This is the third of a five-part roundtable discussion with the Infinite Summer Guides.
Infinite Summer: Does anyone have a favorite character?
Avery Edison: I’ve written before about liking Hal the most, whilst suspecting that he may be a dick. That’s still holding true. I tend to like the smarter characters, and in a book full of drug addicts and athletes, Hal is standing out a fair bit.
Eden M. Kennedy: I like Hal, too.
Matthew Baldwin: Hal?! I thought you and I shared a crush on Pemulis in common. You’ve changed so much since this project started Eden, it’s like I don’t even know you any more.
Two of my favorite sections–“Erdedy Waits for Pot” and “Erdedy Gets a Hug”–star the same person, so I guess Ken is at the top of my list as well. I hope the second half of the book is peppered with more of his comic misadventures. Oh Ken Erdedy, will you ever win?
EMK: I’m also gaining some affection for Steeply, surprisingly. I want to hear more from Avril. In a novel that’s mainly focused on male characters, it’s hard to find a woman to relate to. Apart from Air Marshal Kittenplan, of course.
Avery, you raised some gender issues in your first post. What are your thoughts on them now?
AE: After learning more about the Office of Unspecified Services, and its strange M.O. of outfitting operatives with highly inappropriate disguises, I feel a little better about Steeply. I have to believe that DFW is going for something a little higher than “ha, ha, look at the man in the dress!” because he’s obviously a smart guy and that would be an easy joke to make.
I hope Wallace ends up treating the infatuation Orin has for Steeply with respect and kindness, although the fact that he’s drawn it out for so long worries me. I’m beginning to wonder if the point of Orin’s crush is for us to laugh at him, as many other works of entertainment wish us to when they feature an un-suspecting protagonist becoming romantically involved with a trans-person. It seems like an innocuous trope, but it reinforces the concept that trans-women “trick” everyone they don’t explicitly divulge their status to. The idea that people are entitled to such information leads to the “trans panic” defense, which is used to justify violence against transgender people on a sadly routine basis.
Aaaaaand I’ve talked for far too long about this.
Speaking or Orin and Steeply, how do you feel about the mix of drama and comedy in the novel?
MB: I have no objection to the absurdity when it is “Out There” (subsidized years, the rise of Johnny Gentle, the history of O.N.A.N., and so on), but find it jarring when it’s in close proximity to the more realistic portions of the novel. I kind of consider Orin to be “Out There” so he’s exempt, but I was truly annoyed at the Clipperton passages. How are we supposed to take the real characters seriously when they are intermingling with cartoons?
EMK: The Clipperton stuff really felt like a parable or a philosophical exercise to me. “Let’s take this premise and draw it out until it collapses.” It seems like it could have been the outgrowth of some philosophical dilemma that Hal might have invented, just to toy with Orin late at night on the phone.
MB: And had it had been presented as such I would have no objection.
EMK: I keep asking myself, “How much disbelief are you willing to suspend in reading this novel? ” Because so much of it is so emotionally real. But then what do we do with the fact that the woman journalist Orin’s so intrigued by is actually a badly disguised man? I find it just so delightful and ridiculous that I honestly don’t care how just plain impossible that would be, I just can’t wait to see how it all shakes out. But still.
AE: To touch lightly (lest I type out another “trans-issues” screed) on the Steeply thing, I tend to assume that Steeply is actually pretty well disguised, and it’s only the fact that Marathe is such an intelligent man that he notices all the costume’s flaws. We also have to bear in mind that every description of Steeply so far has been after he fell down a muddy slope on his way to meet with Marathe. For all we know, his usual appearance is quite passable.
EMK: That’s good, I hadn’t thought about it that way at all, I was assuming that eventually someone like Hal would see through Steeply’s terrible disguise and set Orin straight, so to speak (ahem). I certainly hadn’t foreseen something tragic happening with Orin and Steeply. Now I’m a little worried.
AE: With regard to the mix of drama and comedy, I must say that I’m not finding the book at all laugh-out-loud funny. Every now and then I’ll chuckle at a concept (I think the head-through-monitor part of Eschaton got a giggle) but every attempt at humor by Wallace seems a little self-conscious. When I got to the section with Lateral Alice Moore the other day, I threw up my hands and asked aloud “is there anyone in this book that doesn’t have some ‘comical’ deformity?”
Kevin Guilfoile: It’s an old assumption that no one would recognize a perfect novel even if it were possible for somebody to write one. If I had one major complaint about IJ it would be this inconsistency of tone Eden and Matthew talk about, but that’s also inevitable given the scope of what Wallace is trying to accomplish. When you write a novel of huge ambition you are, by definition, stretching beyond your known abilities and so there are going to be occasional swings and misses along with the tape measure home runs (and obviously readers will disagree about what works and what doesn’t). During the Tournament of Books I said about Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 that in order for a novel to be a masterpiece it probably also has to be at least a little bit terrible. I said that with some tongue in my cheek, although compared to Infinite Jest I found 2666 to be a lot less ambitious and a lot more terrible.
It feels to me like you guys are over thinking things a bit, but maybe I’m just enjoying the book more than you are. For example, I find myself laughing out loud (occasionally in public) at least every 10 pages, often just at the way he words certain things. It’s true that the tone is all over the map but I’m so used to that by now that the contrast seems essential to the book. I’m thankful for the variety and the sheer immensity of imagination on display. I like the sensation of laughing at something ridiculous and a few pages later gasping at something horribly painful and real. And the more obtuse passages are tolerable because you know something amazing is around the corner.
Fav. Characters: Without any doubt, it’s Gately, followed by Mario. I had a bit of a crush on Marathe, but that fizzled when I saw him outside the conversations with Steeply. His character changes without his foil.
But then, I’m about 150 pages past schedule.
Who are your favs?
I am completely behind Gately. I think it’s because he’s so vividly real, which is because he’s Come In, and so has put everything on the table.
But I also like that Gately uses completely un-PC terms not because he’s prejudiced, but because it’s all he knows. He has a child-like innocence almost.
My favorite character so far is Lenz. While I’m not behind his actions, what he does during this week’s assignment (I can’t state what, since it’s not due until tomorrow, but if you’ve read you surely know what I mean) kept my attention and really drew me in. He is the most compelling character to me.
I agree. Despite (because of?) being such an execrable excuse for a person, Lenz is one of the best characters yet. I also second the appreciation of Mario and Gately. Gately is definitely my favorite character at this point, and I also very much enjoy Halation’s deceased dad and grandfather.
I too love Lenz, he’s hilarious. The part where he’s @ an AA meeting with 3(!) cigarettes going simultaneously is priceless.
Nutz to y’all. Lenz is a turd.
I’m with Russell. DFW’s ability to create memorable characters, over time, is what keeps me reading IJ. For favorite characters, I love Hal and absolutely identify with Pemulius, but I was also drawn to Don Gately from the get-go (who can’t love a guy who will let elevator doors close in on his head?), and I’m really finding Mario to be a wonder. I can’t wait to see how things turn out the last two, in particular.
What no love for Poor Tony? Every new occulus or paragraph has me hoping to hear that rambling narrative tone again, but it hasn’t happened since the catastrophe on the subway train. This is when I find Wallace flourishes with his fiction the most and I really enjoy it.
I love IJ’s humor but it is so tempered with a horror show foil that I find myself always kept in check for fear of being irreverent. But maybe that’s on purpose.
I like Poor Tony out of gay solidarity; there could be no other reason, if I saw him (and I have) in real life in my neighborhood I would not be so sympathetic to the gray-skinned purse-snatcher.
I like Jim Struck best. He’s obviously very minor as a character, but he’s the only one who uses substances occasionally without becoming dependent and without understanding what the others see in them.
I have found some of DFW’s comic interludes funny, smiling if not laughing out loud, but sometimes I’m annoyed by the ridiculous. The impossible things, the crazy stories. I don’t have a finger on why some absurdities are funny and some are irritating.
Gender issues: until AE mentioned it, I didn’t notice. Now I can’t help but wonder if there will be any females who are fully fleshed out by the end.
Since early in this online discussion I was informed that the brick-falling email was lifted verbatim from the internet (although it’s pretty funny that the person who used the excuse actually tried it and broke his bones in this book), I have been wondering if some of the other strange hyperbolic stories were urban legends or myths* of some kind.
*I intersperse reading IJ with watching Mythbusters. Perhaps it’s situational.
I would like to offer the following question for consideration: whose attempts at humor aren’t self-conscious? Most of what we find funny has its root in some pretty deep psychological insecurity. So why fault someone for making that obvious? Things that are slick aren’t usually all that funny.
I find this particular criticism, the one with its inherent presumption that an author should never let us see him sweat, is outmoded. What Wallace was on the cusp of, movement-wise, is something he repeatedly referred to as “Post-Irony,” which means that the messiness, the unevenness, the neuroses, the striving, “the making of the sausage,” as it were, actually gets to be part of the story, and it’s really his way of saying “I love you; I am you.”
I’m surprised that there aren’t more people who appreciate this technique. Although I guess it makes sense that having spent so long in the cruel embrace of irony and postmodernism, genuine sentiment would frighten or confuse the daylights out of folks.
Agreed x10.
Fave characters are Mario (as mentioned before) and now Gately. On Mario, some of the perceptive students here http://ijstrose.wordpress.com/ say it better than I could. On second reading of the book he just seems to be a much more important character. Also, I like the pure warmth of the tone in which DFW writes about him. Gately appears (so far anyway) to be the only character who is f’d up but actually doing something about it. Least fave character: Madame Psychosis.
If Steeply is meant to be a convincing trannie then let’s see some evidence of that. From the Marathe conversations he seems to be a comic-book character, and so Orin’s believing in him as Helen just jars. I don’t buy the theory that Marathe is so smart he can see through it.
I think the discussion here of the mixture of comic and tragic is interesting. To me, harder-hitting material is much more effective when the reader is first softened up with comedy. I don’t think DFW really pulls this off in IJ (if indeed that’s what he’s attempting, he may not be). Catch 22 is the master-class in this IMHO.
The slapstick comic parts (like Pemulis’ cap bouncing off his head as he jumps up and down in rage during the Eschaton, which is explicitly described as being something you’d only see in a cartoon) still do throw me off a little bit. I agree with Matthew Baldwin that it is really jarring to have these kinds of scenes side-by-side with the incredible emotional realism that Wallace is capable of.
But it’s something I’ve learned to roll with, something that I just shrug and surrender to at this point. I also think what ray gunn said above about uneven messiness and sausage-making is highly apposite here.
Really enjoying this roundtable format. It’s unfathomable to me that anybody could not laugh out loud a whole lot while reading this book, but I guess people just have different senses of humor. I think Steeply is probably not very close to passing at all. Avery makes a fair point about his just having slid down a muddy cliff, but there are a number of kind of Frankensteinish, mannish type women (or “women”) in Wallace’s work, and I think this is kind of a gag. I agree with KG’s assessment of IJ vs. 2666. I like both, but IJ, to me, is just heads and shoulders above 2666.
I guess I’m just trying to read the book too fast is what I’m not laughing very much. Some of it’s amusing, but I think overall it’s a very difficult book to read, so I gloss over the parts that aren’t interesting me (Steeply/Marathe) and don’t take everything in. I do enjoy the book though, and will probably eventually end up reading it a second time and take more in.
Favorites: well, I can’t say he’s really a favorite because he’s a creep, but Randy Lenz between pages 575 and 620.
Lenz is a creep, but a brilliant creation by Wallace. This passage brought others out of their shells too: Erdedy and Gately in particularly. I like them a lot more as a result of these pages.
Regarding comedy: I remember watching Rushmore (Wes Anderson’s film) and not laughing at all in the theater, then for the next month, I would find myself chuckling at something that popped in my head: a line, a scene, an image . . . I find IJ having the same effect.
I like Gately less after the scene with Lenz. I despise violence and acting before thinking. Not to say it was pure thuggery. But in defending Lenz, Gately acted just like him: violence is itself a reward for him.
I don’t think Gately enjoyed the violence or at all wanted to fight. I think he was in a position where he felt that he had to look out for those in the community around him, and if one of them was under attack, he would defend him, putting him before himself.
To follow up:
“Having no choice now not to fight and things simplify radically, divisions collapse. Gately’s just one part of something bigger he can’t control… He says he’s responsible for these people on these private grounds tonight and is part of this whether he wants to be or not, and can they talk this out because he doesn’t want to fight them.”
In my opinion, he smiled strangely and felt the warm surge of adrenaline because it was familiar behavior. Like he was relapsing and using drugs. But I think the reason he perpetrated this violence was changed – instead of for his own gain, as it always was in the past, this time, it was for someone else.
Then again, to play deil’s advocate, I’m not sure that those reasons justify his actions. But I think his intentions were different than in the past, and certainly different from Lenz’s motives.
I think “relapse” is the best way to describe what happens. His intentions are honorable at first, but the violence is so brutally over the top – he goes way beyond what’s necessary to subdue these guys. It’s like he loses himself in what he used to be. And it’s no surprise, considering the banal descriptions of his day-to-day, referred to repeatedly as “soul sucking,” and also Lenz has been killing animals as a way to deal with his rage at his own Powerlessness, and meanwhile Gately has been letting it build up for at least a year – no wonder the explosion.
I think the writing in this passage is incredible, part of which you quoted. Whether you agree w/ Gately or not, the way DFW describes the unfolding violent scene is remarkable.
Is it possible that Orin finds Helen/Steeply so alluring because of, rather than despite of “her” manly mannerisms? I’ve always pictured him/her looking a bit like (the almost always awesome) John Lithgow’s character in The World According to Garp.
As for favorite characters – Don Gately, Pemulius, Mario, and in a love to hate him sort of way, Randy Lenz.
On the comedy/tragedy thread. Isn’t good old Will Shakespeare the paradigm? Slapstick atop grief. Of course it’s theater, not a novel, but having read The Bard, DFW’s easy for me to enjoy.
Note – I do laugh out loud pretty frequently.
Very good point. It bears noting that the scene from which the book’s title is derived is a reminiscence for a dead clown. Pathos and humor (or, at least, the specter of it) married once and for all.
Oh and as for Wallace’s humor, I find it to be one of the most humanizing, just straight up attractive and enjoyable aspects of the novel. Writing such as this never fails to crack my shit up:
Any sort of culinary comments are always extremely oblique. Randy Lenz up at the northeast corner likes to raise his can of tonic and say that Don’s food is the kind of food that helps you really appreciate whatever you’re drinking along with it. Geoffrey Day talks about what a refreshing change it is to leave a dinner table not feeling bloated.
– I’ve interpreted the Orin/Steeply thing like: Orin wants Steeply because he knows he can’t have her. I think it says more about his compulsions w/r/t women than anything else. It can be funny (I chuckle every time I remember that not only is Steeply huge, he’s also covered in electrolysis scars) but I think the humor is more about the cluelessness particular to Orin’s character than some general aren’t-men-in-drag-inherently-funny thing. I don’t think we’re ever meant to laugh at Poor Tony because of his boa or his heels, for example.
– I also have no problems with either suspension of disbelief or what some people are calling inconsistency of tone. I guess even the most absurd elements don’t seem too far off to me… I just read a news story about a guy who pretended to be developmentally disabled and tricked a woman from craiglist into taking care of him for months before he was found out. Crazy stuff happens in the real world all the time. And for me, the juxtaposition of humor/tragedy just makes the book feel that much more alive and human. I appreciate when narrative conventions and readers’ expectations are toyed with… I guess I think it’s more true to the actual experience of life than if all the “serious parts” were totally predictably somber.
– Favorite character is Don Gately, hands down. So vivid and human and sincere.
I am totally and completely absorbed in this book and its world, in the same way I used to be absorbed by reading as a kid.
I realize it’s not adding much to say that I absolutely agree on both points, but I do. I take the Steeply interludes with Orin as a device to lampoon Orin’s issues with women, especially his mother, and to illustrate his ego in a setting alternate to his calls with Hal.
I’m also totally enveloped by the book’s world at this point. I find myself stealing away to read it during lunch time that I don’t have.
Mario is hands-down my favorite character, followed by Gately. I’m a sucker for earnestness, I guess.
My heart belongs to Michael Pemulis. Not just because he hails from my neighborhood (good ol’ stinky ol’ Allston), but because he’s a wonderful jackass.
That said, I’m also miffed by the lack of female perspective in the book. I keep hoping to get back into Joelle’s head [PS: I am a little behind schedule], and to hear from Avril. I have to think that maybe it’s just that DFW is so entrenched in the male perspective, but come on. In 1000-odd pages, he could at least try.
I would have to re-read all of the Maranthe/Steeply sections, but could the status of Steeply’s “true” sex be lost, as is his “true” national identification, in a series of trans-genderings, that, like his potential double-double agency or some indeterminate but multiple series of crossings serves to question the legitimacy of the individual representing the interests of the nation representing the interests of its people against the Other? I guess all that’s left would be analyzing the effect of these transformations at the points which they’re most clearly visible in the book. I, at least, don’t care much to solve the riddle of which side of inter-O.N.A.N. politics Steeply acts for, and I don’t think that Maranthe or any other character who is privy Steeply’s association with both sides really cares to sort that out either, as they still believe that regardless of Steeply’s true intentions of affiliation, they can use him to their advantage (although I admit I’m not sure what either side wants out of him, perhaps they both just want to figure out WTF the Entertainment really is, and thus his work getting close to Orin serves both sides). Because Maranthe is supposedly more in the know than Steeply, I think our tendency is to trust his gendered representation of him, and those beliefs are reinforced by the fact that we know the B.S.S. looks for agents to dress up in costume. But, barring a complete rereading of these sections, I don’t think we get a self-representation of Steeply that isn’t mediated by either Maranthe, the B.S.S., or Orin, who we all have reason to believe are limited in the extent that they know where Steeply fits within the matrix of possible persons, with Maranthe and B.S.S. the very least unsure where his national allegiance lies, and Orin potentially mistaken w/rt Steeply’s gender.
Marathe is the one double/triple(?) crossing, not Steeply. Steeply is a U.S. agent, no ambiguity there.
Oh yeah, and Orin’s attraction to Steeply may stem from the same impulse as his attraction to JvD. We learn in JvD’s discussions with Gately that she always had the impulse to hide herself, but it’s the U.H.I.D. that allowed her to accept this fact (she says on p538 my copy, “‘Don, I’m perfect. I’m so beautiful I drive anybody with a nervous system out of their fucking mind. Once they’ve seen me they can’t think of anything else and don’t want to look at anything else and stop carrying out normal responsibilities and believe that if they can only have me right there with them at all times everything will be all right. […] I’m so beautiful I’m deformed.'”) Now with our knowledge of JvD’s accident and subsequent deformity, this appears to be a misrepresentation of JvD to Gately, with an ability to misrepresent afforded to her by her veiling. But when I read this passage, it made me believe that there was something deeper and that when JvD was still the P.G.O.A.T. she felt burdened by the pressure and the scopophilia she induced in other. Her repressed desire to hide may thus have been what attracted Orin to her in the first place, the fact that her True Self resisted the outward display of her beauty. This is a cliché of romance, that while looks are what initially draw us in that we need a personality or Common Interest to keep us attracted (also a cliché warned against in literature, that of Not Judging a Book By Its Cover), but in JvD/Orin’s case it’s precisely the desire to retreat from appearance that draws him in. Perhaps it goes back to Orin’s psychoses w/rt his mother, whose O.C.D. need for order and for the logophilic demand that words portray their true meaning, that Orin is drawn to people and women that seem to resist easy meanings and order. I’m admittedly not sure how this relates to Orin’s schemes for picking up women or for his penchant for sleeping with multiple Subjects, but it does give me at least a pause for trying to understand how the two women are connected who are connected to Orin that the book describes in detail.
So like I’m really IDing with Joelle/Madame P. I was wondering if the chemical burn story is bullshit? Concocted by the PGOAT to explain the veil, which she really wears b/c of what she told Gately. For the record, I’m digging J van D not because I’m a pretty girl or hideously deformed. (Though I am weirdly-cool deformed). I think she is just a feminist’s wet dream as far as a character to ponder.
pic•a•resque (pk-rsk, pk-), adj.
1. Of or involving clever rogues or adventurers.
2. Of or relating to a genre of usually satiric prose fiction originating in Spain and depicting in realistic, often humorous detail the adventures of a roguish hero of low social degree living by his or her wits in a corrupt society.
n.
One that is picaresque.
Main Entry: 1pi•ca•resque
Pronunciation: \pi-kə-resk\
Function: adjective
Etymology: Spanish picaresco, from pícaro
Date: 1810
: of or relating to rogues or rascals; also : of, relating to, suggesting, or being a type of fiction dealing with the episodic adventures of a usually roguish protagonist
Another vote for Don Gately as favorite character, ESPECIALLY for whuppin’ some ass in Lenz’s defense. The cast of ETA, the students, whenever they converse, make them my second favorite. As a substitute teacher in the public schools of rural Michigan, their diction and vocab are a joy to fantasize about! Unrealistic, perhaps! But we’re already suspending a great deal of disbelief here.
Orin encounters Steeply in November of the YDAU; Marathe and Steeply converse on April 30/May 1 of the same year: six months earlier. Yes? Considering how seriously Steeply takes his disguises, much could have changed in those months.
Just to join in here, my favorites are (in no order) Hal, Gately, Mario, and Schacht.
It upsets me that I forgot to mention Bruce Green. I LOVE him!
I love Infinite Summer.
Okay, on tone:
To me, Infinite Jest is a tragic story written in the form of a comic novel. That is to say that the language, even during the most tragic scenes, remains funky, jargonish, playful. And, since it’s a comic novel, there are going to be absurdities and cartoonishness riddling every chapter, no matter what else the chapters are about.
I’d compare this to the experience of your funniest friend telling you about her most miserable year. No matter how many times you say, “Oh no! Oh, that’s terrible!” while listening to her story, you’ll still find yourself laughing out loud just because of the way the story is told. And sometimes you’ll have to cover your mouth with your hand and say, “I don’t know why I’m laughing, it’s awful!”
This brings me to the footnotes. The entire novel seems almost like it’s told to you by someone, a real person who can’t help exaggerating and joking through the awfulness of it, just as your funniest friend does. But and so then the footnotes add a second authorial voice, presenting the tales told in the book as actual facts backed up by a wider world of facts and documents. Which one is DFW? Both, of course, but this gave him a chance to be both your goofy-ass friend and the scholarly documentarian who’s compiled this masterwork.
I think one aspect of the shifts in tone has to do with keeping the story amusing enough to hold people’s interest, because without this the tragedy of the whole business would become rather overwhelming. And by making some aspects of the book cartoonish, it gives DFW great license– he has made it clear that the story need not be judged on the basis of realism or plausibility.
But I think I another thing to note is that the closer one gets to the heart of the action, the central characters like Hal and Gately, the less cartoonishly they are portrayed. I think this ties in with Wallace’s perception that our experience of others is by nature cartoonish, that we can never identify with them and their history as strongly as we do our own. It reminds me of “lords of our little skull-sized kingdoms” line in the Kenyon College graduation address. Also of the old “tragedy is when I stub my little toe; comedy is when you fall into an open manhole and die” line. I am also reminded of the figurants thing a little while on.
And I suspect this ties in with the endnotes. It is my impression that one of Wallace’s projects in the book was to “break down the fourth wall.” I see the endnotes as one tool towards that end; they mirror the digressiveness of thought. I think they make you aware of the author’s voice in your head, but in such a way that it sounds like your own thoughts.
Empathy is important.
[…] he replies by spitting his disgusting Kodiak chew into a wastebasket very slowly. Hal is being kind of a dick but he does have some reasons (pot withdrawal, almost getting beaten on the court) And he did […]