As a reader, I like to underline, star and bracket. I write questions in the margins: How does he know about the entertainment? Is he high? Huh? I often jot down little blue-inked notes to myself: Sexist. A joke about God. Unbelievable! I also circle vocabulary words of which I do not have a full understanding (but I rarely consult the dictionary while I am reading). Overall, I am confident that the skills I bring to a text like Infinite Jest enable me to have an enriching experience. But I am a slow reader (that I don’t want to “miss” anything reveals something about me as a person) and I found the sheer length of the novel had a counter-productive effect on my experience. It was like running a marathon every day, and my focus shifted from really absorbing the text to just getting through it.
I shredded my first reflective essay because I felt it was stale and clunky. I felt I was too invested in my personal experience and that I wasn’t challenging myself to glean new insights from the process. Then, taking a new tact, I extrapolated 35 excerpts from the text. In winnowing it down to three, I was conscious not to pick items for which I would already have an “ideal” response, after all, what would be the point of regurgitating something that was already in my head? At Thursday’s tutor training, when Megan Fulwiler mentioned the zone of proximal development, I started to think about how people can plateau in their learning. I thought that if I truly want my graduate experience to be a time of growth, then I need to challenge myself in a new ways. This sentiment is reflected in my first selection.
Ortho Stice explains Schtitt’s philosophy to his young charges. He says “…it’s about more than tennis, mein kinder… it’s about how to reach down into parts of yourself you didn’t know were there and get down in there and live inside these parts. And the only way to get them: sacrifice. Suffer. Deny. What are you willing to give…” (119). Taken at face value, this sounds more like the mantra of a drill sergeant or a pre-game speech of an NFL head coach. But in my view, this approach is delimiting for young people, particularly in the context of sport. I wrote in my blog that this “closed system” does not work because it is predicated on the belief that all human beings have an emotional on/off button. Case in point: Hal Incandenza has all of the physical attributes to be a top-ranked tennis player, in fact, DeLint observes, “Nobody stays back and out-controls Incandenza anymore” (656). But we also know that Hal was the first person to find his father after he committed suicide by sticking his head in a microwave. How could this NOT do irreparable damage to the psyche of a young person? And how can Hal be expected to “stay in the zone” when he is engulfed in inner turmoil? I believe the human brain processes experiences via hierarchy of emotional necessity. Hal cannot achieve “self-transcendence through pain” (660) because his unresolved issues take precedence.
As is often the case, I chose the Schtitt example because it resonates with my past experience. But if I am being honest with myself, then I have to admit that I am “stuck” when it comes to my past. The question then becomes: how do I get un-stuck? This is the essential question and also the moment in which I am sensing a personal shift. I must admit, I am troubled by this. It supports the nagging suspicion that I am somehow damaged or tainted. I am drawn back to the key words “sacrifice,” “suffer,” and “deny.” I have a pre-conceived notion that in order to reach my goals – writing a memoir, being at relative peace with myself – then I must do these things. But what if I am wrong? What if my approach is somehow flawed or I don’t have the “emotional toughness” to see it through? I am afraid that I have been doing somersaults with one hand nailed to the ground for too long. But all is not lost. This type of brutal self-honesty is important and critical in my development as a person and as a writer. It is, in fact, what lead me to select my next quote.
Jim Incandenza’s father raises a flask of liquor and tells his son, “I drink this, sometimes, when I’m not actively working, to help me accept the same painful things it’s now time for me to tell you, son” (160). Taken out of context, this line may be construed as fairly innocuous, a father justifying his actions to his son. But within the framework of Jim’s first tennis lesson, we see several other strands of inheritance. When Jim’s father asks him to put the Guide to Indices down, it is clear that he doesn’t respect Jim’s natural talents. He all but dismisses “That quick little scientific-prodigy’s mind that she’s (Jim’s mother) so proud of…” (159). Jim’s father is obsessed with the physical nature of objects – the perfectly round tennis ball, the feel of the garage door and the flask – and tries to impart this respect in his son. He also tells Jim how his own father “never acknowledged I even existed” (163) and that he’d once overheard his father tell a client that his son would “Never Be Great” (166). Reading this section helps us to see the origins of Himself’s deep emotional scars, and furthermore, how he evolved into the man who conferred his emotional baggage onto his children.
This scene was particularly poignant to me because my father was a severe alcoholic who died of cerrhosis at 57, and reading this section had the effect of cloaking my mood in a gray woolen blanket. At some point during my reading, though, it dawned on me that my experience, by comparison, was idyllic. Although I suspect my father suffered from depression, he wasn’t a doom-and-gloom kind of guy. He tried to hug and kiss me all the time, for Pete’s sake. For a long time, I thought that the circumstances of my father’s death would be an integral part of any memoir I would write (see above how I am/was “stuck”). But by working this process through in my own head, I now realize that I have more choice in the matter. As it turns out, the dark chasms I have ascribed to his life are, to some extent, my own creation. Moving forward, I think it would be useful to talk to my mother about my father’s sense of humor and the fun things they did together before the disease took over.
Scanning my “List of 35,” it occurs to me that many of the items I’ve excerpted have a dead-serious, austere quality to them. But there were some funny moments in the novel as well. One of the highlights in the story, for me, occurs in footnote 332: 17 NOV. Y.D.A.U. In this scene, Michael Pemulis is called to the Dean of Academic Affairs Office to explain what he knows about John Wayne’s “reaction” to the drugs he’s ingested. As Pemulis gives his side of the story, “DeLint’s nostrils got that pale flare they got… when he smelled horseshit and knew you knew it” (1073). What follows is a hilarious recap of Wayne’s “public castigations of his various peers and instructors” on the WETA broadcast (1074). DeLint then informs Pemulis: “you can either finish out the term for credit or you can hit the trail with your little sailing cap full of pockets on a stick like a banadanna” (1075). Just when we think deLint, Nwangi and Watson have finally pinned the goods on Pemulis, he asks: “And this affects the WhataBurger, my chances?” (1076)
This scene, although occurring in a latter section of the novel, represented a major shift in my attitude towards David Foster Wallace. Previously, I had felt that he was more geared towards portraying the darker parts of the human experience. However, in just three pages, he managed to change my impressions of him. Also, because the subject matter of Infinite Jest is quite heavy (addiction, depression, suicide), it was nice to get a much-needed reprieve from the oppressive tone. What this ultimately tells me about myself as a reader, thinker and writer is that I place a premium on humor. This gets back to the idea of choice. In life, we can either wallow in the muck or pick ourselves up by our bootstraps and go on our merry way.
If we are to truly grow from the educational experience, then we must continue to question the strategies we use, the themes we gravitate towards, our interpretations of those themes, and the biases we bring to a piece of literature. So many of our personal preferences in literature are, it turns out, reflections of our own experience. Reading Infinite Jest put me in a contemplative mood for three weeks running; its cumulative effects stirred the sleeping wraiths of my own past. On some level, this novel strikes me as a cautionary tale. The moral: if you go searching for the darkest qualities of the human condition, chances are you will find them. (Funny how we gloss over the consequences of this exhumation process and its effect on the author’s psyche). In the end, David Foster Wallace’s novel allowed me to look at my own ”stuff” from a more optimistic vantage point. That I would prefer to tread lightly is a matter of personal choice. This wisdom is especially useful as I search for ways to tell my own story.
