“They’d never noticed it before, the delusion—it’s like it was so emotionally complex that it could be countenanced only in the context of its loss. Good old traditional audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to attention to her. […] And yet—and this was the retrospectively marvelous part—even as you were dividing your attention between the phone call and all sorts of other idle little fuguelike activities, you were somehow never haunted by the suspicion that the person on the other end’s attention might be similarly divided. […] Regarded with the objectivity of hindsight, the illusion appears arational, almost literally fantastic: it would be like being able both to lie and to trust other people at the same time.”
The once and pale king would have been forty-eight today.
Some people have suggested that there is such a thing as The Philosophical Novel. Whereas other people think that there are only Good Novels and Bad Novels. Other people think other things. I’d suggest that every Good Novel is also a Philosophical Novel in the good faith sense that people who believe in that sort of thing believe. Take this passage from Infinite Jest. I’ve elided the more literary bits to tease out its thesis, but believe me there is description and enumeration. However, outside the confines of the novel, this bit comes off as somewhat didactic/expository/talky/discursive. But Wallace’s discursive bits also really ‘get’ that chummy, Nabokovian mien. You don’t feel lectured at. (Ideally.)
Of course Infinite Jest is a like a mosaic comprised of little ways people fail to communicate, so it’s not really jarring when you get to these very explicit (like not even imagistic but very literal) parts about how we have a hard time talking to each other. Your head has kind of subsumed that that’s the general idea of the book. Isn’t that great? The book communicates all the different ways we fail to communicate. It does it in ways liminal and sub (and super?). Its antagonistic size is even another way it shows simultaneously how great it is to communicate with people and how awful hard it is to communicate with people. It’s as if it says Here’s a really long tedious-seeming book about why it’s hard to say anything. What a joke, right?
