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.
I agree that IJ is biblical, but I don’t think you have the right angle.
The Bible is not a book written by God, nor is it “the word of God in the words of men.”
The Bible is not even a book.
What the Bible is, is a kind of feedback device that can change the way the reader sees the world. IJ seems to do the same thing. You can’t read either one intelligently and not come away altered. And both repay rereading and reflection. You can just sort of dive in anywhere.
This hit me about 50 pages into IJ, as an impression rather than a coherent thought, but as I go deeper into the book, the more it seems to me to be mind altering.
The correct comparison here is AA. The Bible, IJ, and AA. The same sort of thing. You don’t have to believe a word, just engage, and how you see things will be changed.
At least, that seems to be what is happening to me.
This sickens me. Next please.
You just compared a self-indulged rich guy’s overwordy, plagiarized collection of short stories to the bible? Thank god I stopped reading this, hahaha.
You shouldn’t be so hard on the Bible. I couldn’t get through it either, but a lot of people seem to think its worth reading.
I think you’re on the wrong site bro. Rich guy? Sorry, in America, great literary writers like Wallace, Eggers, et al don’t exactly get rich; make a (comfortable) living maybe, but rich? No, that’s for the Grishams, Kings, Clancys, etc. And talk about “overwordy [sic], plagiarized collection of short stories”, I can’t think of a better description of the bible than that.
Excellent post!
One of the first things I mentioned when I joined the Wallace list serve was how some discussions about IJ reminded me of Torah study. Torah study, in enlightened neighborhoods, is a really intense, progressive, supposedly fun experience. If the spin doctor … I mean Rabbi, is good and participants are literate, the Torah can take on incredibly wild meanings. And very grounded meanings. A typical Torah study, as I’ve experienced it, is about 2 hours parsing out the “meaning” of a portion of a sentence.
Because the bible a hodgepodge of stories spoken by illiterate shepherds (correct me if I’m wrong) and as punditius states “a kind of feedback device,” it’s highly impressionistic and subject to wild interpretations and often dangerous interpretation (people who hear God tell them to kill their children, just like Abraham did).
The bible is surreal.
But there are people who take it literally!
I’m starting to digress. To illustrate my point, which is really about revelation: whether Moses received the big 10 on Mt. Sinai after seeing a burning bush, or whether someone had spiked a 106 fever and was delusional, revelation happens. And provides a moral blueprint. I’d say IJ does that, too.
Tom is a douche. Is that nice enough? DFW would be too polite and Socratic to simply call you out. So I’m doing it for him. Go watch Family Guy, you douche…
The precise term is troll, as in, “Do not feed the troll.”
love this post
No, sorry. This is way too far of a stretch. This is the kind of ham-fisted analogy that a middle schooler tries to pull the day before an assignment is due.
IJ is only biblical in the sense that the bible is deep enough in the common consciousness that you can draw biblical ties to anything. See for reference anyone who has compared for example Star Wars to the bible. Lunacy.
I agree. I’m going to have to give this essay a C- tops. Someone is working just a little too hard to make the whole thesis fit the page and it comes off clumsy and half-hearted to this reader.
Next up.
mm
There have been some REALLY bad posts during this Infinite Summer project but this one is the worst. The amount of over analyzing that IJ receives is amazing; I’ve never read a book so dissected as this before and it seems that people want to “crack the puzzle” of IJ so bad they just basically start making shit up.
I totally disgaree. I feel like everyone is being unnecessarily harsh on this post. It doesn’t seem to me like he’s saying IJ was intentionally modeled after the Bible – or that it matches up in any real substantial ways – but instead that some of the themes in IJ can be found in the Bible as well. I feel badly that everyone’s lashing out at this post when there were far worse posts on this board.
I kind of feel, in general, that the guides have lost interest in the book – they all seem to be behind the reading schedule and sort of lackluster in the effort they put into their posts, not to mention the fact that I think a couple of them don’t even like the book. Meanwhile, a bunch of blogs have sprung up (Infinite Tasks, Infinite Zombies, Infinite Detox, etc) that are way more fulfilling to read. I think the service that the guides gave us was setting up this project and website and initially spurring discussion, but beyond that, I feel that the heart of it has been passed into more thoughtful, thorough hands.
So – at least this post was written by someone who thought it worthwhile to form connections between IJ and another text about the story of life/humanity (albeit fictional as well).
Marathe as Jesus to Steeply’s devil? That’s a serious stretch. I certainly don’t want to get into some biblical/theological debate here, bit I think you’ve got it all wrong on this IJ/Bible thing. I’ve read/listened to/watched a lot of DFW interviews and I don’t recall him mentioning the bible even once, or religion at all for that matter; he is WAY too smart to buy into anything like that. Of course I could be wrong, I often am.
Btw, are you sure you’re an atheist?
Are you implying here that only Christians should have a knowledge of the Bible? Or was it just the tone of the post that made you ask this?
I think, like the Bible, IJ is deep and maybe convoluted enough that you can make it speak to just about anything at once. While this argument wasn’t perfect, it was certainly thought-provoking.
Additionally, in the heirarchy of the internet age, people who diss on internet comments have too much free time. I wonder, if you culdn’t be bothered to even finish the whole book, what the hell are still doing here? Quitter.
Also, I’d like to challenge the idea that Family Guy is only for douches. I think DFW would approve of anyone’s periodic embrace of “low” art.
Fair enough Zach. I too like FG and the Simpsons…quickest ref I could think of. Mea culpa!
brian warden — if you think dfw was “way too smart” to bother with religion, you may want to check out hthe view from mrs thompsons’, which was reprinted in “a supposedly fun thing” and which centers entirely around a group of people he knows from…his church. i’m not saying that dfw was a dyed-in-the-wool baptist, but he apparently expressed some interest in religion at some point in his life. I’m also almost certain i’ve read before that he greatly appreciated the writings of St Paul, though I can’t seem to find the article anywhere and potentially dreamed it up.
all of that aside, i have to say that while IJ is about as thick as the bible, I hadn’t noticed any structural similarities. wallace’s morality, though, which is on display all over IJ and well-summarized in “this is water,” was at least congruent with christian morality as proclaimed by the bible (cf zadie smith’s paraphrasing of dfw at a memorial service, which, neatly summarized, read that the distinction between good art and bad art is the art’s heart’s purpose, that art is supposed to serve its audience rather than consume it–obviously not an exclusively christian principle, but certainly a consistent ethic). cf also IJ’s push against consumerism and materialism, its calls against spiritual deadness, against freedom being defined as “no limits”, cf also the fact that there are no clean characters anywhere in IJ, etc etc. Again, I’m not claiming that DFW was Christian (as some have, btw), but drawing parallels between IJ and the Bible is not so foolish an idea as it may seem.
You’re right about DFW’s affinity for St. Paul. I got that info from D.T. Max’s New Yorker piece, “The Unfinished.” The syntactical and formal connections between the the former and latter was the major insight of this post for me.
“that the distinction between good art and bad art is the art’s heart’s purpose, that art is supposed to serve its audience rather than consume it–obviously not an exclusively christian principle, but certainly a consistent ethic”
This statement of aesthetics sounds a lot like Tolstoy (another one of those guys way-too-smart to be religious
in “What is Art?” which DFW references in his intro to BAE 2007*. In that essay he (DFW) also argues against those who delete “all parts of reality that do not fit the narrow aperture of, say for instance, those cretinous fundamentalists who insist that creationism should be taught alongside science in public schools, or those sneering materialists who insist that all serious Christians are as cretinous as the fundamentalists” (xxiii).
To argue that religion (not to speak of spiritual crisis) and intellect are incompatible is adolescent, and simply incorrect. See Tolstoy, CS Lewis, TS Eliot. There are many contemporary examples, too: the writer Mary Gordon, Anne Lamott, Garry Wills. Etc.
the view from mrs. thompsons was printed in consider the lobster.
the post wasn’t very well developed but you can’t hit a home run every time. chill out.
Well, DFW does mention in his article about 9/11 (IIRC) that he attends church. No man attends church without being, at a minimum, a “cultural Christian.”
But I want to point to the issue of process in connection with this post. Put aside theology. AA, IJ, and the Bible can each be seen as involving a process that alters one’s consciousness.
The alterations do not necessarily involve the same thing. AA, it appears to me, alters behavior – independent of belief. The Bible can alter one’s moral stance – independent of theology.
IJ seems to alter how one reads – independent of content, though not independent of how the content is presented. Or at least, it seems to be doing that to me, and I’ve read other comments suggesting that the same thing has happened to others.
The last experience I had which altered how I read was going to law school. I found it much more difficult to read fiction after law school – it ruined science fiction for me for years. What happened was that the terms of engagement with the written word changed, such that it became very difficult to suspend disbelief, and get lost in a book.
Tried to hold back from this post just because the poor author seems to have an astonishing number of responders who are blatently or insidiously violating the heck out of “Be nice.” That said, I don’t see much in this post that goes much beyond saying that “you can draw biblical parallels to a lot of things in IJ if you wanna”, which is a far cry from making a case for the Bible as unusually priveleged or significant as a touchstone or interpretive tool for IJ.
Put another way, the multitude of stories and the short list of major structural or moral/ethical themes of the Bible are, of course, likely to be a demonstrable influence, conscious or unconscious, on more or less any major work to arise out of the English language literary traditions (among others) if for no other reason than that they were major touchstones for so much of the culture of a huge chunk of the world over a few millenia, but it takes more than a few parallels to a few of the (massive number of) well known stories/figures in the Bible to demonstrate that the influence level is more profound or meaningful than that.
I think the potential fallacy here can be addressed, also, through the use of the Joseph Campbell reference: Campbell studied a large number of literatures, including both many predating the Old Testament (such as Sumerian myth) and many not really at all connected to the Judeo-Christian tradition (such as Mesoamerican myths) to develop the archetypes he became well-known for. The value in his work is pretty straightforwardly in showing these archetypal stories (and the human yearnings or problems they embody) to percolate through many traditions and NOT the reverse — NOT to show that the Biblical versions of these archetypes were the foundation for the other versions he identified.
So, can it be useful to think of characters or situations through particular tropes/figures found in the Bible, be they Moses, Paul, Jesus, the end of the world, etc? Sure. But I don’t think any particularly convincing evidence has been presented here to suggest that the Bible deserves or was intended by DFW to have any particularly special interpretive status.
That said, it seems equally unfounded to say that the lack of special status for the Bible proves something about DFW’s spirituality or attitude towards faith. Marty Garner is right to point out that claiming that someone is “too smart” to be religious/interested in religion is usually a pretty deeply vapid argumentative strategy. People (such as myself) who are skeptical of religion nonetheless should try to keep in mind, at the very least, the ultimate logical impossibility of proving a negative and have a little humility.
These are excellent, clearly communicated points. Perhaps you could write the next post.
Well put, Doubtful Geste. And I agree that while Nick’s arguments for privileging the Bible as an interpretive tool are a very long stretch, some of the vitriol aimed his way made me think of how people in IJ respond to Mario’s earnest desire to broach serious, un-ironic subjects.
Nick, how do you see Steeply as the devil? I don’t think Marathe and Steeply are presented as good v. evil at all. I believe DFW uses the Marathe/Steeply dialogues to point out the importance and consequences of making choices, of prodding readers to recognize and question our own default settings: to see the water.
The dialogue between Steeply & Marathe takes place in a location not unlike that which one visualizes when Jesus spends 40 days in the wilderness and is tempted by the devil.
Damn. Now I’m going to have to reread that segment. As if I have all the time in the world to read IJ or something…
So any two people talking in the desert is going to be an allusion to Jesus in the wilderness?
I just don’t buy it. Marathe isn’t tempting Steeply out there. As someone stated before, a lot of these connections sound like something written in middle school or high school just before its due.
The Bible is a huge, sprawling work put together from segments centuries apart, written by multiple authors. And when you’re dealing with topics as broadly as in the Bible, you’re inevitably going to find traces of these things in modern works.
How can you make this post without referring to O.N.A.N. or Biblical Onan? And is there a connection regarding certain ETA players obsessing over their seed?
With all of the other literary references and influences apparent in DFW’s writing, I’d say it would be strange if you couldn’t find any parallels with the Bible. The Bible is full of literary inspiration and great stories. Heck, I’m an atheist but if I wrote a 1000-page novel I’m sure there would be tons of biblical parallels. So I don’t think this essay presents any startling revelations but I found it interesting to read, anyway.
This post certainly got more argument than any other.
I simply (I am simple, I’ll admit) thought it was an elaborate explanation for why we need to trust DFW and read the book. It recalls some of the earlier discussions on whether an author is omnipotent or not.
Anyway, interesting, especially since I have read the bible, whereas I only saw Hamlet, the movie, and if it weren’t for another book I read in between IJ passages, I would have forgotten who Poor Yorick was.
I am not an English major, or a liberal arts major of any kind, and I rarely get the references literature is supposed to be saturated with, so I appreciate these posts, stretch or not.
I’d like to begin in a graveyard, since that’s one of the starting off points of IJ and one of its most enigmatic endings. A rumor has it that Jean-Paul Sartre was buried with a copy of the Torah next to him. We would have to dig him up to check on that.
As is well known in Europe (and I suppose states-side too), Sartre threw a monkey-wrench into the confraternity of his disciples by spending more and more time with his personal secretary, Benny Lévy, who was in the process of converting back to Judaism, and in the same stroke in fascinating the old, blind French philosopher way beyond what the usual Sartriens could stomach. It’s as if this former Egyptian who left his native country, first for Belgium then for France, where he became a Maoist revolutionary before putting an end to that around 1973, and to whom Giscard offered French citizenship after Georges Pompidou had refused years earlier.
The interior monologues in IJ are superb, and will remain a challenge for years to come: how to separate who is speaking, which voice from which world, the underworld or this one? I can’t help but compare this interior dialogue with the dialogue of the last years of Sartre’s life, when he jettisoned much of his existentialist philsophy, and the sum total of everything he had to say about the Jews, by way of listening up to an inner voice echoed in the still strong accented voice of his secretary become friend.
So why do I bring this up? to suggest, simply, that the question is not one of belief or of atheism. Many of Benny Lévy’s friends complained that it was hard for them to follow him into the labrinth of Talmudt-Torah, since they could not share his experience of conversion, his return to his original Jewish being. to this Lévy answered: bullshit. the question has nothing to do with belief. But everything to do with observence and study. Belief or disbelief are simple klipa: the rind or shell or glass around the pulse of the heart.
Sartre was fascinated to see this authoriatarian revolutionary who for so long had suffered from a kind of inner exile (close to the solipsism that DFW struggled with throughout his adult life) that did not stop him from being an effective leader and charismatic figure in the political struggles of France and Germany in the early 70s, slowly but surely come full circle to an appreciation of the power of the letter to maintain an exteriority with respect to the 1003 mind games we all play.
A parting shot. No study has been published (to my knowledge) concerning the reactions of Protestants, Catholics and Jews to the viral growth of the entertainment industries in the twentieth century.
Another parting shot. We know now what the bottom is in AA. There is an equivalent in the Jewish tradition. The Maharal of Prague puts it with customary concision: There is no redemption (guéoula) that does not begin with Galout: exil, or bottoming out. I agree with Greg Carlisle: it’s high time we stopped arguing and set ourselves to work.
Here’s why I think Infinite Jest is like the New Testament book of Revelations:
People have raised up an entire mythology around Revelations and endowed it with all sorts of meaning it never had. It was intended for a very small, specific audience — seven specific churches at a specific moment in history — and only those few could truly understand its message. But it was so beautifully written, all those wonderfully cryptic predictions and wildly creative images. It took on a life of its own.
First came the true believers, then the curious scholars, then the agenda-mongers, and then the flood of those who ably regurgitate the religion but are secretly baffled by the book itself. They loudly pledge their allegiance because they desperately fear being “left behind.”
I closed IJ at about pg 400. I am not this book’s intended audience. My soggy moment of epiphany, if you’re interested:
http://tinyurl.com/npcjm2