July 2, 2009In an interesting (to people like me) bit of analysis, Andrew Seal writes about Infinite Jest:
Specialized knowledges pervade the book—tennis, recreational drug use, optics, burglary, even punting (surely the most narrowly specialized position in football). But one of the more (in)famous elements of “research” in the novel is the filmography Wallace includes in endnote 24. In the age of IMDb, we might be apt to forget that the filmography is (or was) actually a highly specialized and intensely laborious feat of archival research, but the almost eight-and-a-half pages of James O. Incandenza’s collected works should surely remind us that a filmography is actually the product of research, and not Googling.
Yet there was, of course, no research necessary for composing this “artifact”—having no basis in reality, everything in it is a pure product of imagination. Yet Wallace never seems comfortable simply acknowledging that the imagination that produced it is his own. In just about as many ways as possible, Wallace continually disrupts the filmography with secondary or tertiary commentary to let us know that he’s looking at it from the outside too: I kept waiting for that click where the self-distancing irony would drop away and, as with Borges or Pynchon or Bolaño or even (especially) Auster, you get a real note of dread or mystery where the author seems to have been finally convinced of the reality of his artifice. Even in the last entry, which is about The Entertainment itself, there are three skeptical footnotes embedded.
And a bit later concludes:
Most of Infinite Jest, I think, does not do this approximate deconstruction act; the bulk of it is what can be defined as specialist realism—which I think is actually a broadly popular mode of writing. I don’t think very many people mind writerly ostentation by itself: there are simply far too many popular authors who are grossly ostentatious for this to be the case. And readers of all kinds are capable of showing enormous patience with heavily-detailed and at times rather tedious passages of questionable importance to the overall novel. “Specialist realism” is not terribly problematic to most readers, and is often even considered enjoyable. (Consider, here, Wallace’s enthusiasm for Tom Clancy: there is not as great a distance between the two as one might think.) This mode of writing, however, sometimes slips into a different mode of writing that is indecisively subversive—a lukewarm irony that I think turns nearly everyone off. This is present, too, in Infinite Jest, and in order to have a conversation among people who really like the book and people who can’t get through it, I think it’s necessary to begin by separating this lukewarmness from the specialist realism that actually makes the novel so captivating.
Wallace may have had very well-thought-out, very theoretically smart reasons for trying to have things both (or more) ways, for trying to be indecisive, but there are lots of things which are really theoretically well-grounded which are simply annoying. I’m sure there are folks who think that the lukewarm ironical mode is really brilliant and is actually the most brilliant thing about the novel. I’d be happy to hear those arguments, but I want to make clear that I don’t really find this lukewarmness all that much of an obstacle to enjoying the book. So please, don’t confuse me with attacking Wallace or “hysterical realism” or any of that stuff.
The interesting question is how intentional the “lukewarm irony” (not sure I like the term; I have nothing better… and I think Wallace was jesting with the list that mentions Clancy, though the point still stands, but in a way I’m not sure matters much). I guess I’m squarely straddling the fance. Is it intentional? Just about every bit of it. Could Wallace have achieved the kind of distance that Borges did? I don’t think so. I think that inability is a fundamental characteristic of the fiction because it was a fundamental characteristic of Wallace’s philosophy– of language, of story and of life.
What was fascinating about Wallace’s work– to myself and many others– was this absurdly heightened self-consciousness, which many of us share, paired with such incredible gifts, which most of us don’t. In this respect Wallace’s life might have been a train wreck. But a beautiful (why do I keep thinking of Ballard’s Crash here?) sometimes elegant one. Wallace crashed. We all do. But what a way to delve deep into what I believe to be an inescapable part of the (excuse me for this) postmodern condition! Borges would be a very different writer were he writing now. In fact, I’m not sure he could be Borges at all. And I think he’d agree, though he might– Pierre Menard style– create a better Borges than Borges himself.
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