One Thousand Misanthropic Pages
David Foster Wallace on addiction, depression, and bodily fluids
Infinite Jest is one of those books that’s more of a meme than anything else these days. Like many, I first discovered in in undergrad when I heard a cooler, older friend at a party describe this absurdly long novel with footnotes that had footnotes, “I’m actually reading it guys”. Of course I had to get a copy.
It sat on my self unread through undergrad, grad school, and for three years post graduation until three months ago when I decided to actually give it shot. I had read and enjoyed DFW’s short story collection Oblivion, though there were a few stories I found to be more disturbing than I had expected when my only prior experience with DFW had been his viral speech about fish and water and an essay about lobsters.
One story in particular, “Good Old Neon”, immerses the reader in the mind of a deeply depressed man who has tied himself into a psychic corner with some particularly destructive, self-reverential thought loops, eventually killing himself. It’s a particularly distressing read as DFW is so skillful at tracing complex lines of self-hatred. So anyway, this fall I thought I’d give Infinite Jest the ol’ college try.
I found it to be a grotesque piece of anti-art. It’s the kind of book someone would write if they believed the world to be fundamentally ugly and worthless, that most of life for most people was spent somewhere on a spectrum of cruel joke to hellish nightmare made worse by the horrible things people create to escape it (the title itself refers to a film so addictive people watch it on repeat until they die).
I call it anti-art because DFW uses the nonlinear, plotless, stream-of-conciousness structure as an elaborate troll. It’s as if he’s daring the reader to find some meaning in meaninglessness, and trying to show that such attempts are futile because life itself is meaningless. I wonder if DFW was so full of self-conscious fear of being incapable of creating transcendent art that he used his formidable talents to mock the entire project of using art to transcend life’s furies.
Anyway, I’d recommend anyone interested in a shorter, better, excavation of the heterosexual male subconscious to check out Michel Houellebecq’s excellent The Elementary Particles. Or for anyone interested in a stark depiction of anxiety/depression to watch Lars von Trier’s Melancholia. Might save yourself three months and 1,000 pages.