9–10 - Notes on DFW’s “Infinite Jest,” With Autobiographical Digressions, Part 1 of X

“The footnote, like any other significant invention, begins as an idea in someone's swirling gray matter, then seeks a way through human distractions, daydreams, fantasies, arguments, and conflicts, and then gets itself transformed into a “thing.”

—Chuck Zerby, The Devil’s Details: A History of Footnotes

I was able to finally give myself this summer to David Foster Wallace’s 1996 summum opus Infinite Jest. My twentieth anniversary edition may have a foreword—a sweet reflection from a friend of the author’s—but by now it surely needs no introduction. Nearly thirty years on it continues to appear, weekly it seems, in “Best of” lists. “Must Read,” “Most Overrated,” “Overanalyzed,” etc. My generation grew up with it. It’s a one-of-a-kind novel (seriously, there’s nothing like it) that is, essentially, a collection of extended vignettes and deeply intertwined stories about a Boston halfway house, tennis academy, and Tucson bluff sundown conversation, in no particular order. The reader is presented with such thought-by-ponderous-thought-rate third-person narrative that they feel, that they taste the sweat, say. Like they’re living vicariously through each character’s every quale. Far from being the “failed entertainment” that Wallace originally wanted to title it, the 1000-plus-page beast of a novel has so much relevance for the way we—as Americans, or at least denizens of the Western world—think today, I can see why it’s still in the conversation. Zerby calls the footnote a “thing.” Infinite Jest is, certainly, that, and so much more.

Full so far of all to which the above quote alludes—distractions, daydreams, fantasy, arguments, conflicts—Infinite Jest has nearly 400 footnotes. Number 24, on page 64, lasts for seven-and-a-half pages. Upon first read-through, and not having felt the need to be apprised of the late filmmaker and educator Dr. James O. Incandenza’s list of movies, finished and otherwise, I’d skipped over it. I was wrong to do this.

On Page 89, nested footnote 39b (the footnotes have footnotes), leads the reader to Footnote 304, which also lasts for seven pages, and tells the nested story of James Struck, Jr., currently enrolled in an outrageously specific humanities course at the aforementioned tennis academy. He’s plagiarizing an obscure article about a Canadian railway pastime. (It was at this point that I finally deigned turn to the back of the book in order to take in 24.) While in Footnote 304, the narrator relating Struck’s plight pans out and back to main character Harold Incandenza—whom we meet, soliloquizing, on Page 1. Hal, son of the aforementioned filmmaker, self-identified “lexical prodigy, and “possible genius at tennis,” is beyond brilliant. Quite possibly a fictional foil for the author, he doesn’t need to resort to copying anyone else’s anything. Not so much, in this reader’s opinion, a question of ethics or even personal pride, Hal is prolix, loquacious, self-composed, confident. He’s ever ready to write. The narrator relates his thoughts on the matter:

“Congenital plagiarists aren’t lazy so much as kind of navigationally insecure. They have trouble navigating without a detailed map’s assurance that somebody has been this way before them.”

Navigationally insecure. I appreciate this perspective. One thing I learned last school year was that students today need more writing structure than ever before. Sentence frames, paragraph frames, predictive text. What other response than enthusiastic, if surreptitious, acceptance can the modern secondary student of English bring to the bot or agent that can, very simply, do the writing for them? Indeed, at the beginning of Footnote 304, we see Struck looking unsuccessfully for an inroad with which to answer the paper’s prompt. It can be all-fired difficult, looking at a blank page, trying to come up with something good, something you think that the individual under whose authority you toil, will accept. You know this: the temptation to plagiarize is perennial. But now it’s easy as water. Relying on his French writing teacher’s lack of fluency, or at least facility, in English, Struck chooses to paraphrase wholesale the article in question. With, what this reader, and writer, assumes, will be disastrous, if hilarious, consequences. It’s risible, this late-night scholar manqué trying his hardest to outthink his teacher, or at least his mental model of his teacher. I really wonder just what goes on in the life and mind of the student who has, for all the time of the lesson and more, staved off the putative impulse to put pen to paper and show up and produce their piece. Maybe they aren’t busy, just resigned to letting someone or something do their writing for them? Maybe it’s more. Hal, from his once-removed reverie, cites a sense of trepidation and reluctance in his classmate. I see of late the atrophy of the curious and creative impulse. Staring at a screen—phone, TV, PC, whatever—for hours and hours on end causes catatonia. Wait. That’s essentially IJ’s plot. From 1996.

I see that Footnote 45 also leads to Footnote 304. I’m grateful to have already read it. Please understand, it wasn’t until after I’d taken in Struck’s aside that I decided to turn back and take in Footnote 24; the elder Incandenza’s oeuvre. Much was learned. It seems it was his “unseen and unfinished first attempt at commercial entertainment,” titled Infinite Jest, that’s causing people to straight up lose it. The sins of the father, as it were, and the reactor core around which this story rotates. At present, and by my count, there are twenty or so individuals who have become incapacitated.

I’m a hundred or so pages in, roughly a tenth of the way through. Maybe with the exception of Bronson’s Bombardiers, no fiction has ever made me laugh like this. (I can’t wait to read that one again, maybe next summer when I’ve finished Jest.) And barring the scene, deep within Rothfuss’ Name of the Wind, when the main character realizes, spoiler alert, that his love interest is, unbeknownst to her, writing, singing, working, performing for the enemy, I’ve never put down a novel and stared slackjawed into the middle distance. I was, around Page 14, and to quote Hugh Steeply in Jest, “unprepared for an entertainment like this.” And I can’t recall ever needing two bookmarks for the novel I’m in. The second one’s for the footnotes, you understand.

Rémy Marathe, from his wheelchair, overlooking the lights of Tucson, asks Steeply, his American compatriot: “Who teaches your U.S.A. children how to choose their temple? What to love enough not to think two times?”

Steeply responds: “What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love?”

I know I’m proof-texting here. I also don’t know what to say in response. It scares me a little. We’ll talk next time about Wallace’s futurism, as Jest takes place in the first two decades of the millennium. We’re beyond it by now, far as I know. But what makes the novel so enduring (and, dare I say, endearing) is its vision of a future that almost was, yes, but that was, in this writer’s opinion, so weirdly different from what actually happened—what has actually transpired. Those drastic divergences, and signal similarities, make Infinite Jest a novel for right now.

“[A] scholar's research surely should not be game of hide-and-seek—though a sense of play and child's capacity to wonder (and wander) are essential to the scholar, of course.” —Chuck Zerby

Infinite Jest is nothing if not playful. But there’s a serious core that I have only yet begun to wrap my mind around.