Sipped Ink vol 1 issue 6
Infinite Jest pp317-390
‘[T]he truth unslanted’
What a week. Looking back, to my mind at least, it seems to have been comprised mainly of two sections: the eschaton game at Enfield, and further explication of the workings of Boston AA.
The whole eschaton section is brilliantly cinematic: the scale of the playing field; Otis P Lord trundling around with his trolley full of cartridges, computing the random1 - it builds and builds, incorporating the whole ‘map vs territory’ pseudo-metaphysical dispute (between teenage, semi-pro tennis players) and finally comes to a great comic conclusion with Pemulis shouting from the side-lines. Putting aside the fact that the whole thing would be more fun on the screen than any of the Harry Potter series’s quidditch matches, we should ask what Wallace is saying with the section. There’s perhaps some detectable overlap with the backstory of President Gentle, as given via Mario Incandenza’s short (puppet-starring) film, and glimpses (mainly in the conversations between Steeply & Marathe) about the Concavity / Convexity, of a theme Wallace is playing out across all levels of politics—perhaps several layers of the book—that we just can’t help ourselves. There’s a kind of desperate inevitability in here somewhere, about things eventually going wrong or slipping away. There’s a sense here that Wallace himself may be painting all of these characters, across their various scenarios, as ‘like a shock-trained organism without any kind of independent human will’. On a long enough time line, we regress to our natural tendencies.
See also the Coming In and Hanging In of the Boston AA cohort. I enjoyed very much learning about how the whole culture of Substance-recovery works in Wallace’s Boston. Wallace paints some really sympathetic pictures of some of the characters involved: from the shaky newcomers with hip flasks in their jackets, to the sage old crocodiles and their reassuring / infuriating repetition of the old AA mantras. It’s a wonderfully full depiction of a community that’s being built for us in these chapters. And then… let’s just say that the Raquel Welch thing is one of the most disturbing passages of any novel I’ve ever read. And then it’s as though Wallace tries to outdo himself with the following story of the junky and her stillborn infant - I found those passages very difficult to read, and did so with a permanent scowl on my face which, I suppose, is testament at least to powerful writing.
On the other hand I laughed harder than I have at a book in ages when it twigged for me that Orin Incandenza’s new Subject, the Moment journalist he’s so infatuated with, is none other than Hugh Steeply in his (per Marathe far-from-convincing) disguise as a buxom lady. Looking back it seems this was actually revealed a couple of hundred pages earlier, but for whatever reason the penny only dropped for me when I got to endnote 145 and read the words ‘PUTATIVE MOMENT MAGAZINE SOFT-PROFILE-WRITER HELEN STEEPLY’. I laughed until I had to put the book down for a minute.
Across both of these two sections I also enjoyed how Wallace incorporates a grammatical element that he then gets to play with. In the eschaton game there are so many block caps acronyms, and in the world of Boston AA so many capped-up phrases, that it becomes a kind of poetry watching Wallace establish them and then try to get as many as he can into giant run-on sentences.
This week mark’s the anniversary of Wallace’s death on 12 September 2008. My intention right now is to post something that day, with some links and material that’ll help you learn more about our author if you’re interested. Until then, enjoy the week and just hope you don’t accidentally walk into a room and catch One Million Years BC or something playing on TV. Take care.
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BTW, this post was almost titled ‘lapse in omniscience’ because that phrase is just wonderful; poor Lord ↩︎