schweblog

I finished up reading Infinite Jest a few days ago and I’ve been wandering around in a bit of a daze ever since. The length wasn’t as much of an issue as the general structure and nature of the novel–it was arguably one of the most difficult texts that I’ve gone through, but it was also profoundly rewarding. I rarely blog on the books I read with any sort of formal review; I’m not that confident that my opinion of a book is particularly justified, nor do I think that my feelings on literature are shared by many. Infinite Jest got me thinking about some structural changes in literature, however, and what it means to be–pardon the buzzword–postmodern.

[Anyone reading this can rest assured that I won't be spoiling the plot, but I will be discussing some meta-level stuff that may bias the reading of someone who is reading it or will be reading it.]

David Foster Wallace’s literary watermark is his extensive use of footnotes, which appear in most of his nonfiction and quite a bit of his fiction, as well. The tradition is alive and well in Infinite Jest. A number of critics seem to have been bothered by this tendency–indeed, the footnotes are disruptive to the narrative flow while also introducing key points of information that would normally be included within the text. This can be unsettling to someone used to the traditional role of footnotes: to contain information that is, at best, corollary to the text. With Wallace, the footnotes are essential. All 98 pages of them. Having to flip through several hundred pages to find your footnote makes for a jarring reading experience.

But I think this is intentional. Rather than looking at it as obnoxious (which it is) and being done with it, I think it’s helpful to consider their use from a stylistic perspective. Infinite Jest is sprawling–it covers multiple story lines in a non-linear way; many of these “flashbacks” (and “flashforwards”) are nestled in footnotes and their relevance is only made apparent several hundred pages later. In using this disjointed, disruptive organizational structure, I think Wallace is trying to express a very important part of the postmodern condition. Now, more than ever, we are bombarded with an unfathomable amount of information. A young barista I used to work with would quip that the Sunday edition of the New York Times’ contained more information than your average “Renaissance man” of a few hundred years ago had access to. I can’t confirm this, but given the advertisements we see daily, the number of links you click and explore when reading a Wikipedia article, and the amount of “noise” out there, it certainly seems right.

Thus, the disjointed text and the footnotes and the general presentation of the novel all contribute to a feeling of what it’s like to be alive today in a world of information excess. If, for some strange reason, someone were to pick up Infinite Jest 100 years from now in a future that had been cleaned up and quieted down, information-wise, I think reading the book would give them a very good feel for what it was like to be alive when the flow of information was constant and unrelenting. This genre of my-mind-overfloweth, if you can call it a genre, has been dubbed hysterical realism and supposedly started with DeLillo and Pynchon. Apparently they passed the torch on to David Foster Wallace, in the eyes of the critical community at large. The genre itself has been met with criticism from some and praise from others.

These works, though–Infinite Jest, Mason & Dixon, Libra–are doing something profoundly different that is arguably more dramatic than creating a new genre. They contain almost encyclopedic amounts of information on all manner of things. In this flood of information, however, there are tiny details nestled within the narrative that connect things. The various plotlines in Infinite Jest, for instance, are only asymptotic; Wallace makes you think that things will be connected at the end, only to pull the rug out from you at the last minute. Having grown accustomed to the end of the novel being profound in its completeness, almost to a fault (I’m looking at you Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows), Wallace leaves you hanging.

Simultaneously, your feelings of betrayal upon completion are coupled with a sense of culpability. Maybe there were connections that you didn’t manage to make. Maybe you missed something when your eyes glazed over on the 8-page footnote. This is where the novel betrays you and your reading habits betray you. Infinite Jest, unlike most canonical literature, does not describe the feelings that people are experiencing. It does not spoon-feed you the narrative or flesh out the details in a CSI-esque whodunnit montage. In fact, I would argue that these kinds of novels are almost minimalist in nature; granted, they contain an epic amount of information, but the traditional narrative nuances that are spelled out for the reader in most literature are absent here. It is up to the reader to make the connections and evaluate their relative worth. Without the uber-engaged reader, I’m quite sure that Infinite Jest would be an incredible let-down.

But for someone who enjoys actually paying attention to what they read and not having plots digested and explained for them explicitly, these kinds of texts can be satisfying, engaging, and worthwhile. I’m still wrestling with what, precisely, happened in Infinite Jest, but I know that things within are interconnected in a rather brilliant way. And I’d argue their style and narrative structure (or lack thereof) will be viewed as a trademark of the postmodern literary tradition when the time comes to evaluate such things.

Filed under: literature by Jesse