Mrs. Heretic asked me, when I started reading Infinite Jest, why I was reading it. I had a little bit of difficulty answering the question. I've had more difficulty continuing to answer it since I started reading it. I put the book down intending to definitively quit on page 134, but felt guilty two hours later, and now am on page 182. That's a week's work. I guess I've also read 13 pages of the footnotes at the back of the book, two of which were several pages long.
Why am I reading this book? Because of late, I've been thinking that maybe literature isn't the stupidest thing for me to invest my time into. Because it's considered one of the most important fiction books of the last 50 years. Because if I'm going to invest time into literature in a serious way, it's a book I ought to have read. Because what I know of David Foster Wallace seems interesting. For example, his belief that literature can and should be sincere. (Contrast this to Harold Bloom's dictum, "All bad poetry is unfailingly sincere," which had a lot of influence on me twenty years ago.) DFW also wrote about other quaint ideas, like how the point of literature is to decrease our feeling of loneliness. He seemed to have believed in a lot of classic, humanist ideas about what the point of literature was. So if there was a guy whose oeuvre was worth sinking a lot of time into, it was him.
It's not an easy task, though. First of all, I'm a terribly slow reader. I get distracted easily. I have no idea how some people read entire books in an evening. I made it through graduate school by being willing to put forth super-human effort to get my work done. If it took me ten hours to read something most people read in five hours, then I would spend ten hours reading it. But this is 1,000-plus pages of fairly dense writing, and there are a lot of other things I could be doing.
It's not so dense I can't do it. It's not Joyce. It's not Derrida. The question isn't whether I can read it, it's whether it's worth all the time. And that's how reading this book is like writing itself. Each step forward requires not just effort, but faith that the effort will be worth it. Dave Eggers' forward to Infinite Jest notes that it took him a month to get through it. That means it'd likely be about six weeks for me. That's six weeks where I'm plowing forward, hoping the effort will pay off in the end. With a book like this, it's a little difficult to tell as it goes along whether it's going somewhere worth going. So I have to believe that all those people who finished it already and declared it worth the effort know what they're talking about.
I wouldn't expect it to be the best of all possible uses of those six weeks. That would be like expecting the person you marry to be the best possible match of all the billions of people in the world. But it would be nice if it were the best of the several uses of those weeks I was otherwise immediately considering.
The concern that I'm wasting my time is actually one of the most common thoughts that distract while mid-reading. At least once an hour, I have to fight back the feeling that this is all a lot of effort for nothing, that it's not really going to change me or how I see things in any meaningful way. The same thing happens while writing a story--the odds are always long that anything I write will get published, that anyone will share with me the breakthrough I think I've had while writing it.
I used to get through this feeling when I was younger by telling myself that even if what I was doing wasn't the best use of my time, that wasn't a problem because eventually, I would work so hard I'd read everything and do everything, and in time, I would hit upon the best selections. But I'm far too familiar now with my own limitations to still think that.
It's humanist optimism that pushes me forward, the belief that by applying my intellect, I can improve myself in some sense and maybe the world around me. But in many ways, that's like thinking I can bail out the ocean with a bucket. In my case, my brain isn't the most effective bucket, either. Still, I've been committed for a long time now to the quixotic quest to try to bail out that ocean, even while knowing the whole time it's a fool's quest. Maybe that's why I'm drawn to books like Infinite Jest--or Moby Dick or Gnomon. Books that indulge a bit, that invite criticism like "there is a well-crafted 400-page novel somewhere inside this 750-page book"--those books are the ones to me that encapsulate the spirit of throwing oneself with abandon at an impossible project.
I recently became the same age DFW was when he gave up trying. Maybe that's why I feel such a sense of urgency to keep pushing. If I stop feeling like I need to put everything I have into it, I'm afraid I'll feel like it's no longer worth putting any of myself into it.
I guess that's why, when I'm done writing this, I'm going to try to force myself to sit down for another hour or so and see how much more of this book I can chip away at.
Shouldn't one's time be worth something to enter into a calculus about whether reading a particular book is worth spending it on? We're all in death's waiting room (although usually it's a wait that we're perfectly willing to endure, unlike the doctor's office), and it's not clear there's much of a point to any of this. If it's between this and Proust or this and Tolstoy or this and a few hours watching TV, who's to say the choices really aren't just about the same: ways of biding one's time. Most of us, after all, contribute little to the human cause outside of lies in our immediate periphery.
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