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:
- 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.
- 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.
It does remind me a bit of House of Leaves because of the footnotes and the jumping around from person to person. It is getting less convoluted as it goes along, though. Completely the opposite of House of Leaves.
Footnote 24 was useful to me because that's when I finally figured out how the years work (I'm only a few pages ahead of you in the book). If you look carefully at the filmography, it sorts out several of the Year names, because the filmography is chronological.
Also, did anyone else notice the similarity between one of the films in the filmography and that weird scene earlier where Hal is talking to Himself, and Himself's face slides off? Still haven't figured that one out. Is that earlier scene meant to be a dream, or a recounting of the filming, or what? Mysteries!
I thought the earlier scene really happened, and his face melted off because it was make-up. Maybe Himself was filming it? Or maybe Himself based the film off of that encounter? I like these mysteries!
Yeah, I interpreted it as being Himself's mask/make up peeling away/falling off/melting, and Himself then based the film on that encounter.
That seems like the most reasonable explanation. The movie seems to have been made a year after the scene takes place in the book. This makes me suspect we'll see other scene-to-movie connections later on, perhaps.
WHICH IS RATHER EXCITING, I MIGHT ADD.
Does anyone else think that Magnolia is freakily like an adaptation of Infinite Jest? I saw it last night, and couldn't help being stunned by the similarities, to name but a few: they're both very long, they're both about a large ensemble cast of characters who interact largely by chance, they're both about pretty messed up people, and they both feature father-son relationships prominently.
P. T. Anderson's directing style also reminded me very much of Wallace's writing style. If there's anyone who would make a good adaptation of Infinite Jest (although it would be impossible to do properly, I think it just about could be done, with limitations) it would be him, in my opinion.
I'll have to re-watch it after I finish, but I had never thought of that. Neat!
Your redwood dream reminds me of The Word Shaker; I'm surprised The Book Thief didn't give you flashbacks!
I really want to talk about everything in that second Year of the Depends Adult Undergarment section. The technical stuff and the filmography made me ecstatic. I don't quite understand it, but the annular cold fusion seems to be a perpetual energy generator. I'm not sure if it's referring to the process itself, or the confinement; I saw images of circular confinement devices (I don't know the terminology) while following the Japanese nuclear disaster, and they're actually quite pretty. But I also like the idea of on infinite power source. That section also reminded me of Hal remarking on a "Kekulean knot" in the beginning of the novel — I love all of the circles.
The films are amazing. The production companies seem pretty relevatory, though I'm not sure if James was reflecting current events or predicting them. Meniscus Productions reminded me of the Great Concavity and Convexity and Poor Yorick is an ominous Hamlet reference. I had to look up Latrodectus mactans, and was pleasantly surprised to see that it's the black widow spider, and that name seemed to crop up when the film plot lines shifted to adultery. The films at the end referring to possible temporal lobe damage and muteness? Hi, Hal. One involved a father about to teach his son tennis and ending up rambling drunkenly as the son cries, and that son could be from either generation (though it seems to be Hal). Circular dipsomania and parental pressure. I only really remember the title of one (aside from all of the Infinite Jests) because it included one of my favorite words, and it was Dial C for Concupiscence, which has a medical attache. Hmm. This entire section hints at so many real world events, and is filled with reference to circles, lights, and reflection. I don't think I've ever been so entertained by a footnote.
I may be wrong, but I don't think James went into Method acting so much as he was consumed by it, probably because of his father's failed career before method actors swept onto the scene. I loved the inclusion of a Brando-induced disaster.
Fun fact, I read the section about the half-asleep nightmare in bed, in the dark, with a flashlight. I got to this bit:phone console, desks' TPs, the face in the floor, posters of pros…, and I just about wet myself. Had to stop reading for several minutes to work up the courage to shine my flashlight at my own floor to check there wasnt a face there XD
Oh shit! Thanks, Mitch. I had no idea.
I don't know if anyone reading these comments has ever served before (like at a restaurant) but every server I know, myself included, has "server nightmares" in which you get sat like 12 tables at once and everyone wants everything and you can manage absolutely nothing. All this dream talk got me thinking about it, because I find it so fascinating that literally every server I've ever talked to has these nightmares. Even those that never actually feel that stressed at work, like myself. I just love how the brain works and how dreams can be interpreted, especially recurring ones. Thanks DFW for describing nightmares and the dream state so wonderfully.
It was my understanding that Orin's stunt was just some kind of show that all the players had to do, not just that he was a mascot. Is this correct or has he actually been "demoted" to mascot?? I don't know if it will be relevant to the story later, but I'm curious to know.
You are correct, I don't think he is a 'proper' mascot, but all the players have to put on these costumes at the beginning of the match in a mascot-like manner.
Yeah that's how I read it, he seemed pretty indignant at it, and he obviously has more of an athletic duty than just a mascot.
Also out of all Himself's filmography I'd most like to watch Cage III – Free Show:
" The figure of Death (Heath) presides over the front entrance of a carnival sideshow whose spectators watch performers undergo unspeakable degradations so grotesquely compelling that the spectators’ eyes become larger and larger until the spectators themselves are transformed into gigantic eyeballs in chairs, while on the other side of the sideshow tent the figure of Life (Heaven) uses a megaphone to invite fairgoers to an exhibition in which, if the fairgoers consent to undergo unspeakable degradations, they can witness ordinary persons gradually turn into gigantic eyeballs. "
WOW.
I think my first reaction was "Holy shit." And my second, third and fourth.
DFW has probably the most powerful imagination of any writer I've ever come across.
Ooo, thanks for bringing that up. I wonder if the choice between arrière-garde and après-garde was completely intentional. The arrière-garde is the rear guard, or the trailing end of the movement, whereas an après-garde would be completely after the movement, like kids chasing military trucks. They're not part of the forces at all, but are playing in their dust. Wasn't there a reference to a journal article in the filmography questioning whether Himself ever produced an original work?
Oh heck, I hadn't ever thought of that! That's perfect, and I wouldn't be surprised if it were on purpose. It's true that a lot of his films seem to be based off of preexisting stories or events in his life (the Medusa and the Odalisque, to choose a non-spoilery example), so he does seem to be running behind. He's trying to be so far ahead that he's just cycled back to predictability and recycling.
finished. OK. herm. Well. I'm glad I read it. I think I'd prefer it if Mark doesn't pick it up again. And hey, look! There are serious gaps in my American Gods so I will finally get to "read along with Mark".
Good to see that there are still informative blogs out here, thanks.