Let's Read Infinite Jest!1. Introduction: Title, Plot, and Themes

TITLE/CHARACTERS

Whenever I begin reading a book, I try to understand why the author chose the title of the book. Usually it's not until you're well into the book that you begin to figure out how the title fully relates to the material within. But I try to get a bit of a handle on it before then so it's at least at the back of my mind. It's nice when it's something like Infinite Jest because, right from the starter pistol, you know to keep an eye out for dead clowns, suicidal emo boys, drowned love interests, and incestuous hanky-panky! Those are all things in Shakespeare's Hamlet. If you're wondering why I mentioned them, the phrase Infinite Jest is taken from Hamlet's speech in the graveyard where he's contemplating skull fucking Yorick. Look, I read the comic book version of Hamlet drawn by Simon Bisley so I might have a misguided understanding of some of it.

Sorry to get your hopes up. There is no comic book version of Hamlet drawn by Simon Bisley. I love to make shit up and lie. It's the only way to hide really earnest and sincere truths about myself on the Internet. I can be as honest as I want when I've surrounded my inner truths with absolute bullshit. Good luck figuring out what's what!

I'm actually doing a re-read of Infinite Jest (which I just finished reading) so I can speak a little bit more as to why the book is called Infinite Jest without merely wild speculation. One of the "mainest" characters is Hal Incandenza, the son of James Incandenza. Hal takes on the role of Hamlet in a number of ways, like when the janitors call him Prince Hal, and being sad, and having a dead father who appears as a ghost, and digging up the skull of his father, James, and having a mother who seems to be in an incestuous relationship with her brother (referred to as her half-brother but almost certainly a step-brother). James Incandenza is both Hamlet's dead father's ghost but also, and more importantly, Yorick, the clown full of infinite jest (that's why Hal digs up his skull (which he doesn't actually do in the chronological telling of the book. It happens in the secret part of the book that I suspect exists but I need to find on the re-read). Hal's father sees his son disappearing into sadness and depression (this may be because Hal is doing that or it might be because James is delusional. We'll see which is more probable on the re-read!) and only wants to make him happy. His father works with light and energy (his last name is Incandenza for literary reasons!) and begins to make movies in an attempt to create the ultimate entertainment which can cheer up his son. Ultimately this entertainment probably destroys the world but that wasn't the point of it! The point was to make Hal happy. Also, just for transparency's sake, when I described what the actual entertainment depicted, called Infinite Jest by James in the book, to the Non-Certified Spouse, I was on the verge of tears. But we'll get to that!

Hal has a younger brother (almost certainly his half-brother whose parents are Hal's mom, Avril, and Hal's Uncle Charles Tavis, Avril's probable step and not half brother) named Mario who is almost certainly a representation of Horatio, Hamlet's school friend and basically the only character to survive the play. Mario has the best relationship with James Incandenza and acts as a sort of human camera lens, seeing things others cannot see, viewing things without judging, and needing a tripod to stand up straight.

The worst part about this book being named after a quote from Hamlet is that I need to re-read Hamlet now too! Good thing I still have David Bevington's The Complete Works of Shakespeare (4th Edition) which I've hauled around since college even though it's probably seven pounds. I don't mean I took it with me everywhere the way I almost always had a copy of Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein on me in my late 20s and 30s. I had that book on me so often that all of the contacts in that time of my life have their phones and addresses scrawled on the inside covers.

The book has a load of other characters but we'll get to them as they crop up. The other "mainest" characters are probably Don Gately, Joelle Van Dyne, and Orin Incandenza. Maybe throw in Remy Marathe and Hugh/Helen Steeply too. But that's it! Nobody else gets to be a "mainest" character! Not even Avril Incandenza and Michael Pemulis! I have to draw the line somewhere!

Plot

The plot doesn't really matter. If you think the plot matters, you're going to be fucking livid with the way the book "ends". Just out of your mind cataleptic. That's not the word I wanted to use but then I don't have the ghost of James Incandenza feeding me OED words directly into my brain. Ostensibly, though, the plot has to do with the people who orbit the creators and actors within the entertainment Infinite Jest and those in search of this video entertainment that fires the pleasures senses of the brain so hard that people die while watching and rewinding and watching it again. If they're taken away from the entertainment (once again, called Infinite Jest, filmed by James Incandenza), they supposedly become useless, having taken the greatest source of pleasure they've ever experienced away from them and being driven to continue that experience. I'd say more about that but I've forgotten how Remy Marathe put it, how a person's eyes looked after they've seen the entertainment and had it taken away from them. It's really important the way he describes it but I've forgotten! Stupid reader! I'm the worst!

The way David Foster Wallace writes the book is all explained in the filmography of James Incandenza, specifically his use of anti-confluential plots and his "joke" films of Found Dramas. To understand the plot, you just need to understand those two things. Anti-confluential plots are stories that run in parallel but never come into any real meaningful contact with each other. Now, you might be telling me to hold on at this point, and I get what you're about to say. Yes, everybody's plots in Infinite Jest intertwine with many other people's plots in Infinite Jest. But they do so in a way that bolsters one of the themes and doesn't help to explain the plot. As a reader, you very much want all of these disparate threads to come together to explain what the fuck is going on. But you do not get that. What you get is a sense of connection without any of the characters realizing this connection. Is it a kind of dramatic irony, I guess, where we, as the readers, see how the characters connect while the characters themselves remain blind to it? The Found Dramas are a joke where James Incandenza described the idea of picking a random name out of a phone book and then following an hour and a half of their life (or something. Again, my memory on the actual way it's stated in the book is vague) without their knowledge but then realizing that they don't even need to film these people's lives. In a sense, James' "found drama" exists without James having to record it in any way. This book is fecund with Found Drama.

Themes

I'm sure there are more and we'll be delving into them as we read but I figure three main themes really stand out: the inability to communicate with others, addiction/obsession/compulsion, and suicide.

1. Inability to Communicate with Others.
The book begins with Hal Incandenza trying to communicate to the Dean of a college he's attempting to get into but failing so miserably that they believe he's acting wildly and aggressively and they need to wrestle him to the floor and keep him pinned in the toilet while he calms down. Not long after that scene, readers see a young Hal speaking with his father in a terrible disguise as his father laments that Hal will not talk to him. While they're talking past each other. Various moments are given to how technology hampers the way in which we communicate. And, of course, Hal's father's attempt to communicate with his son which destroys (or will destroy) the world. Many, many more examples will be seen as we read, ending in Don Gateley's long-ass hospital stay where he's got a tube down his throat making him incapable of communicating with anybody at all (except, you know, for the ghost).

2. Addiction/Compulsion/Obsession.
If you think David Foster Wallace is simply talking about alcohol and narcotics, you've missed a driving theme of the novel. Wallace seems to believe that addiction, obsession, and compulsion are not just attributes that drive human behavior but are also what make our lives worth living. A well-repeated concept throughout the Alcoholics Anonymous sections of the book are how addicts coming into AA are just trading their Substance addiction for the addiction of AA's rules, community, and hokey sayings. Hal and the other teenagers at the Enfield Tennis Academy are obsessed with getting so good at tennis that they can become professionals and enter The Show. Someone's father (stupid memory!) becomes addicted to the television show M*A*S*H to the point that it basically kills him. James Incandenza is addicted to alcohol and tries AA but doesn't find meaning in it. What we see when people lose the thing that matters most in their life is that they either eventually go on to find a new addiction or they die, usually by their own hands. James sticks his head in a microwave after he promises to stop drinking. Remy Marathe, without his legs and ability to dodge trains, tries to wheel himself over a cliff multiple times and cannot do it, right up until he saves a woman from certain death on a highway, a woman who is barely functional, barely even alive, but he becomes obsessed with saving. She, in essence, becomes his AA God and reason for living. Joelle has radio and cocaine and AA and, eventually, Don Gately. Joelle's mother loses her beautiful daughter and her denial that her husband was fucking their daughter (in his case, just eye fucking and mentally fucking) and jams her arms down some garbage disposals. Wallace attempts to show that life is meaningless without the meaning we give it, and we must make that meaning intense, no matter what it is. And that intensity is absolutely a driving compulsion, a mind-altering obsession, and an addiction to keep on living.

3. Suicide.
To sleep, perchance to dream, you know? Oh that this too too sullied flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew, you know? Or that the Everlasting had not fixed his canon 'gainst self-slaughter! Oh God, God, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world! You get me? It's fucking Hamlet, man!

So those are the things to look out for as we read! Oh! I almost forgot the most important thing to watch out for as we read! The story of what happens between the last chapter (November 20th, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment) and the first chapter (November, Year of Glad (the year following the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment)). I think that's the secret story within the main story. Why does Hal lose the ability to communicate? How come he cannot regulate his facial expressions? Or express his feelings coherently to others (the only real, earnest feelings he seems to express throughout the entire book!)? We know part of the story right from the start: at some point, Hal Incandenza meets Don Gateley (probably in Gately's hospital room as a bed is being prepared next to him and soon after, as described in this first chapter, Hal winds up in the hospital for psychiatric reasons) and they wind up in the Concavity digging up his father's grave with John "No Relation" Wayne standing nearby "in a mask" (presumably a gas mask). When this is first described in the first chapter, we do not know enough to mark the single sentence about Gately and Hal's father's skull. But after reading, we know that Hal's father was buried in a part of the country that becomes the Concavity, a cut-out of the map of America (the area given to Canada) that had become radioactive and unlivable and where all the trash is catapulted. We also know Hal's father was probably buried with the master copy of Infinite Jest. So this one sentence suggests that Hal, after meeting Gately, and presumably with help from Joelle, decide to acquire this master copy. Hal is obsessed with his father's movies and what his father was trying to say so if they acquired this copy, it is certain Hal watched it. Hal in the first chapter is only one of two spots in the book which uses a first person perspective (later, near the end of the book, we see the world from Hal's point of view too). We have places that describe how other people see the people who have viewed the Entertainment. Is this first chapter so we, the readers, can experience the mind of somebody who has watched The Entertainment, and how they are still in there, trying to cope? Maybe Hal just didn't go as crazy as others because the message was for him. But we also learn John "No Relation" Wayne didn't make this tournament which he was sure to win. I suspect he watched it as well and is insane?

Man, okay, enough with the speculation before we even get into it! There might not even be any more evidence for the secret story because didn't I basically just figure it all out from re-reading the first chapter of the book after finishing the book? Maybe! I am a genius, after all! I'd love to say that my mother told me I was but she thinks I'm kind of dumb. So I'll just have to take my 1st Grade teacher's word for it. Thanks, Mrs. Nelson! I always knew I was super smart!

*ADDITIONAL EDIT*
Oh man! I can't believe I forgot to mention this one silly thing that I wanted to mention in connection with Hal and Hamlet: they both exist within courts! Hamlet in the royal court and Hal on the tennis court. I don't know. I thought it was amusing and cool!