Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

  … (7) Ms. Steeples, to my way of thinking, the word “abuse” is vacuous. Who can define “abuse”? The difficulty with really interesting cases of abuse is that the ambiguity of the abuse becomes part of the abuse. Thanks over the decades to the energetic exercise of your own profession, Ms. Steeley, we have all heard ACOAs and AlaTeens and ACONAs and ACOGs and WHINERS relate clear cases of different kinds of abuse: beatings, diddlings, rapes, deprivations, domineerment, humiliation, captivity, torture, excessive criticism or even just utter disinterest. But at least the victims of this sort of abuse can, when they have dredged it back up after childhood, confidently call it “abuse.” There are, however, more ambiguous cases. Harder to profile, one might say. What would you call a parent who is so neurasthenic and depressive that any opposition to his parental will plunges him into the sort of psychotic depression where he does not leave his bed for days and just sits there in bed cleaning his revolver, so that the child would be terrified of opposing his will and plunging him into a depression and maybe causing him to suicide? Would that child qualify as “abused”? Or a father who is so engrossed by mathematics that he gets engrossed helping his child with his algebra homework and ends up forgetting the child and doing it all himself so that the child gets an A in Fractions but never in fact learns fractions? Or even say a father who is extremely handy around the house and can fix anything, and has the son help him, but gets so engrossed in his projects (the father) that he never thinks to explain to the son how the projects actually get done, so that the son’s “help” never advances past simply handing the father a specified wrench or getting him lemonade or Phillips-head screws until the day the father is crushed into aspic in a freak accident on the Jamaica Way and all opportunities for transgenerational instruction are forever lost, and the son never learns how to be a handy homeowner himself, and when things malfunction around his own one-room home he has to hire contemptuous filthy-nailed men to come fix them, and feels terribly inadequate (the son), not only because he is not handy but because this handiness seemed to him to have represented to his father everything that was independent and manly and non-Disabled in an American male. Would you cry “Abuse!” if you were the unhandy son, looking back? Worse, could you call it abuse without feeling that you were a pathetic self-indulgent piss-puddle, what with all the genuine cases of hair-raising physical and emotional abuse diligently reported and analyzed daily by conscientious journalists (and profiled?)?

  I am not sure whether you could call this abuse, but when I was (long ago) abroad in the world of dry men, I saw parents, usually upscale and educated and talented and functional and white, patient and loving and supportive and concerned and involved in their children’s lives, profligate with compliments and diplomatic with constructive criticism, loquacious in their pronouncements of unconditional love for and approval of their children, conforming to every last jot/tittle in any conceivable definition of a good parent, I saw parent after unimpeachable parent who raised kids who were (a) emotionally retarded or (b) lethally self-indulgent or (c) chronically depressed or (d) borderline psychotic or (e) consumed with narcissistic self-loathing or (f) neurotically driven/addicted or (g) variously psychosomatically Disabled or (h) some conjunctive permutation of (a)… (g).

  Why is this. Why do many parents who seem relentlessly bent on producing children who feel they are good persons deserving of love produce children who grow to feel they are hideous persons not deserving of love who just happen to have lucked into having parents so marvelous that the parents love them even though they are hideous?

  Is it a sign of abuse if a mother produces a child who believes not that he is innately beautiful and lovable and deserving of magnificent maternal treatment but somehow that he is a hideous unlovable child who has somehow lucked in to having a really magnificent mother? Probably not.

  But could such a mother then really be all that magnificent, if that’s the child’s view of himself?

  I am not speaking about my own mother, who was decapitated by a plummeting rotorblade long before she could have much effect one way or the other on my older brother and innocent younger sister and me.

  I think, Mrs. Starkly, that I am speaking of Mrs. Avril M.-T. Incandenza, although the woman is so multileveled and indictment-proof that it is difficult to feel comfortable with any sort of univocal accusation of anything. Something just was not right, is the only way to put it. Something creepy, even on the culturally stellar surface. For instance, after Orin had pretty clearly killed her beloved dog S. Johnson in a truly awful if accidental way, and then had tried to evade responsibility for it with a lie that a parent far less intelligent than Avril could have seen right through, Mrs. Inc’s response was not only not conventionally abusive, but seemed almost too unconditionally loving and compassionate and selfless to possibly be true. Her response to Orin’s pathetic pulverizeand-run-driver lie was not to act credulous so much as to act as if the entire grotesque fiction had never reached her ears. And her response to the dog’s death itself was bizarrely furcated. On the one hand, she mourned S. Johnson’s death very deeply, took the leash and collar and canine nubbin tenderly and arranged lavish memorial and funeral arrangements, including a heartbreakingly small cherrywood coffin, cried in audible private for weeks, etc. But the other half of her emotional energies went into being overly solicitous and polite toward Orin, upping the daily compliment-and-reinforcement-dose, arranging for favorite foods at E.T.A. meals, having his favorite little tennis appurtenances appear magically in his bed and locker with loving notes attached, basically making the thousands of little gestures by which the technically stellar parent can make her child feel particularly valued c — all out of concern that Orin in no way think she resented him for S. Johnson’s death or blamed him or loved him less in any way because of the whole incident. Not only was there no punishment or even visible pique, but the love-and-support-bombardment increased. And all this was coupled with elaborate machinations to keep the mourning and funeral arrangements and moments of wistful dog-remembrance hidden from Orin, for fear that he might see that the Moms was hurt and so feel bad or guilty, so that in his presence Mrs. Inc became even more cheerful and loquacious and witty and intimate and benign, even suggesting in oblique ways that life was now somehow suddenly better without the dog, that some kind of unrecognized albatross had been somehow removed from her neck, and so on and so forth.

  What does a trained analyst of our cultural profile’s soft contours like yourself make of this, Mrs. Starksaddle? Is it mind-bogglingly considerate and loving and supportive, or is there something… creepy about it? Maybe a more perspicuous question: Was the almost pathological generosity with which Mrs. Inc responded to her son taking her car in an intoxicated condition and dragging her beloved dog to its grotesque death and then trying to lie his way out of it, was this generosity for Orin’s sake, or for Avril’s own? Was it Orin’s “self-esteem” she was safeguarding, or her own vision of herself as a more stellar Moms than any human son could ever hope to feel he merits?

  When Orin does his impression of Avril — which I doubt you or anyone else can get him to do anymore, though it was a party-stopper back in our days at the Academy — what he will do is assume an enormous warm and loving smile and move steadily toward you until he is in so close that his face is spread up flat against your own face and your breaths mingle. If you can get to experience it — the impression — which will seem worse to you: the smothering proximity, or the unimpeachable warmth and love with which it’s effected?

  For some reason now I am thinking of the sort of philanthropist who seems humanly repellent not in spite of his charity but because of it: on some level you can tell that he views the recipients of his charity not as persons so much as pieces of exercise equipment on which he can develop and demonstrate his own virtue. What’s creepy and repellent is that this sort of philanthropist clearly needs privation and suffering to continue, since it is his own virtue he prizes, instead of the ends to which the virtue is os
tensibly directed.

  Everything Orin’s mother is about is always terribly well-ordered and multivalent. I suspect she was badly abused as a child. I have nothing concrete to back this up.

  But if, Ms. Bainbridge, you have yielded your own charms to Orin, and if Orin strikes you as a wonderfully gifted and giving lover — which by various accounts he is — not just skilled and sensuous but magnificently generous, empathic, attentive, loving — if it seems to you that he does, truly, derive his own best pleasure from giving you pleasure, you might wish to reflect soberly on this vision of Orin imitating his dear Moms as philanthropist: a person closing in, arms open wide, smiling. (back to text)

  270. ® The Glad Flaccid Receptacle Corporation, Zanesville OH. (back to text)

  271. (including K. McKenna, who claims to have a bruised skull but does not in fact have a bruised skull) (back to text)

  272. This is why Ann Kittenplan, way more culpable for Eschaton-damage than any of the other kids, isn’t down here on the punitive cleanup crew, is that it’s become a defacto Tunnel Club operation. LaMont Chu was nominated to tell her she could blow it off and they’d mark her down as present, which was just fine with Ann Kittenplan, since even the butchest little girls don’t seem to have this proto-masculine fetish for enclosure underneath things. (back to text)

  273. = Stars, shooting stars, falling stars. (back to text)

  274. Poutrincourt uses the Nuck idiom réflechis instead of the more textbook réflexes, and does indeed sound like the real Canadian McCoy, though her accent is without the long moany suffixes of Marathe, and but anyway it is for certain that a certain ‘journalist’ will be e-mailing Falls Church VA on the U.S.O.’s Clipper-proof line for the unexpurgated files on one ‘Poutrincourt, Thierry T.’ (back to text)

  275. Using s’annuler instead of the more Québecois se détruire. (back to text)

  276. Using the vulgate Québecois transperçant, whose idiomatic connotation of doom Poutrincourt shouldn’t have had any reason to think the Parisian-speaking Steeply would know, which is the slip that indicates that Poutrincourt’s figured out that Steeply is neither a civilian soft-profiler nor even a female, which Poutrincourt’s probably known ever since Steeply’d lit his Flanderfume with the elbow of his lighter-arm out instead of in, which only males and radically butch lesbians ever do, and which together with the electrolysis-rash comprises the only real chink in the operative’s distaff persona, and would require an almost professionally hypervigilant and suspicious person to notice the significance of. (back to text)

  277. Trois-Rivières-region idiom, meaning basically ‘reason to get out of bed in the morning.’ (back to text)

  278. Where was Mrs. Pemulis all this time, late at night, with dear old Da P. shaking Matty ‘awake’ until his teeth rattled and little Micky curled up against the far wall, shell-breathing, silent as death, is what I’d want to know. (back to text)

  279. The kid’s the former E.T.A. whose name keeps eluding and torturing Hal, who hasn’t gone over twenty-four hours without getting high in secret for well over a year, and doesn’t feel very good at all, and finds the kid’s name’s elusiveness infuriating. (back to text)

  280. Anhedonia was apparently coined by Ribot, a Continental Frenchman, who in his 19th-century Psychologie des Sentiments says he means it to denote the psychoequivalent of analgesia, which is the neurologic suppression of pain. (back to text)

  281. This had been one of Hal’s deepest and most pregnant abstractions, one he’d come up with once while getting secretly high in the Pump Room. That we’re all lonely for something we don’t know we’re lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that he goes around feeling like he misses somebody he’s never even met? Without the universalizing abstraction, the feeling would make no sense. (back to text)

  282. (the big reason why people in pain are so self-absorbed and unpleasant to be around) (back to text)

  283. S.S.R.I.s, of which Zoloft and the ill-fated Prozac were the ancestors. (back to text)

  284. A crude and cheap form of combustible methedrine, favored by the same sort of addictive class that sniffs gasoline fumes or coats the inside of a paper bag with airplane glue and puts the bag over their face and breathes until they fall down and start to convulse. (back to text)

  285. This has got to be a mispronunciation or catachresis on R.v.C.’s part, since Clonidine — 2-(2,6-Dichloroanilino)-2-imidazoline — is a decidedly adult-strength anti-hypertensive; the infant’d have to be N.F.L.-sized to tolerate it. (back to text)

  286. Kate G.’s never done Ice, or crack/’base/crank, nor even cocaine or low-impact ’drines. Drug addicts tend to fall into different classes: those who like downs and Mr. Hope rarely enjoy stimulants, while coke- and ’drine-fiends as a rule abhor marijuana. This is an area of potentially fruitful study in addictionology. Note that pretty much every class of addicts drinks, though. (back to text)

  287. Since last winter, when a stale smell, litter of dental stimulators, and single slender spit-wet butt signified that a certain upperclassman had been smoking panatelas late at night in V.R.3. (back to text)

  288. The Continent’s Best Yogurt®. (back to text)

  289. In point of a fact wholly unknown to Hal, BS:OTN was in fact a very sad self-hate-festival on Himself’s part, a veiled allegory of sponsorship and Himself’s own miserable distaste for the vacant grins and reductive platitudes of the Boston AA that M.D.s and counselors kept referring him to. (back to text)

  290. Whether the girl’s hideous facial burn-scars are the result of a freebase accident is never made explicit in the film. Bernadette Longley says she kind of hopes that’s the case, because otherwise the scars would function as symbols of some deeper and more spiritual wound/hideousness, and the symbolic equation of facial with moral deformity strikes everybody over thirteen in the room as terribly gooey and heavy and stock. (back to text)

  291. After a heyday during the pre-millennial self-help craze, CA’s receded back to being a splinter of the still-enormous Narcotics Anonymous; and Pat Montesian and the Ennet House Staff, while they have nothing against a resident with cocaine-issues hitting the occasional CA venue, strongly suggest that residents stick with AA or NA and not make splinters like CA or Designer Drug Addicts Anonymous or Prescription Tranquilizers Anonymous their primary fellowship for recovery, mostly because the splinters tend to have way fewer Groups and meetings — and some none at all in certain parts of the U.S. — and because their extremely specific Substance-focus tends to narrow the aperture of recovery and focus too much on abstinence from just one Substance instead of complete sobriety and a new spiritual way of life in toto. (back to text)

  292. Fearful partly because the Ennet House Staff strongly discourages residents forming any kind of sentimental attachment to members of the opposite sex during their nine-month stay, a to say nothing of attachments to Staffers. (back to text)

  293. Apparently the current colored word for other coloreds. Joelle van Dyne, by the way, was aculturated in a part of the U.S.A. where verbal attitudes toward black people are dated and unconsciously derisive, and is doing pretty much the best she can — colored and so on — and anyway is a paragon of racial sensitivity compared to the sort of culture Don Gately was conditioned in. (back to text)

  294. It’s a Boston-colored thing on Commitments to make all speech a protracted apostrophe to some absent ‘Jim,’ Joelle’s observed in a neutral sociologic way. (back to text)

  295. Boston Housing Authority. (back to text)

  296. Mixes 5/1 with ferric chloride to produce ‘A + B Blood,’ an F/X staple of low-budget splatter-films. (back to text)

  297. The cartridge’s repetitive emphasis on the Mother Superior’s desire to silence the novitiate leads B. Boone — a lazy student but very bright girl — to opine that the silent brown-cowled Trappists who’ve been hanging superfluously around the film’s edges like some mute Greek chorus have been serving a symbolic rather than a narrative function, which strikes Hal as percep
tive. (back to text)

  298. It’s also a sly Schtitt-directed à-clef, of course, amounting to something like We Are What We Revile or We Are What We Scurry Around As Fast As Possible With Our Eyes Averted, though when Schtitt mentions the motto he never attaches any moral connotation to it, or for that matter ever translates it, allowing prorectors and Big Buddies to adjust their translations to suit the needs of the pedagogical moment. (back to text)

  299. © the Commonwealth of MA’s Lottery Authority. (back to text)

  300. Easily found when pawning a cordless M. Café® Café-au-Lait Maker at a Brookline shop of pawning, for Fortier and Marathe and the A.F.R. knew well M. DuPlessis’s passion of breakfast café au lait. (back to text)

  301. Having in her M.B.A. program absorbed the litigatory lessons of music producers v. cassette-tape manufacturers and film-production companies v. videotape-rental chains, Noreen Lace-Forché protected InterLace’s golden goose’s copyrights by specifying that all consumer-TP-compatible laser cartridges be engineered as Read-Only — copyable Master cartridges require special OS-codes and special hardware to run, a and you need licenses for both the codes and the hardware, which keeps most consumers out of the bootleg-cartridge business but is not a hard hurdle to clear if you’ve got financial resources and political incentive (i.e., to dupe off a Master). (back to text)