Reflective Essay

    I love a good mystery.  Well, to be honest I love secrets, gossip and eavesdropping on others’ conversations. If I think you are keeping something from me, I make it my mission to find it out.  As an adult these are not good qualities and are probably a sign that my own life is pretty dull.  As a reader of Infinite Jest, these bad habits really came in handy.  The text is dense with hidden connections between characters, explicit and subtle.  You have to read very closely and remember little details that pay off hundreds of pages later.  It raises dozens of questions as it is being read, and only answers half of them.  By the end of the novel, I began to realize that David Foster Wallace is not attempting to firmly answer anything.  He is merely posing questions and using the text to work out an understanding for himself and the reader.

 “Are we not all of us fanatics?  Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care.”

    Marathe poses this question to Steeply on page 107 and it speaks to one of the larger themes of the novel.  Every major character is fanatical about something.  It could be tennis, sex, film, or sobriety.  While following their passion, they are also trying to make sense of it.  Many of my best reading experiences have been those that force/allow me to look at my life in a new way.  The author is able to put into words what I have been struggling to understand.  Perhaps I interpret the text to imagine a connection to my own experience.  I struggled with this question.  What, in fact, was my own temple of fanaticism?  What if I don’t have one?  Am I lacking something?   

 “Make amusement all you wish.  But choose with care.  You are what you love.  No?  You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice.” – pg. 107

    What would I die for without thinking twice about it?  The characters in the novel have so much to care about; there lives seem so full and rich.  Even the folks in the Ennet House have such compelling histories and inner lives.  As a writer, I have often thought that my soft upper-middle-class-suburban-white upbringing may have deprived me of a certain edge.  It is a mistake to believe that you must suffer for your art, but you have to admit there are some famous examples to the contrary.  I have never been to rehab or prison or a mental institution of any kind.  The content of the novel lead me to consider David Foster Wallace’s own history and how much of his life informs his work.  

   There are characters that exist outside the tragic and traumatic circumstances of the others.  Teddy Schacht was of great interest to me throughout the novel.  He is an extremely well-adjusted teenager.  He has decided due to illness and injury to forsake the dream of tennis stardom and instead pursue a realistic goal of dentistry.  Now he plays for the sport of it, not the competition.  Hal describes him as being nicer now than he was before the injury.  He could easily have turned to drugs at the loss of his potential, but he didn’t.  His strong mental state is proved by his closeness to Schtitt.  I am so envious of him.  As a teenager I suffered from anxiety and depression and could barely speak to my classmates.  Even now, I am far away from the kind of emotional maturity that Schacht exhibits.  If Hal had followed Schacht’s example might his circumstances have changed?  Is there anything or anyone that can reverse the psychotic depression described in the novel?    

 “It is a level of psychic pain…It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil…It is a nausea of the cells and soul. 

It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed.” – 695-696

    As a reader I have found very few books that are able to accurately describe the feeling of depression beyond the usual clichés.  In the memoir genre there are some, I found Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel particularly honest, but in fiction they are rare.  This is why I found David Foster Wallace’s words so frighteningly accurate and impressive.  He seems to have a deep understanding of sadness, depression, and anhedonia.  As a writer I have never been able to put my own experience with the disease into proper language.  Hal struggles to contain something within himself that is out of his control.  There is no cure and untreated there is really only one conclusion.  Hal’s experiences pulled me in as they were so different, but so similar to my own.  I understood his pain if that makes any sense and rooted for him to improve.  This is why when others called his behavior a breakthrough I saw a breaking down. 

    There is no way to be sure.  The novel ends without giving the reader a definite answer for his behavior at the beginning.  I am not giving up.  I am convinced that the explanation is in there somewhere.  Perhaps there are more clues in the endnotes, or in a flashback.   Unfortunately even I find an answer I can accept it may just be one of many possible solutions.  As David Foster Wallace was sure to know, in math it is not finding the correct answer that matters.  It is more important that you show your work.

Blog Post #7

When I tell people about the class being centered around one book they inevitably ask, “What is it about?”  I can honestly say I have never had more difficulty answering that question than I have with IJ.  I have reached the point where I reply, “It’s about everything.”  Now that we have reached the end of the novel, I think that may be a pretty good description.  I believe IJ is about two men, Hal and Gately, and about their attempts to understand themselves and the world they live in.  That world is populated by addicts, tennis players, fathers, brothers, drugs, terrorists, violence and film.  I believe IJ is also about so much more than that.  It is full of philosophical questions, mathematical formulas and Freudian psychology.  It includes various literary and cinematic allusions both obvious and subtle.  I wonder if this is what the inside of DFW’s brain looked like.  

What has surprised me most about finishing the novel is that I wish there were more pages.  I want more clues to the various unanswered questions.  I want to discover more connections between the characters.  I want back into the world DFW has created.  Even the foot/endnotes can stay.  I keep returning to the film descriptions in endnote 24.  Most of all, to be completely honest, I want to know that Hal and Gately survive the events of the Year of Glad.  I realize it’s kind of pathetic to be concerned for fictional characters, but I can’t help it.  Do I understand everything about Infinite Jest?  No way.  I doubt I ever could.  However, I leave the experience of reading the novel fully satisfied.

Blog Post #6

The journey through Infinite Jest comes to an end with a flashback to Gately watching his partner in crime Fax get his eyes sewn open and drops applied (A Clockwork Orange style which is referenced by Gately).  This as Gately succumbs to the pleasures of Sunshine, a drug from Canada.  He passes out and wakes up on the beach.  Was this all a dream, brought on by fever?  The image of him on the beach brings to mind his dream about running away from his mother into the water.  It was an abrupt ending to his story.  Not that I was expecting a nice neat resolution.

On the other hand, Hal revealed a lot more about his feelings about his family in this section than we have heard before.  He knew all along about his mother’s various indiscretions with John Wayne and others.  He knew the nature of her relationship with Charles Tavis and presumably that Mario is C.T.’s son.  It seems he misses his father and regrets never really knowing him.  He is jealous of Orin’s sex talk with Himself, even though Orin did not take it seriously.  He also seems headed for a nervous breakdown, which provides insight into the beginning of the novel.

Orin, undone by roaches trapped in a tumbler, as he became the Subject.  It was obviously his greatest fear come to life and made me think if this connects to Himself’s fears of black widow spiders.  Who is the black widow in Himself’s life?  Is it Avril, who quickly replaced him with C.T.?  Is it Joelle? 

Speaking of Joelle Van Dyne a.k.a. Madame Psychosis a.k.a. Lucille Duquette, she was disfigured in yet another of those comic/tragic events that occur so often in IJ.  I have said my peace about her in previous posts and my opinion of her has not changed.  I do find it interesting that the two men who claimed to love her could have prevented her injury, but chose to protect themselves instead.    It is in keeping with the negative effect of the father on the child we have discussed in class.  Here the effect is literal and damage is all over her map. 

Another example of this theme is the Inner Infant meeting Hal mistakenly goes to.  Grown men, all with beards, clutch teddy bears to their chests and behave as their inner child.  The scene is hilarious on many levels.  Hal is horrified, but he kind of belongs there.  His “inner child” has all kinds of unexpressed grief and anger that he should vocalize.  Not in that setting of course, but he needs to get out of his own head.  Instead, he sits and watches his father’s movies, ignoring his friends and classmates.  Hal has no understanding of how to honestly interface with someone and instead turns to Himself’s films for a human connection.  We see at the beginning of the novel the consequences for him. 

Random thought:  The Accomplice, stars Dark Star Stokely as the prostitute who we know through Poor Tony.  I keep returning to footnote 24 and finding more connections to the events of the novel.

Blog Post #5

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean everyone isn’t out to get you.  This is proved by Troeltsch’s claims that the milk has been replaced with powdered.  His conspiracy theory is actually true.  The powdered milk is passed off as real milk supposedly because it contains half the fat.   The fact that it is also much cheaper than real milk is not brought up.    So appearances can be deceiving and if you dig deep enough there is truth to be found.  It is nice to see “the boys” together and not really talking about tennis.  In fact they are purposely not talking about it to avoid upsetting anyone.  Hal is starting to lose his grip, but is it really the drugs?  His issues run much deeper than that.  Hal’s take on sex is also interesting.  He seems to be completely out of the loop.  He claims asexuality is normal at tennis academies (a bizarre and impossible to substantiate claim).  Plus he has definitely misread his buddies Axford and Troeltsch, as we will soon find out. 

To be fair the other players don’t have a real sense of Hal either.  They feel that he, like his father, suffers from anhedonia.  This is too easy an answer and does not begin to address Hal’s emptiness.  In fact, on 695, he explains that he longs for anhedonia, that he is lonely for it.  Instead he feels that there is nothing inside him and he can barely remember a time when he felt anything.  Hal’s depression runs deep and no one (except Mario) has any idea.  At this point, I have to say Wallace’s ability to convey/describe mental illness is stunning and impressive.  The description of It at the bottom of 695 is particulary well put.   Also, it nicely links to the Ennet House/AA storyline the way mental illness and addiction often go hand in hand. 

Random thought:  I want to see Blood Sister: One Tough Nun in a movie theater right now.

Blog Post #4

It is funny how, following the conversation we had in class, that within the beginning of the reading Joelle tells us the mantra of the U.H.I.D.  The veil is “a Type and a Symbol, and the they are choosing freely to be bound to wear it always…(534)”  I am a little unclear what that means.  The veil is a type?  A type of what?  I can guess what the symbolism of the veil is…  It seems the more I learn about Joelle the less I care about her as a character.  She seems a little quick to play the victim, with the veil, the drugs, the suicide attempt.  Himself, her own personal Daddy, Orin.  She wears the veil not only to conceal possible disfigurement, but also to show everyone how isolating it is to be disfigured.  Lest they forget. 

Randy Lenz is suddenly thrust to the forefront in this section.  A clear sociopath, who is quickly working his way up to murdering people.  He is slowed down only by the presence of Bruce Green and there family histories have a unique connection.  Both of their mothers were undone in hilarious, and hard to believe, ways.  Again we are confronted in the novel by how much the past, specifically our childhood, informs the rest of our lives. 

Lenz’ desire for more animals to demap parallels nicely with Orin’s need for more Subjects to feed his enormous ego.  He needs them all to feel “that he is the One,” (566).  He blames Joelle for this, but clearly this is something he is perpetuating and has even developed a routine (or fetish) he expects his Subjects to follow.  Up to now we have attributed Orin’s sex addiction to Himself, but given Avril’s indiscretion with John Wayne we may have another genetic link.  

I can not forget Gately’s heroic moment, an almost cliche of a redemptive act.  Standing in defense of Lenz, a man he knows is using drugs, and even taking a bullet for him.  He is a martyr for AA.  It reminds me of the secondary source I read for the class wiki.  In the article, they stated that Wallace was trying to write a post-modern novel without irony.  He intended to write something hopeful for humanity.  If that is true, then Gately’s actions represent that well.  Of course it does seem like Gately stomped those Canadians to death, so the novel isn’t so hopeful for them.

Blog Post #3

In this section all of our most pressing Mario related questions are answered.  We learn the circumstances of his birth, and get a full description of him.  More importantly we begin to understand the role he plays in the family.  Mario was the closest to Himself, often travelling with him on film shoots.  Orin hates him and seems to have no contact with him.  Hal “idealizes Mario” and considers him to be a miracle.  Also it is an interesting sidenote learning that it was Mario who got the dictionaries that lead to Hal becoming the prodigy he is considered to be.  Mario is fascinating because he seems to exist in a separate universe from the rest of the characters.  He is without ego, and without any particular ambitions.  He maintains that Zen like attitude which we have seen in Schacht.  It is unclear if this is a result of his birth defects or a choice he is making. 

I was completely fascinated by the tour through Boston AA meetings/culture.  I have no idea how much is true and much is fiction, but it all felt authentic to me.  I have given in to Gately and despite his history I think he is the most reliable narrator in the novel.  The parallels between Gately and Hal are becoming more and more apparent.  Gately’s strange and horrific dreams are so similar to Hal’s that both even see the Face in the Floor (347).  However, is the comparison that being in AA is like being in a tennis academy?  I don’t know if I quite believe that at this point. 

I was glad that they explained the governmental structure of this world (as strange as those are) and the idea behind Interdependence Day is clever.  Interdependence sounds like another way of saying codependence, a concept all the addicts in the novel should understand.

How hilarious and crazy is the story of Eric Clipperton?

Blog Post #2

Addiction.  We can continue the discussion we began in class through the pages devoted to Joelle Van Dyne a.k.a. Madame Psychosis as she prepares to eliminate her map by overdosing on cocaine.  She serves as a kind of Erdedy/Gompert hybrid as she obsessively prepares and anticipates both the last big high and her own death.  The reasons behind her desire to end her life seems much more obvious than Gompert’s.  Disfigured by acid, and covering her face in a veil she is clearly disconnected from her peers.  Also, she suffered the emotional abandonment of both Orin, who accused her of sleeping with his father, and James who cooked his head in a microwave oven.  However, she handles her addiction much like Erdedy, swearing it off for good, destroying all supplies and then returning to it with excitement and anticipation.

Contrastly, we learn much more about Teddy Schacht in this section.  While an admitted casual drug user, he can not be considered an addict.  More importantly, he does not suffer from what we could call the tennis addiction that plagues the rest of his peers.  He has resigned himself, due to injury and illness, to a career as a dentist.  Now he plays for the sport of it, not the competition.  Hal describes him as being nicer now than he was before the injury.  He could easily have turned to drugs at the loss of his potential, but he didn’t.  His strong mental state is proved by his closeness to Schtitt.  Is he the embodiment of Schtitt’s philosophy of tennis?  Or is he pathetic, having given himself away to nothing?  Could he possibly be Hal’s non-action hero? 

Random thoughts:

*Speaking of Hal, there is something not quite right about his conversation with Orin.  His description of finding his dead father is cold and distant.  His (mis)treatment of his grief counselor, while very funny, was pretty disturbing.    

*So, Don Gately and co. refer to addiction as The Spider that you can either Feed or Starve.  Interesting.

Blog Post #1

    Through the discussion between Marathe and Steeply we begin to understand some of what has transpired politically in the alternate universe of the book.   The connection between the medical attache and the Moms is made clear on pg. 91. Then the Entertainment is assumed to be some form of revenge?  Seems unlikely.  A memorable passage is the “herd of feral hamsters” running across a disturbing landscape.  I am not touching that one. 

        I find it interesting that Hal enjoys being a Big Buddy, and how his conversation with them, specifically his references to loneliness tell alot about his character.  The possibly uncomfortable conversation leads him to a nicotine craving and to question again why he is doing drugs.  We spoke about the ritualistic and elaborate ways the addict’s would do drugs.  We can add to that now, the way they cover their drug use to pass urine tests.  Marathe’s comments about fanaticism, on pg. 107 seem to speak to a larger theme of the novel.  It reminded me of what we had discussed in class regarding Hal’s attitude towards drugs.  We should all choose our temple of fanaticism with great care.  Whether the temple is sports or drugs or a woman.  Speaking of women, there were three references to men dressing in drag in this section.  Hugh Steeply, the U.S.S. Millicent Kent’s Old Man, and Poor Tony.  I do not know what to make of that.  Or what to make of Madame Psychosis, the strangest radio personality of all time.              

Random thoughts:

*on page 95 the boys are discussing the famous Anna Karenina quotation, Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.  Something Hal can relate to.

*On page 171 Hal is reading Tilden on Spin.  Wiki Bill Tilden; he’s mentioned in Lolita!

*Lyle?  He lives in the weight room and lives off sweat.  Anyone?