Infinite Jest (136 page)

And re Ennet House resident Kate Gompert and this depression issue: Some psychiatric
patients—plus a certain percentage of people who’ve gotten so dependent on chemicals
for feelings of well-being that when the chemicals have to be abandoned they undergo
a loss-trauma that reaches way down deep into the soul’s core systems—these persons
know firsthand that there’s more than one kind of so-called ‘depression.’ One kind
is low-grade and sometimes gets called
anhedonia
²⁸⁰
or
simple melancholy
. It’s a kind of spiritual torpor in which one loses the ability to feel pleasure
or attachment to things formerly important. The avid bowler drops out of his league
and stays home at night staring dully at kick-boxing cartridges. The gourmand is off
his feed. The sensualist finds his beloved Unit all of a sudden to be so much feelingless
gristle, just hanging there. The devoted wife and mother finds the thought of her
family about as moving, all of a sudden, as a theorem of Euclid. It’s a kind of emotional
novocaine, this form of depression, and while it’s not overtly painful its deadness
is disconcerting and… well, depressing. Kate Gompert’s always thought of this anhedonic
state as a kind of radical abstracting of everything, a hollowing out of stuff that
used to have affective content. Terms the undepressed toss around and take for granted
as full and fleshy—
happiness, joie de vivre, preference, love
—are stripped to their skeletons and reduced to abstract ideas. They have, as it were,
denotation but not connotation. The anhedonic can still speak about happiness and
meaning et al., but she has become incapable of feeling anything in them, of understanding
anything about them, of hoping anything about them, or of believing them to exist
as anything more than concepts. Everything becomes an outline of the thing. Objects
become schemata. The world becomes a map of the world. An anhedonic can navigate,
but has no location. I.e. the anhedonic becomes, in the lingo of Boston AA, Unable
To Identify.

It’s worth noting that, among younger E.T.A.s, the standard take on Dr. J. O. Incandenza’s
suicide attributes his putting his head in the microwave to this kind of anhedonia.
This is maybe because anhedonia’s often associated with the crises that afflict extremely
goal-oriented people who reach a certain age having achieved all or more than all
than they’d hoped for. The what-does-it-all-mean-type crisis of middle-aged Americans.
In fact this is in fact not what killed Incandenza at all. In fact the presumption
that he’d achieved all his goals and found that the achievement didn’t confer meaning
or joy on his existence says more about the students at E.T.A. than it says about
Orin’s and Hal’s father: still under the influence of the deLint-like carrot-and-stick
philosophies of their hometown coaches rather than the more paradoxical Schtitt/Incandenza/Lyle
school, younger athletes who can’t help gauging their whole worth by their place in
an ordinal ranking use the idea that achieving their goals and finding the gnawing
sense of worthlessness still there in their own gut as a kind of psychic bogey, something
that they can use to justify stopping on their way down to dawn drills to smell flowers
along the E.T.A. paths. The idea that achievement doesn’t automatically confer interior
worth is, to them, still, at this age, an abstraction, rather like the prospect of
their own death—‘Caius Is Mortal’ and so on. Deep down, they all still view the competitive
carrot as the grail. They’re mostly going through the motions when they invoke anhedonia.
They’re mostly small children, keep in mind. Listen to any sort of sub-16 exchange
you hear in the bathroom or food line: ‘Hey there, how are you?’ ‘Number eight this
week, is how I am.’ They all still worship the carrot. With the possible exception
of the tormented LaMont Chu, they all still subscribe to the delusive idea that the
continent’s second-ranked fourteen-year-old feels exactly twice as worthwhile as the
continent’s #4.

Deluded or not, it’s still a lucky way to live. Even though it’s temporary. It may
well be that the lower-ranked little kids at E.T.A. are proportionally happier than
the higher-ranked kids, since we (who are mostly not small children) know it’s more
invigorating to
want
than to
have,
it seems. Though maybe this is just the inverse of the same delusion.

Hal Incandenza, though he has no idea yet of why his father really put his head in
a specially-dickied microwave in the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, is pretty sure
that it wasn’t because of standard U.S. anhedonia. Hal himself hasn’t had a bona fide
intensity-of-interior-life-type emotion since he was tiny; he finds terms like
joie
and
value
to be like so many variables in rarified equations, and he can manipulate them well
enough to satisfy everyone but himself that he’s in there, inside his own hull, as
a human being—but in fact he’s far more robotic than John Wayne. One of his troubles
with his Moms is the fact that Avril Incandenza believes she knows him inside and
out as a human being, and an internally worthy one at that, when in fact inside Hal
there’s pretty much nothing at all, he knows. His Moms Avril hears her own echoes
inside him and thinks what she hears is him, and this makes Hal feel the one thing
he feels to the limit, lately: he is lonely.

It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia
and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification
of
Weltschmerz,
which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts
here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed
by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool,
hip—and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the
same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure.
It’s more like peer-
hunger
. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent
horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we
will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we
young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion
masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to
assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism
that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté. Sentiment equals naïveté
on this continent (at least since the Reconfiguration). One of the things sophisticated
viewers have always liked about J. O. Incandenza’s
The American Century as Seen Through a Brick
is its unsubtle thesis that naïveté is the last true terrible sin in the theology
of millennial America. And since sin is the sort of thing that can be talked about
only figuratively, it’s natural that Himself’s dark little cartridge was mostly about
a myth, viz. that queerly persistent U.S. myth that cynicism and naïveté are mutually
exclusive. Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for
hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really
human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to
be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be
in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking
infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft
skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably,
is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self,
incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty
mask, anhedonia.
²⁸¹

The American Century as Seen Through a Brick
’s main and famous key-image is of a piano-string vibrating—a high D, it looks like—vibrating,
and making a very sweet unadorned solo sound indeed, and then a little thumb comes
into the frame, a blunt moist pale and yet dingy thumb, with disreputable stuff crusted
in one of the nail-corners, small and unlined, clearly an infantile thumb, and as
it touches the piano string the high sweet sound immediately dies. And the silence
that follows is excruciating. Later in the film, after much mordant and didactic panoramic
brick-following, we’re back at the piano-string, and the thumb is removed, and the
high sweet sound recommences, extremely pure and solo, and yet now somehow, as the
volume increases, now with something rotten about it underneath, there’s something
sick-sweet and overripe and potentially putrid about the one clear high D as its volume
increases and increases, the sound getting purer and louder and more dysphoric until
after a surprisingly few seconds we find ourselves right in the middle of the pure
undampered sound longing and even maybe praying for the return of the natal thumb,
to shut it up.

Hal isn’t old enough yet to know that this is because numb emptiness isn’t the worst
kind of depression. That dead-eyed anhedonia is but a remora on the ventral flank
of the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain. Authorities term this condition
clinical depression
or
involutional depression
or
unipolar dysphoria
. Instead of just an incapacity for feeling, a deadening of soul, the predator-grade
depression Kate Gompert always feels as she Withdraws from secret marijuana is
itself
a feeling. It goes by many names—
anguish, despair, torment,
or q.v. Burton’s
melancholia
or Yevtuschenko’s more authoritative
psychotic depression
—but Kate Gompert, down in the trenches with the thing itself, knows it simply as
It
.

It
is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it.
It
is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence
of conscious existence.
It
is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self’s most elementary levels.
It
is a nausea of the cells and soul.
It
is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and animate and un-map-like
and also thoroughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self, which depressed
self
It
billows on and coagulates around and wraps in
Its
black folds and absorbs into
Itself,
so that an almost mystical unity is achieved with a world every constituent of which
means painful harm to the self.
Its
emotional character, the feeling Gompert describes
It
as, is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all
of the alternatives we associate with human agency—sitting or standing, doing or resting,
speaking or keeping silent, living or dying—are not just unpleasant but literally
horrible.

It
is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed. There is no way Kate Gompert could
ever even begin to make someone else understand what clinical depression feels like,
not even another person who is herself clinically depressed, because a person in such
a state is incapable of empathy with any other living thing. This anhedonic Inability
To Identify is also an integral part of
It
. If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything except that pain,
²⁸²
a clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any other person or thing as independent
of the universal pain that is digesting her cell by cell. Everything is part of the
problem, and there is no solution. It is a hell for one.

The authoritative term
psychotic depression
makes Kate Gompert feel especially lonely. Specifically the
psychotic
part. Think of it this way. Two people are screaming in pain. One of them is being
tortured with electric current. The other is not. The screamer who’s being tortured
with electric current is not psychotic: her screams are circumstantially appropriate.
The screaming person who’s not being tortured, however, is psychotic, since the outside
parties making the diagnoses can see no electrodes or measurable amperage. One of
the least pleasant things about being psychotically depressed on a ward full of psychotically
depressed patients is coming to see that none of them is really psychotic, that their
screams are entirely appropriate to certain circumstances part of whose special charm
is that they are undetectable by any outside party. Thus the loneliness: it’s a closed
circuit: the current is both applied and received from within.

The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do
so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits
do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in
whom
Its
invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way
a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make
no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from
a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively
at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a
constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames
get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors.
It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the
sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump.
Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand
a terror way beyond falling.

But and so the idea of a person in the grip of
It
being bound by a ‘Suicide Contract’ some well-meaning Substance-abuse halfway house
makes her sign is simply absurd. Because such a contract will constrain such a person
only until the exact psychic circumstances that made the contract necessary in the
first place assert themselves, invisibly and indescribably. That the well-meaning
halfway-house Staff does not understand
Its
overriding terror will only make the depressed resident feel more alone.