Reflective Essay

August 7^th, 2009. She had blue on, and I was feeling a bit blue about surfacing issues within myself surrounding Infinite Jest. Over one hundred pages a day had created Gately-like dreams. “One dream consists only of the color blue, too vivid, like the blue of a pool” (934). I was awake this afternoon. The sky was a vibrant blue as I drove and she read pages 348-380. It was the first time I felt the book's words transcending outside of myself. My head constantly down, reading, buried in my own head was my only memory thus far. I heard her read, “You are not unique, they’ll say: this initial hopelessness unites every soul in this broad cold salad-bar’d hall. They are like Hindenburg-survivors. Every meeting is a reunion, once you’ve been in for awhile” (349). This statement made me start to examine AA’s role in this book. I wrote in my seventh blog post:

 

We are all lonely inside our own heads. This novel is partly about examining the self, our own pleasures and how we fulfill them, and the need for a connection with another human being. Which, I think Wallace would believe to be nearly impossible since we never truly can or will show our whole selves to another individual. What we show to each person is specifically modified in a way to deal with the situation/person.

Secondly, was that part of what Wallace was trying to accomplish? He consciously showed us bits and pieces from different character’s lives because we can never truly know the whole person. We are left to infer and try to relate the best we can because that’s what real life is.

 

AA takes away that loneliness—that void that was filled by addiction. AA wants you to think that you are not unique—there are other people that have traveled down the same road as you. The grotesque story that is retold by the girl that "Can’t Keep it Simple" is a reminder that people, not just in AA, are told not to judge, but when given too much information it’s hard not to analyze that person based on our own experiences. All the slogans in the world can never get you out of your own head. Hence why AA wants you to keep it simple and why E.T.A. only wants you to think certain ways. Too much thinking might make individuals, and if that happened where would institutions like E.T.A and AA be?

I’m a product of both of these institutions. I’ve had the Latin insignia, Esse Quam Videri, inscribed on the lapel of my sports jacket. I’ve felt alone practicing and studying so hard to accomplish goals the institution regarded as vital for my development. Then something changed, maybe I was desperate to connect with someone outside my own head, or maybe I was willing to show a potential friend a side of myself I’d never showed anyone else, or possibly I  just wanted to try and feel alive. As she read I related.

 

Substances start out being so magically great, so much the interior jigsaw’s missing piece, that at the start you just know, deep in your gut, that they’ll never let you down; you just know it. But they do. And then this goofy slapdash anarchic system of low-rent gatherings and corny slogans and saccharin grins and hideous coffee is so lame you just know there’s no way it could ever possibly work except for the utterest morons…and then Gately seems to find out AA turns out to be the very loyal friend he thought he’d had and then lost, when you Came in. (350)

 

After awhile you realize you’re right back where you started—Inside yourself again, just showing a different side of yourself to a different set of people. For me I realized what Sven Birkets said in his article regarding the two main protagonists in IJ. Birkets refers to the novel as a “postmodern saga of damnation and salvation” (Birkets 107). As she read I realized it’s up to me how much I show a certain person, and hopefully she’ll know me through my openness and similar experiences we’ve had in the world. “You personal will is the web your Disease sits and spins in, still” (357). It’s just a matter of how stuck you let yourself get, and whether you feel a need to be damned or saved--by yourself. 

You see, doll I got ya' all figured out. Ya' think the veil tells the world somethin' about you? All that thing does is hide ya', keep ya' concealed from the world. 

The convoluted plot-line, violence, the femme-fatale characters in Joelle and Avril, and the mise-en-scene elements in IJ make this book similar to such Film Noir greats as Out of the Past, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, (Important to note because the main character is stuck inside his own mind) and The Maltese Falcon. I think Film Noir movies are the reasons why I like the confusing aspects of IJ. I was interested in how all the plot points would tie together, as most Film Noir movies do. Like IJ, most Film Noir movies make you infer meaning. I started thinking about this connection through the character of Joelle V./Madam Psychosis. The Maltese Falcon also portrays a woman with multiple identities. At first we meet Miss Wanderly, who only goes by an alias to protect herself and her true motive of crime. We find out later her real name is Brigid O’Shaughnessy. I was excited reading IJ because DFW had to have been a Film Noir fan/critic. The way the author describes the works of Himself are straight from the French term, which is translated as “putting on stage.” Mise en scene encompasses everything Himself was attempting to do with sets, props, actors, costumes, and lighting. I’m thinking specifically of, Dial C for Concupiscence, which seems to be a Film Noir-ish title in its own right. The plot is elaborate, it’s shot in black and white, and contains a femme fatale type character that falls in love with an armless medical attaché. 

Joelle is the perfect example of a classic femme fatale character, which drew me to her. Her veil, which partially represents her awkwardness in society is something each person deals with, and allowed me to relate to her as a character. It made me think of the different masks I wear when at class, home, or work. Each mask has been created to deal with the appropriate situation.

 Blue is the color of the sky. Blue is an adjective used to describe sadness. Our society tends to associate blue with depression, the sky, and music also. Blue. The references to this color in IJ are many. Have you ever read or heard a new word  and then after that point you hear and see the word everywhere? This is how I felt about the word, blue in this book. I don't know when I first noticed the seemingly overused word in IJ, but  I found myself underlining blue every time I saw it. I begin to think DFW inserted the word on purpose. I believe his reasoning is linked with the self I eluded to in my first few paragraphs. We see the sky as blue. We're told from an early age it's blue. However, that's what we see and have been told. The more DFW used the word I begin to think of its correlation to depression as well. Many characters have a hard time expressing how they actually feel in this book, and that is directly related to specific individual's definition of what it means to feel, blue. DFW's book, and his constant blue references made me think how I would describe depression, or the sky to a person who had never seen it. Blue would mean nothing to this person, and I think that's one of the reasons DFW uses the reference so much. Most of what we know is a creation of our own mind and the mind's of others. What use is the description, "...even the whites of his eyes finally turning the blue of the bayou" (886) if one doesn't have a reference to the color blue.

 I question DFW's motives with the use of many words in this book because he seemed to be a bit of a "word nerd." Pg. 508 lists items in CT's office that are blue. I believe DFW uses the color specifically in CT's office. The narrator tells us, "Dr. Charles Tavis liked to say you could tell a lot about an administrator by the decor of his waiting room" (509). We also get Hal's reaction through the narrator. "Hal loathes sky-and-cloud wallpaper because it makes him feel high altitude and disoriented and sometimes plummeting" (509). I'm still ruminating on why Hal finds the office discomforting. I know for me I have always felt the color blue to have a calming effect. That's why I think it would reveal more about Hal as a character if this section was dissected. I feel like it tells the reader a little about his uncomfortable feelings towards self, and his relationship with CT and the rest of his family. 

For me, these three experiences made me look outside the pages of the book. They made me look at myself, my relationship to the world and the people around me, and what I find to be entertaining and pertinent. I enjoyed the different avenues I found into this book. I believe those avenues are what made a dense book accessible. 

Work Cited:

Birkets, Sven. "The Alchemist's Retort: A Multi-Layered Postmodern Saga of Damnation and Salvation." The Atlantic Monthly;February 1996; Volume 277, No. 2; pages 106-113.

Wallace, David Foster.Infinite Jest.New York: Back Bay Books, 1996.

WiKi Enteries:

Laughing with Kafka:

http://ijstrose.wetpaint.com/page/Laughing+with+Kafka

The Alchemist’s Retort: Multi-layered Postmodern Sag of Damnation and Salvation:

http://ijstrose.wetpaint.com/page/The+Alchemist%27s+Retort

Stub:

http://ijstrose.wetpaint.com/page/AA

Thread Location: (I feel a little cheated by the 2000 word count)

http://ijstrose.wetpaint.com/thread/3203288/A+Bad+Rap

 

This book made me wish I was more of a lot of things: Shakespearean, “word nerd” to quote Scott Waldman from Times Union, and mathematician to name a few. With the Hamlet references I thought it fitting to quote Shakespeare himself.

 

O, beware, my lord, of jealousy!

It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock

The meat it feeds on. (Othello, Act 3 Scene 3)

 

I suppose in this book the green-eyed monster would be changed to the blue-eyed monster. In IJ the blue-eyed monster would be addiction. “Then after five or six seconds the Dilaudid would cross over and kick, and the sky stopped breathing and turned blue” (915). Not that I am jealous of the addiction in this book, more David Foster Wallace himself. Jealously, envious, covetous, whatever your adjective might be, I’m enamored by the fact DFW wrote this seemingly masterpiece before he was thirty-five. For an author who seemed to be a natural at writing non-fiction this is quite an accomplishment. Does IJ have its weaknesses? In my opinion, yes. Structure, narration, and drawn out monologues to name a few. Despite my frustrations this book has made me think more than any other book has in some time. At some point I will pick IJ up again and try to unravel some of my own theories.

 

Wallace, in his commencement speech to the class of 2005 at Kenyon College, said, "the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master . . . It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger." (Newsweek, Sept. 14. http://www.newsweek.com/id/158935) Wallace had commented on not being able to get out of his own head, and I believe IJ is a reflection on both of the comments above. First, we are all lonely inside our own heads. This novel is partly about examining the self, our own pleasures and how we fulfill them, and the need for a connection with another human being. Which, I think Wallace would believe to be nearly impossible since we never truly can or will show our whole selves to another individual. What we show to each person is specifically modified in a way to deal with the situation/person.

Secondly, was that part of what Wallace was trying to accomplish? He consciously showed us bits and pieces from different character’s lives because we can never truly know the whole person. We are left to infer and try to relate the best we can because that’s what real life is.

 

 

DFW # 6

I have issues with this book. Why? Is it that I’m more familiar with the non-fiction work of DFW? Is it that I too have been conditioned in a literary sense and need a narrative style that has a definitive beginning and end? Is it that I find parts of IJ gimmicky and drawn out? My own questions have led me to ponder DFW’s literary footprint. This post is a rant of sorts, and definitely asks more questions than it answers. (Notice my own gimmicky outline.) 

1. Why do we need back-story after back-story in the last 500 pages? What does DFW’s examination of the past and characters add to this book? Is it that I was asked to read this book in three weeks, and I became more annoyed with these attempts at literary perfection instead of finding the overall meaning in the novel? I keep thinking DFW was trying to write the perfect novel. Why else give us back-story upon back-story about characters that don’t seem to have any real importance. Is it that he did not want us to question anything, while at the same time leaving the reader questioning everything as far as how it all relates to each other by the close of the novel? I enjoyed some of the Hal and Gately back-story, as I feel it brings these two characters closer. (I’m still thinking about all the ways DFW does this and his reasons for doing so.) Seriously, how much back-story do we really need about characters like Fackelmann and Ewell? Do we need the entire Gately drug story? I could infer the guys got problems by his attendance at AA meetings. I don’t think DFW gives enough credit to the reader. He should have listened to his editor and cut a lot of this.
2. What, if anything, do some of these writing techniques add to this novel? In my opinion not a whole hell of a lot. Other than the fact that DFW seems to love footnotes what’s the point? He could accomplish everything the footnotes seem to accomplish inside the pages of the novel. Again, he gives the reader no room for imagination. If I want to know what all these drug references are I could look them up. I don’t need to be told, in a footnote nonetheless, what Ketorolac and Numorphan are. In the end who cares? The longer footnotes would have been more beneficial inside the text. The flipping back and forth brought me out of the story.
1. I feel he adds the dictionary-obsessed portion of Hal’s character so that he can show off. I get it, you’re really smart! (Okay, I'm grumpy. The wooden-like character of Hal in the beginning of the story is supported by his memorization of something as impersonal and academic as the dictionary.)
2. All the acronyms, really? I’m now part of the A.A.A.A. [1]

 

3. I don’t get any sense of closure. DFW raises issues in the last 500 pgs.  I have my own theories of how each character is interrelated, but at this point I feel the book fails. Again, he gives us so much information only to leave us hanging. If you want me to infer meaning don’t give me so much extraneous information. The constant definitions of what constitutes a blizzard started a slight tic on my right side.
1. I liked the death theme that reoccurs. (898) The idea that, “Death says that this certain women that kills you is always your next life’s mother,” draws Gately and Hal together. (850) Both characters deal with motherly issues, addiction issues, and self. Is it a coincidence it's The Darkness that pulls Hal from his slumber. In the form of dreams, Gately’s visits from wraith, and realization of self.
2. The realization of self appears in the character of Hal. He finally begins to question life outside of himself. I believe this explains the switch from a narrative perspective of Hal to I. We actually see Hal leave E.T.A. and examine his family dynamic. 
3. The lying theme. Ewells’ confession about stealing. (813) Many characters seem to confess to a character, Gately, that cannot respond.  Hal questioning everything, including Orin as a pathological liar. (784, 785) Hal finally shows real emotion! Hal says on 774, “I think at seventeen now I believe the only real monsters might be the type of liar where there’s simply no way to tell. The ones who give nothing away” (774). Hal is finally questioning a life away from tennis and E.T.A.
4. All the dreams in the last 500 pgs.(846, 830, 933. etc.)

 

 

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[1] It’s annoying, right? American Association Against Acronyms. 

After reading the blog posts last night while searching the two Wiki sites confirmed my feelings about DFW and his intense fetish with the English language. His essay, Authority and American Usage originally titled, Tense Present: Democracy, English and the Wars Over Usage was published in Harper’s magazine and dissects the origin of snootiness. Wallace states the word snoot originated in his family as a:

 

…nickname a clef for a really extreme usage fanatic, the sort of person whose idea of Sunday fun is to look for mistakes in Safire’s column’s prose itself. This reviewer’s family is roughly 70 percent SNOOT, which term itself derives from an acronym, with the big historical family joke being that whether S.N.O.O.T stood for “Sprachgefuhl Necessitates Our Ongoing Tendance” or “Syntax Nudniks of Our Time” depended on whether or not you were one. (Harper’s 41)

 

That’s why I’m a bit miffed by some of the choices DFW makes in IJ. DFW continues with his snootiness on page 631 where Avril corrects the milk sign in the kitchen. “The sign used to say MILK IS FILLING, DRINK WHAT YOU TAKE. Until the comma was semicolonized by the insertion of a blue dot by a fairly obvious person (631). The two scenes in which black characters have dialogue are strangely similar even though the two characters are different and are in different situations in the book. I have to assume DFW has a reason for doing this and it’s not some sub-conscience racism on his part. From the dialogue on page 506 the reader understands Roy to be from a lower socio-economic class. My problem is not that he uses it dialect, but that we don’t see white characters with specific Bostonian accents/dialogue. From the speech of his white characters I can’t decipher the socio-economic class they belong to, while it’s obvious with his black characters.

I started questioning DFW’s motive when I noticed certain subtle lines in the book that seemed bigoted/stereotypical. This leads me to believe DFW wants to push on this issue the same way he questions entertainment or addiction in this book. Specific examples include, but are not limited to:

 

1. “It’s like impossible to ever spot a Chinese woman on a Boston street that’s under sixty or over 1.5 m. or not carrying a shopping bag, except never more than one bag” (578).
2. Inman Square, too, is someplace Gately rarely goes anymore, because it’s in Cambridge’s Little Lisbon, heavily Portuguese, which means also Brazilians in the antiquated bellbottoms and flare-collared leisure suits they’ve never let go of, and where there are disco-ized Brazilians can cocaine and narcotics ever be far away” (479).
3. “He smokes menthols. He’d switched to menthols at four months clean because he couldn’t stand them and the only people he knew that smoked them were Niggers and he’d figured that if menthols were the only gaspers he let himself smoke he’d be more likely to quit” (478).
4. “Like most Germans outside popular entertainment, he gets quieter when he wants to impress or menace. (There are very few shrill Germans, actually.) (460)

 

It seems like an omniscient narrator makes these statements. I might understand these strange insertions if they were part of character development, but they seem random and all encompassing.  

Work cited:

Wallace, David Foster. Harper’s Magazine. April 2001. Pgs. 39-58.

 

 

Is Hal Pre- Conditioned

For somebody who not only lives on the same institutional grounds as his family but also has his training and education and pretty much his whole overall raison-d’etre directly overseen by relatives, Hal devotes an unusually small part of his brain and time ever thinking about people in his family qua family members. (515-516)

 

 

Has Hal’s reason to be, his raison-d’etre, been conditioned much the same way the viewers of the four major networks had been conditioned by advertising? It’s not surprising Hal notes all of this on page 412. Does his infected tooth act as a metaphor for this family conditioning? If he were some how able to deal with the tooth he would be able to approach his family dynamic differently. (All of his family relationships are somehow strained. He doesn’t seem to know how to interact on a human level with members of his family.) The pain in his tooth leaves Hal, “…sinking, emotionally, into a kind of distracted funk” (411).

I’ve been trying to figure out where, WINTER, B.S. 1963, SEPULVEDA, CA fits into the rest of the story, and this excuse for a theory is all I got. Jim’s dad continuously wears his commercial studio costume throughout this scene. Jim reflects on his own relationship with his father through this costume. He’s unable to recognize the death of his father because he’s just a character, an actor in his life. What resonated the most to me in this scene was his father’s costume. (The wig, the white boots, the makeup.)

Hal’s’ relationship with his parents had been pre-conditioned by his father’s relationship with his parents. Hal deals with the suicide of his father much the same way Jim deals with the death of his. Both seem unable to accept/process the event as real. Hal has this toothache that wakes him from his slumber, his marijuana thinking. Jim deals with a constant squeaking in his household, from his own bed and his parents, that he seems to have accepted and almost enjoy. Jim, speaking of his squeaky bed says, “ Actually, I think I kind of like it. I think I’ve gradually gotten so used to it that it’s become almost comforting” (498). The squeaking bed has replaced parental consoling. Hal’s tooth is a reminder he must actually deal with issues outside of E.T.A even if those issues are inside the institution. (i.e. family relationships, and his father’s suicide.) The squeaking is not the only theme to repeat in this section. We get a lot about rodents as well. Specifically, the squeaking of the bed reminds Jim’s father of rodents. The question was raised last night: Are all these animal/insect references random, or are they specific metaphors?

The organic chemistry reference at the end of this section has to fit in somehow, but I’m not quite sure how. It’s also interesting to note the relationship both Jim and Hal have with their mothers. Jim’s mom is present throughout the entire scene, but speaks only once. This conditioned behavior goes back to the ideas we discussed earlier about the father/son dynamic in this book.  

Poor, Poor Tony

Insects have been used in literature dating back to cave drawings where scientists have found what looks to be honey combs carved on cave walls. Franz Kafka, who Wallace references twice thus far, wrote The Metamorphosis where a man actually turns into a bug. (I will reflect on this more in the WiKi.) Homer used insects to enforce imagery, and Tripp Howell wrote an epic poem entitled, “The Metaphysics of Ants.” Insects have been used throughout literature to represent emotion, they have been used as metaphors, and even characters. Dylan Thomas wrote a poem entitled, “To-Day, This Insect.” In this poem he continues the literary tradition, as Paula Maria Rodriquez Gomez points out in her essay entitled, Dylan Thomas’s Animal Symbology in Celtic Tradition: The Inner Voice of a Poet, “… as an announcer of approaching death and as a conveyor of souls into the Otherworld (Gomez 88). I believe DFW is continuing this tradition with his use of spiders, beetles, cockroaches, and ants. The “militaristic red Southern-U.S. ants that build hideous tall boiling hills” (302) begin to carry Poor Tony metaphorically away piece by piece. In the past ants have been metaphors for a working society. A “working society” cannot function to its greatest capacity with a character like Poor Tony with his flamboyant boa, homosexual tendencies, and drug-using ways. (A capitalist society tends to frown upon these things.) The ants began to dissect his body and soul, carrying him into the Underworld. The ants act as a cleansing mechanism for society. Eventually the ants bombard Poor Tony, “…each vile gleaming ant wanted a minuscule little portion of Poor Tony’s flesh in compensation as it helped bear time slowly forward down the corridor of true Withdrawal” (303).

Ants rely on each other to survive. Each does their part to make sure the rest of the community thrives. At this stage in the book Poor Tony has lost his friends, his community. He has been ostracized—he’s alone. He is no longer welcome in any part of the community.

Ted Hughes, the modernist poet most well known for using animal symbols is quoted in a radio talk saying, “At about fifteen my life grew more complicated and my attitude towards animals changed. I accused myself of disturbing their lives” (Tunnicliffe. Poetry Experience. Pg. 47). Poor Tony is “disturbing” the lives of the ants. He’s now in their world, being carried into decomposition. Is it coincidence DFW chooses the red Southern-U.S. ant? I don’t think so. It seems to me he’s describing the fire ant that has infested areas of the U.S. The fire ant, with it’s “…hideous tall boiling hills” (302) made its way to the U.S. from S.A. Is it coincidence a foreign species takes over Poor Tony, a foreign species to the rest of society himself?

I would like to go back and look specifically at the scenes involving the beetle, cockroach, and spider, and see if some correlation can be made throughout literary history. Dylan Thomas made a career out of the bird as a metaphor. Can anyone think of a poet or author that has done the same with insects?  

I recently attended a four day music festival, and while a separate section of the park was designated, “family camping” I saw a few things that made me think of the habits and quirks we inherit from our parents. In retrospect I’m contemplating Beth’s question of substance abuse, and Randy’s muse on parental responsibility and inheritance.

Special K (Ketamine hydrochloride)

www.dancesafe.org/documents/druginfo/ketamine.php In large quantities users can fall into a “K-hole” where it’s difficult to move and interact with others. As I sat listening to music, close to the “family camping” area I witnessed two little boys playing on some rocks that careened down about ten feet into Long Island Sound. One of the boys was named, River. I heard his name, at first indistinguishable, from a spot just out of my view. I leaned forward and saw three figures lying on the ground. Occasionally they would lean to the side, or attempt to sit all the way up. When I walked over they were quick to offer some K to me, as River came dangerously closer to the Sound.

What do we inherit? Will River be more apt to try drugs because he witnessed potential role models fill their nose cavities with the white substance? Do parents that use give birth to users? Do two athletically inclined people give birth to a genetically advantaged athlete? I’m not sure, but I do know learned behavior is very powerful. My first beer was the same kind I saw my dad drinking growing up. The father to son dynamic is an interesting one because I know I wanted my own father to be proud of me. I played baseball and basketball because I enjoyed them, but also because they were his favorite sports as a kid. Would I have continued with competitive sports if I had heard my father say, “Yes, But He’ll Never Be Great” (166)? Every time I was injured I heard his words inside my head. “If it’s not broken and bleeding get up.”

Are we all powerless? Powerless against some form of addiction whether it be drugs, sports, cleaning, or eating because it all, “…gets learned and passed on” (157). Even before we know we’ve learned a certain behavior we’ve been conditioned to think and act a certain way. So, is there no such thing as pure potential, even at birth?

Switching Gears a Bit: I was re-reading certain parts of this book and I found a relevant definition within Wallace’s six plus page rant on substance abuse and addiction.

“That a little-mentioned paradox of Substance addiction is: that once you are sufficiently enslaved by a Substance to need to quit the Substance in order to save your life, the enslaving Substance has become so deeply important to you that you will all but lose your mind when it is taken away from you” (201).

“That most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking” (203).