Goddamnit David Foster Wallace

When I finished reading Infinite Jest I have to admit I was disappointed.
Are you kidding? I invested myself into a 1000 pages for that to be the ending?
I remember distinctly feeling the urge to go back to the beginning,
To start again, and read the whole thing,
To see if I could figure it out.
Then I stopped myself.
My rational brain took over.
1000 pages is long enough to read a book, that is over the appropriate length as is.
You shouldn't reread it,
The point must be you'll never figure it out.
He must be saying life is cruelly nonsensical in how it ends.
He killed himself eventually.
It makes sense.

A few months later (now) I am working on a show about writers
And one of the characters admits to writing a couple thousand pages
All on this one novel he's been working on.
All on one novel. A double David Foster Wallace.
Indeed he is treated like a genius.
So on a break in the green room,
I get to talking with the actor playing the DDFW
And mention this fact
(Sort of a tricky assistant director way to give a non-note,
To express passion about a fact that may not have come to light quite the same way before,
In hopes of inspiring the sense you wish was there with what you see--)
Anyway,
He starts to talk about Infinite Jest, which he's also read,
And mentions how after HE finished reading the book he ALSO was let down,
And went online.
 I went online, too, but half-heartedly. Like, it felt like cheating,
To read what other people thought.
I wanted to keep my experience with it to myself.
I think I was a little afraid I was too dumb to have really read it.

Well, so, but apparently I am a little dumb
Because I should've followed my instincts.
The last scene of IJ isn't the end at all--
It seems DFW wanted you to go back to the beginning
Where cleverly hid within the first few chapters
was the so called "final" scene
Where Hal and Gately dig the antidote "entertainment" out from Hal's dad's skull
A very Hamletian image
Which, when you first read,
& that's made reference, you don't remember
Because you didn't know what you were reading.

So the sick joke is that Infinite Jest IS a kind of infinite jest,
You're supposed to read it start to finish to start to finish,
And perhaps do so infinitely--
But no one ever will, because the book is famous for being given up on
Too difficult, too dense, too complex, too sick, too silly, too giving-legitimacy-to-the-inner-turmoil-of-the-privileged--

I remember randomly bumping into a friend at the airport
Waiting to fly home to California for Christmas
And we got to talking,
And I mentioned I was reading the book,
Sort of surreptitiously showing off to him about how smart & intellectual & hipster & cool I was,
To read such a difficult literary book,
And I remember him being like "Aw man, I hate that book,
I hate how it coolifies that way of thinking, you know?
It makes depressive and sad thoughts really cool,
When they're not, you know?
I feel like it's no wonder he killed himself.
The book was just too unnecessarily complicated, I stopped after about halfway."

And I know I felt the same way at times,
Though I also know I felt rewarded for taking on the challenge,
Like, he wanted to test readers, to see if they'd follow even if they didn't quite understand,
Or read even when they were sort of being pushed NOT to read,
DFW said in an interview that he felt like he set out to write a really sad novel,
And was surprised everyone thought it was so funny.
A hyper-aware hyper-aware guy.
Someone who wants to control how he is seen.
Someone who plays a part.
An actor.

There's a part in Infinite Jest where Hal postulates
that Hamlet is only pretending to pretend he's mad--
That he uses the excuse of performance to really let himself be crazy

He (David, Hal, Hamlet, my airport friend, my actor friend, myself)
Doth protest too much, methinks--