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intelligence as a kind of curse
That's the thesis statement.
About a week ago I finished reading Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. It's a big book. It took me like two months to finish, although to my credit I only read like a dozen pages per day, but I always looked forward to reading those dozen pages, which must mean I enjoyed the book a good bit, especially since sections of the novel intrusively invade my thoughts multiple times a day. The novel did leave me feeling somewhat confused and frustrated and sad though, but I've found that the best things in life often do that, leave you somewhat confused and frustrated and sad, maybe because those things are often the most rewarding.
Some people say that Infinite Jest has no comprehensible plot, that it's just a thousand-page ramble tied loosely together by a core set of themes, that it’s impenetrable and overwrought on purpose, that it's just a pretentious exercise in literary masturbation, and those people probably haven't read the actual book, but they're also not entirely wrong, because Infinite Jest is all of those things, but it’s also so much more.
Infinite Jest is a post-postmodern encyclopedic work of fiction set in a near-future version of North America where the United States, now called the Organization of North American Nations, led by former B-list movie actor slash Las Vegas crooner President Johnny Gently, who ran on a populist platform centered around “cleaning up America’s garbage” and bears a shockingly prescient resemblance to Donald J. Trump, has subsumed both Canada and Mexico and has “subsidized” time, meaning calendar years have been sold to the highest-paying corporation, for like advertising or whatever, so instead of numbered years you get stuff like “Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad” and “Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster” and so on, and O.N.A.N. uses giant catapults to launch the nation’s chemical waste and radioactive garbage into a region near New England now dubbed “the Great Concavity,” which has turned the whole area effectively into a no-man’s land where unspeakable mutant horrors like giant babies and feral man-eating hamsters roam in packs, which is a detail almost inconsequential to the overall plot, because the story is mostly a rumination on addiction, sincerity, the dangers of irony, human connection, the importance of family, existential dread, and the fallacious belief that attaining all your goals will somehow make you feel happy and fulfilled, centering around the teenage students at a prestigious Boston tennis academy and the recovering drug addicts living in a nearby halfway house, and these characters’ stories are told through a collage of scenes presented in no sensible chronological order whatsoever, like if Infinite Jest were a photograph then David Foster Wallace took that photograph and cut it up into a million pieces and then asked you to put it back together with nothing but a magnifying glass and some Scotch tape, which is exactly what it feels like trying to piece together what the hell is actually going on in this book.
And I’m not going to try to explain what the hell is actually going on in the book, but I will give you just enough context to support my thesis statement up there. Needless to say but the rest of this entry contains significant spoilers.
The plot ultimately centers around the drama of this one particular family, surname Incandenza. The father of this family, James O. Incandenza, was this super-intelligent guy who invented some super high-tech fusion technology but got bored with that so founded a tennis academy but got bored with that too so decided to make indie films, pretty much. James was addicted to his interests and would play them out until he got bored, and although mastering each interest, they still left him feeling bored and unfulfilled. At some point before the events of the novel, James creates this film called Infinite Jest, and this film is so entertaining that, if you watch it, you cannot stop watching it, so you just waste away and die watching it. This film has been copied and sent to people all over North America, resulting in many deaths. Questions abound around the contents of the film, a detail that can't be confirmed because there’s no one alive who’s watched it, and why the film was even created in the first place, which the novel does address, although in a sort of lynchian fashion. The whole plot of the book sort of swirls around this titular film, as all the central characters have some connection to it, even if it's like six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon levels of connection. The symbolic significance of Infinite Jest, the film, and how it relates to our modern entertainment landscape, particularly streaming culture, phones, and having all this media at our fingertips at all times, is especially prescient and interesting, although none of that ultimately matters for my thesis, so I won't be covering that here. Anyway, shortly after creating Infinite Jest, the film, James Incandenza kills himself by cooking his own head in a microwave oven, which sounds like an impossible feat but is actually fully explained in both technical and gory detail. He leaves behind a wife and three kids. Hal, Orin, and Mario, who I will refer to as the brothers Incandenza hence forth.
Hal is sort of like the main character of the novel. He’s the youngest of the brothers Incandenza. He's seventeen years old and enrolled at his late father’s prestigious tennis academy, Enfield Tennis Academy. He’s a super genius just like his father, able to recite dictionary definitions of pretty much any word on command. He’s also cold, detached, downright condescending sometimes, super ironic, unable to express his thoughts and feelings properly, and also super addicted to marijuana. It turns out that Hal is very much like his father in this respect, although his father’s substance of choice was alcohol. Hal was never very close with his father, they couldn’t connect emotionally, mostly because of their vast almost self-defeating intellects, and this haunts Hal both mentally and physically, like the wraith of his late father actually haunts him, like James’s ghost, literally, haunts Hal, in the book, in some weird lynchian attempt to bring Hal out of his detached intellectual shell. So when Hal’s not rigorously training for tennis or playing tournaments, he’s spiraling mentally into a depression by overanalyzing everything in his life, particularly his relationship with his late father, and when he’s not spiraling in some sort of over-analytical depression, he’s smoking weed in secret in the Enfield basement and blowing the smoke into a ceiling vent to hide the smell, to drown it all out, bury his emotional baggage, pretty much.
Orin, who is also incredibly intelligent, is the oldest of the brothers Incandenza. He's a professional football player and a sex addict. Orin spends a lot of time mentally torturing himself and getting anxious and harping on the old times and getting into all sorts of sexual trouble due to his sex addiction which all stems from some sort of unresolved childhood thing with his mom and dad or whatever that he's constantly thinking about and overanalyzing to death. He's also superficial, selfish, and incredibly manipulative, especially with women.
And then there’s Mario, the middle child of the brothers Incandenza. Mario loves his dad. He wants to be just like his dad. Mario makes films like his dad. Mario even wears a helmet with a tripod camera thing attached to it on his head, so he can film everything that's going on in his life, so he can use the footage for future films. He almost never leaves his room at the Academy without the helmet on, which makes for some very comical scenes. But Mario was born premature, and he has pretty much every physical deformity ever medically documented, so he’s hunched over like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and he has claws instead of hands, and his head is humongous, and he has these big bulging eyes, and he’s just like, for all intents and purposes, monstrous, for lack of a better term, and he’s also not very bright, like stuck-forever-at-a-third-grade-reading-level levels of brightness. It would be unfair to say that Mario is “stupid,” because he can comprehend things just fine, but he has a lot of trouble communicating and sometimes can’t follow along in complex conversations. He’s more like incredibly simple. But the thing about Mario is that, although he gets sad sometimes about the death of his father, as anyone would, he never gets stuck in his head like his brothers do, he never questions if his father really loved him or whatever like his brothers do, he never waxes himself existentially into a spiraling depression like his brothers do, he never develops some sort of crippling addiction because of unresolved childhood stuff like his brothers do, he’s never sarcastic or ironic, and he never once says anything bad about anyone, like ever, because Mario is the nicest, most sincere, most loving brother Incandenza. Mario is like the beating cardiac muscle of the book.
And that’s why Mario Incandenza is my favorite character in Infinite Jest.
Mario is a stark contrast to almost every other character in Infinite Jest, especially Hal and Orin and James, who are all too smart for their own good. Due to Mario’s stunted intellectual growth, he seems to lack the faculties to overanalyze people and situations, taking everything at face value, and because of this deficiency he approaches everything with the naive innocence of a young child, harboring no preconceived notions or negative stereotypes about anyone, which leads to him treating everyone he meets with a level of respect that Hal, Orin, and James just are not capable of. I mean, Hal and Orin and James are often cordial and respectful to people, but behind the mask they are brooding, distrusting, and critical, whereas Mario just does not have the capacity to be like that. Mario is guileless, innocent, pure of heart almost. And Mario, despite being frankly hideously-deformed and a little slow in the head, is treated with respect by others because Mario himself treats everyone with respect, because he’s simply incapable of doing otherwise, because he doesn’t have the intellectual capacity and all the psychic baggage that comes along with that. And because Mario is like this, he’s viewed by many as a pleasant, guru-like person to talk to, so people often go to him for advice, especially his own brother Hal, who often calls Mario “Boo,” and who, in one scene, goes to Mario for advice on what to do about some extreme anxiety he, Hal, is feeling about not having smoked weed in a long time yet still perhaps failing an academy drug test and other stressful existential tennis-life things, this scene is also the only time Hal opens up to anyone about anything in the entirety of the novel, which is important, and Mario, in this scene, delivers the best advice delivered by anyone in the entire book, and this advice is not just the best advice in the book, it’s also like the thesis statement, the point, of the entire book, which sort of makes Mario like the most important character in the book, in my opinion. The scene hit me so hard that I had to put the book down and text one of my friends about it, so I’m going to just copy-paste the tail end of the scene here, for reference.
“... It seems different with me, Boo. I feel a hole. It’s going to be a huge hole, in a month. A way more than Hal-sized hole.’
‘So what do you think you should do?’
‘And the hole’s going to get a little bigger every day until I fly apart in different directions. I’ll fly apart in midair. I’ll fly apart in the Lung, or at Tucson at 200 degrees in front of all these people who knew Himself and think I’m different. Whom I’ve lied to, and liked it. It’ll all come out anyway, clean pee or no.’
‘Hey Hal?’
‘And it’ll kill her. I know it will. It will kill her dead, Booboo, I’m afraid.’
‘Hey Hal? What are you going to do?’
‘…’
‘Hal?’
‘Booboo, I’m up on my elbow again. Tell me what you think I should do.’
‘Me tell you?’
‘I’m just two big aprick ears right here, Boo. Listening. Because I do not know what to do.’
‘Hal, if I tell you the truth, will you get mad and tell me be a fucking?’
‘I trust you. You’re smart, Boo.’
‘Then Hal?’
‘Tell me what I should do.’
‘I think you just did it. What you should do. I think you just did.’
‘…’
‘Do you see what I mean?’”
Mario is beyond intellectual obfuscation of any sort. He’s simple. He does not have the capacity to lie, either to himself or to others. He does not hide things. He is guileless, innocent, pure of heart. And because of this, he naturally just sees through the bullshit. He sees through intellectual rationalizations and mental decision-tree-like anxieties that stem from intellectualism. And because of this, when Hal opens up to Mario for the first time pretty much ever, expressing his emotions, fears, and doubts, and then asking Mario for advice on what he, Hal, should do, Mario correctly and simply points out the obvious, that Hal is already doing what he should be doing, opening up, expressing his emotions, admitting that he has a problem, coming out of his intellectually detached shell, which are things Hal literally never thought to do before because he’s just too damn intellectual about everything. Hal’s vast intellect, while enabling him to accomplish great mental feats, has also led him into a black hole of irony and insincerity that ultimately undermines his own happiness.
By the end of the novel, Hal has become so wrapped in his head that he can no longer communicate with other people, James has microwaved his own skull, Orin gets abducted by Wheelchair Assassins and tortured by being placed in a tumbler full of cockroaches, and Mario, well, Mario is fine. He’s just wearing his ridiculous tripod headgear, filming stuff, being nice to people, doing what he likes to do, not overanalyzing any of it, because what’s the point in that?Some people might say Mario is stupid, since he does have a number of learning disabilities, but “stupid” is ultimately a subjective societal construct. I would say instead of “stupid,” Mario is simple. But regardless of whichever semantics you subscribe to, the point is, we should all try to be a bit more like Mario, be that more simple or more “stupid” or more whatever you want to call it.
Because if ignorance is bliss, perhaps “stupidity” is transcendence.
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I don't think I'd get along very well with Infinite Jest, but at one remove--hearing about it from you, hearing your thoughts about it--I can appreciate what it's doing.
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I've been recommended The Brothers Karamazov before. I just haven't gotten around to it, yet. These huge sprawling novels are a real investment for me, because I can't really focus on multiple books at a time, otherwise I lose interest in one book over the other, etc. For example, I didn't read anything else while reading Infinite Jest for two months or whatever. One day The Karamazov Bros will strike my fickle fancy, I'm sure.
I've read that Infinite Jest was heavily influenced by K Bros, and Hamlet, but I wouldn't be able to spot the K B references, as I haven't read the book. Although I suspect there's some influence there in the brothers Incandenza.
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