Author Archives: cgf02007

One commonality among Big Red Son, The View from Mrs. Thompson’s, Up, Simba, Host, a lot of the stories in the “Brief Interviews” parts of Brief Interviews, Michael Joyce, David Lynch, Getting Away, and a Supposedly Fun Thing and perhaps most importantly the vast majority of Infinite Jest, including just about every character’s story except James Incandenza’s, Orin Incandenza’s, Johnny Gentle’s et al., and the AFR/USOUS folks’, is that they all center around the lesser known, the marginal.   This is at once very significant and very suspicious to me.

By the marginal I mean that the real main characters in each of these stories are not those who would otherwise receive attention.   In fact, they are often the players who usher the main characters to the attention they receive.   A very clear example of this is the tech crew in Up, Simba, about which I’m ready to fight anyone who doesn’t believe they are the heart of the story.   Consider the title, consider the time Wallace spent with them on the Trail, and consider the importance he gave to their political advice.

A medium-clarity example of Wallace’s interest in the lesser known is the David Lynch piece.   The obvious counterargument that I’m fibbing or just wrong is that the David Lynch piece was assigned to Wallace by ritzy Premiere Magazine, and so there’s some obvious sense that if Lynch was in fact lesser known he wouldn’t be getting all this press coverage.   But I argue that first of all Lynch is lesser known, which is why 95% of our class had no clue who David Lynch was before reading that piece.   Second, even while Wallace was using a lot of page space to talk about Lynchian theory, what he was really focused on was the extraordinarily bizarre, not-quite-human humanity of a man who piqued Premiere’s interest (I’m guessing) not because of his dressing habits but because of what he makes come out of expensive cameras.   Wallace, while deeply interested in that element of David Lynch, was clearly also interested in what it was about Lynch that allowed him to “keep his head,” the backstage David Lynch that allowed the avant-garde, attention-grabbing director David Lynch to get his limelight.

A low-clarity example, which compared to that last example might be either medium-clarity, or I overestimated the clarity of the last example: the washroom attendant in “Brief Interviews” in Brief Interviews.   Because it’s fiction, we can’t be sure whether Wallace spent time getting into the psyche of any life-time washroom attendants, but the fact that Wallace wanted to is important on its own.   And while the washroom attendant doesn’t do the dirty work (pun intended) so that the attendees can receive the washroom spotlight (not quite sure what that would even entail), he does remain behind the scenes to help usher the attendees through the less glorious tasks in their day, allowing them to focus instead on what gets them attention.   In one sense the washroom attendant is an almost parodic(al) metonym for all the characters I listed at the beginning of this post–he suffers quietly so that others don’t have to.

The significant thing about DFW’s voice-giving to the oft voiceless is that, according to the people that mattered to him on a personal level, it came straight from his anguished heart.     A long quote from Dave’s editor Michael Pietsch in his eulogy of Wallace, all of which I think is important and as primary as a secondary source can be in understanding why Wallace might have been interested in the conventionally uninteresting:

“I don’t want to be a hidden person, or a hidden writer: it is lonely,” [Dave] said in another letter [to Pietsch].   He shied from being known in a public way, but he worked hard not to be hidden from the people he encountered in person. He wanted them to know him himself, not some caricature or idea of him.   One way David endeavored to be known was by endeavoring to know others.   His solicitousness was legendary.   In one note he asked me to remind a new mother in the office that it was time to switch from skim milk to 2% or whole milk.   He wrote thank-you notes not just to the copy editor who worked on Consider the Lobster but also to the supervisor who had assigned the job to so talented a copy ediotr, and he offered to pay a bonus out of his own pocket to the designer who wrestled down a particularly gnarly layout.”

Pietsch goes on to detail other ways in which Dave was an extraordinarily kind and solicitous man, but I think this is enough to get at what I’m trying to suggest in this post, which is quite simply that I would like to believe that David Foster Wallace did not use people like the salesmen/politician-types in Up, Simba use lines to sell a product, he treated them each as carriers of a special humanity he could only glimpse by just like, listening.

“Agency” is as aggravating and cringe-inducing a term to me as “historical context” is to DFW, so perhaps control is more fitting, but agency seems to have the memory hook I’m looking for in discussing who in the adult film industry, between viewer and viewed, has more control.   The initial reaction is that the viewer has more control by nature of the fact that the viewed has become a product and that the viewer can thus choose when and how to observe the viewed, as in owning a copy of Jenna Loves Briana and choosing which scenes to watch, if any, and what to do while watching those scenes.   However, Wallace complicates this notion when he describes the in-the-flesh meetings of pornography-viewers and the porn starlets whom they view.   Starlet Shane’s comments on meeting fans sums up what Wallace notes from his own observations: “Most of these [fans] become incredibly nervous when I come up to them…They pretty much do whatever I tell them to do.” Wallace explains that this is a phenomenon “the whole industry”–a dangerous generalization–experiences, “the consumers are the ones who seem ashamed or shy, while the performers are cocky and smooth and 100 percent pro” (17).   Shane’s comment pretty clearly implies that control, in the sense of command over another’s behavior or thoughts, rests in the hands of the entertainers, or “performers” as Wallace has it.

However, this unexpected reality is complicated by the consumers, who in some sense choose what the starlets will do.   Obviously on the set the director is making the decisions as to what parts go where, but it is the fluctuating, specific consumer demand that describes the set of possible options for parts and places in which to put those parts.   Wallace’s lengthy section on the movement of pornography towards more degrading modes and away from more assumedly enjoyable modes exemplifies consumer control (27).   The discussion DFW has with Harold Hecuba about Hecuba’s interest in pornography–catching the fleeting moments of real emotion sweeping across the faces of starlets–illuminates what once was deemed attractive to the pornography consumer.   However, as the entertainment drifts more towards triple penetration and 300-male-to-one-female orgies, those moments of intimacy betrayed to the camera surely decrease in frequency.   But because this is what sells, performers’ hands are bound by the consumers desires.   Thus, control in this sense belongs to the consumer.

This post is about Wallace’s perception of irony in fiction, and how his writing seems to reflect an inability to stick to his ironic guns in the first ~400 pages of Jest, with regards to “Infinite Jest” the film.

First, Wallace describes the elemental connection between postmodernism and irony in the McCaffery interview, which at this point we all know well:

“Irony and cynicism were just what the U.S. hypocrisy of the fifties and
sixties called for. That’s what made the early postmodernists great artists.
The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets us up above
them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicities. Postmodern
irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip
sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways
of working toward redeeming what’ s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental
and naive to all the weary ironists, Irony’ s gone from liberating to
enslaving.”

Summary: Irony was useful for “debunking” the everything’s okay myth, but we all know that’s a myth now, yet writers are stuck using irony because it’s the only medium they think will be taken seriously.   Realism without irony is received as naive by contemporary American audiences.   What’s not included in that quote is that television has also taken irony for itself, so that irony can’t really have an uncommercial identity, which is what “good art” Wallace and the rest of the “New White Guys”–Franzen and Vollman and others whose names I don’t know–want.

Then, Wallace describes the kind of fiction he tries to write during a 2006 informal interview at Le Conversazioni, which uses Pynchon’s and DeLillo’s postmodern and experimental techniques to discuss “very old, traditional human verities…and ideas that the avant-garde would consider very old fashioned.” (youtube)   This comment very clearly implies that Wallace wants to ironic fiction that juggles “what it means to be a fucking human being.”

Is that possible?

Jon Franzen seems to think so when he says of Jest that it’s “the book in which, for the first time, he’d arranged himself and the world the way he wanted them arranged.”   In Julius’ words, “I respectfully, violently (was it violently, maybe it was something else) disagree.”

To disagree, I want to draw attention to the film “Infinite Jest,” which is a piece of seemingly unironic entertainment from a director whose films were often ironic.   I choose the film rather than other elements of the book–AA, Mario’s and Hal’s relationship–because it seems to be one of, if not the only venue in which ironic, postmodern experimentalism and realism might be able to coincide.   (SPOILERS APPROACHING) Having not finished Jest, and not having read it before, my understanding of the film “Infinite Jest” is shaped primarily by critical explanation.   It is critically disputed whether or not the title of the film is intentionally ironic.   I contend that the word “jest” functions in the oldest sense, as a “notable deed or action” (OED).   Incandenza’s film is an infinitely notable action, or at least that is his direct, single-entendre intention for it.   As Mary Holland explains, the film attempts to “bypass the experience of original loss and free the viewer to enter adulthood without the burden of resentment and inconsolability that sends him or her looping back into narcissism.” (237)   That is, Holland’s argument (as Ryan points out in his blog post from 04/06/09) is that there is an infantile narcissism which strangles all characters in the book, and which is what each character is either 1) trying to separate him/herself from in order to connect with someone else or 2) trying to return to in order to experience true fulfillment.   Holland claims that Incandenza’s “Infinite Jest” attempts to use option 2 without the narcissism to achieve option 1, to nurture the infantophilia latent in Hal in order to free him from his insatiable self-centricity, to “bring [Hal] to life by putting him in the position of an unthinking, pleasure-filled infant” (Holland 238).

Critic Iannis Goerlandt contests that it is impossible to prove Holland’s argument because of the ambiguity purposefully surrounding the film.   In Irony and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest Goerlandt explains, albeit briefly, that the reader is both given what seems to be an earnest attempt on the part of Jim Incandenza: he wanted “to bring [Hal] “out of himself,” as they say. The womb could be used both ways. A way to say I AM SO VERY, VERY SORRY and have it heard” (838-39), and Joelle Van Dyne’s admission that Incandenza “always meant [the title] ironically” (940). If “Infinite Jest” is intentionally ironic in title, then it is ironic in that it impresses on the reader some notion that “aloofness is reached through structural manipulation,” (Goerlandt 310).   Aloofness is synonymous with detachment, so the reader should have some sense that Jim Incandenza is detached from the film’s effects on Hal and the rest of the viewers.   Incandenza must have foreknowledge of what the jest is, requiring jest to be not “a notable action” but a joke.   Ultimately, if the film is intended to be a never-ending joke then it cannot by nature have been created to help Hal, only to prove to Hal (and maybe to Jim as well) that this angst-free return to infancy is impossible.   Moreover, if “Infinite Jest” is a purposely ironic title it indicates that Jim Incandenza doesn’t take the film as a serious solution to infantile narcissism, rather as a serious state of unconsciousness.   The film loses its ability to handle, or interact with loneliness in a straightforward way, instead it avoids the loneliness by entering into an ironic loop of endless fulfillment that doesn’t deeply fulfill, only diverts the viewer’s attention.   In this case, irony and realism are mutually exclusive.

The Eric Clipperton story stands out to me.   When I finished it, I felt as if it was just another Wallacian (?) anecdote for the impossibility of true freedom, or fulfillment, or both.   I still think that it might be, but Coach Schtitt uses the Clipperton Suite to emphasize to the students that the only way to survive ETA and the Show is to avoid behaving like Clipperton, “when an ETA jr. whinges too loudly about some tennis-connected vicissitude or hardship or something, he’s invited to go chill for a bit in the Clipperton Suite, to maybe meditate on some of the other ways to succeed besides votaried self-transcendence and gut-sucking-in and hard daily slogging toward a distant goal you can maybe, if you get there, live with” (434).   If we are to believe that Schtitt has a deeper understanding of how to navigate being a competitive tennis player, which I think both he and Lyle do, perhaps Schtitt’s use of the Clipperton Suite reveals a hopeful lifestyle–a rarity in IJ.   In writing this I don’t want to ignore what Ryan posted: Clipperton is a lost kid from a terrible family which he’s trying to emotionally and mentally escape; he’s not interested in winning.

How does Schtitt understand Clipperton’s story?   Perhaps Schtitt understands it quite simply as the alternative to happiness-destroying hard work if one wants tennis success, but that would assume that Schttit believes Clipperton found success.   There’s only one measure by which Clipperton was successful, the NAJT rankings in a single issue, and upon reading that Clipperton summarily “obliterated his map and then some,” so it would be tough for Schtitt to hold that Clippeton had been successful.   Unless Schtitt was implying that unearned success leads to map obliteration.   Schtitt is obviously a big proponent of the work-until-you-drop pedagogy, but I think there’s more to his use of the Clipperton Suite than reminding his kids that they have to work hard if they want to be able to appreciate, or maybe just live with their success.

Schtitt’s understanding of Clipperton has little to do with tennis.   It is much more about the value of “votaried self-transcendence” as a means of hiding from reality.   I’m assuming that Schtit really has his Wallacian shit together and understands that there is in fact a reality defined by loneliness and misery and an impossibility of connection, and that he understands that that reality, if not tempered by something, leads quickly to playing tennis with a pistol to one’s forehead.   For Schtitt, and potentially Wallace, avoiding suicide is about distraction, and the more thorough the distraction the less likely the lost human being is to lose it.   In sum, I agree with Ryan’s assertions about Eric Clipperton, and think that so does Schtitt.