DFW and the Grotesque

James Martin8 Comments

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.

The Deep End of the Pool

James Martin5 Comments

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).

Notes

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.

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.