Yes, I’ll start off by apologizing for that post title. It’s an awful pun, rendered more awful when viewed in light of the fact that it doesn’t even make sense. Still — we’ve just spent the summer reading Infinite Jest, so hopefully we’re used to things not making sense.
I, for one, thought I was used to it. Wheelchair assassins, massive concavities, an institute full of jocks who somehow posses higher brain function — these were all concepts that astounded and befuddled me, but they were at least possible according to physics, if a little unlikely. Or a lot unlikely, in the case of the clever athletes.
However.
To me — an avowed atheist who has occasionally been referred to as “too rational” — the wraith that visits Don Gately in the hospital room doesn’t so much test my suspension of disbelief as it does rip it apart and stomp on the broken remains whilst screaming “You’re damn right there’s ghosts now, Avery. How you like me now!?”
Of course, this book is far from didactic and should not be taken literally. So it it’s okay with you guys104, I’d like to explore some possibilites that could explain the presence of unusual words in Gately’s head and the rather personal details of Himself’s life that have also found their way into Don’s indestructible noggin’ without having to resort to The Haunting Of ICU Ward 7.
The most boring answer105 is Joelle. Pages 856-7 show her recounting — with no consideration of the “anonymous” part of Alcoholics Anonymous — the partial life story of the hatchet-dented Little Wayne chap. It’s not beyond the realm of rationality to conclude that she might also tell Don about the Incandenzas, and that the bizarre and sudden appearance of the ‘wraith’ can be put down simply to the delusions that accompany massive physical trauma.
We’ve already witnessed Don claiming that he doesn’t understand Joelle’s speech at times (during their first few conversations at Ennet House), and it’s quite possible that this is another of those times — hence the words appearing in Don’s head.
Alternatively, Joelle could have left behind some tapes of Sixty Minutes More or Less to keep him company whilst she is gone, hoping that her voice is something that would comfort him. The show often consists of nothing but words that Don wouldn’t understand, often without context and daunting even to those who haven’t just had their shoulder blown off.
Another explanation is that Gately, in his capacity as one of the Ennet House Staff, may have watched some of J. O. Incandenza’s works and been subjected to some kind of info-dump. We already know that Ennet House — care-of Clenette — has recently received some cartridges from E.T.A, and has apparently been a beneficiary of the tennis academy’s generosity before. Perhaps Himself’s experiments into the technical capabilities of film enabled him to create a Work that taught you things on a strictly subconscious basis.
One can assume that, towards the end of his life, the Mad Stork was sufficiently mad enough to encode his biography into the annular pulses of his movies. Perhaps Gately, reviewing cartridges donated before his hospitalization, viewed just the right combination of entertainments to unlock this knowledge. Perhaps the aforementioned trauma has done so instead.
My third theory106 is far more outlandish, while still fitting in to a world that doesn’t include supernatural beings (yes, I’m still annoyed about the ghost. Okay?) Perhaps Don Gately has been unfortunate enough, after assaulting the three Canadians, to fall into the hands of the Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents.
Perhaps the A.F.R. are under the impression that Gately’s murder of Guillaume DuPleiss (infamous anti-O.N.A.N. organizer) coupled with his association with Joelle, mean that Gately is some kind of government operative or otherwise shady person with knowledge of the location of the master copy of Infinite Jest. Perhaps the A.F.R. are — with their demonstrated ability to play the long game — attempting to fool Gately into thinking he is in hospital, and are providing actors or masked decoys or people he knows to try and coax this highly sought information from him. Perhaps the Wraith is Gately’s mind’s reaction to such a terrible and insane situation.
Perhaps if you think such a plan is too outlandish or nonsensical for the AFR to enact, you have a wonderful seventy-five pages ahead of you.
I agree. The appearance and subsequent revealing of the wraith to be J.O. Incandenza was almost too much for me to swallow (and for what it’s worth to the understanding of / belief in ghosts, I am an avowed theist). It took me quite a while to get used to the idea of it, and I’m still not sure that I am, but a couple of things helped me deal:
First, there are a lot of weird, ghostly things happening at ETA throughout the novel–beds moving, kitchen appliances (if I remember correctly) being moved or defaced or something. For some reason I swallowed those ghostly allusions, and why wouldn’t DFW just carry the idea to its conclusion?
Second is that this is yet another allusion to Hamlet. The ghost of the dead father presiding over the action of the story. There is evidence that JOI is the ghost causing trouble at ETA, and probably was the figure standing behind Ortho Stice as his face was frozen to the window. Now, I realize that an author’s desire to make an allusion should never cause him to make a nonsensical one, so it’s still a struggle for me to fully embrace the wraith. I’m just saying that I think I kind of at least get where Wallace was going by bringing it into the story.
Maybe.
It hadn’t even occurred to me that there could actually be a ghost at E.T.A. — I’d just assumed there were some prank-ish goings-on that we weren’t getting the details of.
I feel a little better now that I realize the ghosts had been set up so far back, but still… ghosts, man.
Frickin’ ghosts.
I was also assuming pranks for the “ghostly” happenings at ETA, but despite trying to keep Hamlet in mind throughout the entire book, the appearance of a paternal ghost was the first time I said “Oh, Hamlet!”. As much as I balked at the idea for the same reason that you did, Avery, that was enough for me to accept it, despite it’s ridiculousness.
I definitely agree with this. If not for the blatant Hamlet reference I would have begun assuming something terrible, like DFW was getting weary in the last 100 pages and resorting to supernatural gimmicks.
I thought DFW did a pretty good job showing that the weird things at ETA where a lot more than just regular pranks. Breaking the laws of physics and genuinely disturbing and traumatizing pretty much everyone and so on.
Boo boo and boo.
The first boo is for your attempt at a horrible pun that you did not even get out correctly. You probably were going for The Gripes of Wraith. Bleh. Even worse. But at least it makes sense. In language, meaning. If punning is the lowest form of humor already, how should we rate a nonsensical pun?
The second boo is to your analysis. What does atheism have to do with ghosts? Are they necessary conditions of the other? Your writing tells us more (in this case: more is less) about you than about the world that DFW created in a work of FICTION. To me, the wraith is the most elegant device in IJ. A little magic [realism] thrown into a post-postmodern masterwork. I really don’t think DFW was going for connect-the-dots realism here.
Please go ahead and also let us hear your thoughts on how annoying the ghost is in Hamlet too.
The last boo is the sound a ghost makes.
The point of the pun is that it’s terrible. I have just a horrible time trying to think of a suitable title for my post every week, and sometimes delight in something ridiculous, annoying and stupid.
You’re right — atheism does not automatically mean “ghosts are stupid”. However, atheism — especially nowadays — tends to be tied to a rational, science-based outlook on the world around us, and I think you’d be hard-pressed to find any famous atheists who believe in ghosts. I was attempting to use “I’m an atheist” as short-hand for “I don’t believe in any of that nonsense”. It was a little patronising of me, perhaps. Apologies. Glad to see you weren’t a jerk about i– Oh.
I won’t tell you what I think about the ghost in Hamlet, because we’re not talking about Hamlet. We’re talking about Infinite Jest, which I read and have a slight problem with. I’m not saying it’s a bad book because of the wraith, just that the wraith is a bad part of the book.
Well for what it’s worth I like your pun, Avery, and your willingness to invent–to think of the available explanations for The Wraith Himself. I can’t help but believe these sorts of experiments in making the text meaningful–though I don’t find these so far particularly convincing–are appropriate responses to the anti-confluences of a story so rich and complicated.
And it is in that spirit that I offer my own non-true account of The Wraith.
If Himself really killed himself by microwaving his head, the head Itself remains in tact. It must be so, if Hal and Don Gately go digging up said head sometime between Nov. Y.D.A.U. and Nov. Year of Glad. Only a year before the last draft of Infinite Jest, in Y.T.M.P., the professional conversationalist claims that an entertainment was implanted in that head. What if Himself had made IJ with not a camera but his own body? And what if Himself is still recording, through that indestructible head, after his death? Maybe The Wraith is really just the last transmission of James O. Incandenza’s head, playing on the screen of the only other head as indestructible as his own.
Wild conjecture, Kendall! But I like it! The ultimate holigraphic projection.
What, so you’re okay with Feral Hamsters, but ghosts are out of bounds? Get over it.
Aside from the obvious Hamlet reference, which I think is mostly a red herring or McGuffin due to its complete obviousness, I would invite you to consider the Serpinski gasket. One of its feature is that the center is missing. Much like JOI and his creation, the film Infinite Jest, are missing from the novel. They appear as rumors, recollections, remembrances and wraiths in the novel, and are its center, but never fully exist.
How’s that for a theory?
I’ll let you all in on the red herring thing when you get to the end…
Miker, can you let me in NOW? I’ve finished. Pleeease.
You’re not the only one:
Allen Ginsberg. Gates of Wrath: Rhymed Poems, 1948-1952.
‘The Gripes of Wraith’ is quality punnery.
“quality punnery”? No such thing.
quality punnery is a quality neologism
I wonder if you feel the same way about the ghost in Hamlet that you do about the ghost of Himself. There’s clearly a resonance here. Does Shakespeare get a free pass because he lived in a more benighted time than Wallace did?
Ugh, I see that while I was writing a longer comment that I whittled down to this point, a couple of other people chimed in about the Hamlet tie-in. I’m not a copycat — just a laggard.
I’ve never really given that much thought to the silliness or otherwise of the ghost in Hamlet. I suppose because I read it so early (in middle school, as I’m sure most people do) that my critical faculties weren’t yet so developed that I would even question it.
Looking at it now, I think that I’d give Shakespeare a pass because the ghost’s appearance is the very first thing in the play to occur. It sets up a universe in which ghosts exist — the rules are clearly and firmly established, and the lens through which I view the play can be adjusted.
My problem with Infinite Jest‘s use of supernatural beings is that it took so very long for them to appear that the rules for this universe — slightly nonsensical, but relatively possible, as mentioned in my post — were pretty solidly set. To include the ghost so late, without any warning (since I’d apparently missed that it could have been a ghost moving beds at E.T.A.) broke my suspension of disbelief. And that’s a bad thing for a writer to do, in my opinion. At least with fiction.
It’s a world where giant babies and feral hamster clans are not a weird thing.
The appearance of a ghost was kind of a welcome return to normal phenomena for me.
I learned at about page 200 to not fight this book, and to just accept the premises the way one has to accept the ocean’s ‘premises’ of waves and swells while bobbing in the surf. Giant babies, feral hamsters, ghosts – all of a piece, to me.
I think that’s a pretty fair reason for giving Shakespeare a free pass but still frowning at Wallace. And I can see what you mean about feeling like the ghost thing is just dumped on you way there toward the end of the book. Of course, there are those clues that there’s something supernatural going on, but most of them are either subtle enough or just weird enough that you either don’t notice them or you write them off as pranks or a sort of hyperbole. For me, the beauty of it, though, is that as you look back on it, you can see that Wallace did plant all these little seeds, that it’s not just sprung on you because he needed to fill some space at the end (lord knows he didn’t need to fill any space) but that it’s meticulously planned and ultimately ties back into some of the themes of the book and its resonance with the material from which it takes its title.
Well, we know that, after he recovers, Gately will go with Hal and John Wayne to dig up JOI’s head (We know it because Hal remembers that it happened in p. 17 (Year of the Glad).)
Another possibility, just to play the game, is that JOI met people at Ennet’s and even spent some time there. After all, he was an alcoholic. This way Gately may not have met him (it should have been at least 4-5 years before YDAU) but maybe there’re stories about the guy, some sort of mythology, that you can hear during Boston AA Meetings, and somehow Gately awoke and made some sense out of the collection of rumours regarding that guy during his hospitalization. Who knows.
Personally, I took the episode literally. The ghost was really there.
Did I just misread the whole bit about Avril taking J.O.I.’s “body” (what remained of it) to Canada, so that it could be cremated? I’m wondering about this whole skull bit at the beginning. Will that scene really happen, or is it just a conflation with the Poor Yorick/gravedigger scene from Hamlet?
I was going to add, too, that according to the wraith’s word-rape, Gately is made out to be Laertes, that is, the guy who *kills* Hamlet. If Hal’s supposed to be Hamlet, this can’t end well.
I finished the book earlier in the summer, so I don’t know if I’m stepping over any spoiler lines here, but as a footnote to the the proof on p. 17 of Hal and “Donald” Gately digging up Himself’s head: While in the hospital Gately has a dream that he and “a very sad looking boy” (I believe that’s the word) are in a grave yard digging something up. Which means that Gately had a sort of premonition (perhaps given to him by the wraith?).
No real point here, I just wanted to point that out if it interested anyone.
Ignore all those naysayers! Part of the jest is certainly for each reader to connect their own dots, to interpret their Own Personal Rorschach blot. All of this background to say there’s support for your JOI movie theory. After finishing this weekend (sniff), I went back and read again the list of JOI’s films, and found as you may have suspected a few films that covered events in his life described in the book (the squeaky-bed incident, for one). I haven’t cross-referenced back to the wraith, but I wonder if those dots could be connected.
Bringing us full circle: here we are at the tome’s finish line, and immediately re-reading sections of it; not exhausted but energized. This IS the Entertainment, and I’m looping back again.
I see the Hamlet reference but I just don’t see how that connection automatically gives literary worth to DFW’s wraith, even if it was set up early on in the novel. After 800 pages, I guess I too had just about reached my quota of suspension of disbelief. The ghost of Hamlet Sr is an essential character who puts the wheels in motion for the rest of the play. JOI’s bouncy, talkative wraith just seems (almost) like an afterthought.
I think the wraith is pretty essential. If you believe (as I do) that Hal is the narrator of the entire novel, then the wraith becomes necessary. How else would Hal have access to the inner thoughts of Don G, Orin, Steeply, etc? A mind-invading big-word-using wraith telling the story to Hal would be a real help.
I think it’s a pretty clear mistake to either assume or conclude that Hal alone is “the” narrator of the novel. Given the massive diversity in terms of writing style and perspective throughout IJ it seems fairly evident to me that there are many narrators, not One.
That was my point, not Hal alone but Hal with the help of a mind-raping wraith.
It’s arguable that, just as in Hamlet, the ghost of Himself is also setting the wheels of the story in motion. But, I’m trying to respect the spoiler line.
Its hard to talk about this without over-stepping spoiler boundaries, but the whole JOI wraith thing (taking into account the fever-fragment that matt mc mentioned, and the memory Hal has in the Year of Glad), while definitely a little anomalous within the IJ universe, I think is an important way to bind together the three narrative threads (well, skeins) and set up the cyclical and infinity-type ways the reading of the book as well as the plots take. If that makes sense. It also brings together the JOI-as-Old-Hamlet’s-Ghost and Himself’s-Grave-As-Ophelia’s/Yorrick’s-Grave things.
Like without the JOI wraith, the connection between Gately and the ‘sad kid’ of the premonition wouldn’t be so explicit, and while many things in IJ are confusing, I don’t think there’s many or in fact any things that are completely unlinked or explicable in some way, and something as important as the meeting of the Incandenzas and Gately needs a specific plot device, as well as the info JOI provides to like highlight it or something. Although then again many important things (well that I think are important anyway) like John Wayne & Avril, Poor Tony and Lenz’s fall to the AFR, Kate Gompert’s relapse go all but unmentioned…
I dunno. I think I need to re-read it IJ at least twice more before I can gather any sort of coherent thoughts about this kind of thing.
I had no problem accepting the wraith as the ghost of JOI. What I’m still flummoxed about, however, is the significance of the Coke can.
Yes, please: could someone talk about the significance of the Coke can? I’m also flummoxed. Thank you.
I don’t think it’s really all that significant, except that it serves as a sort of corporeal proof that the wraith isn’t just in Gately’s head. Then of course there’s the ring (annulus) it leaves on his head, which just ties into what turns out to be a whole bunch of rings/halos in the book.
My thought when you mentioned the AFR as an explanation is that he was watching the AFR’s copy of the Entertainment in the Antitoi’s (sic?) shop, and that’s what it’s like. You just live out your life in this infinitely present way with constantly altering delusional states, becoming more and more present in a moment to where it lasts forever in yr fevered, whorl-eyed mind. Or something.
Awesome Explanations though. I kinda think it’s a ghost, but well played nonetheless.
It’s my second read. It’s the ghost of James. Why make it more or less? I don’t think it’s gimmicky. It’s part of the story and I like it.
There’s all kinds of little suspension-of-disbelief things happening throughout the novel (a conjoined twin champion doubles tennis team, anyone) and I must admit I took the wraith as neither more nor less than another one of these.
Also, Eric Clipperton.
Not sure if this link has spoilers or not, but it’s a really informative read w/r/t all this stuff. I think I got the link originally from Howling Fantods, but can’t be sure. Hopefully someone makes it down this far in the comments and reads the article because it’s really quite good. Here ’tis: jgoodwin.net/academic/papers/wallace-ij.pdf
Not the first ghost/spirit/whatever in the book. Lucien ‘sheds his body’s suit’ and flies back to Quebec on p.488.
Yes, and this happens at the dead centre of the book, suggesting the importance of that moment of transcendence.
Wallace will repeat this trick in Incarnations of Burned Children, where the ghost at the end works as a beautiful metaphor.
Footnote 104 is hilarious.
In a science-based, logical way, I’ve gotta argue Occam’s razor with you. Is it more likely that Joelle’s language settle into Gately in context and his subconscious can use it perfectly as the occasion arises, that JOI’s films to date are nothing compared to the Clenette dumpster-finds in terms of massive primers in erudition, that the AFR has infiltrated Gately’s mind, or that there are ghosts? Come on. You may fight it, but you know the argument that suggests that odds against supreme beings are higher than odds for supernatural deities is the same that predicts that this is probably a garden variety wraith.
But kudos on the creative attempts to keep the ghosts at bay.
I think the question about narrative voice comes in here. If, as another commenter mentioned, you believe that Hal is the narrator for not just the ETA sections of the book, but the entire thing, it’s not necessary that a wraith actually exist. It’s a literary flourish on the part of Hal (or he actually believes it, or maybe he wants to believe it) and gives some of the wraith’s discourse additional relevance.
You pose the question of when the “willing suspension of disbelief” comes to an end. This is clearly a crucial question for any speculative, imaginative, fictional work, and in particular one with a science-fictionish framework. The problem that can emerge is an insult to the reader that breaks some prior tacit agreement that was the reader’s “buy-in” to the authorial world. A common error is to create a magical “fix” that synthesizes impossible strands in a novel.
I can’t see that there is any more being asked of the IJ reader with the wraith’s appearance than any of the other instances (detailed in all the posts above) of unusual phenomena. This has clearly been a magical world since the very beginning. The appearance of the wraith is actually quite consistent. Even more, it has been an essential figure throughout the novel, both its status as revenant and the yet-to-be-resolved but now-probably-quite-reasonable-to-assume narration issue.
Asked the opposite way: had the wraith not appeared, then the book would have serious logical and narrational holes. Though I am (Kevin’s assumption aside) still a precise spoiler-line reader, I feel pretty sure that there is no other substitute for the promises/expectations that DFW has set up throughout.[1] And to repeat, no violation has occurred. You can’t take back the very same disbelief you checked (suspended) at the door, only a new disbelief being asked of you, but there is none here.
[1] This is not quite true – Lyle remains a wild-card, and could yet be used in this way, though we have not been given as much information or hints as to his role.
Lyle lives off of human sweat. Herds of giant feral hamsters described as ‘tornadic’ and ‘implacable.’ Crazy designer hallucinogens, a tennis player who wins tournaments with a pistol shoved to his head, an terrorist group of -wheelchair assassins.- What exactly is it about one silly old wraith that violates the laws of this novel??
I agree with whoever said that this tells us way more about you than it does the book.
Also unmentioned so far: A blind tennis player, Poor Tony’s stolen heart victim chasing him down the street, the ETA driveway being a 70 degree slope, “Helen” Steeply being an object of desire for an NFL team, President Johnny Gentle – geez, once you’ve believed these ‘seven impossible things before breakfast’ why would a ghost be a problem?
I have to say I completely agree. ps– Don’t forget Remy Marathe’s skull-less, jelly-headed wife.
Though I haven’t always agreed with your posts, Avery, I’m feeling much more sympathetic towards this one. I had a similar reaction and distaste when the ghost showed up. Although many of the other commenters are right that there are a lot of other things going on that are implausible, they’re implausible in a different, and less blatant, cliched way. I’ve loved this book throughout, and I still think it’s great, but I haven’t yet managed to wrap my head around the ghost. Though, for what it’s worth, I’m buying that there actually is a ghost. I’m not sure why exactly the ghost bothers me so much more than feral infants, but it does.
On another note, people were referencing the items at ETA moved around mysteriously. Does anybody think it could be Stice doing the moving (unawares)? After all, he seems to be magically levitating his bed every night, so what’s a few more objects? I like this theory better than the idea that JOI is poltergeisting ETA.
Another way of approaching the ghost question in relation to the “is Hal the Narrator?” question already raised above is to say this: The book has, from very early on, been playing games with how to account for the narrator, who always seems to know stuff (words, etc) they shouldn’t even when otherwise seeming to be intended to be the internal narration of a specific character.* The question of “who is narrating this?/how did that character know that word?/how did that character’s narration just refer directly to an incident in another character’s narration?” and so on is pretty pointedly suggesting some sort of agent or consciousness or communication modality that is not c/w the world as we know it OR with any familiar variants of the omniscient narrator. In short the narration itself is an early and frequent sign that weird “supernatural” forms of consciousness are in bounds.**
*and who often footnotes this disjunction
**which (“in bounds” just brought to mind for me the multiple scenes explaining the players’ conventions for calling a ball fair or out of bounds when no line judge is available, which most of them try so hard to be courteous about that, even when balls start disobeying physics when Hal and Ortho play, they still insist on being aggressively polite about giving the other player the benefit of the doubt.
Here I am at the rear-end of a mystery train, running to catch up with it, knowing already it’s too late. I know that you have become a heroine for several people. (“she is my hero”!) You were promoted to this stutus because, although you were having trouble with the book, you promised you would stick it out. You remember the time, and I’m sure you were pleased. But now is another time, when you are making everyone pay for your perseverence. (I’d go on except that I’m sure you will modify the militant tone of a post that begins with a bang that you immediately withdraw: ‘Grapes of wrath.’ Why you would be so intent on substituting ‘ghost” for wraith, given the proximity of wraith to wrath, is beyond me, but I think you’ll already on to all of this.
I’m not at all certain that you win in a confrontation with Wallace on atheism. I’m not sure you’re interested in such a face à face. What seems clear to this reader is that the treatment of the wraith is far more delicate and non-violent than your sudden access of atheistic rage.
I’ll keep this short. The wraith is a wild conceit. Difficult for me to imagine that you not appreciate the “wild” and the “conceit” in wild conceit. It is an amazingly enabling limit on the limits of rationalism as you conceive them. It enables author, characters, and readers, for example, to hone in, and to be honed in, on a shared, generational experience: “I didn’t read him until after he died, but now I’m reading everything he wrote.” Or, to cite once more, ‘like Mrs. Dalloway I see the way that the dead give meaning to life, the way they make it possible for us to live.’ (considerations lifted out of the blog of repatblues.)
Please understandd that I am not refuting your stand. I have waited for a long time before responding, as I’m wont to do. Now I believe, and hope, that later on you’ll return to this moment, whith pleasure, nostalgia, and some kind of regret, because it simply does not encompass enough of what REASON set out to enlighten.
I think the problem here lies in assuming that the norm for literature is a kind of realism in which ghosts don’t occur. But read Wallace’s essay on David Lynch: he says the latter’s work feels true even though (or because) it is expressionist and not ‘realist’. I think something similar can be said about what Wallace is going for. So much of the content of Infinite Jest couldn’t happen in the ‘real’ world, but the best fiction makes the world over in its own image, and can often feel more real than the world. Art reminds us that, as Pemulis says, the map is not the territory, but also hints to us that the territory is not the territory either.
page 830:
“It quickly got so multilevelled and confusing that his eyes rolled back in his head. The wraith made a weary morose gesture as if not wanting to bother to get into any sort of confusing dream-v.-real controversies. The wraith said Gately might as well stop trying to figure it out and just capitalize on its presence, the wriaither’s presenc in the room or dream, whatever…”
… surrender…not thinking… sound familiar? Thanks for this quote, to anchor the issue.
(Is the map not the territory like the mirror is not the lens; and, even the territory and lens are not the real?)
On my second reading of your post (and the comments), I felt like responding with a few thoughts:
a) Is there more vitriol on the commenters to this woman’s posts than anyone else’s? Huh.
b) I thought the ghost/wraith was dumb. By the time I read this, I had forgotten that in my confusion with the rest of the book, and it’s conclusion. This post probably explains better than I could why I thought the ghost was dumb. IJ was not set up as a magical realism book, imo anyway.
c) On reading the comments, and thinking more about magical realism, I recall how I was so so p*ssed off at the end of Life Of Pi. The author there was like, here believe something impossible (oh, and there was the conceit that in believing it, you would also believe in god); oh wait, now it’s the end: I take it back. It was just a metaphor.
So now I’m thinking it is important how the author sets everything up. Springing something new on us 75% into the book: annoying.
d) I have a lot of ideas/thoughts/feelings about this book, but honestly can’t think of any friend of mine that would read it, and therefore that I would give it to. I’ve been encouraged by this blog, and all the loyal readers. I appreciate it truly. But I occasionally felt like I didn’t belong because DFW is not my god, or even my favorite author, although I did enjoy many parts of IJ and am very glad I read it.
[…] actually questions the existence of the ghost, which seems like an obvious thing to question. (I almost feel like that was for you, Avery). This parallel to Gately’s ghost-vision of James is, of course, not a […]
Avery you are awesome!
I was not so much troubled by the use of the wraith itself as that it delivered so much condensed information; it was so “loaded” – in terms of explanation (though of course it also brought up just as many questions) – which I did not think was typical of the other phenomena in the rest of the book. Occurring this far into it caused the wraith to “appear” in a “different light” than the other phenomena. Revealing so much about JOI’s intent and about his perception of Hal’s “disappearance” and lapse into solipsism – delivered in the same breath, as it were, as the conflation of generations of fathers and sons and the description of his work as “either the whole entertainment was silent or else if it wasn’t silent that you could bloody well hear every single performer’s voice, no matter how far out on the cinematographic or narrative periphery they were…the babble of crowds every member of which was the central and articulate protagonist of his own entertainment.”
Now I was hearing the author’s voice. The wraith had made me think more about the author and his intentions than I had since I finally “surrendered” myself to IJ. The author had LITERALLY first seduced me into surrender and then yanked me out of it. That, for me, was the “real” problem.
Alright, so I had a dream last night. A series of dreams, actually, but one of them included a discussion about The Grapes of Wrath. Weird, since I’ve never read the damn book and know next to nothing about it—I skipped most high school literature—and it wasn’t as if it’d come up in recent conversation. Someone in my dream was explaining that the title was actually supposed to be “The Grapes of Wraith,” but there was a typo during printing. Uh, what? Okay, dream. Thanks for that random bit of false information. I appreciate it.
I’ve been having a lot of weird dreams lately. A few days ago, I had a dream about Patrick Swayze in drag, probably leftover trauma from watching To Wong Foo, and soon after my dream, he turned out to be dead. Now, I’m not craaaaaazy, and I have absolutely no real belief in PSYCHIC DREAMS and crap, but hey, it happened, and it was kinda weird, and it’s got me in the habit of Googling things I dream about in a semi-joking attempt to find something prophetic about them.
So today when I wake up with a damned pun floating around in my head, I had to Google it. I mean, who dreams in puns? LOSERS, that’s who.
After Googling the actual book to discover what I wasn’t missing in high school, I Googled the “Wraith” alternative. This is one of the only pages I found where it was an intentional misspelling rather than a careless typo, and the only one that could be found easily. And then I discover, oh snap, it’s a blog about Infinite Jest? I picked that baby up a few months ago and have been determined to read it, but I’ve barely touched the thing all summer.
I don’t know what my point is. Maybe that it’s pretty sweet that I dream up potential blog titles. Maybe that I wish I’d come across this site before the summer was almost over, and I’d actually read the freakin’ book with the rest of y’all. I’m envisioning an alternate universe in which I actually finished something this summer, rather than sitting on my ass and watching life pass me by, and it’s pretty sweet. Sometimes I wish I could turn back the clock and do things a little differently. I also wish I wasn’t making a completely inane comment on a blog post I merely skimmed for fear of spoiling plot points for myself when I actually crack down and read this baby. Regardless of my point, I just want to say that I’m glad I Googled a terrible pun and came across this site. CARRY ON, SOLDIERS.