Divided Attention and Being in the Body

Daryl L. L. Houston5 Comments

I took this note on page 146 (the part about video phones):

DFW is concerned here and elsewhere (Mister Squishy) with divided attention — yet look what the full attention of The Entertainment yields.

What I was reacting to was this:

A traditional aural-only conversation… let you enter a kind of highway-hypnotic semi-attentive fugue: while conversing, you could look around the room, doodle, fine-groom, peel tiny bits of dead skin away from your cuticles… all while seeming to be right there attending closely to the voice on the phone. And yet — and this was the retrospectively marvelous part — even as you were dividing your attention between the phone call and all sorts of other idle little fuguelike activities, you were somehow never haunted by the suspicion that the person on the other end’s attention might be similarly divided…. The bilateral illusion of unilateral attention was almost infantilely gratifying from an emotional standpoint: you got to believe you were receiving somebody’s complete attention without having to return it.

He goes on to write about childish self-absorption and the “infantile fantasy of commanding your partner’s attention.” Tangential as this little section seems (almost like a little bit of filler that helps provide some context for the just-barely-future world of the novel), it actually seems to tie in with the infantilizing effect of The Entertainment.

How about JOI’s father’s monologue? What an amazing, sad, funny, unlikely thing. Nobody really talks the way this speaker does, and yet it’s hard not to visualize it happening and to believe it. I always think of John Turturro playing this role.

My first post about the book proper was about being trapped. In this section, we see things like this:

  • “Living in your body” (158)
  • “Head is body” (159)
  • “a machine in the ghost” (160)
  • “That’s my kid, in his body.” (164)
  • “I was in my body. My body and I were one.” (165)
  • “The court becomes a … an extremely unique place to be. It will do everything for you. It will let nothing escape your body.” (166)
  • “It was a foreign body, or a substance, not my body” (167)
  • “We’re just bodies to you.” (167 – 168)
  • “That I was in there” (168)

Flash back to early in the book, where Hal says “I am in here.” I don’t have a thesis about what all this means. I do have yet another quote, though, this time from the Kenyon commencement address Wallace gave a few years ago:

Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education — least in my own case — is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.

As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master.

Almost immediately after saving a draft of this post, I went and read the latest post over at Infinite Summer and discovered that Eden had excerpted from the same part of Wallace’s speech. I swear I’m not just a copy cat. Whether I have a fleshed-out thesis or not, it’s hard for me not to see some thematic similarities between this part of Wallace’s speech and the two sections of the past week’s milestone that I wanted to comment on: divided attention, being (trapped?) in your body/head, a sort of narcissism/solipsism and its infantilizing outcome, the perils of giving yourself too fully to something (The Entertainment, pot, whatever) versus dividing your attention to some degree, and how all that relates to how to think and how to be.

Of attachment in Infinite Jest

James Martin9 Comments

[The spoiler line is currently page 168.]

Scribbled down on the back of my Infinite Summer Bookmark:  “Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no?  What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith” (107).  These words are from a conversation between Marathe and Steeply. Marathe has been expressing his frustration with Steeply’s real or pretended ignorance about history–literary and otherwise–and etymology. Steeply, in turn, is amused that Marathe is about to launch into what must be one of his pet lecture topics. Despite Steeply’s derision, Marathe is insistant, “Make amusement all you wish.  But choose with care.  You are what you love.  No?” (107).  Marathe has, up the same page a bit, defined love as attachment.

When I read this passage, it resonated thematically with an earlier conversation between Mario and Schtitt (and, really, an unnamed narrator, who bursts in on page 82 and takes on the expository role that he finds Mario incapable of), where Schtitt, commenting on the modern idea of happiness as “The happy pleasure of the person alone, yes?” (83).  He continues “Without there is something bigger.  Nothing to contain and give the meaning.  Lonely.  Verstiegenheit” (83).

DFW glosses the foreign word, in note 36, as “Low-Bavarian for something like ‘wandering alone in a blasted disorienting territory beyond all charted limits and orienting markers,’ supposedly.”  The Walace Wiki glosses it as “litterally German for ‘eccentricity’.”

It’s clear enough from just the opening pages that subjectivity is going to be one of Wallace’s concerns in Infinite Jest.  And I’ve often heard that, along with it, loneliness is as well.  This makes sense, as “post-post-” modern life, despite all of the ubiquetious technologies we design to faciliate interaction, of which this post is part and parcel, can feel fairly isolated. I’m typing this and you’re reading it. We’ve likely never met and likely never will. Yet, on a certain lexical level, you and I might know more about one another than I and plenty of other people I’ve met in the “real wold” do.  Still, sitting on opposite ends of this node, the connection certainly feels a lot less real, doesn’t it? In fact it is not unlike the real-yet-not-real conversation authors and readers have had as long as there have been authors and readers, separated in time and space (essentially, since the birth of writing itself).

Marathe, a fanatic, a devotee of a cause larger than himself, is caught in a bind between the love of the cause he believes in, and his love of his sick wife. We don’t know, at this point in the novel, which one he will be willing to sacrafice for the other.

Schtitt and Marathe agree that individualism is a problem and attachment is the solution.  Marathe defines the thing deserving of such devotion as that for which one would die without a second though, or, in his sometimes pidgin English, “without, as you say, the thinking twice” (107). Schtitt seems more ambivalent about it. His concluding comment to Mario is “Any something.  The what:  this is more unimportant than that there is something” (83).  And, though the syntax of that line is certainly open to interpretation, I think the point is that having something larger than the self in which to believe is more important than the real existence of that chosen thing.

How this argument grows and shakes out will be interresting to see, as there are fairly obvious dangers both to Marathe’s fanaticism and Schtitt’s pragmatic nihilism. I’m just curious at this point; I’m not entirely sure where DFW will (or would) pitch his weight.

Fewer Words

Daryl L. L. Houston10 Comments

I read something recently (I forget where, though I suspect either a comment to a blog post or perhaps even a tweet, which, this latter, would be pretty fitting) about how Wallace could be saying a lot of what he says with a whole lot fewer words. The idea, I guess, is that the sort of prose Wallace gives us in Infinite Jest is in a way masturbatory and hostile to the reader. I remember feeling this way about books I was forced to read in high school. It’s related to the “I’ll never use this algebra stuff again anyway” attitude I also had in high school. It arises out of a sort of pragmatism, I guess: For the person wanting simply to say that he read the book, all those words do rather hinder progress.

The thing about literary fiction is that it has mannerisms, and these mannerisms are often what make it worth reading. A Dan Brown book and a John Grisham book are more or less interchangeable in terms of the prose framework across which the often riveting (I’m not throwing stones here) plots are strung. It’s the style, the tics and quirks and fluidity or herky-jerkiness of the prose (and a thousand other things) that make literary fiction fun to read. It’s not about efficiency.

Saying that an author like Wallace is using too many words is like saying that — well, let’s just go with a big obvious but simple example here — DaVinci should have rendered the Mona Lisa as a stick figure. Surely no one will doubt that that modified painting I’m imagining would in a general sense convey the idea “woman” (or “person,” at least), but all of the nuance, all of what makes the picture art rather than just a picture would be leached out of it.

Behind already??

Heather Wardell1 Comment

I was ahead after my first reading session, and I think I somehow figured I was WAY ahead. Now, I’m behind.

I just spent 15 minutes bookmarking each ‘spoiler line’ page in my Treo, so that should help me stay at an appropriate pace… when I pass a bookmark I’ll know I’ve done what I need to by that date.

I don’t mind getting a bit ahead, but I don’t want to be so far ahead that I inadvertently post spoilers. (As a natural speed reader, I’m hyper-cautious about discussing books with people who’re still reading.) Of course, I also don’t want to be behind, because then (like now) I can’t read the posts here for fear of getting spoiled myself.

So I will get caught up over the weekend and be ready to post something insightful (with any luck) on Monday!

In the meantime, I am certain that my colleagues’ lovely long posts over the last few days are brilliant. I will read them on Monday and then know for sure. 🙂

Heather, who vows NOT to get behind again!

Infinite Spam

Daryl L. L. Houston6 Comments

I sort of hate to write a post about this (I’m feeling like maybe I’m a little too prolific), but my comments on wordpress.com blogs seem to get automatically flagged as spam for some reason (even, in some cases, on this very blog; maybe I am too prolific after all). So writing a post is an end-run around that and a way to weigh in via trackback on a post over at A Supposedly Fun Blog that sucked my comment into a spam black hole.

The post in question makes note of the misspelling of “roulants” as “rollents”  in references to the Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents. It turns out that there are all sorts of French language errors in the book. In the post, Matthew speculates that this error is another attempt to disorient the reader. I don’t know how charitable it is to suggest that Wallace wanted to disorient anybody. Lay a bunch of information on them to force active reading, sure. But disorientation seems like such a malicious thing, and I don’t think there’s malice in Wallace’s work.

My vanished reply to his post went as follows:

Some suggest that the bad French is intentional, chalked up in some cases to the fact that much of it comes to us via term papers, etc., written by teenagers with dubious French language acumen. In long note 304 (in which we read about the origins of the AFR), we’re also led to question the authority or lucidity of the person who has written the paper Struck is cribbing from. So it could be a mistake, but given how squishy authority and lucidity in that note are, it could also very well be intentional.

Some notes on the second milestone

James Martin4 Comments

In th readings for the second milestone (63-94), we learn, in a fairly straightforward fashion, a lot of backstory pertaining to Hal’s father, Dr James Orin Incandenza, as well as some details about Hal’s grandfather.

This is the first chapter in the book that I found challenging, both because of the the length of DWF’s sentences and because of the length of his footnotes, one of which contains the entire filmograhy of Dr. Incandenza, running to almost nine full pages and containing, depending upon how you count it, listings for almost 80 films.  Some of these entries are funny in the extreme, especially if you’ve ever suffered through too much really bad avant garde cinema.

Structurally, the details of Dr. Incandenza’s filmic output reveal many details about his own troubled life and, especially, his troubled relationship with his wife and, to a lesser extent, his son Hal.  Also notable, as I’ve been told to watch out for Hamlet references (and as I am something of a Hamlet freak), is that the production company for many of the films, especially the later ones, is “Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited” (990), which is, of course, a reference to the court jester whose skull Hamlet famously addresses in the speech from which Infinite Jest takes its title–a speech, not inconsequentially, about death and the purpose of life, given the fact of it.

Pages 68-78 comprise an interesting chapter about a Katherine Ann “Kate” Gompert, an attempted suicide now confined in the psych wing of some hospital. The cause of her attempt seems to be a combination of depression and pot withdrawal.  We see the chapter in limited omniscient (or maybe free-indirect?) POV from her doctor’s perspective. It’s a really great scene, as we get inside the head of the doctor (actually a resident) trying very hard to keep the clinically correct outward emotional affect, even as he seems to also become genuinely concerned (and maybe a little out of his depth) during this consultation. So, here, the communication theme appears again. There seem to be moments of genuine understanding here, when the doctor goes off script and Kate reaches out, attempting to be understood. I’m not sure the doctor ever gets named. Kate, mentions another doctor, Dr. Garton (a previous shrink?).

We get a really good chapter introducing Gerhardt Schtitt and his relationship with Mario Incandenza (79-85).  I like this one for a lot of reasons. First off, it’s one of the few places so far where DFW gets overtly philosophical, admiring–while also admitting the possible issues with–Schtitt’s pro-fascist upbringing (82), as it creates a sense of belonging and shared purpose, something DFW thinks is sorely missing from modern life (and that Schtitt thinks is missing from American life).  It also lets him philosophize more about tennis as a battle not between player and player or even player and objective rules but one between player and self.  Stylistically, it’s great because DFW switches, abruptly, from a free indirect POV (hovering in and out of both characters minds) to direct authorial intrusion (e.g. “This should not be rendered in exposition like this, but Mario Incandenza as a severely limited range of verbatim recall” [82]).

We also get into the really fascinating and strange chapter about Marathe, a wheelchair bound Quebecois separatist and member of an elite group of similarly injured assassins.  The origins of the injury itself are explained in detail in perhaps the longest footnote so far (Note 39, which leads to note 304, which tells the story of James Albrecht Lockley Struck, Jr. as he is plagiarizing an essay on Marathe’s group of assassins and the Quebecois separatists in general.  The story is eight pages long with several footnotes on it as well).

The tape (which Steeply calls “the entertainment”) which we now know has killed–or, at least, frozen, Medusa-style–the medical attache, his wife, and many others who entered the room and inadvertently looked at it, is mentioned.  Steeply wants to know if Marathe’s crew had anything to do with it, which he denies.  They speculate that it might have been personally motivated, which leads me to suspect that it might have been James Incandenza’s work, an effort to get even with the medical attache for sleeping with his wife.  But we’ll see.  It gets a little confusing there.

Fragmented Into Beauty

Daryl L. L. Houston8 Comments

Well there’s no getting away from mentioning note 24 this week. I skimmed it the first time I read the book because it seemed extra and annoying and probably extra annoying. End notes with footnotes of their own. A text within a text. Plots (or not) described within the text within the text. A tiny bit of plot among the players in Incandenza’s films (if you watch last names, you’ll see evidence of marriage and, presumably, divorce). Untitled. Unfinished. UNRELEASED. My feeling is that you don’t have to read most of these too carefully on a first dip into the book. It’s the kind of note that it might be instructive to read after you finish and on subsequent readings, and I find it more funny than annoying every time I’ve read it since that first.

I don’t have a lot to say about Kate Gompert. This section is hard to read after Wallace’s death. I have the impression that there’s something of a kinship between this section and the Erdedy section. Maybe it’s how they deal with something that is, or could be, treated as a very big cliche. Or it might be how they seem to try to deal with that cliche very honestly, how they’re pretty much devoid of some of the absurdity that occurs elsewhere in the book (feral hamsters and infants, anyone?). I’m not sure. But without going back and doing a side-by-side close reading of the two, I have an amorphous sense that the two are cousins.

From 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.

I just dig that dream and its concluding sentences.

From pages 81 – 82:

[Schtitt] knew real tennis was really about not the blend of statistical order and expansive potential that the game’s technicians revered, but in fact the opposite — not-order, limit, the places where things broke down, fragmented into beauty…

And Schtitt… nevertheless seemed to know what Hopman and van der Meer and Bollettieri seemed not to know: that locating beauty and art and magic and improvement and keys to excellence and victory in the prolix flux of match play is not a fractal matter of reducing chaos to pattern. Seemed intuitively to sense that it was a matter not of reduction at all, but — perversely — of expansion, the aleatory flutter of uncontrolled, metastatic responses to those responses, and on into what Incandenza would articulate…. as a Cantorian continuum of infinities of possible move and response… beautiful because infoliating, contained, this diagnate infinity of infinities of choice and execution, mathematically uncontrolled but humanly contained, bounded by the talent and imagination of self and opponent.

I think that any time Wallace starts writing about infinity, it’s probably pretty important, given the title of the novel and the title of the film(s) that it references (didn’t catch that if you didn’t read note 24). This passage is kind of wonderful, and I have trouble not thinking of it as something of an artistic statement. Wallace’s work takes you in a million possibly chaotic directions. Understanding that his work can’t be forced into a template is, I think, a key to enjoying it. Your job as reader is to supply containment where he doesn’t and yet to let the work bounce about within your own sense of its containment, producing whatever associations it produces for you, which then feed back into your reading of the work. Reading Wallace is more like playing a match of tennis (I suppose that’s pretty trite of me) than sitting back in your special chair in front of the TV drooling into the tray strapped to your chin. It’s about engagement rather than passive entertainment.

I’ve always found the Steeply/Marathe scenes a little tedious and sometimes confusing.

Here’s a Question

Daryl L. L. Houston5 Comments

What do you know about Wallace and his life (and his death) that influences your participation in Infinite Summer? Annie Lowrey over at A Supposedly Fun Blog made me think to ask:

This [reading has been far more poignant than others] in part because I know, I think, a bit too much about DFW for comfort now. I read the D.T. Max and the Rolling Stone pieces on him, and many other outpourings. I wish I hadn’t, at least in the context of reading IJ.

It’s a great post, and the bloggers over there seem to be off to a solid start all around. I don’t especially need more to read about Infinite Summer and its subject, but into my feed reader they go. (Disclaimer: If their blog turns out better than ours, we’re totally going to stagger, my zombie compatriots and I*, arms outstretched, and eat their brains.)

I’ve blogged already about what baggage I bring to the project. What about you? Is Wallace’s death a big factor in your signing on? Are there things you’ve learned about his life (e.g. that he was depressed for a long time, that he was a near-great young tennis player, etc.) that were factors? Given any such factors, can you bring yourself to avoid succumbing to the intentional fallacy? (And should you?)

Just curious.

* I actually have not gotten pledges from any other Infinite Zombies bloggers to do this. Also, this is not a cutesy attempt to use notes the way Wallace does. I find that kind of irritating. But I was inside a parenthesis and a bracket just didn’t feel right.

Some notes on the first milestone

James Martin9 Comments

I have to admit, pulling my thoughts together in order to create a decent first blog post about Infinite Jest has been harder than I had anticipated.  I’ve been beneffitting greatly from Daryl‘s observations and some of the posts and comments over at the mothership.  But, in a way, the wealth of good and informative posts only makes things harder, as anything I might be clever enough to say has likely already been said, and more cleverly.

I’ve found myself taking more than the usual amount of notes for this thing.  And I’ve been trying to stay ahead of the the reading schedule, both because I know that I’ll sooner-or-later fall behind (likely right after the students in my summer class turns in their second round of papers) and because getting a little deeper into the book ads some perspective.

[Here be spoilers: I’ll be discussing pages 3-63, below.]

What to say about the first sixty-three pages?  First off, it’s not pulling teeth. DWF keeps things lively with shifting points of view, a huge cast of characters, and a good dose of (generally dark) humor.

The first chapter (“Year of Glad,” 3-17) is one of discrepancies, the first being the distance between Hal’s academic performance, which is outstanding, and his performance on academic tests, which is described by one of the deans in the interview that is the gist of this chapter as “subnormal” (6). The second, and probably more significant, is the discrepancy between Hal’s point of view and that of everyone else in the chapter–or as much as we can surmise of it, since we see their reactions only through his eyes. Internally, Hal seems on the verge of a panic attach of some sort, but he also seems quite well versed in how to manage his own anxiety.

It is only after the deans dismiss his two handlers, Uncle Chuck (whose full name, we later learn, is Dr. Chuck Tavis, [half?] brother-in-law of Hal’s late father, James O. Incandenza, and his successor as director of the Enfield Tennis Academy) and Avery deLint, one of the “prorectors” at the ETA, that the silent Hal finally speaks and the distance between his point of view and every other is revealed, albeit with a good dose of comedy, like Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen skit gone mad, as the deans seem to try to outdo one another in their descriptions of Hal’s behavior:

‘But the sounds he made.’
‘Undescribable.’
‘Like an animal.’
‘Subanimalistic noises and sounds.’
‘Nor let’s not forget the gestures.’
[. . .]
‘Like some sort of animal with something in its mouth.’
[. . .]
‘A writing animal with a knife in its eye.’ (14)

Stylistically, one of the most interesting and enjoyable things about the first chapter is how close we are to Hal’s view of things.  His view is idiosyncratic and finely focused on visual details of the room and his experience of it (and reflections triggered by the same). But, for all that, it isn’t too hard to follow Hal’s thoughts.  What is challenging is DWF’s penchant for giving characters multiple names and nicknames, referring to them by whatever one pleases him, or the character doing the describing, as is common both in the real world and in Russian fiction.  Uncle Chuck is, at various points, “Charles,” and “C.T.” (even before we know his last name).  The same is similar for almost every other character. I find myself drawing lists of characters to keep this all sorted out.  The business with the names adds realism and a bit of mystery, and is clue enough that the author expects us to keep track of things.

(I’ve been using the term “chapter” here, to describe the divisions of the text, but just what counts as a chapter is also a judgement call. Some “chapters,” like the first one, start off with a little circular symbol and a title.  Other have just white space and a title. There are many places where the narrative shifts and the only typographical indication of it is additional white space. I’ve seen a few different numbering schemes for these. So I’ll stick with page numbers, for clarity.)

I think the main takeaway from these opening chapters is to acquaint us with some of the vast cast of characters (the vastness of which also, like the penchant for nicknames, invites a comparison with Russian novels), whose story lines will surely converge and intertwine as time goes on. It also serves to introduce us to some of the range of styles and points of view to expect from DFW.

The second chapter (17-27), where we are introduced to Erdedy, is a case in point.  Here, we move from the chaos and first person point of view of the opening chapter to a third-person point of view centered on Erdedy and following his thoughts in stream-of-consciousness fashion, following his anxieties as he prepares for yet another “one more last time” (19) marijuana binge. This chapter is a stunning and stunningly accurate portrait of anxiety, and it could easily stand on its own as a short story.

If I had any reservations about the novel, this chapter sent them packing. Erdedy’s contemplation (or, really, refusal to contemplate) the bug in his stereo system brings to mind Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. Though not physically a bug, sitting almost without motion in his own protective armor, how much does Erdedy already resemble one?  Like Hal, Erdedy also finds himself trapped in lines of anticipation and expectation. And, like Hal, his consciousness is finely focussed, at times to the point of distraction, on the world around him and the thoughts it sparks. DWF clearly has a metaphorical turn of mind, which means we’re in for a lot of fun unpacking what he offers us and making connections between the various characters, events, and symbols in this novel.

Quick note: Reminds me of ‘Magnolia’

Scott Porch3 Comments

I’ll have a longer post about the first 63 pages later — I’m working this afternoon — but my snap observation is that the opening reminds me a lot of the opening of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Magnolia” (1999).

I first noticed it in the section about the burglary victim with the head cold; that whole bit had the tragi-comic efficiency and off-kilter feel of the opening scene of “Magnolia,” in which the narrator tells a series of stories with neat, ironic outcomes — the first of which was a robbery-cum-murder by three vagrants.  And then it occurred to me that the beginnings of both “Magnolia” and Infinite Jest set up a series of narratives that do not obviously interlock but that you expect will over time, and both introduce an exceptional, troubled boy.

Anderson’s film followed Infinite Jest by two years, so I wonder if he had read the book.