Sipped Ink vol 1 issue 7

Infinite Jest pp391-464

‘Freedom to Choose and the Right to be Entertained’

In a piece in yesterday’s Guardian discussing potential American winners of Booker prizes past, Laura Miller advocates for Wallace’s novel. It’s a tough case to make, in that the book wasn’t so much as shortlisted for the National Book awards or Pulitzer upon publication in 1996, but Miller makes a case for the novel’s timely wrestling with issues that have only grown in pertinence in the years since:

Infinite Jest is about winners and losers and how to tell the difference (a lot harder than most of us like to think), but it succeeded better than any novel before or since in capturing the excruciating self-consciousness of life in a highly mediated society. How is it possible to be real or sincere or authentic any more?

This is one of the questions Wallace’s narrative is asking. We’ve talked already about how addiction and mental health feature, questioning the capacity of (if not quite the existence of) free will, and the rules and credos of Boston AA and life at Enfield Tennis Academy that have been laid out for us in detail over the preceding weeks have shown how routine and structure rub up against the human will. This is huge stuff, and it’s starting to feel more purposeful on Wallace’s part that his two sets of main characters are engaged in different flanks of the same battle.

Sometimes it’s a little on-the-nose, as with Marathe’s encapsulation to Steeply: ‘Maximize pleasure, minimize displeasure: result: what is good. This is the U.S.A. of you’, but by-and-large Wallace’s interrogations are more subtle and prolonged - there’s a sense of him walking us through his thinking on the page. In this manner some of my favourite passages recently have been extended dialogue exchanges with each character standing in for some kind of skewed or warped aspect of the argument. Wallace doesn’t get enough credit for his dialogue, which is frequently hilarious. There’s some great stuff in Mario’s puppet film of President Gentle (FC) talking with Tine and the advisors - the list of people fleeing the newly besmirched (former-)American territories by various methods:

Someone junior in the office foresaw hang-gliders. I don’t foresee demographically significant hang-gliding, personally, at this juncture

&

We foresee some folks just outright running like hell, possibly, Rod

along with the promise that the administration are ‘day-and-nighting on strategies to forestall anything like ostensible refugeeism’.

This week’s reading also included the seed of what would become Wallace’s famous commencement speech to Kenyon High graduates a decade after the novel’s publication. I take pretty much any opportunity to link people to this, and I’m not going to miss this one: so here’s the audio, even if you’ve heard it a half-dozen times it’s worth taking 20 minutes out of your day.

In the shape of Michael Chang’s obsession with making it to The Show, there’s also further signs (following some of the Orin stuff earlier (and, arguably some of the JGFC stuff too)) of another of Wallace’s messages in the novel: ‘Fame is not the exit from any cage’. That too is all tied up with how we see each other, how we relate to each other, and I’m sure it’ll continue to flourish as we move on.

Enjoy the week’s reading. This is the half way point - all downhill from here.