Infinite Jest: A Typical Reading Experience

I have been reading Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace for quite some time now.  I have not talked or written about it much. Simply put, I have not really even known how to.   Most of the time, while reading it at home, I just stop, look up at my wife, and say only with my facial expression "there's no way I can even talk to you about what I'm reading".

In the purest sense I can think of, reading this novel has been a singular experience.  Perhaps this is true of all literature; that reading is a solitary act consisting of not merely going over a story from point to point but of immersively enjoying the art of logically strung together words over the course of a narrative.  But I have a feeling David Foster Wallace in his writing meant to give us a particular kind of "singular experience" that can only be experienced in the thing itself, making it imperative to read over every word; a kind of work that could be recounted in various anecdotes to someone who has read it as well ("Do you remember the part when Hal...") but as soon as one begins the description of any one scene they immediately begin to realize the inadequacy of their recounting and are then drawn to just go to the section itself and read it aloud.  Meaning, Wallace wrote a novel that cannot simply be talked about (or for that matter made into movie or TV show), but has to be read.

If only we could have gotten inside DFW's head...

So, apart from reading the entire work aloud with a devoted group of people (which would be some strange social experiment, let me tell you) or to meet with a meticulously detailed book group (e.g., "For this week's meeting--#179 of 470 planned--we're going to be discussing pages 358-359, wherein Done Gately has his dream about the smiley-faced figure with the shepherd's crook and how this relates to 12-step programs and people trying to overcome substance abuse, as well as reflecting on the use of dream sequences within a narrative as a way of communicating deeper truths by means of symbolism"), which I am sure has been done, it is a very difficult work to even begin sharing about what it is "about"--its scope, its themes, its characters, its settings.  Its about everything and yet its about a long list of really specific and odd things (e.g., even though most of the story is based in a prep school tennis academy and a halfway house for substance abusers, undergirding the narrative is an alternate history of a (near) future (semi-)dystopian (North) America which contains within it a group of Quebecoise nationalist activists. Oh yeah, and there is also a lot in there about avant garde film history. Does that follow?).

And but so the reason I am writing this blog post is that in the current passage of Infinite Jest I am reading, something just happened to me as a reader that continues to happen again and again throughout the book: my reading of the text breaks down and I have to consult something outside the text in order to help me to comprehend the text.  Now, all good literature should be challenging and have words that extend beyond any reader's current vocabulary; this is part of the joy of reading, this act of discovery. But I am beginning to think that Wallace actually intended for his readers to have this constant breaking down when engaging his text(s), because for me I could potentially have a "reading breakdown" every 2-4 pages.  Let me explain.