Month: December 2020

“Samuel rode lightly on top of a book and he balanced happily among ideas the way a man rides white rapids in a canoe. But Tom got into a book, crawled and groveled between the covers, tunneled like a mole among the thoughts, and came up with the book all over his face and hands”

John Steinbeck

If you’re anything like me, you read like Tom.

I’ve always felt that if I didn’t truly understand a piece of fiction, I would be missing out on something important or significant. It’s like that feeling you get where you can’t remember something you know you know but can’t think of, and you’re unable to function properly until you remember it. Like a nagging feeling almost. A compulsive itch that needs scratching.

That’s how I felt after finishing Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. A book that’s notorious for its complex plot, unconventional narrative structure, literary allusions, and – the topic of my last post – the social commentary surrounding it.

The book left me with more questions than answers. I found I was more disappointed in myself for not having understood it completely as opposed to being proud of myself for having finished it at all. It started to make sense to me why some people are so dedicated to analyzing the thing. The truth is, I had become just as obsessed as they were. I had spent the last two months of my waking life thinking of little else; consuming podcasts, reading articles, lurking subreddits, all in an attempt to better understand the novel and its author.

I think that to appreciate any great work of literature, a certain amount of research is necessary. For example, I think it’s helpful to immerse yourself into the context in which a book was written. What was the author’s life like? What experiences and ideas did they have that made their work special? What was happening in the world at that time?

A lot of the time there are subjects and ideas in these books that a reader is expected to be familiar with. Different periods had different ideas about science, technology, morality, race, gender, politics, entertainment, communication, family values, etc. They were written in a different time for a different audience.

Not to mention our language is constantly changing and evolving with our culture, which can make meaningful comprehension of old ideas require a lot of effort.

I even remember looking up all the different names for horse drawn vehicles once. It was something I felt was necessary in order to appreciate the nuance of 19th century literature. Recognizing these vehicles provided clues about the narrative. They could reveal information about a characters personality, their class distinction, and their wealth and status. A hackney for instance, was a taxi for hire. coaches were used for long distance travel, and a curricle was a small two seater that was popular with the youngsters.

When I read The Three Musketeers, I spent a significant amount of time learning about 16th and 17th century Europe. I must have read the equivalent of the novel’s length on wikipedia alone, learning about the Protestant Reformation, Cardinal Richelieu, and European Monarchies.

As I read Around the World in 80 Days, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, I would enter the coordinates from the novels into Google Earth and follow along geographically with the story. I did the same with Moby Dick, War and Peace, The Travels of Marco Polo, and Robinson Crusoe.

I remember learning about European politics and “rotten boroughs,” and the British Reform Act of 1832, while I read George Eliot’s, Middlemarch.

I read A Moveable Feast, Hemingway’s autobiography of his experiences in Paris, while I walked down the same boulevards and neighbourhoods that he so vividly described. I went to his favourite bookstore and walked along the river Seine as he did every morning after he worked on his writing.

During my six month adventure into James Joyce’s Ulysses. I listened to 368 episodes of a podcast called Re:Joyce, created by the passionate author and Joyce mega-fan, Frank Delaney. Each episode was around 15 minutes in which he deconstructed the novel a few pages at a time. Ulysses is astonishingly dense with biblical, historical, and literary references, which makes it almost impossible to read and understand without a guide. Unfortunately, Delaney died before he could complete his podcast. He estimated it would have taken him another 30 years to finish it. He was 74. I had to do my own research after that. But I had help from a website called The Joyce Project. Here is a link to one of the chapters titled Proteus. Every highlighted word or phrase contains a link to another page explaining the reference Joyce was alluding to. I even remember watching a ten hour documentary on Ireland one weekend. All to familiarize myself with Joyce’s references to his country and its complex and often brutal history.

And although some of the following books were written by men, researching them has given me an edifying glimpse into the historical oppression of women; novels like Charolette Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Gustave Fluebert’s Madam Bovary, Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the Dubervilles, Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Nathanial Hawthorn’s The Scarlet Letter, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple, and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.

And yes, you’ll hear occasionally about how some of these “old white men” perpetuate the idea of a white male patriarchy, but some of them went on to inspire the pioneering women thinkers of the 20th century. Mary Sinclair, one of the early campaigners for women’s right to vote, wrote to Thomas Hardy in 1909, commending him for his advocacy on behalf of women.

I’m also aware that these stories are “made-up”, but the ideas, settings, cultures, and the actions of the characters were born out of truth. History gives you facts, but these narratives give you emotions to pair them with. If you can understand the general feelings of the day, and immerse yourself into the common ideas of the people, the books come alive, spirited with relevance.

I realize I went on a bit of a tangent there. And it might come across as some ego trip, but I was more intending to show the type of effort I put into literature. How passionate I am about it. I was tempted to leave it out because I didn’t want to come across as Mr. Braggy Pants, but I thought better of it. Partly because I have to remind myself why I write this blog. It’s so easy to get caught up into some vague idea of self-perception and identity. I’m continuously asking myself: What am I trying to accomplish? Do I want to dissect culture? Help people? Entertain? I always seem to forget the most important reason of why I’m doing this: to leave a part of myself behind when I’m gone. Which is a tad narcissistic, but my hope is to create some kind of personal connection between myself and my future children; to prevent the same emotional paternal void that I’ve been left with.

Another reason why I left it in, if you’re still reading and/or care, is that these books do a good job of representing the cultural movements that I had been steeped in, i.e., Romanticism, Naturalism, and Modernism.

So when I first picked up Infinite Jest, a novel set in the late 2000’s, I wasn’t expecting to have to do the same amount of research I had done with other classics. Wasn’t I living it? Wasn’t I sucking the air of the very epoch that DFW belonged to, was scrutinizing, and hopefully, was redeeming?

I learned however, that I was just as ignorant of my own culture’s ethos as much as I had been of an earlier centuries’. The novel demanded just as much socio-cultural exploration as anything I had read previously. I quickly discovered how unaware I was of the very phenomena that I had been surrounded by my whole life.

Researching this novel and its context has stretched my mind way beyond its comfortable limits. I’ve spent hours scratching my head, confused, ready to give up and move on; especially because most of the source material I was reading came from sites like JStor and other academic journals.

To be honest, this has been really hard for me. Learning’s not easy. And I don’t mean memorizing things or learning by iteration, I mean like heavy, laser focused learning. The grappling with difficult ideas that are barely hanging on by a thread in some dusty corner of your mind type learning. Because even if you grasp some abstract concept and understand it in your own terms; it’s a whole different story trying to write about it.

There is a quote from Thomas Wolfe who said something like: A writer writes to forget something, a reader reads to remember.

That’s what I hope this will be for me. The formulation of my thoughts. My attempt to parse some kind of order out of the chaos in my mind.

But before I get into it I should say, that if you’ve read the book and are interested in a much deeper analysis of it, this might not be what your looking for, because, after all, I’m just a machinist, and this isn’t an undergraduate thesis. I’m just here to find some pieces of actionable wisdom to share.

That being said, the wisdom of Infinite Jest, as far as I understand, is directly tied to the genre that it belongs – that being Post post-modernism. But in order to understand what that means, we need to understand what Post-modernism is, and in order to understand what that means, we need to know what Modernism is.

Bear with me, it’ll be worth it in the end.

Modernism

“…the term ‘Modernism’ is not a precise label but instead a way of referring to the efforts of many individuals across the arts who tried to move away from established modes of representation”

Peter Childs

This is from wikipedia:

“Modernism is both a philosophical movement and an art movement that arose from broad transformations in Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new forms of art, philosophy, and social organization which reflected the newly emerging industrial world, including features such as urbanization, new technologies, and war.”

Modernism can be defined by a few key tenets, those being: the rejection of history; the emphasis on progress; the rejection of God and faith; the belief in an individuals’ autonomous nature; and finally, the idea that science and reason provide us with objective truths, independent of individual and cultural factors.

One of the more interesting ideas that emerged with Modernism was Existentialism. Existentialists struggled with how to deal with the meaninglessness, irrationality, and absurdity of a world that lacked the moral framework of religion and society. They placed a new emphasis on the individual as the only one responsible for giving life any sort of meaning.

Absurdism was a literary off-shoot of Existentialism that explored the conflict between our tendency to search for meaning and our inability to find any in an inherently meaningless world.

Absurdists believed that there were only three options to escape this meaninglessness: Suicide, the acceptance of the absurd, or religious or spiritual belief. The last, according to the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, required an irrational “leap” into the abstract and unprovable. Hence the term, “leap of faith”. Albert Camus, a popular Absurdist writer, considered that to be “philosophical suicide.”

Post-modernism

This is from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

“(Post-modernism) can be described as a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and hyperreality to destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty, and the univocity of meaning.

What the fuck does that even mean? Is “simulacrum” even a real word?

As far as I understand it – just like Modernism did before it – Post-modernism rejects certain aspects that defined the preceding cultural era.

This is from wiki again:

“Post-modernism (which began sometime in the 1970’s) is generally defined by an attitude of skepticism, irony, or rejection toward what it describes as the grand narratives and ideologies associated with modernism…Common targets of postmodern criticism include universalist ideas of objective reality, morality, truth, human nature, reason, science, language, and social progress. Accordingly, postmodern thought is broadly characterized by tendencies to self-consciousness, self-referentiality, epistemological and moral relativism, pluralism, and irreverence.”

Essentially, Post-modernists refuse to believe in the idea of objective truth. Similarly, they don’t believe in any form of objective moral value either. To them, everything is subjective. Everything is deconstructed. And they argue that truth is dependant on historical and cultural contexts as opposed to universality.

In a nut shell, according to Mel Ramsden: “Post-modernism is Modernism’s nervous breakdown.”

But unlike the styles of art and literature that emerged in the Modern era, Post-modern artists refused to adhere to any definitions of what art should be. They intentionally blur the lines between so-called “high-art” and “low-art,” by using different genres and mediums interchangeably.

Here are a few examples:

Weird.

And some of the literature is even weirder. In 1990, The “author” Walter Abish, published a book called 99: The New Meaning, where the title piece is just a fragmented collection of the 99th page from 99 different books.

This is the American academic, Camille Paglia, on the Post-modern artists:

“Young artists have been taught to be “cool” and “hip” and thus painfully self-conscious. They are not encouraged to be enthusiastic, emotional, and visionary. They have been cut off from artistic tradition by the crippled skepticism about history that they have been taught by ignorant and solipsistic postmodernists. In short, the art world will never revive until postmodernism fades away. Post-modernism is the plague upon the mind and the heart.”

And Post-modernism isn’t just restricted to “art” and literature, it’s spilled into our broader cultural consciousness; specifically pop-culture and media. Television and the internet are overflowing with the ironic, cynical, and self-referential aspects that Post-modernism is famous for.

David Foster Wallace talks about this in his essay, E Unibus Pluram, about how television has created a viewer who becomes dependant on it to be their cultural lens through which they experience life.

“If television can invite Joe Briefcase (aka the average viewer) into itself via in-gags and irony, it can ease that painful tension between Joe’s need to transcend the crowd and his status as Audience member. For to the extent that TV can flatter Joe about “seeing through” the pretentiousness and hypocrisy of outdated values, it can induce in him precisely the feeling of canny superiority it’s taught him to crave, and can keep him dependent on the cynical TV-watching that alone affords this feeling. And to the extent that it can train viewers to laugh at characters’ unending put-downs of one another, to view ridicule as both the mode of social intercourse and the ultimate art form, television can reinforce its own queer ontology of appearance: the most frightening prospect, for the well-conditioned viewer, becomes leaving oneself open to others’ ridicule by betraying passe expressions of value, emotion, or vulnerability. Other people become judges; the crime is naivete. The well-trained lonely viewer becomes even more allergic to people. Lonelier. Joe B.’s exhaustive TV-training in how to worry about how he might come across, seem to other eyes, makes riskily genuine human encounters seem even scarier. But televisual irony has the solution (to the problem it’s aggravated): further viewing begins to seem almost like required research, lessons in the blank, bored, too-wise expression that Joe must learn how to wear for tomorrow’s excruciating ride on the brightly lit subway, where crowds of blank, bored-looking people have little to look at but each other.”

And that’s only what television does to us. Because he got the last part wrong; think about how social media and the internet are compounding his ideas. I found this in a comment section somewhere, it’s a good example of the ironic, in-gag, canny superiority that he was referring to:

Sincerity: Making fun of people who say “lit.”

Irony: Saying “lit” because its dumb and cringy.

Post-Irony: Starts saying “lit” out of habit.

Meta-Irony: When someone else says “lit,” you say it’s cringe.

“Irony tyrannizes us.” He continues, “the reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All irony is a variation on a sort of existential poker-face. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit “I don’t really mean what I say.” So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: “How very banal to ask what I mean.”

In one of Malcom Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcasts, he echos DWF’s ideas by criticizing our contemporary forms of political satire. According to the definition, satire is meant to point out the follies, abuses and shortcomings by holding them up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, corporations, government, or society itself into improvement. “Into improvement” is the key message there. Gladwell points out how Tina Fey, for example, the comedian on Saturday Night Live, satirizes the former Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin. He argues that this “satire” is not about actually doing anything about the possibility of an incompetent vice-president, it’s just, in Tina Fey’s words, “a goof;” meant to get laughs and to appear hip and cool.

I don’t think DFW, Gladwell, or myself for that matter, are anti-comedy. It’s like having an ice cream cone once in a while, it’s not going to kill you, but what happens when your whole diet consists of ice cream cones? Because, look around you, spend some time on the internet, everything involves this Post-modern idea of deconstruction and criticism. There is a meme now for almost every conceivable situation and emotion we can think of, and many of them contain the same useless elements of irony and sarcasm hidden just beneath the surface. We are losing the ability to be sincere, emotional, or enthusiastic about anything.

It’s interesting to think about how far this perverted movement has come, and what it’s doing to disconnect us. I wonder about the possible correlations to our society’s current mental health issues because of it. Not to mention the political and academic repercussions. I’ve written about this before. The movement has created a sort of unhinged religiosity regarding social justice and this unattainable utopian ideal of moral purity. I could write an entire post about that topic, but I’ll save that for another day.

DFW summarizes Post-modernism nicely here:

…the last few years of the postmodern era have seemed a bit like the way you feel when you’re in high school and your parents go on a trip, and you throw a party…. For a while it’s great, free and freeing, parental authority gone and overthrown…. but the sense I get of my generation of writers and intellectuals or whatever is that it’s 3:00 a.m. and the couch has several burn-holes and somebody’s thrown up in the umbrella stand and we’re wishing the revel would end. The postmodern founders’ patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We’re kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we’re uneasy about the fact that we wish they’d come back…. Is there something about authorities and limits we actually need? And then the uneasiest feeling of all, as we start gradually realizing that parents in fact aren’t ever coming back — which means we’re going to have to be the parents.

He’s referring specifically to fiction writing, but I think the metaphor can be applied more broadly to our culture.

I also found this short video on YouTube. I think he gets some things wrong; it was Modernity that “killed” God, not Post-modernity, but it still captures the essence of our transition from Modernity to Post post-modernity.

Post post-modernism

What now he asks?

An 1079 page Post-postmodern Magnum Opus is what.

The following is from Infinite Jest, I think it reveals DFW’s primary message:

“It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip — and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent…naïveté is the last true terrible sin in the theology of millennial America….Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.”

But what is this need? I would say it’s authenticity, sincerity, enthusiasm, vulnerability, and goo-proneness, and maybe even – not trying so hard to be cool.

In another part of the book, DFW points out the harmful effects of our cultures’ distance from tradition, faith, and objective truth.

“Someone taught that temples are for fanatics only and took away the temples and promised there was no need for temples. And now there is no shelter. And no map for finding the shelter of a temple. And you all stumble about in the dark, this confusion of permissions. The without end pursuit of a happiness of which someone let you forget the old things which made happiness possible.”

DFW is saying that maybe the things we’ve rejected during our culture’s progression through Modernity and Post-modernity were actually worth something; that perhaps we got a little excited, and threw out the gift with the wrapping paper.

“We, like children, pull the watch to pieces, take out the spring, make a toy of it, and are then surprised that the watch does not go.”

Leo Tolstoy

It’s no wonder someone like Jordan Peterson has become so popular over the last few years. He has restored faith to people that were starving for it. And not necessarily a faith in God, but of structure, of stability, and of meaning.

Part of what defines Post post-modernism in Infinite Jest is DFW’s very use of the irony he criticized. His characters do “uncool,” “un-postmodern” things, but they turn out to have redemptive qualities.

The following is from, “Re-fanging Irony: Infinite Jest and Capitalist Realism,” by Macon Holt:

“With Gately, we see an unresolvable contradiction in the ways in which he engages with the rituals of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) that have helped him so much. In particular the task of relinquishing his will to that of a higher power. Gately does not believe in any sort of god, in fact, he finds the notion ridiculous, but every day he is one his knees next to his bed asking the ceiling to relieve him of his will. This is a moment of knowing and cynical surrender to the naive belief that this quasi-mystical system will allow him to escape his addiction. Ironically, for Gately, it seems to be working.”

Any readers familiar with Peterson might recognize similarities in the previous passage to the seemingly arbitrary actions he suggests to do in his book, 12 Rules For Life; stand up straight with your shoulders back, and clean your room, etc.

As I was thinking about this idea, I was reminded of another literary giant who liked to write 1000 page novels; Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy explored the deepest darkest recesses of philosophy and thought while capturing the human condition better than anyone else I’ve ever read. He was a genius. Like a capital “G” Genius. And he spent years trying to answer the Big Questions about the meaning of life. But after completing his major works, he fell into a depression and was at the point of suicide. Science and reason brought him knowledge, but not comfort. He then turned to religion, and for the next 30 years dedicated his life to pacifism and to the teachings of Jesus.

This is from Tolstoy:

“Faith is a knowledge of the meaning of human life in consequence of which man does not destroy himself but lives. Faith is the strength of life. If a man lives he believes in something. If he did not believe that one must live for something, he would not live. If he does not see and recognize the illusory nature of the finite, he believes in the finite; if he understands the illusory nature of the finite, he must believe in the infinite. Without faith he cannot live.”

When I first read that I thought it was curious; the word Infinite in relation to faith, but then I saw this:

In an interview in 1993, DFW said: “(I’m) the only postmodernist you’ll ever meet who absolutely worships Leo Tolstoy.”

And then I remembered his This Is Water speech at Kenyon College in 2005:

“in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

The “everything else” he’s referring to, is everything finite: social status, money, power, knowledge, entertainment, addiction and substances, deconstruction, satire, and the products of Irony. And as Tolstoy said: “we do not see and recognize the illusion of the finite.” And because of that, “they’re eating us alive.”

Here is Tolstoy again:

“I began to understand that in the replies given by faith is stored up the deepest human wisdom, and that I had no right to deny them on the ground of reason, and that those answers are the only ones which reply to life’s question.”

When I think about the moral relativism of Modernism and Post-modernism, I think about how religion would have been one of the easiest things to condemn. It doesn’t exactly have a good track record; think about all the people who have died in the name of Christianity. Think about the atrocities committed by the Catholic church; The Spanish Inquisition, the selling of indulgences, the sexual abuse cases. I even think back to my own teenage years. Like most curious 14 year olds, I was beginning to question the beliefs of my parents. And I learned, as I imagine so many others like me did, that religion is fragile without faith. It’s the easiest thing to point out all the inconsistencies and inaccuracies in the bible. It’s easy to be cynical and to transcend sentiment – all the while appearing hip and cool.

Even now, though I’m ashamed to admit it, a part of me is sympathetic with Albert Camus’ concept of spiritual or religious belief being “philosophical suicide.” Although now in our present day of hip cynicism, it might be called social suicide instead (notice the eye roll and the sarcasm next time someone refers to a “born again Christian”).

Still, I’m going to risk being the “not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool,” and say, the biggest piece of wisdom that Infinite Jest gives its readers, is showing them where wisdom might be found.

“For we walk by faith, not by sight.”

2 corinthians 5:7

Thanks for reading.

Featured Image: Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa