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Ezra Klein and Too Little Fun

Daryl L. L. Houston17 Comments

Ezra Klein over at A Supposedly Fun Blog had this to say of this week’s milestone:

But my enjoyment of the book is not outpacing my growing frustration with it. I ignore most of the footnotes. If you want to know why I ignore most of the footnotes, check out footnote 216. Yeah, fuck you too, David.

I guess what I would ask is what happens when you run across a word whose precise definition you don’t know (in any book). Do you just skip over it or figure that the context will iron it out? I know I often skip and figure. Good readers (and I’m not claiming to be one — see the comment just prior) will stop and look up the word. When you see an unfamiliar word (e.g. “Coatlicue”) that has an end note saying “No clue” (e.g. note 216), you are being told pretty clearly to go look the word up. I guess the note could say “Hey, you might want to look this up” rather than the more whimsical “No clue,” but then a reader like Ezra would be pissed that Wallace didn’t just include the word’s definition in the note (but he’d be pissed if Wallace did include it because it’d be too much extra information that he (= Klein) doesn’t care about because he’s got TPS reports to file or whatever). The note isn’t a fuck you. It’s an invitation to go outside the boundaries of the text to bring some deeper understanding back into the text. It’s a chance to learn something.

I’m not going to get in as big a funk over this as I did over Avery’s post of a couple of weeks ago. Klein doesn’t have time to commit himself to reading the book, and that’s understandable. I don’t really have the time, frankly (I’m missing lots of Cubs baseball games to read and write about the book). I do wish that naysayers like Klein (who has been disposed to dislike the book from the beginning) and Avery would own some agency (ie, that they have other priorities they rate higher than reading IJ) rather than couching their difficulty with the book in terms of some sort of agency on Wallace’s part (ie, he’s wasting their time and antagonizing them). It’s a little silly. It’s like going to the gym and being frustrated that you have to lift the weights to see any benefit. Sometimes you have to do more than just show up to reap any reward.

The Appearance of Control

Daryl L. L. Houston2 Comments

Joelle says on page 534:

Well Mr. Gately what people don’t get about being hideously or improbably deformed is that the urge to hide is offset by a gigantic sense of shame about your urge to hide… [Y]ou know that hiding yourself away out of fear of gazes is really giving in to a shame that is not required and that will keep you from the kind of life you deserve as much as the next girl… You’re supposed to be strong enough to exert some control over how much you want to hide, and you’re so desperate to feel some kind of control that you settle for the appearance of control.

The passage in which these severely elided quotes appear makes me think of a story within the story of The Broom of the System. Throughout the book, editor Rick Vigorous tells protagonist and girlfriend Lenore Beadsman stories that have come across his desk for potential publication. The first of these that we’re privy to is one Vigorous (of the firm Frequent and Vigorous) gives some context by talking about second-order vanity. This is the sort of vanity a lot of us know kind of a lot about, in which you do care at least to some degree what you look like, but it’s important to you not to seem as if you care. So maybe while you’re at the gym, you take great pains to avoid looking at the wall of mirrors at your kind of hot masculine and freshly pumped muscles lest somebody catch you at it and think you care, but when you’re at home, working, say, on a blog post about some book or another that you’re reading, and you happen after a quick trip to the bathroom to catch a flash of yourself in the mirror stuck to the wall behind your home office door, maybe you stop for a second and lift up the old shirt-tail and lean back a little or maybe give just a little twist so that the newly minted concavity of the slightest little bit of abdominal definition shows up and you feel like maybe it’s just a little worth the daily 45-minute elliptical horror show and the repetitive strained exercises and the rather more strict than usual diet after all. For example.

So but the story Vigorous has had to read and shares, early in TBOTS, with Lenore is about one of these second-order vain folk, a guy with a particularly bad case of second-order vanity who one day discovers a gray patch of skin on his leg. It begins to spread, and he goes to his doctor after a while, and the doctor tells him that the stuff will keep spreading and make him carbuncular and gray and twisted and gross all over unless he pays for a procedure abroad that would wipe out the life savings he shares jointly with his girlfriend, whom he hasn’t told about the gray patch because he’s so vain and yet also doesn’t want to let her know that he’s vain enough about it that he has gone secretly to have it looked at. He’s sufficiently paralyzed by his second-order vanity that he winds up alienating his girlfriend, making up weird excuses to cover, for example, his whole scaly leg, etc. He withdraws completely and, when he finally decides to come clean and put his vanity about his vanity aside for the sake of not losing his one true love, she doesn’t answer his call and we’re left with nothing but ominous suspicions about the outcome. Joelle and others in the U.H.I.D, confronted with deformity, are simply embracing the fact that they care, giving in to the fact that they do want to hide, being in a way more honest about their deformities, though it comes off as if they’re being less honest in their hiding.

The passage I quote also makes me think of Hal, with his compulsion to hide his pot smoking. I think Joelle has it right. In an environment in which nearly every waking moment is scheduled, Hal runs down to the pump room or hides himself in the bathroom blowing thin smoke up at the vent not because he’s especially worried about being caught (being caught by a fellow indulger would hardly, on its own, be much of a worry). It’s to provide for himself a feeling of control, or at least the appearance of it. Of course, what he perhaps doesn’t realize is that this control is ultimately inverted, as the desire to exert control over something turns into his being controlled (to some degree) by it, to the extent that he’ll skip a meal with a pal to run down into the pump room to get high. The appearance of control becomes the appearance of control.

Coatlicue

Daryl L. L. Houston19 Comments

We learn on page 516 that Dr. Rusk “always wants to probe [Hal] on issues of space and self-definition and something she keeps calling the ‘Coatlicue Complex.'” This latter term has an end note reading “No clue,” which pretty much screams “go look it up.” Of course never until this read has it occurred to me to actually look it up. Courtesy of wikipedia, I’ve learned that Coatlicue is the following things:

  • the mother of gods
  • the one with the skirt of serpents
  • “Goddess of Fire and Fertility”
  • “Goddess of Life, Death and Rebirth”
  • “Mother of the Southern Stars”
  • she wore a pendant made of human hearts (calls to mind Poor Tony’s victim), hands, and skulls (alas, poor Yorick)
  • She represents the devouring mother, in whom both the womb and the grave exist.
  • According to Aztec legend, she was once magically impregnated by a ball of feathers that fell on her while she was sweeping a temple (she was rewarded for this ignominious begetting with a plot by daughter Coyolxauhqui to murder her, which plot was foiled by son Huitzilopochtli who sprang fully formed from the womb to kill his sister and prevent the murder)
  • the mother of Quetzalcoatl and Xolotl and Huitzilopochtli (among many others)
  • generally sort of a motherhood goddess, and a patron of mothers who die in childbirth
  • She’s also known as or associated with Toci, who is generally considered to be old but “is not always shown with specific markers of great age”
  • “Mother Goddess of the Earth who gives birth to all celestial things”

This makes me think of Avril’s (= April = spring = a time of fertility and rebirth) green thumb. She’s also the mother to a southern (football) star, and the notion of Avril as a devouring mother resonates with some of the ways in which she is so needy of her sons, but in a way that makes it obvious that she’s trying not to come off as needy — how she wants to seem as if she’s supportive almost more than she actually wants to be supportive and nonjudgmental. Orin describes her as “The Black Hole of Human Attention” (521); black holes are all-devouring. Orin has bird associations (I think I wrote something brief about this in a prior post), and Coatlicue has the whole impregnated-by-a-ball-of-feathers thing.

Which brings me to Quetzalcoatl, a feathered serpent deity who is often depicted with his beak-like mask insignia. Worship of Quetzalcoatl sometimes included animal sacrifice. His was a virgin birth. Orin’s birth may have been one of expediency (so not a virgin birth, but not quite a wholly wanted or optimal birth). He sacrifices the roaches that he finds in his bathroom. And he is feathered (playing for the Cardinals, sometimes literally feathered during pre-game antics) and is, with respect to his Subjects, sneaky and snake-like. He wears a helmet with a (vaguely) beak-like face mask.

Of course, then there’s another son, Huitzilopochtli, represented in iconography as a hummingbird with feathers only on his left side (isn’t Orin left-handed?), with a black face (“Orin” is an anagram of “noir”) and holding a snake-like scepter and a mirror (consider Orin’s fascination with watching Joelle’s short videos of himself).

Now consider Xolotl, a god (twin brother to Quetzalcoatl) of lightning (Incandenza = incandescent?) and death (Hal discovers his father’s body). In art, Xolotl was often depicted with reversed feet (Hal and the bad ankle?). He was the patron of the Mesoamerican ballgame, which resembled something like a cross between hip-volleyball and basketball but which had ritual associations (Eschaton, anyone?) and sometimes resulted in human sacrifice (Penn and Lord?). Of course, with Pemulis’s knowledge of optics (lightning = light) and his presiding over Eschaton, perhaps it’s less of a stretch to associate him with Xolotl than to associate Hal with the god.

Still, we know that Hal has indigenous American type heritage via a Pima-tribe great-grandmother (p. 101), and this, paired with the Coatlicue reference suggests that there may be something of good old native American mythology (versus the more obvious European mythology in evidence throughout the book) behind parts of this great American novel. The details could probably inform a pretty substantial master’s thesis in the hands of somebody with a better grounding in indigenous American culture than I have (meaning somebody who at minimum doesn’t have to go to wikipedia for recall of the stories behind even the most familiar deity names).

Getting back to the context for this tangent, what exactly does Rusk mean by a Coatlicue Complex? Hal sort of clings to the hem of Avril’s skirt (so to speak), and Coatlicue has a skirt of snakes, which calls to mind the Medusa myth. Yet Avril is no hag; a looker, she bears greater resemblance to the Canadian Odalisque variation on the myth. Hal, the hero (?) of stasis (like the hero he writes of in an essay within the book and of which somebody blogged about on one of the prominent Infinite Summer blogs, but I forget who and where) is ultimately rendered effectively stone-/gem-like. But Rusk of course has no idea about this future outcome. Maybe Rusk is getting at Hal’s habit of defining himself in terms of his mother’s all-devouring expectations of him. Or maybe this is just another, more American, way of saying Hal has something of an Oedipal complex.

Questions

Daryl L. L. Houston11 Comments

It turns out that I don’t have time for a big long well-thought-out post on this week’s milestone. So I’m just going to lob some questions out there and let the comments write the post for me.

Why are hamburgers referred to as “hamburgs” (and as “hamburg-sauce spaghetti”)? Does anybody say that really? Is this maybe one of those little things designed to yank us out of the narrative?

How, on page 470, can Steeply have his hands “clasped before his back”? The voice here is possibly that pseudo-Marathe/Quebecer voice, but this just doesn’t seem like the kind of error somebody would really make.

Did you notice that Steeply talks about rats being used to experiment with the p-terminal thing? And how he previously (429) brought up rats in the context of basically behaviorism and teaching people not to get addicted to things? And how Gately feels like a rat as he contemplates the whole higher power thing (443)?

As Gately contemplates the baggy sky (478) through the big windshield of the Aventura after contemplating talking to the ceiling, did you find yourself thinking back to a weird little reference to Herman the Ceiling that Breathed from one of Gately’s childhood homes (447)?

When you read about the “curved and planar mirrors at studied angles whereby each part of the room is reflected in every other part” (482), did you find yourself feeling like maybe this was sort of a little metaphor for the novel itself? If so, do you make anything of the fact that once Lucien is scrambling away from the AFR agents, this setup, designed originally to disorient those who come into the store, proves disorienting for him and ultimately helpful for the sort of people it would seem to have been designed to disorient? Ahem.

What’s with the weird masks the AFR agents are wearing? I’m not under the impression that this is SOP for them. Maybe it has to do with the silly pranks the Antitoi brothers pulled and is a sort of mockery.

Why does the narrator go on and on about the thread caught on the sight of Lucien’s gun?

Is there a good reason to associate Lucien with Mario by describing the broom he’s impaled on as “puncturing tile and floor at a police-lock’s canted angle” (488)? I think there may be more ore to mine here. Both characters are sort of innocent and simple and damaged, for example. And both wind up having something sort of almost messianic about them — or are reborn in a way, at least.

On 483 and 495, we have more instances of wobbling, which Infinite Detox has already addressed in some depth. Will he have more to say? (Sorry, I know that was a cheap way to sneak in a question.) There’s lots of rotation and even some concavity and convexity in this section featuring a young JOI.

Do you know anything about Powell’s Peeping Tom, posters of which JOI has on his boyhood bedroom walls? If not, you should read up.

Plug

Daryl L. L. Houston1 Comment

I posted this to wallace-l and to the Facebook group for Infinite Summer, but I haven’t pimped it here yet, so I thought I’d cut to a commercial interruption and promote a little Facebook app I wrote to go along with this summer’s reading. Once you authorize the app, you just enter your page count whenever you’ve read a few pages, and it updates your wall with your page count and the (rough, based on 981 pages) percentage completion you’ve managed. That’s it. Nothing fancy. Just a way to have something like semi-public accountability (if you’re into that) and possibly to attract the attention of friends who might not otherwise even really know about Infinite Jest or Infinite Summer. I reap no benefit or anything from this (well, the wall post does link back to this blog and to the main Infinite Summer page, but I mean that I’m not raking in dough over it or anything); I just did it for fun. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming. I’m sitting on a post about Renaissance drama and Infinite Jest that’s sure to bore you to tears.

The Way It Gets Better and You Get Better is Through Pain

Daryl L. L. Houston11 Comments

I’ve lifted my title from page 446, in a passage in which Gately has just publicly expressed frustration with his still not understanding the Higher Power thing at all. He’s just been told a joke that runs as follows:

This wise old whiskery fish swims up to three young fish and goes, ‘Morning boys, how’s the water?’ and swims away; and the three young fish watch him swim away and look at each other and go, ‘What the fuck is water?’ and swim away.

It was with basically this parable that Wallace opened his famous Kenyon commencement address, recently distributed in book form as This is Water. As this is the first time I’ve read to this point in Infinite Jest since he delivered that address, I had long since forgotten it, and so I did sort of a double-take and said a holy shit and scribbled a big wide bar of scribbles in the margin of my book to highlight it. In the address, after telling the parable, Wallace goes on as follows:

The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

Sounds kind of familiar, doesn’t it?

Infinite Detox said in a comment to my post on sadness that, like me, he had tended in past readings to overlook the profound sadness of the book, tuning in to the stylistic tics and the dark humor instead. He went on to suggest (or rather to question whether or not) this common oversight by readers was a bug of the book or a feature (ie, book experience as antidote to addiction — I hope I haven’t mischaracterized the suggestion in too grossly wrong a fashion). I dismissed the idea that it was a feature, at least in any clever book-structure-as-mimesis-of-life kind of way, but as I consider it more, and especially in light of this excerpt from This is Water, I think maybe there’s something to Detox’s idea after all. For the real sadness has surely been buried; it’s been one of the big important realities that has been hardest for me (at least) to see and talk about. So maybe Wallace did kind of bury it and submerge us in all of these dark clever things to make us really work to separate the comic from the tragic.

But back to my title. Gately is ruminating on desperation on the way home after hearing the fish parable and has the following insight:

Something they seem to omit to mention in Boston AA when you’re new and out of your skull with desperation and ready to eliminate your map and they tell you how it’ll all get better and better as you abstain and recover: they somehow omit to mention that the way it gets better and you get better is through pain. Not around pain, or in spite of it. They leave this out, talking instead about Gratitude and Release from Compulsion. There’s serious pain in being sober, though, you find out, after time. Then now that you’re clean… [they tell] you that at least this sober pain now has a purpose. At least this pain means you’re going somewhere, they say, instead of the repetitive gerbil-wheel of addictive pain.

And just a moment later:

You’ll start to feel why it was you got dependent on what was, when you get right down to it, an anesthetic.

Fast forward to page 460, in the utterly different context of dawn drills:

Schtitt shrugs, half-turning away from them to look off somewhere. ‘Or else leave here into large external world where is cold and pain without purpose or tool…’

And so again, I find myself thinking (and kind of shuddering at how cutesy stupid a thought it is) that maybe Wallace is what some call antagonistic to the reader with all the footnotes and characters and narrative shifts and elided plot lines in order to make it kind of painful to get through the book and to get at that message of sadness and hopefully, eventually, to a message of redemption or recovery. Anybody who’s spent any time at all around a high school sports team will be familiar with the saying “no pain, no gain.”

Changing gears now.

As I read Gately’s recollections of his childhood and his mother, I noticed an interplay between images of fire and water. He says that his mother tried to ward off her lover’s blows “as if she were beating out flames.” Later he describes her weeping and “beating at herself as if on fire.” Young Gately would drink his mother’s vodka with diet Coke “until it lost its fire.” The narrator describes Gately’s memories as having sunk without bubbles and then having bubbled back up in sobriety. As we learn about Gately’s mistaking “cirrhosis of the liver” for “Sir Osis of Thuliver,” we also learn that he would tell the neighborhood kids he was one of Arthur’s “vessels” (for vassals). And then:

And [Gately’s] dreams late that night, after the Braintree/Bob Death Commitment, seem to set him under a sort of sea, at terrific depths, the water all around him silent and dim and the same temperature as he is.

With these things in mind, I started looking for that other elemental pairing, earth and wind. These are a little harder to find, and a bit more of a stretch. But there is a reference to “Herman the Ceiling that Breathed.” Then all the mention of wind sprints and other drills that take your breath away, with ATHSCME fans in the background and references made to the Lung. Finding earth in this week’s sections is a little tougher. That Schtitt is elevated above the ground is kind of a tenuous reference to earth, I suppose. And there’s the notion, hearkening back to Eschaton (which is referred to herein), of the courts as map as territory (as earth) (or not).

I don’t mean to say that I think Wallace is intentionally trying to highlight the four elements (though the fire/water contrast seems pretty clear), but this week’s milestone did make me begin to pay attention to the motif as a possible thing to watch for going forward.

Avery Edison Hurt my Feelings

Daryl L. L. Houston27 Comments

I think I’m generally considered by those who know me personally to be like Vulcan-level rational, often to a fault. Rational thought tends to supercede feeling, to the point that I wind up hurting people’s feelings by demanding (or at least expecting, and balking at the lack of) distanced, objective consideration of things that are really more or better felt than considered.

So imagine my surprise when I read Avery Edison’s Infinite Summer post yesterday and found myself becoming defensive and doing this weird rare thing that I think may have been emoting. She doesn’t like the book. She’s reading it with distaste and figures it’s a waste of time. She disdains the style and yearns for more explicit and I suppose active plot rather than what she describes as portraits. When I read (and reread) her post, I find myself getting flushed, feeling angry. She doesn’t deserve this book. She’s somehow profaning the book by owning a copy of it and having these opinions. I wish she’d stop reading it, stop taking pot-shots at it. Why doesn’t she just go get the latest Grisham (not much but plot in those, is there?) or maybe a Harlequin romance? Is she fucking retarded?

Silly, huh? I know rationally that her position is valid and shared by many (for many express similar sentiments in the comments to her post). I know that there are simple matters of taste in literature. And I don’t mean taste as in snobby wine drinkers who’ll buy only from boutique wine shops vs. those of us who are happy enough to drink a Yellow Tail. I mean taste simply as in some people like broccoli and some people don’t, and there’s nothing wrong with either position. I know this. When I read Portrait of a Lady many years ago, I had much the same reaction to it that Avery had to Infinite Jest. Rationally, I understand that this book, and probably most of Wallace’s work, just isn’t for Avery, and I know objectively that that’s ok and doesn’t in any way detract from the book’s value for me.

But still, I feel like she’s denigrating one of my children, or unjustly defaming one of my heroes. It’s hard to get past. And here’s the thing: I don’t feel this way about any other author. I’m a great admirer of the work of William Gaddis, but if somebody told me they couldn’t get past page 4 of JR, I’d be neither surprised nor bothered. I have kind of a love/hate relationship with Pynchon’s work; it took me three or four tries to get through Gravity’s Rainbow, and I’ve false started a couple of his others a couple of times too. I haven’t made it more than halfway through Ulysses yet (despite several tries). Steinbeck is another favorite of mine. He’s more traditional and human, in a way, than these postmodern giants. Where I have no real sense of personal admiration for Gaddis or Pynchon (it’s their work I’m on board with), I feel like Steinbeck was a nice, sort of approachable guy, and I sort of like him. Yet if somebody says they don’t like his work, it doesn’t bother me. No hard feelings.

What is it, then, about this disdain for Infinite Jest that sticks in my craw? I do admire who Wallace seemed to be. I think he was probably a good, nourishing person to know personally. But I didn’t know him personally, so I can’t chalk my hurt feelings up to that. Maybe it’s because he died, but then Steinbeck is dead too. Maybe it’s because he’s the first real author whose prime occurred during my active reading/intellectual prime, and whose life ended during mine. That does make it all more personal to me. I had looked forward to many more books from Wallace, to many more years of not only enjoying his work, but of watching it develop in something more like real-time than for these old or dead authors whose work I admire mostly looking back in time. Reading Wallace’s work has been, in a way, almost like watching a child grow up (though I’m not comfortable with the sort of superior or parental role that simile places me in, so let’s discard that part of it). And now that work is done.

There’s a reference somewhere in Infinite Jest to a character (I think a past boyfriend of Molly Notkin’s) who believes that there’s a finite number of orgasms available in the world, and so he’s crippled by the fear of consuming one of them and thus depriving another person of one of them (side note: it just occurs to me that this orgasm limit and selflessness ties in with the whole can-of-soup discussion Marathe and Steeply have at the end of this week’s milestone). Although I know it’s irrational, I feel almost that way about reading Infinite Jest. If somebody’s going to read it at arm’s length or with a sneer or a frown of distaste, I don’t want her to read it. It’s almost like she’s wasting its time (rather than its wasting hers) or preventing some other person from enjoying this major piece of what sadly turns out to be a finite (and far less prolific than I’d desire) body of work. It’s irrational and stupid, I know, but it’s how I feel. Hashing it out here has helped me step back a little bit, so that I can get past the weird flash of anger or resentment I feel when I think about Avery’s post (and similar reactions), but it still all hurts my feelings a little, makes me feel sad and further bereft.

Sadness

Daryl L. L. Houston14 Comments

Wallace once said that in writing Infinite Jest, he wanted to write something sad. There are lots of individual fragments of sadness throughout the book that I need not catalogue. As I got to the end of this week’s milestone, I was more or less knocked over by what turns out to be probably the central overarching sadness of the book. And I found it in, of all places, a Steeply/Marathe section. These sections have always felt during previous readings almost like filler, stuff to sort of loosely bind together a couple of the larger plots. I’ve found them a bit more compelling this time around, though still strange and disjunctive, removed somehow (geographically, of course, but also in mood) from the rest of the book.

In the section that struck me, Marathe is trying to coax Steeply through a dialog (in almost the Socratic sense) about desire and delayed gratification. Steeply says the usual platitudes about freedom and being responsible adults and how the social contract is what keeps us from bonking one another on the head, because in order to maximize our own pleasure, we have to make sure we’re not curtailing the pleasure of others. He has also says that, in the case of kids and candy, for example, “[i]t can’t be a Fascist matter of screaming at the kid or giving him electric shocks each time he overindulges in candy. You can’t induce a moral sensibility the same way you’d train a rat. The kid has got to learn by his own experience how to learn to balance the short-and long-term pursuit of what he wants” (429).

Just a page later, we go to Marathe:

‘You believe we are underestimating to see all you as selfish, decadent. But the question has been raised: are we cells of Canada alone in this view? Aren’t you afraid, you of your government and gendarmes? If not, your B.S.S., why work so hard to prevent dissemination? Why make a simple Entertainment, no matter how seducing its pleasures, a samizdat and forbidden in the first place, if you do not fear so many U.S.A.s cannot make the enlightened choices?’

This now was the closest large Steeply had come, to stand over Marathe to look down, looming. The rising astral body Venus lit his left side of the face to the color of pallid cheese. ‘Get real. The Entertainment isn’t candy or beer. Look at Boston just now. You can’t compare this kind of insidious enslaving process to your little cases of sugar and soup.’

Marathe smiled bleakly into the chiaroscuro flesh of this round and hairless U.S.A face. ‘Perhaps the facts are true, after the first watching: that then there seems to be no choice. But to decide to be this pleasurably entertained in the first place. This is still a choice, no? Sacred to the viewing self, and free? No? Yes?’

In the case of the attache in the context of whose viewing we’re first introduced to the Entertainment, of course he had no specific choice in the matter of being made catatonic by the film; he didn’t know what specifically he was in for. One could reasonably enough argue that he was so enslaved by the habit of passive entertainment that he may as well have made the choice to view the cartridge that would leave him slobbering and incontinent. Let’s put that aside for a moment, though, and grant that most people confronted with the choice to watch or not watch a movie that will assuredly prove fatal would choose not to. If we grant as much, then Steeply’s more or less right, and Marathe’s point doesn’t really hold.

But take Steeply’s own words: “Look at Boston just now.” Look at it. Hookers turning tricks with their dead babies still placentally attached. Fathers diddling their catatonic retarded rubber-masked daughters and driving their complicit adoptive daughters to become strippers. Withdrawal-racked transgendered prostitutes stealing hearts and later going into withdrawal-induced seizures on buses. Talented, smart, All-American-type girls going into friends’ bathrooms for what they plan to make their last dance with Too Much Fun. And so on and so forth, all to feed the Spider. Boston just now is full of people who know, in at least vague, Just-Say-No, ways that there can be severe consequences for engaging in certain behaviors known to be addictive. And yet they do them, many well beyond that healthy way in which, say, a Schacht occasionally indulges, and they do them, and they do them until they hit bottom, until they have to bonk others on the head for their fix: they’re kids eating candy all day until they throw up even though, in many cases, they knew better.

As Steeply says, “[y]ou can’t induce a moral sensibility the same way you’d train a rat.” And yet clearly the moral sensibility (or whatever sensibility it is — one of self-preservation, maybe?) isn’t self-generating, or at any rate is pretty easily put aside, for all of the people suffering the horrors of their addictions. How, then, do you fix the problem? You can’t force a fix, but people resist fixes from within. It’s another double-bind, its own sort of dark infinite jest. This is a bleak, bleak view.

Deliver Us From Irony

Daryl L. L. Houston3 Comments

Well there’s lots about irony (directly and indirectly) in the latest milestone:

He doesn’t know there’s an abstract distance in the look that makes it seem like he’s studying a real bitch of a 7-iron on the tenth rough or something; the look doesn’t communicate what he thinks his audience wants it to. (365)

Speakers who are accustomed to figuring out what an audience wants to hear and then supplying it find out quickly that this particular audience does not want to be supplied with what someone else thinks it wants. (368)

The prior two quotes I guess I’d call indirectly pertinent to irony, insofar as they deal with friction between what seems and what is and the willful deployment of a seem for an is. These quotes aren’t really classic irony, but the mechanics seem sort of the same to me, and the quotes are certainly related to one another.

Dealing a bit more directly with irony:

The thing is it has to be the truth to really go over, here. It can’t be a calculated crowd-pleaser, and it has to be the truth unslanted, unfortified. And maximally unironic. An ironist in a Boston AA meeting is a witch in church. (369)

And a little later, Wallace describes the Canadian students at ETA huddled together at the Interdependence Day dinner:

This American penchant for absolution via irony is foreign to them. (385)

Compare to Gately’s chatter about listening vs. hearing, really engaging and hearing not only what the person you’re listening to is saying but listening to (or hearing) what they mean, how their experience bears on and enriches your own. This is real engagement vs. showiness or something rather like self-puppetry.

It’s no coincidence that when we get to Lyle, we learn this:

But it’s the way he listens, somehow, that keeps the saunas full. (387)

I’m not going to write a lot of stuff synthesizing it all, but I will leave you with a few (lengthy; sorry, it’s just too good not to quote at length) goodies from Wallace’s E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction (which by the way, you’ve heard that phrase before in IJ, haven’t you?).

I’m going to argue that irony and ridicule are entertaining and effective, and that at the same time, they are agents of a great despair and stasis in our U.S. culture, and that for aspiring fiction writers they pose especially terrible problems (49 — from the collection  A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again)

As Hyde (whom I pretty obviously like) puts it, “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.” This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. This is why Hyde seems right about persistent irony being tiresome. (67)

And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit “I don’t really mean what I’m saying.” So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: “How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.” Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like an hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionallized irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to inderdict the question without attending to its subject is, when exercised, tyranny. It is the new junta, using the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself. (67)

Of possible interest, particularly with this last bit in mind, is a quote from page 38 of the same book in which Wallace gives what he calls a “commonsensical” definition of malignant addiction:

[TV] may become malignantly addictive only once a certain threshold of quantity is habitually passed, but then the same is true of Wild Turkey. And by “malignant” and “addictive” I again to not mean evil or hypnotizing. An activity is addictive if one’s relationship to is lies on that downward-sloping continuum between liking it a little too much and really needing it. Many addictions, from exercise to letter-writing, are pretty benign. But something is malignantly addictive if (1) it causes real problesm for the addict, and (2) it offers itself as a relief from the very problem it causes.

Boundaries

Daryl L. L. Houston3 Comments

In a post from nearly a month ago entitled “Fragmented into Beauty,” I pulled the following quote from a dream Hal describes on page 68:

We sort of play. But it’s all hypothetical, somehow. Even the ‘we’ is theory: I never get quite to see the distant opponent, for all the apparatus of the game.

So imagine my surprise (I wish I could say I was prescient or that I had picked this out on a prior reading) when I stumbled across this on page 338 in what turns out to be sort of a riveting and hilarious riff on boundaries (which was the context for that earlier quote):

Players themselves can’t be valid targets. Players aren’t inside the goddamn game. Players are part of the apparatus of the game. They’re part of the map. It’s snowing on the players but not on the territory. They’re part of the map, not the cluster-fucking territory. You can only launch against the territory. Not against the map. It’s like the one ground-rule boundary that keeps Eschaton from degenerating into chaos.

Within the Eschaton section — about which I’ll be frank: I heaved a sigh when I started in on the first few pages of it, having forgotten what a payoff there was if you only got through the first few sloggy pages — you’ve got this treatment of territory vs. map within the game, which is played by kids framed within a set of tennis courts, framed within a tennis academy, framed within a made-up town in a reconfigured continent. There’s a lot of framing and boundary stuff going on here. Wallace takes it a little farther, even, by interrupting the Eschaton with brief, apparently insignificant, yank-you-out-of-context descriptions of the idling mint-green sedan and then again with note 130 sort of editorializing on Pemulis’s diction.

I don’t know exactly what Wallace is doing here, but I think he’s playing with authorial or narrative boundaries in some way, for one thing. There are several mentions of absorption (even, on 340, of being “paralyzed with absorption,” which, hey, anybody heard of a little film that paralyzes people with absorption?) and engrossment. Maybe Wallace is perforating the Eschaton story frame with these interjections in order to sort of yank us out of what became, for me, at least, absorption in the notion of territory vs. map.

In his story Mister Squishy, Wallace deals with framing as well, as applies to market research. Sort of the holy grail of market research within the story is a scenario in which the market itself (rather than easily-contaminated focus groups, etc.) provides the data for testing the market. And of course this is actually now possible (and Wallace was flirting with the idea) via web site tracking, A/B testing, etc.. An excerpt (emphases mine):

For now, in Belt and Britton’s forward-looking vision, the market becomes its own test. Terrain = Map. Everything encoded. And no more facilitators to muddy the waters by impacting the tests in all the infinite ephemeral unnoticeable infinite ways human beings always kept impacting each other and muddying the waters.

Both Mister Squishy and Infinite Jest treat of the notions of maximizing pleasure and of giving yourself away to something larger and meaningful outside your own solo frame of reference. I think Wallace was very much concerned with escaping the destructive frames of reference (the cages of addiction and solipsism, for example), and this meditation (though it’s too zany to be a meditation, I suppose) on territory vs. map in Infinite Jest, well, maybe it’s calling attention to how easily our frames of reference (self vs. other; healthy indulgence a la Schacht vs. absorption) can be blurred and how bad things can result from that blurring. I’m still trying to piece all of it together, and I haven’t even given much thought yet to the actual map/territory/concavity/convexity parts of the story yet.

I won’t write today about the AA stuff, though I think it’s brilliant and horrible and beautiful and probably exactly right. There’s also something weird about the page numbers for this spoiler-line, which seems to end right in the very middle of the AA section.