Brett Szyjka: Incandenza Relations

Brett Szyjka is a Software Engineer from Buffalo, New York.  If he’s not coding, reading, or watching baseball, he’s probably asleep.

Hooray everyone, we’re more than a quarter of the way to the finish!  This is my second time through Infinite Jest aside from all of the picking I’ve done at my favorite sections.  I’m enjoying it more than the first time actually and I wanted to quickly thank all of the guides for doing the work of facilitating conversation and highlighting perspectives that otherwise I would have missed out on.

For this post, I want to pick apart the phone conversations that Orin and Hal have over the phone.  At this point in the novel, we’ve heard three of them, and they’ve been increasing in complexity and relevance.  I think that the phone calls between Hal and O thus far have served two major purposes; to build on the themes of communication that Wallace has introduced already and to expose some plot details that we were previously unaware of.

Ever since my first IJ reading I’ve noticed that large parts of conversations that take place between Hal and members of the Incandenza family (Mario excluded) seem less like two parties exchanging information than the two parties separately speaking at one another.  This was framed by the scene between Hal and Himself (as the professional conversationalist).  To a certain degree, it seems like the two participants are talking to each other, but it eventually devolves into the two sides having totally separate discussions with no one in particular.  This breed of conversation is again referenced during Joelle’s experience at Molly Notkin’s party with a number of quotes from pretentious film-school graduates talking at rather than to each other, and pops its head up near the end of Orin and Hal’s most recent phone call when Orin starts to say things like “Are you alright?” and “I can call back when you’re more yourself,” perhaps noticing that Hal is conversationally slipping a bit.  Orin can sense that shift in Hal’s communication just as the reader can.

The other fantastic thing about this phone call section is that it drops a lot of plot details in rapid succession and leaves responsibility to the reader to interpret and draw connections to previous moments in the text.  It seems unreasonable to refer to the author of a 2.5 pound novel as a minimalist but some of the conversation here reflects that style, with us as the reader being keyed in to only brief particulars and filling in the story from there.

We find a lot out about Orin here, especially.  O has isolated himself from the family but specifically the Moms, having cut off his correspondence two years prior (about November Year of the Yushityu…) and even neglecting to attend J.O.I’s funeral.  He intimates a relationship of some kind between Avril and C.T., and confirms for the reader his unease with Mario, which was first brought up immediately after Hal and Orin’s first phone call when Hal responded “No one you know, I don’t think“ to Mario’s query about who had been on the phone, then again in the section concerning Molly Notkin’s party during Joelle’s exposition of her relationship with the Incandenzas.

We can also suss out some of the reason that Orin “abruptly” started calling again in Spring of Y.D.A.U.  I think that Orin’s “self-abuse” and “Enfield Raw Sewage Commission” jokes opening phone calls two and three are meant to be disarming conversation-openers, and are just some of the tools that Orin may be trying to use to mend his strained relationship with Hal.  O also seems sympathetic to Hal’s experience directly following Himself’s suicide, though who could not be with all of the frankly horrifying details explored.  On top of all of that, he seems genuinely concerned with Hal’s seemingly distressed mood near the end of the call, and resembles something close to remorse when Hal continually brings up the Orin-deficient funeral.

And but so* the last things from these phone calls that I’m left with are the translucent bits that may signify foreshadowing, clues, or nothing at all; the mention of Orin at the post office combined with Hal’s knowledge of O’s distaste for them, Orin’s suspicion that he is being followed by paraplegic men, the “red decorative giftwrappish bow” on J.O.I’s final bottle of Wild Turkey, and Orin’s cryptic prompts during his first phone call to Hal.  I hope that others are having as much fun with the family dynamics here as I am.

 

* – sorry.