Spoilers possible: I do my best to avoid plotline and stick to only the high-level ideas in the book. That said, I assume no liability for any spoilers that may be coming your way.
Like most, I was introduced to David Foster Wallace through his commencement speech to Kenyon College known as This Is Water. It is a sincere, no BS guide through American life that emphasizes the frustrations that people in rich countries deal with but are too scared to talk about. Any graduate from a half-way decent university, no, any middle-class American, already knows how someone would respond to a confession of their troubles:
“It must be so hard to be little old you.”
“You don’t know how good you’ve got it.”
DFW didn’t cower to these easily anticipated responses. He spoke to the class (in the commencement) with a respect and understanding that is rather hard to find nowadays, like they were people who experience real pain, despite their materially comfortable lives.
He does this 1000x over in Infinite Jest. (get it?)
It is a uniquely American novel that reflects upon the pathologies that follow from an individualistic society where a materially comfortable life is the norm. “The American genius, our good fortune is that someplace along the line back there in American history them realizing (sic) that each American seeking to pursue his maximum good results together in maximizing everyone’s good…The United States: a community of sacred individuals which reveres the sacredness of the individual choice. The individual’s right to pursue his own vision of the best ratio of pleasure to pain: utterly sacrosanct.” (424) Each of us (Americans) are vehemently encouraged to choose the path that suits us best (whatever that means). But we are not warned that the path we choose will almost surely be one we walk alone. Instead of a “life well lived,” we accidentally pursue loneliness, solipsism, and good ol’ existential dread. DFW shows us the abysses that each of our lonely paths lead to, and offers a way off, with literary skill that is damned impressive.
Wireheading ⇒ Anhedonia
The book is filled with themes found in modern American life, but what attracted me most was the focus on loneliness, solipsism, and the result of living in your self-indulgent inner world. Indulgence can take many forms, the two most salient of these being drugs & entertainment and achievement. DFW exposes both as wireheading, which puts you on a fast track towards anhedonia.
Drugs & Entertainment
In Infinite Jest there is an Entertainment (sic), called Infinite Jest that, once viewed, will kill you. You will have no desire other than viewing this Entertainment. You won’t shower, eat, drink, or move. You will just watch. Of course this is rather extreme, but it sets you up to understand the danger that comes with over-indulgence of entertainment.
Without proper relationships or “things going on in our lives”, TV can be a potent escape into a world where we can feel valued and understood. Michael Moats, the author of the Infinite Jest Liveblog, puts it best.
“To keep us from feeling so lonely as constant watchers, TV had to convince us that it was our only friend, and the only place where we could get away from the slack-jawed pack of other humans and enjoy (passively) the company of clever, good-looking and like-minded people. The ultimate result was that shared sentiment was out; individual smugness and disapproval were in. TV watchers were convinced, through commercial etc, that they are not lonely because they spend so much time alone, but because they are unique, special, rebellious, misunderstood snowflakes and are repeatedly comforted that they have transcended the herd mentality of their sheepish peers while they spend 6 hours a day as part of the largest group behavior in human history.”
Bored by your friends? Listen to the podcasts of the most interesting people in the world. Then get upset that your friends aren’t as interested in these topics as they are (the most interesting people in the world) and resent them for it. Feeling unproductive at work? Watch 3 hours of productivity hack YouTube videos to feel like your rut is fixable once you watch one more video.
Dissatisfaction with life will tempt us to escape through entertainment (now much more than in DFW’s time, with TikTok and YouTube), which will start a vicious cycle. The escape attempts will strip us of our agency and leave us as bipedal amoebas.
The entertainment we have today (2023) is easy to interchange with drugs.
“The choice for death of the head by pleasure now exists” (319)
Bored by your friends? Drink until you’re having fun again. Feeling unproductive at work? Take some percocet to dull your feelings of inadequacy. You get the point. Both drugs and entertainment offer a way out of the present.
“But now he realized that that was the first time it really ever dawned on him in force that a drug addict was at root a craven and pathetic creature: a thing that basically hides” (932)
Addicts, no matter their drug of choice (be it entertainment, Percocet, or knifing other people’s pets (hint hint?)) are escaping reality for a superior interior world. Yes, entertainment can be your drug of choice.
Achievement
Eric Clipperton, a character in the book, is mortified of losing a tennis match. Literally so. He plays each game with a pistol to his head. Showing his opponent that if he loses he will literally blow his brains out. Naturally, people are scared to beat him, so he slowly climbs the rankings of the O.N.A.N (new nation of the U.S, Canada and Mexico) and becomes #1 in the continent. This “achievement” isn’t met with pride and fulfilment, no, it’s met with suicide, as he had nothing else to live for.
Choosing achievement as your escape of choice doesn’t put you on a “path” but rather on the hedonic treadmill. To DFW, there is more to life than achievement, and you’ll feel nothing once you get to the top of the mountain. Well, if you do feel something, it won’t be joy….
“Have Himself hunch down to put a long pale arm around your shoulders and tell you that his own father had told him that talent is a sort of dark gift, that talent is its own expectation: it is there from the start and either lived up to or lost. Have a father whose own father lost what was there. Have a father who lived up to his own promise and then found thing after thing to meet and surpass the expectations of his promise in, and didn’t seem just a whole hell of a lot happier or tighter wrappen than his own failed father, leaving you yourself in a kind of feral and flux-ridden state with respect to that talent. Here is how you avoid thinking about any of this by practicing and playing until everything runs on autopilot and talent’s unconscious exercise becomes a way to escape yourself, a long waking dream of pure play. The irony is that this makes you very good, and you start to become regarded as having a prodigious talent to live up to.” (173)
Scott Alexander, in Slate Star Codex, put it best:
“the fact that getting what you want doesn’t make you any happier, it just makes that your new set point and you want something else. Ironically, this is no different than the drug addicts, who find that as much as they enjoy their drugs, after a while they adjust to that dose and need a higher dose…they do not enjoy their drugs so much as they fear that they will cease to get their drugs.”
Hal Incandenza, an important character in the book, is a tennis prodigy as well as an addict. He represents what may happen to someone if they chose both drugs as well as achievement as their escape. His pursuit of achievement led him to be one of the best tennis players in the continent, but that only resulted in him living in a “reverse-Buddhism” state of stress and loneliness that led him to experiment with recreational substances (he is addicted to everything under the sun, as one of his classmates said). On paper he is an impressive kid, but inside there is nothing.
“One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pulses and writes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.” (695)”
So achievement and drugs & entertainment go hand-in-hand. But if we can’t pursue either of these routes? What must we pursue?
Giving Yourself Away (to someone else)
“We enter a spiritual puberty when we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluding engagement of the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not Alone, we young.” (694)
If we ever approach this spiritual puberty (likely not many of us), we will try to fit into society and leave our agency at the door. This is pure philistinism, and even though we no longer feel lonely, we are still dead.. and alone.
‘What if sometimes there is not choice about what to love? What if the temple comes to Mohammed? What if you just love? Without deciding? You just do: you see her and in that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love’… ‘Then in such a case your temple is self and sentiment. Then in such an instance you are a fanatic of desire, a slave to your individual subjective narrow self’s sentiments; a citizen of nothing. You become a citizen of nothing. You are by yourself and alone, kneeling to yourself.” (108)
Ideally we can exit this spiritual puberty with agency and pursue something with intention, so we can actually understand “what it is to be a fucking human being”. DFW shows this in a rather sardonic fashion through Hal Incandenza. Throughout most of his time at the Enfield Tennis Academy, Hal is a stellar player that feels no real connection to anybody… not even his mother (the Moms). When he finally starts to feel like a human again (it is believed that this is through connection with his father), he is no longer able to communicate with regular people. When he speaks he sounds “non mammalian.” The conclusion is as clear as it is dark – once you “turn the lights on” in America you realize that you’re walking amongst a bunch of English speaking Grendels.
Sincerity in an Ironic (Postmodern) World
With all the quotes I’ve bombarded you with it may seem that Infinite Jest belongs to the nihilistic doomer wojak (sic) crowd. Don’t let me mislead you – throughout the book DFW sprinkles in humanity, hope, and sincerity with enough skill to blow your hair back and make you re-re-read a page.
He fights back against the postmodernism that dominated American literature & film throughout the 90s by actually offering a way to rebuild from the wasteland that postmodernism left behind. I’ll let him say it, as he of course says it better than me:
“Irony’s useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now been done and redone. Once everybody knows that equality of opportunity is bunk and Mike Brady’s bunk and Just Say No is bunk, now what do we do? All we seem to want to do is keep ridiculing the stuff. Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving. There’s some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who’s come to love his cage.”
Infinite Jest offers encouragement, hope, and reminds you of the value of things you might say are obvious. For example, there is a section of the book that lists some of the things an addict may learn when checking-in to a half-way house.
“That no matter how smart you thought you were, you are actually way less smart than that”
“That loneliness is not a function of solitude.
That is it possible to learn valuable things from a stupid person.
That boring activities become, perversely, much less boring if you concentrate intently on them.
That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
That it is simply more pleasant to be happy than to be pissed off.” (201-203)
He breaks down modern life with irony and ridiculousness while also reminding us that we can rebuild from the rubble.
It’s a Seriously Technically Impressive Book
Beyond the philosophical lessons and cultural critique, the book is simply a joy to read. The writing is witty, often hilarious and absurd, and so detailed in its observations that it seems DFW has grown up with you.
It is a fractured, non-linear narrative, so you have to put the story together yourself. He’ll subtly place breadcrumbs for you along the way (so pay attention) and then offer you an incredible “ah ha” moment when you arrive at the final page (and then re-read the first chapter, of course).
If you focus on it hard enough, take notes, and keep a couple of bookmarks, you will be rewarded not only with having witnessed literary genius but also with the newfound ability to tell members of the opposite sex how you’ve read Infinite Jest.
Best of luck.
Teddy Holappa 