The Infinite Jest Read Thru, Part 1

I am not, in general, a fan of reader's guides. Maybe it was my high school teacher's ban on them (particularly Cliff's Notes) which resembled Singapore's drug ban in its swiftness and harshness.  They actually read Cliff's Notes so they could spot resemblance's between the guides' thoughts on a book and our own. Yikes.

I'm not a fan of them because of the way books have a kind of hegemonic authority over our interpretive capacity.  I am worried about swallowing their conclusions and connections wholesale, of letting the guides do the thinking for me.  I want to discover books myself as much as possible (it is perhaps for this reason that I've never even purchased a copy of Ulysses). I do, however, love discussing books with others, so maybe in an effort of group discovery on Infinite Jest, much will be learned. I've invited other people who are reading it to e-mail their thoughts to be posted here at Parabasis, so hopefully we'll get something interesting going on.

Re-reading IJ is a totally different experience. When I first read the book, my familiarity with DFW was limited to his fiction, specifically Brief Interviews With Hideous Men and The Broom of the System (the latter of which I read deliberately as a test run to see if I was "up for" IJ).  In a weird way, though, this is not the best preparation for reading the novel.  His two books of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and Consider The Lobster on the other hand, contain a lot of material that's more deeply connected to the concerns of the novel.  Not that you have to read this stuff to "get" IJ (much of it was written after the novel, after all), but it does provide some good windows into the book, particularly his two essays on writing, Authority And English Usage and E Unibus Pluram.  The former of which is pretty much my favorite thing ever, the latter of which is awesome but I no longer have a copy as a former friend of mine still has the copy of ASFTINDA that I loaned him several years back and as we are really no longer in touch any more, getting it would be totes awkward.

If you want to spend a lot of time reading ancillary DFW material, this fansite has a comprehensive bibliography (with links to publicly available stuff).  Two things i would particularly recommend are the Kenyon College 2005 Commencement Speech and this interview he did with Salon while promoting IJ.

***

Reading the book again, what's striking me is how much easier a book it is to reread. This is because DFW frequently delays exposition for some length of time.  We're told, for example, what year it is, but since the years have names and not numbers ("Year of GLAD" "Year of Dairy Products From The American Heartland") we don't necessarily know what order things come in, only that they are out of.  We see that the abbreviation ONAN is used instead of USA but what ONAN is isn't explained (yet).  Rereading it, I of course know the answers to a lot of that stuff, but I'm going to try stave off revealing it for as long as possible.

Keeping track of who the characters are, what we know about them and when everything takes place is tricky work, but worth it (someone pointed out to me on the phone a connection between two characters I hadn't realized and it's spelled out pretty clearly only 20 pages after you meet one of them).  So we'll try to do that as much as possible.

The first pages (3-17 in my edition) take place in the YEAR OF GLAD.  Here we meet Hal Incandenza (at this point age 18, keeping track of Hal's age is helpful in figuring all of this out).  He's applying to college in Arizona, the same University (we learn) that his older brother Orin (now a pro football player) attended.  We lear some things about Hal: he is a genius as a tennis player and a student, having written papers on subjects like Byzantine pornography so advanced that he is in fact called into this interview because the quality of the work (combined with his low test scores) makes the administration of the school doubt their veracity.

He also attends Enfield Tennis Academy, a boarding school run by his mother and his step-Uncle C.T.

DFW begins the book in first person (not to reveal anything, but the novel won't stay in Hal's head for long), and while the scene he talks about is somewhat humorous and humorously described (there's a part about a character having altogether too many eyebrows that made me giggle out loud) you also get a sense from reading it that there's something dead inside Hal Incandenza.  He seems completely alienated from all other humans and describes them and their actions like they're completely alien to him. Moreover, it's unclear how much he cares about anything that's going on around him.  He has no faith in the Deans surrounding him that he'll be understood and yet refuses to offer an explanation.

The other thing I noticed about this first chapter is that although the language is dense and thorny, and the descriptive prose complex and maybe a wee bit dry ("I have committed to crossing my legs I hope carefully, ankle on knee, hands together in the lap of my slacks. My fingers are mated into a mirrored series of what manifests, to me, as the letter X"), (A) this says a lot about Hal (see above) and (B) this first chapter is actually a perfect flashback-mystery set up. By the end of it, we have a lot of questions planted (here's a few):

(1) What happened the year before? There's multiple references to it being a very tough year, why was it so tough?

(2) Who is Don Gately and why did he and Hal dig up Hal's father's head?

(3) Why does Hal end up speaking gibberish in the meeting with the Deans and end up hospitalized?

There's also a cavalcade of characters at the very end (Cosgrove Watt, deceased, The Moms, Himself, The Grief Therapist, John NR Wayne, the woman with the almost comical Quebecois accent etc.)

This flashback-mystery structure has only gotten more popular since the book's writing, particularly in televisual circles. Just think about how many episodes of Battlestar start with something crazy happening (Apollo floating in space, say) and then suddenly whammo! 48 Hours Earlier appears on the screen.  Anyway, it's interesting to see how deftly DFW is braiding quite a bit of world development and information with genre tropes.

The next section takes place in the Year Of The Depend Adult Undergarment which (we learn later, but not so much later that I consider this a spoiler) is, in fact, the year before the Year of GLAD, in other words, the aforementioned Very Bad Year for Hal Incandenza. Except Hal is nowhere to be seen.  Instead, we meet a character named Erdeddy, waiting for the woman who said she'd come (pages 17-27 in my edition)

All I'll say about this section (as this post is getting long) is what I noticed at this point. First, there's the way that DFW portrays the rituals of addiction.  He's clearly fascinated by them. He goes to great great lengths (and depths, perhaps) to portray Erdeddy's and the different behaviors that surround it.  In Erdeddy's particular case, his addictive ritual is a binger's one, every time he smokes weed it's the Last Time He Will Do It (a final "marijuana vacation" he calls it), so he gets an enormous quantity, smokes huge amounts of  weed, cuts off all contact with the person he's manipulated into getting him the weed, destroys his gear and declares himself sober.

Only you can see that it being the "last last time" is what gets Erdeddy so excited about it. He could, after all, not smoke the week and continue saying that the previous last time was the actual last time. One thing I remember from talking to ex-addict friends of mine is that the shame of being an addict is very much a part of the addiction itself.  You get so convinced that you're a monster that you cut yourself off from others, allowing yourself to continue indulging in your monstrosity because that kind of self-destruction is, on some level, what you deserve. Erdeddy appears here trapped in that. In this case, Erdeddy wants to pretty much obliteratre himself in a weekend of marijuana and masturbation. Waiting for the woman to come with the weed, he commits himself to smoking 120 grams of weed in four days "over an ounce a day... an incredible, insane amount per day, he'd make it a mission, treating it like a penance and behavior-modification regimen all at once, he'd smoke his way through thirty high-grade grams a day, starting the moment he woke up and used ice water to detach his tongue from the roof of his mount and took an antacid-- averaging out to 200 or 300 heavy bong-hits per day, an insane and deliberately unpleasant amount..."

In other words, the self-laceration is part of his addiction. He's hooked on quitting: "He had never been so anxious for the arrival of a woman he did not want to see."  

The section also ends without us knowing if the woman shows up.  Erdeddy has gone so into his head that when both his phone and his front door buzzer ring at once, he is paralyzed deciding between the two, like The Moms running around screaming "my child ate this" in the prologue, he's rendered comical and ineffectual, "splay-legged, arms wildly out as if something's been flung, splayed, entombed between two sounds, without a thought in his head".

There's also one of many DFW references throughout his work to theatre (it's a glancing one, the woman he's working for is a set designer for a Cambridge theatre company that only does German plays, a kind of funny knock, I'm guessing, at A.R.T.'s love of continental European directors) 

UPDATE: Aaron Riccio's take here, in which he mentions looking up the following wors:

mottle: "to mark or diversify with spots or blotches of a different color or shade (or the blotches themselves in noun form)

circumflex: "bearing the mark ~ or ^ or the sounds those marks over letters make" 

lapidary: "someone who cuts and/or polishes precious stones

presbyopic: "farsighted" but I think DFW means it as the opposite of "myopic" in other words farsighted as a visual impairment 

parquet: "a floor composed of short strips of wood forming a pattern"

enfilade: has military connotations (a position of works, troops etc. making them subject to a sweeping fire along their lengths i.e. a trench or a battery) and architectural connotations (an axial arrangement of mirrors creating the illusion of infinitiy or the axial arrangement of doorways in a suite of rooms allowing a view down the whole length of the suite)

Comments

[Aaron]

I love that we're going to have different readings given that you're looking back and I'm looking forward (having only read the first 200 pages before); even with just that small background, I do agree that it's much easier to read through now that I know what the years represent. Nabokov also wrote this way, especially with Lolita, which tells you everything up front, though unrecognizably so for first-time readers.

As for my take on 18-year-old Hal (and I elaborated more on my site because there isn't enough space here), it's all about that first line: "I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies." There's a divide between the physical and the mental, with Hal doing his best to describe things, knowing full well that what he does is not what other people see. (A cross between aphasia and autism?) From what I recall, a lot of the book has this break (which is why some describe DFW as a writer of technical-manual prose), not even including the actual page-turning effect of the interrupting end notes.

So WHY do this? In my reading, it's a meditation on reality--that is, what is it? Is a color-blind person's world any less real? Is Benjy--from The Sound and the Fury--not living in the "real" world? At the least, this would certainly clarify why there are so many potentially "random" characters introduced--they're all making up something far larger than themselves.

[Aaron Leichter]

I've put something up on my blog about the first ten pages.

http://the-fifth-wall.blogspot.com/

But an extra thought, just for your readers: IF really is a funny book. Mostly, it's a cerebral sense of humor, lots of wordplay & grammar games. But the anarchy that erupts when Hal speaks is dramatic farce. Sound & the Fury is an accurate comparison, but so is Cat's Cradle or even Tristam Shandy (AKA the funniest novel you avoided in college).

[Elizabeth]

Something I didn't put together until I read your post is the similarities to Hamlet. Particularly the digging up of the head to reveal a man of infinite jest. But then there is Hal stuck between heads and bodies in a room with his uncle CT who may or may not be Mario's dad, who now also shares the leadership of ETA academy (founded by Hal's dad) with Hal's mother.

[how to write a masters dissertation]

Blogs are good for every one where we get lots of information for any topics nice job keep it up !!!

[Generic Viagra]

hello do you write the part 2?

[Dfstone32]

i just finished IJ and am trying to construct a timeline in my head. The only thing I would add/correct is that Hal's brother Orin went to BU not Arizona. My current puzzle after re-reading the first section is why "the late Cosgrove Watt" is mentioned so conspicuously in the closing of the first scene. His name doesn't sapper for another 900 pages.

There is an obvious connection between JOI's movie "Accomplice!" which starred Watt and Pelumis's brother who appears only once as an adult and as a child during the passage about Pemulis's father.

During Hal's initial breakdown Nov, YDAU (the period when symptoms are really starting to manifest) "Accomplice!" is the movie he watches from the floor of the E.T.A. viewing room. Additionally I believe he asks Pemulis to insert the cartridge into the viewer. Pemulis is trying to interface seriously with Hal (presumably about the fact that John N.R. Wayne is banging Hal's mother, which Hal already knows, or that he may have been accidentally dosed with DMZ). We never find out because Hal dismisses Pemulis's desires to converse seriously. Hal wants nothing of it.

Someone tell me why Cosgrove Watt is so imkportant to Hal during the opening chapter of the Book please! dfstone32 [at] yahoo [dot] com