“And The Tide Was Way Out:” Self and Awareness in Infinite Jest
Gabriela de Mendonça Gomes
One can say many things about David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. It’s long, it’s complex, it’s literary, it’s philosophical, it’s at times boring, it’s preternaturally critical of technology, it’s crazy, etc., etc., and so on and so forth. I’ve read it twice. I must say, it’s better the second time through, because the novel’s fragmented and atemporal narrative structure treats its readers as a teabag and the narrator(s) the tea drinker(s) plunging us again and again into the literary solution without obvious beginning and ending. It leaves us wading through something over 1000 pages--depending on your edition--of vignettes until we get to the end, an unexpected and anticlimactic scene with one of our protagonists, Don Gately, “flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.”
Writing about Infinite Jest makes me feel like Don Gately in this scene. There is the novel, the ocean, and there I am on my back in the freezing sand. Where the sand ends and the ocean begins is nebulous, and I’m trying to figure out where to build my sand castle argument. Every time I try to pick one theme or idea to think through, I must at least briefly mentally land on whole realms of other, equally complex concepts because it all seems so intensely and irrevocably interwoven. And I think that, as with almost everything Wallace wrote, that intellectual disarray is purposeful, for one of my major interpretations of Infinite Jest is that, in its absurdity and fantastical elements, it is in fact doing mimetic work. That is, when you think about the novel, as when you think about life, it feels hard to unknot and classify neatly into parts and players. It all blurs and resonates meaningfully only in retrospect, in concocted narratives of causation and significance.
And the convoluted web of what resonates as meaningful and how it comes to do so and what comes in the way and how we even come to know what the way is and what an obstruction versus a new branching path looks like is what Infinite Jest deals with. It takes a host of characters within a particular geographical circumference dealing with these questions of existence and shows the physical and psychological reverberations of their choices. Indeed, the question of the nature and consequences of reverberation is a singular underpinning of the novel. It arises as a literal matter through JOI’s cinematographic and scientific endeavors with annulation, a psychological one through its exploration of addiction and Alcoholics (or Narcotics or Cocaines or Designer Drugs or Sex Addicts) Anonymous, a structural one in its narrative construction, and a metaphorical one in its language. And it multifacetedly looks at how awareness of self both elucidates and complicates the possibility of achieving understanding, or truth.
At one point, Wallace writes, “The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.” To speak of truth is hard, to write clearly of it, even harder. Here, I want to discuss it relative to that statement of freedom.
The novel’s opening scene presents Hal, another protagonist, in a university application office with coaches and administrators willing him to literally speak for himself to ensure that his written application accurately reflects who he is. He, however, has lost the ability to speak intelligibly--palpably ironic because readers receive the scene through Hal’s first-person narration. The scene moves through a tensioned back and forth between those speaking for Hal and those wishing him to speak. Eventually, he caves, but while he relays to readers his intended speech, that he is “not just a boy who plays tennis” but one who is “complex [and] reads,” who does “things like get in a taxi and say ‘The library, and step on it,’” his horrified listeners hear what they describe as guttural sounds, like goats drowning. Hal says, twice, “I am in here.” At first, the phrase seems only to describe his physical placement in the room. But its second utterance, as he’s pinned to the bathroom floor by the tanned knee of a sweaty uncomprehending administrator, shows that what Hal sees as his self, articulate and complex, is trapped within an unexpressed internal world. His tennis-trained body betrays his sense of self, and in his search to transcend that mechanization of his body by the prospective university, he finds himself oppressed in the schism between worlds.
Hal’s struggle resonates with the alcoholic sandwich-bag salesman in one of JOI’s strange avant-garde films called The Pre-Nuptial Agreement Between Heaven and Hell. (Notably, the man resembles JOI’s own father). The film’s perspective perpetually keeps the man’s “tiresome ubiquitous involuted head” in the shot. Like Hal, the man cannot escape his mind. This matter appears as something that afflicted the novelist himself. But, unlike Hal, the salesman’s issue stems from the self and its existence seem irreducibly present in everything that we do because the ‘I’ always is. With enough alcohol, he can foster a temporary loss of self at the expense of his health and with the reserve clause that in the morning, along with a headache perhaps, the self returns. But then the man encounters Bernini’s The Ecstasy of St. Teresa and, almost miraculously, the shot moves past his head, focusing only on the statue. It shows another instance of self-forgetting, yet what mediates it now is art, and, moreover a piece where “the mediated transcendence of self was just what the apparently decadent statue of the orgasmic nun claimed for itself as a subject,” says the narrator of the scene, Joelle. The bizarre film shows that what does that mediation is what changes the positive/negative valence of the person’s life.
Infinite Jest is a novel of imbalance. Both Hal and the sandwich-bag-salesman typify that. In fact, all the characters do. For the truth to set them free, each character is required to confront the causes and consequences of their imbalances; otherwise, they remain trapped in the annular echo chambers of their inner worlds. Their characterizations show that freedom has only one promising path: engaging with the comprehensive truth of one’s existence, however painful or confusing. Genuine freedom, it seems, comes not from obliterating, but reckoning, by struggling through all the internal opacity and external forces that seem to tie themselves around each limb and pull in opposite directions. It’s not necessarily about releasing ourselves from the knots, but learning about them in order to feel a release in navigating the burdens of being a self in a tangled world. Though sometimes, we might once again find ourselves on the freezing sand.