Two relevant passages:
[When depressed, in the less severe version of depression] one loses the ability to feel pleasure or attachment to things formerly important...a kind of radical abstracting of everything, a hollowing out of stuff that used to have affective content. Terms the undepressed toss around and take for granted as full and fleshy—happiness, joie de vivre, preference, love—are stripped to their skeletons and reduced to abstract ideas. They have, as it were, denotation but not connotation. The anhedonic can still speak about happiness and meaning et al., but she has become incapable of feeling anything in them, of understanding anything about them, of hoping anything about them, or of believing them to exist as anything more than concepts. Everything becomes an outline of the thing. Objects become schemata. The world becomes a map of the world. An anhedonic can navigate, but has no location. (692–3)
One of [Hal's] troubles with [his mother] is the fact that [she] believes she knows him inside and out as a human being, and an internally worthy one at that, when in fact inside Hal there's pretty much nothing at all, he knows. His [mother] hears her own echoes inside him and thinks what she hears is him, and this makes Hal feel the one thing he feels to the limit, lately: he is lonely. (694)
Infinite Jest is a sad and lonely book, and we do David Foster Wallace a disservice when we treat it as only clever, only intellectual, only large. I understand that Wallace drew the addiction theme and AA storylines from his own personal experience, and it seems all the more clear today that the focus on intense, destructive depression was also something he knew too well. Part of the reason there was such a backlash against the book in the later '90s was that people felt it was masturbatory or even (and this kind of thinking, I'm sorry, strikes me as either ignorant or bigoted, or both) somehow guilty of oppressing the people who didn't like it. I submit to you that Infinite Jest is not masturbatory, that it instead simply captures a way of thinking—a desperate, painful, soul-searching way of thinking—that ought not to be rejected by someone as somehow "false" just because that person doesn't happen to see the world the same way. Taste is taste, and Wallace is not for everyone—nor is any other writer. But Wallace, I think it's now clear, dug into himself in a way few are brave enough to do, in print or in private, and even that which may have felt cold or antiseptic to some readers was itself deeply confessional—a glimpse into a bleak and heartbreaking universe in which we are totally alone, and ultimately nothing that matters can ever be more to us than a kind of faint, flickering hologram, or ghost.
...it's there all the time, the feeling, and I'm totally inside it, I'm in it and everything has to pass through it to get in, and I don't want to smoke any [pot], and I don't want to work, or go out, or read, or watch [TV], or go out, or stay in, or either do anything or not do anything, I don't want anything except for the feeling to go away. But it doesn't. Part of the feeling is being like willing to do anything to make it go away. Understand that. Anything. Do you understand? It's not wanting to hurt myself it's wanting to not hurt. (77–8)
2 comments:
I think this is totally right on, Alex. By my lights, the pain of dealing with the human condition was always at the heart of DFW's work. He battled against the modern fashion of writing from a place of cynicism and glibness, not (just?) because he saw these as supports for the lazy and trite, but also because he thought those traits were dangerous. They hurt us by pushing us apart and and making us less human. But looking directly into the sun has its pitfalls, and in this case it cost the world someone truly remarkable.
For sure. I'd say, though—and this is my only point of near-agreement with the serious naysayers—that, like some of the characters in the book, DFW himself had a lot of trouble fighting the cynicism and often was able to confront the tough stuff only through a distracting fog of intellectualization. That's part of what the novel's about: not just the pain, but the alienated intellectual's doomed efforts to conquer the pain. So, yeah, he looked directly into the sun, but it was like a Van Gogh sun, and he was blinded and incapable of experiencing it as real—the worst of both worlds.
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