Sipped Ink vol 1 issue 12

Infinite Jest pp834-917

‘My Life Is Unmanageable and I’d Like to Share It With You’

And now… etc. etc.

What a week. For the first time I’ve found myself switching from wanting to be finished to not wanting it to end. I could read Wallace forever, and there are many characters within Infinite Jest that I’m loath to lose the company of in less than a week (gulp).

The whole Gately dream thing remained weird, and I could find no discernible reasoning beyond Himself’s paying a visitation to the immobilised Don beyond narrative expediency. Perhaps that’ll pan out in some neater way in the closing pages, but to me it felt like one of the weirder crossovers of the novel so far. The dream-logic of it does allow Wallace a neat way to espouse certain narrative truths in a relatively non-obtrusive way:

the wraith, when alive in the world of animate men, had seen his own personal youngest offspring, a son, the one most like him, the one most marvellous and frightening to him, becoming a figurant, toward the end

Including some explanation for the the impulse behind making The Entertainment / Infinite Jest V / VI:

impersonation of professionals hadn’t done it. His last resort: entertainment. Make something so bloody compelling it would reverse thrust on a young self’s fall into the womb of solipsism

The Stice-stuck-to-a-window section has some great moments, as Wallace finds yet another way to enforce stasis on a character, and then has fun with it. I love little lines like

He seemed oddly preoccupied for a man occlusively sealed to a frozen window

and watching Wallace indulge his goofier side:

‘We’re going to have to thaw it off, Dark.’ ‘You’re not getting close to this forehead with a saw, bud.’

However, serious business, this week we came across something that felt almost like a thesis statement for the novel:

It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately — the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into.

The question of exactly what the flight is from remains unanswered, but is perhaps intimated at (cleverly) in a manner that also alludes to its being hinted at rather than explicitly stated:

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

This reminds me of the counterpoint in Schtitt’s assessment of tennis as “sending from yourself what you hope will not return”. The constancy of this battle, between what we love, need, dread, hate, fear etc. and what we do or don’t do to bring it about or avoid it, is the novel’s push and pull; the tide that moves within its characters and pages alike. Weirdly, when you consider the comas, the dreams, the entrapments by Entertainment, (heck even the occlusive seal of a forehead to a window) there is no real stasis in the novel. Even when a character’s body is trapped their minds are racing, their assessments of their circumstances are being reconfigured, it’s all in constant motion. And yet we re-encounter a sentiment this week that we’ve seen before:

No one single instant of it was unendurable

It’s reassuring in a way, to come across that idea for what I make the third time in the novel. My guess is that it was a thought Wallace himself found reassuring too: a kind of logical supposition imposed upon any manner of psychic pain that he—like his characters—encountered. An attempt to not let one’s present be wholly dictated by one’s past, and to not fear the future. What Gately terms

An endless Now stretching its gull-wings out on either side of his heartbeat

or, maybe, an infinite jetzt.

Dear future reader, it may be worth pointing out that the 2014 read-along, being the first, existed in a time before the whole enterprise was called Sipped Ink. Instead, the 2014 read-along was called Infinite Jetzt. I thought it was funny at the time, and by golly I still do.