The Fact of the Cage

Reading and Redemption In David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest"

Karl A. Plank

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000338966
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Literatur
• Sous-sujet: Nordamerikanische Literaturkritik

David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest raised expectations of what a novel might do. As he understood fiction to aim at what it means to be human, so he hoped his work might relieve the loneliness of human suffering. In that light, The Fact of the Cage shows how Wallace's masterpiece dramatizes the condition of encagement and how it comes to be met by "Abiding" and through inter-relational acts of speaking and hearing, touching, and facing. Revealing Wallace's theology of a "boneless Christ, " The Fact of the Cage wagers that reading such a novel as Infinite Jest makes available to readers the redemption glimpsed in its pages, that reading fiction has ethical and religious significance—in short, that reading Infinite Jest makes one better. As such, Plank's work takes steps to defend the ethics of fiction, the vital relation between religion and literature, and why one just might read at all.

1 Reading to Become Better

An Approach to Infinite Jest

By any account, Leslie Jamison would seem well qualified to offer expert testimony on her experience of reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. She is, at once, a highly touted writer, a recovering alcoholic, and the recipient of a Ph.D. in English literature from Yale where she wrote her dissertation on addiction narratives including Wallace’s massive novel.¹ She comments personally, but without naivety, either existential or critical. In The Recovering, her volume that combines memoir and literary criticism, she notes that her first run at Infinite Jest coincided with her initial turn to AA meetings in New Haven and without any advanced enthusiasm for the book which she anticipated to be “a blue brick of a book by a smart guy who wanted to buoy his ego by writing it, beloved by other smart guys who wanted to buoy their egos by reading it.”² Still, she found the volume to possess a surplus, a more, that did not simply reduce to the pyrotechnic virtuosity for which Wallace was known. Thus, she read the novel with the discipline and need that an addict might bring to his or her recovery program, “reading fifty pages a day—showing up for them whether I wanted to or not.”³

Such an approach, she confesses, involves reading with an eye to wisdom, an expectation that this fictional narrative might in some fashion guide and support her making her way through the steps of recovery—that is, that the act of reading might make some difference in her world. Something in her tucks tight, if not winces, at this recognition, aware of the critical indictments that might come her way. Yet she persists:

In my PhD program, other grad students talked about their undergraduate students with fond condescension, how they were always looking for the moral of the story, or the lesson to learn. But fuck that easy dismissal. Fuck that charge of reduction, and that snickering at bromides. Because sometimes I just needed to sit there and remember that Infinite Jest said sometimes I just needed to sit there and, like, hurt. Sometimes I needed the single-entendre truth. Sometimes I needed the cherry blossoms, the abundant meat aisle, the cold sunlight, the new life. “Too simple?” Wallace wrote in the margin of one of his self-help books. “Or just that simple?”⁴

Of course, it’s too simple; and, of course, it’s not.

Jamison would scarcely be alone in the reception history of Infinite Jest. Others have lined up to testify similarly to the book’s significance. Kathleen Fitzpatrick, in her study of the collective reading experience of the novel that grew under the name “Infinite Summer,” points to the comments of a reader who blogged as “infinitedetox.” A self-identified addict, infinitedetox writes of his reading in transformational terms, as a kind of “self-surrender” to the power of the novel. He avows:

Somehow the book—and now brace yourself for one of those cliches that Wallace seems so interested in in IJ—made me want to be a better person. And it inspired me to stop taking drugs immediately, to Kick the Bird, via a mechanism which I’ve had a hard time articulating … Wallace’s judgments on addicts and addictions fell upon me with great force, and something about the ferocity of his critique, coupled with his profound compassion and humaneness toward the subject, compelled me to waste absolutely zero time in booting the pills and Getting My Shit Together.⁵

Though Fitzpatrick wisely cautions that struggling with a text about addiction is one thing and the addiction itself is, to borrow Wallace’s phrase from Infinite Jest, a “whole different kettle of fish” (204), infinitedetox’s conviction that the book compelled him “to be a better person” resonates with Jamison’s experience that it offered vital, needed help.⁶

To say that a work of fiction helps one be better—however one may understand that—is no small statement. Different from the usual theoretical drift of critical praise and assessment, the comments of Jamison and infinitedetox point to the existential significance or moral consequence of reading a work of narrative fiction, and Infinite Jest in particular. In one sense, the two comments impress because of the differences in the readers. Jamison reads as a professional with critical awareness (thus her pause at how her colleagues might respond to her affirmation of single-entendre truth). infinitedetox, one would assume, is a committed amateur (which yet is no small thing when one considers the challenge of a novel so long and difficult). The combination suggests that the significance of the novel goes beyond an appeal to simply one kind of reader, or a reader with only a certain critical capability. The novel’s worth is not simply an academic matter even to the academic nor restricted to its constituency. While it is hard to imagine a casual reader of Infinite Jest, one can imagine and recognize a community such as the “Infinite Summer” readers who undertook to have a serious go at the long thing not out of professional motive or responsibility, but for reasons more plainly personal or venturesome.

From another angle, both Jamison and infinitedetox approach Infinite Jest from the common vantage point of substance abuse, addiction, and recovery. Given the prominence of the novel’s treatment of the experience of the residents of Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House as well as the pharmacological affinities of certain tennis players at Enfield Tennis Academy (two of the main settings for the novel), it does not surprise at all that the narrative should speak to those who have contended in that arena. The points for identification are so many, the capture of the addicted mind-set so vivid, the attendant struggles with depression and suicide so on-target, that the novel would seem to be their book. But certainly not theirs only. For Wallace, the ordeal of addiction is a symptom of an underlying cultural and existential predicament that manifests itself not only in the various stripes of substance abuse, but in the obsessiveness with which one undertakes any human pursuit aimed to distract from one’s reality. There is simply no limit to the ways in which anxious selves might seek to do this, especially in the midst of a culture that seems bent on thriving by making available, if not necessary, just such opportunities. As the various plot-threads of Infinite Jest make clear, the obsessiveness with which one might undertake a professional tennis career, surrender life (and country) to an irresistible entertainment, or become lost in the cycles of drug abuse, differ only in the choice of substance chosen for infinite distraction—infinite distraction, another way of speaking of a deep attention deficit disorder whose prevailing symptom is unrelenting loneliness. Infinite Jest is not about addiction as much as the culture which preys upon it. If the novel helps anyone get better, it does so not apart from a piercing cultural critique that lays bare the trap to which all are vulnerable. Thus, those beyond the explicit recovery community may also be drawn to the novel and somehow feel that they are made better by their reading.

Still, that reading makes one better in any way of moral consequence is not self-evident. Jamison and infinitedetox offer testimony, but as Jamison’s words reflect, she knows that she may be swimming against a strong critical current in affirming what she does (she seems to imagine a distinct, irony-laden eye-roll on the part of her fellow graduate students).⁷ If one is to read her comment as more than idiosyncrasy, one also should allow it to raise the question of fiction’s purpose and function, how narrative relates to the world of readers and the prospect of their getting better in that world precisely by their reading. Is her affirmation something that occurs beyond or outside the world of literary criticism, or is it of critical importance to realize such an existential claim?

From Henry James’s The Art of the Novel to Wayne Booth’s The Company We Keep to the more recent writings of Martha Nussbaum on philosophy and literature, one finds a significant arc of ethical criticism that not only welcomes but requires a critic to ask “What relationship does my engagement with [a novel] have to my general aim to live well?”⁸ At the same time, as Jamison’s comment reflects, such a perspective butts up against a prevailing critical temper that is indifferent to or perhaps disdainful of such a concern. Nussbaum identifies three sources of resistance: first, the suspicion that ethical criticism, in its practice, would be “dogmatic and simplistic,” veering too quickly and cheaply into normative ethics, on the one hand, and ignoring literary complexity and integrity on the other; second, the formalist and New Critical separation of aesthetic and practical matters, such that the critic’s attention focuses on intrinsic textual matters of form and style; and third, the post-modern preoccupation with textuality and intertextuality that holds “that literary texts refer only to other texts and not to the world.”⁹

Philosophical and theoretical questions are much at play here, but one suspects, as well, the creep of a certain mindset whose worry takes a different form. If one looks to the reading of serious literature as a means for “being a better person,” does one diminish the serious stature of that literature by regarding it in a way not totally separable from works of self-help and personal growth, works whose aim is more middle-brow than high, works perhaps more familiar to the list of Oprah’s Book Club than the syllabus of the graduate seminar in fiction. And, if there is some relation between these works, does it blur, as well, the distinction between the professional and the non-professional reader whose reading tendencies might fall out along similar lines, a distinction the theoretically inclined might be self-interested in maintaining?

One should not be doctrinaire on the point. Elizabeth Hardwick’s cautionary question, do novels “have to be vitamin-enriched bowls conveying good-for-you moral fiber?” reminds that to aim too directly at the ethical benefit may yield an underwhelming reading—“dogmatic and simplistic,” as Nussbaum acknowledged—and may evade the artistic challenge of a given work that demands attention to complex matters of form, style, and the attainment of the work in its full expression.¹⁰ Yet this criticizes poor practice more than denies the goal of ethical criticism which might well be approached with full sensitivity to a novel’s literary complexity, form, and, sense of life that is expressed in the work as a whole.¹¹

Wallace’s own example breaks down the simple binary opposition between artistically oriented literature, literature that reflected aesthetic sophistication and awareness of theoretical perspectives, and more popular works that aim to be accessible and edifying. As Jamison’s comment points out, Wallace himself read self-help books and did so with seriousness; she, in fact, quotes an annotation he had made in the margin of one such volume.¹² As infinitedetox notes, Wallace famously found clichés to be worth reflection and in Infinite Jest he holds in no disdain those who benefit from them; on the contrary, to the degree that the character Don Gately can be held as a heroic model, such a commitment to the plain, post-ironic maxim may be necessary if one is to make one’s way in the world of addiction and recovery.¹³ Yet, at the same time, one has to uphold what should be obvious: Wallace demonstrates the value of single-entendre truth (and its critique of the ironic temper he found to be afoot in contemporary literature) through one of the most demanding, critically ambitious novels of our time. Infinite Jest would not have been what Oprah had in mind for her list of novels to which readers might easily relate and, from a sense of identification, gain benefits of personal growth and community. Yet readers of the novels Oprah...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half Title
• Seires Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Copyright Acknowledgements
• Introduction: In Praise of One Good Reading
• 1. Reading to Become Better: An Approach to Infinite Jest
• 2. The Predicament of Encagement
• 3. Contending with the Cage: Abiding and Breaking Through
• 4. The Redemption of Boneless Christs
• 5. The Redemption of the Reader
• Bibliography
• General Index
• Index of Characters