Not to be confused with flatulence.

Afflatus is a Latin term derived from Cicero (in De Natura Deorum (The Nature of the Gods)) that has been translated as “inspiration.” Cicero’s usage was a literalizing of “inspiration,” which had already become figurative. Literally, “inspiration,” like “afflatus,” means “to be blown into” by a divine wind. As “inspiration” came to mean simply the gathering of a new idea, Cicero reiterated the idea of a rush of unexpected breath, a powerful force that would render the poet helpless and unaware of its origin.

In English, “afflatus” is used for this literal form of inspiration. It generally refers not to the usual sudden originality, but to the staggering and stunning blow of a new idea, an idea that the recipient may be unable to explain. In Romantic literature and criticism, in particular, the usage of “afflatus” was revived for the mystical form of poetic inspiration tied to “genius”, such as the story Coleridge offered for the composition of Kubla Khan. The frequent usage of the Aeolian harp as a symbol for the poet was a play on the renewed emphasis on afflatus.

Wikipedia

Joelle has no problem seeing beauty approved, within compatible relative limits; she feels not empathy or maternal nurture any longer, just a desire to swallow every last drop of saliva she will ever manufacture and exit this vessel, have fifteen more minutes of Too Much Fun, eliminate her own map with the afflatus of the blind god of all doorless cages.

From Infinite Jest

But starting soon after that he’d suffered athletically from the same delayed puberty that had compromised his father when Himself had been a junior player, and having boys he’d cleaned the clocks of at twelve and thirteen become now seemingly overnight mannish and deep-chested and hairy-legged and starting now to clean Orin’s own clock at fourteen and fifteen — this had sucked some kind of competitive afflatus out of him, broken his tennis spirit, Orin, and his U.S.T.A. ranking had nosedived through three years until it levelled off somewhere in the low 70s, which meant that by age fifteen he wasn’t even qualifying for the major events’ main 64-man draw. When E.T.A. opened, his ranking among the Boys’ 18s hovered around 10 and he was relegated to a middle spot on the Academy’s B-squad, a mediocrity that sort of becalmed his verve even further. His style was essentially that of a baseliner, a coun-terpuncher, but without the return of serve or passing shots you need to stand much of a chance against a quality net-man. The E.T.A. rap on Orin was that he lobbed well but too often. He did have a phenomenal lob: he could hug the curve of the dome of the Lung and three times out of four nail a large-sized coin placed on the opposite baseline; he and Marlon Bain and two or three other marginal counterpunching boys at E.T.A. all had phenomenal lobs, honed through spare P.M. devoted more and more to Es-chaton, which by the most plausible account a Croatian-refugee transfer had brought up from the Palmer Academy in Tampa. Orin was Eschaton’s first game-master at E.T.A., where in the first Eschaton generations it was mostly marginal and deafflatusized upperclassmen who played. 

Also Infinite Jest

Joelle and Orin are the only two characters in Infinite Jest mentioned proximally to the concept of afflatus. For the last two days, I thought the word had something to do with flatulence, but Wikipedia correctly bade me not to conflate (pun!) the two. Good thing I looked it up.

(I’m reading the book for the second-and-a-half time, right now, and it’s amazing to me, well, how stupid I used to be! I got literally nothing from the book on my first reading (8 years ago) except for the eyeballs watching horrible acts thing and what the word “concupiscence” meant. This is a seriously good book.)

The concept of afflatus inserts itself well into my burgeoning understanding of Wallace as, like, a post-romantic writer as much as anything else. His work and those of Wordsworth/Shelley/Milton are of a similar cloth: They all try to dissolve the distinction between—what—the Rousseauian state of nature and the industrial nation-state by signaling the ways in which the two are similar and ways in which the one surpasses the other. It’s a pretty uninteresting reading of the British romantics to see them merely as people shilling for a return ticket to Walden Pond. I think they had respect for the all-out destructive potential of nature, and its unsurpassable potency; their setting up London as an opposition to nature isn’t necessarily to say London is worse, but that thinking makes it so. Of course, their work would never be widely known if it weren’t for the exponential technological and social imperatives forced on man by his own wont of thought.

I mean, have you ever heard an Aeolian harp? They sound terrible. They are, as Coleridge implies, very much a product of the human mind and reason. (Think Cage-ian unlistenable over-thought crap.) And if we see perfection in nature, it’s much easier to see perfection in ourselves, as organic reason-built harps being the locus of natural force and human intellection. There is a similar message in “Tintern Abbey.” 

 For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue.

It’s a continuum with the form of a dialectic. The wild days of youth are tempered by years of education and experience, which then works again upon the wild, potent stuff. Concepts without experience are empty; experience without concepts is blind.

Infinite Jest is about the dark promise of potential. It’s impossible to read as anything other than autobiographic. The Lipsky book has made certain that. All the characters deal with the deployments of their potential. Joelle and Orin are a neat pair. I’m in the middle of the beginning of the end of their relationship. It’s clear that their given natural talents (not uncultivated, though) necessitate a steeper mortgage of their potential, the payment of which bankrupts them both.

Wallace seems to use “afflatus” differently w/r/t Joelle and Orin. Since Joelle is more womb-sprung fully-formed (her talent is being the P.G.O.A.T.), her afflatus is the smoky, wet womb-climb back to the precipice of non-life. She tries to kill herself, but she ends up covered in human liquids, flaccid, not unlike a large-sized newborn. Orin’s afflatus is only realized in hindsight, by its absence. Losing his afflatus frees him to pursue a generally better life than had he kept it. By becoming deafflatusized, Orin catches a lucrative break.

Joelle and Orin are out of phase. As the one’s life takes off, the other sinks. Joelle ends in, I think I recall, a rather decent place. Orin ends up not as well. Their respective afflatus-based turning points have similar results on the structures of their lives w/r/t society. Joelle ends up in rigorous treatment. Orin ends up playing professionally an organized sport. Both are thrown headlong into society, and into interstices of society with specifically stringent demands. But within the structure of the book, their lightning bolt inspirations have, again, opposite implications. Joelle is tossed into one of the two foci of the book—The Ennet House Drug and Recovery House—while Orin is taken from the other—Enfield Tennis Academy. What are we to make of their twain-but-divergent paths spurred by afflatus?

It seems like this whole discussion was posited on a false premise. Rather, Joelle’s decisive moment all along was spurred by afflatus. Orin, while connected significantly with the concept, has been thoroughly deafflatusized. So Orin is like the archetypal romantic hermit living in solitude. Joelle by means of divine inspiration finds herself back in society. Even though her end was to demap herself, she pays off the debt of promise with her self-destructive act. Orin, having lost his inspiration, lives and works in the cowardly manner of mere self-preservation. He ends up [spoiler alert] under a giant glass with cockroaches. Since he loses his natural concept of self, he fails to cash in his potential.

Infinite Jest, then, can be seen as a sort of post-romantic tale like this: It’s necessary to cultivate the self’s potential and be diffused with the naturally occurring instances of divine inspiration; failing to navigate the dialectics between 1. disorder and structure and 2. unordered living (Nature qua non-foci locations) and civilization results in more fully realized destruction than one can rightly bring upon herself.