I saw a tall pile of Infinite Jests in my university bookstore, on a table near the cash register. It must have been in 2002 or 3, a period in which I was deeply immersed in modernism, oblivious to all currently living writers, disgusted with what I understood of post-modernism (very little), and repulsed as only a cocky grad-student can be by anything remotely contemporary. I’d heard the name David Foster Wallace before and pigeon-holed it with Delillo for some reason. On that day, I remember noticing the imposing size of the book. Maybe I even picked it up to get a sense of its heft, but that was it. I did not give it a second thought.
Really, the process that led to my actual encounter with David Foster Wallace’s work began several years earlier when I picked up, through some random fluke, Thomas Wolfe’s sprawling, exuberant, and hyperbolic 900 page posthumous novel You Can’t Go Home Again. The adjectival thunder and bombast of Wolfe’s language was unlike anything I’d ever read. The lyrical flights and the rhetorical flourishes, though often beyond what my young mind could compute, seemed to me then the stuff of truly meaningful and majestic literature. My whole reading career—from Tolkien to Poe to Kerouac—had been a mere prelude to the experience of Wolfe, and when I was done with You Can’t Go Home Again (a four-month long enterprise!), the next step in my life was clearer than it had ever been: I had to find other books like it; to read them and unpack them and revel in their magic and genius and life-altering vision. In short, I was bound to the nearest English department. As a side effect, years of reading and studying Wolfe’s oeuvre turned me into a sincere but hopelessly affected writer. And thus—O lost, and by the wind grieved—went my writing career.
It was my sister who sent me an email sometime in 2008 with a link to an essay by David Foster Wallace—some speech he gave that was circulating online. She said I should read it and did I know the writer? It didn’t ring a bell, but a quick google search later I answered, ever the literary buff, “sure, it’s David Foster Wallace, famous writer of Infinite Jest. Dude committed suicide recently. Sad story. Anyway, thanks for the text, inspiring stuff!” But the essay had resonated with me more than I cared to admit back then, and had aroused my curiosity about DFW, so Infinite Jest made its way to my Amazon wish list, where it remained for a couple of years before I added it to one of my orders as the ‘serious lit pick.’ It gathered dust for two more years on my unread shelf—in between The Fountainhead and Moby Dick—before I cracked it open in the spring of 2012. I’ve since read Foster Wallace’s Kenyon College commencement speech—published in book form as This Is Water—a good number of times. Its simplicity is always disarming, its truths always reformative. I go back to it whenever I feel like my perspective on life falls short of my faith in its sublimeness.
When I began the project (how else to qualify it? The endeavour? The journey?) of reading Infinite Jest I was unaware of all the hype floating around that novel. I admittedly had a lot to catch up with when it came to literary fashions and trends, and so I was also unaware that being seen lugging the book around made me look like some sort of pretentious literary hipster-elitist. I read it, then, unselfconsciously. And ditto for reviews or criticism. As far as contemporary literature went, I’d lived in a cave up until then (I still do compared to some, of course). So I approached the book with an untainted, unbiased attitude, save for some vague notion that it was an infamously difficult read. No walkthroughs, no superimposing other’s inept ideas on the narrative, just a receptive intellect encountering a mind-bending work of art. Now that I know about the mostly irrelevant but inescapable fluff around it, I’m thankful I got to experience it in that way.
I devoted the whole summer of 2012 to Infinite Jest—from early June to late October—my own personal and very lonely infinite summer. It was the most difficult and fun and frustrating and transformative summer of my life, the cumulative effect of which is the closest thing to an epiphany I ever think I’ll experience. It was truly the shock of the new. Tom Bissell used that expression—the shock of the new—while talking about a videogame, in his book Extra Lives: Why Videogames Matter, and he was himself quoting Robert Hughes who originally used it in reference to visual arts. In Bissell’s excellent words, it is “the sensation of encountering a creative work that knocks loose the familiar critical vocabularies and makes them feel only partially applicable to what stands before you. It is the powerful, powerless feeling of knowing your aesthetic world has been widened but not yet having any name for the new ground upon which you stand.” That is exactly how I felt post-Infinite Jest. That and also an odd emptiness, as when you realize something important and irrecoverable has come to pass—the intangible, vertiginous awareness of a Before and an After.
That novel, like no other before or since, renewed the literary fury with which I had originally entered the English department, all ablaze with youthful curiosity and idealism, thirteen years earlier. A decade of critical theory, of cookie-cutting the enjoyment of prose with sophisticated ideas about its intricacies, had stranded me in a refined, cynical state of detached appreciation. Funny that, of all the personally meaningful works of literature on my shelves, it was theory-laden, philosophically-opaque Infinite Jest that would turn me on to the pure, undiluted pleasure of the Text again (forgive the Barthesian slip).
In a bizarre, perverse twist, David Foster Wallace brought back writing in my life as well. Not in some vain hope of one day displaying the same inventiveness and wit and brilliance, not in some futile attempt at emulation, as I had felt in my days of enthrallment to Wolfian prose, not in some sudden excess of literary ambition and fame-envy, but rather as a result of my renunciation of all these things. I had encountered a novel of such scope and breadth, such genius and grandeur, it rendered the very notion of imitation and comparison ludicrous, just absurd, and with that gone I was left, happily, with unfazed writerly motivations: the big-blue-sky potentiality of the blank page, the intellectual stirring that accompanies the stringing of sentences and the interplay of ideas, creative work lying before me that is ambitionless, except for the one worthy ambition which is unbound by ego, almost entirely intimate, and free of anxiety.
Time will tell but I don’t think I can ever read Infinite Jest again. It might break something inside me that could not be fixed afterwards. Of course, part of me wants to get back in it right away, to delve into its labyrinthine depths and come back to the surface with kernels of truth. Part of me wants to retrace its multitudinous plot lines and unveil their inner workings. Part of me wants to absorb it whole and henceforth share in its unique worldview. But all this is illusory, I’m afraid. What matters to me now is not so much Infinite Jest the literary work on my bookshelf, or its true meaning, or even my own flawed understanding of it. All that matters is the experience of Infinite Jest as a Text (again, Barthes) that existed only then, that was created, or rather, conjured at the crossroads of my own personae—my mood and mind-set, my proverbial hopes and fears as they then were—and the field of play of that novel. Reading Infinite Jest anew, in effect, would weave a new cloth out of the same fibers, and through that process, the Text that Infinite Jest had once been would be undone. It would recede from memory and be replaced by that newer, but somehow lessened construct (I can’t ever go to Paris for a similar reason: my Paris always has Hemingway sitting intently at a Montparnasse Café).
So then the tattoo, very simply, blends the memory of my experience of Infinite Jest, which prompted a chain of events that led to a more creative, more passionate version of myself, with the ‘something-to-live-by’ message of This Is Water in one purposefully unavoidable symbol in the middle of my forearm. It recalls a past epiphany and serves as a tribute to a transcendent work of fiction. But more than anything else it is about forced awareness as a lifestyle choice. It is of course a big part of what Wallace was trying to get across in his speech when he talked about “altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting.” It’s a notion that resonated deeply inside me; that we are moving through life oblivious to so many tiny yet essential details, oblivious to beauty everywhere and to poetry, oblivious to others. It was such a persistent, haunting and panic-inducing thought, I was sure the resulting urge to pay attention would remain near the surface, as if tattooed on my psyche. Turns out though that it’s easy to ignore our own psyche too, so I had it tattooed on my body for that little extra help. And so there you have it, lest we forget that great literature has the power to transform us, and lead us to a richer, fuller, more mindful existence.
Photograph by Steve Bourdeau
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