I recently reread Infinite Jest for the fourth time, and had the thrilling (and humbling) experience of discovering that I had previously overlooked two brief passages in the last fifty pages that unlock what appears to me to be the book’s central message.
As the end of the novel nears, the A.F.R. is on a deadly search for the Master Copy of The Entertainment. Joelle is walking back to Ennet House after visiting Don Gately in the hospital, when Hugh “Helen” Steeply intercepts her and informs her that she is in mind-boggling danger. Steeply then proceeds to interview her regarding her role in The Entertainment, what she knows about the Master Copy, and whether or not James created an antidote. Joelle describes to Steeply the only two scenes of the film: the first, of her and an androgynous character circling each other in a revolving door of an office building, and the second, of her in a white floor-length gown, leaning over a camera in a crib, imploring over and over again that she is sorry, so sorry, so, so sorry, so terribly sorry. On page 939, Joelle explains the technical aspects of the second scene:
The point of view was from the crib . . . The camera was fitted with a lens with something Jim called I think an auto-wobble. Ocular wobble, something like that. A ball-and-socket joint behind the mount that made the lens wobble a bit . . . I’ve never been around them [infants]. But I know there’s something wobbled and weird about their vision, supposedly. I think the newer-born they are, the more the wobble . . . I don’t think there’s much doubt the lens was supposed to reproduce an infantile visual field. That’s what you could feel was driving the scene. My face wasn’t important. You never got the sense it was meant to be captured realistically by this lens.
The main scene of The Entertainment reproduces for the viewer the infantile visual field. Or in other words, it reverts the viewer back into an infant; and Joelle, leaning over the crib, looking into the camera profusely apologizing, represents the mother figure apologizing to the infant for ever allowing it to enter the existential horror of selfhood. This is what is so addicting and thus lethal about the film: once someone begins watching it, they become completely helpless: they cannot feed themselves, shit and piss themselves, and will remain in place on the couch until either they die, or someone else, an adult, comes to their aid—just like an infant.
And it makes complete sense that it’s a breakthrough with lenses that allows Jim to create something lethally entertaining. What purpose in the novel does Jim’s expertise with lenses serve, other than to enable exactly this? During the interview, Joelle explicitly states:
Lenses were Jim’s forte. This can’t be much of a surprise. He always had a whole case full. He paid more attention to the lenses and lights than to the camera . . . Lenses Jim said were what he had to bring to the whole enterprise. Of filmmaking. Of himself.
We often associate the watching of TV and movies not just with entertainment, but more specifically with mindless entertainment. It seems weird to think of an infant as having a mind, and as a result seems weird to think of an infant as having thoughts, or being bored. What DFW is getting at here is that when we mindlessly watch TV, the state that we are reduced to—the state that we are seeking—is that of infancy.
Drug use and entertainment are two of the most prevalent themes in Infinite Jest. Both are forms of self-forgetting, and by having the ultimate entertainment—The Entertainment—return its viewers to infancy, a symmetry is established between the two: both activities propel the subject away from the present, in opposite temporal directions, with the ultimate aim of escaping one’s self. Drug addiction annihilates the self by propelling one forward through time, towards death, while mindless entertainment erases the self by propelling one backwards through time, towards infancy.
Page 944, tellingly coupled with footnote 378, expands on this. It’s the weekend of E.T.A.’s annual fundraiser, just a couple of weeks before the highly anticipated Whataburger tournament in Arizona. Morning drills and classes are canceled for the entire weekend. Hal is in the early stages of withdrawal from Bob Hope, after having experienced a close call where he and Pemulis were almost drug tested but talked their way into a 30-day delay. Hal’s lying on his bed in his dorm room, where Mario and Coyle are watching James Incandenza’s Accomplice! Hal begins reflecting on the late stage of his father’s career, when James, after years of making obscure, avant-garde films, suddenly started attempting to make films that were commercially appealing (i.e., entertaining). The text reads:
In his last several projects he’d been so desperate to make something that ordinary U.S. audiences might find entertaining and diverting and conducive to self-forgetting378 that he had had professionals and amateurs alike emoting wildly all over the place.
378. (As opposed to self-confronting, presumably.)
Self-forgetting and self-confronting are fundamentally opposed to one another, and DFW reproduces this opposition in physical form by separating the two words between the main text and a footnote—the two cannot appear on the same page together. It’s also interesting to note that “self-forgetting” is in the main text while “self-confronting” is relegated to the footnotes: the main text of our lives in America today is that of self-forgetting.
Self-confronting, in contrast to self-forgetting, must always happen in the present. Drug use and entertainment are forms of self-forgetting because they propel one away from the present, and as a result, our selves.
And it’s not just drugs and entertainment that can be used for self-forgetting. Hal actually has three main activities of self-forgetting: Bob Hope, tennis, and academics. It’s not by chance that once Hal loses these three things during the weekend of the fundraiser that he finally begins self-confronting. His sober first-person narration is full of reflections on his past, his brother, Orin, his mother, Avril, the family dog, S. Johnson, his childhood home, and his father. There are multiple scenes earlier in the book where Mario tries to get Hal to talk about all this, but Hal, absorbed in a state of self-forgetting at the time, refuses. But now that he’s self-confronting the floodgates are open, and through his first-person narration we get to witness everything that he was previously holding back now thrash around inside his head. And in addition to processing his past, Hal also comes to grips with unsettling facts about the present: that his mother is sleeping with his classmate, John Wayne, as well as his uncle, C.T.
While Hal is in this state of self-confronting, Don Gately, the other main character of the novel, is in a hospital bed recovering from a bullet wound in his shoulder, bearing what seems to be an unbearable amount of pain, self-confronting as well. As an ex-opiate addict, much to the consternation of his doctors he’s refused all opiate-based painkillers. He’s also stripped of the daily routine he’s established in sobriety: his unending number of chores as an Ennett House staff resident, as well as the AA meetings he religiously attends every evening. Gately begins self-confronting by going over memories from his childhood, of him as a kid and his mother being violently beaten by her boyfriend, the M.P., and him doing nothing about it; of him as a teenager waiting for his mom to pass out drunk so that he could finish off whatever was left in her bottle of vodka; and lastly, the closing scene of the novel, where he’s dosed with Sunshine after a multi-day binge as his running partner, Gene Facklemenn, is murdered right in front of him.
Given that Hal and Gately both need to be stripped of not just their drugs but their main occupying activities in order to finally begin self-confronting, the message here seems to be that religiously attending AA meetings, burning the candle at both ends working at a halfway house, carrying around and squeezing a tennis ball 24/7, and memorizing the entire O.E.D. are all functioning for Hal and Gately as forms of self-forgetting. These activities are not destructive in the way that drug use or entertainment addiction are, but they nonetheless serve a very similar role. This is pretty unsettling, since these are all activities we usually think of as “good”.
If we follow this path of interpretation, we seem to be headed towards the conclusion that the only way we can truly self-confront is to sit in a chair in a room, alone, staring at a bare wall. And this is sort of true: this is the exact state Don Gately is in—lying in a hospital bed, staring at the bulging ceiling—when he finally begins reckoning with himself. Hal also was initially in the T.P. viewing room alone, watching his father’s early (specifically not entertaining) films, until other E.T.A. students barged in and he went back to his dorm room in agitation.
But although solitude and a lack of distraction are necessary for self-confronting (and self-confronting is a necessary thing we must do), we cannot spend our entire lives like this. Existing in a constant state of self-confronting would be just as unhealthy as shooting up heroin all day in an act of self-forgetting. To be well-balanced individuals we must spend time in both states. Problems only arise when we exclusively remain in one or the other state. We must dance between the two.
Mario, ironically, despite all his physically deformities, seems to be the most psychically well-balanced character in the novel, if not the only one. He regularly ventures into self-forgetting via his interest, like his father, in cameras and lenses, but balances this out in attempts at self-confronting by keeping Hal up all night asking him questions about their family and their past. Mario is physically, through his extreme deformities, unlike most of us, and psychically, through his wholeness, unlike most of us as well.