David Foster Wallace & the Christianity of Filling in Forms
Part 2

3,429 words

The reason I believe that Infinite Jest is David Foster Wallace’s masterpiece is that it takes for granted that there is no real reason for him, or really anyone to embrace the mundane horrors of modern life— unless (and he isn’t), you’re willing to defend the transcendent ideal of your people, which if you’re me, or you’re someone like Wallace today, equals the white race. And if you can’t do this, then truly there is very little keeping you from just embracing a life of temporal pleasure before offing yourself. I’m going to slow down a bit now.

The story of Infinite Jest is broadly about a film cartridge that is so addicting it causes the people who watch it to replay it over and over again, paying attention to nothing else, and eventually starving and shitting themselves to death, and expiring in a bliss that is somehow much more convincing than that second kind of “bliss” behind office boredom that Wallace saw as instrumental to The Pale King. Part of the story of Infinite Jest is also based on the testimonies of real people that Wallace met when he stayed in a drug recovery centre, or half-way house, and it’s easy to see how the implicitly fucked up psychological drives of crack addicts, and porn addicts[1], and dope fiends, and sexual predators, not to forget alcoholics, feed into the culture that created the Liebestod[2] that emanates out of this very particularly cursed tape. I think David Foster Wallace would have watched this thing and have died to it if he were seriously given the chance, and in one interview from 2003 with a nice German girl, he said he absolutely “couldn’t own a TV” because if he did, he would watch it “all the time”; “What it is is too much good stuff combined with my sick little head that thinks there’s always something a little better…We’re screwed.”

Over the course of this very long novel, when you’re waiting around to find out just how Wallace is going to sell you a tape that would make you give your life up to be entertained by it, there’s plenty of time for consideration. At an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, a woman describes giving birth to a dead baby with no eyes and going back to her 8 Ball of drugs directly after the process is complete. There are a group of characters known in Boston AA as “crocodiles”—sort of chunky leathery types addicted to smoking and coffee, who have made sobriety into a hard-won scar tissue, a new physiology. It’s become who they are. Meanwhile, we’ve got the parts of the novel about the tennis academy, and the likes of Eric Clipperton: a kid so terrified of losing that he brings a gun in a beautiful case to each of his matches and threatens to off himself, or as Wallace puts it he threatens to “demap” himself. But it’s only when Clipperton finally wins that he actually does it,[3] the Purgatory of continuously not winning and then going out with a gun during each match being so exhilarating in terms of dopamine in its own right that actual victory—and therefore not needing to do that anymore—causes Clipperton what I would presume to be a massive hormonal crash out.

Anyway, I list these sections because whenever someone actually gets around to watching the tape, however previously damaged they happen to be, Wallace presents them as rationally enjoying the thing. It’s not just sickness, nor, as the character Hugh Steeply suggests, is it some kind of chemical hacking of the lizard brain that forces the audience member to simply remain in his seat. What’s on the tape is David Foster Wallace’s closest equivalent to the something at the end of the endless dark walk in the cave that Dostoevsky describes. Only, after we’ve walked all the way through 1073 pages or less of Infinite Jest, what we’re presented with is not some Nirvana, some genuine and sincere kind of Heaven. What we’re given is an encounter with a life-destroying media pleasure, or what would amount to that if we ever saw it on tape. It’s death in a video. And to Wallace’s credit, what he presents on the tape is certainly something one can imagine a great number of people wanting to watch forever, plus or minus the basically magical lenses used by the director James Orin Incandenza (J.O.I) to render the material genuinely addicting.

[For when push comes to shove]––Molly Notkin tells the U.S.O.U.S. operatives that her understanding of the après-garde Auteur J. O. Incandenza’s lethally entertaining Infinite Jest (V orVI) is that it features Madame Psychosis as some kind of maternal instantiation of the archetypal figure Death, sitting naked, corporeally gorgeous, ravishing, hugely pregnant, her hideously deformed face either veiled or blanked out by undulating computer-generated squares of color or anamorphosized into unrecognizability as any kind of face by the camera’s apparently very strange and novel lens, sitting there nude, explaining in very simple childlike language to whomever the film’s camera represents that Death is always female, and that the female is always maternal. I.e. that the woman who kills you is always your next life’s mother. This, which Molly Notkin said didn’t make too much sense to her either, when she heard it, was the alleged substance of the Death-cosmology Madame Psychosis was supposed to deliver in a lalating monologue to the viewer, mediated by the very special lens.

We find out what this “lalating monologue” contains from Madame Psychosis herself a little later, as do we that the camera is positioned in a crib and taken from the perspective of an infant—from “A crib’s- eye view [with an] Ocular wobble.”

Says Madame Psychosis:

I wore an incredible white floor-length gown of some sort of flowing material and leaned in over the camera in the crib and simply apologized…As in my lines were various apologies. “I’m so sorry, I’m so terribly sorry, I am so, so sorry. Please know how very, very, very sorry I am.” For a real long time. I doubt he used it all, I strongly doubt he used it all, but there were at least twenty minutes of permutations of “I’m sorry”.

So this is what addicted hundreds of people to a cartridge to the extent they let themselves lie down and rot. It’s effectively the Mother of Life, or as I’ve elsewhere called her Vera Natura, or true nature, apologising for creating you personally, for allowing you to be born and therefore to suffer. Wallace, an author without a Christ, creates an addictive, beautiful Oedipal mother who will not only take care of you, give you the excuse to just give up and let go, but essentially take on the responsibility for everything that went wrong in your life, embracing you like your own mother used to when you were merely her own adorable golden child. It is this tone and these themes that cause Fortier, the leader of the A.F.R.[4] terrorist organisation in the book, to dream about releasing the tape all over America. Fortier sees “in his imagination two-thirds of NNE’s[5] largest urban city inert, sybaritically entranced, staring, without bodily movement, home-bounded, fouling their divans and the chairs which may recline.” Fortier estimates there are going to be buildings because of this cursed tape “striated as two of every three floors is darkened to lightless black.” Seemingly, Wallace could see the writing on the wall for what human—but especially Anglo-American—drives were going to demand for themselves in technological terms, what doom we would have to lust after in the years following his own death. And this was before the invention of the smart phone, on which I could find—right now, find—or AI generate porn of this very Oedipal Mother Death, and make her say sorry to me continuously, not that I’m going to.

The fact that Wallace did kill himself is obviously evidence that he could not find an ideal through the Christianity of filling in forms that transcended the suicidal bliss of Infinite Jest. Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club (1996), criticises David Foster Wallace in the harshest possible terms for taking the nature of the future of the American soul so seriously that he inevitably (or it would seem so to him) ended up at Mother Death.

Says Palahniuk:

Did you read my colouring books?…Do you think somebody who would publish literary fiction colouring books really gives a shit about the great sociopolitical fog out there?…Do you want to end up hanging from a belt in Pomona? From a belt above your patio in Pomona with a college teaching job and the Roy Disney Fellowship?…Right, and your two dogs to say goodbye to while your wife’s at the gallery? Yeah, the fastest path to that is to take things a little too seriously. You know, if somebody had given David Foster Wallace or Sylvia Plath fourteen issues of Spiderman to do, they’d both be alive. And so, I really have to say, the trick is not to give a fuck.

Given my disposition is much closer to DFW’s than Palahniuk’s[6], yours truly has a number of thoughts on this, especially given one slightly-to-very-embarrassing anecdote that recently occurred to him. (This is the long overdue explanation for the bizarre use of the second epigraph at the beginning of this essay, following the predictable T.S. Eliot quotation about distraction.) I was caught between my latest chapter of the Drama Queen (2023-) manga about aliens getting gradually terroristically overthrown by the Japanese Otoya Yamaguchi[7] style, and the latest issue of Chainsaw Man (2022-). The concept of the latter is almost self-explanatory: there’s a superhero created through having a chainsaw devil shoved into his heart; he cuts demons up; there’s also a prophecy, in part 2, of Nostradamus the Seer.

But let’s leave that aside. There’s this one character, who I will not include pictures of but commit myself to describing, who is meant to be the long-prophesied final boss Death Devil in Chainsaw Man. And is it a horrible monster? No, it’s an adorable chick with spirals in her deep eyes, with white or grey hair, and with a standard (Japanese[8]) uniform that’s long and elegant and black and white, as well as woundingly sore tears in her face from crying at life almost always. Death appears in a classroom preparing for a school festival, and she, crying, comes in and shrieks autistically in chapter 195, whilst biting her sleeve, “Um I’m the new transfer student. Um! So this is sudden, but…I’m here to save you guys!” I don’t know if it was this moment with the spiral eyes and the bad posture, but, shamefully, egoistically, hauntingly, I fell in love with this miniscule underdeveloped equally socially retarded character to the same extent that I fell in love with the only woman I have ever.[9] But I won’t mention her here.

I don’t know what it was precisely. Probably the fact in the next chapter she gets bullied out of her class, she is told to “go kill some ants” in the backyard if she can’t contribute, and this is something she actually does, and I would have done.[10] I remember the time when I pulled out a chair enthusiastically from under this kid with an arm-sling from the second school I moved to for one year because I was too happy over a chess match, and then he fell down, and I had to draw, and my league position was lost, and I ended up screaming in the corridor until I got three “stripes”, they called them, and then by the end of the evening Will—13th son of one polygamous family—came at me semi- provoked with a javelin, and it hurt. I did an IQ test and scored higher than I do usually, and they let me go off and be retarded with my slightly older spiritualist friend Lloyd sometimes, whose mother was a medium, and we would walk around, and he would talk about Valkyries being real. Mine he called “Liz”; she guided me to a very particular bench, and she appeared wearing a sort of full-on Elizabethan gown but as a short skirt, speaking in a vague cockney accent, and enunciating her arguments with music hall gestures that were quite personalised. All this sounds grossly bizarre, and yet it happened. He loved it.

And I thought about this Death Girl character as I did my Valkyrie last week, and I listened unprompted to a sped-up version of the song Let it Happen (2015) by Tame Impala, which bizarrely came out ten years ago (although I’m only discovering it now), over 37 times in a row that evening, dancing, and I imagined that she was singing it to me. She wanted to save me. She wanted to break me out of the endless formula of forms that I am in.[11] Eventually, a kind of interdimensional pustule presented itself to me. The reality in front of me folded into a papier-mâché, and she peered out of it, and she addressed me, delicately, clasping my throat, as well asking me how things were going, and singing those same lyrics again and again, and I interpret them as extensions of herself—meaning I heard them as Death also. I am this deep in, so why not?

All this running around trying to cover your shadow, a notion growing inside now all the others seem shallow. All this running around bearing down on your shoulders. You can hear an alarm. It must be morning.

My response in the dream world, to these edited, personalized lyrics, was something like “I cannot have you save me because I need to overthrow whatever has imprisoned us.” And she told me, “Okay.” It was an extremely odd psychic interaction that repeated itself over the rest of two and a half of yours truly’s most recent days. Have you ever gone so wild over a chick that you’ve been left with an unimaginably bountiful residue of love that you fucking applied it to a cartoon character and left it at that?[12]

The point of this otherwise irrelevant anecdote is that I was in the approximate position recently of a viewer of the Infinite Jest (V or VI) tape, and I couldn’t deal with it perpetually, albeit listening to Tame Impala rather than sitting down at a screen. Whatever suicide the caress of Death Girl managed wasn’t equal to the equally moronic desire Chuck Palahniuk addresses i.e. my desire to do a few Spiderman comics[13] and, maybe, leave it at that—or to think about this Death Girl character for a bit and then move on. There’s nothing that doesn’t bore me in the end. Maybe if DFW had Chainsaw Man, had that high school girlish retard Death versus his terrifyingly maternal one, he would have been okay. Maybe the point is if I got that Oedipal Mother Death tape I too would expire.

All I know is that the all-too empty Christianity or ethical post-Christianity of filling in forms is over with now. And if David Foster Wallace were alive—not to dispute Palaniuk directly—it would be because he no longer had to be ashamed of himself; it would be, in essence, because he eventually realised that “THEY”, namely the same “THEY” that the substitute teacher Mr. Johnson writes about by accident on the blackboard—that THEY—do not give a shit and never will about the moral intentions of an Anglo-Saxon or Germanic writer of any description. They just hate you, and if you try and appeal to them, they will call you an abuser of women, or a rapist, or any equivalent insult which is on the same spectrum as being Hitler, even though you personally oppose him, etc.—because you are a White man.[14] Either way: whatever the circumstances, your work will be enough of a threat. They will want you gone; “they”, people who do exist, not “THEY”, principalities that don’t.

Now I will finish by referencing part of the painful, horrific, trismic, hesitant paragraph at the end of David Foster Wallace’s short story The Depressed Person (1998), hated by one Zero HP Lovecraft.[15]

The depressed person therefore urged her terminally ill friend to go on, to not hold back, to let her have it: What terms might be used to describe and assess such a solipsistic, self-consumed, bottomless emotional vacuum and sponge as she now appeared to herself to be? How was she to decide and describe—even to herself facing herself—what all she had learned said about her?

Yours truly has been this intellectually cancerous in front of a great number of almost dying or now dead people. He doesn’t know how to take it. He doesn’t know how to listen to the Tame Impala song, or future renditions of the hallucinatory adorable anime Death Girl that almost must appear to him. He knows that the David Foster Wallace route is not the way out i.e. the Christianity of filling in forms, but that having an humanity—a specific ethnos—is perhaps significant above all, and potentially represents some selective salvation.

He does not know how it goes from henceforth, nor can do without such self-hatred as David Foster Wallace provided the final impressive example of.

One day, he will give up reading. One day there will be no Madame Psychosis, or recorded fantasy significant enough, to keep him from the unsympathetic, enemy nature of the world. Believing not certainly in God, but his own life as Wallace did not, before his personal incarnation of teenage Death, an autistic adorable girl, he shall never give up. He shall live; he shall never give up.

This is how it goes.

Notes

[1] In the interview I’m about to get to that DFW does with this German girl, he notes that the Latin root of the word “addict” is “addicere”, which means “religious devotion”, and was apparently “an attribute of beginning monks” according to Wallace. Isn’t that interesting?

[2] Richard Wagner’s lovely term for “Love-death” from Tristan und Isolde (1865).

[3] Fun fact about yours truly: I was once on an elite high school course and my actual plan that I read to my peers and teachers in case I didn’t get into Yale or Stanford entailed rigorous details about how I was going to hang myself. Consequently, this part of DFW’s novel caused yours truly to chuckle. That’s all.

[4] Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents

[5] North-Northeast’s

[6] We were born one day apart and astrologically have the same rare Pisces-Aquarius cusp, which—as Sam Hyde notes—probably leads to the development of a guy who is “such a sensitive, poetic, feeling, man that he [can’t] take the pain and hypocrisy of living anymore. [And] If that’s the case, I don’t want to read his shit because I’m fucking here, and I have people who rely on me.”

[7] 17-year-old Japanese Nationalist who assassinated Inejirō Asanuma, chairman of the Japanese Socialist Party.

[8] I guess for チェンソーマン.

[9] X

[10] Why not? –I’ll source the acutely good ending of Roddy Lumsden’s poem Autism (2015):

No one has ever known me.
is that cute? I hear a woman
say, ‘I died that night.’ A man in the audience shouts out in the quiet part
of the play. Some self-styled prophet screams,
full minute, on the beach
and all the poppets scatter from the sea, gapey-eyed and clinging
at Mummy. I count these sifting colours of my brief spectrum,
softly touching each in turn. You should believe me when I say
that what I am seeing now is something you must never see.

[11] Applying to Brown; applying to Harvard, thus far—although there are plenty more to come, and plenty of emails mildly complaining about how things are going thus far, because, and inseparably, that is inevitably how things sometimes happen to go.

[12] I thought not; (apart from particularly you).

[13] Read Chainsaw Man

[14] See DFW getting himself sadistically accused of shoving Mary Karr—fucking out of a car.

[15] See Astral Flite’s interview with the writer Zero HP Lovecraft, November 5, 2020: “David Foster Wallace is a fallen hero, I mean, he is a hero who fell from grace; committing suicide when you’re 46 is a powerful way to discredit yourself. I love almost all of his books. The fact that he killed himself…what was I saying earlier about pharmaceuticals? It’s hard to understand if better psychiatrists and better meds could have saved him. Some of his stories, like e.g. The Depressed Person are just comically bad and are almost a perfect synechdoche [sic] of everything that was wrong with DFW.”