These Fragments I Have Shored Against My Ruins

After the scattershot, disorienting welter of voices and documents and nonplot that made up the third week’s reading for Infinite Summer, week 4 felt almost like a reward. Infinite Tasks commented on my last post that week 3’s reading was “a point in the novel when things appeared to be spinning out of control,” and I agree. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy reading that section—James Incandenza Sr.’s monologue, in particular, was brilliantly done—but it was frustrating in the sense that it felt like it was a lot of marking time rather than marching forward. The satisfactions it offered were various, but they were piecemeal.

Week 4, on the other hand, is much more conventionally gratifying. For one thing, it’s almost a parade of plot and backstory. Joelle’s time at Molly Notkin’s party is almost 21 straight pages of incident. Perhaps this is the influence of Molly’s chairs talking, but this whole section feels almost like a Nouvelle Vague film to me. It’s poetic, it’s elegiac from the very beginning, it’s filled with flashbacks and reminiscences. The present-time plot is pretty compact: Joelle’s at a party, she remembers stuff, then she goes into the bathroom, cooks up, and tries to die. That “she remembers stuff” part, though, opens wide, just like one of Gately’s AA “slogans that looks so shallow for a while and then all of a sudden drops off and deepens like the lobster-waters off the North Shore.” The time Joelle spends wrapped in memory amounts to the most sustained backstory we’ve yet had in Infinite Jest, I think, and a fair portion of it involves Incandenzas.

(Some of it also involves Joelle’s own personal Daddy in ways that make me uncomfortable: He tells Joelle “over and over again how she was prettier than this [movie star] or that one right there,” then she has this whole sexualized response to being at the movies and feeling “about to be entered by something that didn’t know she was there and yet was all about making her feel good anyway, coming in,” then she and her own personal Daddy sit there in the dark theater, “his hand in her lap her hand in the box and rooting down past candy for the Prize.” I feel led to an inference.)

The parade continues, after a short description of E.T.A. and surrounds, with 16 pages of Hal filling Orin in on things he really should already know. But rather than feeling contrived, it strikes me as a pretty economical bit of writing, in that it’s a hefty infodump that’s also designed to develop characters. We learn quite a bit about both Hal and Orin through here, not the least of which is that it is fully in character for Orin to have skipped his own father’s funeral. It’s a funny stretch of writing (“‘That something smelled delicious!’ I screamed”), but it’s also terrifyingly sad; imagine being 13 and coming home to find your own father’s body in that condition, and then being put into a counseling situation with a person who isn’t prepared to recognize your coping methods as valid. Think about how lost and devastated you would be. (I can’t find it now, but I could swear I remember reading DFW say he wanted to write something so sad it would make you sick.)

Then, after some other stuff that’s not really plot or backstory (although we do meet Geoffrey Day, who was introduced to us in note 304 as G. T. Day, M.S., when Struck was working so very hard not to write his own paper), comes another 17-page section on Orin and Joelle.

At this point, reading Infinite Jest is somewhat like reading The Name of Rose. Here’s a passage from the “Postscript” to The Name of the Rose:

After reading the manuscript, my friends and editors suggested I abbreviate the first hundred pages, which they found very difficult and demanding. Without thinking twice, I refused, because, as I insisted, if somebody wanted to enter the abbey and live there for seven days, he had to accept the abbey’s own pace. If he could not, he would never manage to read the whole book. Therefore those first hundred pages are like a penance or an initiation, and if someone does not like them, so much the worse for him. He can stay at the foot of the hill.

Eco makes the early part of the book strenuous reading on purpose, but not gratuitously; it’s strenuous because it requires the reader to adopt the pace and style of an alien milieu (a 14th-century mountain abbey), but it’s necessary because the whole book takes place in that milieu. Likewise, the early going in Infinite Jest can be disconcerting and difficult, but that’s partly because the book takes place within an unfamiliar, saturated media space, and partly because it strives for effects that rely on overcoming the social fragmentation it depicts—and those effects are much more powerful if the book can first instill in the reader a sense of that fragmentation. I don’t think week 3’s reading (or indeed any of IJ) is difficult just for the sake of it. It’s always in pursuit of the book’s ultimate goals, which do not include pissing off the reader. It looks like we’ve reached a point in IJ where the foundations have been laid and we can really get moving. We’ve climbed the hill, and now it’s time to see what happens up here.