Sipped Ink vol 1 issue 4

Infinite Jest pp169-242

‘The almost unbelievably thick-ankled’

So… how are you getting on? This week I reached the furthest point in the novel I’ve made it to on previous occasions - so it’s all new to me from here on out. It feels a little strange, like standing at some vaguely familiar base camp on the lower climbs of a mountain and looking up, knowing that previously I’ve turned back. I’m enjoying the experience though, and I hope you are too.

This week I found Madame Psychosis’s exhaustive list of various physical maladies pretty entertaining, but it seemed to be one facet of a theme Wallace is developing around affliction in general. There’s physical & psychological addiction to various (S/)substances of course, and recently there have been some other threads introduced that share some elements in common with that dependency. The passage giving the geography of Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House (sic) is a veritable catalogue of debilitating infirmities, perhaps the most terrifying of which to my mind is that of the lady described in endnote 67:

Her deal is apparently that she’s almost psychotically terrified of the possibility that she might be either blind or paralyzed or both. So e.g. she keeps her eyes shut tight 24/7/365 out of the reasoning that as long as she keeps her eyes shut tight she can find hope in the possibility that if she was to open them she’d be able to see, they say; but that if she were ever to actually open her eyes and actually not be able to see, she reasons, she’s lost that precious like margin of hope that she’s maybe not blind.

There’s a pitch vein of satire in there—a colour Wallace is unafraid to paint with from time to time—almost entirely unmitigated by the cheery reasoning given earlier that ‘severity is in the eye of the sufferer’.

I have a feeling affliction of this magnitude will be sustained as a theme of the novel, as it is elsewhere in Wallace’s work: both fiction and non-fiction. There are a couple of particularly apposite phrases within pages of each other that seem to give the beginnings of the narrative working out how to address these things:

‘it takes effort to pay attention to any one stimulus for more than a few seconds’

&

‘no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable’

See also the various nods towards the concept of irrevocability in the shape of both T. Ewell’s tattoo obsession and the boys’ preparations to maybe use DMZ (‘What I’m saying. This is not a fools-rush-in-type substance, Inc. This show-tune soldier like left the planet’).

Heavy stuff.

On a slightly lighter note I chuckled a bit at Wallace’s inclusion within Madame’s Downer-Lit Hour of ‘a truly ghastly Bret Ellis period during Lent’. If you’d like to read more on the relationship between the two authors, I can recommend this (slightly cattily-titled) Salon piece from a couple of years ago.

OK - enjoy the Bank Holiday weekend, and stay in touch with favourites lines, moments, ideas, endnotes!