One of David Foster Wallace’s goals (he said, sometimes) as a fiction writer was to help people combat loneliness.  Writing fiction allows the writer to reach out to an audience of strangers.  Reading it allows the audience to reach out to an author they will likely never meet.  Reading texts in common, like with Infinite Winter, gives us a chance to have a shared experience. I think a shared intellectual experience is why a lot of us have nostalgia for school (both high school and college).

Shared experiences are growing harder to come by in an age of personalized experiences.  It may well be a golden age of television, but with so many choices, we’re not all watching the same thing.  A writer friend of mine said once, after watching a documentary about J.D. Salinger how amazing it was that people used to read a Salinger story in The New Yorker and then call all of their friends to either talk about it or urge them to read it.

We can choose our news from a source that tells us what we want to hear.  One paradox of choice is that we have so many that we become indecisive or impossible to please. Another paradox of choice is that our choices can be rendered meaningless if we cannot share them with other people.  If we always choose such exotic ice cream flavors but our choices never, ever overlap, we’ll have a hard time discussing ice cream.  We might drop the subject all together.

Recently, reading Infinite Jest became a kismetally shared experience.  First, I had lunch with the proprietor of Dagblog, and we spent a lot of time talking about story structure, helping each other plot some tales we’d like to tell.  As I’ve also been trying to understand the structure of Infinite Jest, I had recently turned to the graduate thesis James Jason Walsh Jr., who received a Master’s Degree in English literature from Cleveland State University in 2010.  Walsh Jr. wrote a wonderful piece about how Infinite Jest makes use of Hamlet as a template for its plot.  Walsh Jr. received his degree.  His thesis advisor?  Doc Cleveland, resident scholar of Dagblog.

The relationship between Infinite Jest and Hamlet is in the title of Wallace’s novel. When Hamlet digs up the skull of Yorick, the deceased court jester, he describes him as a man of “infinite jest.”  At the heart of the novel is a movie made by Hal Incandenza’s father that is so entertaining that it saps the will to live from anyone who dares watch it. The film production company behind this deadly masterpiece is “Alas, Poor Yorick Productions.”

Walsh Jr. neatly summarizes the thematic parallels between the novel and Hamlet:

“In one sense, it portrays an entire generation of “Hamlets” who are addicted to thinking, saturated with fear, and overwhelmed, like Hamlet with revenge, by the burden of an isolated an unequivocal pursuit (i.e. drug addiction, recovery, tennis, politics, film theory, espionage, and many more).”

Now, I remember Hamlet as one of my “young man” texts, alongside Catcher in the Rye. It’s about action and inaction and being young but confronted with monumental decisions.  I’m not sure how choosing a college major seemed to me as monumental as committing regicide, but it did.  One thing Hamlet is not, in my opinion, is narratively complex.  It’s a pretty simple story.  It is not the kind of thing you would adapt into an 1,100 page novel. Says Walsh Jr.:

“Hamlet is the loose guideline for Wallace’s narratological improvisation...”

I love this because another big part of Infinite Jest is tennis, a game played within narrow baselines but where near limitless action can occur. Wallace has not transposed the plot of Hamlet into the future, he has used the plot to create a court wherein his world can sprawl.  For all its vaunted length, Infinite Jest is carefully bounded.

There is, even, discussion of this among the young and gifted tennis players at the Enfield Tennis Academy, where much action of the book takes place.  In the early rounds of tournaments, we learn, there are few people watching and there are no courtside judges to call faults and out of bounds. The high stakes games are played on the honor system. In many ways, the art of creative writing, particularly the novel, is the art of letting yourself be bound by your own rules, even when nobody is watching.

This also reminds me that Hamlet is like tennis -- it is compact and it has limits, but has so much going on within.  Wallace has teased out so much more of the Hamlet story by getting beyond the coming of age elements, the revenge elements and the ghost elements (though that’s all there) and he’s really gotten us to the crux of the matter -- thinking ourselves to death.  Maybe Hamlet isn’t such a young person’s story after all.  I think I’ll have to revisit it.  

Another observation, in the vein of Hamlet: when we meet Hal Incandenza, he is a young man (Hamlet-aged) who has been deprived of the ability to speak or express himself, even while his thoughts whir a sophisticated cadence. Why can’t Hal speak is part of the mystery of the book (and the subject of a future post).  In this opening scene, Hal desperately wishes that the people he cannot speak to could see him for his humanity, and not as a tennis playing machine, not much later on, we meet Hal’s father James, as a child, being coached in tennis by his alcoholic father.  James is told a horrible truth about human existence -- that he is a machine and that the thoughts in his head are nothing but physical processes, like the revving of an engine.

Hamlet is famously psychological and interior but one of the more famous revisions of the story, by the German playwright Heiner Müller in 1977 is known as Hamletmachine. It mechanizes the theatricality of Hamlet.  Did Wallace know about Müller?  Probably.  He seems to have known quite a bit. Hamlet was pretty smart as well...