This is not a linear prose tale as we know it. In fact it is pure vaudeville to the main circus, big-top act which is the intellect of Foster Wallace himself, and the pre-frontal cortex mythology which he conspires to create and then exudes, seemingly, so effortlessly.ĭid Foster Wallace write a capable work? That is down to the moral subjectivity of the reader, and relative comprehension of what literature is, and how far they are willing to travel to meet such a work. The plot is tertiary to Wallace’s intellect and ego in flux. So, with a slingshot in hand, I strapped on my leather sandals and headed out to the dusty milieu to grapple with the colossal swinging giant. I suppose this may be permissible in others but not for anyone prepared to leave their comfort zone. On social media, namely Twitter, a few people remarked that they had undertaken the David versus Goliath battle with Infinite Jest and retreated to safe passage, beaten some two hundred pages in. One could assert that David Foster Wallace, straddled the tumescent, guilt-ridden world of the former and then found his comfort, and solace, in the latter, where the rotating, tangible Gods are more within one’s reach if they exert themselves and actually get down to it and, libidinal energies aside, write.
In section two of Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents (1930) on ‘Civilized’ Sexuality Morality and Modern Nervous Illness he opens up by drawing a distinction between the ‘natural’ – rampant? – sexuality in the human, and the subservient, moral sexual behaviour in ‘civilized society,’ which delineates into sublimation, leading to one’s efforts being thrown wholly into Art and cultural activity. Recently, I looped the meta-modernist, hyper-realist circle and reached for David Foster Wallace’s encyclopaedic, metadata novel, Infinite Jest (1996) I figured that while sedate prose is at the behest of book sellers, and publishers, means – and modes of production for the masses – I thought “To hell with this, give me a novel with shtick.” So employing a reposed epidural, I plugged into Foster Wallace’s acicular vein, man, and plunged the diviner right on into the other side.
Which, is, seemingly, scant upon the ground these post-modern, non-ideological – apart from vast consumerism and neo-liberalist agenda(s) – days. The morning fontanelle, in its softwarm glade, peeping out, making way for noontide, and the ossified skull pivots towards Jupiter my dumb-wondering skull swinging gallantly to the heavens, and then back again to the social world, where the overtly self-conscious auteur can record the very thing itself, Kantian logic. I have a mild neurosis, situated in Utopian wish-fulfillment, of the ideal that I often step in a prelapsarian coppice with slats of warm-light breaking the gentle canopy and then filtering on down through the trees to come to a swirling perceptible rest and thus luxuriating golden on the forest floor.
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