Well, thanks to Avery’s insightful “it’s like an art gallery” post on Infinite Summer, my whole attitude to IJ has changed. I think I’d been expecting it to converge, and hadn’t quite understood why that wasn’t happening.

I read a great deal at a friend’s cottage in early August, sitting in the lake (and I do mean IN the lake – the water temperature was perfect) reading off my Palm Treo. Something about being outside made the book just really click for me. I’m only just past the August 10th spoiler line, but I am still committed to being done by the 21st of September. Doable? Tight, but yes. I’m determined.

Yesterday I hit the part about Toronto’s SkyDome and the “people doing adult-type things in the windows of the hotel” issue. I remember when that happened! I don’t think it was as frequent an occurrence as DFW suggests, but it did most definitely happen and there was the usual outrage. I loved seeing that and having the book tie into my own experiences like that.

And I absolutely adored the eschaton sections. I’m right now at the point where the boys and Ann Kittenplan are waiting to receive possible discipline over the mess it became, but I can’t stop thinking about the game itself. I let some of the technical details roll over me, since I’m not exactly going to be playing it myself, but seeing the interactions of the kids, and the way the game changed as tempers flared… so clear and so beautifully written.

Finally, I got stopped dead by the vision of the Moms holding her feelings out in front of her with a Glock to the feelings’ head daring people to hurt them. It still gives me the shudders. I get the Moms in a way I didn’t before just by that one image. There’ve been a few spots in IJ that made me jealous of the writing skill, and this is most definitely one of them.

I so hope I get to the end with everyone else. If not, though, I will be getting to the end regardless. I want to.

InfiniteTasks writes this week of the Scorn of Death in Infinite Jest. I’ve been holding off for the milestone to write about the Gately showdown and hadn’t really planned to write about death. I wanted instead to write about dancing. First, of course, there’s this choreography of car movement, as people scuttle out to their cars at midnight to shift them to the other side of the street, engaging in a whole series of stylized movements — extend hand to door to insert key; swing door open, rotate down into seat, reach out to turn key, turn head to check over shoulder, swing arm out over back seat to back up if needed, twist arms about as you steer the car in a short arc across the street, then more or less reverse it all — so that their cars too can engage in the series of more or less synchronized, stylized movements of switching sides of the street. But Wallace takes it a little farther than that. Consider the following examples:

• “Gately takes the arm and pirouettes around twisting the broken arm behind the guy’s back” (613)
• “Gately feints and takes one giant step and gets all his weight into a Rockette kick that lands high up under the Nuck’s beard’s chin” (613)
• “It’s impossible, outside choreographed entertainment, to fight two guys together at once” (613)
• “he’s spun around on one knee” (613)
• “the guy’s Item-hand’s arm still up in the air with Green’s arm like they’re dancing” (614)

And let’s not forget that the Nucks in question have just left a hula-type party, with its own dancerly associations. Given the fates of said Nucks, this dance really is a dance of death.

The danse macabre is

a late-medieval allegory on the universality of death: no matter one’s station in life, the dance of death unites all. La Danse Macabre consists of the personified death leading a row of dancing figures from all walks of life to the grave, typically with an emperor, king, youngster, and beautiful girl—all skeletal. They were produced to remind people of how fragile their lives and how vain the glories of earthly life were.

And while we don’t have a skeletal figure leading these poor Nucks off to the afterlife, this kind of representation of death does sort of resonate with a lot of what we see in Infinite Jest. I’ve long noted that Wallace adopts a pretty equal-opportunity attitude with respect to who’s likely to suffer from addiction (consider Erdedy and Joelle next to Poor Tony and yrstruly), much as death in this old allegory plays no favorites.

The problem InfiniteTasks grapples with is what he takes to be scorn of death, evidenced by a sort of derision or (in some cases) cartoonishness of depiction. What I’ve discovered with a little googling tonight is that even this cartoonishness is part of the pictorial tradition of the danse macabre. For example, there are a number of old engravings of the danse macabre in which death is gleefully tugging an acrobat from a tight-rope in a carnival atmosphere. There’s another of death dressed as a fool, tugging a fool by the hand. There’s one particularly nasty one that calls JOI’s Free Show to mind of death playing “tour guide to gullible fools in the catacombs.” And there are others of people killed by drink (poison or alcohol, take your pick), gluttony, suicide.

So I don’t know. Maybe there is something of scorn in the way Wallace writes of death. But maybe he’s just working within an old set of approaches to death, which is after all the final (and infinite, life springing from death) jester. Is there comfort in laughing right back at it?

David Foster Wallace’s fascination in Infinite Jest with the grotesque is hard not to notice. To be fair, it might or might not be DFW’s own personal fascination, but it is certainly fascinating to many of the novel’s narrators. (I’m still a little perplexed about how many narrators there are in this novel, as the third-person narrator seems to speak in many voices. And I suspect I’ll have to finish the novel before I can make any real conclusions about that feature.)

“The Grotesque” is a term I heard kicked around in grad school (especially in the phrase “the Southern grotesque”), but, other than being able to pick out more more obvious examples in Faulkner’s and O’Connor’s work–which is especially easy in O’Connor, as almost every character qualifies–it wasn’t something that I ever learned much about.

So, why not let’s go fishing? I’m no expert, but I am lucky enough to have access to JSTOR. The first stop on our journey is Geoffrey Harpham’s “The Grotesque: First Principles,” where he maintains that “The grotesque is the slipperiest of aesthetic categories” (461). After a brief overview of the history of the term, originating in the study of art before being applied to literature, he judges it one particularly susceptible to change over time and from one writer to another:

All of this implies that, in approaching a definition of the grotesque, we should not always take etymological consistency for conceptual accuracy; the definition of the concept, almost as fluid as that of beauty, is good for one era–even one man–at a time. (461)

Some of DFW’s uses of the concept are fairly traditional: characters are estranged from us and, in some cases, from the rest of the world through some physical deformity or exaggeration, often described in animalistic terms. Mario immediately comes to mind. Some writers use outward deformity–rather heartlessly–as a sign of a similarly twisted inner nature. Others turn that idea on its head and use it, as DFW does with Mario, as a maker of inner beauty. DFW extends the concept a bit further in his characterization of Joelle dan Dyne, a woman so beautiful she must wear a mask and disguise her perfect form in order to make social interactions with other people possible. She, too, is a grotesque, as far from the norm in one direction as Mario is in the other, and, to the uninitiated, producing as estranging an effect.

But what’s the function? I’m still thinking that one over. Harpham mentions, among other things, the grotesque as a way of marking estrangement from a more-or-less realistic world. If Infinite Jest were purely absurd, entirely divorced from our day-to-day experience, the grotesque wouldn’t be felt, as it requires a distance from some norm. But Infinite Jest is not absurd. It has absurdist elements, to be sure, and DFW plays these for laughs, but they’re only funny because of their distance from the mundane events that are commonplace in the novel.

Grotesque features need not be physical; they can be psychological, ethical, perhaps spiritual. Think of the characters in David Lynch’s movies. (DFW was a fan of Lynch and wrote an essay on one of his films.) The settings and the characters often have a surface of normalcy, almost mundaneness, that masks deeply weird inner lives and behind-closed-door proclivities. Lynch likes to dramatize the luridness lurking beneath, perhaps, in part, produced by, the calm, rational surface.

Perhaps something similar is at work in Infinite Jest. Wallace’s characters, considered by clique, are not unusual. They’re mostly addicts and athletes, often both. But each of the major characters has his or her own deeply personal and, often, deeply alienating inner life. Not only is the landscape populated with grotesques, it is peopled with characters who experience themselves as grotesques, driven by deep obsessions and compulsions, idiosyncratic to a fault, alienated from real connection with others.

The few times that anyone has asked me what the novel I’ve been lugging around for nearly six weeks is about, I’m always tempted to say “it’s about 1,100 pages long,” or, “it’s about tennis,” or “it’s about addiction.” But I think the true answer is this: it’s about loneliness. And I think DFW’s use of the grotesque one more tool in his box for bringing that point home.

Works Cited

Harpham, Geoffrey.  “The Grotesque: First Principles.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 34, No. 4 (Summer, 1976), pp. 461-468.

For a long while now, it’s been my contention that whether you like or dislike a novel is about the least interesting thing you can say about it. The same goes for arguing about which books are or are not “great literature” (1). Every book has something to say, and possibly an interesting way of saying it.  Focusing on these things is where the fun is, and it is where reasonable people have room for disagreement.

There are many heavy-hitters of the literary canon that I’ve read but didn’t particularly enjoy reading.  Joyce’s Ulysses and Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment come immediately to mind. Those works don’t speak directly to me, and I didn’t dig deep enough to find a connection with them.  I may revisit them at some point in the future, or I may not. But I’m convinced that I’m better off for having read them, even if they’re never likely to be favorites of mine (2).

The fact that I’m not a fan of either work isn’t a fault of either author.  Both novels are classics–required reading for people who take literature seriousy. Both authors have other works I have sincerely enjoyed (e.g. Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground; Joyce’s Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). My experience with reading them simply underscores the fact that what anyone in particular happens to like doesn’t make for a very interesting discussion. I also like Dr. Pepper, sushi, mandarin oranges, and chicken-fried steak. But, unless you’re taking me out to a very odd dinner, it’s not really of much interest, is it?

I’ve bailed on a good many literary works, too. And some of them, regardless of what good might or might not be mined from them, I’ll never revisit. As a professor I had in college once said, “By this point in my life, if there’s anything I’m still missing about, say, DeFoe, I’m content to miss it.” We probably all feel that way about certain authors or at least about certain works (Paradise Lost comes to mind).

A certain amount of the complaining, over at Infinite Summer, about the length, heft, and complexity of Infinite Jest, serves, a similar function to the locker-room post-match sessions in Infinite Jest: it’s just a release valve for the pent-up frustrations of a difficult but useful task. It also gives cover for those considering ditching the project entirely. And that’s sad, really, because it strikes me as the sort of book that really is worth the effort.

I run into this sort of attitude a lot when I’m teaching. Some students complain that some modernist novel or poem is convoluted. They want everything to be direct and not to have to do any work–or, at least, not much work–to figure things out. They want answers, not puzzles. Cognitive dissonance gives them the howling fantods.

Since they are, mostly, unfamiliar with how long realism held sway, they have a hard time understanding why novelists get bored with what has gone before and try to find new ways to say things. In short, they don’t often appreciate technique, much less how a particular technique might lend itself to a particular theme (rather than just being all for show). They’re accustomed, to the extent that they’re accustomed to reading at all, to reading for plot and for “entertainment,” in the lowest-common-denominator sense of the term (3). Unfortunately for them, quite a lot of literature, at least after realism, requires just this sort of jumping in at the deep end of the pool and hoping you can swim your way back out. It’s not surprising that not everyone finds that prospect entertaining; but some of us do.

Or, as DFW put it–in a Salon interview about teaching that I read after I penned the previous paragraphs–and much more succinctly and casually than I am, evidently, capable:  “To watch these kids realize that reading literary stuff is sometimes hard work, but it’s sometimes worth it and that reading literary stuff can give you things that you can’t get otherwise, to see them wake up to that is extremely cool.”

That sums it up pretty well, I think: sometimes hard and sometimes worth it. I just happen to think this is one of those times, at least for me. And, honestly, this is cake compared to Ulysses, if only because DFW and I were both born in the same country and in the same century.

The self-selecting crew of people participating in the Infinite Summer project is much larger and much more varied than any group of students in a literature class. It’s a wide spectrum of people with a wide range of motivations and a wide range of familiarity with literature in general and DFW’s work in particular. I don’t know how many were signed onto the project at the beginning (there’s no official tally), nor how many remain. Attrition is a factor in any project of this sort. Some people simply aren’t going to have the time for it. Others will find that the book simply isn’t what they expected and will lose motivation for it. This would happen no matter what we were reading. Even though DFW’s bona fides as a literary genius are well established, not everyone will have the time or motivation to make it to the finish line (4).

I might not either, for that matter, at least not until all the bleachers have been folded up and the street sweepers have finished cleaning up the confetti. At the rate I’m going, I might make it there before Christmas. As with most projects, I overestimated the time I’d have to devote to this one. But I’m content to keep on limping toward the goal. Because, even though there are certainly some tedious parts of Infinite Jest, it’s still holding my interest, and I still feel like it’s worth my time. And I don’t anticipate changing my mind about that.

So I’m going to post this and then get to reading, because I’m way behind, and the water is deeper than it looked when I first jumped in (5).

1. Discussions of this sort are entirely contingent on whose definition of “literature” and whose definition of “great” has jurisdiction. And it doesn’t take too many counterexamples to find that there’s no definition of either which has 1) stood the test of time or 2) ever been shown to be applicable to enough works to be useful without, at the same time, leaving out plenty that any reasonable person would want to include.

2. I am a believer in the probably psychologically and philosophically naive notion that reading is good for you. And, given the time I’ve devoted to it in my life, I have a vested interest in believing that reading challenging works is better for you than reading whatever is on sale at the supermarket this week. Call it elitism if you like. That doesn’t mean that all great literature must be, by definition, challenging to read.

3. For a good and very accessible discussion of entertainment in literature, check out Michael Chabon’s introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2005. Chabon has his cake and eats it too, defending entertainment as a concept but also pointing out that sometimes it takes something a little more complicated to entertain people.

4. He’s a MacArthur Fellow, for Christ’s sake. That puts him in some pretty good company.

5. If it wasn’t obvious, this post is in response to Detox’s post and Daryl’s post, both of which are in response to Avery’s post.