Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

and there’s dinette sets in the tunnels and acoustic tiles in the halls and lawn-mowers in the kitchen and tripods in the grass and squeegees on the wall and Stice’s bed moves around, and there’s a ball machine in the girls’ lockers, Longley reports, that for this kind of tuition none of this stuff the staff can get around to cleaning up bef—’ Stice’s head has jerked up, a trace of mashed potato on his nose. ‘Who says my bed moves? How’s it you know anything about any beds moving?’

This turn to the supernatural, generally explained as a Hamlet allusion, is still tough to reconcile with all that's come before and never sits well with me - I have yet to find a really convincing explanation.

The black girl Clenette Hal had read fear in as she left C.T.’s office with his litter now has a bulging backpack on her back, as in bulging maybe with dumpster-pilferage, 261

Possible Entertainment-cartridge sighting, with the junk found by the Tunnel Club going to Ennet House by way of Clenette.

the crisis of faith that cost Stice the match had concerned a different Hal, Hal can tell. It’s now a whole new Hal, a Hal who does not get high, or hide, a Hal who in 29 days is going to hand his own personal urine over to authority figures with a wide smile and exemplary posture and not a secretive thought in his head.

Summoning the sort of coercive reverence he’d felt this P.M. as several balls’ sudden anomalous swerves against wind and their own vectors half convinced Stice they’d become sensitive to his inner will, at crucial times.

Common explanation holds that this is JOI's wraith influencing objects in Stice's favor, but again a really convincing explanation is lacking (in my opinion).

Steeply said ‘My own father, sometime around midlife. We watched him get consumed with a sort of entertainment. It wasn’t pretty. I was never sure how it started or what it was about.’

Steeply's father's M*A*S*H obsession is another favorite part of mine. I love how well the description matches up with the real-life experience of reading and getting sucked firmly into IJ itself.

‘This, the final enclosing isolation of obsession.’

‘His unbalance of temptation cost him life. An otherwise harmless U.S.A. broadcast television program took his life, because of the consuming obsession. This is your anecdote.’ ‘No. It was a transmural infarction. Blew out a whole ventricle. His whole family had a history:

A weak joke?

‘Stuck. Fixed. Held. Trapped. As in trapped in some sort of middle. Between two things. Pulled apart in different directions.’

Recalling again quite clearly Erdedy from the first act.

‘The Mr. Bouncety-Bounce Daily Program,’ and when Mr. Bouncety-Bounce appears in his old cloth-and-safety-pin diaper and paunch and rubber infant-head mask he is not a soothing or pleasant figure at all, for the sleepless adult.

Mr. Bouncety-Bounce, another underdiscussed symbol. Did Wallace try too hard with this concept?

the whole House is still reeling and spiritually palsied.

Now that is a clever phrase. Too bad Wallace's witticisms get muffled by the truckloads of prose that surrounds them.

the fan’s vibration combined with some certain set of notes I was practicing on the violin, and the two vibrations set up a resonance that made something happen in my head. It is impossible really to explain it, but it was a certain quality of this resonance that produced it.’

This is a rather strange explanation for the onset of depression. What is Wallace doing here? A lot of people sag they relate to this description of depression, but I don't personally. I admire Wallace for trying, though.

It isn’t like a real interface or conversation. Day doesn’t seem to be addressing anybody in particular.

These "confessional" type monologues of the House residents, especially those directed at Gately, are significant.

One sophomore night it came up out of nowhere, the black shape, for the first time in years.’ ‘But there was an inevitability-feeling about it, too, when it came.’ ‘It is the most horrible feeling I have ever imagined, much less felt. There is no possible way death can feel as bad. It rose up. It was worse now that I was older.’ ‘Tell me all about it.’ ‘I thought I’d have to hurl myself out of my dormitory’s window. I simply could not live with how it felt.’

‘Some boy I hardly knew in the room below mine heard me staggering around whimpering at the top of my lungs. He came up and sat up with me until it went away. It took most of the night. We didn’t converse; he didn’t try to comfort me. He spoke very little, just sat up with me. We didn’t become friends. By graduation I’d forgotten his name and major. But on that night he seemed to be the piece of string by which I hung suspended over hell itself.’

Community

Aubrey deLint’s smile was notoriously bad, his face seeming to break into crescents and shards, wholly without cheer. It was almost more like a grimace.

Just another really clever single line.

Everything seemed to hang distended in air now so clear it seemed washed, after the clouds. The bleachers’ people could feel Hal feel Stice letting the point go, inside, figuring it lost, knowing he could only guess and stab, hoping. Little hope of Hal fucking up: Hal Incandenza does not fuck up passes off floater half-volleys.

There was applause off thirty hands for the point as a whole, which was faultless and on Hal’s part imaginative, anti-book. One of very few total inspired points from Incandenza, deLint’s chart would show.

I recall a big deal being made of Hal's game as essentially defensive, playing for such a long time that his opponents either mess up or leave him an opening. So here, originality is noteworthy. Also he's 24ish hours sober at this point, making the argument for keeping off Substances practical and obvious.

The bleachers’ E.T.A.s hunched forward with hands warmed in the crease between hamstrings and calves, or else gloved and layered and stretched out with their heads and bottoms and heels on three different levels, watching both sky and play.

Dammit, this line complicates even further who the mystery figure outside ETA is at the end of YDAU, before Hal's alleged DMZ dosing.

At just this moment, @1200 meters east and downhill and one level below ground, Ennet House live-in Staff Don Gately lay deeply asleep in his Lone-Rangerish sleeping mask, his snores rattling the deinsulated pipes along his little room’s ceiling. Four-odd clicks to the northwest in the men’s room of the Armenian Foundation Library, right near the onion-domed Watertown Arsenal, Poor Tony Krause hunched forward in a stall in his ghastly suspenders and purloined cap, his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands, getting a whole new perspective on time and the various passages and personae of time.

A rare instance of Wallace connecting some dots for us, bridging the various major threads.

just out of reach, still travelling at a severe cross-court diagonal, and it passed Stice’s racquet half a meter past

Mathematically this is about the 67% mark of the text by page count, footnotes included.

13473 Blasted Expanse Blvd. Tucson, AZ, 857048787/2

This is not a typical AZ-type street name, fyi.

Chu has Blott see whether he can lift a bulky old doorless microwave oven that’s lying on its side up next to one wall,

One whole box on its side with its frayed strapping tape split has spilled part of a load of old TP-cartridges, old and mostly unlabelled, out onto the tunnel floor in a fannish pattern, and Gopnik and Peterson complain that the cartridge-cases’ sharp edges put holes in their Glad bags,

Plus hamster-incursions could be posited to account for the occult appearance of large and incongruous E.T.A. objects in inappropriate places, which started in August with the thousands of practice balls found scattered all over the blue lobby carpeting and the carefully arranged pyramid of AminoPal energy bars found on Court 6 at dawn drills in mid-September and has gained momentum in a way no one cares for one bit—feral hamsters being notorious draggers and rearrangers of stuff they can’t eat but feel compelled to fuck with anyway, somehow—and so ease the communal near-hysteria the objects have caused among aboriginal blue-collar staff and sub-16 E.T.A. alike.

An alternate explanation for things being out of place? (admittedly not a very convincing one)

But the reason Wayne is Three continentally and Hal’s Six is the head. Hal looks just as perfectly dead out there, but he’s more vulnerable in terms of, like, emotionally. Hal remembers points, senses trends in a match. Wayne doesn’t. Hal’s susceptible to fluctuations. Discouragement. Set-long lapses in concentration. Some days you can almost see Hal like flit in and out of a match, like some part of him leaves and hovers and then comes back.’

identifiable as poor old Poor Tony only by the boa and red leather coat and the certain way he held his hand to his throat’s hollow as he walked, that way Equus Reese always said always reminded him of black-and-white-era starlets descending curved stairs into some black-tie function, Krause never so much walking as making an infinite series of grand entrances into pocket after pocket of space, a queenly hauteur now both sickening and awesome given Krause’s spectral mien,

This is a really clever and dazzling wording.

His Da’d begun fucking Matty up the ass when Matty was ten. A fook in t’boom.

Among my least favorite discursions. It feels forced, with the taint of dated homophobia.

Da’d get angry: who are we scared of, then? Then who are we, a sone, to be scared so of our own Da? As if the Da that broke daily his back were nothing more than a. Can’t a Da show his son some love without being taken for a. As if Matty could lie here with his food inside him under bedding he’d paid for and think his Da were no better than a. Is it a fookin you’re scared of, then. You think a Da what comes in to speak to his sone and holds him as a Da has nought on his mind but a fook? As if the sone were some forty-dollar whore off the docks? As if the Da were a. Is that what you take me for. Is that what you take me for then.

Again, uncomfortable and while interesting in an experimental stylistic way the stuttering refusal to say the word (probably the f-word) is more melodramatic than meaningful. People say this type of juxtaposition of postmodern literary tricks with highly personal verisimilitude is supposed to enhance Wallace's point: real communication is more important than any slick but empty showmanship.

‘You just never quite occurred out there, kid,’ deLint apprises him. He has regressed certain figures to back this up, this nonoccurrence. His choice of words chills Hal to the root.

Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat remains Mario’s favorite of all their late father’s entertainments, possibly because of its unhip earnestness. Though to Mario he always maintains it’s basically goo, Hal secretly likes it, too, the cartridge, and likes to project himself imaginatively into the ex-bureaucrat’s character on the leisurely drive home toward ontological erasure.

Another use of Mario as the ideal, a gentle and empathetic soul who delights in truth. Hal buries it but has the same essential feeling, which is demonstrative again of Wallace's belief in some kind of shared humanity we could all tap into.

one of Himself’s posthumous hits, a cartridge called Blood Sister: One Tough Nun that he’d always found kind of gratuitously nasty and overwrought, but which Hal has no idea that this piece of entertainment actually germinated out of James O. Incandenza’s one brief and unpleasant experience with Boston AA, in the B.S. mid-’90s, when Himself lasted two and a half months and then drifted gradually away,

A rind of moon hanging cocked above a four-spired church. And the emergent stars are yo-yos, you feel, after a seizure: Poor Tony feels as if he could cast them out, draw them in again at will.

he never saw his old former crewmate Mad Matty Pemulis, a sure source of compassion, looking up and out and down and back up, aghast in recognition of what Poor Tony has come through the corridor to resemble.

A thought occurs here re: the ending. This sort of call-forward/flashback setup is employed several times throughout, and we often get allusions to an event before witnessing it. So the book sets up one half of the structure with Hal's inability to speak, then denies us the resolution we are conditioned to expect.

It’s a kind of emotional novocaine, this form of depression, and while it’s not overtly painful its deadness is disconcerting and… well, depressing. Kate Gompert’s always thought of this anhedonic state as a kind of radical abstracting of everything, a hollowing out of stuff that used to have affective content. Terms the undepressed toss around and take for granted as full and fleshy—happiness, joie de vivre, preference, love—are stripped to their skeletons and reduced to abstract ideas. They have, as it were, denotation but not connotation. The anhedonic can still speak about happiness and meaning et al., but she has become incapable of feeling anything in them, of understanding anything about them, of hoping anything about them, or of believing them to exist as anything more than concepts.

Now THIS description of depression (anhedonia) I can really relate to.

Hal himself hasn’t had a bona fide intensity-of-interior-life-type emotion since he was tiny; he finds terms like joie and value to be like so many variables in rarified equations, and he can manipulate them well enough to satisfy everyone but himself that he’s in there, inside his own hull, as a human

An often-referenced quote, integral to the understanding of the book as a whole.

We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté.

This is Wallace's point, distilled.

Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.

Boom - the bombshell Wallace hopes will blow down the walled defenses of a culture too numbed to know what to do anymore.

numb emptiness isn’t the worst kind of depression. That dead-eyed anhedonia is but a remora on the ventral flank of the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain. Authorities term this condition clinical depression or involutional depression or unipolar dysphoria. Instead of just an incapacity for feeling, a deadening of soul, the predator-grade depression Kate Gompert always feels as she Withdraws from secret marijuana is itself a feeling. It goes by many names—anguish, despair, torment, or q.v. Burton’s melancholia or Yevtuschenko’s more authoritative psychotic depression—but Kate Gompert, down in the trenches with the thing itself, knows it simply as It. It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it.

It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and animate and un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self, which depressed self It billows on and coagulates around and wraps in Its black folds and absorbs into Itself, so that an almost mystical unity is achieved with a world every constituent of which means painful harm to the self.

It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed. There is no way Kate Gompert could ever even begin to make someone else understand what clinical depression feels like, not even another person who is herself clinically depressed, because a person in such a state is incapable of empathy with any other living thing.

Everything is part of the problem, and there is no solution. It is a hell for one.

Thus the loneliness: it’s a closed circuit: the current is both applied and received from within.

The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

Another famous passage. When demonstrating this level of what we might call clinical empathy Wallace is at his best. This type of tighter, more evidently directed and purposeful writing, is a breath of fresh air in such a dense, meandering novel.

What’s remarkable to Kate Gompert is that she seems to be able to move forward without any sort of conscious moving-forward-type volitions. She puts her left foot in front of her right foot and then her right foot in front of her left foot, and she’s moving forward, her whole self, when all she’s capable of concentrating on is one foot and then the other foot.

Another part of the point and the shared magic of AA, professional sports training, and living life itself.

purposely late, to offset the Saturday-night jones so many drug addicts suffer weekly, Saturday still being the week’s special mythic Party-Night even for persons who long ago ceased to be able to do anything but Party 24/7/365.

since Randy Lenz got invited to ingest Substances and abuse animals elsewhere, and left, which was who knows how many days or weeks ago.

Three.

Standing on tiptoe in Subdorm B’s curved hallway, using the handle of an inverted tennis racquet whose vinyl cover he can absently zip and unzip as he moves the handle around, Michael Pemulis is gently raising one of the panels in the drop-ceiling and shifting it on its aluminum strut, the panel, changing its lie on the strut from square-shaped to diamond-shaped, being careful not to let it fall.

This is significant to those tracking the DMZ's whereabouts. It is the evening of 11/14 at this point, presumably.

Lyle hovers cross-legged just a couple mm. above the top of the towel dispenser in the unlit weight room, eyes rolled up white, lips barely moving and making no sound.

Some have claimed Lyle is a wraith. This little addition corresponds to his advice about respecting objects and not lifting more than your weight in a tough to articulate way.

Ms. Avril Incandenza, seeming somehow to have three or four cigarettes all going at once, secures from Information the phone and e-mail #s of a journalistic business address on East Tucson AZ’s Blasted Expanse Blvd., then begins to dial, using the stern of a blue felt pen to stab at the console’s keys.

Checking into Steeply, I would guess. Does this cast new suspicions on Avril?

Blood Sister: One Tough Nun, one of Himself’s few commercial successes, wouldn’t have made near the money it made if it hadn’t come out just as InterLace was starting to purchase first-run features for its rental menus and hyping the cartridges with one-time Spontaneous Disseminations. It was the sort of sleazy-looking shocksploitation film that would have had a two-week run in multiplex theaters 8 and above and then gone right to the featureless brown boxes of magnetic-video limbo.

I skimmed BS: OTN my first two readings and didn't really ascribe it much significance until my 4th time, really. It's a semi-funny parody of AA with layers of literary/art critixism that I enjoy. But it goes on for a long time.