Something Pathetic About It

When I was a little way into Infinite Jest I was thinking the interesting thing about it was that it didn't seem to be about love at all. And most of the books that I read and like really do seem to be about love. Or at least, I suppose, they have an easy way in for me to make it about love. Like for example, the novel I read before Infinite Jest was Dostoevsky's The Devils. Pretty much about love. You might say madness, or something about the nature of politics and revolution and utopia and hope (like, it's all mad), but for me it was mainly really about love (the maddest thing of all, eh?).

Then I got a bit further through Infinite Jest. In fact I was pretty near the end. I think I might even be able to pinpoint the moment when I had this sort of revelation. When Gateley's lying in hospital after the fracas with the Canadians and he's sort of immobile and thinking, and he's thinking about Joelle and fantasising about their maybe future love. Incidentally there are a few lines there that are appear almost word-for-word at the beginning of The Finkler Question - which makes you think, Gately and Treslove are such different characters, or maybe DFW and Jacobson such different authors, this must be real, here. Let me quote at length (it's all at length) from Infinite Jest:

If a halfway-attractive female so much as smiles at Don Gately as they pass on the crowded street, Don Gately like pretty much all heterosexual drug addicts, has within a couple of blocks mentally wooed, shacked up with, married and had kids by that female, all in the future, all in his head, mentally dandling a young Gately on his mutton-joint knee while this mental Mrs. G. bustles in an apron she sometimes at night provocatively wears with nothing underneath. By the time he gets where he's going, the drug addict has either mentally divorced the female and is in a bitter custody battle for the kids or is mentally happy still hooked up with her in his sunset years, sitting together amid big-headed grandkids on a special porch swing midofied for Gately's mass, her legs in support-hose and orthopedic shoes still damn fine, barely having to speak to converse, calling each other 'Mother' and 'Papa,' knowing they'll kick within weeks of each other because neither could possible live without the other, is how bonded they've got through the years.

...Having Joelle share personal historical snapshots with Gately leads his mind right over the second's wall to envision Joelle, hopelessly smitten with the heroic Don G., volunteering to bonk the guy in the hat outside the room over the head and sneak Gately and his tube and catheter out of St. E.'s in a laundry cart or whatever, saving him from the BPD Finest or Federal crew cuts or whatever direr legal retribution the guy in the hat might represent, or else selflessly offering to give him her veil and a big dress and let him hold the catheter under the muumuu and sashay right out while she huddles under the covers in impersonation of Gately, romantically endangering her recovery and radio career and legal freedom, all out of a Liebestod-type consuming love for Gately.

This last fantasy makes him ashamed, it's so cowardly. And even contemplating the romantic thing with a clueless newcomer is shameful... Gately sees it's probably no accident that his vividest Joelle-fantasies are coincident with flight-from-Finest-and-legal-responsibility fantasies. That his head's real fantasy is this newcomer helping him avoid, escape, and run, joining him later in Kentucky on a modified porch swing. He's still pretty new himself: wanting somebody else to take care of his mess, somebody else to keep him out of his variou cages. It's the same delusion as the basic addictive-Substance-delusion, basically. His eyes roll up in his head at disgust with himself, and stay there. [pp862-864]*

That passage was really powerful for me when I read it, and I guess I felt a bit ashamed too, I guess I felt like Gately. Shall I do a trite line here? We're all "drug-addicts" really. We just have different drugs. And that's what I take DFW to be saying, one of the things he's saying in the book: life's big, and there are lots of drugs, lots of obsessions, and love's one of them. It's not something more special than that. Because all sorts of drugs are pretty special for different sorts of people. But it's just part of that bigger thing, it's part of this (which line I took to be the motto of the novel):

We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately - the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. [p900]

That's- I don't know, that's hard for me.


* Here's the line from The Finkler Question:

When a woman of the sort Julian Treslove found beautiful crossed his path it wasn't his body that took the force but his mind. She shattered his calm... He no sooner saw the woman than the aftermath of her - his marriage proposal and her acceptance, the home they would set up together, the drawn rich silk curtains leaking purple light... only for every wrack of it... to come crashing down on him in the moment of her walking past. [p3]