Sipped Ink vol 1 issue 3
Infinite Jest pp95-168
‘[L]ike an Ovaltine scan or something’
Has it been a week? Actually, when you look back at the variety of what we’ve encountered in the novel over the last seven days it seems like a lot longer than that should have passed, and yet (to my mind anyway) it seems to have flown by.
Central to the last week’s reading have been two pretty extensive sequences inhabiting characters’ interiors for extended periods. The first yrstruly section is a bit of a shift in tone, with Wallace using an altered dialect for an extended period and eschewing even endnotes as a means of clueing the reader in on what the narrator is talking about. I mentioned on Twitter at the time that the passage felt to me to have overtones of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993) and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962) - in both cases not just because of the use of slang, and near-phonetic presentation of dialogue etc., but also the subject matter (obviously) and (perhaps less obviously) the vein of dark humour that runs through both of those novels and this passage of Wallace’s.
A nice counterpoint to that, I thought, was the monologue delivered to James Incandenza by his father (which fit almost neatly into Saturday’s reading) and was by turns really funny and pretty heartbreaking. The way Wallace writes that section is just shot through with this pervading sense of desperation which makes it almost awkward to read, like you’re somehow stood in some unseen, shadowed corner of that garage overhearing all of that dialogue and looking for a good time to make your presence known and excuse yourself. It’s also interesting to see Wallace start to give us the pieces to put together Hal’s personality by means of being able to trace back through the paternal line how his father behaved towards him, and how that ties (maybe) to how James’s father behaved towards him.
I started to feel also the dichotomy that’s being set up in the book between the physical and the psychological. Arguably it’s there just in the mix of different characters, different viewpoints, and different settings that Wallace employs, but there have been certain specific instances where it’s started—for me—to begin to appear as an explicit theme. As early as page 81 we’re given the calculus that tennis is a hybrid of chess & boxing1, and here and there this relationship between the work of the body and the work of the mind has been visible. It’s there in the (all too) detailed descriptions of various drugs: their psychological and physical effects, and in passages such as when, in the middle of blaming Marlon Brando for two entire generations’ physical carelessness, Jim Sr. makes his position clear to Jim:
Son, you’re ten, and this is hard news for somebody ten, even if you’re almost five-eleven, a possible pituitary freak. Son, you’re a body, son. That quick little scientific-prodigy’s mind she’s so proud of and won’t quit twittering about: son, it’s just neural spasms, those thoughts in your mind are just the sound of your head revving, and head is still just body, Jim
I really enjoyed the chronology of the rise and fall of video calling. I can attest to experiencing something in the way of Video-Physiognomic Dysphoria when using FaceTime, though I haven’t (yet) resorted to the fabrication of a latex mask or static diorama… it’s a thought though.
OK. This is the week where you may want to have a third bookmark / scrap of paper / post-it note handy or otherwise consider permanently disfiguring a particular page - I’ll point it out when we reach it in a few days. Enjoy the week’s reading!
⏎ Return to the
a theme also felt somewhat in Wallace’s 2006 piece ’Roger Federer as Religious Experience’ ↩︎