Infinite Jest. Everyone’s heard of it. Everyone knows how long it is. Everyone knows about the endnotes. But what’s it about?
Many things: the inevitability of loneliness, seeking pleasure as an escape, the importance of sincerity and faith, the role of advertising and consumerism in modern society, and more.
It’s also about recursion.
It’s an odd thing for a literary novel to be about: Recursion is this technical thing that pops up in logic, linguistics and computer science. The quickest way to understand it is by googling it.
Recursive procedures are procedures that can be applied to themselves or their outputs over and over again. In theory, they can go to infinity, a topic DFW was fairly interested in. He even wrote a (separate) book about it.
Infinite Jest is about recursion but also has a recursive structure. Meta-recursive, if you will. It may be a little gratuitous for a 1,000 page book, but it’s sort of meant to be read more than once. Indeed, most readers start rereading it immediately. Some will do this before they’ve finished.
It’s not just a recursive loop like a hiking track that finishes at the start line. It’s fractal-like: Parts of it contain elements that represent the whole.
We can listen to DFW describe the book’s structure: He says it attempts to resemble a Sierpinski Gasket: This proto-fractal shape thing that I always mispronounce with an extra syllable for some reason. DFW called it a “pyramid on acid”.
One of the book’s characters, the flawed but lovable Michael Pemulis, has a hand drawn picture of it on his wall. It looks like this:
The entire object can be contained within a part of itself, which can be contained within a part of itself, which can be… You get the idea.
DFW's editor Michael Pietsch described reading a draft Infinite Jest for the first time like picking up disparate broken shards and realizing they resemble each other. We slowly appreciate the "connectedness of all events"
Reading Infinite Jest is like viewing a modern day Bosch painting of Metro Boston from a helicopter: We’re looking down on various quirky characters. Some experience similar fates. Some interact. And some just-about-oh-so-nearly cross paths but never meaningfully encounter.
The Bosch painting slowly coalesces and we see that scenes are not only related to each other but are sometimes microcosms within microcosms of broader themes.
As I said, not only do the characters and scenes resemble one another, but the book itself recursively resembles its themes. For instance:
The book’s about actively applying effort for the most important things in life: feeling human, seeing simple truths, and combating loneliness. The book itself requires active effort. Quite a lot of it.
The book’s about how life is full of double binds that don’t resolve. The book itself doesn’t fully resolve. (Sorry.)
The book’s about a filmmaker who makes works that are “anti-confluential” (ie, films that don’t flow easily). The book itself is “anti-confluential”.
The books about a mysterious film called Infinite Jest. The book itself is, of course, Infinite Jest.
More broadly, the book’s about loneliness. Everything DFW writes seems to find its way back to loneliness.
The brand of loneliness in Infinite Jest surrounds the fact that we are inherently disconnected from others: We are confined within the walls of our head. We can’t pour the inner contents of our mind with a bucket into others.
The book examines the impact of universal loneliness: We distract ourselves with pleasure. Infinite Jest is filled to the brim with drug addicts. Affable addicts, athletic addicts, and abhorrent addicts. Current drug addicts, recovering drug addicts, and non-drug addicts who are addicted to something else.
Drugs are a metaphor of the general phenomenon: We seek passive consumption as an escape. Scott Alexander labelled this “wireheading” in his review.
However, a cause of loneliness, along with the physics of our craniums, is recursion. Namely, we get stuck playing recursive games. These games can become solipsistic, neurotic loops. The main character Hal is secretly addicted to marijuana. He’s also secretly addicted to the secrecy.
Sometimes the recursive games we play are based on something external. Indeed, I’ve been playing a doomed recursive game of trying to interpret this damn book. We can become obsessed with completing the game. Alas, the problem with recursion is that it doesn’t end.
Like the other themes, Wallace litters fun literal examples of recursion throughout.
In the memorable opening chapter, we find the main character Hal Incandenza interviewing for Arizona University under a tennis scholarship. However, despite high intelligence and a rich inner experience, he is totally unable to communicate with others. Hal’s uncle describes him as “communicatively challenged” which is an understatement. By the end of the interview Hal is somewhere between choking, psychosis, epilepsy, and making sounds like a “drowning goat”.
The recursion spotting occurs when the university dean, who is restraining Hal, is being restrained by Hal’s uncle, who is being restrained by the university tennis coach.
About 100 pages in, we meet two odd characters having a secret meeting on a high outcropping outside of Tuscon, Arizona. One of them is Hugh Steeply, a burly man who dresses as a woman in disguise. He works for the the Organisation of North American Nations (ONAN1), the political alliance between USA, Canada, and Mexico.
The other, Remy Marathe, is a member of a violent Quebecois separatist terrorist organisation: the Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents, aka the wheelchair assassins. Well, actually Marathe is a quadruple agent: Namely, someone pretending to pretend he’s a double agent who’s betraying the separatists. By my count that means his alliance lies with ONAN.
The possibility of a quintuple agent is discussed at one point.
There is a confusing moment where Steeply's superior doesn’t know that Marathe’s superior knows that Steeply knows that Marathe’s superior knows that Marathe is meeting Steeply.
300 pages in, at an AA meeting, we hear from a man who works at the complaints department. He’s pathologically lazy but works extremely hard to avoid doing any work. Someone eventually finds a way to make a complaint about the complaints department.
200 pages in, we are introduced to Joelle van Dyne, aka radio host Madame Psychosis2, aka PGOAT (the prettiest girl of all time).
She constantly wears a veil as a member of the Union of the Hideous and Improbably Deformed (UHID). However, we’re never quite sure if her face has been disfigured or she’s covering up her “hideously beautiful” fatal attraction.
She explains that openly wearing a veil everywhere isn’t just because you are ashamed. In fact, it’s a way to not feel ashamed of your being ashamed. You no longer hide the fact you are hiding. Joelle even refers to less explicit disguises as veiled veils.
There’s a 27 page endnote outlining the entire filmography of Hal’s father, the troubled genius James O. Incandenza. Along with being “anti-confluential”, many of his films have recursive elements.
For instance, the film The Joke is literally the audience watching themselves watching themselves. James and Hal’s younger brother Mario hide behind the screen and set up a camera to film the audience. Once it’s finished they rush out, avoiding an increasingly frustrated audience to catch a flight to set up for the next screening.
The film Medusa vs the Odalisque is about a theatre audience watching a play about two mythical female creatures fighting. They attack with their petrifying stares and defend with a mirror and reflective nail file respectively. The fictional audience is frozen one by one. The movie’s audience in the Infinite Jest world leaves feeling frustrated as they’re never able to see the fatal allure of what the fictional audience sees. One notices how this dynamic might apply to the real audience of the book (in our world) who feel similarly frustrated: What’s so special about the film Infinite Jest that everyone’s making such a fuss about.
The film Blood Sister is about a formerly delinquent but now reformed nun who fails to reform a juvenile delinquent which leads to a rampage of recidivist revenge. The main nun was saved by another reformed nun who was saved by another reformed nun and on and on.
Some of these examples feel like nerdy easter eggs. Someone has a tattoo on of a hand which itself has the same tattoo and you’re like: “Hey, recursion”. But Wallace wasn’t just trying to be clever. He thinks that recursion is a vital aspect about life and the human condition.
Our language is famously recursive. A sentence can contain a clause which can contain another clause. Chomsky argued this is what makes human language distinctive from animal communication.
More importantly for Wallace, the games we play, often with ourselves, are recursive and this can lead to solipsism. We get lost in these games. We have anxiety about anxiety. We can’t sleep because we’re worried about not sleeping. We think we’re making progress in life but recursion generates infinity. We end up back in the same spot.
Wallace struggled with this himself. He became a published author in his 20s and the acclaimed author of his generation in his 30s. He realised that these achievements didn’t make satiate whatever it is he was searching for. Whatever your temple, there’s more to chase. You will never be good looking enough. Smart enough. Rich enough.
Language and logic which are based on recursive rules aren’t enough to get us out of the loop. In Infinite Jest, Wallace asks us whether faith is the way out.
I’ll stop there.
As Andy Matuschak said in my favourite review of Infinite Jest: Go read it.
This is also the Metro Boston street name of the incredibly potent psychedelic DMZ, which Joelle was nicknamed after.