racist, when really they were simply uncomfortable with their own assumptions regarding race and did not know what to do with their anxiety.
I haven’t heard anyone say Wallace is a racist, just that he shows a lack of sophistication/empathy with black people. I’d have a tough time buying into the argument that he’s racist. I will say that he doesn’t write about the poor black experience very convincingly, and that the section doesn’t ring true–the accent, the sentiments, all of it–in the same way some writers don’t write women very well, or young or old people.
But I’ll also say its like three pages, you know? The great writing here far outweighs the bad.
I couldn’t have said it better myself, Matt. The hypocritical tremulous cries of racism elicited by Clenette’s section are one of the most egregious and galling of the myriad responses ‘Infinite Jest’ draws. For my part, I thought that the segment was exceptionally well-written and that Wallace had a rare knack for hearing and replicating the voice of another. I have heard, in my lifetime, just such a dialect as Clenette’s used, as I’m sure Wallace did. Placing his emulation of such in his magnum opus was a bold and controversial thing to do, for obvious reasons, but indicates nothing more than perhaps an overly optimistic appraisal of the sensitivity of his readers.
It’s also worth noting that if the speech patterns of nearly any of us were set down in type as nearly as possible to the manner in which they were uttered the resulting text would likely look very strange and possibly offensive.
InfiniteTasks made a great post on the Wardine and yrstruly sections, if anyone missed it: http://infinitetasks.wordpress.com/2009/07/11/race-and-tattoos/
See points 1 and 2.
I never got the hubbub over the Wardine section – it’s literally not even two pages long. If you can’t grind your way through that much and then immediately forget about it, I’m convinced you’re just not trying hard enough.
I am not bothered by Wardine or yrstruly. I did not think per se that yrstruly was/is black. I still don’t know who that was. Maybe I never will.
I did very much struggle to get thru the yrstruly one, it took longer than any other same-page-number section.
I would like to ask, if anyone thought those passages are racist/problematic/offensive/etc., then what about the Irish guy later on (I have no idea where that is)? What about Marathe’s ESL-type speech?
I’m not asking to be dismissive. I am often offended by things, which I frequently forget the next day because who has that kind of time. I remember learning in college that people thought “Gone With the Wind” was racist, partly for the speech of black people. When I read it, as a 14-year-old probably, I saw it differently. Every white person who treated a black person rudely got a comeuppance, often death. I’m sure that my youthful impression was wrong, and influenced by my belief that we were past most racial problems (naivete, how fondly I remember you), but it strikes me that much of what we perceive is biased by our assumptions.
Honestly, at this point (p 663) I hardly remember those sections. There’s so much in my head surrounding this book. Ie, Lenz and everything around him. I have been slacking off lately because of him.
I believe on page 300 yrstruly’s identity is revealed.
Yeah, yrstruly is Emil Minty, IIRC.
Tizzle, because you’ve already passed it, read page 562 again.
I actually think the reference to yrstruly on pg. 562 is misleading. Lenz can’t be yrstruly, mainly because their back stories don’t match at all. The reference on pg. 300, where Poor Tony says Emil had marked him for de-mapping as a result of the horrid thing with C and Bobby Wo, and then dematerialized. This is consistent with Emil Minty, the new resident at Ennet House. Plus Emil has the “Fuck Nigers” tattoo, which was the way he spelled the racial slur (sorry to use it, though hopefully I didn’t really use it, just quoted it).
Meanwhile, yrstruly never asked for the time, like Lenz does, or acted out violently, and he wasn’t a coke dealer, either. So I’m not sure what the reference on pg. 562 is about, unless it’s a red herring.
If it is a red herring, it certainly got me, despite all the differences between the two characters. The only thing I knew for sure was that Lenz is wildly unreliable.
But why mislead the reader into thinking Lenz is yrstruly? I know there’s a lot of misdirection going on, and outright screwing with the reader, but this seems off for some reason. Are we supposed to assume Lenz picked up the expression from Emil at Ennet House?
I guess maybe we’ll see.
I could totally be wrong, as I haven’t finished the book yet and don’t know for sure, but I just wanted to offer my thoughts. I suppose we’ll see. If I am right, though, I have no idea why DFW would mislead the reader… very confusing.
Is yrstruly sorta like w/r/t and a couple other internet shortcuts DFW put in the book?
I remember seeing the ref. on p 562 and noticing it, and then it left my brain. Isn’t that where Lenz becomes more main-charactery?
Thanks for the references and thoughts. I’m not even trying to keep track anymore.
I don’t know if it was misleading. I think it may just be the characters all using the same colloquialisms. For instance, yrstruly says “and everything like that” throughout his section, and I did a double take when, much later in the book, Calvin Thrust’s dialogue is being recounted by the narrator with a bunch of “and everything like that”s thrown in.
But I agree that yrstruly is Emil Minty.
So, I just stumbled upon this site a week or two ago, and was immediately enamored. The remarkable thing was that I happened to be roughly on the same reading schedule as all of you folks. How about that.
Anyways, I just had to say that I’m shocked at how provocative the Wardine section has been for so many people. This isn’t particularly new ground. I don’t even know where to begin, John Berryman for starters. If anything, I thought it was the least original voice in the book so far. I’m expecting that voice to recur or at least echo within the narrator’s voice later, though, so I’m holding off judgment.
One more thing for those who haven’t gotten there, or may have missed it:
yrstruly makes another appearance on pg. 562.
Cheers, I’m glad to have found this!
That’s actually past the spoiler line (pg. 559) but I’d be happy to discuss it when everyone reaches it.
Re: JOI and his father – it started slow for me but by the end, it became one of my favorite sections of the book. Here lies a promising old man? A self that touches all edges? I learned what it meant to be a body, Jim, just meat? Yes, But He’ll Never Be Great? Pg. 166 – 169 is all perfect, to me.
Oops, didn’t scroll far enough down before my comment. I would add that, I too, have been amazed at the lack of comment about some of DFW’s use of dialect when it’s been used by Canadians, the Irish and a few others. I could never see the reason for the bruhaha. It’s an author trying to give a character a voice.
I, for one, did comment in the forums on the use of “French-Canadian” dialect. I don’t think it’s an accurate representation at all. There’s nothing wrong with giving a character voice, but in the case of Marathe, the syntax and word choice is just off. It was a bit off-putting in the early part of the book (and a contributing factor to my abandoning the book on my first go round a few years ago), but past a certain point, I took it for simply parodic, and, well, funny.
Actually my early problem/roadblock was the 10 page paragraph on or about pg. 165. This 10 page paragraph consists of nothing but JOI’s father’s drunken rambling. I am surprised no one else has mentioned this section in the “hard to read” category. I put the book down for a week before I had the time/energy to slog through it. And it needs to be read to get some key info on the JOI/JOI Dad relationship and the whole Father/Son relationship/communication theme which starts and ends and permeates throughout this story.
Just my rwo pennies.
Sorry, I left my response to your point about the JOI/father section in my comment above.
I loved that piece, actually, and I’ve heard a couple others who like it to. (Not that I can’t see where you’re coming from–the lack of graf breaks is frustrating.) But I loved the voice, the circular (or annular?) way the monologue revisits themes and advances them, again and again.
That section was what made me want to continue the book. I get where there’s no break, and that could be difficult, but I loved that 10 page paragraph. I liked when the Father explains how to open up a flask mindfully. Genius! I would quote it, but no one I know has read the book.
As a life-long Bostonian it has been fun to be reading about the Boston and Cambridge environs while actually riding the very Green Line trains DFW references*. On the flip side it has been occasionally sad to read references to longtime favorite and now defunct locales such as the Rat in Kenmore Square
*I commute daily on the T in Boston
Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! I just learned something from a friend: Enfield is one of the four towns that were flooded in the 1930s to create the Quabbin Reservoir that provides Boston’s water. (The other towns were Dana, Greenwich, and Prescott.) And the Wikipedia page for “Quabbin Reservoir” adds this: “Before the reservoir’s construction, there was a hill in Enfield called Quabbin Hill.” Perhaps this was the hill chopped down to build the Enfield Tennis Academy?
Except that it’s clear in the text that Enfield is essentially shoved in between Brighton & Newton. He says so many times. And that’s nowhere near the Quabbin. But I did know about that connection and wonder if that’s where DFW got the name. If so, why a flooded-out now-defunct town rather than a name that was totally made up?
What I’ve noticed is a propensity to skew information so you’re never quite sure what’s “real” and what’s not.
You people and your super-have-time-to-readiness.
I’m still way way behind, but I was fortunate this week to get the MIT and introduction (not including the filmography) to Madame Psychosis’s radio show while visiting my brother in East Cambridge. I didn’t have time to do a full Infinite Tour, but reading and seeing these places for the first time at the same time was a bit surreal.
I didn’t see a brain-shaped student union. But the brand-new architecture (my brother’s apt. on 3rd was built last year) is a good stand-in for the post-language riot world.
Had no problem reading and following the Antitoi section. Just having a problem getting over the image of the killings. That horrific passage, to me, ranks with the killing of the priests in Hem’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” And, I’m betting there won’t be much climactic retribution. Honest, I’ve forgotten how the book ends (or winds down) since reading it in 1998
Yes. I had to put the book down for a few days after reading that section to get rid of the imagery. I also decided to not read right before going to bed.
In re: the Boston question, I think that’s what has kept me latched on to the book more than anything. I’ve lived here for 3 years, and went to school just outside the city for 4 years before that, so I can visualize the places (the real ones, at least) that DFW’s talking about to the street corner.
I love stories about places, especially places I’ve been, and to have the place where I live be the connective tissue in a sprawling novel like IJ has this quality of making everyday places feel monumental and iconic.
One thing though: Gately’s drive to Bread & Circus down Comm Ave and through Cambridge–I love the section, but DFW fudged the geography a little. Can’t tell if it’s by mistake or on purpose.
Just recently graduated from Boston College, which is in Chestnut Hill, also on the Brighton/Newton border. It’s been very easy to visualize everything for me, from the Green Line t rides to Blanchard’s Liquor Store, etc.
As a BU grad student, I lived in an apartment directly beneath the Citgo sign in Kenmore Square, so DFW’s description of it as “a triangular star to steer by” connected particularly with me.
[...] Stars Are Right: Also during that roundtable, I predicted that the Bostons of H. P. Lovecraft and David Foster Wallace would eventually intersect. And: [...]