Stasis is a kind of existential angst about taking responsibility for the consequences of one's own freedom and actions. Although stasis is not inherently negative, in Infinite Jest Hal apparently suffers from stasis/in-action out of a fear of confronting his own freedom.


In order to understand Hal's resistance to change, and affinity toward stasis, we need to understand the context in which Hal is growing up. We do not get to see a lot of his childhood, or his relationship with his parents. However, we do get a clear description of the institution he has grown up. Enfield Tennis Academy is an institution set up to create great tennis players but it is also a place of education and where most of the students attending are going to develop perspective about the rest of the world.

Schtitt

Schtitt presents his students with a direct correlation of the game of tennis, to the game of life. In tennis "you seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely" (84). Tennis is the game these students love the most, but Schtitt wants them to see the bigger picture, namely that tennis is only one facet of life and there are many other opportunities to confront the limited self. Schtitt surmises that, "All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again...this game the players are all at E.T.A to learn, this infinite system of decisions and angles and lines Mario's brothers worked so brutishly hard to master:...is but one facet of the real gem: life's endless war against the self you cannot live without" (84). Schtitt's philosophy of tennis is existential in that he seems to believe that the same care with which these athletes master angles, force, and power, can be used to master responsibility and choice in the real world. Schtitt laughs that the "chance to play" [tennis] is much like the chance to play at "life and death" (84).

While tennis has "two heads," (461) its unalterable limits, and its players, it is only "one world" (461). Schtitt teaches students to focus on the self, to grow as an individual and human to attain the right state of mind. He says “if you stay the same, stay inside…This world inside is the same, always, if you stay there. This is what we are making, no? New type citizen. Not of cold and wind outside. Citizens of this sheltering second world we are working to show you every dawn, no?” (459) In response to this lecture Hal answers, “the human head, sir…where I’m going to occur as a player” (461). Hal's response illustrates the danger in Schtitt's teachings and perhaps what he didn't take into consideration. Birkets explains that “This is a game world, a closed system, but the idea of play has been pumped out of it, and the remaining husk is but a slight barrier against the maniacal forces at large in the world” (108). This is true, at least in terms of Hal's character. Although Schtitt and even the reader may never understand Hal's childhood we do know the state of the political chaos that ensues. It is no surprise that Hal resists confrontation with the self. He wishes not to change but to preserve himself in a state of stasis as a way of affecting the variables in his "game of life."


Tennis and the Feral Prodigy/ Stasis as a Negative


Hal does not understand the choices of his father and therefore was never taught how to take responsibility for his own choices. Instead, Hal suffers because of this fear of responsibility. These people, according to Avril are "Not quite there. Blank. Distant. Muted. Wooden. Deadened. Disconnected" (767). It is no surprise that Himself sees Hal as mute, when Hal believes he is talking. Hal maintains this stasis by hiding his emotions of fear from everyone around him. "This is how not to fear sleep or dreams. Never tell anyone where you are. Please learn the pragmatics of expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express really invoke" (175). Avril describes this logic to Mario, when Mario comes to her out of concern over Hal. Avril says, "Dolores describes these persons as afraid of obliteration, emotional engulfment. As if something truly and thoroughly felt would have no end or bottom. Would become infinite and engulf them ... I am saying that such persons usually have a very fragile sense of themselves as persons. As existing at all. This interpretation is 'existential'' (765).

A notable scene that invokes Hal's static existential angst is the phone call between Orin and Hal where Orin first tries to discuss Him self’s suicide. While being asked about his father, Hal clips his toenails into a wastebasket across the room, somehow landing a vast percentage of the clippings in the wastebasket, and describes a feeling of “Being in the Zone.” (242) “And once the magic descends you don’t want to change even the smallest detail. You don’t know what concordance of factors and variables yields that calibrated can’t-miss feeling, and you don’t want to spoil the magic by trying to figure it out.” (243) Too worried to ruin whatever factors are contributing to this moment of Zen he experiences while clipping the nails on his left foot, Hal states, “I haven’t even started on the right foot yet… I’m self conscious and afraid… frozen with aboriginal terror.” (248) Again in the scene where Avril explains the feeling of not being "oneself" to Mario, she hits of Hal's state of mind dead-on. She says these people are "frozen inside, emotionally" (766) A few sentences later, after Orin presses him for more questions he says, “I’m still frozen, by the way.”(249) Unfortunately for Hal his stasis is a sort of catatonic fear of moving, or adjusting variables. Hal thinks if he remains still than he won't have to fear playing at the game of "life and death."


The Eschaton scene plunges Hal into an existential confrontation with the static he feels and invokes inside himself. Hal watches the game from the sidelines, “paralyzed and absorbed.” (335) “Eschaton gentlemen is about logic and axiom and mathematical probity and discipline and verity and order…It’s like the one ground-rule boundary that keeps Eschaton from degenerating into chaos.” (338) However Eschaton does breakdown into chaos after Ingersoll breaks the one rule, by attacking the map instead of the territory. Hal “finds himself riveted at something about the degenerating game that seems so terribly abstract and fraught with implications and consequences that even thinking about how to articulate it seems so complexly stressful that being almost incapacitated with absorption is almost the only way out of the complex stress.” (340) Hal fears associating with the real world because of it being "fraught with implications and consequences." Later on in the scene where Hal watches some of Himself's cartridges he expresses this fear again. "There seemed to be so many implications even to thinking about sitting up and standing up and exiting V.R.5 and taking a certain variable-according-to-stride-length number of steps to the stairwell door...that just the thought of getting up made [him] glad [he] was lying on the floor" (900). He feels that if he participates in the real world that it would degenerate into chaos just like Eschaton did. Ironically, if Hal were in touch with his emotions he would be able to realize that even a mathematically calculated, and logical game like Eschaton can degenerate into chaos. Also, based on the circumstances of his family life, and the political turmoil, the world is pretty chaotic to begin with. Thereby indicating that freezing himself in a cold, calculating state does not protect him from the confrontations with self that he fears.



Because Hal ingests Marijuana we even get to watch as his intellectual logic gets held up in "in-action." Pemulis stoically describes that "at a certain level of abstraction the brain recoils" (570). This circular logic Hal experiences and calls "Marijuana thinking," adds to his suffering of the catatonic fear existential understanding. Hal even begins to suffer from medical stasis, where because of "tobacco and/or marijuana...his circulation is poor...and he's sullen and chilled" (452). In an abstraction of Marijuana thinking Hal tells us that "we're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. How else explain the curious feeling that he goes around feeling like he misses somebody he's never even met? Without the universalizing abstraction, the feeling would make no sense" (1053). Without actually participating in the real world, Hal intellectually universalizes what he feels in order to pretend or perform normality. However, the person Hal has never met is his inner self. This self that he has frozen, the one that has become static because of his fear of the consequences of a real human life, is the self he refuses to confront.

The Entertainment

In the conversations between Marathe and Steeply we learn the most detail about the features of the Entertainment. Steeply likens the effects to an Oriental myth about a women who is so 'exotic and seductive' that no one can resist. The women causes the men to be "rendered paralyzed with stasis by this intimate act" (528). Likewise the Entertainment causes people to become "'Petrified', Marathe said. 'Ossified. Inanimate.' 'No. Not inanimate. More like the opposite. More as if ... stuck in some way...' Fixed. Held. Trapped. As in trapped in some sort of middle. Between two things. Pulled apart in different directions...' Not even cravings so much. Emptier than that. As if he were stuck wondering. As if there was something he'd forgotten.' 'Misplaced. Lost'" (647). When Hal quits smoking Marijuana in order to take the urine test with "not a secretive thought in his head" (635) he explains his fears to Mario. "It's going to be a huge hole, in a month. A way more than Hal sized hole...And the hole's going to get a little bigger every day until I fly apart in different directions. I'll fly apart in midair...clean pee or no" (785). Hal's emotional detachment has made him much more similar to the Entertainment victims than the humanity of his peers. So it becomes completely ironic that near the end of the novel we get to understand that Himself created the Entertainment specifically for Hal. Himself's intentions for the Entertainment are revealed to be "something the boy would love enough to induce him to open his mouth and come out—even if it was only to ask for more. Games hadn't done it, professionals hadn't done it, impersonation of professionals hadn't done it. His last resort: entertainment. Make something so bloody compelling it would reverse thrust on a young self's fall into the womb of solipsism, anhedonia, death in life" (839).


Conclusion


Like Schtitt was trying to get him to see all along, tennis is a game that affords the opportunity to not only confront the self, but practice dealing with the implications and consequences of your own actions. Instead of playing the game and attempting an understanding of himself, Hal romanticizes his static position. This is why Hal imagines a non-action hero, “the catatonic hero, one beyond calm, divorced from all stimulants,” (142) i.e., a static-hero. Near the end, we see Hal loose taste in tennis even, the game he supposedly perfected and loved. Hal very well "divorces himself from stimulants," in that he gives up tennis. "I would on the whole have preferred not to play...or fall so carefully badly I'd take out all the ankle's ligaments and ever play again. Never have to, never get to" (954). Again, Hal misinterprets Schtitt. The chance to play tennis, according to Schtitt is much like the chance to play at life and death. So in choosing not to play either, Hal really has frozen himself in an all embracing death in life. (Link)

In reference to the novel as a whole, or the American culture that Wallace has depicted in Infinite Jest, Hal's character reveals a crack in American ideology that individuals like Hal can easily slip through. Steeply describes that in order to truly get along in the American culture, one has to be "freely enlightened to self" (429). Marathe makes an important point that in order to be free and understand choice, one has to be "taught...how to choose any but a child's greedy choices if there is no loving-filled father to guide, inform, teach the person how to choose? How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?" (429, 320). It can be argued that Hal was definitely traumatized by his relationship with his father, and being the one to discover his gruesome suicide. However, Schtitt at E.T.A makes an attempt to fill the void in Hal's family life, and Hal wastes that opportunity as well.

Overall, Wallace's characterization of Hal presents stasis in Infinite Jest as a alienating way of life, fraught with fear. However, it is also important to note that the death-in-life Hal experiences is very different from the way suicide is depicted in the novel. Hal resembles Clipperton in the fact that he directly affects the variables of the game so that he can “win.” The only difference is that when Clipperton finally does achieve success he eliminates his own map, blowing his brains out. Hal suffers the same fear of experiencing life directly, but he continues to live. Again, Kate Gompert describes suicide and depression as if one is in a burning building, and one can either jump or get burned. Both are scary to think about, but Kate Gompert would choose a moment of bodily pain over a lifetime of suffering. Hal on the other hand, is so frozen that it seems like he would stand at the edge of the window, both afraid to jump and afraid to get burned.

Works Cited

Birkets, Sven. "The Alchemist's Retort: A Multi-Layered Postmodern Saga of Damnation and Salvation." The Atlantic Monthly;February 1996; Volume 277, No. 2; pages 106-113.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_system

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasis_%28medicine%29

Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest: A Novel. New York: Back Bay Books, 1997. Print.

Recommended Reading

Melville, Herman. "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street." The Writings of Herman Melville. Ed. Harrison Hayford. Newberry: Northwestern UP, 1987. 13-45..