Infinite Jest

Joelle

Daryl L. L. Houston4 Comments

Although I’m still very much a part of Infinite Summer and am staying about a week ahead in the reading (it’s hard to stop myself; I’m within 200 pages of the end and am both revved up about it and a little sad that it’s almost over), I’m having trouble getting motivated to write about it. This is in part because I’m working on a longish essay that I’ve submitted an abstract for for a November conference on Wallace’s work. I’ll find out around September 15 whether they’ve accepted the essay or not (and I’m conflicted about it, to be honest: I’m terrified of doing this sort of thing, of putting myself really out there in any way more formal than a blog post or email list post, which I can just shrug off if it’s deemed insufficiently scholarly; there’s also the crippling fear of speaking in front of people; at the same time, it would be kind of an ego stroke to have my paper accepted and actually manage to pull it off). Until then, I’m frantically trying to pull together notes and hack out a rough draft and reread basically all of Wallace’s fiction and some related material to make sure I can actually pull the essay off. That’s what’s consuming my evenings that’s making it hard for me to write the same sorts of posts here that people seem to have liked previously.

So for today, I have just a few quick observations about Joelle. I think that in prior readings of Infinite Jest, I may have sort of dug Joelle, even crushed on her in a way, sort of the way people have a tendency to crush on the similarly intelligent but troubled Hal. She comes across, after all, as something of an intellectual, and with a sort of darkness of persona (at odds with her background as cheerleader) that certainly appealed to me when I first read the book during my own now-amusingly dark period as a college student.

But now I see a lot more in Joelle that I don’t like. There are undertones of racism, for example. Wallace writes these off in an end note as the product of her rural Kentucky upbringing, suggesting that they’re just sort of encoded in her and not really fully transcendable, as if it’s not that she judges based on race but she still can’t help noticing. I may be reacting to this out of a sort of southern white guy angst, since, as with so much of Wallace’s work, I probably recognize a kernel of this in myself. I think Wallace addresses this sort of white guilt in one of his essays somewhere, this conundrum of noticing otherness (I think in particular blackness) and then knee-jerk reacting to it with a sort of horror and worrying that noticing makes you a racist even if the initial noticing didn’t, but then also knee-jerking that worrying about being a racist actually makes you in a way an even worse racist because you’re no longer as concerned with the people you’re judging by maybe being a racist as with the reflexive property of the racisim itself, making you really more disconnected monster than man.

The first instance of Joelle’s pseudo-racism comes on page 226, when she’s not making any sort of judgment but merely zooms in on the blackness (something of Pynchon in this?) of an older man she’s waiting with on a train platform: “she walked without much real formality to her T-stop and stood on the platform… then a pleasant and gentle-faced older black man in a raincoat and hat with a little flat black feather in the band and the sort of black-frame styleless spectacles pleasant older black men wear, with the weary but dignified mild comportment of the older black man.” He then goes on to address her in a way she finds quaint and to tip his hat, and the anguished hoping-I’m-not-a-racist in me cringes to think that he’s almost like Uncle Tomming here, that Wallace is almost making a just a tiny little bit of an Uncle Tom of the deferential man, or worse: that I’m making this impression up out of my own head, making my own sort of Uncle Tom of this man, which is really only OK to do if you’re Harriet Beecher Stowe, and maybe not really even then. Which makes me really uncomfortable.

Later, at a Cocaine Anonymous meeting, Joelle finds herself listening to a “colored man with a weightlifter’s build and frightening eyes, sloe and a kind of tannin-brown” (707). More from this passage:

  • “His story’s full of colored idioms and those annoying little colored hand-motions and gestures”
  • “The truth has a kind of irresistible unconscious attraction at meetings, no matter what the color or fellowship.”
  • “The colored man…”
  • “the standing men are absorbed by the colored man’s story.”
  • “Financial Insecurity, which he mispronounces”
  • “Two other Holmeses”

And then notes 293:

Apparently the current colored word for other coloreds. Joelle van Dyne, by the way, was aculturated in a part of the U.S.A where verbal attitudes toward black people are dated and unconsciously derisive, and is doing pretty much the best she can — colored and so on — and anyway is a paragon of racial sensitivity compared to the sort of culture Don Gately was conditioned in.

and 294:

It’s a Boston-colored thing on Commitments to make all speech a protracted apostrophe to some absent ‘Jim,’ Joelle’s observed in a neutral sociologic way.

The thing about this is that it’s really not OK. She’s not doing the best she can. I grew up in the South too, and I had plenty of stupid, regrettable things to say about black people when I was a kid, and not even because I really thought them, but because it was what I grew up hearing (not from my parents, incidentally — just within the broader community) and so was my own default mode. I too was aculturated in the way Joelle was, and yet, I — no towering intellect, but just another reasonably intelligent liberal arts student like Joelle — seem (I think and dearly hope) to have transcended that past. At least mostly, since I still have those weird knee-jerk fears that certain fears or reactions to what are possibly simple observations but what may also be sort of heightened sensitivity to race may prove me still some kind of latent racist. But I still think that to excuse Joelle on the basis of cultural heritage or whatever is a cop-out.

The other thing that stands out to me about Joelle and makes me like her a little less is how she takes special notice of other people’s ugliness. I want to think that she’s above that, that wearing the veil has made her less judgmental. See for example her take on Ruth Van Cleve on page 698:

Her face has the late-stage Ice-addict’s concave long-jawed insectile look. Her hair is a dry tangled cloud, with tiny little eyes and bones and projecting beak underneath. Joelle v.D.’d said it almost looked like Ruth van Cleve’s hair grew her head instead of the other way around.

I can’t point to another example right now, though I can’t help thinking I underlined and took a margin note for at least one more. A couple of times, she’s commented on people’s mental stability, calling one person “crazy as a Fucking Mud-Bug” (370) and another “crazy as a shithouse rat” (532). We may be able to attribute these to Wallace’s trying to provide a sort of regional color to Joelle, exposing the part of her background that creeps in from time to time to contrast with the very cultured, sensitive part of her that I found so attractive during my first reading of the book. Gately notices these shifts too: “You seem like you drift in and out of different ways of talking. Sometimes it’s like you don’t want me to follow” (535). I’m all for having Joelle’s method of discourse drift, but it makes me a little sad that this character who seems so tuned into psychic pain of the sort caused by deformity and mental or emotional instability — whose alter-ego (and maybe that’s just what it is) strikes such a chord with the beloved Mario — can also be so shallow and backwards.

Maybe this is Wallace giving Joelle depth or complexity. Most of us vaccilate between different modes, I guess, reading literary fiction one night, for example, and watching TMZ the next. Whatever the case, as I read her character more carefully this go-around, I’m finding Joelle less appealing than previously.

Underground

Daryl L. L. Houston2 Comments

It’s probably coincidence that something of an underworld scene in Infinite Jest happens to start on page 666. But here we have the young male E.T.A. students “punitively remanded below ground” to clear the tunnels in preparation for the inflation of the lung. It’s been a good long time since I’ve read The Inferno (when I did, it was Pinsky’s translation in terza rima, and I thought it was so good that I sat in my dorm room and read the whole thing aloud to myself in one sitting), but I wonder if one might not find a reference or two within this section. Certainly, reminders of sins past abound — the “sweet stale burny smell none of them can place” (668) a node to Hal’s lonely indulgence; “a bulky old doorless microwave oven” (670) possibly the microwave JOI used to eliminate his map (Dante’s representation of Hell itself, if I recall correctly, something of a map). When the boys find the awful refrigerator, one says “This is Death. Woe unto those that gazeth on Death. The Bible” (673).

Avril makes her way from place to place underground as well, calling to mind for me the myth of Demeter (like Coatlicue, a mother goddess) and Persephone (with underground Hal as a sort of Persephone, Avril as Demeter with a real green thumb as far as her Green Babies go but ultimately batshit toxic and stifling to her kids). Although I can’t find it now, I thought I had read a description in this passage of what seemed disembodied (not literally) heads, and it made me think of Pound’s poem “In a Station of the Metro”:

The apparation of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough

There are variations on the punctuation of the the poem, but the idea is that the heads of people lined up somewhat haphazardly waiting for the subway train resemble petals (I think of cherry blossoms, probably because the poem has kind of a haiku feel to it) lined up on a branch. “The metro” thrown through a European filter can read as “De Metro,” and it’s just one hop from there to Demeter, who prowled around looking for her daughter who was underground, meanwhile affecting the seasons and the earth’s fertility (e.g. flowers).

I am not suggesting that Wallace was making an oblique reference to Pound (he’d be more likely to point to Larkin). I’m not even sure I’d defend too steadfastly the notion that this scene is an underworld scene (though epics tend to have those) in the literary sense. These are just associations that came to mind.

I can’t do those two standout nearly-blank pages 664 and 665 and the just fantastic note 269 anything resembling justice, but gosh are they ever good.

No comment

Daryl L. L. Houston10 Comments

This week’s early milestone stops right in the middle of what is both metaphorically and literally a pivotal scene. I can’t even pretend to say anything useful about it until the scene is resolved. Maybe later in the week, I’ll come up with something about stuff that happens through page 611, but for now, I’ve got nothing. There’s stuff to say. The stuff about Mario, for example. Weird little motifs (e.g. fingers). That sort of thing. Sinister (by which I mean not just sort of malignant but also left-handed, which I think is a good thing to notice) Swiss Subjects. There’s plenty to write about — just not much I’ve got the urge to sit down and do anything with just now.

Two things that sort of broke my heart, reading this far in the book for the first time since Wallace’s death:

It’s weird to feel like you miss someone you’re not sure you even know.

and:

Madame still had a slight accent and often spoke on the show as if she were talking exclusively to one person or character who was very important to her… Mario’d fallen in love with the first Madame Psychosis programs because he felt like he was listening to someone sad read out loud from yellow letters she’d taken out of a shoebox on a rainy P.M., stuff about heartbreak and people you loved dying and U.S. woe, stuff that was real. It is increasingly hard to find valid art that is about stuff that is real in this way.

Bread & Circus

Daryl L. L. Houston9 Comments

Having grown up in the South, I had never heard of a Whole Foods Market until I ventured out to California on business a few years ago. I had certainly never heard of a little store named Bread & Circus (which Whole Foods bought in 1992), and I guess I assumed it was a made-up name when I encountered it in Infinite Jest. It never occurred to me to really think about the name at all until tonight. It’s the sort of thing that’s pretty easy to gloss over, though Wallace gives us a couple of clues that maybe we ought not to. First, on page 478, as Gately is driving to get special vittles (I’m from the South, see) for Joelle and opts to go the long way and hit the B&C rather than the Purity Supreme Pat Montesian had suggested, we see this little digression:

Bread & Circus is a socially hyperresponsible overpriced grocery full of Cambridge Green Party granola-crunchers, and everything’s like microbiotic and fertilized only with organic genuine llama-shit, etc.

Just a couple of pages later, we’re told that Bertraund Antitoi is in the back of his shop “eating Habitant soupe aux pois and bread with Bread & Circus molasses.” Recall that the soupe aux pois is the centerpiece of a discussion Steeply and Marathe have had pertaining to duty and pleasure. And now flip forward to just a little beyond the spoiler line (p. 623 — no spoilers to follow, I promise) and yet another mention of the “upscale Bread & Circus.”

Wallace just kind of keeps sneaking in these little references to the store, and though I had previously kind of glossed over it as an unimportant store name, it finally dawned on me during my reading tonight that it was a familiar phrase. Some old Roman guy had said something about the public’s being happy as long as they were provided bread and circuses. After a quick search online, I had my reference:

This phrase originates in Satire X of the Roman poet Juvenal (c 200). In context, the Latin phrase panis et circenses (bread and circuses) is given as the only remaining cares of a Roman populace which has given up its birthright of political involvement. Here Juvenal displays his contempt for the declining heroism of his contemporary Romans. …

Juvenal here makes reference to the Roman practice of providing free wheat to Roman citizens as well as costly circus games and other forms of entertainment as a means of gaining political power through populism. The Annona (grain dole) was begun under the instigation of the popularis politician Gaius Sempronius Gracchus in 123 BC; it remained an object of political contention until it was taken under the control of the Roman emperors.

Spanish intellectuals between the 19th and 20th centuries complained about the similar pan y toros (“bread and bullfights“). It appears similarly in Russian as хлеба и зрелищ (“bread and spectacle”).

With this information as a backdrop, it’s hard not to think that Wallace used the name Bread & Circus with a sort of volition, given the name’s source material’s relevance Infinite Jest‘s treatment of spectacle/entertainment and its relationship (within the O.N.A.N. political arena in particular) to heroism (or duty to the state, as I take it to mean for Juvenal). It’s also interesting to note the following tidbit about the above-referenced politician Gaius Sempronius Gracchus:

Politically Gaius’ most farsighted proposal was the ‘franchise bill’, a measure which would have seen the distribution of Roman citizenship to all Latin citizens and the extension of Latin citizenship to all Italian allies. This proposal was rejected because the Roman plebeians had no wish to share the benefits of citizenship, including cheap grain and entertainment.

How can one not think about the alliance Gentle and Tine are trying to forge with Mexico and Canada, this latter of which (if we can believe Marathe) largely rejects the bread and circus-type ideals America is known for?

Also of interest and a possible association (though I wouldn’t go very far out on a limb to defend this) is an old Star Trek episode entitled Bread and Circuses, of which part of Wikipedia’s synopsis runs as follows:

Spock and McCoy must face off against Flavius and another gladiator, Achilles, under a set of studio lights, television cameras, and an obviously fake backdrop of a Roman combat arena. The whole scene looks more like a violent game show. The battle begins as Spock quickly overpowers his opponent, and when McCoy is in trouble, Spock nerve-pinches his opponent ending the fight to a hail of boos and hisses from a pre-recorded “crowd”. Spock and McCoy are taken back to the slave pens and Kirk is taken to stand execution which will be televised live

Of even less probable relevance but still fun to mention is the fact that there’s a Toad the Wet Sprocket album (their debut) entitled Bread & Circus featuring songs titled “Scenes from a Vinyl Recliner” (makes me think of the attache) and “Pale Blue” (all the blue in Tavis’s office). The engineering and mixing of the album were done by one David Vaught (the Vaught twins). And the band name comes from a Monty Python sketch called “Rock Notes,” in which Eric Idle speaks of an imaginary group with the same name. I’m not familiar with the piece, but there are other Monty Python (MP initials again) references in Wallace’s novel, so I thought it was a neat coincidence or whatever.

Thanks, Wikipedia.

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.

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.