Monthly Archives: March 2009

When reading Infinite Jest I often get mixed up with the themes of other books that we have read thus far this semester. The book is so enormous and complex that it seems to hold every message that Wallace has to offer all in one. One idea that keeps popping up is the same one we explored in A Radically Condensed History of Post-Industrial Life. That is, the theme of losing ourselves in our quest to create the perfect image.

                      This most clearly came to my attention during the tragic Eschaton debacle in which Evan Ingersoll left the bounds of the game and struck Ann Kittenplan with a tennis ball to the back of the head. Immediately following the incident there was a huge argument concerning the difference between the territory and the map. These can be interpreted as metaphors for the self and the image. Since reading this portion I have been reading the book in this context and noticing that it is largely a book about finding the self that is buried deep below the image. Perhaps the failure to reconcile the two is what forces some of the characters to try to eliminate “their own personal map,” as Wallace says.

                      One character that comes to mind is the P.G.O.A.T., Joelle Van Dyne. Her actual self is so gorgeous that everyone is too intimidated to approach her. Because of this she is forced to wear a veil and she assumes the image of a hideous woman, whom everyone guesses is deformed under the linen. I cannot say that this lead to her suicide attempt or drug usage, and I do not want to fall into the trap of excuse-making that so irritates the crocodiles at Boston AA, but she does eventually try to kill herself by having “way too much fun,” which struck me as sounding oddly similar to being way too pretty and thus hideous. Perhaps substances themselves have something to do with this inability to understand oneself. They serve different purposes for different people but one thing that they do for many is assist in escaping oneself, becoming a different person. Not really sure where I am going with this, but just an idea.

                      Another character is (this comes on page 408, don’t read the following if you would rather not have it spoiled) Eric Clipperton. For all intents and purposes he is without identity, other than his name. No one knows where he comes from, all that is known is that he gets marked “Ind.” for independent. This apparently Self-less junior tennis player prances about the court with a gun to his head threatening to take his life should anyone ever beat him. Again, the importance placed on the image and the lack of understanding or acceptance of the self seems to lead to an inability or lack of desire to live.

                      Whether it is the cause of the elimination of maps or not, image obsession vs. self understanding seems to be a desperately important theme in this book. DFW seems highly critical of the modern disconnect between these two things.

             One of the many human problems that DFW has beaten over our heads this semester has been the basic issue of communication. We are each alone in our own heads, and language, as an abstraction, only exacerbates this problem by making a complete and flawless communication of our thoughts and feelings next to impossible. In his Everything And More, DFW attempts to communicate the problem of infinity to the non-mathematical mind, and while some of us might find the read kind of enjoyable-ish, the book is filled with technical flaws for the mathematical mind to pick out and get upset about.
                      “Trying to express numerical quantities and relations in natural language- to translate mathematical propositions into English and vice versa- often causes trouble” (34). After he says this, DFW goes into a word problem in which 3 men split a 30 dollar hotel room, receive a 5 dollar refund, each take a dollar of the refund and give the remaining 2 dollars to the bellboy. Simply on the basis of the wording of the problem, a dollar disappears: each man paid 9 dollars (3×9=27) and the bellboy received 2 dollars, which adds up to a transaction totaling 29 dollars. In reality, a dollar did not disappear, as a different framing of the problem accounts for the extra dollar. The issue of the missing dollar is simply a product of a faulty communication of the problem. I think this example can help to explain why there are so many mathematical errors in the book. In attempting to use one abstraction (language) to communicate another (math) to those without mathematical backgrounds, DFW lost much of the math’s meaning.
                      Math is, as DFW never ceases to point out, a multi-layered abstraction that is difficult for some of us to understand, and nearly impossible for a lot of us to relate to the real world. To those who are not mathematically gifted, it is much easier to read well-written books about the surface of mathematical concepts than to gain a deep and fully functional understanding of the concepts. It is these people for whom Wallace wrote Everything And More, and it is these people more than mathematicians who find the book enjoyable and maybe enlightening. Thus, DFW had to dumb down the concepts to a readable level, taking out unnecessary mathematical language and equations and, in consequence, filling the book with errors, both of omission and otherwise. The errors were not intentional, nor were they a result of any lack of mathematical understanding on DFW’s part: the errors were simply a product of the same language difficulties DFW discusses in much of his fiction work.  

I was already serendipitously planning to write about Wittgenstein in Infinite Jest and E&M when Tammy posted her questions for group discussion. The one I’m most interested in is Tammy’s third: In what way to abstractions ‘exist’?

It seems sensible to begin with Wittgenstein’s view of this question. He, like his teacher and friend Bertrand Russell (also an important mathematician/philosopher of mathematics, cited often in E&M), wants abstractions to truly exist. They exist as external abstract objects, considered as external and objective as things in physical reality. In Wittgenstein’s view, we can say that 3 exists in the same way as a rock or a house exists; it is external, outside any single individual. Despite 3’s abstract nature, it is objective in the sense that no opinion about it will change its characteristics. The complicating element here is that this abstract objectivity appears contradictory to the subjective-leaning Wittgenstinian notion of meaning as use. By this standard, wouldn’t different use of ‘3’ change its meaning, and hence make it subjective? Strangely, though, it is precisely this principle  that allows math to remain objective.

In paragraph 55 of Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein says the following: “What names in language signify must be indestructible; for it must be possible to describe a state of affairs in which everything destructible is destroyed. And this description will contain words; and what corresponds to these cannot then be destroyed, for otherwise the words would have no meaning.” (We are meant to understand that ‘3’ is a name for 3.) What this means for physical objects is that even when the physical object itself is gone, the name still has meaning via that physical object’s concept, its abstraction. But since 3 is only an abstraction – it has no physical manifestation – it is entirely immune to destruction or alteration. It is unchangeable. When we prove new mathematical properties, we are simply discovering a property that already existed without our knowledge; we are not creating or adding anything to  the  abstraction itself, we add only to our personal understanding of that abstraction.

And so Wallace’s idea of abstraction (his abstraction of abstraction?) aligns with this Wittgenstinian/Russellian model. This view is necessary to consider math an objective enterprise. Without it, proofs are not proofs so much as just detailed strings of subjective reasoning. By this Wittgenstinian standard, post-Cantor, infinity exists in the way all numbers exist, as an abstract external object. If you think about it, it is just as hard to imagine 3 (the abstraction) as it is to imagine infinity.

On a completely different tac, as a side-note of sorts, I want to call attention to Bob Death’s joke on p. 445 of Infinite Jest. It is the same fish-joke that Wallace uses in his Kenyon Commencement speech. The joke is: “This wise old whiskery fish swims up to three young fish and goes, ‘Morning, boys, how’s the water?’ and swims away; and the three young fish watch him swim away and look at each other and go, ‘What the fuck is water?’ and swim away.” This joke is deeply Wittgenstinian in a number of ways. It is a play on the (more famously Orwellian) notion that to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle. This struggle to see what is so obvious and basic as to never be noticed is the main struggle of Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein’s project is to break  language  down to its most basic elements and discover how it actually works, how it is actually used. This preoccupation with ordinary  language  is one of the things that makes Wittgenstein so revolutionary and original. He is trying to see water clearly, even while swimming in it. We already know from Lenore that we are all swimming in language.

That’s all for now. Thoughts?

The broom of the system figures prominently in IJ’s narrative, at about the novel’s midway point. Lucien Antitoi has “a broom he made as a boy, carved out of a tree branch” (483), and this broom serves multiple functions, not least of which to remind us we’re in Wittgenstein territory.

Lucien “is one of the few natives of Notre Rai Pays ever who cannot understand French, just never caught on” (480). He practices the three French words he does know on the broom, but he really seems to have a sort of pre-linguistic existence: “he attends mutely, meticulously, and with childlike innocence to the general cleanliness of the store, using a broom he made as a boy, carved out of a tree branch” (483). He sweeps with “his stout trusty broom” (482), but has also sharpened the tip so that it serves “as a sort of domestic weapon, even then, before ONANite experilaist impost made any sort of struggle or sacrifice remotely necessary, as a silent boy, keenly interested in weapons…” (482). Even though Lucien was silent, he had a keen interest in the broom’s second (linguistic) function. The broom is a relic of his childhood, and now shows his inability to participate fully in the Notre Rai Pays- he is excluded from it because he cannot enter their language game.

In a way, Lucien uses the broom as a crutch- practicing his limited vocabulary on it, and never cataching on to the rules of language in general- he is thus like Vlad the Impaler, repeating one catch phrase over and over, out of context. Furthermore, Lucien has “pretty good intuition that the lone comunicable ‘va chier, putain!’ wouldn’t be a good idea in this context” (fn206.1034). The only words Lucien knowns, the only thing he can communicate, is totally innappropriate given the context- it would function to offend his assaulters. His “lips are quivering not so much from fear — although there is certainly fear — but not from fear spo much as in an attempt to form words. Words that are not and can never be words are sought by Lucien here through what he guesses to be the maxilloficial movements of speech, and there is a childlike pathos…” (488). The childhood pathos recalls his childlike innocence, as he goes through the same process a toddler would while trying to learn English- appropriating the right movements, trying to communicate. I think this whole passage, especially given its context (there’s a broom right there!), can be seen as Lucien’s gestation- perhaps it’s a tribute to Joyce’s Oxen of the Sun chapter in Ulysses, where he traces the gestation of the English language, though obviously on a smaller scale.

Lucien soon becomes Vlad the Impaled, as the broom’s function expands from crutch to weapon. In a particularly gruesome passage, “the broom is shoved in and abruptly down by the big and collared A.F.R…. down Lucien’s wide throat…” and this elicits “the landed-fish gasps that accompany speechlessness in a dream” (488). Lucien’s inability to speak or understand makes him a landed-fish, out of his element because he is speechless. He becomes impaled by the broom whose significance he could not comprehend.
DFW describes Lucien’s death in unusually poetic language in the final passage of the chapter/episode, structurally reinforcing perhaps the idea that Lucien’ss linguistic gestation is complete: Lucien becomes “newly whole, clean and unimpeded, and is free, catapulted home over fans and the Convexity’s glass palidsades at desperate speeds, soaring north, sounding a bell-clear and nearly maternal alarmed call-to-arms in all the world’s well-known tongues” (488-9). Where Lucien had struggled with language in life, and could not understand the nuances of language or word’s meaning as function, he now speaks all the world’s well-known tongues; he has achieved linguistic mastery through his “necessary” “sacrifice” (482). He matures, as he moves from “childlike” to “near maternal.”

There seems to be a dark implication here that we must be impaled/killed by our own brooms/words in order to transcend language. I think this ties in to what DFW said in the McCaffery interview, that the author must “be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. And the effort to actually do it, not just talk about it, requires a kind of courage that I don’t seem to have yet. (McCaffery, 150).