Mark Reads ‘Infinite Jest’: pp 60-68

I’m actually enjoying the sensation that once I feel like I know what’s going on, David Foster Wallace laughs from his grave because this book is not really meant to be understood in any way I’m used to. And that challenge — to read a book as convoluted and pedantic as this — is definitely something I’m beginning to enjoy.

I must not go so long again before reading this again.

I’ve only chosen nine full pages to read for a few reasons, the main one being the fact that there’s so much information in these nine dense pages that I worry about taking on too much per review and not noticing or appreciating the details. (Which is not to say that all the details are necessary at this point, but I do want to make sure I’m not just reading large swaths of Infinite Jest just to get to finish it. This book is too intricate (and hard) to rush through. And then, on top of all of that, we get our first multi-page footnote and it is a fucking trip, y’all. But more on that when we arrive there.

3 NOVEMBER — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

DFW spends time with one of the students at E.T.A. and there are so many ridiculous details thrown our way, not only about the culture of the school, but of the inherent terror of dreams, that I had to re-read a good deal of segments just to comprehend the words on the page. I totally get why people have such a hard time read this book and why so many people have given up along the way. DFW is not making this easy for anyone, let alone himself. I get that people get to his large rants about drug use and colloquial language or medical terminology, and even if he defines these with footnotes, it’s an exhausting journey for sure. (Part of the reason I stuck only with nine pages, too.)

Jim Troeltsch is sick. I don’t know how that’s going to relate to the story as a whole, but I suppose that doesn’t even matter. DFW seems to operate in thematic waves, as we move from paranoia to obsession to the fright of a nightmare, something about each segment has ties to the last part. As I came to see, what DFW talks about here, surrounding Troeltsch’s sickness relates to the next segment about Dr. Icandenza and to Orin’s absurdly surreal display in the one right after it.

I don’t know if I should credit any of this with DFW’s research or if he was truly just knowledgable about this, but despite the inherent difficulty of all this, it’s amazing how well we can understand exactly what he’s talking about once we break it down. With Troeltsch’s story, the banal idea of a rush of sickness and the effects it has may seem so inconsequential, but it’s eerie that DFW can describe it right down to the very last detail of what that experience is, from building the world that Troeltsch lives in, to supplying all the matter-of-fact terms about what he’s going through, to the collection of drugs on the bedside table….there’s no shortage of information. Sure, his tone can be dry at times, but it’s that methodical nature that gives this all such an authentic feel. Hell, I can even imagine Pemulis’s poster of the paranoid king. (Which, by the way, is the first footnote of the book the references a later footnote. How does that exactly work? How would DFW know that footnote 211 would be about that poster? Just a thought.)

But even aside from such things, there’s an element of humor coded into this when I read it, since it reminds me of those times in my life where I truly believed I was in my last moments because of a cold or the flu, and I think that’s something a lot of us can relate to, and I can’t help but read that sort of humor in parts like this:

He speculated on if yesterday when Graham Rader pretended to sneeze on J. Troeltsch’s lunch-tray at the milk-dispenser at lunch if Radar might have really sneezed and only pretended to pretend, transferring virulent rhinoviri to Troeltsch’s delicate mucosa. He feverishly mentally calls down various cosmic retributions on Rader.

It feels great to be validated on two things here:

1. My desire to constantly assign blame to one person who got me sick, even if I have no real evidence and the act merely exists to perpetuate a grudge.
2. My constant assignment of cosmic retribution on people. How many times have I wished the earth would eat up and gobble people? Or comets would blow people up or decimate entire groups of people?

Glad to know that even a fictional character has the same brain as I do.

I’m the kind of person who doesn’t get sick often, but when I do, it’s short and nasty and brutish. In fact, it’s precisely the kind of sick that Troeltsch is right here, the kind where reality seems to seep away and time slows to a crawl and the waking dreams I experience mix so well with real life that I end up feeling exhausted. Hell, why am I describing this? DFW does a much better job than I do:

It’s one of those unpleasant opioid feverish half-sleep states, more of a fugue-state than a sleep-state, less a floating than like being cast adrift on rough seas, tossed mightily in an out of this half-sleep where your mind’s still working and you can ask yourself whether you’re asleep even as you dream. And any dreams you do have seem ragged at the edges, gnawed on, incomplete.

Seriously, the man’s got a gift.

And then, DFW switches to first-person.  Are we back to Hal? Is this now from Jim’s perspective? Again, I understand why this confuses people, as it’s confusing to me and I’m reading this book at a painfully slow pace. It wasn’t until the very last line of this “chapter” that I figured it out:

…you lie there, awake and almost twelve, believing with all your might.

It’s Hal. Is Hal telling us this entire story? That’d be pretty interesting.

Identity aside, it’s an elaboration on the idea of this half-sleep dream state and how they relate to the reoccurring nightmare.

Actually, it’s something I’ve always wanted the means (and the reason) to talk about with other people, but I’m interested in how others read this section about a reoccurring dream can blend with reality in a way that you not only believe it is really happening, but it feels that way. So much of what DFW describes here involves physical cues, from the room that Hal is in (I’m assuming this is Jim Troeltsch because it doesn’t make sense to be anyone else), to the people who inhabit it, to the way that light and one’s perception of the darkness that swallows it up can make the must mundane of objects terrifying and sinister.

It’s been a long, long time since I had a reoccurring dream or nightmare, though I must admit that these days, I generally cannot remember my dreams anymore. For as long as I can remember, though, most of my dreams are lucid in nature, meaning that I am completely aware that I am dreaming. In that sense, the way that reality bends from when I go to sleep to how I experience it inside my head while dreaming has always been a hard thing to describe to other people. I’ve actually fallen asleep but knew I was and knew that I entered straight into a dream. So in the dream, I’m actually laying in bed. YES, MY BRAIN IS WEIRD.

Most of dreams as a kid and a teenager were of this nature. Sometimes I knew going into the dream that it wasn’t real, but I recall that most times I’d simply come to knowing it was all a dream. However, I was always plagued by one non-lucid dream. I had it for the first time when I was living in Boise, Idaho. I was seven, and for the next ten years or so, there wasn’t a month that would go by where I did not have this dream, though about ten years ago, it all stopped and I’ve not had it since then.

I’m always in a redwoods forest with tall, towering trees blocking out almost all of the sunlight. It’s not dark out, but the trees are so dense that no rays of light hit the forest floor. It’s the same every time: A tree bends down to my face and starts talking to me. WHY. Naturally, this frightens me, so I begin to run through the forest to escape, and then all the trees start talking to me and trying to yell at me to stop, and they’re calling me names and I can’t make it stop.

The worst part, though, is the fact that time literally slows down, almost as if my dream is playing out at a dramatically reduced frame rate, and I start to grind my teeth because it’s almost as if I can feel time, and just as I fall to the ground and feel the trees surrounding me, I wake up.

Time and time again, I wake up at the exact moment and I never find anything else out about that dream. But I’ve had that dream over a hundred times in my life, and not a single detail ever seems to change. But it was so real that I believed it to be a memory of something for a while, until I just accepted that my brain was fucking weird.

I’m perfectly fine with that.

AS OF THE YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

This segment is even more matter-of-fact than pretty much anything aside from the attachés’s “chapter” earlier in the book, and I’m pretty happy this is the case, too. Because we get SO MUCH INFORMATION ABOUT ALL OF THIS IN JUST TWO PAGES. We learn very explicitly that E.T.A. was formed by Hal’s father, that he moved into Method acting and filmmaking, and that, like many of the characters in Infinite Jest, obsession rules his life. We learn about the ridiculous things that he did as a “applied-geometrical-optics man in the O.N.R. and S.A.C.” And I cannot even pretend I know an iota of what DFW says here, even though I cracked open my dictionary and Google to attempt to decipher the string of hyper-technical words and phrases dropped in our laps. From there, we learn that he then opened E.T.A. as a way to escape the world of hard science, and from there he moved into “apres-garde” filmmaking — literally the antithesis to “avant garde.” It’s at this point, where DFW’s narration states that Dr. Incandenza’s foray into filmmaking was “admittedly just plain pretentious and unengaging and bad,” that we get handed Foonote Number Twenty-Four. And it gets a title like that.

That footnote is the entire filmography of J. O. Incandenza. And it is PAGES long. I don’t want to say that it’s disposable, since it’s not at all, but I don’t necessarily think I should “review” that footnote, though there’s a lot of funny and weird shit in that man’s filmography. What I do care about mentioning is something I know has to play into the larger story: James Orin Incandenza made five attempts at a film called Infinite Jest. (Are they attempts? Or five parts? Or is it really six parts, as one of the footnotes suggests?) So, now I know where the title of the book comes from and I have a much, much better idea of the setting and basis for all of this. But what exactly is in that film? Why make it five (six) times, and why do the footnotes seem to suggest something grandiose about the mere existence of the film? (I also cannot ignore how much this is reminding me of House of Leaves. I’ll leave this commentary alone until a later date.)

Hmmm. I am very, very intrigued.

DENVER, CO, 1 NOVEMBER
YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

So Orin is a mascot, eh? How’d he get up to Denver and how’d he end up being an official mascot for some professional sports team? (The Denver Broncos?)

I don’t have anything particularly insightful to say about this segment, except that it made me smile. DFW never seemed to ignore the humor of this all, and for that, I appreciate him.