I N F I N I T E · J E S T

EXCERPT FROM AN EMAIL FROM YRS. TRULY TO HER TUTOR AT SCHOOL; THURSDAY 5TH, THE MONTH OF COMPETENT DEMOCRATIC PROCESSES

I’m glad you’re enjoying Proust; I think I can set some store by your recommendations. Perhaps one of the unforeseen consequences of a global health crisis is record-numbers of people finishing hard-to-read books. Towards the end of this summer, I started reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, and finished it last week. I found it readable, understandable and extremely enjoyable, though not super satisfying - which I gather is the exact opposite of the typical reading experience for ‘Infinite Jest’.

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I read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest in the months of August to October 2020. It took me exactly 12 weeks to read, counting an interlude of non-progress when I happened to move into university and kick-start a new life of sorts. For some reason I am one of the like five people in my circle of acquaintance who have heard of Infinite Jest, and the only person I know who has read it. I read it, and I enjoyed every single page.

THE BLURB ON THE ABACUS EDITION OF INFINITE JEST WITH A FOREWORD BY DAVE EGGERS, COPYRIGHT © DAVID FOSTER WALLACE 1996, COPYRIGHT © THE BENEFICIARIES OF DAVID FOSTER WALLACE 2008

Somewhere in the not-so-distant future the residents of Ennet House, a Boston halfway house for recovering addicts, and students at the nearby Enfield Tennis Academy are ensnared in the search for the master copy of Infinite Jest, a movie said to be so dangerously entertaining its viewers become entranced and expire in a state of catatonic bliss…

WHAT WOULD BE ON INFINITE JEST’S LIST OF CONTENT WARNINGS, IF PUBLISHING CW’S BECAME AN INDUSTRY REQUIREMENT

major themes: suicide; depression; death and dying; drug- and alcohol-addiction

sprinklings of: graphic physical violence; domestic abuse; graphic animal cruelty; abduction; mild sexual content; hinted incest; strong language; characters expressing casual racism and sexism

Did I like this book? Hell yes. Would I recommend it? I don’t know. Is the blurb a good summary of what it is? … No?

Some other things to know about this book, then, before we get properly started. Infinite Jest was published in 1996, and is 1079 pages of tiny and tinier print. One can call it dense: full of syntactically entangled sentences, esoteric and/or made-up vocabulary, microscopic attention to detail, and there are around 300 characters. The narrative cuts between characters and different points in time, and makes extensive use of footnotes (‘Endnotes and Errata’). The footnotes have footnotes too, and range from unnecessary information to important plot points that aren’t mentioned in the text proper.

Judging by what’s out there on the internet, my reading experience of Infinite Jest is pretty atypical. Apparently people don’t tend to enjoy it as much as I did, nor find it readable by any stretch of the imagination. Articles and podcasts about the book, even when the creator likes it, share a consistent theme of wanting to throw it at the wall.

In that sense, Infinite Jest is the most recent in the long line of niche things that I like, though admittedly most of my other niche interests aren’t so divisive. Some people think it’s even better than sliced bread, while others see it as elitism and obfuscation at their worst. I think it’s one of the most intuitively likeable things I’ve ever read, and buying it on a whim was probably the best £2.99 I’ve spent in my life.

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FRIDAY 7TH, THE MONTH OF AUGUSTINE

It’s currently very humid, outside not any cooler and windless. I met up with Rosie in the 35°C sun. We wondered around town and chatted about this and that. I bought the next notebook for my diary in Paperchase. I also bought a second hand copy of Infinite Jest at Oxfam.

SATURDAY 8TH, THE MONTH OF AUGUSTINE

After dinner, I felt too tired to read ‘Girl, Woman, Other’, let ‘Infinite Jest’ lure me in. Even attempting to read it is an act of hubris - I am 18 and people twice my age fail to finish it. But I feel an innocent, irresistible tug to simply open it and read. So that I did. I’ve finished the first chapter. I have to read this now. I am in thrall and a little too disturbed by that first chapter not to.

THURSDAY 13TH, THE MONTH OF AUGUSTINE

I’m on p.87 of IJ. So far it’s been plain sailing and highkey enjoyable. I can only read a few pages at a stretch, but I’ve decided to ignore my progress in terms of pages and just focus on enjoying it. It’s brilliant fun. It’s funny like Borges is, in that there are no jokes with punchlines, just facts and ideas and speech and perspective switches interspersed in such a way that it tickles. The humour is taste.

FRIDAY 15TH, THE MONTH OF AUGUSTINE

Fucking hell, ‘herd of feral hamsters’ ?!?!1!111!!1!!!1

TUESDAY 25TH, THE MONTH OF AUGUSTINE

I am very almost a quarter of the way through - 200+ pages. The stage is all set for the supposed quest for the master copy of the film ‘Infinite Jest’. - Only, you think everything is set up, but when you get to the next chapter something new is introduced - Hey, do you wanna hear about these teenagers taking mega-LSD For Science, and how their scientific research trying to predict the drug’s effects fit around their tennis championship schedules?

MONDAY 9TH, THE MONTH OF SEVENS

I found myself watching the 2020 US tennis Open yesterday, and liking it. I love it when novels get me into something else, that I’d otherwise not know anything about. In the case of IJ, so far I’ve learned about Quebecois separatism and the sport of lawn tennis. I now also in disturbing detail about how to cook cocaine and how to blow one’s brains out in a microwave oven, but that’s by the by.

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Infinite Jest is set in a satirical near future, where North America has become a superstate called O.N.A.N., and the naming rights to calendar years are auctioned off to commercial corporations to supplement government revenue. Most of the action in Infinite Jest is set in suburban Boston, autumn of the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, although it technically spans states and decades. The narrative jumps around the timeline, and between different characters’ perspectives. People have described it as a narrative told in shards. I’d say there are three main focuses for the narrative. We hear about seventeen year-old Hal at tennis academy, whose athlete-turned-scientist-turned-film-maker dad founded the academy in the last years of his life, and whose mother and uncle now run the academy. We hear about Hal, his family, and life with other tennis-players and -staff at the school. A second focus is a nearby half-way house for drug- and alcohol-addicts. recovering under the wing of Boston Alcoholics Anonymous. Lots of personalities here, though we hear the most from one Don Gately, who is now a staff member of the half-way house, having recently come through the recovery process himself. The third part is about Quebecois separatist agents trying to find copies of a lethally entertaining film, and weaponise it against the U.S. and O.N.A.N.. The film being an unreleased work by Hal’s dead dad, which the reader knows is called ‘Infinite Jest’.

Does this sound crazy and marvellous? Good for you, it gets crazier and marvellouser yet.

Does this sound absolutely tedious and forbiddingly niche? You’re in good company. Even with the book’s reputation for hard words and cruel footnotes, I found the plot description of Infinite Jest the most off-putting thing about it when I was debating whether or not to read it. It reads better than it sounds. True, Infinite Jest did have me looking up YouTube videos explaining Quebecois separatism, but ultimately the book only uses this stuff as a background, and demands surprisingly little specialist knowledge.

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MY READING NOTES FOR KEEPING TRACK OF THE SUBSIDISED YEARS IN O.N.A.N., BASED ON CHRONOLOGIES AND HINTS IN THE NARRATIVE, UNTIL I REALISED THE BOOK PROVIDES YOU WITH A LIST OF SUBSIDISED YEARS ON PAGE 223

Hal etc born late 1980s / early ‘90s

Year of Whopper

Tucks Medicated Pad Hal turns 11

Trial-Size Dove Bar JOI dies

(next year) Perdue Wonder Chicken Hal 7th Grade (turns 13)

Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster

Yushityo 2007 etc.

Dairy Products from the American Heartland

Depend Adult Undergarment (4 years from JOI death) Hal 17

Glad Hal 18

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THE MONTH OF AGGRESSIVE HALLOWEEN MERCHANDISING

Infinite Jest is a book about depression as much as anything else. If I were to retitle Infinite Jest to accord with what it’s about, I’d call it ‘A Sardonic but Hairraising Account of the Truly Not Okay’.

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I think the most special thing about Infinite Jest is the book’s narrative voice. Most of the book is told in the third person, but in a way that still makes each character’s viewpoint have a distinctive voice. Apparently this technique is called the Uncle Charles Principle, named after a character in Ulysses, who is narrated like this. It sounds like the third-person narrator is repeating a character’s stream of consciousness verbatim. As well as being very subtle and effective for characterisation, the narrative voice mediates the distance between reader, author and character too. It’s a very intimate form of narration because you not only hear the contents of a character’s thoughts, but also how it sounds inside their own head, the literal words they use. Hal is cerebral and dispassionate; Gately misuses long words; the Quebecois agent Marathe’s internal monologue is addled with Francophone features. (People have criticised Wallace for using Parisian French more than Quebecois. I don’t know French, but I am a fan of the concept here regardless of the execution.) Yet it’s also distancing, because you never quite know who the narrator is or how faithfully they are representing the characters or Wallace. Sometimes, these tonally first-person narrations given in third person also makes it hard to tell whether the narrator is sympathising with the character or mocking them.

It’s worth considering this in the context of Wallace’s vocal support for the New Sincerity movement, which criticises the use of irony and meta-jokes in late 20th century literature. For Wallace, irony is a cleverer-than-thou attitude that points out problems but never directly engages with them. It’s a refusal to going down to meet a problem at its level, it’s a refusal to exhibit vulnerability. In a 1993 interview, Wallace describes ‘the ’90s’ twin towers of postmodern irony’ as ‘hip cynicism, [and] a hatred that winks and nudges you and pretends it’s just kidding’, as well as listing the prime culprits of this attitude, including writers like Robert Coover, John Barth, even Vladimir Nabokov, and also the rampant commercialist culture in rap music. This has particular interest to me as a member of Gen-Z, which has been called the most ironic generation ever. I don’t know if my generation’s irony is the kind Wallace was talking about. On the one hand both are fuelled by disillusionment with the public sphere and political helplessness (the fact that most of Gen-Z are legally children; public helplessness against American politics during the Cold War - it was a very American-centrist analysis); on the other, openness about our emotions and mental health has never been more encouraged in modern Western society. I don’t know if contemporary irony has in fact transcended the irony that Wallace was critiquing, or if our irony is simply more elaborate and world-weary, aided by and reflected in our desensitisation towards it.

But as I was saying, it’s interesting to consider Wallace’s intimate-but-distant narrative voice in relation to his commitment to sincerity and non-irony. I think ultimately it works, but note ‘ultimately’. The intimacy of being so transparently able to hear characters’ voices through the narration I found incredibly emotive. You are inside a character’s head, be it a desperate, paranoid, guilt-ridden marijuana addict, a full-of-himself American football player, or a militant secret agent whose internal syntax is French. Yet I found it all subtly mocking towards the characters. After all, when someone’s voice is quoted verbatim for as extended a period as Infinite Jest’s narrative voice, a point must be being made. But whenever the narrative became more vivid or emotive, it easily overrides this sense of slight derision, and Wallace’s narrative voice helps us understand the characters at a deeper level than we otherwise would. Wallace ultimately succeeds in a sincere portrayal of all his characters, but I don’t think he transcends irony - he just does it in a less obtrusive but no less aloof kind of way.

This rather reflects film. The book is named after a film and there are lots of film-related things and characters in the book, so I don’t think this association is a stretch. Compare Wallace’s narrative voice to the framing and editing of a film, where because we see people’s act and speak in real time, it’s easy to forget that what we see is completely curated by way of manifold communicative and artistic decisions. The proverbial lens that is Wallace’s narrator seems to bring you the characters’ internal lives on a plate, but this is a representation of the characters, and nothing more.

AN EXERPT FROM PAGE 750, WHEN THE QUEBECOIS AGENT MARATHE IS SPYING ON A COLLECTION OF DVD’S (‘CARTRIDGES’), WEARING A VEIL OVER HIS FACE

Among the small-of-font titles such as Focal Length Parameters X-XL and Drop Valley Ex. II were two cases of plain brown plastic, blank, except for — this was why his veil, it remained tilted upward for so much longer that he was concerned that this woman of authority — except for — but it was difficult of sureness, for the office’s light was the deadening fluorescence of U.S.A., and the cabinet’s mouth in the shadow of the lid and the cheesecloth veil made less his focus — except maybe for tiny round faces of embossed smiles upon the brown cases. Marathe felt suddenly the excitement of himself — M. Hugh Steeply’s wording for this had been from somewhere blue.

I’ve heard people talk about the Don Gately / AA storyline as being the thematic centre of Infinite Jest, and thereby consider Infinite Jest a moralistic tale about growth and redemption. AA (in DFW’s portrayal anyway) functions by inundating its members with cheesy inspirational axioms (Ask For Help, ONE DAY AT A TIME, ‘You give it up to get it back to give it away’ - the ‘it’ being sobriety not drugs - etc. etc.) to rely on to stay clean, rather than their own drug-warped and second-guessing minds. Because of how emotive AA sections of the book can be, and how sympathetically Gately is portrayed, there’s a case to be made that DFW ‘sides with’ him.

I don’t agree with that, that Infinite Jest is basically moralistic. Because of how Wallace uses the narrative voice, I think it’s a misstep to take any one character’s perspective as the ‘right one’. In any case Wallace’s treatment of AA and its methods is too thought-provoking. Wallace makes a point of having multiple characters question AA’s mantras and cult-like organisation throughout the book. Yet Wallace has Gately reflect that AA’s cheesy clichés are ultimately so viscerally true that they defy rational examination. There’s a bittersweetness to this, the notion that vapidity can transubstantiate into profundity, but Wallace undercuts it enough that this can’t stand as the book’s moral and thematic backbone. Also Wallace was way too cynical for this, but that’s a meta-textual point.

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Infinite Jest is a very involved book, stylistically and narratively. We are plunged into the story in medias res; there’s dense meandering prose, characters that you are supposed to remember after only seeing them once in passing, long snuck-in expositions on politics and architecture, copious endnotes at the end of the book… This has annoyed people, and many attribute it to arrogance on Wallace’s part, saying that Infinite Jest is disdainful of its readers, and Wallace tried more to dazzle than to entertain readers in good faith.

I don’t agree with that, I think Infinite Jest was intended as a genuine piece of entertainment, and I really enjoyed being entertained by it. I was sad that it ended, both because I was enjoying it so much, and because of the tantalising lack of resolution at the book’s ending. Nothing is resolved, from the characters’ fates to unexplained supernatural phenomena; the closest thing to a what-happens-next turns out to be the opening scene of the book. When people say they found finishing Infinite Jest to be hugely rewarding, I think they mean they enjoy having read it, because there’s not much that’s remotely enjoyable about the ending.

Infinite Jest does take a lot of time and energy to take in and enjoy - it’s the kind of book that demands your fullest attention. But once you give it that, you find Wallace gives you just about enough handrails to lean on, though still few enough that you have to fill in gaps for yourself, feel clever because you did, and feel appreciated because Wallace knew he didn’t have to spoon-feed it to you. It’s fair to say that Infinite Jest doesn’t go out of its way to be accessible, but is ‘being accessible’ part of an author’s responsibility, and what does it mean anyway? I personally found Infinite Jest very comprehensible and very easy to like, despite every review that I came across warning the contrary. (For reference, I think it’s easier than Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, the short-story collection Wallace put out after Infinite Jest. As a novel, at least Infinite Jest is bound by the need for proper characterisation and overall narrative coherence.)

When I found Infinite Jest was nowhere near as distressing to read as I’d been led to expect, my reflexive response was to spend half my time reading the book being very defensive about enjoying it, and also rather possessive of how it should be enjoyed. It wasn’t a good look - I remember talking quite a lot about ‘if you and DFW are on the same wavelength’ - but it may well serve as a reminder that some things we have to find out for ourselves, and whether or not you will enjoy Infinite Jest is one of those things.

THURSDAY 13TH, THE MONTH OF AUGUSTINE

[description of A-Level Results Day]

I think I get the endnotes, why they’re there. I think it mimics how when you read a book you sometimes look up things that come up and get sidetracked into little information holes. The overly technical descriptions of drugs is like when you google a science word and it brings up the Wikipedia page for it, but the Wikipedia article is so full of jargon that you have no point of reference and still understand nothing after reading the entry. E.g. obscure pharmaceuticals, e.g. the reference to an episode of Goethe’s Faust. The listing of JOI’s filmography is like finding his name in an encyclopaedia and reading the entry through to the end. Only that normally, when you get sidetracked trying to find the meaning of something, you decide how far to pursue the tangent, but here DFW is deciding for you. It’s also why the footnotes are at the back rather than the foot of the page - to replicate how you always have to temporarily exit the story to find a dictionary, encyclopaedia, or in our case Google. Once I realised this, I kind of leaned into it. It’s actually a very nice feeling, like everything is being taken care of for me, including my responsibilities as a reader. It’s like DFW is shaping the kind of reader he wants you to be - a reader who reads dense encyclopaedia entries, and navigates an opaque system of nebulous references. A) I find this a clever, subtle, manipulative way in which DFW explores creator-consumer relationships, and b), because we’re always inside a specific character’s head, it reflects how idiosyncratic points of reference can be, that an obvious point of reference for one person is utterly unplaceable for others.

The traditional take on the endnotes’ existence and the fact that they are at the back is it replicates a game of tennis, a back-and-forth. Legit critics came up with this, but I think comparing flipping back and forth across a book to the back-and-forth of tennis is rather superficial. The tennis analysis does tie in with the endnotes being a way for Wallace to ensure that the reader is an active participant in the story, but I think the dense non-linear narrative forces you to be active enough that an Active Reader Experience doesn’t really need to be simulated. As to whether Infinite Jest ‘cares’ about its reader, I think the endnotes are Wallace’s way to help the reader navigate Infinite Jest’s world, and it’s a deliberate choice that they sometimes obfuscate rather than explain, as a reflection on how abstract our semiotics often are, and how real-world questions have inexplicable and infuriating non-answers.

25TH, THE MONTH OF AUGUSTINE

A lot of writers are good - novelists, essayists, YouTube creators - but there’s a difference between recognising that something’s good and feeling like its way of expression just gets you. DFW’s matches my wavelength, so much so that it’s scary. Is this when someone writes not to be accessible or popular, but just to express - inevitably resonating deeply with some people over gaining any reputation for being readable?

I keep saying ‘it’s great as long as you’re on his wavelength’ like that’s meant to sound comforting. I mean it that way, but that’s a crappy way to recommend a book.

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25TH, THE MONTH OF AUGUSTINE

I’ve been listening to this podcast called The History of Literature, and one of the guys on it compared DFW to Borges, saying that DFW takes whacky concepts JLB could have dealt with in a few pages and stretches it out into a thousand. I straight up disagree. Borges’ fiction is concept art, moving because of their dispassion and their crystalline simplicity. Wallace’s is the opposite, not about the polished product, but the sprawling process. The point of ‘Infinite Jest’ isn’t about throwing you into a commercialist dystopia with tennis pros and drug addicts and telling you there are substances in that world that literally make you insane. The point is everything else that is put on top of these bare bones.

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TUESDAY 25TH, THE MONTH OF AUGUSTINE

Maybe profundity is not cosmic, maybe the only worthwhile profundities are the little realisations about happiness and boredom and living with people at the addicts’ half-way house, and the pinprick of amazement you get at your brother’s obsession with midnight radio played quietly. And maybe that’s okay, because to call the human condition’s absurdity ‘profound’ would be an understatement through an attempt at comprehensibility, and it’s amazing we mostly keep our heads through all this.

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WEDNESDAY 28TH - THURSDAY 29TH, THE MONTH OF AGGRESSIVE HALLOWEEN MERCHANDISING

At 12.09 midnight, I finished ‘Infinite Jest’. I wasn’t planning on finishing it when I picked it up at half nine, but I kept letting myself read one more chapter until there wasn’t any left.

Infinite Jest has no plot. I think I only realised this on the last page, but Infinite Jest has no plot. Instead it’s an amalgam of characters and their stories, plus world-building. For every character backstory Wallace gives, there’s probably a novella to be had from that material. I enjoyed every page, but became increasingly suspicious that the characters I was reading were never actually going to tie in together to form an actual central plot. No, that was not Wallace’s intention, it so transpires. The book is a collage of little details. In a sense none of them is a plot point, but in another sense they all are, because the narrative and its effect on you comes from the interaction of these little bits of information, that are often funny, disturbing or thought-provoking partly because of how they fit in with other little bits of information.

When I finished Infinite Jest I concluded it had no plot, but since then I have come across a better interpretation. It’s from a 1996 essay by Chris Hager, looking at the book in relation to postmodern fiction. Hager thinks that Infinite Jest does have plot, but its central plot point is not told in the book. The opening scene of Infinite Jest is also chronologically its last, and there is a blank stretch of several months between the book’s final scenes and this flash-forward. The book hints at one incident from that interval, but they only create more questions rather than any answers. In Hager’s view, all 1000+ pages of Infinite Jest is a periphrasis of whatever inexplicable event that took place, too horrific to begin to describe. As Wittgenstein said, Whereof we cannot speak we must remain silent. For Hager, this silence is one of Infinite Jest’s central themes, the limitations of language and communication; indeed that is a common thread in postmodern literature.

It had never occurred to me before that a novel could be about an event that is barely alluded to in the book, so I thought Infinite Jest was about the characters and experiences that are described in it. But in Hager’s view, what I took to me the main narrative of Infinite Jest were the preambles that contribute to a greater and more terrible central plot, the key to which literally lies beyond the pages of the book. I think both mine and Hager’s are valid interpretations of Infinite Jest, though his is much more sophisticated and a lot darker than mine.

In this review I mostly stick to my initial interpretation of Infinite Jest, but it is only one possible reading. I’ve seen people on Reddit call Infinite Jest a choose-your-own-adventure book because its intricacy and ambiguity allow it to be whatever you want it to be; Borges wrote that differing translations of a text do not detract from each other or the original text, but rather make the original multiply in meaning and richness - this applies equally well to more general aesthetic interpretation.

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WHAT NEARLY BECAME THE SECOND DRAFT OF THIS REVIEW; OTHERWISE KNOWN AS A BREAKDOWN

How is communication ever anything other than futile? I think thoughts, formulate them into words, express them through sounds or squiggles, and somehow expect them to make a dent in the thought-process of another person? How do we even enter communication assuming imminent success? I sit here ranting about my love for Infinite Jest, but how do I know that it makes any sense to anyone who isn’t me? Wittgenstein advised silence where we cannot speak; what makes us think we can speak in the first place?

My favourite thing about Infinite Jest is the world-building, little random and farcical details that fly out of nowhere. They very much show Infinite Jest as a book of the early ’90s, but they are still funny and many of them all too salient today. Calendar years are named after commercial brands; North America becomes the superstate O.N.A.N. in response to unmanageable waste and pollution. The book also features a kind of proto-Netflix and predicts Deliveroo. The President of the United States is an ex-singer whose election campaign can be paraphrased as ‘make America clean again’. And these are just the mainframe we’re working with.

TUESDAY 1ST, THE MONTH OF SEVENS

Eschaton has been mentioned a couple times already, being this game that they play at tennis school. I, being a true child of my age, assumed it to be some sort fo tennis-themed Let’s Dance. But no - meet Eschaton, a prepubescent RPG world-nuclear-war game whose set-up includes composing detailed accounts of international aggression and failed diplomacy, game-play involves long-distance aiming with a tennis serve, and scoring requires the game-master’s data-crunching computer transported on a trolley as well as high-school calculus.

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SATURDAY 16TH (SIC.), THE MONTH OF AUGUSTINE

I have a sleep problem - sleep deprivation from overexcitement. Last night it was two things: it finally sunk in that I’m going to Cambridge; and that I could collate for my blog my diary from reading Infinite Jest.

[two crossed-out starts to a paragraph]

- Ffs - I’m such a blogger that I’m redoing my own diary because the pacing is wrong.

I’m enjoying IJ so much. Naturally I’m going to write a cohesive review of it, but it’s such a mammoth book I feel a simple review written at the end wouldn’t do justice to it or the experience of reading it. So I thought I can collate my diary written while reading it. I’m already writing so much about it, it should come together pretty naturally. I will arrange the entries logically by content, rather than chronologically, and structure it like in IJ, where it jumps between points in time. Only my time markers will be called Month of Augustine and so forth. - Naturally this entry on the conception of the idea will be included, to be all meta.

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One thing I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about is Infinite Jest’s reputation for erudition. Infinite Jest gets treated as an aspirational reading milestone, like Ulysses or Proust. While it’s nice to celebrate the books we read, I wonder whether the hype around Infinite Jest has misshapen our perception of it, made us fixate on a version of Infinite Jest that is larger than life. While it’s hard to gauge whether reviews on the internet are actually typical of how Infinite Jest is perceived, both fans and critics of Infinite Jest heavily associate it with intellectualism.

This characterisation doesn’t quite sit right with me. The book is sophisticated, tragic and spectacular, but I don’t think it’s necessarily all that profound. It’s possible to interpret Infinite Jest as a postmodern novel that spends 1000 pages commenting on silence (viz. Hager), but it’s perfectly entertaining and valid to read it as a series of stories about flawed and troubled people living in a flawed and troubled world. The details and ambiguities in Infinite Jest allow for all kinds of conceptual interpretations, but regardless of whether one subscribes to all or any of them, Infinite Jest will still be a story about people - the ubiquity of sadness, alienation and absurdity, told with prose as twisted, fluent and obsessive as our very minds.

I think the popular characterisation of Infinite Jest as something profound and erudite essentially overlooks this. I find the perception of Infinite Jest as an intellectual icon to be a superficial one, as the perceived intellectualism comes from its form rather than its content. But then what else do I expect, for what is Infinite Jest but a novel about wide-reaching things told in a very niche way? And if I actually disapprove of using Infinite Jest as a symbol of intellectualism, why did I change my laptop screensaver to ‘I finished Infinite Jest’? But coming to think about it, doesn’t the formation of all cultural symbols involve some kind of decoupling between the object’s actual denotation and supposed connotations? (Off-topic but related, isn’t artistic symbolism simply when the connotation of an item overrides its denotations? Semiotics brain is shook.)

THE MONTH OF MAYING, 2020, WHEN YRS. TRULY STARTED READING DFW, BEGINNING WITH HIS NON-FICTION

I think DFW has changed how I see and use words. It’s like DFW literally warped and extended what I thought words were capable of. Broke some perceived rules about using the written word whose validity I’d hitherto taken for granted, and thus brought writing a step closer to how I actually think and feel. Does your mind digress into philosophical rabbit-holes irrelevant to the actual topic at hand? No worries, just write out the digression in the middle of your argument! Do you ever find it limiting that writing is confined to a linear word-by-word sequence, due to how sentences appear linearly across the page? Consider using footnotes for key ideas as well as supplementary information, thereby creating a new dimension for your narrative to go in!

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THURSDAY 17TH, THE MONTH OF SEVENS

I think I’ve just found my favourite scene from Infinite Jest. Pp. 596 - 601, where Orin is accosted by a wheelchair man partway through his seduction of a Swiss hand-model, to answer questions about what he misses about pre-ONAN America. Only of course, unbeknownst to O., both hand-model and wheelchair man are in fact militant Quebecois separatists trying to mine him for information about his father’s film Infinite Jest. Interrupted in (contrived) post-coital love, Orin plummets from jaded and humouring into a sense of inexplicable loss as he recalls the small silly things he’s not even considered to miss. Orin, who’s a football star, but not particularly bright, thoughtful or articulate, whose first assumption was that the man wanted his autograph. It’s a very touching sequence, made all the more so by the scene’s underlying tension, as Orin is blissfully unaware of the agents’ intent or how they could kill him just because they can. Orin:

I miss TV. I do. Oh man. Some of this may sound stupid. I miss commercials that were louder than the programmes. … I miss being told things were filmed before a live studio audience. … I miss sneering at something I loved. How we used to love to gather in the checker-tiled kitchen in front of the old body cathode-ray Sony whose reception was sensitive to airplanes and sneer at the commercial vapidity of broadcast stuff. … I miss stuff so low-denominator I could watch and know in advance what people were going to say. … I miss summer reruns. … I miss seeing the same things over and over again. … [Watching the same thing over and over again on tape is] not the same. The choice, see. It ruins it somehow. With television you were subjected to repetition. The familiarity was inflicted. Different now.

- But even excerpting this I wonder: can one really capture the saliency of one scene 600 pages into a thousand-page book, simply by picking out some phrases and putting them in quote marks? The answer is No, so you’ll have to take my word for it.

THE MONTH OF COMPETENT DEMOCRATIC PROCESSES

Grange Road darkens outside, the hipster lightbulbs hanging in Selwyn Bar seem to glow brighter and brighter orange as twilight sets in. It’s hard this, trying to structure my response to Infinite Jest as a blend of review-after-reading, diary-from-during, and structural homage to IJ itself. I think of it like a YouTube vlog, where real footage is blended with voiceover done in post. It’s funny how writing was around before vlogging, yet my frame of reference for how to write come [sic.] from vlogs. Term is in full swing. I’ve realised I no longer have enough free time to sustain my extreme slow- and distractedness when writing a first draft. I consider whether or not to buy another coffee before the bar shuts for the next four weeks.

Maybe one of the best things about DFW in IJ is his use of contrast. Favourite scenes I mention, and others that I don’t, all share this: a juxtaposition of different moods and the unlikely association of clashing ideas, either all happening at the same time (cf. Orin hotel room scene, Steeply at ETA scene), or closely following each other (cf. Antitoi shop scene).

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WEDNESDAY 28TH - THURSDAY 29TH, THE MONTH OF AGGRESSIVE HALLOWEEN MERCHANDISING

It’s a densely interwoven, complexly layered book. Narrative-wise, definitely so, but thematically as well. Wallace likes to present characters, events, and circumstances, wait for them to sink in for a few hundred pages, and then introduce information to completely recontextualise the original thing, and thereby undermine or challenge the point you thought he had been making. As exemplified by Marathe’s soliloquys on love: in the early sections with him and Steeply on the cliff-face, where he talks about how love should always be a conscious choice, he sounds moralistic but ardent, like the patriotic zealot he’s meant to be. But we learn more about his weariness, how Marathe is in no way so idealistic as we thought. Then we learn about his actual relationship with his wife, and you realise his rhetoric about love as a choice is in fact the rationalisation for a deeply disturbing relationship where he uses another person to try to bypass his own depression. Or, take how characters are repeatedly characterised from different angles - like how the best characterisations of Hal and his mother come from when other characters talk about them when they’re not there. Or how it turns out Hal’s known about his mum’s serial affairs all along, throwing light on their relationship and his mental state throughout the earlier parts of the book.

This is probably the biggest way in which Wallace develops his characters in Infinite Jest. They don’t really change or grow very much throughout the narrative’s month-long focal period, but our knowledge and understanding of them changes and grows as Wallace peels back the layers of what’s already there. Everything that’s there at the end of the book was there from the beginning, has been there all along.

Which leads me to the last thing I want to talk about here: the figure of JOI. James Orin Incandenza is Hal’s dad, ex-tennis champion, optical scientist, founder of the tennis academy, modernist film-maker, auteur of the lethally entertaining ‘Infinite Jest’. He committed suicide a few years before the main events of Infinite Jest, splintering the already dysfunctional Incandenza family; we see him in a few flashbacks and in the book’s very last scenes. At the start, he’s made out to be a great artist - technical skill, sophistication of concept, artistic temperament and all. But then the book makes its characters debate whether his films put form above content, and whether he was even capable of being sincere and emotive through his art. By the end of the book, there’s doubt on whether, under the hype, JOI was actually ever much good. Given Wallace’s vocal support for New Sincerity, JOI could be seen as the personification of irony, and of the creator’s complete alienation from any emotive aspect of their work. ‘Infinite Jest’ was JOI’s magnum opus; in it he tries to really emotionally engage with his audience, and it turns out lethally engrossing. Characters wonder if making ‘Infinite Jest’ cost JOI his life, and terrorists want it as a weapon to overthrow America - I feel there is a case for an allegoric reading where ‘Infinite Jest’ is the representation of incurable irony.

WEDNESDAY 28TH - THURSDAY 29TH, THE MONTH OF AGGRESSIVE HALLOWEEN MERCHANDISING

What is ‘Infinite Jest’ the film? To use the meme, ‘Infinite Jest’ is the friends we made along the way. Every description of IJ (the book) that I have come across (including blurbs) fronts the film ‘Infinite Jest’ and its deadliness, like that is the hook of the book. But the actual presence of ‘Infinite Jest’ in IJ’s narrative is marginal, especially considering it’s literally the eponymous object. At this point I don’t think it even counts as a McGuffin, as the secret agents’ search for it does not dominate the narrative in any way. I’d say its more a motif, a metaphor, the Platonic form for obsession, refracted and reflected in drugs and alcohol, success (tennis), sex (Orin), the appearance of affability (Avril and Tavis), Joelle’s beauty (I’m still not sure if I believe she’s actually disfigured), to name a few. If ‘Infinite Jest’ is indeed the concrete objectification of Allure and Addiction, then the AFR’s failure at finding the root Master copy, and the non-existence of an antidote, are also symbolic.

When I finished the book, I didn’t think Infinite Jest the book was about ‘Infinite Jest’ the film. Now I wonder if Infinite Jest is in a sense about JOI. His legacy haunts the book - the architectural and pedagogical structure of the tennis academy, his films, his emotional impact on those who knew him. He is the only point of contact shared between the book’s main plot-lines, from his family and the school he founded to people searching after his film and the life at AA that he rejected. (Also, Chris Hager uses the absence-yet-presence of JOI to talk about Infinite Jest in relation to Barthes’ notion of the Author-God. It’s really cool.)

For some reason people talk about Hal Incandenza being the DFW-stand-in in Infinite Jest, but the comparison between Wallace and JOI is much more interesting, even uncannily prophetic. The in-book discussions on and criticisms of JOI’s film-making career very closely resemble the contemporary discourse around Wallace himself: Is he a genius or is he messing with us, or both? Self-expression or contempt for their audience? Arch ironicist or incredibly sincere? Is he worth our effort? He is most known for film-making / novel-writing, but really should be remembered as a scientist / journalist? Eventual suicide linked to career or mental health or substance-abuse or family or will we never know? Different characters in the book have different answers regarding JOI, just as different readers of Wallace have different answers regarding Wallace. We will probably never know.

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A METAPHOR, AND A COP-OUT ENDING

Marmite is a foodstuff that inspires strong opinions. But ultimately it’s just another item of food, and you have to try it for yourself to see if it’s for you. If it is, you have just added to your list of life’s great joys; if it isn’t, well that’s okay too.

Maybe, like ‘Infinite Jest’, Infinite Jest is also the friends we made along the way.