Some Thoughts on the Dynamics of Chronology & Storytelling in David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest”
According to many reading guides for David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, page 223 is one you have to get to; suck it up through the confusion that is the book’s first 222 pages. The guides also tell readers, once there, to bookmark that page as they’ll constantly need to come back to it. At first, that page gave me hope when the book seemed too much to take in and get through. I trembled as I flipped page by page in the 200’s with anticipation. However, once I got there, I was underwhelmed. I realized that maybe they had played a trick on me.
[spoiler alert]
Those who have read Infinite Jest (or as least past page 223!) may agree. The page is to act as an aid to readers by listing the chronology of otherwise unnumbered years to help them piece together the narrative’s events in a more linear fashion. If we know when the events unfold, we can make better connections and better understand correlations and cause and effect that gives reason to the story. Presumably.
But maybe the years don’t matter; maybe a chronology of that kind, formalized and “historized” actually doesn’t matter as much as we think or as much as it should. Which is the point and perhaps why I was so underwhelmed by page 223 and it’s “intel.” Sure there are politics and “milestones” that touch characters’ lives — the same as those that touch our own here — yet, at the end of the day, the longest chapters, the most colourful — at least to me — were those internal dialogues describing more of our banal moments in life (Erdedy, for one). In some ways it didn’t matter when these moments were occurring; committing them to memory is what gave the novel its depth, as these chapters informed my understanding of each character and DWF’s overall messages about progress, consequence, anticipation, ambition , passing time, and ultimately, the human drive to find “happiness” — or rather, meaning and belief.
Whatever we see fitting to be spotlighted in the central story we tell ourselves is what makes up our lives because it drives how we live. We can look back to the time we waited for something for what seemed like eternity but forget that it also happened many times before and nothing great came of it (Erdedy); we may remember the wrong phone conversations and recall inconsequential ones (Hal and Orin); we may never forget how sick we got all those times, cold-sweat and shuddering on the bathroom floor — except the time that it nearly kills us (Joelle). Those everyday struggles and banalities, the points in our lives that we orient our understanding of ourselves around, are what make up our lives, perhaps even who we think we are. Even if there are larger uncontrollable events and circumstances primarily driving our plot forward, what matters is those moments, what I’ll call our holydays.
holy (adj.) Old English halig “holy, sacred; godly,” from Proto-Germanic from *kailo- “whole, uninjured.” Primary (pre-Christian) meaning is not possible to determine, but probably it was “that must be preserved whole or intact, that cannot be transgressed or violated,” and connected with Old English hal (see health) “wholeness, a being whole, sound or well,” and Old High German heil “good luck.”
However big or small the before Then’s and the after That’s (the “before J. Incandenza’s suicide” or “that night before Interdependence Day”) — these are symbolic days in our minds. Though most obviously our experience of them is linear, what meaning we draw from them can be somewhat arbitrary. Events tend to “reveal” themselves later to us and change in their relative importance as time moves on, and when they occurred becomes less important than the fact that they did. In an effort to weave together a story of our lives that has some semblance of meaning and holiness, we alter and skew, whether consciously or not, our belief or understanding of what really happened. It helps provide us with more more weight as we float so that we may better anchor ourselves — so that we may find some kind of buoyancy in the havoc that is otherwise likely more of an existentialist void, an infinite(simal) phenomenon or some metaphysical accident than objectively “a chronicle” or “history” at all. Our “life story” is no happy accident though. It’s a work of art!
luck (n.) late 15c. from early Middle Dutch luc, shortening of gheluc “happiness, good fortune,” of unknown origin. [go figure!]
Without those relatively inane, though wholly personal holydays, we cannot find a way to establish our identity, to bookmark our tiny selves into the massive life continuum with whose limits and edges we know little of. Without them we are nothing, unidentified and unidentifiable, with no story, arc, nor denouements; No Amens or Hell Nos; no Holy Cows to accompany the moments that fill the empty hole that otherwise could be any of our lives in this dumbfounding world.
continuum (n.) 1640s, from Latin continuum “a continuous thing,” meaning a continuous sequence in which adjacent elements are not perceptibly different from each other, but the extremes are quite distinct.
We need reference points in our experience of the world and what better place to start than with the personal. Many moments in the book, the story of a single character or two sweeps the reader into forgetting about some of the dystopian elements in the story. However, every time, just as I started getting used to a character, the fractal chronology of the novel took me to a new place, a new time, a new angle and story. DFW forays into the personal amidst a highly complex setting to “authorially” remind that it’s the personal stories and our own ability to relate that help us understand the world — any world imagined by the author, be it Wallace or you.
It’s easier to relate to modern-day addiction or competitive tennis and training than the abundance of rampant feral hamsters, teleprompter assassinations, mathematical equations and Latin cognates hidden in scientific terminology. DFW’s words are not always inclusive, and this only further makes his ideas less accessible. It seems essential that we take an extra step and consult external indexes, online wikis, or at least the book’s own footnotes, to get a fuller understanding. And even then, we never quite get everything. It helps if what we’re learning about is somehow already in our vicinity; if the idea introduced is related to our own milestones or somehow touches something already familiar to us — especially in real life. It becomes more interesting (we’re egotistical like that) and thus, more accessible.
Ultimately though, absolute clarity can never be achieved — and perhaps only slowly refined if we actually live out the story ourselves and build out the pieces that are missing on our own.
The stories we tell ourself makes each of our lives feel more sacred and unique. This “life storytelling” that moves us through this world obscures many of our experiences; it marks some as holy, untouchable and sacred while many more are forever banished into the corners of our memory. And just like that, as we get caught up in our own holydays that underpin our life story, we eject ourselves from the larger picture — akin to when when we pick up a book and get lost in its story, we forget our own. Thus, it would be reasonable to hypothesize that:
1) Anything we read is not really valuable until we sanctify it and apply it in real life.
If we can take what we read, however fictitious, and apply it to our own life as metaphor, fodder for cliches or descriptive inspirations, we may better devise ways to sanctify the moments that happen to us. This can help us find more meaning as we run the chapters of our lives from Capital to ., from life to death, and all the calendar years in between.
2) We should try to extrapolate our “life story” and its sanctity and meaning more universally to draw a more objective viewpoint.
If we can’t step back and gain perspective, we’ll be narcissists, self-possessed theatrical drama queens, foolish in thinking we are the centre of the universe. Which brings me to:
jest (n.) from Latin gesta ‘actions, exploits’, from gerere ‘do’. The original sense was ‘heroic deed’, hence ‘a narrative of such deeds’; later the term denoted an idle tale, hence a joke.
It seems we need to achieve a balance — or rather, some kind of comfortable (or comfort with) oscillation between the two. Otherwise we’ll retreat to such extreme solipsism and lose our minds, experiencing the comedy and tragedy of life with no one to laugh or cry with us. Or we’ll be followers and fools with our heads in the ground with no will of our own.
Oh, p.s. I’m only halfway through the book.
