Drugs, Tennis, and Wheelchairs

David Foster Wallace – Infinite Jest

A poster supposedly inspired by Infinite Jest by Cody Hoyt. The novel is definitely not that much of a mindfuck (a term I consider derogatory and indicative of puerility) 

FOR a long time I have been hearing nothing but high praise for Infinite Jest. It’s supposedly one of the major masterworks of post-modern fiction. By reputation, it’s a leviathan of a novel, has ridiculous footnotes and is a huge drug-fuelled mindfuck. How much of that is actually true though? The book took me a good three weeks to get through and was certainly absurd in places, but I didn’t find it a difficult read, or as absurd as it was made out to be. One of the design features of the novel is its “cyclicality”, that word being in quotation marks because I’m not sure how to approach it in that regard. In a television interview with Charlie Rose in 1997 – a little after the book was published, Rose and Wallace seem to agree on the fact that the novel was meant to be read through several times and that Wallace had designed it with that in mind.

                The ending in particular, as well as the details of what happens after the novel end (found near the beginning of the novel) are the things that remain persistently on my mind having left the book now for a little over a month. I could easily just wax lyrical about the quality of the novel, which, frankly, was superlative in almost every way – absolutely a joy to read, and I most certainly will read it again at some point. However, I am going to talk about the ending here for the most part, so, unlike in my other posts, I will warn potential readers that they might stop reading this post here if they don’t want to spoil it for themselves.

The last rotating sight was the chinks coming back through hthe door, holding big shiny squares of the room. As the floor wafted up and C’s grip finally gave, the last thing Gately saw was an Oriental bearing down with the held square and he looked into the square and saw clearly a reflection of his own big square pale head with its eyes closing as the floor finally pounced. And when he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out. Infinite Jest, “20 November   Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment Immediately pre-fundraiser-exhibition-fete Gaudeamus Igitur”

The last scenes of the novel are mostly comprised of Gately in a hospital bed, reflecting on the last days of his pre-on-the-wagon days, the above words, the very end of the novel, are from that reflection or dream. There is a lot to look at in this section – the symbolic reflection within the reflection, which obviously links back to the cyclic nature of the text, there’s the differences in the way that Gately refers to the characters in the last scene and how that bears on his attitudes to them, whether this is a sign of his distancing himself from this dream sequence. The most interesting part of this for me though is its very nature – all I, as the reader, wanted at this point was for some resolution to the story, not because it was going on a bit, but because I wanted to see how the characters turned out. The subtitle to the date – unusually followed up with information on the specific time of day gives a sense of penultimacy. The fact that this section is pre- the fundraiser raises the readers expectations that there will be a conclusion at a later point, while the Latin “Let us rejoice” perhaps leads us to hope for a culmination. However, all we get here, and all we have been facing for a while in the text is a Gately struggling in his hospital bed and the ghost of the protagonist’s father seeming to desperately urge the two story arcs to join together. This is where the theme of the figurant seems to come into play, we get a sense that Hal’s struggle with drugs and addiction could be helped greatly by Gately’s experience and even solve the problem of the Infinite Jest tape itself. However, our helplessly mangled protagonist is unable to get out of the bed or even get into present tense. I even got the hint, due to the way that he drifts in and out of his dream/reality that the main body of the text could easily be contained within a hallucination, dream or vision from Gately’s drug days than it could the other way.

Either way, the reader is not given a satisfying conclusion to the story. There are details within the first thirty pages of the novel as to what happens to Hal and Gately, that Hal resolves his drug-problem and acquires a new one, perhaps worse, with his ability to communicate, and that the two of them dig up Hal’s father’s head and perhaps find the tape. However, there is an enormous lacuna here and the reader is left desperately struggling to find resolutions that simply don’t exist. This is where the infinite part of Infinite Jest comes in to play however, the reader is then left to read and reread the text over and over until he shares a similar fate to the viewers of the tape – I just realised I meant cartridge all along here.

In the same interview quoted above Wallace said two things of pertinence to this. The first was that he wanted to make the novel enjoyable enough that a reader would want to reread it, the other is that he thought that Post-Modernism as a movement was finished by the time Infinite Jest was published. However, if we look at techniques of similar longer Post-Modern works, we can see a similarly employed device. Consider in Gravity’s Rainbow some of the minor characters that get introduced near the opening of the novel and then are revisited later in the text as they become pertinent to the story again – in fact this is a very Pynchonian device. In Infinite Jest, and I should say I’m probably the millionth reader to compare the two texts (is that good or bad?), the reader is introduced to the various inmates of Ennet House through little vignettes as the novel progresses, with some characters not coming into the story until much later. This fragmentation differs in Pynchon in that it is entirely within the bounds of the plot’s chronology, whereas in Wallace the fragmentation is far more artificial, it breaks from the chronology of the plot. For me, that would make the latter the most fragmented. The lack of resolution, the inability for things to come together, would seem to be one of the key features of post-modernism as far as I’m concerned. The question raised is how much in the text is fragmented to the point where it can’t be repaired, and how much is expected of the reader to repair it? There are elements of absurdism and surreality in Pynchon that simply cannot be resolved: crawling down toilets after harmonicas, landing on counter-earths, human-bone cigarettes, buildings shaped like golden-fangs erected in a single day. These things are as much designed to break the reader’s suspense of disbelief as they are to fragment the reader’s conception of the text’s reality, to make it less solid, workable or believable even within the realms of its own laws. However, while surreal things do occur in Infinite Jest, they seem to fit with the internal logic of the novel, and the reader is perfectly able to assume and theorise the whys and hows that the text leaves out.