Infinite Jest

"Another great time to turn to an ebook is when you’re reading a doorstopper. It’s too tough on the wrists to hold the print book up when you’re reading it in bed and it’s not a lot of fun carting it around town either. Infinite Jest is David Foster Wallace’s novel about tennis, drug abuse and much more, which novelist Chad Harbach called “the major American novel of the past 25 years.” Two reasons we’ve put it on our list of books that are easier to read as ebooks. Firstly, it is large: more than 1,000 pages, but when it’s on your Kindle, you can still fit it in your pocket. Another reason is that Infinite Jest has endnotes, not footnotes, so you have to do a lot of flicking back and forth. It’s a lot quicker to flip back and forth to endnotes on a Kindle. Simply click the hyperlink, leap forward to the relevant endnote, then leap back to your place in the text."

"Yes, he did. He was an undergraduate major in philosophy, his father was a philosophy professor, and he wrote a senior thesis that was about Aristotle’s argument about determinism. The thesis, which I’ve read, got into modal logic and time, tensed and tense-less logic. Then he went to Harvard as a graduate student in philosophy and dropped out in his first year. It is. I was resistant to reading it, just because it’s so very long and I knew it was going to be a long and immersive experience if I was going to give myself over to it. I teach a course at NYU called ‘The Literatures of Hope and Despair’ about literature that had been influenced by Spinoza—literatures of hope—and Schopenhauer—literatures of despair. Between the two of them you can explain so much that goes on in 19th century literature. Then a dean said, ‘Oh, all of our students are always clamouring to read Infinite Jest . Since you’re doing this course, would you teach it?’ So, at that point, not only did I read it, I read the book during the semester because I wanted to have the same experience that the students were having. I assigned it to myself as well – it only seemed fair. So we were all working under great pressure. It’s an extraordinary book and I, of course, have my own interpretation about what is going on. I think it’s about recursion. Recursion is a somewhat technical term – we use recursion theory a lot in logic and mathematics. Recursion theory grew out of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. Here’s recursion: When you have an operation that you perform on some element—say a number—and you get a new product as a result, and then you perform the very same operation on that product and get a new product, and then you perform the operation on that, ad infinitum . Ad infinitum is very important because that’s how we generate infinity. That’s how we generate, for example, the natural numbers. You start with zero, you perform the operation of adding one, get a product, and keep applying the same recursive rule. “It is an ultimate novel of despair, as wildly entertaining as it is.” The phrase Infinite Jest comes from a scene in Hamlet and, as in The Black Prince, there is also a play with Hamlet. But, for me, the notion of recursion forms the framework of understanding this massive, explosive novel. David Foster Wallace was very interested in recursion. Both he and I had written a book in the same series, Great Scientific Discoveries . I wrote on Gödel and he wrote on Cantor. Wallace’s book was called Everything and More — about infinity and Cantor’s discovery of the different orders of infinity. There’s countable and uncountable infinity, so you can get infinity and then, in some sense, bigger infinity. Wallace was very interested in infinity and the role that recursion plays in it. One of the things that he is examining in the novel is the various games that we play, many of them recursive. The way we lose ourselves in recursively looping games can drown our sense of isolation and loneliness and misery. They can make us feel as if we’re making progress in our lives. And of course, since recursion generates infinity, perhaps this sense isn’t illusive. Or perhaps it is. Perhaps on the human level it undeniably is. That’s a despairing line to take, and Wallace takes it. He creates this massive work with all these different, crisscrossing plot lines. Then he gives us something to do to try and interpret it. The book is about the games that we play, and Wallace gives us a game, which is trying to interpret this book, finding the solution that will make all the pieces of it come together, and the pieces don’t really all come together. I think that’s part of the ‘infinite jest’ of the book. You can’t put it all together. But he will give us this massive entertainment to try to lose ourselves in, and that is—again recursively—the very subject of the book. What he gets us so obsessively to do—this game we might lose ourselves in—is itself the theme of the book. The novel is also about our infinite loneliness. The one game that we play, which is language, should be able to make us understand one another, to relieve our isolation, our solitude. But language, yet another rule-governed game, is too feeble to accomplish this. It can’t deliver us to one another. “I do think that the kinds of things that philosophers think about have much to add to novels.” All these games can be a kind of addiction, a way of playing together as if we really are together, but we are not. At the heart of it all is utter aloneness and sadness. The fact of our utter aloneness is a theme of much literature. And this is interesting, because literature, in doing justice to the commonality of our experiences, is a means of muting this feeling of isolation, you might think. Wallace offers a novel that expresses his scepticism on this point. It is an ultimate novel of despair, as wildly entertaining as it is. Its very entertainment is part of his point. I think that’s true. Because these activities are, in some sense, governed by rules, it is something that we are able to share together. Rules are something that we can understand, replicate in our own minds and play together. So this is a way that we can alleviate the aloneness, in company with others. That’s what games are about, and ultimately, Wallace seems to be suggesting, it’s all games, except for our essential aloneness and sadness. That’s no game. There is an incredibly heart-breaking scene where the main character, Hal Incandenza, first appears. He’s a tennis player. That’s yet another game given much attention in the book. There’s also, in the novel, a game called ‘eschaton’—from eschatology—that uses game theory and computers to lob tennis balls at targets. In any case, this young boy Hal, who is a great tennis star, is being interviewed for college. He’s not speaking. His uncle, who is head of the private school that he attends—a school devoted to tennis—is talking for him. But you’re hearing Hal’s thoughts and he is brilliant. He has an eidetic memory; he had memorised the Oxford English Dictionary . Then, finally, the interviewers goad Hal into speaking, and we see the horrified reaction. We’ve been inhabiting the inner life where he’s brilliant but if he tries to speak he sounds like an animal or a deranged person. They’re all wondering, ‘Is he having a seizure?’ You realise that something has happened and maybe you’re going to find out what it was in the remainder of book, which all takes place before this opening scene, and maybe you’re not. Hal has memorised the Oxford English Dictionary , but language completely fails him and he is as alone as it is possible to be. Language hasn’t kept up its promise. And then Wallace offers us a massive multi-plotted novel that makes—among other promises—the promise of explaining why Hal Cadenza has been forsaken by language—but this novel doesn’t keep its promise. That’s not a criticism. Its not keeping its promise is at the very heart of what Wallace is up to. When I’m writing novels I often have to fight my philosophical training. When you’re a philosopher you want to control the thought processes of your audience. You’re trying to think of every criticism that they can possibly make and answer it beforehand. That’s what it is to write good philosophy. But this letting go and knowing that you’re going to be preparing an experience that you can’t anticipate, it’s a little hard, actually. The two trainings are often in tension with each other. You have to truly love novels to be a novelist. You have to immerse yourself, not out of a sense of duty, but out of love. You have to have a passion for them. That is the most important thing. You have to have a feel for literature, for character, for individuality. To love novels is also to love the inner world of the subjective. That’s not necessarily something that goes along with philosophical training: to be in love with subjectivity as well as with objectivity. But I do think that the kinds of things that philosophers think about have much to add to novels. How far can reason get us? How can we tell which intuitions are sound and which aren’t when intuitions, by their very nature, can’t be accounted for? What do we do about reconciling moral responsibility with determinism? How much of ourselves can we get into rules, including the rules of language, and how much is left over after rules? What is the best of us that we ought to work to augment? All of these are questions that we deal with as philosophers and they can make for great literature. These five novels demonstrate that they do make for great literature. The voices have to come out of the individuated characters, made real with all the quirks of their individuality. If the dialogue is between disembodied talking heads, it doesn’t work. What’s so amazing is that we trace philosophy to Plato and he wrote, of course, dialogues with brilliant discourse which comes out of character. When Alcibiades speaks in the Symposium , he’s not only giving his counterexample to what Socrates has just stated: that counterargument is coming out of Alcibiades’s character just as Socrates’s previous argument is coming out of his character. This is where it all began and we got very far away from it. There’s a deeper problem with what’s happened with philosophy, which has taken us so very far away from Plato and Aristotle, and this dismissal of literature is a symptom of the deeper problem. There has been a professionalization of philosophical thinking that is completely separate from the question of how we live our lives. So you can be a brilliant ethicist and a complete asshole. To Plato or Spinoza this would be unthinkable. For them, you do philosophy with your whole self. Your philosophical thinking comes out of your character, and it, in turns, transforms your character. There can’t be any separation. Alcibiades argues as he does, in the Symposium, because he is Alcibiades, and the limits of his character, its ultimate imperviousness to what Socrates had tried to teach him, is what dooms him, and dooms the Athenians along with him. Casaubon’s characterological imperviousness to what Dorothea herself struggles to learn and tries to teach him dooms him. The interweaving of philosophical thought with character is something to which justice is done in the philosophical novels I treasure. My sense of this interweaving is what drove me to write fiction in the first place, and then my study of the great philosophical fiction of others convinced me further of the myriad and inventive ways that this can be done."