Clinamen

I am now 339 pages into Infinite Jest (well ahead of schedule!), and I've got lots to say. For the time being, I'd like to float an idea that I've been kicking around for a while now. As I read some of my favorite contemporary authors - most or all of which could probably fit comfortably under the "postmodern" umbrella - I see a repeating focus on infrastructure. Here are just a few that come to mind:

--In Didion's Play It As It Lays, Maria deals with the trauma of having an abortion by compulsively driving California highways.

--In Wallace's The Broom of the System, Lenore's place of work is plagued by crossed phone lines. Her grandmother (a devoted reader and, one might argue, "follower" of Wittgenstein) ends up in the tunnels and presumably is the one mucking things up and crossing the wires.

--Matt tells me that Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow deals extensively with the "underground." I haven't read it yet, but I may one day take on GR...maybe next summer.

--Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 deals with competing (warring) postal services.

There are more examples of this, but these few give you a sense of the kind of thing I'm talking about. I'm using the term infrastructure broadly here. I'm thinking of infrastructure in terms of networks through which bodies and information (or bodies of information) move. And now comes Infinite Jest:

Here's Hal Incandenza, age seventeen, with his little brass one-hitter, getting covertly high in the Enfield Tennis Academy's underground Pump Room and exhaling palely into an industrial exhaust fan. It's the sad little interval after afternoon matches and conditioning but before the Academy's communal supper. Hal is by himself down here and nobody knows where he is or what he's doing...The Academy's tennis courts' Lung's Pump Room is underground and accessible only by tunnel. E.T.A. is abundantly, embracingly tunneled. This is by design. (49)

The five pages after this involve a discussion of Hal's practices for getting "secretly high" and an extremely detailed discussion of the Enfield Tennis Academy (E.T.A.) infrastructure.¹

So, why this detailed discussion of the E.T.A. underground? Supremely detailed. Ridiculously detailed. In fact, the description is so detailed that it's actually impossible (for me, at least) to get a good sense of the space that Wallace is describing. This is counter intuitive. One would think that more detail would mean a better understanding of what's being described, but I don't think that's the case in this section.

Now, in this particular section, the linking of infrastructure with Hal's secret habits seems important. Hal goes to extraordinary lengths to get secretly high, and E.T.A.'s underground offers a useful resource in this regard.² Ultimately, the intricate, excruciating, confusing details of the E.T.A. underground seem to be linked to one of the main ideas that Wallace performs through the text: there is always more going on. The footnotes offer us, in this sense, the underground of the novel. And they extend for pages in excruciating detail (sometimes with sub footnotes). There is always too much going on, and Wallace seems dedicated to a) recognizing this inevitable fact and b) trying to push against it. That is, Wallace immerses (submerges?) us into the world he has created, doing his best to surround us with the detail necessary to be completely immersed. But the novel seems to be completely aware that complete immersion and perfect information are impossible.

Infinite Jest's dealings with infrastructure seem to be linked to the other novels mentioned above in this way: these works are dealing carefully with environments in which space and infrastructure are undergoing radical change. These works seem to want to dig deeper into those changes while also acknowledging that you're never going to get to the bottom.

But I'm also reminded of Bret Easton Ellis' Glamorama, in which the U2 lyric "We'll slide across the surface of things" appears numerous times. So, it's not as if all of these "postmodern" authors (scare quotes, scare quotes, scare quotes all over when this word is in play) are all dealing with the mysteries of infrastructure in the same way...

I'm going to think more on this...

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1.We should note, in passing, that E.T.A. is not a random acronym. The players at E.T.A. are hoping that their time there is a short stop-over on the way to "the Show," i.e. Pro Tennis. They are awaiting their estimated time of arrival.

2. It's also worth noting that this section of the book ends with a jump to the medical attache watching "The Entertainment" and then another jump to a discussion of why Mario films the players during practice: "The reason being it's a lot easier to fix something if you can see it" (55).