I'm going to attempt some kind of cathartic post on what the big ideas in the book are so I can move on with my life and do something else. I intend--unwisely, in all likelihood--to do this without a net. That is, I'm going to try to come up with my take on the book without referring to what the many, many experts and fans of the book have already said about it. I don't want to do either an academic-style analysis or a New York Times-type critique. The book's great. We all know that. It's also been studied to death, so if I'm going to say anything even close to new about it, it's going to have to be more personal.
This post is about suicide, about my relationship to the topic, about a book that deals extensively with it, written by an author who ultimately committed it.
Suicide in Infinite Jest
Suicide is all over IJ. The meaning of the title within the novel refers to a movie about a woman who seems to softly promise the release of death. The movie has become weaponzied because people who watch it become essentially lobotomized, unable from their first viewing to desire anything but to watch it again. Beyond that, the book spends roughly half its pages on the down-and-out, the addicts and recovering addicts of Boston. This is a population that includes some who are tormented by the shadow of the black wing of aggressive depression. (If aggressive depression is anything like it is described in this book, let me say I feel nothing but sympathy for those who suffer from it, and I do not in the least bit begrudge anyone wanting out.)
But the link to suicide goes deeper still. It isn't just an option for the mentally ill. The book is, as the title suggests, deeply indebted to Hamlet, a play we teach to moody teens every year for some reason even though suicide is all over the play. Of course, there is the "To Be or Not To Be" soliloquy, which is an extended meditation on suicide. It's an option that Hamlet eventually only weakly opts out of because he is concerned about what kinds of dreams may torment him in that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler has returned. There is also Hamlet's even more direct wish that "the Almighty had not fix'd his canon 'gainst self-slaughter."
Hamlet's reasons for considering suicide in many ways contradict those given in IJ. The shifting narrator of IJ at one point notes that generally, people do not seriously consider suicide because they decide that "life's assets and debits do not square." But that seems to be exactly what has led Hamlet to consider it. He is disillusioned (but not, I think, depressed) that life seems to have moved on after his father's death so quickly. If his father can be forgotten like that, what is the point of life, if it's so fleeting? Why would anyone put up with the million annoyances, big and small, just to endure to the end of a thing that means nothing?
Perhaps this isn't the kind of suicidal thinking, though, that brings action. It's not enough to override the animal impulse, the instinct to survive. Hamlet may deride himself outright for being a coward, but that's not enough to make him do what he thinks he ought to do and end his own life. His abstractions do not bring action.
And that's a key theme of IJ. Intellectuals are capable of seeing through the many holes in the answers proposed by others of how to make life meaningful and worth living. But they are only able to show the holes, not to propose something better. They're just smart enough to be miserable. It's a theme Jonathan Franzen has picked up in his work.
Geoffery Day is one of these just-smart-enough-to-be-miserable characters. He has come into Ennet House, a halfway house for those recovering from addiction, but just can't abide the cliches that AA wants him to repeat. Don Gately, although stunned nearly to silence by Day's verbal wit, manages to make one thing clear: Geoffery is completely right that everything AA tells you is garbage, but it is also completely right that if you do what AA wants you to do, it will work. It's a complete paradox (although Don wouldn't call it that), but it's true. But Day is too smart to unlock the magic.
The Antidote to suicidal tendencies in IJ
There are a couple of classes of people who might consider suicide. There are those tormented by psychological maladies or addictions that make life so painful they override the will to survive. These kinds of motivations lead to action. IJ compares these feelings to those who are so afraid of dying in a fire they jump from a burning building, preferring the certain death of the fall to what so terrifies them. People in really awful depression are in pain, pain that's greater than their fear.
There are also those whose problem with life is more a philosophical one. Hal, the novel's rather obvious teenage simulacra of Hamlet ("Prince Hal," a janitor calls him, rather too pointedly), is one of these. He is gobsmacked one morning when he imagines a pile of all the food he will eat from that morning to the end of his life, then pictures next to it a pile of all the shits he will have to take when he eats all that food. It gives him the screaming fantods, and it's all too much to take in. He spends the rest of his few moments on stage lying down, watching his father's movies. We are left to wonder if his coming seeming madness, alluded to in the chapter's opening scene, one in which every facial expression and word he says is misunderstood, is real madness.
Both those suffering direct psychological torment and the less direct, existential kind are offered options. For the recovering alcoholic, drug addict, or depressive, there is the magical compartmentalizing cliche of AA: one day at a time. Build a wall around the day, don't see beyond it. Build it over each second of the day if you have to. Yes, it's a cliche, but cliches tend to become cliches for a reason. You cannot eat that entire pile of meat or defecate all of that shit. As Joelle van Dyne discovers, if you try to think of all the days in front of you, they will feel like they are too big a hurdle, like each day is a car you have to jump on a motorcycle, Evil Kenevil-style. But a series of jumps over one car, repeated each day, is possible.
For those who have talked themselves into an intellectual state of uncertainty, until they feel that all the uses of this world are dull, stale, flat and unprofitable--maybe not actively considering suicide, because their thoughts cannot ever obtain the name of action, but nonetheless supremely indifferent to life--for these, the options are maybe a bit more complicated. The magic of cliches might not be available to them. So what do they turn to?
One thing they shouldn't turn to, according it IJ, is a sense of world-weary, ultra-cool ennui or weltschmerz. IJ constantly reinforces for us the idea that the never-ending cycle of smart-ass American irony is not, as we tend to believe, proof that we are wise to our own foibles; it's the cause of many of our most profound social anxieties and pathologies. It's natural to yearn for earnestness. (Here, I will cheat and bring in a video that explains Wallace's thoughts on Irony, one I was aware of before reading the book):
Early on in the book, we read a paper Hal has written for school on how America's police hero evolved from Hawaii Five-O to Hill Street Blues. It went from the man of action, who moved endlessly toward a conclusion we all saw was right, to post-modern hero Frank Furillo, a man struggling to figure out his murky way in a complex bureaucratic landscape. Furillo is not a hero of action, but re-action. Hal wonders if the future of the hero will give us a hero of "non-action, the catatonic hero, the one beyond calm, divorced from all stimulus..." By the end of the novel, Hal is on his way to being this very thing.
The last remaining vestige of the hero of action the novel sees as possible is Hal's brother Mario, a strange mix of birth defects and Yoda-like wisdom. In a touching (i.e. schmaltzy and utterly un-ironic) scene, the trainer who comes to the tennis academy where Hal and Mario live was moved to come there when he (the trainer) was conducting a social experiment living as a homeless person. Instead of asking for money, he asked for someone to just touch him. He held out his dirty hand and asked for human contact. When nobody did this for weeks, he (the trainer) began to despair, and almost forgot his real identity and became homeless. But Mario hears him (the trainer) asking for someone to just touch him and, unable to think it is just some weird argot for "please give me money," as everyone else has, shakes the man's hand.
But let's get real here
I haven't used scholarly sources here, because this book's been gone over by scholars and fans to death. I'm not going to produce something new through doing a lot of homework. In the spirit of Wallaceian earnestness, I'd like to talk about what this book made me feel.
This book is better than anything I could ever do. If I quit my job, abandoned my family, lived to write, I'd never touch the jaw-dropping wonder of this book. And yet, the guy who wrote it killed himself at about exactly my current age. A big part of me doesn't understand Wallace's suicide. I'm like the tennis students at Enfield Tennis Academy. I think that because he wrote a book that was ten times better than anything I've ever written, he should be ten times happier.
Of course, this is nonsense. No sooner do tennis players make the big time than they begin to worry about losing their fame and sense of being special when they stop winning. Tennis is a symbol for the American dream in IJ. Once we achieve it, our options are: enjoy it (often too much, which makes us lose our edge), or work tirelessly and paranoiacally to maintain it, which begins to feel like a grind, and leads some athletes to seek refuge in drugs, alcohol, etc.
There is retrospectively unnerving foreshadowing of Wallace's death in the book. The character in IJ who is most like its author is the film-maker, a man referred to by his family, suggestively, as "Himself." Himself "de-maps" himself by sticking his own head in a microwave.
I haven't extensively looked into Wallace's life. In grad school, I was still part of the generation that believed somewhat that details about the author's life were as likely to mislead you as enlighten. I don't believe that anymore, but I still wanted to try to connect purely with the book before I learned too much about the author. It turns out that Wallace probably killed himself more out of the psychic torment and addiction sorts of problems than the existential malaise kinds.
Thankfully, these are torments I've been spared. I'm not depressed, and I'm not within a million miles of addicted. But I have thought about suicide often since I was a teenager. I've almost always thought of suicide in terms of a cold calculus, the "credits and debits" of the novel. For now, I've put the question of suicide out of mind, because I feel--for reasons I can't quite describe--that it would be wrong to go while my parents are still alive and while I still have kids to get established in life. But man, I've seen my grandmother and my mother-in-law die in nursing homes in the last ten years. I do not want to go that way, surrounded by the eye-burning ammonia stink of urine until I don't notice it anymore.
I don't want to go too early, but when the time comes, I don't want to lose the name of action and go too late. I'm worried I won't have the stamina to put up with life until I've made it long enough, but I'm also worried that when I've made it as far as I want to make it, I'll be too scared to give it up. It's a difficult balance I want to achieve between clinging to life and being ready to leave it. The thing about Infinite Jest is this: I don't think IJ goes far enough to make a convincing case for sticking around.
Instead of tennis, life just seems to me like a kind of semi-interesting board game, but one that goes on way too long, well past the point of being amusing. I have no real grudge against others if they enjoy the game, and in fact wouldn't mind making room for them at the table by bowing out myself, if it weren't for the fact I think it will hurt the chances of others I feel responsible for help them to enjoy the game themselves. So I keep playing well past the point of diminishing returns for me, until life just seems like a big pile of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrows I have to endure.
I know it's an ad hominem to say that what DFW offers in IJ must not be a good method for getting myself as far in the game as I want to go, since it didn't work for him. But doesn't that mean something? Doesn't it suggest something about the usefulness of the solutions offered in IJ for finding a way to keep getting up every morning without de-mapping oneself?
It seems absurd to say Wallace underestimated the role humor can play in survival, because I can't remember reading a funnier author. But in taking irony out of play, DFW is really taking a major weapon in the humorist's arsenal, one that can help to cope with life. Sometimes, irony is better than earnestness. Not always. I'm glad DFW made an earnest plea for earnestness, and that it seems to have had an impact on our culture. But sometimes, yes, it really is better to evade your true feelings and use humor, even douchey world-weary ironic humor, than it is to come in contact with real feelings.
Me, I use some combination of fuck-you-universe rage, emotion-dodging humor, dopamine I get from occasionally being able to help others or finding something genuinely fun to do, and bits of occasional hopefulness that somewhere in the things in heaven and earth not dreamed of in my small philosophy might be something that could make this whole tale to be told by someone other than an idiot. There is no right formula. You get through life telling yourself whatever you need to tell yourself. If I tell myself enough things to get to a point where I feel pretty sure I've played long enough, I win.
I loved this book, but I'm not sure in the end it was enough of what I look for that I'm going to keep going back to it. I don't think I'll be one of those annoying DFW acolytes I've read about, sort of the literary equivalent of the worst of the Rick and Morty fanbase. Maybe that's for the best, since those kinds of fans seem to lead to the kinds of snarky, ironic critiques of themselves that DFW would have hated.
In the meantime, should the wraith of Wallace ever feel the desire to slow down enough to sit atop my monitor and share its thoughts with me, he's always welcome at my desk. I'm hope his wraith is happy wherever he is.
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