Infinite Jest Diary #5

Progress: currently on page 364

The review of Although of Course You Always End Up Becoming Yourself that I mentioned in Diary #3 contained some speculation about DFW's experiences with addiction. As you may know, Infinite Jest is set partly in an addicts' halfway house. I just finished reading a long passage about the characters there (actually I'm still in it), which concentrates heavily on addiction and the AA program. And I've come to the conclusion that either DFW did some serious research which had to have included interviews (which I can readily believe he did), or he or someone close to him personally experienced this process. The passages, of course, are filled with careful and meticulous detail. DFW writes as one of the most careful observers I've ever read. He literally takes care with every detail, and you end up caring because he cares. And just when you think the detail is really getting a bit too much, he'll say something that will keep you going.

Anyway, for all their detail, the passages about AA come around a couple of times to the same conclusion: that the program works, even for those who find it horribly simplistic, but no one knows why or how. See the following quotations:

"What metro Boston AAs are trite but correct about is that both destiny's kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person's basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it." (p. 291)

A variation, perhaps, on John Lennon's famous quote about life being what happens to you while you're making other plans - but really quite difficult to accept (especially for someone like me) when you think about it. And then, further on, DFW breaks AA's axiomatic program down further:

"How do trite things get to be trite? Why is the truth usually not just uninteresting but anti-interesting?" (p. 358)

I can't figure out if this is the character or the author talking. In either case, I'm going to have to think about it for a while.

And now, words:

1. nystagmic (adj.) Characterized by involuntary, rapid, oscillating movement of the eyeballs (most commonly from side to side).
2. Levantine (adj.) Of or pertaining to the Levant [basically, the Far East]; in early use, pertaining to the east, eastern. Also, recalling or resembling the manners of the Levantines.
3. lordotic (adj.) Characteristic of anterior curvature of the spine, producing convexity in front (occurring as a physical deformity).
4. ascapartic (adj.) According to the Infinite Jest wiki: "A word coined by Wallace, it means gigantic, as Ascapart was a giant depicted in the fiction of, among other people, J.R.R. Tolkien."
5. bilirubin (n.) A reddish pigment, C₃₃H₃₆O₆N₄, occurring in bile.
6. candent (adj.) At a white heat; glowing with heat.
7. felo de se (n.?)- One who ‘deliberately puts an end to his own existence, or commits any unlawful malicious act, the consequence of which is his own death’ (Blackstone).
8. mucronate (adj.) - terminating in a point, as an organ.
9. solander (n.) - A box made in the form of a book, used for holding botanical specimens, papers, maps, etc.
10. GAUDEAMUS IGITUR - Latin for "Let us rejoice"
11. prognathous (adj.) Having projecting or forward-pointing jaws, teeth, mandibles, etc.; having a facial angle of less than 90°.