IJ study archive

The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing

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TL;DR

Wallace's first published story (The Amherst Review XII, 1984, written as an undergraduate; uncollected in any book), read here as the deepest prehistory of Infinite Jest's clinical-depression thread. A first-person narrator describes a year on antidepressants as life on the numb, sleepy "planet Trillaphon," and narrates the descent that put him there: the onset of a devouring condition he and his doctor call the Bad Thing. The story already carries, in embryo, Infinite Jest's two-stage anatomy of depression (the numbed antidepressant "planet" versus the active agony of the Bad Thing), its burning-building logic of suicide, and its clinical texture of E.C.T., tricyclics, and the psych ward, all of which return in the Kate Gompert material a decade later.

Key claims

  • What it is. A monologue by a college-age narrator who has been "on antidepressants for, what, about a year now," addressed to a reader he assumes wants to know what antidepressants are like (Amherst Review pp. 26-33). The controlling conceit: being medicated is like living on another planet, the planet Trillaphon (misremembering the drug name Tofranil), which is warm, comfortable, sleepy, and electrically hummy but is not "good old Earth."
  • The Bad Thing. The narrator's descent runs from his senior year of high school through a year off working and his first semester at Brown University: a hallucinated "huge and deep wound" opening on his face, compulsive attempts to stitch it shut with carpet-thread, crying for no reason, constant nausea and vomiting. He distinguishes ordinary sadness (a dog dying, Bambi's mother) from the Bad Thing — a condition his doctor names "severe clinical depression," though the narrator himself only half-accepts the label — and describes it as being the sickness rather than merely feeling it: the self itself becomes the disease (pp. 26-30).
  • Suicide, explained by analogy. The narrator anatomizes why the Bad Thing drives people to kill themselves: not because death appeals, but because the Bad Thing is you, and self-destruction becomes the only apparent exit. He reaches for a submersion analogy (there is no surface to the water; you realize you are simply going to drown) to convey the trapped logic (pp. 29-30).
  • The clinical apparatus. New Hampshire law barring involuntary E.C.T. without consent; Dr. Kablumbus; the two drug families (tricyclics and M.A.O. inhibitors, with the dietary hazards of the latter); a hospital "White Floor" (the "Troubled Little Soldier Floor") with sanded-round corners and a regime of soft white walls and confiscated sharps and matches; the meeting of May, a fellow White Floor patient, killed ten days before the telling when her boyfriend, driving drunk, crashed the car (pp. 30-33).
  • Provenance / rediscovery. Long available only in Wallace's college literary magazine; reprinted in Tin House in 2009 and circulated online as a PDF scan; a touchstone of Wallace fan-archaeology (see Cross-references).

Theories & evidence

Wallace's own fiction advances no theory about Infinite Jest; what follows records continuities of theme, phenomenology, and clinical vocabulary between this 1984 story and the novel's depression thread.

CONNECTION: Depression comes in two stages — the numbed antidepressant "planet" versus the active agony of the Bad Thing — exactly Infinite Jest's split between anhedonia and "It"

  • Crux: anhedonia
  • Early text: The planet Trillaphon is a numbed, sleepy, electrically humming state where "the hairs on your arms will stand up and a chill will go through the big muscles in your legs and your teeth will vibrate"; distinct from it is the Bad Thing, which the narrator insists is not ordinary sadness but the thing his doctor names "severe clinical depression," a condition in which "you are the sickness yourself" [Amherst Review pp. 29, 33].
  • IJ echo: Kate Gompert's "It" (scene 135, pp. 692-698): the novel's insistence that "dead-eyed anhedonia" is only "a remora on the ventral flank of the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain" — the deeper condition ("It") being a positive agony, not a numbness.
  • Weight: prefiguration
  • Notes: The two-state structure is the precise continuity. Trillaphon's narrator lives numbed on the drug-"planet" (an anhedonic death-in-life) yet the story's dread is reserved for the active Bad Thing; Infinite Jest, twelve years on, makes exactly this hierarchy explicit through Gompert, distinguishing numbing anhedonia from clinical/"psychotic" depression. The two texts name the deeper condition differently, and the difference is kept as written: the story's word for it is "the Bad Thing" (its doctor's gloss: "severe clinical depression"), while the novel's Kate Gompert "knows it simply as It" (scene 135) — "Bad Thing" appears nowhere in Infinite Jest.

CONNECTION: Suicide is a trapped person's least-bad exit, argued by a submersion/entrapment analogy that anticipates Infinite Jest's burning-building image

  • Crux: anhedonia
  • Early text: [quote|scene] The narrator explains that the Bad Thing makes self-destruction seem the only exit because the Bad Thing is the self, and he reaches for a drowning-with-no-surface image to convey why (Amherst Review pp. 29-30 — paraphrase from the scan).
  • IJ echo: The burning-high-rise passage (scene 135, pp. 696-697): "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" — falling is not desired; it is the lesser of two terrors.
  • Weight: prefiguration
  • Notes: Both passages perform the same rhetorical move: explaining suicide to a non-depressed reader through a physical-entrapment analogy (drowning / the burning building) whose point is that the act is not a wish for death but the arithmetic of a trap. The story's version is cruder; the novel's is the canonical statement of the same idea.

CONNECTION: The clinical apparatus — E.C.T., tricyclics and M.A.O. inhibitors, the psych ward, the fellow patient — is shared verbatim across the two texts

  • Crux: anhedonia
  • Early text: [scene] E.C.T. ("Electro-Convulsive Therapy") and its legal consent regime; the two antidepressant families named as tricyclics and M.A.O. inhibitors with the latter's dietary restrictions; the hospital floor and the fellow patient May, killed by her boyfriend's drunk driving (Amherst Review pp. 30-33).
  • IJ echo: Kate Gompert's ward and the case of Mr. Ernest Feaster (scene 135, pp. 697-698): failed treatments listed as "Tricyclics, M.A.O.I.s, insulin-comas, Selective-Serotonin-Reuptake Inhibitors... Quadracyclics", and, of the shock therapy the Trillaphon narrator's own doctors weigh, "Not even high-amperage E.C.T. relieved It." (scene 024, pp. 68-78, carries Gompert's own ward and prior suicide attempt).
  • Weight: verbal-echo
  • Notes: The pharmacological vocabulary (tricyclics / M.A.O. inhibitors / E.C.T.) is common to both; the novel expands the drug list and darkens the prognosis (in Feaster's case E.C.T. fails entirely). Counter-note within the continuity: the story's ward is comparatively gentle ("soft light-brown carpeting," sanded corners), where the novel's is a place of undetectable screaming — the tonal distance measures twelve years of development, not a contradiction.

Themes

Depression and anhedonia (the story's whole subject); suicide (its explanatory core); addiction, adjacent (marijuana as an anti-nausea crutch); the clinical / institutional world of psychiatry (E.C.T., wards, pharmacology); solipsism (the depressive's radical inability to be understood or to identify with others, which the story states outright and Infinite Jest later names the "Inability To Identify").

Cross-references

Notable passages

The full story survives in the archive only as a facsimile of the magazine pages, so verbatim quotation here is confined to its opening paragraph.

I've been on antidepressants for, what, about a year now, and I suppose I feel as if I'm pretty qualified to tell what they're like.

I've been doing somewhat better here where I am now, on the planet Trillaphon

The narrator's summary of medicated life — "it would be fine, but it wouldn't be good old Earth, obviously" — states the anhedonic bargain the whole story turns on.