Infinite Jest and a Skull-Sized Kingdom

‘And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self…The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation.’

David Foster Wallace - This is Water

It is odd what one’s mind finds itself holding onto after so many years. When I was young (around the age of 10-11) there was a school assembly that stuck with me to this very day. The talk began in a standard way. The deputy headmaster bid us good morning, then held up a walnut. He said there was a part in Hamlet where the titular character goes mad. He said that during this period Hamlet says something important:

‘I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself the king of infinite space’.

I didn’t much care about the assembly at the time. It was just something you sat through, the same way I sat through lessons until I could go home and get back on the internet. Still, when the teacher brandishes a walnut, you sit up and take note. 

I think of this anecdote because skulls and more broadly Hamlet itself are important motifs in Infinite Jest. The book’s very name comes from Hamlet’s speech when holding up the skull of the deceased jester Yoric. Infinite Jest is bookended by a scene of skull-focused grave robbing. 

The parallels do not stop there. Hamlet is a man caught between action and self-absorbed rumination, not unlike DFW himself and his most obvious avatar in the text, the protagonist Hal Incandenza. Whether the reference to skulls and a skull sized kingdom was intentional in his later commencement speech (where the opening quote of the article is from) is not something I could ever prove. There is something about skulls though that permeates his work, not just as a symbol of death. Think about it: What is a skull at its core but the hard wall that separates our mind from everything else? It keeps us protected, but in doing so has us forever walled off from others. This inescapable solipsism is a central theme of Infinite Jest. Every other thought leads back to this painful realization, and how to deal with it is the mission not only of the book but more broadly that of it’s ultimately doomed author. 

‘Never date a man with Infinite Jest on his Shelf’

One of the reasons I’m compelled to write this in the first place is a sense I need to justify my appreciation for the book against the eye-rolling that such appreciation from a person as myself seems to elicit from the general culture. If there is anything I would advise to those who have this opinion, it would be to please give the book a chance in spite of those that seem to like it. Healthy people don’t need to see a physician after all. 

Infinite Jest is not as difficult as people make it out to be. It is long and the overarching plot is hard to grasp, but on a granular level each chapter is accessible. There is a plot in the book, and not a plot in an abstract thematic way. Things clearly happen but often very important plot points are hidden deep inside long passages that otherwise don’t seem to relate to anything else. 

I’d consider this more of an issue if I thought the central plot was vitally important to the themes of the book. I don’t think it is, and I don’t think it was intended to be. The loose plot is an excuse to put characters in interesting situations. In particular, their relationship to the central McGuffin of the book, the eponymous Infinite Jest: a video so entertaining it causes all who watch it to become so hopelessly enthralled they watch until they expire. 

An irony free zone

Mark Twain’s famous Aphorism was to ‘write what you know’. If you’ve ever had any experience with writing, you’ll know it’s much harder to begin penning a fantasy setting from scratch than it is to just recount things that have happened to you. Half the work is already done. Many great works of fiction are just well disguised Roman A Clefs and Infinite Jest is no different. 

Wallace was coy for many years about his experience with Alcoholics Anonymous. In reality, he had been attending AA meetings since his breakdown at Harvard in the early 90s, and the community around the 12 step program would be one he relied on until the end of his life. Half the story of Infinite Jest takes place in a halfway house and features intricately detailed descriptions of AA and NA (Narcotics Anonymous) meetings. In hindsight it is hard to see how this sort of vividness could have been captured without first hand experience. Ennet House itself is based on the same Boston halfway house Wallace found himself in. Don Gatley, the square headed co-protagonist, was also based off of a similarly built member of that same halfway house that Wallace met.

AA meetings are described in the book as ‘An Irony free zone’ but it is hard to avoid the Irony in Wallace’s life that a despair at being a washed out failed writer would lead to the experiences that would form the book that made him a wildly successful one. There is an enormous sea change between his pre AA work (The Broom of the system, The girl with Curious hair) and his post AA work. The former is clever but it lacks soul. Wallace had an explosively analytical mind. He loved formal logic and mathematics. He spent much of his original degree as an acolyte of Wittgenstein’s famously dry Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which held that all philosophical issues could be reduced to issues of language and definition. A very early influence on him in terms of fiction had been Thomas Pynchon, who wrote ironic, deconstructive novels. He would later be coy about Pynchon’s influence on him, though once again it is fairly obvious in hindsight. Wallace would later confess that much of his early work was just him trying to prove how smart and clever he was, in which case the aversion to bringing up Pynchon makes more sense. 

In a pleasing historical echo, the maturation of Wallace winds up bearing a striking parallel to Wittgenstein’s own progression as a philosopher. In Wittgenstein’s case, the tension between Tractatus and his later Philosophical Investigations is so striking that they seem to be written by different and opposing philosophers. Even to this day there is a notable split between the followers of ‘Early’ and ‘Late’ Wittgenstein. From what I understand of his work, Wittgenstein came to believe that there would always be parts of experience and knowledge which could not be reduced to language or formal definition. Taken on it’s own, it is an acceptance of the parts of knowledge that will always escape our full understanding. 

This more than anything is what Wallace found in AA. He was forced to come to terms with one of the group’s sayings: ‘Your best thinking brought you here’. For someone with the intellectual firepower of Wallace, this must have been difficult to take. But take it he did, and from that moment on his work became more raw and human as a result. It is said that it is the mark of a truly educated mind to be able to tolerate ambiguity, and what better paradox than an intellectual finding himself relying on cliches like ‘one day at a time’, or asking higher powers for help in spite of not quite believing in them. To watch those who seemed so much more ordinary than himself deal with the world much better than he could is a humbling irony. 

The terror of Solipsism 

Solipsism as a concept seemed to Wallace unbearable. This is a similar conclusion that Wittgenstein had also come to. Solipsism, both the fear of it and the things that drive it, is a theme throughout his post AA work. Infinite Jest saw the pleasure that American (and now increasingly global) society seemed to place highest value on was a road that led directly towards this same, terrifying, conclusion. The implicit solipsism of addiction is weaved in every page of Infinite Jest. Littered throughout  are chilling descriptions of ‘Bottoms’, a term for an addict’s lowest point. Usually it involves some unforgivable, unthinking betrayal of others in service to the vice. It is fitting that the final scene of the book ends with the most disturbing bottom of all. 

Dark though these themes are, it would be a mistake to take away from this that Infinite Jest is just a torturous depressing slog. There is optimism throughout, but it is the stoic optimism of confronting the worst while still hoping for the best. Moments of happiness and purity exist however small and understated. They hide in dense passages and farcical premises, all of which serves to make them ‘pop’ that much more when you stumble across them. I won’t spoil them, but they are there, and none quite compare either in farcicality or heart to the book’s penultimate scene, the tear-jerking denouement of the book’s purest character; Mario Incandenza. 

On the bigger picture, the central theme of the book is just the latest salvo in a war as old as philosophy itself. The debate between self gratifying hedonism as the highest form of being against against self denying sacrifice. This is quite literally debated in the novel through a series of scenes between agent Hugh Steeply and Remy Marathe, a Quebecois quadruple agent who pokes holes in Steeply’s defence of the classical American pursuit of happiness. Wallace intended Marathe himself to represent the opposite extreme to American consumerism, a fascistic obsession with individual self-erasure for the collective. 

Abiding with the Book

One thing that is not in doubt as a central theme is that of pain. Pain/Pleasure is an obvious dichotomy, and it would not be fair to say that the book simply suggests ‘embrace pain’. It is much more about choosing what to suffer for. It is about the way pain can be something through which we transcend our solipsistic, lonely world. As he would later say in his commencement speech:

‘Here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.’

Most obviously this comes across in Don Gatley’s heroic refusal of painkillers while recovering from a gunshot wound (Gatley is a former Demerol addict). The reality of bearing pain for something greater leads to an extended passage that has one of my favourite in all of literature:

‘Abrupt Withdrawal. The Bird. Being incapable of doing it and yet having to do it, locked in. A Revere Holding cage for 92 days. Feeling the edge of every second that went by. Taking it a second at a time. Drawing the time in around him real tight. Withdrawing. Any one second: he remembered: the thought of feeling like he'd be feeling this second for 60 more of these seconds — he couldn't deal. He could not fucking deal. He had to build a wall around each second just to take it. The whole first two weeks of it are telescoped in his memory down into like one second — less: the space between two heartbeats. A breath and a second, the pause and gather between each cramp. An endless Now stretching its gull-wings out on either side of his heartbeat. And he'd never before or since felt so excruciatingly alive. Living in the Present between pulses. What the White Flaggers talk about: living completely In The Moment. A whole day at a crack seemed like tit, when he Came In. For he had Abided With The Bird.’

For anyone that has had to deal with a substance ‘kick’ or some other event of extreme emotional or physical pain (grief, loss etc.) the passage not only hits close to home but offers genuinely sage advice for making it through. It is Book of Job like in its acknowledgement that suffering is in it’s own way a great gift. It chimes in with another one of my favourite passages:

‘Only now did Pierre realize the full strength of life in man and the saving power he has of transferring his attention from one thing to another, which is like the safety valve of a boiler that allows superfluous steam to blow off when the pressure exceeds a certain limit.’ 

-Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

It also makes me think of the act of actually reading the book itself. DFW was insistent that Infinite Jest be a novel, and that no other medium would suffice for it’s message. A book asks something of the reader, especially in terms of attention and delayed gratification, the way passive entertainment does not. Thinking of the size of the book, there is an echo of Don Gatley’s ‘one day at a time’ approach. Taking it one page at a time, letting the prose wash over you and not worrying about where the plot is. Doing it this way, it is not a particularly difficult book, it is just long. There are lots of other books I can point to that are more difficult. Dostoevsky for one is much less forgiving if you miss out on specific thematic and psychological moments (a friend of mine once read the ‘Brothers Karamazov’ and managed to totally miss one of the most important scenes in the book due to the subtlety of its prose). Infinite Jest on the other hand is more than happy to hit you with the same motif a couple different times to make sure you catch it. 

If Infinite Jest were a lesser book, and DFW a lesser writer, i’d dismiss the book as an onanistic exercise in literary masturbation. If I had read Infinite Jest totally cold, I may well have done that. Thankfully having been exposed to other work of his, in particular his non-fiction, I knew he was writing from the heart. What he is trying to express is something worth expressing. It is something important. Knowing this, I don’t mind nearly as much if the book wants me to work harder to get it. It’s the same reason the bible is written in parables, or Kierkegaard wrote using a maddening amount of pseudonyms and viewpoints. It is the same thing that made Wittgenstein recant his earlier belief in the power of language to fully clarify. You can direct people towards truths, but for people to really get them, they have to work through it themselves, and to reveal it straight out would hinder this goal. 

This does not mean that Wallace was able to truly internalize these messages in his own life. He does not seem to have been a good or well adjusted person, and in fairness to him he never made claims to be. The sort of manic introspection that made him a great writer seemed also to manifest as paranoia and obsession in his personal life. He was frequently uncaring, sometimes abusive, towards women. This bolsters the eye rolling that surrounds Infinite Jest as a book for equally toxic men. Whether this is a deal breaker for reading this book is ultimately a matter up to each individual person.

New Sincerity

This is also likely why no precise answers are provided in the book. What is indisputable and obvious is Wallace’s belief that our ability to dissociate from our problems with irony and deconstruction is increasingly lethal. A quote Wallace oft used was that ‘Irony is the song of the bird that has learned to love it’s cage’ (originally written by the essayist Lewis Hyde). The book became known as the spearhead of the ‘new-sincerity’ (sometimes maddeningly referred to as ‘post-postmodernism’) movement. A counter to the deconstructivism of Pynchon and even The Broom of the System. Just as AA was irony free, so too did Wallace believe sincerity was the most powerful tool we had to combat nihilism and the issues of the age. 

Since 1996, there is a case to be made that things are more sincere than they have been. Certainly people seem to believe in more than before, even if the beliefs on both the left and right are increasingly convoluted. But in other ways the internet has exacerbated this trend. The ability of things to be analyzed, deconstructed and turned on their head has increased in speed and ferocity thanks to the ability of the internet to allow fast dissemination of information. Meme culture represents the apex of this. 4chan (a controversial site that nonetheless is the white hot foundry of many of the most popular memes) has such a fast feedback loop to information that to be pranked by them is like having a swarm of digital bees set upon you. In another twist of Irony, the literature board of the site, /lit/, has an obsession with both David Foster Wallace and Infinite Jest. Sometimes self-awareness hits home. 

With this in mind, I think it is hard to look past Infinite Jest not just as the seminal novel of the 90s but also the 21st century. Like most great works of art it feels as though it becomes more relevant as time goes on rather than less. I know that just saying this will play into the image of fawning obsession by certain men, and I don’t care. I’m not going to ironically abstract away why I think this book is important, and I’d implore you to do the same. Believe me, if I thought this book was a circle jerk, I would tell you. 

It remains what it has always been: A call to truly care about that which is outside of you, to have the courage to live in a real and authentic way and to consciously choose what it is you are willing to suffer for. His This is Water might be a much faster way to imbibe these messages, but it is only by wrestling with them that you can truly try to take them to heart. As one character in the book says: 

‘The truth will set you free, but not until it is finished with you’

Final Thoughts

I never told you how that assembly finished, did I?

As the bell rang for the first lesson of the day, he pointed to his temple and gave his final remark. 

‘Remember, there’s a kingdom here. Use it well.’