David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest

A Reader's Guide

Stephen J. Burn

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441186324
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Infinite Jest has been hailed as one the great modern American novels and its author, David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008, as one of the most influential and innovative authors of the past 20 years. Don DeLillo called Infinite Jest a "three-stage rocket to the future, " a work "equal to the huge, babbling spin-out sweep of contemporary life, " while Time Magazine included Infinite Jest on its list of 100 Greatest Novels published between 1923-2006. David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: A Reader's Guide was the first book to be published on the novel and is a key reference for those who wish to explore further. Infinite Jest has become an exemplar for difficulty in contemporary Fiction-its 1, 079 pages full of verbal invention, oblique narration, and a scattered, nonlinear, chronology. In this comprehensively revised second edition, Burn maps Wallace's influence on contemporary American fiction, outlines Wallace's poetics, and provides a full-length study of the novel, drawing out the most important themes and ideas, before surveying Wallace's post- Infinite Jest output, including The Pale King.

1

Infinite Jest and the twentieth century: David Foster Wallace’s legacy

David Foster Wallace’s fiction is full of ghosts who have fallen out of time. In “Good Old Neon” (2004), a character returns from death to tell the reader how “I kill[ed] myself” and reveal “what happens immediately after a person dies.” The secret he reveals is that the “one-after-the-other temporal ordering” of life ceases after death (143, 166). In Infinite Jest (1996), the shade of another suicide stalks the novel’s dark night and explains that “death was just everything outside you getting really slow” (883). The frequency with which ghosts haunt these books tells the reader something about Wallace’s belief in a temporal economy, and, in fact, the way time is trisected into past, present, and future was one of Wallace’s great themes. Whatever counter-factuality characterizes the world of Wallace’s first two novels comes from the deflection of The Broom of the System (1987) and Infinite Jest’s chronologies into the near future, but the larger architecture of the books—and the core of Wallace’s explorations—always hinged upon the continuity of time past into time future. Wallace’s ghosts represent the culmination of this exploration. The dead speak to us, these ghost-haunted novels insist. They continue to shape our thoughts and actions. On the evening of September 12, 2008, as if fulfilling a grim prophecy, Wallace ended his journey through time and ensured that he would now only speak to us from beyond the grave.

The body of work that Wallace left behind is remarkably eclectic. Ranging from transfinite mathematics through radically concise short fiction to encyclopedic excess, his books bespeak both an intellectual restlessness and a versatility that is unmatched by any living writer. Equally remarkable is the extent of his influence. Although he published only two novels in his lifetime, Wallace’s influence nevertheless circulates through the bloodstream of American fiction. As early genealogies of the end of postmodernism have begun to appear, this influence has tended to rest, for better or worse, upon his dialogue with self-referential postmodernism—especially as explored in his essay, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” and stories such as “Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way” and “Octet”—but at the center of his output is the virtuoso performance of Infinite Jest. A 1079-page journey into the maelstrom of the modern self, Infinite Jest will continue to speak to readers because of the strength and invention of its sentences, because of its extravagant humor and sadness, and because of the secrets it keeps.

Measuring Wallace’s influence, even at this early stage, is a way of mapping the prismatic complexity of his fiction, revealing the variegated impact of his work upon other writers. Direct allusions to Infinite Jest appeared in other American novels with remarkable speed—in fact, David Markson’s Reader’s Block, which was published just nine months after Wallace’s novel appeared, includes “James O. Incandenza” in a list of famous literary and mythical suicides (190) ¹ —but over time more substantial parallels emerged. In relatively general terms, there are novels whose large-scale, maze-like plots, and rhetorical register seem to owe something to Infinite Jest’s example, such as Joshua Cohen’s Witz (2010), or Adam Levin’s The Instructions (2010). ² In a more self-conscious fashion, the ninth segment of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) carries out a brilliant stylistic and thematic parody of Wallace’s signature obsessions. While the chapter performs a Wallacian anatomy of celebrity and emphasizes his characteristic focus on vision—tracing what it means to be constantly watched by people “swiveling, craning, straining and contorting” (127)—Egan recreates Wallace’s elastic vocabulary—running in this short section from the slangy “creepazoid” (132) to the remorseless medical precision that classifies a man as “eczematous” (126). At the same time she rehearses Wallace’s cantilevered descriptions, where language’s insufficient code requires a simple statement to be bolstered from below by several clarifying clauses: “Kitty’s skin . . . is perfect. And by ‘perfect’ I mean that nothing hangs or sags or snaps or wrinkles or ripples or bunches—I mean that her skin is like the skin of a leaf” (135). Finally, the page’s hierarchy is fractured by Egan’s adoption of “the footnote-ish fashion that injects a whiff of cracked leather bindings into pop-cultural observation” (126).

Yet if there’s plenty of evidence for Wallace’s influence on the contemporary novel’s thematic and aesthetic preoccupations, what is more unusual is the number of novels in which Wallace appears as a character. Kathe Burkhart (who is partially invoked by Infinite Jest’s “appropriation artist” [23]), loosely based a character on Wallace in her The Double Standard (2005), while, perhaps more playfully, the narrator of E. Lockhart’s young adult novel The Boy Book (2006)—Ruby Oliver—is taught American literature by a Mr. Wallace, who counsels the class about the power of images “to spark desire by creating a sense of inadequacy” (136). At a formal level, Wallace’s influence is palpable in the footnotes that spill over from Ruby’s energetic narration, while Lockhart has elsewhere written of David Foster Wallace’s “linguistic pyrotechnics” (“Interview”). But while these isolated references are noteworthy, it’s striking that a miniature genre has hardened in the years since Wallace’s suicide, a form in which his autobiography is more comprehensively nested within a larger narrative. ³

The earliest example of what we might call the post-Wallace novel is Richard Powers’ Generosity (2009). Powers has recalled that in the 1980s, The Broom of the System, with its blend of “ecstatic riffs with rigorous empiricism, bleak satire with cries of the soul,” made him “want to broaden [his] own canvas, to be bold and relentless and ambitious in a way that [he] hadn’t yet dared to be” (Tribute 102), and in Generosity he re-engages with Wallace’s achievement by basing his novel on the same series of experiments into the pleasure centers of the brain that underlie the infinitely pleasurable cartridge in Infinite Jest, and which Hugh Steeply summarizes as the result of “a biomedical experiment, involving the idea of electro-implantation in the human brain” (470). ⁴ While a cluster of minor allusions abound—narrative fragments in Generosity are divided by a lemniscate; a drug is delivered in Powers’ novel as a “bright-yellow pill stamped . . . with the universal smiley-face icon” (90)—the most important sequence of references gathers around Powers’ central character, Russell Stone. Like Wallace, Stone begins his career as a young writer fascinated by “hall-of-mirrors avant-garde novels whose characters try to escape their authors” (37–8),
but then completes an MFA in “the Arizona writing program” (13). Stone goes on to write nonfiction essays for glossy magazines and, paralleling the phase of Wallace’s career that produced A Supposedly Fun Thing (1997), his essays rely on a “hapless narrator: bewildered victim of the world’s wackiness,” an adopted mask of a “goggle-eyed Midwestern rube ripe for conversion” (14). Later, Stone abandons such work after glimpsing the consequences faced by the real people who are transformed in his satirical essays, and goes on to struggle in a world in which irony is “our generation’s native idiom” (267).

Something similar seems to be at work in Jeffrey Eugenides’s “Extreme Solitude” (2010)—a fragment of his third novel, The Marriage Plot (2011)—where the tobacco-chewing, Updike-disdaining Leonard echoes Wallace, and in Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City (2009), which establishes a series of running parallels to Wallace’s work, particularly in a cluster of allusions split between the dealer Foster Watt and the avant-garde writer Ralph Warden Meeker, author of the “tubby paperback” Obstinate Dust (111). Yet the most elaborate circuit of references is surely to be found in Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (2010). Many critics have noted general parallels between Wallace’s work and Franzen’s earlier novels—especially The Corrections (2001)—with Chad Harbach going so far as to claim that by 2004: “Wallace [had] already written his next big novel—it’s called The Corrections . . . Even Franzen’s selection of his fictional family’s surname (lambert, n.: the centimeter-gramsecond unit of brightness equal to the brightness of a perfectly diffusing surface . . .) must be read either as conscious or unconscious homage to Wallace’s Incandenzas.” But Franzen’s fourth novel—by incorporating Wallace as a character—does something qualitatively different to his earlier work. In a novel formally and thematically obsessed with twins and doubles, Freedom seems to set Franzen and Wallace as opposed terms undergoing “the polarizing specialization of achievement that comes with sibling rivalry” (133). The most obvious parallels are between Wallace and Franzen’s Richard Katz—both paint their walls black, are fascinated by Margaret Thatcher, ⁵ while Katz contemplates suicide—but such correspondences are supplemented by verbal echoes to Infinite Jest and “E Unibus Pluram.”

Tracing the emergence of the post-Wallace novel suggests two preliminary conclusions. First, the number of allusions to Wallace’s life (rather than work) implies that his current centrality in American letters is, to some extent, contingent upon extra-literary factors. While this is clearly the case in the media—where in the years since his death Wallace’s name has floated free of his substantive literary context, providing an index for larger cultural fantasies about the tortured artist—in literary circles, the borders of the post-Wallace novel begin to make visible an emergent collective, a network of writers whose interchange of ideas and attendant social, psychological, and cultural context is likely to be the focus of later studies of the potential transition beyond postmodernism. ⁶ Yet the running parallels that make Generosity or Freedom read as roman à clefs do not simply represent some biographical surplus that can be cleanly excised from an otherwise complete narrative. The second conclusion to draw from the post-Wallace novel is that the nested biography is typically entwined with a consistent thematic exploration that suggests that, in the minds of his contemporaries, Wallace is particularly connected to an examination of freedom; in ways that are unlikely to be a simple coincidence, Generosity, Freedom and Chronic City are each novels that work through deterministic logics and explore what possibilities, if any, might lie in what Lethem calls the “ashtray of human freedom” (430). Freedom is a concept that runs right through Wallace’s career—one of his earliest publications was a 1984 letter to the Amherst Student critiquing “fundamentally selfish” conceptions of “freedom” (3), while of course his undergraduate philosophy thesis itself wrangles with “a strange and unhappy metaphysical doctrine that does violence to some of our most basic intuitions about human freedom” (Fate 146)—but often the discourse of freedom in Wallace’s work seems to funnel back to the personal network that surrounded him, engaging, in particular, with his father’s philosophical work. ⁷

The America that Infinite Jest grew out of, Wallace told an interviewer, was one where the freedom to pursue “pleasure” had become “a value, a teleological end in itself.” In a culture that Wallace saw as increasingly defined by the hedonistic horizons of television, he questioned “to what end, this pleasure-giving?” (Conversations 24). Yet in interrogating the ends that pleasure should lead to, Wallace engaged with philosophical questions that his father had mapped thirty years earlier. David Foster Wallace is cited amongst those whose “comments and criticisms” (ix) improved James D. Wallace’s second book, Moral Relevance and Moral Conflict (1988)—a study of ethics and practical reasoning—but it is an earlier work that seems particularly seminal in terms of the novelist’s development. In “Pleasure as an End of Action” (1966), James D. Wallace’s argument intersects with numerous subjects that would be important to his son’s novel—including Platonic philosophy, and the thought patterns fostered by addiction—while the core of the essay concerns a relationship that is also close to the heart of Infinite Jest: the relationship between freedom and desire. The elder Wallace’s essay considers the act of neglecting “one’s needs and obligations” in favor of pursuing pleasure for no end other than itself, as “paradigmatic of acting freely” (314), and, of course, the movie at the heart of the novel dramatizes exactly this situation. ⁸ The movie offers a pleasure so all-consuming that viewers lose “even basic survival-type will for anything other than more viewing” (507), and the opportunity to watch the film is defended by Hugh Steeply in the novel as one of the “hazards of being free” (320). But while the choice to watch or not watch the movie seems to play out the father’s paradigm of free acts, a further paternal dimension is added to Infinite Jest’s investigation when Rémy Marathe counters Steeply’s conception of freedom by asking: “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?” (320).

The idea that the novel is not an independent entity but a node in a network—a site of communicative energy not only drawing from the complex cultural matrix around it, but also pointing beyond itself—is one that recurs in the next two chapters of this book. Yet arguably the most interesting indication of Wallace’s influence—or, at the very least a revealing case of the deepest affinities—may lie in George Saunders’ “Brad Carrigan, American.” Saunders’ story does not obviously allude to Wallace, but it seems to everywhere exemplify the lessons of his most famous nonfiction, “E Unibus Pluram,” which offered both an anatomy of postwar American fiction’s ambivalent relationship with television, and apparently a prescription for new fiction.

The potential cultural impact of television had been registered by a number of writers at midcentury. In 1950 T. S. Eliot wrote to the Times with reactionary concerns about the “effect (mentally, morally, and physically)” mass spectation could have (7), while five years later, in The Recognitions, William Gaddis had presciently begun to outline how the world was changing to one where “images surround us” (152). From Wallace’s perspective nearer the millennium, however, the salient facts about television were its emphasis on surface, and its adoption of self-referring postmodern irony as a form of self-defense. The first of these strands develops from television’s need to maintain an accurate finger on the pulse of national desire so that it can serve up what people want, and ensure as much watching as possible. It naturally becomes clear, from this, that attractive people are more pleasant to watch, particularly if these pretty people are “geniuses at seeming unwatched” (A Supposedly Fun Thing 25), unaffected by the kind of inner doubt and self-consciousness that afflicts most people faced by an audience. Because television typically presents lives that seem more perfect than our own, these pretty watchable people are idealized, and every time the viewer turns on the television they receive “unconscious reinforcement of the deep thesis that the most significant quality of truly alive persons is watchableness” (26).

This led Wallace to speculate on the impact of so much spectation upon the viewer’s sense of self. If the most highly prized personal attribute is a watchable exterior, and the lonely viewer has begun to view a relationship with characters portrayed in “television’s 2-D images” (38) as an acceptable alternative to connecting with “real 3-D persons” (39), then human identity becomes “vastly more spectatorial” (34), an empty and emotionally impoverished existence located in the shallows of surfaces and exteriors. Yet since television needs to ensure continued spectation, since the 1980s it has become increasingly self-referential in an effort to prevent viewers from realizing the role it plays in their unhappiness. By presenting television shows about television shows, and making the viewer watch shows about watching, television aims to delude viewers into thinking that they are intellectually critiquing spectation, rather than passively consuming. It is at this nexus, Wallace contends, that television’s connection with postm...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Reprint Permissions
• Contents
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Chronology
• 1 Infinite Jest and the twentieth century: David Foster Wallace’s legacy
• 2 Problems in David Foster Wallace’s poetics
• 3 The novel
• Epilogue : Wallace’s Millennial Fictions
• Appendix: The Chronology of Infinite Jest
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• eCopyright