1. Tennis and Solipsism

I’ve encountered a number of Medium articles about literature and competitive tennis, either in relation to Wimbledon (Literary Secrets of Wimbledon) or Wallace (What DFW Can and Cannot Teach Us About the State of American Men’s Tennis). And for all the philosophical talk about Wallace’s rendering of the sport into some metaphysical Eschaton-like crisis, I think his conception boils down to one simple idea.

In the game of tennis, there is a giver and a receiver. For a rally, the receiver needs to become the giver, and so on. The game is played in a well-defined box where the players are far apart from each other.

For me this serves (do you see what I did there) two purposes. The first, in relation to Wallace’s theme of entertainment, is to represent how passive consumers are in the television age. Of course, interactivity in television/the Internet has changed this, but in a way it hasn’t. We become the giver (of information), only to teach the receiver (companies) how to better defeat us. Tennis as consumerism then becomes a losing battle designed to advantage the giver when played ad infinitum.

The second has to do with human communication. Infinite Jest’s narrator clearly struggles with accessing his character’s feelings, and tries to compensate for this by being an overwhelming giver of text. And while many readers feel all sorts of confusion/anger/umbrage about how the novel ends, I think that the sudden ending is the necessary solution to the narrator’s problem. That is, by allowing the reader’s imagination to complete the rest of Infinite Jest, the reader also becomes a giver in the writing of the text. Rather than simply writing for a reader, the writer also demands that the reader participate in his literary project. This, the narrator gleams from Alcoholics Anonymous, is what allows for the possibility of sincere human feelings breaking the cynical veneer of, for example, the intellectual genius writer or the passive reader.

Lolita essentially comes to the same conclusion. The novel is spilling with Romantic sentiment and flowery metaphors in a way that only accentuates the hollow and grotesque nature of Humbert’s relationship with Dolores. Again, because the narrator struggles with real human feelings, and with the terrible nature of his crimes, he compensates and justifies by trying to overwhelm the reader. How can the reader accuse/judge Humbert when he was seduced, when his never-ending love was taken advantage of? Naturally, Humbert is a sad sack of bullshit who’s out of touch with human connection, and worse fails to teach his step-daughter about it too. He tries to teach her tennis instead:

“…and awkward Lo would slash at the ball and miss it, and curse, and send a simulacrum of a serve into the net…”

Yet, as her teacher says later to Humbert, Dolores does become “excellent to superb” at tennis, yet “cannot verbalize her emotions.” Like Hal, Dolores wasn’t raised to look inwards, and it’s only in through the game of tennis that she can find some uncynical mode of expression:

“There was nothing wrong or deceitful in the spirit of her game — unless one considered her cheerful indifference toward its outcome as the feint of a nymphet. She who was so cruel and crafty in everyday life, revealed an innocence, a frankness, a kindness of ball-placing.”

I think it’s a profound source of sympathy for Hal and Dolores that in both novels the game of tennis has been corrupted. For Hal, tennis is nothing more than a cutthroat competition, a gateway to college admissions, a continuation of his family’s tennis legacy. For Dolores, tennis is just Humbert’s tool to distract her, to cover his perversions with a semblance of normalcy.

This idea that growing up inherently involves the corruption of play and imagination is everywhere in fiction. From postmodern language games to Shakespeare (see Rereading Hamlet After College), writers have always been fascinated with how individuals must struggle with the complex systems of meaning thrust on them from birth onwards. Our two young characters can’t even choose their own names: Dolores is Lolita or Lo in Humbert’s mind, and Hal’s name is just a piece of Infinite Jest’s intertextual game.

Yet, these characters do grow up. They achieve this by escaping their respective narrator’s subjectivity, and only returning when they’ve had their own “adventures”, their own narrative life. The younger, outward Hal at the end of Infinite Jest is different from the older, inward Hal who, with Don Gately and Joelle, has dug up his father’s skull. When Humbert finally finds Dolores after Quilty abducted her, he finds his precious Lolita married, pregnant, and jaded. Interestingly, both return to their narrators at the age of 17, at the cusp of adulthood.

Of course, the reach of hideous adult’s goes beyond our tennis players. Infinite Jest is filled with children with developmental disorders, many of whom are sexually abused by their parents. Mario’s neurodevelopmental issues are presumably caused by his mother’s incestual relation with his uncle Charles. These parents are really messed up, and just like the incestuous “father” Humbert, who dreams of abusing Dolores’ children and then their children, they completely prevent these kids from growing up “normally,” or at least from having a fair crack at the game of life.

There are two conclusions in my mind, one solipsistic and the other not. The solipsistic answer is to say that people just cannot understand others, and to try is an exercise in oppression and puppetry. People need time to learn the same systems of meaning and get on a level linguistic playing field that allows for communication, genuine or not.

The other recognizes that fiction itself must be a kind of tennis game between the writer and the reader, that the symbiotic interaction between the writer’s ideas and the reader’s imagination create the space for empathy. I would argue that Hal and Dolores don’t just escape from the narrator, but that they escape into the reader, much like how readers escape into the novels.