Scan barcode
A review by couuboy
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
5.0
Take a quick look at this Joseph Turner painting, titled "Sun Setting over a Lake"
It’s quite impressive, right? You might think about it in terms of the colours and style, how what it represents and how it is represented are conjoined, you might bring in teleology and link it to Rothko or Monet, you might even eschew historical context and just focus on the objet d’art and how it’s certainly alive on one hand but that there’s still a sense of it being “incomplete” on the other, less charitable, hand.
What makes art complete and what makes it incomplete? In literature, film, music etc., a sense of completeness might have something to do with resolution, whether the wave crashes upon the sand. You could use a pretty reductive formula – whether at some point in the art object you can comprehend and then link point A to point B. That some sense of a self-contained life exists within.
Where is point B in DFW’s Infinite Jest? It’s most definitely there; just beyond the horizon you’re currently at: here just before the mountain’s peak. Just before the zenith with its grand view. But wait – a sign: There’s no going forward – please return the way you came – come back another time. You reluctantly acquiesce, content that you’d come even this far, that the view from this side was impressive in itself, willing to come back tomorrow.
And so you do come back, rejuvenated and motivated. But wait, that can’t be right? there’s something different about today’s hike, something you hadn’t realised yesterday; that there was a slight layer of fog which has now passed – you can see so much further today, it’s even more magnificent that you’d previously thought. Oh yes, this certainly only spurs you on further to make it to the very top and witness the sublimity you know you will behold. Until, wait – a sign.
And yet, even more of the fog has dissipated, you had made it this far before except now the view is even more incredible, even more awe-inspiring at this point, just shy of the peak. You think you’re beginning to understand.
Anti-confluential is a term used in this book to describe some of Jim Incandenza’s films, films that resist the impulse to tie a narrative together, to reject interdependency in composition. You want to think that this term describes this book well, that DFW was inserting his own self-referential literary theory, that maybe it’s intentional that narrative strains aren’t packaged or explicitly linked. Except they are, because this is not an anti-confluential book. The book only seems like it’s anti-confluential because it doesn’t link threads in the way we’re accustomed to see them linked, you will not be nudged in the shoulder to pay attention to an important and specific part because everything is an important and specific part. Hold a sentence in your mind and you may unearth its pairing couplet 600 pages later. To understand this book, not only do you need to enlarge you mind, you need to subtilize it.
It’s quite impressive, right? You might think about it in terms of the colours and style, how what it represents and how it is represented are conjoined, you might bring in teleology and link it to Rothko or Monet, you might even eschew historical context and just focus on the objet d’art and how it’s certainly alive on one hand but that there’s still a sense of it being “incomplete” on the other, less charitable, hand.
What makes art complete and what makes it incomplete? In literature, film, music etc., a sense of completeness might have something to do with resolution, whether the wave crashes upon the sand. You could use a pretty reductive formula – whether at some point in the art object you can comprehend and then link point A to point B. That some sense of a self-contained life exists within.
Where is point B in DFW’s Infinite Jest? It’s most definitely there; just beyond the horizon you’re currently at: here just before the mountain’s peak. Just before the zenith with its grand view. But wait – a sign: There’s no going forward – please return the way you came – come back another time. You reluctantly acquiesce, content that you’d come even this far, that the view from this side was impressive in itself, willing to come back tomorrow.
And so you do come back, rejuvenated and motivated. But wait, that can’t be right? there’s something different about today’s hike, something you hadn’t realised yesterday; that there was a slight layer of fog which has now passed – you can see so much further today, it’s even more magnificent that you’d previously thought. Oh yes, this certainly only spurs you on further to make it to the very top and witness the sublimity you know you will behold. Until, wait – a sign.
And yet, even more of the fog has dissipated, you had made it this far before except now the view is even more incredible, even more awe-inspiring at this point, just shy of the peak. You think you’re beginning to understand.
Anti-confluential is a term used in this book to describe some of Jim Incandenza’s films, films that resist the impulse to tie a narrative together, to reject interdependency in composition. You want to think that this term describes this book well, that DFW was inserting his own self-referential literary theory, that maybe it’s intentional that narrative strains aren’t packaged or explicitly linked. Except they are, because this is not an anti-confluential book. The book only seems like it’s anti-confluential because it doesn’t link threads in the way we’re accustomed to see them linked, you will not be nudged in the shoulder to pay attention to an important and specific part because everything is an important and specific part. Hold a sentence in your mind and you may unearth its pairing couplet 600 pages later. To understand this book, not only do you need to enlarge you mind, you need to subtilize it.