Infinite Jest: initial impressions

All other of our you say free choices follow from this: what is our temple
-David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest
-Shakespeare, Hamlet

I am currently tackling David Foster Wallace's 1996, thousand-odd page novel Infinite Jest. I'm roughly a 150 pages in, and thus far it appears to be an extended meditation on America's addiction to entertainment--whether to sports, drugs, technology, movies, etc, and how this addiction is caused by and causing our crippling inability to connect and communicate with each other, both metaphorically, and (in the case of at least one character) literally.

The novel takes place in the "near" future--some critics have posited the year to be 2011, so now may be the ideal time to encounter this novel. It's difficult to pinpoint the novel's years, because in Wallace's slightly-dystopic future, the traditional Gregorian calender has been supplanted by corporate "subsidized" years, e.g. the Year of the Whopper, the Year of the Depends Adult Undergarment, the (my personal favorite) Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office Or Mobile, etc.

Clearly there's a fair amount of satirical humor operating here, meant more for parody than to be taken at face value (for crying out loud, in the novel, America has annexed Canada and Mexico into the Organization of North American Nations, or O.N.A.N.--I mean, the sin of Onan is a great metaphor for entertainment's self-pleasing waste and loneliness, but no one would ever name a real geo-political entity that); nevertheless, from the perspective of the real 2011, it's still tempting to critique Wallace's frankly-shaky futurism.

For example, not only are we currently doing the opposite of trying to annex Mexico, but Wallace doesn't seem to have anticipated the internet age at all, even though he published in 1996. No one in his novel's 2011 is surfing the internet or playing on home-computers (which would have fit comfortably his theme of the alienating influence of entertainment); "video-phones" are mentioned and even Bell-style land-lines, but not cell phones; and he fails to anticipate not only DVDs, but even live internet streaming, opting instead for "entertainment cartridges," as though we'd all be watching movies on the same format as Super Nintendo.

Again, these are just quibbles, since the thrust of the novel is clearly a fun-house-mirrors distortion, not hard-sci-fi; nevertheless, at least one thing he surprisingly nails just right. Namely, I just finished a chapter on the failure of the "video-phone" market bubble in the near future, and the narrator mentions off-hand how some over-eager investors lost their employees' pensions funds after investing them with Freddie Mac during this Tech Bubble.

Let me repeat: Employee pensions. Invested in Freddie Mac. Lost in a market bubble. I mean, wow, of all the things for Wallace to absolutely nail about 2011...slow clap, slow clap.

And for that matter, though the rest of Wallace's sci-fi is almost-distractingly off, his central premise is uncomfortably prescient: for the "infinite jest" in question isn't just an allusion to Shakespeare's "Hamlet," but is an actual video-cartridge, that some Quebecois terrorists are trying to track down, of a movie that is so entertaining, any one watching it loses all desire to do anything else, even live. I mentioned this to a roommate while he was playing video-games, and he just straight-faced quipped, "Well, that's not realistic at all!" Indeed.

If nothing else, this novel so far has gotten me to question: what indeed is my temple? What is the center of my devotion, beyond the church I attend on Sunday? In America, for all of our much vaunted freedom of faith, Infinite Jest makes the case that entertainment may in fact be our unacknowledged state religion after all.