IJ study archive

The Great Concavity Ep. 20: John Mango — depression, AA, and reading Infinite Jest sober (recorded ~October 2016)

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TL;DR

A recovery-testimony episode: the guest (met at the 2016 Illinois Wallace conference, i.e. the third annual) is a grad-trained writing teacher, a depression/suicide-attempt survivor who found Wallace in 2008 through the coverage of Wallace's suicide, and an AA member of ~1.5 years at recording. The episode's value is phenomenological — a member of the program checking IJ's AA material against lived experience item by item (gift of desperation, irony in meetings, program-of-action, gratitude) and reporting that it checks out — plus one genuine theory from his conference paper (The Joke vs. the Entertainment as JOI's two failed poles of art) and useful biographical triangulation (Charlie Rose denial vs. D.T. Max; Big Craig vs. the real Pat Montesian). Datable to ~Oct 2016 ("close to one year" from an Oct 12 2015 first episode; the conference "just had a couple recap episodes"). ASR, paraphrase only; the transcript carries a single [00:00:00] stamp, so locators below are coarse transcript positions ([early]/[mid]/[late]), not timestamps.

Key claims

  • Guest's origin story: severe depression diagnosed sophomore year; left school after a suicide attempt around 2008 — the year Wallace died — and came to Wallace by reading about his depression and suicide before reading him; the perverse comfort was evidence he wasn't uniquely broken. Prior tastes: Heller, McCarthy, Pynchon.
  • IJ's spectrum of depressions named as what bored Wallace "into his soul": the ETA students' anhedonia; the man in excruciating psychic pain who wants his limbic system out and is really into model trains (guest forgets the name on-air); Kate Gompert explaining to the doctor what depression actually feels like. He'd lived all three registers and had never seen them voiced. [early]
  • Timeline: read Wallace from 2008; in AA only ~1.5 years at recording — so most of his Wallace reading predates sobriety. First read of IJ (while still drinking) glossed over the AA material; the sober reread found a "glowing joy" in the Gately sections he'd entirely missed — his exhibit is the Irish resident's first-solid-bowel-movement testimony (a turd with a pulse — ASR, approximate): transcendence narrated through excrement. [mid]
  • Eagleton frame: literature took over religion's good functions in a secular age (a place to worship, meaningful emotional ties); Wallace's professor-derived motto that literature comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable (ASR, approximate; the old journalists' chiasmus). [early]
  • The public denial: in the Charlie Rose interview Wallace flatly minimizes ("did a little bit of drugs and my nervous system couldn't handle it") — against the D.T. Max biography's record of heavy use, Granada House, and the 1989–90 near-death period. Host point: those who followed the career pre-2008 had no idea about the depression or the AA involvement, and his death therefore changes how IJ reads. [early]
  • Wallace and the spotlight: an interview where he admits dreaming of Pulitzer/Nobel spotlights then immediately retracts it in shame; the treasured "regular-guyness" passage in Lipsky that betrays itself in the saying — the guest's running thesis that Wallace could never parse when he wanted attention, and that hiding (cf. Hal's enjoyment of hiding his Substance use) is a core Wallace subject. [early]
  • Lewis Hyde thread (Bucher): per D.T. Max, at Granada House Wallace read Hyde's essay "Alcohol and Poetry" (largely on John Berryman) — the American-writer-drink complex tied back to irony; AA's demand for sincerity is why the ironic mode simply stops functioning in recovery (the novel's ironist-in-a-Boston-meeting-as-witch-in-church line invoked; ASR, approximate). Berryman as the pattern: rehab after rehab, militant atheist denial, then a ~1970–71 religious conversion he couldn't explain. [early–mid]
  • Big Book anatomy (Bucher, with guest confirming): Bill W's opening story as incurable-drunk-tries-religion-last; AA's pragmatic agnosticism ("god as you understand him"; GOD backronymed as Group Of Drunks — considerate group of drunks per ASR); the gift of desperation as shared AA/IJ vocabulary — guest defines it from inside: your own consciousness has run out of options. He reads aloud the White Flag passage (Gately, the crocodiles, joining a group, the Elit diner — page not stated on-air). [mid]
  • AA texture from experience: the meeting-room reading of irony as a thick wool coat that fools nobody but the wearer; honesty as attempt rather than certainty; his first meeting story (the gratitude-radiating Tim Allen-looking old-timer naming the resisting voice itself as "the disease") — the lived analogue of IJ's crocodiles. Laird contributes the St. Anselm ontological-argument comparison to the steps' logic. [mid]
  • Model-and-source triangulation: D.T. Max's interview with the man Gately is physically based on ("Big Craig"), who resented Wallace as "a writer who was just there mining us for material" — set against the Boston-public-radio interview with the real director of Granada House (the Pat Montesian model), who says the opposite: Wallace genuinely cared, never pulled rank as a published author, took direction humbly. [mid]
  • Favorite-passages exchange (page refs ASR-derived, approximate): p. 203's list of things you learn — "raw unalloyed agenda-less kindness" (ASR, approximate) as a deliberate, earned violation of show-don't-tell, which the guest reads as Wallace granting himself permission to just say the important things; Bucher's triple-underlined p. 202 sentences (you don't have to like a person to learn from them; "That loneliness is not a function of solitude."; "That evil people never believe they are evil, but rather that everyone else is evil." — hosts apply the last to Trump); p. 952's ETA motto (those who serve best usually win) as ironic-and-serious at once; Laird's closer, from Mario's Hal-and-the-feral-prodigy film: opponents and nets can be mirrors (ASR, approximate). [mid–late]
  • William James: the Big Book cites The Varieties of Religious Experience and so does IJ (plus a garbled ASR aside about a coke stash hidden inside a copy — unverified); Bucher recalls asking Rob Short (ep. 13) which philosopher most influenced Wallace and being convinced by the answer: James. Guest adds that Varieties' "sick soul" letter from a suffering man was secretly James's own experience, disowned — the same concealment pattern as Wallace. [mid]
  • His scholarly program: the conference paper read JOI's filmography (The Joke, Infinite Jest) against "The Suffering Channel" to extract Wallace's theory of art's function (see Theories); current project: a Wallace-driven vocabulary of "emotional literacy" for teaching writing, with a Hegel scaffold (see Theories). Blog: Hazards of the Course (WordPress; title from a John Ashbery line). [late]
  • Saunders anecdote (Bucher): George Saunders's first breakfast with Wallace — Saunders braced for Derrida and deconstruction talk; Wallace asked about his kids' schools. Guest names Saunders the chief torchbearer of Wallace's compassionate project. [late]
  • Color: guest is from Hebron CT, teaches at UVM in Burlington; the hosts met him at the conference and the Bloomington–Normal airport; long Netrunner coda (his academia.edu paper on representation politics in Netrunner) — no IJ content. [late]

Theories & evidence

THEORY: IJ is a love letter to AA, written out of Wallace's gratitude to the program that saved his life — and the Ennet material is essentially autobiographical

  • Crux: ij-aa-love-letter
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [secondary] The D.T. Max biography's record: Granada House, the depth of the actual drug use behind the public denials, the 1989–90 near-death bottom — Bucher reads the book as Wallace "thanking the universe" for surviving by telling the story. [early]
    • [author] The Charlie Rose interview's minimization ("a little bit of drugs" — ASR, approximate) cited as the public cover the fiction quietly contradicts. [early]
    • [inference] The book's felt "emotional generosity" (guest) is what gratitude-plus-humility reads like on the page; AA's everyone-on-the-same-level tenet is reproduced in the Ennet sections' refusal of narrative condescension. [mid]
    • [text] The gift-of-desperation vocabulary and the White Flag joining-a-group passage track real AA practice closely enough that a member recognizes his own program in them. [mid]
    • [inference] The steps' own logic (admitting alcohol's power over you already concedes a power greater than yourself; step 3's leap that something could restore you) is, per the guest, "the kind of logic Wallace follows through Infinite Jest" to walk the reader toward a spiritual awakening. [mid]
  • Notes: Bucher advances ("the greatest love letter to AA ever"), guest endorses emphatically from inside the program. Compositional claims (Granada House, Big Craig) are testimony; the theory proper is the gratitude-reading of the book's design and warmth.

THEORY: Gately's rescue of Randy Lenz is his religious-conversion scene — rendered as pure action, without interior monologue, because AA itself is a program of action

  • Crux: gately-conversion
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] In the Lenz rescue we get no detailed interior monologue — only the action, with the reader left to infer what is happening inside Gately. [mid]
    • [inference] That formal choice mirrors AA's self-description as a program of action, where conversion is different for every person and is shown, not explained; hence this scene, not any explicit epiphany, is the closest thing to Gately's conversion. [mid]
  • Notes: Laird responds "you're confirming my thesis" — recorded as host endorsement of the reading (his MA thesis apparently adjacent).

THEORY: JOI's Infinite Jest was an attempt to help Hal (and himself) find a voice, but fails by mollifying — an anesthetizing apology that soothes the viewer without challenging them; The Joke is the opposite failure (pure audience-hatred); Wallace's own ideal is the middle ground

  • Crux: entertainment-contents
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] The Joke lines up with JOI's stated intentions: it hates its audience, plays a joke on them, and repels them outright. [late]
    • [text] The Entertainment contains a mother-figure apologizing for birthing you into such pain — an easy anesthetic that makes the viewer feel okay now while demanding nothing. [late]
    • [secondary] Read against "The Suffering Channel" (his conference paper's third term) to triangulate Wallace's view of art's function: there must be provocation, but also understanding of the reader's pain. [late]
  • Notes: From his 2016 conference paper on Wallace's representations of artistic creation; he concedes on-air the paper may not have fully landed. The block records his account of the film's content and JOI's intent as presented — the intent layer (help Hal find a voice) is the interpretive move.

THEORY: William James's Varieties of Religious Experience is the deepest philosophical influence on IJ (via AA's own genealogy)

  • Crux: william-james-influence
  • Stance: endorses
  • Evidence:
    • [text] The Big Book cites Varieties; IJ also cites Varieties — the influence arrives both directly and through AA's canon. [mid]
    • [secondary] Rob Short's answer (ep. 13) to Bucher's which-philosopher question, with quotes Bucher found convincing. [mid]
    • [inference] James's concealed authorship of Varieties' "sick soul" letter parallels Wallace's own concealed suffering — a temperamental as well as doctrinal kinship. [mid]
  • Notes: Guest and both hosts aligned; the James-as-answer claim is Short's originally (see cross-refs).

THEORY: Irony is functionally incompatible with recovery — IJ's AA sections dramatize a real mechanism

  • Crux: irony-vs-recovery
  • Stance: endorses
  • Evidence:
    • [text] The novel's line that an ironist in a Boston AA meeting is like a witch in church (ASR, approximate), cited by the hosts as the thesis statement. [early]
    • [inference] Guest's testimony from inside meetings: ironic sharing reads as a thick wool coat, a deliberate self-separation that fools only the wearer; what the room responds to is the honest attempt to get at something real. [early–mid]
    • [secondary] Hyde's "Alcohol and Poetry" (read by Wallace at Granada House per D.T. Max): the American drinking-writer tradition tied to irony, with Berryman as the case study. [early–mid]
  • Notes: The novel's claim validated experientially rather than textually — the episode's characteristic move.

THEORY: Wallace dramatizes Hegel's dissolution of solipsism — subjects mutually constitute each other, so feeling another's pain is a mandate, not a choice

  • Crux: solipsism-enmeshment
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [secondary] Hegel's subject-object relations: the object is always part of the subject; two subjects constitute each other (I become a full subject only by recognizing myself through your recognition), which dissolves the barrier keeping solipsism alive. [late]
    • [text] Wallace, he says, works this idea through a huge share of his writing (ASR, paraphrase) — Brief Interviews generally, and "The Porousness of Certain Borders" pieces named as exactly about enmeshment. [late]
    • [inference] On this phenomenological picture, recoiling from another person's presented pain becomes the bizarre behavior — grounding Wallace's empathy-ethic in ontology rather than sentiment. [late]
  • Notes: The guest's announced research program, offered as a frame for Wallace's whole compassionate project rather than an IJ-local reading; IJ evidence not itemized on-air.

Themes

Addiction-and-recovery (the episode's spine: AA anatomy, gift of desperation, Gately); depression (the anhedonia/psychotic-depression spectrum, Kate Gompert); irony-and-sincerity (irony's death in the meeting room; the earned telling of p. 203); communication-and-solipsism (Hegel, empathy as mandate, Wallace's hiddenness vs. connection); entertainment-and-the-self (The Joke / the Entertainment / Suffering Channel triangulation).

Cross-references

Advances