Before I dive into the main body of this post, there are a few notes I should get out of the way.
Firstly, I realize that the topic I’m to write about — suicide in IJ — is a little unseemly in light of David Foster Wallace’s own departure from this plane of existence just last year. I apologize for that, but it really can’t be helped.
Second, I will make — every now and then — statements about suicide that I will appear to present as fact. I should clarify (without going into detail) that I have some experience with the whole horrible concept, and am speaking with personal insight, albeit not professional.
Lastly, I totally spent like, ten minutes trying to make a pun out of a combination of the word “unseemly” and the “seam” of a tennis ball, for the purposes of titling this post. This is similar to last week’s endeavor, which saw me spend an equal — perhaps greater — amount of time ruminating on how I could fit the phrase “I decided to call an audible and call Audible” into my post.38
This week’s massive-chunk-of-IJ-that-I-had-to-read-all-at-once39 featured not one but two suicides: a third person look at Madame Pychosis’ — possibly successful — purposeful overdose; and a discussion between Hal and Orin on the cause of their late father’s… well, lateness.
I was struck that Wallace seemed to take great pains to make sure that we saw these two examples of suicide as wildly different from the normal perception of the act. Madame P’s method of choice might seem terribly familiar to anyone who knows much about drug addicts (or watches a whole bunch of CSI), but Wallace — from the beginning of the section — assures you that you don’t know jack:
Among pernicious myths is the one where people always get very upbeat and generous and other-directed right before they eliminate their own map for keeps. The truth is that the hours before a suicide are usually an interval of enormous conceit and self-involvement.
James Incandenza’s own method of self-destruction is, of course, more obviously unique — a perversion of the already perverse act of sticking one’s head in an oven. It is the last great technical achievement of a lifelong genius. There is sometimes a desire accompanying suicide to do it as efficiently as possible, which can be at odds with an occasional wish to inflict greater psychic damage than normal on those who have ‘driven you to it’. Incandenza’s method meets both requirements.
These are probably just a couple of literary flourishes in a book already full of them — Infinite Jest is not one for standard deaths of characters, as we learned when reading of Guillaume DuPlessis’ accidental suffocation. But still, there is irony to be found in the fact that Wallace spends such time developing these off-the-wall methods of suicide for his characters, and then ended his own life with a simple belt.
Hal and Orin’s discussion of Himself’s death strays into a discussion of grief itself, and how to handle it. Hal, prodigy that he is, refuses to submit to the prescribed process of loss. He sees his grief counselor as an enemy combatant, to be studied and conquered. This battle appears to be the very method with which he chooses to deal with his grief — Hal cannot see things other than as academic or athletic challenges to be overcome — and we are given no opinion from our narrator (whomever he or she is) on whether or not this is healthy.
I didn’t know David Foster Wallace, and have only read 274 pages of his masterwork, but already I grieve for him and for the books he will never write. I’m sure that part of the process of dealing with this minute amount of grief is to look for clues or hints in the author’s work. Such a cliche way of dealing with this loss would be frowned upon by Hal. But I think that’s okay, because maybe Hal is kind of a jerk.
Comments
44 responses to “Aren’t I Meant to be the Funny One?”
“James Incandenza’s own method of self-destruction…is the last technical achievement of a lifelong genius.”
While it can be looked it this way there is a little back and forth about it on page 250:
Hal: “As we later reconstructed the scene, he’d used a wide-bit drill and small hacksaw to make a head-sized hole,,,” etc.
Orin: “Sounds kind of ad hoc and jerry-rigged and haphazard.”
When I read this last line I was chilled to the bone. It was just like how I think of DFW’s method. He used his belt, nailed it to the support. The iffiness of the belt not breaking from the weight makes you think that maybe he didn’t have a rope in the house, and if only that leather or nail had faltered, as I think in most cases a piece of leather that relatively thin would have.
The haphazardness of this suggests that he wasn’t sure he wanted to do it or at least to do it by hanging, at all; I just felt a renewed sense of pain for the guy.
Good post Avery and very brave too.
I second this. Thanks, Avery.
While the more IJ I read the more I miss a guy I never appreciated in life, I’m hesitant to look for clues in his work, in the same way that I find it ridiculous to suggest that playing the role of the Joker caused Heath Ledger’s eventual death, whether accidental or on purpose. (I don’t want that to become an issue of debate, it’s just my opinion that the process of acting does not and should not have such an effect, and more importantly filming for the Dark Knight had been completed months if not over a year before his death.)
While I don’t know for certain, I doubt MP was successful in her attempt. For one because her time with us was so brief, and for another I can only speculate that she may soon become a new resident at the Ennet House. But I could be dead wrong (is that poor taste?).
I appreciate your insight into Hal’s grief process (and I, too, am beginning to suspect he may be kind of a jerk), and that his method for getting away from the grief counselor is to pretend he is upset over the very thing he is, in fact, upset about: namely, that everything about Himself’s death and Hal’s grief is completely outside of Hal’s control, academically and physically, and that is what really drives him nuts.
As a control freak… well, it seems frustratingly familiar.
I agree about Hal. My impression of him has changed since reading that conversation with Orin. But in Hamlet, if I remember correctly, he was a jerk about Ophelia’s death. In both characters the poorly expressed grief could show more than a flaw. It could show their inability to cope with the suicide, having guilty feelings for somehow contributing to it.
Nice comparison to Hamlet, there. You may be onto something.
I think you guys are being way way to hard on Hal. Finding your exploded father’s head in the microwave at that age is sure to do some serious fucking with one’s emotional map.
Nice use of the word “map.”
Guys, just found out about this page. I started reading IJ in late May and im slightly ahead of everybody, but its great finding a place where people are thinking and discussing these matters. I found Madamme P’s section here one of the best so far. As for interpreting the work and looking for clues to DFW own suicide i am reminded of the Nabokov Story Signs and Symbols (or maybe the other way around) where he says something like “he suffered from a terrible desease where he interpreted everything that happened to him as a sign of his own life” great story check it out.
And as for Hal’s conversation with Orin, I was particularly struck with the fact that the word his father hated most was “deconstruction”. I don’t know how much people are into the whole postmodernism/Derrida thing here, but from the footnotes and all the philosophy names being dropped – as when Joelle Von D overhears in the party someone saying, ‘more interesting question is an a priori one wether for Heidegger, space as a concept is enframed by technology as a concept.” – you can tell DFW clearly had a lot of this in mind. The footnotes here seem to hearken back to Derrida’s thoughts on the concept of the book etc. Any thoughts?
Anyways, thanks again for the website, what a fantastic idea and im very glad I found this. IJ is the best book I’ve read in a long time and i find myself like you guys, missing DFW incredibly, saddened by the fact that he never wrote again.
“Referential mania” — it’s a real disease, and it has a Mormon support group. Just google “R.M.” and Mormon, and watch the link-count rise.
I don’t get it. that’s not what RM stands for and you know it. what’s the joke? are you evangelizing?
OOPS! Sorry. Bad/Lame joke. My (very faint) point was that an evangelist suffers from Referential Mania when he/she/it assumes that everyone needs to see the world as he/she/it sees it (i.e., through his/her/its religious filter). As you correctly point out, RM, in the Mormon sense, is a Returned Missionary; i.e., (former) Referential Maniac.
I was hoping for, at most, a chuckle; and I sincerely apologizing for sparking anger/annoyance.
I was chuckling Matt.
I’m not familiar with Derrida’s thoughts on books. It sounds intriguing, though. Would you please either explain or post a link to a good explanation-page? Thanks!
Derrida is a notoriously complicated writer, but one im sure DFW read. He first coined the term “Deconstruction”. His two major works, “Writing and Differance” where the essay “Structure, Sign & Play” appears and “Of Grammatology” contain probably the best reference for this “process” (although it should by Derrida’s own admission escape definition, this is i guess an introduction kind of thing.) These two texts are considered foundational for PostStructuralism, a very big part of PostModernism which has a lot to do in IJ in my opinion.
Derrida thought that the idea of “the book” as a one whole interpretable thing, with a definite meaning, interpretation and linearity was misguided. Any given text he maintained escapes any one definite interpretation or meaning due not only to the fact that different readers approach it in different ways, with different attitudes and personal histories that affect what they find more or less meaningful and what resonates with them particularly, but mainly due to the fact that language as such carries with it what Derrida labeled a “metaphysics of presence” which he said were the result of phallocentric, logocentric, and ethnocentric practices throughout western history. This particular characteristic of language and writing, says that every word or concept for instance has many meanings and definitions. I.E. to define a word we must use other words, which in turn are defined by words themselves etc etc etc. This then prevents any ONE “Transcendental Signifier” as he called it, and leads eventually to the point where every meaning has included in it other unlimited and contradictory meanings. This (again a definition is innapropriate b/c as he says nothing can be Trullly defined) is what he calls ‘Differance’ a “non-concept”. As you can see in IJ with all the footnotes (Derrida himself used many of these) and the fragmented non-linear storyline, the ‘concept’ of book becomes blurred, we dont read it linearly from beggining to end, but constantly jump back and forth, between footnotes, storylines, and even time itself. Its as if linearity is altogether non-present. That is kind of my mediocre attempt at an explanation, does it make sense at all?
As for deconstruction it is kind of the process of finding the place of a work, the ‘aporia’ where some word or meaning subverts the text and creates a paradox or a limit of intelligibility. The deconstruction however is not a process (i know i just said it was but bear with me 🙂 ) one applies or submits a work through, but it is ‘always already’ occurring within any writing. To undergo a successful deconstruction then, one needs only to do memory work.
The Wikipedia entry for Derrida is quite decent, also the ones for Deconstruction, and for Differance are solid. I highly recommend the essay “Structure Sign and Play” from Writing and Differance, its available free online and is only about 15 pages i think, itll give you a good sense of Derrida’s stuff… Heres a quote from the wiki entry on Deconstruction:
“Deconstruction generally operates by conducting textual readings with a view to demonstrate that the text is not a discrete whole, instead containing several irreconcilable, contradictory meanings. This process ostensibly shows that any text has more than one interpretation; that the text itself links these interpretations inextricably; that the incompatibility of these interpretations is irreducible; and thus that interpretative reading cannot go beyond a certain point. Derrida refers to this point as an aporia in the text, and terms deconstructive reading “aporetic.” J. Hillis Miller has described deconstruction this way: “Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text, but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself. Its apparently-solid ground is no rock, but thin air.”[1]”
Thank you very much. I’ll check out those wiki entries and the essay. You mentioned Nabokov in your original post, and I wondered, have you read Marina Grishakova’s fine essay, “The Acts of Presence Negotiated: Towards the Semiotics of the Observer and Point of View”? I’ve read it many times and I’m still not sure I understand it.
I don’t have a formal background in any of this, so must of my knowledge is autodidactish and ad hoc. After reading your explanation above, I’d love to hear your opinion of M. Grishakova’s essay (which mentions Derrida).
I havent read that but thanks for the recomendation! Ill try and find it and get back to you once i read it. Once again, what an awesome website this is 🙂
Two things to remember from this section. James O. Incandenza’s least favorite word is “deconstruct.” Joelle, mid-suicide, considers: “Are facts abstract, or are they just abstract representations of concrete things?” Wallace is clearly aware of Derrida, but in the sense that he’s playing with that perception: we’re inevitably going to change his “facts” with our “perception” of them (the reader, in sense, becoming the writer), so take Infinite Jest as an “interpretive” Entertainment.
Good call, i had forgotten that one. Hit the nail on the head. Also i think that second line you quote points to that “phenomena / Noumena ” distinction that Kant made which Heidegger, Nietzsche and all their followers – Derrida up to a certain sense in there – tried to escape so much from. Heidegger held truth to be not an abstract representation of otherwise outside of perception unknowable “things in themselves”, but rather the manner in which things manifest themselves. Truth he translated from Aletheia as “disclosedness”. Its amazing how many layers there are to this book….
Miguel; great, passionate, synopsis of Jacques D.
RE: Derrida
One important notion you did not mention of his is that a writer’s words develop a life of their own; this is a thing I like about Derrida, that he aims “over the head of Kant” back to the Scholasitcs in this. See John Duns Scotus.
Derrida, in Dissemination, reading Plato quoting Socrates:
“And once a thing is put into writing, the composition, whatever it may be, drifts all over the place, getting into the hands not only of those who understand it, but equally of those who have no business with it; it doesn’t know how to address the right people, and not address the wrong. And when it is ill-treated and unfairly abused it always needs its parent to come to its aid, being unable to defend itself or attend its own needs.”
Derrida continues interpreting Plato: “Wandering in the streets, he [writing] doesn’t even know who he is, what his identity–if he has one–might be, what his name is, what his father’s name is. He repeats the same thing every time he is questioned on the street corner, but he can no longer repeat his origin….Uprooted, anonymous, unattached to any house or country, this almost insignificant signifier is at everyone’s disposal, can be picked up by both the competent and incompetent, by those who understand and know what to do with it…and by those who are completely unconcerned with it, and who, knowing nothing about it, can inflict all manner of impertinence upon it.”
This is an interesting way to consider texts, especially as a writer. One’s words become independent of him, the work its own life, as Derrida puts it, simulacra.
Mostly, though, I just wanted to point out that (even in translation) Derrida knows how to friggin’ write a sentence, eh?
RE: DWF
I am pretty sure Wallace was well steeped in Derrida and was in fact approaching him ironically in this novel. Derrida would not have been obscure for someone of Wallace’s schooling, or for that matter many, many of his readers here.
mm
I’m of the Hal-is-the-narrator school, so I’m not surprised to find him withholding judgment on himself. What I found interesting is that Orin kept trying to get Hal to admit to grieving in a more traditional way and Hal just glossed over. I think Hal has some horror about his inability to feel.
Great post, Avery. I, too, just finished these 2 sections and I was overwhelmed with the feeling that DFW was showing us himself alot in both of them. Since I never met him or read his works until after he died, it’s difficult for me to separate his suicide from his writing. (I’m sure it’s different for those who read him before his death).
Hal does seem kind of like a jerk, but I am giving him a pass because even though he’s very smart – he’s only 17. This is how his mind has chosen to deal with the death of Himself. I didn’t get the feeling that Avril or C.T. were much comfort at the time, shoveling him off to a grief counselor who he basically manipulated like Hannibal Lecter. But I can’t blame him or dislike him for it. I feel sorry for him, I wish Orin would have been around to talk to since it seems that Orin is the only person to whom Hal can be completely honest. It may have helped him.
Thanks though for the post. Very insightful!
But are we sure that Hal’s being honest here? Remember that Orin is asking for the real story so that he can avoid telling it in an interview and that Orin on the whole is kind of a jerk who only calls when he needs something. Maybe this is localized or reactive jerkishness, yanking Orin’s chain because Orin is a jerk. Or maybe it’s what really happened. At any rate, with things like the Big Buddy chat and some of the Mario conversations in mind, I’m not inclined just yet to write Hal off asa jerk.
I think that is one of the reasons Hal comes off sarcastic and maybe a bit jerky in the phone conversation with Orin. His anger at Orin’s failure to engage him at the time has ripened into resentment and bitterness. And now that it is necessary for Orin to find out the details, Orin wants to talk. When Hal needed to talk,Orin is nowhere to be found and all Hal has was the grief counselor, a poor substitute for real human connection, which is one of the things that happens all the time in this book.
I don’t think Hal is a jerk just because he doesn’t hold the majority opinion that a grief therapist works for his specific personality. From his perspective, maybe a grief therapist is a vampire feeding off Hal’s emotions instead of an altruistic person. Hal doesn’t trust Orin, and he is somewhat justified in that. I know if someone that I loved died, I would feel terribly uncomfortable talking to a stranger, particularly a grief therapist with hollow jargon, about my loss. That’s just me; I realize it is the exact thing someone else might need.
I agree with Chris’s Ledger-as-Joker analogy w/r/t DFW’s suicide.
I’m convinced the Incandenza boys are bioengineered, or robots. Something went wrong with Mario’s programming. While Orin seems to be a little more excitable than Hal, it’s not like he’s a bubbling brook of emotion either.
For what it’s worth, I think Hal is lying to Orin about his reactions with the therapist. I think all his alleged attempts to make the therapist think he was okay, and his alleged success after Lyle clued him into another way to pretend, were all real. Hal has admitted that he loves lying to Orin about unimportant things…why not about the most painful thing you can think of? If Schtatt’s assertion that Hal started substances after Himself eliminated his map, maybe the kid is tormented six ways from Sunday and is lying to his brother. His brother who, YEARS later still has never heard the story. Why not make it seem like no big deal, like you’re playing the stupid therapist.
So maybe jerk. Sure. Maybe sad and lonely liar. maybe all of the above. Maybe kid who hasn’t figured it out. This hyper-erudite kids are all playing games, including playing grown-up to their little brothers and sisters.
I agree this is a very real possibility, although I think Hal said he lied to Orin mostly about trivial things, which I think we can agree Himself’s suicide hardly qualifies as trivial. I wonder, actually, whether Hal could only let himself actually grieve with the grief counselor by studying/mastering grief and grief counselors. After all, the idea of thinking something smells delicious before discovering the something delicious is your dad’s nuked brains has got to be a very real horror. Perhaps, the way Hal’s brain works, the only way to actually, like, face and vocalize that horror is to approach the grieving process the way he did and seems to with all things— grammar, the English language, Byzantine erotica, tennis — as something to be studied, mastered and perfectly executed. *shrug*
I definitely wouldn’t write Hal off as a jerk, not just because I’ve read the book before. I always return to those first few pages: “I’m not just a boy who plays tennis. I have an intricate history. Experiences and feelings. I’m complex….But I’m not a machine. I feel and believe….I am not what you see and hear.”
Can’t write Hal off, but for those of you who read footnote 304, don’t you think it’s sort of funny that Hal essentially plagiarized his way through grief counseling–working harder to APPEAR to be healed than to simply face his grief and allow the healing? In 304, Hal observes that Struck Jr. has a similar issue and that maybe plagiarists just fear going out on their own–Hal is the same way, with his need to please authority figures. He’s a product of ETA, through and through.
I don’t feel that Hal plagiarized his way through grief-counseling. Those of you who have gone through some kind of externally imposed counseling know there is a real possibility that one is being judged, not counseled. Hal needed to get back on the court in the afternoons, and the tiny-handed counselor was a fraud. So, Hal outwitted the fraud – more power to him! So far, imho, Hal is a pretty cool hero, not a jerk. Maybe when the spoiler line retreats another few hundred pages, we can hash this out in more detail (and of course, I may change my mind with more reading under my belt!).
Maybe I’m being overly conscious of any possible Hamlet parallels, which I haven’t seen many of other than a small dead bird falling from the sky, which I’m afraid by saying I’ll come to find out I’ve missed many more, but I finished the Hal-Orin exchange about Himself and decided that Hal was incredibly racked with grief and uncertainty after his dad’s death, like Hamlet was, and that led me to conclude that the so-called tactic of finally unloading a torrent of grief and admitting the smell-association business which has got to be difficult to take away from the experience was not a tactic, but rather really eventually happened without any planning or forethought. And so I also think his cavalier attitude about the whole thing is a lie, too. But it’s entirely possible I’m wrong, and (other than as someone already mentioned Hal isn’t always completely honest with Orin) really the only reason I think so is the Hamlet thing.
Hal had to study the process of grief and grief counseling in order to grieve because Hal is in essence a “pleaser.”
With the exception of clandestine Bob Hope, everything he does is to please someone else (esp the moms). Hal has to fully understand the correct way to grieve and fully know what the counselor expects of him before he is able to grieve. It was an honest admission of grief and guilt but it could not come organically from within Hal. Before he could process these emotions he had to first learn how to do it in the correct manner.
With all these well thought out comments you folks would be great additions to the forums.
What’s the difference between commenting here, on our own websites, or in the forums? (I’m just trying to avoid spoilers, myself.)
The discussion board is way more specific and in depth. Check out the daily discussion forum – no spoilers allowed.
This kind of ties into how profoundly weird it felt to mourn a man who I had never met, but felt like I had known. His writing has meant so much to me personally, for a variety of reasons I won’t get into in a public forum. But I had always wanted to meet him, and I felt horribly sad to realize that I never would. This forum has been very helpful, in its way, because it’s nice to know that there are so many people who felt, or are coming to feel, the same way,
Amen.
amen squared.
Amen on acid
I’ve always thought that when DFW is writing about James Incandenza, or “Himself,” that he was in some sense indeed writing about HIMSELF: the polymath innovator, and, sadly, the suicide who killed himself because he could not handle withdrawal.
I remember what struck me when I read IJ the very first time shortly after published was the notion of what I’ve been calling since “Infinite Sadness.” Sadness and despair so overwhelming that the one hurting simply has no choice.
That notion struck me as incredibly profound and intuitive on the one hand, and amazingly sympathetic. Many monologues and conversations by characters from the beginning to this point of the book all point to this human defect, this sadness.
I remember thinking at the time that the author must have had some close, personal contact with suicide or with someone who was suicidal.
I agree with Sorrento, above.
That makes a lot of sense Sorrento.
It is a strange way to grieve but then the idea of a grief counselor is absurd and Hal wants to rid himself of the grief counselor.
Being detached and ironic about something horrible is not the same as discounting the horror. It’s something a lot of people do.
I got to the end of the book and went back and for some reason I was re-reading this part to day. I don’t know why I like it.
I notice that all the suicides in IJ are inimitable. They would not get stuck in one’s head as things one might consider doing, in the way that suicidal ideators tend to have described suicides get stuck in their head.
I get this idea that there is hostility to Derrida in IJ but I can’t really back that up.
I see the hostility to Derrida, as well. A bit in the anti-academic passages, wherein academese is mocked, but mostly in little references, like the above mentioned bit that “deconstructed” or “deconstruction” (can’t remember which) was Himself’s least favorite word. Deconstructionism itself is quite alienating (in that sense of removing something that seems human and emotionally rich from a text and deconstructing it into signifiers and signifieds, manipulating language at a nano-level), so it would seem a diminishing prospect to have a text fraught with deep existential pain be parsed as an amalgam of signs and signifiers rather than an organic artistic creation. That’s where I hear the Derridean hostility, initially. Willing to hear otherwise, though.
Digging into DFW’s suicide through his work feels like grave robbing. For the sake of enjoying IJ as it is I am going to avoid the cemetary. Any person that confronts the absudity of the world reflects upon suicide. If there is any mystery in suicide it not when one choses to end one’s life but when one choses not to.
Let look elsewhere, Camus perhaps.
“There is on but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide” Myth of Sisyphus
I’m kind of freaking out because I’m on my second read of IJ, this time reading it in the bathroom, so I’d be forced to read it really slowly. I was up to page 193 when I read about Infinite Summer in Time Magazine, which I only happened to have because my neighbor gave me a bunch of magazines to cut up for some collage. ANYWAY…for the last two days I’ve been alternating between glutting myself on these posts, trying to catch up to the read, and getting thoroughly overwhelmed by the whole damn thing. This is massaging my super private literary masturbation in a way I frankly, never dreamed was possible. Off point, but I wanted to say Hello. Thankfully I have the next six weeks off. Scarily, they may now be completely absorbed in this extravaganza. I am promising now to continue getting some exercise and eating regularly. Here’s to David and an Auspicious Enterprise.