Sipped Ink vol 1 issue 10

Infinite Jest pp6__-769

Here we are with less than three weeks to go and it’s really feeling like things are coming together. There’s a coalescing of plot threads happening, formerly disparate characters meeting each other in curious ways, the narrative seems to have gained a kind of forward propulsion completely different to how the first third of the novel moved.

Perhaps that’s partly down to my reading habits: the last week has seen a few epic, multi-hour reading sessions first to catch up with the timeline and then to maybe creep ahead a little bit perhaps to give myself a little leeway should I perchance slip up again. It’s been difficult going (in this week where the very experience of reading the novel was likened, in The Guardian, to ‘swimming through setting cement’, but I’m relieved to be back up to speed and firmly pointed down the toboggan run of the final stretch.

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One particular passage stood out for me in this week’s reading: a few pages starting p692 (‘And re Ennet House resident Kate Gompert and this depression issue…’) in which Wallace, pretty nakedly, talks about his own, decades-long battle with depression. Reading Wallace on television, or tennis, or grammar–knowing him to have been personally invested in all three–is near-endlessly entertaining. Reading Wallace on addiction, knowing him to have been addict, is sometimes tough. Reading Wallace on depression however, perhaps knowing that it is ultimately what killed him, is genuinely saddening. For all of its eloquence there’s a frustration underpinning this little slice of the novel: frustration at an inability to communicate precisely (after all one of Wallace the loquacious, deep-thinking, linguistic pedant’s superpowers) the true horror of something he personally experienced. It’s a powerful few pages of writing, but one senses the author trying on several explications (eg. the various definitions of ‘It’ starting at the bottom of p695) and not finding anything that comes close to what he actually wants to convey. Perhaps this is unsurprising; the entirety of Infinite Jest takes as one of its central themes various forms of psychic and emotional malformations: chief among them addiction and emotional dependence, with–of course–the deadly potency of the televisual Entertainment perhaps conceivable as a kind of equally-paralysing anti-depression.