Over the course of my reading I became aware that DFW liked Cormac McCarthy’s novels a lot, especially Blood Meridian and Suttree. As it happens, those are my two favorite Cormac McCarthy novels as well, and even though it’s been fifteen years since I read either of them, once I became aware of this bibliographical fact I began to pick up threads of McCarthy in Infinite Jest, and threads led to whole hand-loomed rugs bordered with Byzantine pornography.
McCarthy’s and DFW’s writing share several things, including a keen attention to physical and emotional detail, but it’s the way they delve into violence that seems to both unite and separate them. McCarthy, for example, considers the whole scene but then gifts you with just a sketch of the worst details — reading him is like looking at one of Bacon’s howling Popes, it’s the details you have to fill in for yourself that make it ten times worse. But DFW doesn’t let you look away. Think about how the Antitois brothers died. It’s horrible. But their deaths were described with so much detail that by the end I had almost no emotion about them. The image of a man with a spike through his eye or a broomstick shoved all the way through him is, on its own, nearly unbearable. But in IJ these images ride a wave of words that’s already pounded us into submission, and we only come up for air when Lucien Antitois floats cleanly away from his body over the Convexity toward home to the ringing of bells.
The scene where Gately takes the brunt of one Nuck’s aggression toward Lenz and the girls are on the lawn working over the other one echoes this scene from early on in Blood Meridian:
. . . Toadvine seized him about the neck and rode him to the floor and held him by the hair and began to pry out an eyeball with his thumb. The man grabbed his wrist and bit it.
Kick his mouth in, called Toadvine. Kick it.
The kid stepped past them into the room and turned and kicked the man in the face. Toadvine held his head back by the hair.
Kick him, he called. Aw, kick him, honey.
He kicked.
Toadvine pulled the bloody head around and looked at it and let it flop to the floor and he rose and kicked the man himself. Two spectators were standing in the hallway. The door was completely afire and part of the wall and ceiling. They went out and down the hall. The clerk was coming up the steps two at a time.
And so on.
Later on, the way the M.P. beats Gately’s mom in such a slow, considered fashion shows a little more of McCarthy’s restraint. Ultimately I find McCarthy pretty much riveting because he leaves so much out, but the world he creates is one I am heartily glad I don’t live in. Whereas the world of Infinite Jest, despite the horrible things that can happen in it (the family dog being dragged to death and reduced to a nubbin, my God), is one I feel I could navigate maybe just because the nape of the carpet is familiar and I have an accurate sense of how high the nets are strung.
Or, as Gately learns in the midst of his agonizing stint in the hospital bed, focusing on the small things helps you to endure the larger ones.
DFW also alludes to A Clockwork Orange a couple of times, which is well known for its own particular brand of joyous degradation. I think Gately has the self-awareness not to get off on beating the shit out of people the way Alex and his Droogs do — he doesn’t have the heart of a rapist – and the spoiler line limits what I can say about Sorkin’s crew, but I do know that for me, Gately’s redemption and Hal’s trying to Come In and Mario’s sweet nature and a thousand other moments of true humanity balance out the psychic impact of all the brutality in this novel, described in numbing detail though it may be.
Thanks for the comments, Eden! Not the first time I feel my not-yet reading of McCarthy is a serious hole.
A past post of mine entitled Scorn of Death, in which I review a number of the more gruesome death scenes, elicited a very interesting set of Comments from IJ usuals.
Your mention of Lucien Antitois floating above his own body reminds me that the wraiths scene(s) are not the only supernatural/afterlife moments in the novel. Noteworthy.
I would have to dispute this claim. When I read that passage I understood it more as poetic licence to illustrate a point rather than something I thought the author expected me to accept literally. (I also intensely disagree with the Wraith-as-a-physically-existing-entity position, but of course this small comment box is no place to make the argument.)
@ Todeswalzer – This might not be the place to discuss the wraith’s “existence”, but my blog is! I just posted the second half of a two-part post on “The Walk-On of James O. Incandenza.” I won’t link it here; just go to the main page and you’ll see them both. The first part deals with some ghostly Poetry, specifically of Percy Bysshe Shelley, in relation to the wraith/revenant. The second takes the wraith “at its word” in terms of being a figurant, and tries to understand some fundamental textual issues, such as why J.O.I. stuck his head in a microwave. And while I don’t make any special claims about “material” presence (after all, it’s a wraith, not extended substance), I do take it that it is “real.”
I’d love to hear your concerns and position! Always more room in my Comments!
And this is not the first time that I’ve regretted not having 36-hour days so I could keep up with the forums and blogroll. Thanks for that link, IT. I think part of my IJ decompression process will be going back and catching up.
Robert, I know! After reading Avery’s post I was pleased to recall that pre-wraith episode.
and so but: it was Blood Meridian I could not finish, while IJ did not hold me back. Further proof (??diagonal proof with expanding infinitudes??) that we change, the texts change with readers, and readings, through the axes both of readers and of time.
May have to go back to McCarthy. Thanks for this.
I had queued up Suttree (my first McCarthy) before Infinite Summer landed, and now that I’m through IJ, I’ve gone back and am halfway through Suttree. It’s just great stuff, and I got a little thrill to see you tie the two together.
[...] I had picked up a few weeks before Infinite Summer started) and so got a neat little thrill to read Eden’s post today linking Infinite Jest and [...]
Regarding moments of true humanity, my favorite is Pemulis trying to cheer up Postalwaite in footnote #324, pointing him toward math as something that is true. I *think* that might be my favorite passage in the book.
Thanks so much for the McCarthy connection. As a committed fan of his work I encourage everyone to read him. I started with All the Pretty Horses in a book group and immediately started working my way backward through everything he’d written and now read the new ones as soon as they come out. His prose blows me away and Blood Meridian is definitely my favorite. I’ve been saying for years that he’s my favorite living American author, and now, sadly, it still holds true. If I had read IJ while DFW was alive it would have probably been a tie. An interesting note since Roger Ebert has been mentioned in other posts/forums here for his blog piece on AA, he wrote a wonderful bit about McCarthy in his review of the film No Country for Old Men and specifically mentions Blood Meridian (if I’m remembering correctly!).
I wish I could find the Wallace interview right now so I could quote it properly, but DFW once said that he liked the advice of a writing teacher who said good fiction should disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed. I find that IJ achieves both. I’m afraid my efforts at McCarthy have left me feeling more disturbed in the balance than I can take. I definitely see the parallel you draw and appreciate it. I just find that McCarthy fails to comfort me as much as I’d like.
I love that quote, paraphrased or not. I wonder if the kind of “comfort” I have found in McCarthy stems from the way he sheds light on a particular kind of darkness of the soul — a darkness that doesn’t normally get the sort of intelligent treatment he gives it.