Michael Hancock: A Few Observations

When I signed on to do this guest post for the blog about a month ago, I had no idea what I would write. When I talked to Phil about it last week, I had no idea what I would write. And when I sat down to write this, a few short hours before sending it to go up on the blog, I—well, I’m sure you can guess. In lieu of an argument, then, I’m going to provide a few observations on my reading of Infinite Jest over the past few weeks, and if a theme emerges, I promise it’ll be a surprise to me as much as anyone.

Medium. This is my second complete read-through of Infinite Jest, and I have to say, it’s a book that rewards repeat readings. Wallace does so much set up and foreshadowing that flew over my head the first time through. What’s really making a difference, though, is that I’m reading it in a different medium (two different medi if you count a reading group as a medium, but I digress). I’m on my iPad, rather than the printed tome I had borrowed from the library the first time round. For most books, I don’t find much a difference between print and digital, but for Infinite Jest, it feels like there’s a compression that occurs that fundamentally changed how I read it.

The search function, for example, is a game-changer. Infinite Jest‘s size and format, the way it jumps around in time and place, discourages going backwards. If you find a passage that reminds you of something that came earlier, physically looking for that passage can take on a needle in a haystack quality. For me, though, it’s as simple as double clicking. If I want to find out where the book’s first kertwang came in—Struck regaling his junior kids on November 3rd, YDAU—or look up an acronym that’s only explained a handful of times—O.N.A.N. appears 257 times in the book; Organization of North American Nations comes up seven times—I can do so. It makes it much easier to pursue random repetitions, and forge them into connections.

And in a related difference, the digital version of the book cuts down radically on a part of reading we maybe don’t think of so much, the physical labour of reading. Take the end notes—even in a relatively small book, end notes are a burden of sorts, that they require you to physically turn to the book’s end, and then turn back to the page you left. In Infinite Jest, where the endnotes are vital to the plot and tend to come fast and frequent, you get used to flipping over a pretty hefty amount of pages. The digital version occludes that—the worst I get is the mild frustration in accidentally triggering the page back function instead of the link back to where I was reading.

Even just carrying around the book is a labour, as I’m sure most of you can attest—Infinite Jest is a bludgeoning weapon, and should be held with caution around children and small animals. The flip side—besides developing the upper body strength necessary to ferry it around—is that I remember an immense sense of satisfaction in reaching the end of the physical book, a satisfaction that’s somewhat truncated when your progress is measured in a tiny scroll bar icon instead of a massive quantity of turned pages.

In short, there’s a materiality to Infinite Jest, a mental labour that comes out of its resistance to going backwards, and a physical labour out of its sheer size. I won’t say that the digital equivalent is immaterial—such claims encourage cyberspace/meatspace divides that provide unnecessary segregation of our daily lives—but it is a very different materiality, one that deeply changes my relation to the text.

You’re quite a looker. This thought is a little more scattershot, so please bear with. In a post last week, Virginia Shay brings up the concept of observing without judgment, that Mario sees the world around him without the desire to be critical of what he sees. I think that was a hugely insightful (pun unintended) observation about a book that’s so frequently about onlooking, and what to do with being looked at.

All of my favourite Incandenza films—with the possible exception of Blood Sister: One Tough Nun (side note—if any part of Infinite Jest is ever developed into a feature film, it should be Blood Sister, and maybe just Blood Sister)–revolve around looking. “The Medusa vs. the Odalisque” features a creature so ugly it kills and a creature so beautiful it kills, and an audience of spectators destroyed by watching; “The Joke” is an audience watching a looped version of themselves until they get bored and leave; “Cage III – Free Show” depicts a carnival crowd being invited to watch a crowd turn into monsters, with the revelation that the monsters they’re watching were invited with the same, and everyone’s turning into a gigantic eyeball. In all cases, you essentially have variations of Infinite Jest itself, the pharmakon that delivers so much pleasure that it becomes an obsession that leads to death. To watch without judgment, without doing harm to yourself or what you view, is virtually impossible in these films.

The connections between watching, pleasure, and harm is repeated over and over in the book—Joelle, for example, is a sort of Medusa/Odalisque figure herself, in the way that she dons the veil and refuses to be visual entertainment for others, but then draws endless speculation on whether what’s under the veil is too hideous to look at or too beautiful. I want to look at two more recent examples, though: DeLint talking to Steepley, and the scene of the engineering student’s capture.

In DeLint’s discussion with (or maybe more accurately, at) he presents his version of what Enfield Academy is meant to do—in short, to prepare players for the Show. Not, in this account, to give them the skills necessary to play tennis at that level, but the training to move so far inward, to be “inculcated” that they aren’t ground up by the fame (echoing Lyle’s earlier conversation with LaMont Chu) but play outside of the audience, in their own head. The terms DeLint uses, though, are somewhat different from Lyle’s—that for the spectators, tennis is about entertainment, about turning the players into Statues to be chewed up and consumed. Entertainment is, of course, a common way to refer to the paralyzing Infinite Jest tape, and statues bring us back to Medusa and the gaze that kills.

As DeLint describes it, the goal is to help the players escape the pressure that drove characters like Clipperton or the kid from Fresno—to redirect the players’ look so they’re looking inward instead of at the audience and seeing an impossible standard reflected back at them. The catch is that turning inward may not be a solution either, as Hal seems to be looking inside and finding nothing there, which is arguably sending him into his own spiral.

The second example perhaps takes us more directly back to the issue of medium. I love the whole sequence of the engineering student’s capture by the AFR, the way it culminates, like the Antitoi capture, in an almost death tableau, a Wallace-patented paragraph long sentence that carries the reader along and drops you off almost before you realize it. But what really interests me is the start of the scene, where Wallace dips deep into the sociological ramifications of on-demand video access.  He posits a future where over half of Boston’s population works from home, receive education from home, and 94% of paid entertainment in O.N.A.N. happens in the home.

The result is a massive upswing in the consumption of free public spectacle, with street musicians earning enough to drive foreign autos, and events like traffic tickets, switching car sides, and, as now, the annual duck pond scrubbing at the park, draw a crowd. (Not incidentally, the oft-repeated q.v. in the section translates into “See that” or literally, “which see.”) It’s not that the event is interesting, but that it’s a chance to do something that has been made financially unviable, to watch as part of a crowd, to observe something jointly. If you want to get postmodern about it, it’s the collapse of carnivalesque and the ordinary, where even the most mundane event can be made into entertainment.

Wallace’s vision of Interlace overlaps with the Internet in a lot of ways, so it’s interesting to explore where the two differ. The break that Interlace doesn’t anticipate is the smartphone; it’s not that we didn’t get this urge to pursue mundane spectacles (an internet full of cat videos can attest to as much) but the mobility that comes with the smart phone means we can still share and participate via proxy. We can look and be spectators without leaving the protection of our own home (and just typing that makes me think of Avril’s and Bain’s agoraphobia).

I’m running out of steam, so I’ll close with….

A Few Words and Phrases That Interested Me in These Sections

“The inappropriate found objects have a tektitic and sinister aspect”

phoneless cord

barocquoco

“pericardum-piercer”

“Saprogenic Greetings”

“lozenges of shadow”

“the horrific areas beneath wooden porches” (counterpart to the special and leonine roar of a public toilet?)

vermiform gleam

Mrs Starksaddle

“the hideous bulging neo-Georgian cube of the Community and Administration Building”

“special little cognomens for their genitals”

“One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for.” (I love that “probably”; even here, he can’t quite fully admit hs longing.)

And if I had an infinite amount of time, I’d dip into spectatorship and Hal’s desire to watch alone in a public space. And Blood Sister, because you can never have enough Blood Sister.