Why I detest "Infinite Jest"
Narrative Architecture #2
This is the second chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with David Foster Wallace’s infamously footnoted doorstop, Infinite Jest (Back Bay Books, 2006). Spoilers throughout, but if you haven’t read this one already, are you really going to read a 1,104 page book?
This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.
To put it simpler than David Foster Wallace would ever have it—Infinite Jest is a loose, postmodern retelling of Hamlet through the guise of the tragic Incandenza family, whose patriarch, James O. Incandenza, Jr., committed suicide in the recent past. The late Incandenza formed the center of a constellation of institutions—he was the founder of a Massachusetts tennis academy, its affiliate rehab center, and the creator of many experimental indie films, the final of which is the eponymous Infinite Jest, a rare film with a supernatural aura—no one can stop watching once they begin.
Meanwhile, Quebecois separatists alternately known as “the Wheelchair Assassins” and the US “Office of Unspecified Services” compete to find a master copy of the “Entertainment,” as the supernatural film is known, with the fate of North America hanging in the balance. The overarching theme of the novel is addiction, with various characters struggling with different types of substance abuse—drugs, alcoholism, and watching TV through “cartridges” (reflective of VCR culture then, prescient of binge-streaming culture now).
And while there are many characters in this dizzying novel, at least two of them can be considered “main”—“Hal” Incandenza, the Hamlet stand-in and son of the late patriarch, a tennis player who is trying to shake a drug addiction before a tennis tournament—and Don Gately, a recovering addict at the rehab center who is in love with Joelle Van Dyne, a woman who also happened to be the former lover of Hal’s brother, Orin, as well as serving as the late Incandenza’s chief cinematic muse.
While there were many rhetorical flourishes or sections in Infinite Jest I enjoyed when I read it—to be perfectly honest, most of the time I picked the book up, I got a headache. It is undeniably an impressive work, and I can’t imagine how much time DFW spent typing away with that bandana strapped to his head. But there’s a certain hubris that comes with writing anything this long, and from a screenwriting perspective, long books are generally not written with an eye for the pacing department. Once you reach page 700, isn’t it more economically viable to split the book into two?
So I guess I would say that Infinite Jest is ingeniously constructed, carefully playing what I’d call a “long con”—building up to a payoff which doesn’t entirely materialize. We start at the end of the book’s timeline, when Hal is having some sort of nervous breakdown, but we as readers don’t exactly understand what is going on. Also, in a humorous foreshadowing, we witness the process of an Arab diplomat who accidentally stumbles upon the irresistable Entertainment and becomes addicted; periodically we are treated to a one-line update, such as: “At 2010h. on 1 April Y.D.A.U., the medical attaché is still watching the unlabelled entertainment cartridge” (Wallace 42). When inevitably more people are drawn into the attaché’s room, they are also caught in the infinite loop of the film, until federal agents cut the power and end the carnage.
These early sections feel a bit more controlled and accessible than the stream-of-consciousness tempest that Wallace unleashes for much of the novel’s length. The novel’s famous footnotes which undergird the text and create a story-within-a-story start slow, too—the first note appears on p. 23, the second on p. 46, until eventually we are bombarded with a cacophony around p. 53, a blitz which doesn’t really hold up until we finish the novel; the footnotes top out at 388 in total.
The best footnotes are probably the extended catalogue of James O. Incandenza’s films (Note 24, pp. 985-993) and the lecture describing the hazing ritual of the Wheelchair Assassins (Note 304, pp. 1055-1062), both of which are cited more than once and feature notes-within-notes. However, there are so many footnotes with little or meaningless impact, such as various definitions of drugs in the novel, I would sigh every time I found a footnote that was longer than one line. While Wallace is indeed a trailblazer when it came to the footnote technique, I think that Nabokov’s precedent in Pale Fire and the later Mark Z. Danielewski book House of Leaves are superior efforts within the postmodern footnote subgenre, mostly because a greater proportion of the footnotes in those books matter—the majority have a direct result on the trajectory and outcome of the story; in Pale Fire, they are the story. However, I wonder that if you cannot sum up what you want to say in a manageable length, perhaps you have nothing to say at all.
I think the fear of not having anything to say was part of DFW’s point in the novel, which seems to focus on a very 1990s anxiety about American malaise and a disenchantment with America’s future in a postmodern, postindustrial, globalizing, Neoliberal world, themes also tread on (and more efficiently) by writers like Don DeLillo in White Noise. This theme is emphasized by the extended conversations between Marathe, a triple (or perhaps quadruple) agent of the Wheelchair Assassins, and the trans American spy, Hugh/Helen Steeply:
Marathe made small emphatic circles and cuts in the air while he spoke: ‘These facts of situation, which speak so loudly of your Bureau’s fear of this samizdat: now is what has happened when a people choose nothing over themselves to love, each one. A U.S.A. that would die—and let its children die, each one—for the so-called perfect Entertainment, this film. Who would die for this chance to be fed this death of pleasure with spoons, in their warm homes, alone, unmoving: Hugh Steeply, in complete seriousness as a citizen of your neighbor I say to you: forget for a moment the Entertainment, and think instead about a U.S.A. where such a thing could be possible enough for your Office to fear: can such a U.S.A. hope to survive for a much longer time? To survive as a nation of peoples? To much less exercise dominion over other nations of other peoples? If these are other peoples who still know what it is to choose? who will die for something larger? who will sacrifice the warm home, the loved woman at home, their legs, their life even, for something more than their own wishes of sentiment? who would choose not to die for pleasure, alone?’ (Wallace 318)
When Marathe asks—“Can such a U.S.A. hope to survive for a much longer time? To survive as a nation of peoples?... who would choose not to die for pleasure, alone?”—he spells out the central question of the novel. Most of the novel’s characters are troubled by their addictions and an anxiety about the future and their place in it. This is somewhat complicated by the geopolitical complication in the novel, that America has absorbed Canada and Mexico into a super NAFTA state called the “Organized North American Nations” or O.N.A.N.; meanwhile, the American president is a drugged-out former “crooner” who has determined that a large part of the Midwest around Michigan should become “the Concavity” to store excess trash; and finally the US has sold the naming rights to calendar years to corporations, leading to the book’s “Year of the Whopper,” “Year of Glad,” and of course, the main timeline year: “Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment.” I enjoyed these satirical, Vonnegut-esque details, which are gradually explained as you proceed through the novel, but they feel like window dressing compared to the extremely dense and complicated plotting and non-plotting around them.
One of the troubling ironies of Infinite Jest is that some of the most beautiful sections, such as Joelle Van Dyne’s introduction (though at this point we’ve already seen her in the guise of radio host Madame Psychosis (Wallace 182) seem to be built entirely around jokes:
For a while, after the acid, after first Orin left and then Jim came and made her sit through that filmed apology-scene and then vanished and then came back but only to—only four years seven months six days past—to leave, for a while, after taking the veil, for a while she liked to get really high and clean. Joelle did. Scrub sinks until they were mint-white. Dust the ceilings without using any kind of ladder. Vacuum like a fiend and put in a fresh vacuum-bag after each room. Imitate the wife and mother they both declined to shoot. Use Incandenza’s toothbrush on tiles’ grout. (Wallace 225)
Immediately after this section, it’s clear that Joelle is a pivotal character, and an intriguing one—she wears a veil for mysterious reasons—and is known to Orin and Hal as the “P.G.O.A.T., “The Prettiest Girl of All Time” (Wallace 239, 295). However, I have to wonder—was Joelle’s whole MO built around the dark pun “she liked to get really high and clean”? The joke about getting clean, but not in the way that helps addicts, seems like the whole punch line of Joelle’s character introduction. I appreciated it, but I didn’t know why it had to go on for so long if that was what Wallace wanted me to get out of it.
In building such an intricate ecosystem of plots centering around the Incandenza family, the tennis academy, the rehab center, and the Entertainment, Wallace created an immense challenge for himself. At the end of the day, he has to credibly tell us what the Entertainment consists of—to not show us what the Entertainment is would be a huge cop-out, one that would spoil the effect of the whole, since the Entertainment is the binding glue between all the plot threads. I think his description of the content of the Entertainment is effective; it comes twice in the novel, the first in a reference from Molly Notkin’s massive exposition dump during her Office of Unspecified Services interrogation (Wallace 788); the second, more powerful explanation, is when Gately is convalescing from gunshot wounds in the hospital and he has a hallucination which coincides with the supposed content of the film, a depiction of Joelle acting as the embodiment of Death seated in front of him:[1]
Because in this dream, Mrs. Waite, who is Joelle, is Death. As in the figure of Death, Death incarnate. Nobody comes right out and says so; it’s just understood: Gately’s sitting here in this depressing kitchen interfacing with Death. Death is explaining that Death happens over and over, you have many lives, and at the end of each one (meaning life) is a woman who kills you and releases you into the next life. Gately can’t quite make out if it’s like a monologue or if he’s asking questions and she’s responding in a Q/A deal. Death says that this certain woman that kills you is always your next life’s mother. This is how it works: didn’t he know? In the dream everybody in the world seems to know this except Gately, like he’d missed that day in school when they covered it, and so Death’s having to sit here naked and angelic and explain it to him, very patiently, more or less like Remedial Reading at Beverly H.S. Death says the woman who either knowingly or involuntarily kills you is always someone you love, and she’s always your next life’s mother. (Emphasis Added) (Wallace 849-851)
It's so hard to excerpt Wallace! All the good sentences last a hundred years. In any case, this scene feels climactic, in that Gately coincidentally experiences the vision of what the Entertainment is; and the Entertainment’s content is credible with what we know about Joelle and the strange idea she says as dialogue in this film. I can somewhat believe that Joelle, described as unspeakably beautiful, saying that your next life’s mother is the one that kills you, is probably very hypnotic, I guess. This feels like a payoff. Here, Wallace has done it convincingly in a scene that feels like a quote of Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” speech (“except maybe in dreams” vs. “perchance to dream”).
What I found a little less convincing was the way he decided to wrap things up—(let’s return to that idea of the “long con”). Throughout the back half of the book, we have a series of scenes indicating that Orin has been entrapped by a “Swiss” (all the Quebecois terrorists pretend to be Swiss, it’s great) hand model, but we don’t get to Orin’s fate at the hands of the Wheelchair Assassins until quite late into the novel:
Every few seconds Orin wiped the steam of his breath away from the thick glass to see what the faces were doing. ¶ His foot really was hurt, and the remains of whatever had made him fall asleep so hard really were making him sick to his stomach, and in sum this experience was pretty clearly not one of his bad dreams, but Orin, #71, was in deep denial about its not being a dream. It was like the minute he’d come to and found himself inside a huge inverted tumbler he’d opted to figure: dream. The stilted amplified voice that came periodically through the small screen or vent above him, demanding to know Where Is The Master Buried, was surreal and bizarre and inexplicable enough to Orin to make him grateful: it was the sort of surreal disorienting nightmarish incomprehensible but vehement demand that often gets made in really bad dreams. Plus the bizarre anxiety of not being able to get the adoring Subject to acknowledge anything he said through the glass. When the speaker’s screen slid back, Orin looked away from the glass’s faces and up, figuring that they were going to do something even more surreal and vehement that would really nail down the undeniable dream-status of the whole experience. (Wallace 972)
Despite this passage’s light tone, Orin, the celebrated punter of the “Phoenix Cardinals” NFL franchise, has been captured by the Wheelchair Assassins, and as soon as he gives them the location of the master Entertainment (thought to be in Incandenza’s skull, or at least buried with him), he will be shown a copy of the Entertainment. Orin is doomed. That is the gist, and it seems like the Wheelchair Assassins will win in their quest to destroy America.
This is the story I am most interested in, but unlike Vonnegut, Wallace doesn’t want to show me the Ice-9 freezing the world, or Orin’s actual moment of doom. Instead, Wallace doubles-down on Don Gately, a character who is endearing in small doses, but aggravating when we spend much of the last two hundred pages unnecessarily expanding on his backstory. Gately’s character climax comes when he accepts the opioid medication of the doctor and gives in to his addiction (979-981). In fact, it seems every character gives in to their addictions—Orin, Joelle, Avril’s affairs—we aren’t really sure what happened to Hal, whose ending is presented at the beginning, except that perhaps he quit his drugs and that caused his breakdown. Regardless, all the characters lose. That’s what it seems Wallace wants us to take away from all this.
According to the Infinite Jest Wikipedia page, Wallace answered critics who were wary of the lack of a satisfying ending by saying “the answers all [exist], but just past the last page.” That may be true, but it doesn’t make it the right narrative decision. After so much buildup, I wanted to see the world that Wallace so painstakingly created come crashing down with the unleashing of the Entertainment.
Notably, the same article claims that Wallace privately admitted to Jonathan Franzen that the book’s “story can’t fully be made sense of.” In that sense I do think the novel got away from him. A book this long can’t be controlled, only directed. This is what we are left with.
So, at the end of Infinite Jest, I am caught with two impulses. One, if you want to read Hamlet, why not just read Hamlet? The other is—some books are intriguing, but have greatness thrust upon them. Infinite Jest is good—but if you cut maybe 300 pages from the tennis / rehab plotlines—maybe it would have been fantastic.
[1] Molly Notkin is a friend of Joelle’s.
References
Danielewski, Mark Z. House of Leaves (Pantheon: New York, 2000).
“Infinite Jest,” Wikipedia, February 22, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_Jest
Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire (Vintage: New York, 1989)
Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest (Hachette: New York, 1996).
Thank you, I needed this as I was experiencing my biennial urge to pick up this brick. You’ve cured me.