Pleasure and Escape

That the text of Infinite Jest is cyclical, with the majority of its plot resolutions being unwritten is vital to the nature of its conception of pleasure and sincerity. Wallace, preoccupied with questions of genuinity and from such, happiness, in what he sees as a fundamentally insincere world, spends the majority of the text’s story being concerned with ways in which the world is broken out of. The rehab facility sits in contrast to tennis academy’s uncovering their own role in insincere-production by way of the Infinite Jest, its transmission connecting all disparate threads of narrative throughout the text. The viewer is a subject trapped, enclosed in a dopamine-based prison out of which they must claw themselves by way of rehab, as shown in the arc of Erdedy.

This reading, common to many, however is incomplete, though it terminates where Wallace himself most likely did. The preoccupation throughout much the text with the tennis academy presents another path. On the first snowfall of YDAU, the world’s systems are replicated through an elaborate ruleset in the game of Eschaton. In doing so, the nature of tennis is replicated at a micro scale. Two seekers of the real, outside of the rigid system of Gately present themselves in the text. Eric Clipperton, moving through the game with a driving goal, circumventing and destroying the rules with an outside goal (echoing the destruction of Eschaton) and Randy Lenz on his night-time rampage. The high of cocaine in Lenz present a problem for the structure of Wallace’s view of pleasure, with Lenz showing a route to an immediate real faster, cutting through the structural ways of Gately.

The problem posed by these narratives is only solved in reinterpretation of the nature of pleasure in the text. When JOI’s head is dug up, the face of dopamine is brought into full, horrifying focus. Hal breaks down in fits in the chronologically latest section, unable to cope any longer within what Wallace constructs as the dopamine-based prison. The question has to be asked however, whether this breakdown represents anything universal. The game itself is called into question as a structure from the same that produced the entertainment and its attendant opium analogies, this identification falls apart as anything but an identification with the text itself being the same as the entertainment, where the central character’s father is revealed to be the author of such misery and as such, the text. The text remains innocent however, only breaking down if the spectre of the father is taken for granted as Wallace assumes it to. Wallace’s construction of sincerity/insincerity remains only in the way it does when it’s allowed to be the construction itself, ie, when it’s already accepted. Forgetting him, the real fulfillment so chased is revealed to exist in that which was rejected. Gately’s rehab functions as a game, as does the academy.

The function of the academy is shown in the Cult of the Last Train. The creation of a “floating world” (Ukiyo-E) as in the tennis game allows for the full escape, an escape which has no objective end into an ever-absent “sincerity” as Wallace believes it does, but an escape into the route of escape itself, the retreat into the floating world of the game, of the text, of literature. The Line of Flight goes in circles, its true flight being off the ground, not to any particular destination.