Book Review of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest

James O. Incandenza created the film Infinite Jest, a.k.a. “the Entertainment,” so addictive that anyone watching it couldn’t take her eyes off it and eventually dies from lack of food and water. Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents (A.F.R.), or the Wheelchair Assassins, a Québécois separatist group seeking to have Canada secede from the Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N.), searches for the master copy and intends to distribute copies and use the film as a weapon of mass destruction. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is a satire about our contemporary culture. Specifically, addiction. And not only to entertainment, i.e. the film Infinite Jest. The novel depicts the addicts in The Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House trying, or not trying, to recover from cannabis, cocaine, Demerol and other drugs. And in nearby Enfield Tennis Academy, many students are on drugs. Wallace’s writing is humorous, but beneath the events, sadness flows.

Brighton, MA

While thinking about the power of entertainment in our culture, I recall Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, where he describes how TV, and more generally, visual entertainment, has transformed the way we think and process information. Whereas reading requires us to process the words and sentences and to imagine the scenes, we can “absorb” the information much quicker when we view a picture or watch a video. But just as taking too much easily digestible sugar rather than complex carbohydrates isn’t good for the body, watching too much TV may be harmful to the mind, from not exercising the muscles in the brain. We have the Internet and we don’t lack information, but what’s more important than information is the ability to analyze data, qualitatively and quantitatively, and to imagine new ideas and possibilities.

David Foster Wallace

Erich Fromm's To Have or To Be?

To have or to be?

“I have a problem,” or “I am troubled?”

“I have insomnia,” or “I cannot sleep?”

In To Have or To BE?, the psychologist Erich Fromm describes the having and the being modes of existence and argues for the latter. Do we live in the realm of objects, to get them, to manage them, to secure them, to use them? Or do we live in the realm of experiences, to sense our surroundings, to relate to other, to understand ourselves?

Fromm published the book in 1976, but his analysis of society remains relevant for our contemporary life. “Because the society we live in is devoted to acquiring property and making a profit, we rarely see any evidence of the being mode of existence and most people see the having mode as the most natural mode of existence, even the only acceptable way of life. All of which makes it especially difficult for people to comprehend the nature of the being mode, and even to understand that having is only one possible orientation.” We have seen some of the havoc, such as the recent recession, this imbalance between the two modes could cause. This book reveals to us the other mode of living, the being mode, and helps us understand the arena in which we live and the challenges we have to overcome.

Erich Fromm

Fromm proposes that the new society would bring about the new Man and he listed such an individual’s twenty-one traits, including “willingness to give up all forms of having, in order to fully be.” So, he believes that once we remove the external corrupting factors, we can achieve such an ideal.

And I wonder whether he was in the having mode when he proposed such a solution.

Still, I recommend this book for the insight into one dimension of the human condition—the dynamics between having and being. This book lays out the landscape of our contemporary society along this axis, and helps us assess our mentality and way of life and navigate the obstacles between the two modes of living. And though Fromm’s new Man may seem utopian in light of our internal and external constraints, we can strive toward a balance between having and being, knowing the journey may be as important, if not more so, than the goal.