Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

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

—And about how the hiding-under-the-desk-and-pounding thing worked, incredibly enough, for almost the whole last year of his drinking, which ended around this past Labor Day, when one vindictive complainant finally figured out where in Filene’s to go to complain about the Complaint Dept.—the White Flaggers all fell about, they were totally pleased and amused, the Crocodiles removed their cigars and roared and wheezed and stomped both feet on the floor and showed scary teeth, everyone roaring with Identification and pleasure. This even though, as the speaker’s confusion at their delight openly betrays, the story wasn’t meant to be one bit funny: it was just the truth. Gately’s found it’s got to be the truth, is the thing.

An ironist in a Boston AA meeting is a witch in church.

Uncharacteristically pithy and quotable line from DFW

Gately’s most marked progress in turning his life around in sobriety, besides the fact that he no longer drives off into the night with other people’s merchandise, is that he tries to be just about as verbally honest as possible at almost all times, now, without too much calculation about how a listener’s going to feel about what he says. This is harder than it sounds. But so that’s why on Commitments, sweating at the podium as only a large man can sweat, his thing is that he always says he’s Lucky to be sober today, instead of that he’s Grateful today, because he admits that the former is always true, every day, even though a lot of the time he still doesn’t feel Grateful, more like shocked that this thing seems to work, plus a lot of the time also ashamed and depressed about how he’s spent over half his life, and scared he might be permanently brain-damaged or retarded from Substances, plus also usually without any sort of clue about where he’s headed in sobriety or what he’s supposed to be doing or about really anything at all except that he’s not at all keen to be back Out There behind any bars, again, in a hurry. Ferocious Francis G. likes to punch Gately’s shoulder and tell him he’s right where he’s supposed to be.

One of my favorite passages in the whole book. So heartfelt! I love Gately, he's real role model material.

As she’s telling what she sees as etiological truth, even though the monologue seems sincere and unaffected and at least a B+ on the overall AA-story lucidity-scale, faces in the hall are averted and heads clutched and postures uneasily shifted in empathetic distress at the look-what-happened-to-poor-me invitation implicit in the tale, the talk’s tone of self-pity itself less offensive (even though plenty of these White Flaggers, Gately knows, had personal childhoods that made this girl’s look like a day at Six Flags Over the Poconos) than the subcurrent of explanation, an appeal to exterior Cause that can slide, in the addictive mind, so insidiously into Excuse that any causal attribution is in Boston AA feared, shunned, punished by empathic distress.

So, this is kind of the worst example of tortured prose in the book - it's difficult to follow and not rewarding to untangle. But, the AA audience is more upset that this speaker used her childhood trauma as an excuse for becoming an addict instead of being upset that such an awful trauma (which is exceptionally unpleasant and hard to justify being included) happened in the first place.

Some ironist who decamped back Out There and left his meager effects to be bagged and tossed by Staff into the Ennet House attic had, all the way back in the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad, permanently engraved his tribute to AA’s real Prime Directive with a rosewood-handled boot-knife in the plastic seat of the 5-Man men’s room’s commode: ‘Do not ask WHY If you dont want to DIE Do like your TOLD If you want to get OLD 143

Perhaps the most overtly Pynchonian writing one could point to.

And the fact that it was so good to hear her, so good that even Tiny Ewell and Kate Gompert and the rest of the worst of them all sat still and listened without blinking, looking not just at the speaker’s face but into it, helps force Gately to remember all over again what a tragic adventure this is, that none of them signed up for.

8 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT GAUDEAMUS IGITUR

Actually this section gives off rather Pynchonian vibes as well. Haven't read any DeLillo to compare with, though.

a quotation from President Gentle’s second Inaugural: ‘Let the call go forth, to pretty much any nation we might feel like calling, that the past has been torched by a new and millennial generation of Americans,’

This is actually pretty dark...

the Dems and G.O.P.s stood on either side watching dumbly, like doubles partners who each think the other’s surely got it, the two established mainstream parties split open along tired philosophical lines in a dark time when all landfills got full and all grapes were raisins and sometimes in some places the falling rain clunked instead of splatted, and also, recall, a post-Soviet and -Jihad era when—somehow even worse—there was no real Foreign Menace of any real unified potency to hate and fear, and the U.S. sort of turned on itself and its own philosophical fatigue and hideous redolent wastes with a spasm of panicked rage that in retrospect seems possible only in a time of geopolitical supremacy and consequent silence, the loss of any external Menace to hate and fear.

IJ's venture into the political runs toward caricature, but still packs a punch.

A President J.G., F.C. who said he wasn’t going to stand here and ask us to make some tough choices because he was standing here promising he was going to make them for us. Who asked us simply to sit back and enjoy the show.

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

DFW really hated irony. Not even allegedly, he's on record in many an interview railing against the big bad society-draining force of Irony.

After the first photograph has been in a magazine, the famous men do not enjoy their photographs in magazines so much as they fear that their photographs will cease to appear in magazines.

Do not underestimate objects! Lyle says he finds it impossible to overstress this: do not underestimate objects.

A hugely resonant motto, or maybe mantra, given how often it's repeated and stressed.

‘The Medusa v. The Odalisque’ ’s own audiences didn’t think too much of the thing, because the film audience never does get much of a decent full-frontal look at what it is about the combatants that supposedly has such a melodramatic effect on the rumble’s live audience, and so the film’s audience ends up feeling teased and vaguely cheated,

Hmmm, remind you of anything? Another pre-emptive criticism to expect against the book itself.

In the very last couple years of solar, Unsubsidized Time, this kid Eric Clipperton appeared

Another of my favorite setions, the story of Eric Clipperton says lots about dependence, unhealthy fixations, and empathy.

another vicious spiral.

The entire preceding section re: the death of broadcast Tv and the rise of the Internet, summed up neatly: another vicious spiral.

our whole system is founded on your individual’s freedom to pursue his own individual desires.’

I appreciate these Marathe/Steeply dialogues more as I get older, though again they're really boiled down to a state of near-caricature. But they form the book's intellectual core, a thematic consideration of philosophical ideals.

Maximize pleasure, minimize displeasure: result: what is good. This is the U.S.A. of you.’

The United States: a community of sacred individuals which reveres the sacredness of the individual choice. The individual’s right to pursue his own vision of the best ratio of pleasure to pain: utterly sacrosanct. Defended with teeth and bared claws all through our history.’

His favorite personal place of off-duty in the U.S.A.’s city Boston was in the Public Garden of summer, a broad and treeless declivity leading down to the mare des canards, the duck pond, a grassy wedge facing south and west so that the grass of the slope turns pale green and then gold as the sun circles over the head, the pond’s water cool and muddy green and overhung with impressionist willows, persons beneath the willows, also pigeons, and ducks with tight emerald heads gliding in circles, their eyes round stones, moving as if without effort, gliding upon the water as if legless below. Like films’ idylls in cities the moment before the nuclear blast, in old films of U.S.A. death and horror. He was missing this time in U.S.A. Boston MA of refilling the pond for the ducks’ return,

Oh, this struck me as really sad this time around - knowing the plot's elaborate twists and turns in advance can really shift your affect around some of this stuff.

You can’t induce a moral sensibility the same way you’d train a rat. The kid has to learn by his own experience how to learn to balance the short- and long-term pursuit of what he wants.’ ‘He must be freely enlightened to self.’

The Entertainment isn’t candy or beer. Look at Boston just now. You can’t compare this kind of insidious enslaving process to your little cases of sugar and soup.’ Marathe smiled bleakly into the chiaroscuro flesh of this round and hairless U.S.A. face. ‘Perhaps the facts are true, after the first watching: that then there seems to be no choice. But to decide to be this pleasurably entertained in the first place. This is still a choice, no? Sacred to the viewing self, and free? No? Yes?’

So I think in the big picture the Marathe/Steeply stuff is clunkier and could have been tightened up, but raising this question also opens us up to the universe(s) of addiction, dependency, unhealthy selfishness, and competition. A good illustration of the core of this book being extremely significant, while the presentation often tends to extremes.

wagering over whether Clipperton’ll even bother to materialize at Indy now that he’s extorted himself to the sanctioned top he must have craved so terribly, or whether he’ll retire from the tour now and lie around masturbating over the Glock in one hand and the latest issue of NAJT in the other.

Footnote says: "The both-hands-full logistics of which are hard to envision, but realism wasn't really the point of the image for the bitter Brigade boys." And I laughed out loud - seems most of the overt humor in this book is toilet/locker room quality.

It took the bradykinetic Mario all night and two bottles of Ajax Plus to clean the room with his tiny contractured arms and square feet; the 18’s girls in the rooms on either side could hear him falling around in there and picking himself up, again and again; and the finally spotless room in question had been locked ever since, with its tasteless sign—except G. Schtitt holds a special key, and when an E.T.A. jr. whinges too loudly about some tennis-connected vicissitude or hardship or something, he’s invited to go chill for a bit in the Clipperton Suite, to maybe meditate on some of the other ways to succeed besides votaried self-transcendence and gut-sucking-in and hard daily slogging toward a distant goal you can then maybe, if you get there, live with.

This is just an absolutely heartbreaking detail that I missed in every previous reading - Mario insists on, and is allowed to, clean up the mess left after Clipperton's suicide. Mario, the beating empathetic heart of the entire novel, taking on much more than would ever be considered reasonable and allowed to do so because nobody else could possibly feel the same way that he does in this situation...

Guys in D.T.s treat the heaters like TVs and leave broad spatter-paintings of coffee over the walls of the barrackses.

This is a direct link to the first intake sequence Tiny Ewell graduated from so many pages back. The book follows a very distinctly cyclical pattern which is revealed to be either intentional on the author's part or completely imagined on the reader's.

by the end of the night the whole family’s lying there blue-hued and stiff as posts, with incrementally tinier amounts of lethal Quik smeared around their rictus-grimaced mouths;

This is stupid, but I laughed (again - that's twice in one day's reading)

ALL SECS. [Stiff turns to look at each other, tie- and mustache-straightenings, gulping sounds.]

Jesus Christ, is this puppet show theater piece STILL going on???

Boys, I heard punts, burped redhots, smelled beer-foam and recoiled from public urinals at the Ken-L-Ration-Magnavox-Kemper-Insurance-Forsythia Bowl.

Honestly, a joke that had to strain so hard to land it had no real oomph when it got there. I get that this helps fill in the plot's background and historicity, but I did not like the slog of this dumb puppet show and script format to get there.

He feels about the ritualistic daily Please and Thank You prayers rather like a hitter that’s on a hitting streak and doesn’t change his jock or socks or pre-game routine for as long as he’s on the streak. W/ sobriety being the hitting streak and whatnot, he explains.

Oh wow, this is an overt connection back to what Orin said about pro ball players being exceptionally superstitious - another little detail I never picked up on til now.

He says when he tries to pray he gets this like image in his mind’s eye of the brainwaves or whatever of his prayers going out and out, with nothing to stop them, going, going, radiating out into like space and outliving him and still going and never hitting Anything out there, much less Something with an ear. Much much less Something with an ear that could possibly give a rat’s ass. He’s both pissed off and ashamed to be talking about this instead of how just completely good it is to just be getting through the day without ingesting a Substance, but there it is. This is what’s going on.

One of my most personal connections to the text, right here - Don Gately became the hero that got me through the text, strong enough to be interesting and weak enough to be relatable.

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. The young biker leans back and smiles at Gately and gives an affable shrug and blatts away, a halter top’s tits mashed against his back.

As a tiny throw-away bit this fish-and-water joke sucks. But when expanded upon at length in DFW's Kenyon University grad speech it is overwhelmingly moving.

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.

Boy howdy, the honesty is palpable.

and logged each beer he drank carefully in a little spiral notebook he used to monitor his intake of alcohol.

This small little window into Gately's childhood is near-excruciatingly heartfelt, and the subtle way it alludes to the connecting motif of illusions of control is masterfully deft.

No one tells you when they tell you you have cirrhosis that eventually you’ll all of a sudden start choking on your own blood.

One of those "garden path" sentences that contains surprises when you parse it.

And his 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 he is.

A connection to the very end of the book, and a memorable womb-like image that may evoke the alleged samizdat film's content.

It’s all the sort of thing that’s uninteresting unless you’re the one responsible, in which case it’s cholesterol-raisingly stressful and complex.

the thing it’s not entirely impossible he may have fathered

"the thing"=Mario, in a really overt hidden in plain sight admission that it seems a lot of people miss. Fault on DFW's part for burying it too well?

the key to the successful administration of a top-level junior tennis academy lies in cultivating a kind of reverse-Buddhism, a state of Total Worry.

Another line I laugh inwardly at, but never outwardly.

Wayne and Hal amuse themselves by making their cross-court balls collide on every fifth exchange or so—this is known around E.T.A. as ‘atom-smashing’ and is understandably hard to do—and

Another little line I never noticed before - does this signify anything as far as the wild speculations for the ending? Hal and Wayne are highly skilled rivals (on-court anyway)

‘Adjust. Adjust? Stay the same. No? Is not stay the same? It is cold? It is wind? Cold and wind is the world. Outside, yes? On the tennis court the you the player: this is not where there is cold wind. I am saying. Different world inside.

Another great parallel between competitive athletics and sobriety.

Occur. Be here. Not in bed or shower or over baconschteam, in the mind. Be here in total. Is nothing else.

Very dangerous thinking, per Ennet House and Gately's A.A. Get outside of your head, they will warn you.

Pat walked with a dignified but godawful lurch,

As with many of the long-term sober characters, a grim resolve metastasized into acceptance. Pat and the rest wear the evidence of their mistakes openly and do not waste time or energy regretting the past.

They said to get creakily down on his mammoth knees in the A.M. every day and ask God As He Understood Him to remove the agonizing desire, and to hit the old knees again at night before sack and thank this God-ish figure for the Substanceless day just ended, if he got through it. They suggested he keep his shoes and keys under the bed to help him remember to get on his knees.

the infamous Boston AA cake analogy.

As good a shibboleth for having read IJ as anything else.

It didn’t matter one fuckola whether Gately like believed a cake would result, or whether he understood the like fucking baking-chemistry of how a cake would result: if he just followed the motherfucking directions, and had sense enough to get help from slightly more experienced bakers to keep from fucking the directions up if he got confused somehow, but basically the point was if he just followed the childish directions, a cake would result. He’d have his cake.

Ugly text here. Why, when we know he can write so eloquently? His ability to use dialect to show character seems to need refining.

He couldn’t for the goddamn life of him understand how this thing worked, this thing that was working. It drove him bats.

Gately usually no longer much cares whether he understands or not. He does the knee-and-ceiling thing twice a day, and cleans shit, and listens to dreams, and stays Active, and tells the truth to the Ennet House residents, and tries to help a couple of them if they approach him wanting help. And when Ferocious Francis G. and the White Flaggers presented him, on the September Sunday that marked his first year sober, with a faultlessly baked and heavily frosted one-candle cake, Don Gately had cried in front of nonrelatives for the first time in his life. He now denies that he actually did cry, saying something about candle-fumes in his eye. But he did.

A positively beautiful moment.

Has anybody mentioned Gately’s head is square? It’s almost perfectly square,