David Foster Wallace, 'Infinite Jest' And Lessons In Empathy

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TL;DR

Qainat Khan's WBUR essay, written for Infinite Jest's twentieth anniversary, is a reader-transformation testimony braided with the novel's Boston biography. Khan came to Wallace after his death, reached for IJ to "feel smart again," and found instead that "reading this novel changed my life" — specifically by teaching a turn from self-scrutiny to empathy, the AA discipline the book calls "Identify instead of Compare." She threads that reading through Wallace's own Boston: the 1989 arrival, McLean's, the Brighton halfway house where — as tour guide Bill Lattanzi puts it — "he learned how to live", and the AA rooms that became "the thematic core of "Infinite Jest"". The essay's interpretive value is as a clean specimen of the reading-as-empathy-training reception — IJ as a book that makes you feel "less alone inside" and reorients you toward others, up to a political empathy Khan carries into her journalism. It makes no argument about the novel's plot or open questions; its interest is as a record of how the book reoriented one reader.

Key claims

The reader-transformation. Khan first read the Kenyon speech ("Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid"), then reached for IJ to "feel smart again, to conquer this behemoth of a book." Instead: "Reading "Infinite Jest" was a humbling experience" … "reading this novel changed my life, which I know is a cliché, but please, bear with me."
The book's real subject. "On its surface, “Infinite Jest” is a caper about a Quebecois separatist trying to obtain a film so entertaining, anyone who views it loses the will to live. But really, it’s interrogating the deep, abiding, terrifying loneliness and sadness that Americans feel and try to keep at bay by distracting themselves through entertainment --whether in the form of drugs or the consumption of media or things."
The Boston biography. Wallace came to Boston in 1989 for a Harvard philosophy PhD after the Arizona MFA; per D. T. Max he arrived early "to party," then "was hospitalized at McLean’s … prescribed an anti-depressant and sent to a halfway house in Brighton for his alcohol addiction." Max: "That’s where he has a moment that is key for his own fiction, for his own life, where he realizes that he’s got to try to live differently". Wallace, in a 1996 WBUR interview with Christopher Lydon: "I’d never really seen how a lot of people live. My chance to see that was here in Boston". Bill Lattanzi (who leads IJ Boston tours): "He had learned all this intellectual stuff, in the metaphorical, Harvard side of his life, but in Brighton he learned how to live."
The AA-clichés material. Khan reads the Geoffrey Day / Don Gately thread — Day, "a “red-wine-and-Quaaludes man” who comes to the halfway house, called Ennet House in the book", who scorns the AA clichés — and quotes the novel's answer: the "clichéd directives are a lot more deep and hard to actually do. To try and live by instead of just say."
Identify vs. Compare. The book's empathy discipline, quoted from the Ennet House counselors' advice to "sit right up at the front of the hall where they can see the pores in the speaker’s nose and try to Identify instead of Compare … Identify means empathize." Khan's gloss: the novel gave her "a different way to interact with the world", a resolve "to be truly curious about other people’s experiences."
Fiction against loneliness. "In an interview with Larry McCaffery, Wallace said the work of fiction is to make people feel “less alone inside.” Reading “Infinite Jest” made me feel that way."
Empathy as politics. Khan extends the Identify discipline to the civic — the Lydon-interview "tangent" she reads as central: Wallace's wish that his generation "would be way better for us, like inside, in our stomachs, to be willing to pay higher taxes to be able to shelter and feed poor people", "So that we would be the sort of culture that doesn’t let people die." She carries it into reporting on Boston's opioid crisis and child-welfare failures: "holding systems accountable" over "blaming a person".

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Reading Infinite Jest retrains the reader toward empathy — a turn from self-scrutiny (Comparing) to identification with others (Identifying) that reorders how one lives

Crux: reading-as-rehab
Stance: advances
Evidence:
- [inference] First-person testimony: "reading this novel changed my life," slowly dawning "that I would be less miserable if I stopped looking inside myself, and started looking out". [¶ transformation]
- [text] The novel's own empathy discipline, "Identify instead of Compare … Identify means empathize", quoted as the mechanism. [¶ Identify — maps to scene 074]
- [inference] The extension to civic empathy — "holding systems accountable" rather than "blaming a person" — carried into Khan's journalism. [¶ politics]
Notes: A clean specimen of the reading-as-self-improvement response — the made-me-want-to-be-a-better-person reaction Wallace's admirers commonly report. First-person and unadjudicated; its evidentiary weight is popularity (that readers read the book this way), not textual proof the book prescribes it.

THEORY: The novel's AA clichés are hard-won truths, "more deep and hard to actually do" than to say — the recovery material taken straight, against the intellectual's scorn

Crux: aa-seriousness
Stance: endorses
Evidence:
- [text] The Geoffrey Day / Gately opposition: Day the scornful "red-wine-and-Quaaludes man" (Khan's rendering; the print text reads "red-wine-and-Quaalude man"), against the novel's line that the "clichéd directives are a lot more deep and hard to actually do. To try and live by instead of just say." [¶ Day — maps to scene 066]
- [secondary] Lattanzi's biographical corroboration — in Brighton Wallace "learned how to live", discovering the halfway-house residents "were really smart and they knew a lot about life and they had a lot to teach him". [¶ Lattanzi]
Notes: Khan takes the AA material at face value (endorses), reading the Day-vs-Gately structure as the book siding with lived cliché over intellectual disdain — the earnest-recovery reading.

THEORY: Fiction's purpose is to make the reader "feel less alone inside" — the anti-solipsism hope, endorsed from a reader's chair

Crux: communication-solipsism
Stance: endorses
Evidence:
- [author] Wallace, via Khan quoting the McCaffery interview: "the work of fiction is to make people feel “less alone inside.”" [¶ McCaffery]
- [inference] "Reading “Infinite Jest” made me feel that way. Seeing Boston through the eyes of drug addicts and meeting them as fully realized characters … gave me a different way to interact with the world." [¶ McCaffery]
Notes: The reader-side endorsement of the fiction-defeats-loneliness reading — the sincere counterpart to Sullivan's "Wallace knew that this was a bromide" complication of the same McCaffery line. Recorded as endorsed, not adjudicated.

Themes

Reception and reader-transformation (IJ at twenty, the "changed my life" testimony); addiction and recovery (Ennet House, the AA clichés, Geoffrey Day vs. Gately); empathy and its politics (Identify vs. Compare, the taxes/shelter tangent); communication and loneliness (the "less alone inside" purpose of fiction); Wallace's Boston biography (McLean's, the Brighton halfway house, the AA rooms as the book's genesis); entertainment as anesthetic (the loneliness Americans "keep at bay by distracting themselves").

Cross-references

The 1996 Christopher Lydon interview Khan quotes is held as wbur-connection-1996-lydon — the same WBUR source, here mined for the Boston-genesis and the higher-taxes empathy tangent.
The "less alone inside" purpose traces to the 1993 McCaffery interview; the biography (McLean's, Brighton, "learned how to live") to D. T. Max's work.
The opening Kenyon-speech quotation connects to This Is Water.
The reader-as-empathy-trained reception is the affirmative, sincere pole to the critic-side skepticism about Wallace's sage role in Lorentzen and to Sullivan's "Wallace knew that this was a bromide" reading of the same anti-solipsism line (Sullivan).

Notable passages

Verbatim from the essay (mixed straight/curly quotes as the raw carries them, em-dashes preserved). IJ excerpts are Khan's rendering.

The Kenyon line (Wallace, via Khan): "Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid."
"Reading "Infinite Jest" was a humbling experience." … "reading this novel changed my life, which I know is a cliché".
The subject: "it’s interrogating the deep, abiding, terrifying loneliness and sadness that Americans feel and try to keep at bay by distracting themselves through entertainment".
D. T. Max (via Khan): the halfway-house "moment that is key for his own fiction, for his own life, where he realizes that he’s got to try to live differently".
Lattanzi (via Khan): "He had learned all this intellectual stuff, in the metaphorical, Harvard side of his life, but in Brighton he learned how to live."
IJ (Khan's rendering, scene 066): Geoffrey Day, "a “red-wine-and-Quaaludes man” who comes to the halfway house, called Ennet House in the book"; the "clichéd directives are a lot more deep and hard to actually do. To try and live by instead of just say."
IJ (Khan's rendering, scene 074): "try to Identify instead of Compare … Identify means empathize."
Wallace via the McCaffery interview: "the work of fiction is to make people feel “less alone inside.”"