This document summarizes an article that analyzes David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest through the lens of Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of carnival. It discusses how Wallace uses carnival elements like bodily grotesques and linguistic play but ultimately aims to reveal the limitations of postmodern irony and transgression as an end in itself. While many postmodern theorists embraced carnival's subversion of stable meanings, Wallace's novel suggests engaging with reality in a more redemptive way can be a radical act in late 20th century culture.
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Dialogizing Postmodern Carnival- David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest
This document summarizes an article that analyzes David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest through the lens of Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of carnival. It discusses how Wallace uses carnival elements like bodily grotesques and linguistic play but ultimately aims to reveal the limitations of postmodern irony and transgression as an end in itself. While many postmodern theorists embraced carnival's subversion of stable meanings, Wallace's novel suggests engaging with reality in a more redemptive way can be a radical act in late 20th century culture.
This document summarizes an article that analyzes David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest through the lens of Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of carnival. It discusses how Wallace uses carnival elements like bodily grotesques and linguistic play but ultimately aims to reveal the limitations of postmodern irony and transgression as an end in itself. While many postmodern theorists embraced carnival's subversion of stable meanings, Wallace's novel suggests engaging with reality in a more redemptive way can be a radical act in late 20th century culture.
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Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vcrt20 Dialogizing Postmodern Carnival: David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest Catherine Nichols Published online: 26 Mar 2010. To cite this article: Catherine Nichols (2001) Dialogizing Postmodern Carnival: David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest , Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 43:1, 3-16, DOI: 10.1080/00111610109602168 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00111610109602168 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the Content) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/ page/terms-and-conditions Dialogizing Postmodern Carnival: David Foster Wallaces Znfinite Jest CATHERINE NICHOLS The problemis that once the rules for art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, then what do we do? -David Foster Wallace I n Rabefais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin applied the symbolic hierarchical inversions of medieval carnival to literature and galvanized intellectual interest in carnival as an analytic, literary, and political model for transgression. For Bakhtin and those influenced by his theory, carnival provided an ideal setting for what he termed the dialogic imagination, because it involved a temporary sus- pension of official order that allowed for a creative and therapeutic admixture of the symbolic forms of cultural life. As Wilson Yates succinctly explains in The Grotesque in Art and Literature, this heterogeneous festivity also served as a revolutionary vision and understanding of a new world freed from both bour- geois and totalitarian cultures (22). In the postmodern era, carnivals liberatory vision has been used to counter hegemonic notions of stable identity, gender, lan- guage, and truth in the contemporary work of such authors as Ishmael Reed, Angela Carter, William Burroughs, and Thomas Pynchon. In the recent novel Infinite Jest, however, David Foster Wallace turns the carnivalesque against itself to reveal a literary vision that foregrounds the line between transgression for its own sake and the use of art for redemptive purposes. Although carnivals masks, disguises, ironies, and intertextualities are used in Bakhtins vision to negate uni- tary interpretations of reality, Wallace articulates the carnivalesque qualities of postmodern culture as a permanent, though superficially heterogenous, mask that is used to avoid confrontation with a wider scope of human vision than its cult FALL 2001, VOL. 43, NO. 1 3 D o w n l o a d e d
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of ambiguity accommodates. Under these conditions, Wallace establishes a set- ting where attempting to engage the dynamism of reality, rather than professing its fictionality, becomes a radical act of dialogue appropriate to late-twentieth- century life. The popularity of carnival as a postmodern theoretical framework can in large part be traced to its co-extensivity with the poststructuralist, Nietzschean-influ- enced, and culturally deterministic discourse that dominates current academic circles. M. Keith Booker echoes these sentiments in Techniques of Subversion in Modem Literature, explaining that Bakhtin has risen to prominence in contem- porary literary criticism, where adjectives of boundary-crossing like hybrid, interdisciplinary, and multigeneric reign supreme (3). Indeed, that transgres- sive spirit is evident in Michel Foucaults archaeologies of knowledge, which, like Bakhtins heteroglossia, expose the stratification undergirding apparently sturdy notions of identity, sexuality, science, madness, and medicine. As Fou- cault explains in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, genealogy is history in the form of a concerted carnival (161). In feminist theory, the dialogic, opposi- tional aspect of carnival also coincides with J ulia Kristevas idea of a semiotic f l ux disrupting the patriarchal symbolic order. Bakhtins work features prorni- nently in Desire in Language, in which Kristeva asserts, carnivalesque discourse breaks through the laws of a language censored by grammar and semantics and, at the same time, is a social and political protest (65). The transgressive spirit of carnival is likewise harmonious with J acques Derridas linguistic interrogations of stable meaning. In American Fiction and the Metaphysics of the Grotesque, Dieter Miendl argues that the popularity of deconstruction in postmodern culture has created an endless carnival manifesting itself in the play of language, in the enactment of linguistic games, and in the collision and superposition of incon- gruous discursive patterns ( 172). Regardless of their disciplinary orientations, these influential poststructuralist theorists are concerned with the breakdown of epistemic truths consistent with carnivals riotous celebration of heterodoxy, and their resonance with Bakhtins theory has surely strengthened the popularity of carnival as an intellectual telos. At first glance, Wallaces novel appears to be a rather straightforward post- modem text that uses bodily and linguistic grotesques to satirize contemporary culture. Set in the eerily familiar near-future, Wallaces America has merged with Canada and been rechristened O.N.A.N. (Organization of North American Nations). In a classic Bakhtinian inversion of the hierarchical distinctions between high and low, the new republic is presided over by a former Las Vegas crooner named J ohnny Gentle, who bears the distinction of being the first U. S. President ever to swing his microphone around by the cord during his inaugura- tion speech (Wallace 383). Time, the perennial yardstick of teleology, has ceased to depict the progression of linear history and has been replaced by sub- sidization, in which the temporal has yielded to the timelessness of corporate- sponsored years. That the thrust of the novels action takes place in the Year of 4 CRITIQUE D o w n l o a d e d
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the Depend Adult Undergarment presents the ideal milieu for a culture where the lower stratum of the body is emphasized. The novels action is split pri- marily between the lives of the Incandenza family, who reside at an elite tennis academy (Enfield), and the residents of a drug recovery halfway house (Ennett House). The Incandenza family consists of three boys, all with exterior physical deformities. Marios entire body was deformed at birth; Hal, a seventeen-year- old addicted to marijuana, has a distended forearm from training for profession- al tennis; and Orin, a professional football player, has an unusually large knee from repetitive punting. The boys mother, Avril, is loving, supportive, and gen- erous to the point of pathology, whereas their deceased father, an avant-garde filmmaker and optics genius who committed suicide by sticking his head in a microwave oven, is the novels self-proclaimed infinite jester. Residents of Ennett House include Don Gately, an ex-barbiturate addict with an unnaturally large head, and J oelle Van Dyne, a recovering crack addict whose face has been deformed by acid. Rapacial feral hamsters, insects of Volkswagen size, and the presence of giant infants who roam the republic and occasionally crush hous- es underfoot (573) are among the litany of grotesque creatures peppering the text. The novels circuitous plot involves the simultaneous struggle of Hal Incanden- za and the Ennett residents to overcome their loneliness and drug dependencies while Quebecois insurgents and O.N.A.N. intelligence operatives fight for pos- session of a lethal Infinite J est entertainment cartridge that is literally amusing O.N.A.N.s citizens to death. Thus, on the surface at least, Infinite Jest includes references to the kinds of grotesques that signal Bakhtinian multiplicity and het- erogeneity. On the level of language as well, Infinite Jest seems thoroughly carnivalesque. Bakhtin termed carnivals tendency to dissolve linguistic sociolects into a new, aggregated version of egalitarian language, a form of dialogic heteroglossia (Dialogic 273). Like literary notions of the intertextual or polyphonic text, its aggregate composition resists the idea of a unitary, nonpartisan language. In the same vein as this style, Wallace has expressed his intention for readers to experi- ence a sense of mediated [. . .] consciousness (McCaffery 138) that continually denies linguistic neutrality. As such, material in Infinite Jest is often filtered through various media, including third- and first-person narrations, personal let- ters (1006), e-mails (138-9), interview transcripts (176, 1026), bureaucratic form letters (1 007), mathematical diagrams (1 023, 1024), bibliographic references (1034, 1037) academic essays (14042, 307), newspaper headlines (391-94, 398400), and even puppet-show scripts parodying presidential cabinet meetings (40044,43942). Perhaps his most predominant intertextual conceit is the use of more than 200 footnotes that, in the vein of carnivals inversion of high and low bodily strata, blur the distinction between foot and head, errata and mater- ial central to the story. At the word level, Wallace foregrounds Bakhtinian het- eroglossia by the prodigious use of acronyms and esoteric jargon from various professional and social spheres. He weaves medical terminology such as hyper- FALL 2001, VOL. 43, NO. 1 5 D o w n l o a d e d
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auxetic and bradyauxesis with pharmaceutical drug terms like pentazocine hydrochloride and Ialwin-NX into a constant stream of jargon from Alco- holics Anonymous, academia, commercial culture, professional sports, teenage slang, and terminology that requires a deskside Oxford English Dictionary for translation. In crafting this superdialogized textual landscape, Wallace depicts a linguistic environment ever teetering on the brink of centrifugal disintegration. Despite his ample use of these postmodern carnivalesque techniques, closer investigation makes clear that Wallaces text does not draw a direct correlation between human liberation and the mere transgression of bodies, language, and cultural signs. Although the title itself, with its reference to Hamlets Poor Yorick-a fellow of infinite jest, most excellent fancy (Shakespeare 5.1)- reflects the potential for wit to mock authority without attending to its displace- ment, Wallaces interviews and essays also indicate a skepticism toward post- modernisms prevailing attitude of critical negation. In an interview with Larry McCaffery, Wallace takes issue with much postmodern art for its inability to marry avant-gardism with a vision conducive to social transformation. As he explains, Whats been passed down fromthe postmodern heyday is sarcasm, cyni- cism, a manic ennui, suspicion of all authority, suspicion of constraints on conduct, and a terrible penchant for ironic diagnosis of unpleasantness instead of an ambition not just to diagnose and ridicule, but to redeem. (McCaffery 147) In his estimation, this redemption begins not with aesthetic nonconformity, but in the act of confronting what is truly, perhaps existentially, fearful. In the McCaffery interview, Wallace asserts that, any possible human redemption requires us first to face whats dreadful, what we want to deny (136). In Infinite Jest, he exposes the potential of the postmodern carnivalesque to become a sort of literary Prozac that alters perception rather than attends to the alienation, despair, and isolation that the unmedicated perceive. Under these circumstances, countenancing, rather than fleeing, this sober reality becomes an even more rev- olutionary act than deliberately seeking out its distortions. Perhaps the first indication that Wallaces polyphonic, heterogeneously peo- pled textual universe falls short of Bakhtins utopian ends is the troubling pres- ence of a dark chasm that lurks around its kaleidoscopic edges. Wallace weaves a dense skein of carnivalesque intertextuality only to rupture it with glimpses of a fearful Otherness2 that cannot be assimilated into its cacophonous dialogue. Despite their athletic celebrity and prodigious intelligence, the brothers Hal and Orin Incandenza suffer from harrowing nightmares. Orin awakes from these dreams soaked, fetally curled, entombed in that kind of psychic darkness where youre dreading whatever you think of (42) and filled with the souls certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer 6 CRITIQUE D o w n l o a d e d
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(46). When he showers, Orin, is beset by hordes of enormous roaches with Kevlar-type cases that doggedly resist extermination (44). Yet the Incandenza brothers are not alone in glimpsing this dark underside. The residents of Enfield Tennis Academy refer to their inexplicable fears as the howling fantods. Depression victims Kate Gompert and Ken Erdedy describe a lurge, dark shape [. . .] billowing [. . . and] flapping that encompasses total psychic horror: death, decay, dissolution, cold, empty black malevolent lonely space (649-50). The recovering drug addicts at Ennett House refer to centerless eyes and a ravening maw . . . the Face in The Floor that lurks beneath the smiley-face substances they once abused (347). This encounter with fear is perhaps best articulated by an anonymous I whose monologue is inserted into the beginning of the novel. I am coming to see that the sensation of the worst nightmares, a sensation that can be felt asleep or awake, he explains, is identical to those worst dreams form itself the sudden intra-dream realization that the nightmares very essence and center has been with you all along, even awake: its just been overlooked (61). The sense that this horror is everywhere, yet unseen, highlights its suppres- sion beneath a postmodern mosaic so dazzling that it can blind readers to what lies below its surface. One of Wallaces more ingenious depictions of this suppression involves the carnivalesque, yet insular, nature of O.N.A.N.s physical landscape. Although Bakhtins grotesques were meant to evoke natures constant state of renewal, Wallace replaces these images of regeneration with those of thinly veiled redun- dancy. Perhaps the best example of this strategy involves the annular fusion energy system that fuels the new republics environment. Like a harlequin trans- formed into a jack-in-the-box, annular fusion is likened to somebody doing somersaults with one hand nailed to the ground (570), and it fittingly produces a type of fusion that can produce waste for a process whose waste is fuel for the fusion (572). Apropos of the Year of The Adult Undergarment, this system is as if nature itself had desperately to visit the lavatory (Wallace 573). Whereas Bakhtin viewed bodily emissions such as urination and defecation as evidence of the human form in a constant state of growth and change, Wallaces annular fusion produces waste that only perpetuates stasis. The effect of annular fusion on O.N.A.N.s physical landscape has deformed the terrain itself into an image of grotesque circularity. This apparently ideal process has become so successful at ridding the environment of toxins that it has also eliminated all inhibitors to organic growth. The result has split the region into a rainforest on sterebolic anoids and a land resembling a desert. Thus, the topography has been warped into two halves, the Great Concavity and the Great Convexity, which, though clearly distorted, combine to form the closed system of a self-reflexive mirror. In this respect, a theory that appears to celebrate excess actually insulates and perpetuates stagnation. Within this closed system, the potentially regenerative openness that is most pervasively denied resides at the emotional level. As Bakhtin stresses, one of the FALL 2001, VOL. 43, NO. 1 7 D o w n l o a d e d
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distinguishing features of the grotesque body is its emphasis on apertures that allow the human form to become an open conduit for change. Emotional vulner- ability, like the porous body, also serves as an image of metamorphosis because it leaves its bearer open to the risks inherent in growth and renewal. Most of Wal- laces characters, however, have an abiding terror of this particular brand of openness and numb it with every drug imaginable. For Kate Gompert, depression victim and marijuana-addict-turned-alcoholic, an escape from her own emotion- al vulnerability entails transforming the world into a drug-induced mediation- what she calls a Novocaine of the soul (775cthat begs the question of her own suffering. After being incarcerated in a mental hospital for attempted sui- cide, Kate is asked by her physician to describe her feelings. She replies, Its more like horror than sadness. [. . .] Lurid is the word [. . .] everything sounds harsh, spiny and harsh-sounding like every sound you hear all of a sudden has teeth. And smelling bad even after I just got out of the shower (73). Kates description of her feelings, with its imagery of sharpness, stench, and heightened sensitivity, becomes an emotional grotesque in comparison to the way she encounters her environment under the influence of drugs. She is so terrified of this feeling that she begs for electroshock therapy as a happy alternative to the terrible resensitization that accompanies sobriety. Like most of the characters in Infinite Jest, Kate never considers that this fear might be the actual state of fac- ing life without the aid of synthetic compounds that replace her emotional vul- nerability with a chemically induced callousness. Instead, she considers herself recovered when she discovers that alcohol keeps the fear under better control than marijuana. Despite the stigma of difference usually attached to clinical depression, Kates condition proves the norm rather than the exception in Infinite Jest. J ames Incandenza commits suicide because he cannot face his psychic pain without the benefit of Wild Turkey (694-95); Remy Marathe recalls feel- ing habitually moribund and chained in a cage of the self, from the pain (777); and Ken Erdedy recounts a depression so horrifying that he understood on an intuitive level why people killed themselves (651). By depicting the ubiq- uitousness of depression, Wallace creates a context for viewing social reality rather than an individuals mental state as the source of despair. In so doing, he highlights the evasive, rather than therapeutic, value of using drugs and denial to avoid facing what emerges in this context as the requisite pain of existence. In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin explains that the mask reveals the essence of the grotesque (40). With its ability to confer an identity at odds with the wearers stable, homogenous sense of self, the mask is connected with the joy of change [. . .] transition, metamorphoses, the violation of natural bound- aries (40). The liberating aspect of these temporary disguises in masquerades and carnival festivities creates a sense, as in all of Bakhtins imagery, of the human potential to become open to the world by transgressing its fixed appear- ances. Geoffrey Galt Harpham emphasizes the masks permeability when he explains that, like belching and farting, the carnival mask [. . .] with its 8 CRITIQUE D o w n l o a d e d
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bulging eyes, open mouth, and outsized nose all go out to meet the world (108). In Infinite J est, on the other hand, masks are used to conceal identities that are already rendered as grotesquely open. One of the novels more humorous examples of this technique involves the republics reaction to the invention of video telephone conferencing. When faced with the apparent boon of this new opportunity for face-to-face electronic interaction, characters become so fright- ened of their own faces that they begin donning celebrity look-alike cut-outs and air-brushed, computer-enhanced masks of themselves whenever making phone calls. The particular quality of this self-repulsion reflects Wallaces inversion of the masks manifestation of flux: The public does not find themselves merely unattractive without their masks, their naked faces themselves are blurred: It wasnt just Anchormans Bloat, that well-known impression of extra weight that video inflicts on the face. It was worse. Even with high-end TPs high-def viewer-screens, consumers perceived something essentially blurred and moist-looking about their phone-faces, a shiny pallid indefiniteness. (147) Similarly, an entire support group has sprung up in Infinite J est around the prospect of masking deformity. The group is called, fittingly, U.H.I.D. (Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed), and its aesthetically challenged ( 187) members adopt veils to hide their facial deformities. The groups purpose, unlike the liberatory purpose of mask wearing in carnival, encourages hiding. Its philosophy involves teaching members to be open about their essential need for concealment (535). The use of masks to hide rather than to address what appears monstrously open takes a dark turn in a scenario involving a catatonic, soggy, invertebrate girl referred to only as It, whose father finds it more stimulating to rape her after pinning a Raquel Welch mask on her face (37 1). This image, perhaps more than any other, implies that embracing the masks joy of change and metamorphosis, without regard for human sensitivity and dignity, achieves an end considerably less than liberating. Like masks, costumes and disguises are part of the festive imagery used in car- nival to interrogate the stable identity-constructions of the official culture. In Infi- nite J est, however, the official culture is perpetuated by the use of grotesque cos- tumes. As part of their routine operations, the members of O.N.A.N.s FBI (now called the Office of Unspecified Services) are required to take on carnivalesque identities. The Office routinely casts men as women, women as longshoremen or Orthodox rabbinicals, hetero- sexual men as homosexual men, Caucasians as Negroes or caricaturesque Haitians and Dominicans, Healthy males as cephalic boys or epileptic pub- lic-relations executives. (41 9) In the traditional carnival setting, these costumes would have suggested trans- gression, but that implication is undermined by the fact that such disguises are used to cloak a conservative group of government agents that is elsewhere FALL 2001, VOL. 43, NO. 1 9 D o w n l o a d e d
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described as a white-suited gang responsible for requiring citizens to scrub and mask and then walk through chlorinated footbaths as at public pools before inter- acting with their employer, a president equally concerned with hygiene? The strangely comforting effect of these undercover disguises is indicated by agent M. Hugh/Helen Steeplys reaction to his transvestite field operation uniform: the more grotesque or unconvincing he seemed likely to be as a disguised persona the more nourished and actualized his deep parts felt (420). Steeplys discomfort with self-exposure is displaced by donning heterodox costumes that further the surveillance, information gathering, and violence that serve as instruments of social control rather than subversion. Even in the case of physical deformity, such as Hals huge forearm or Orins protracted knee, the apparent regenerative becoming of bodily protuberances can serve as repressive costumes. Both Hal and Orin acquired these deformities in pursuit of perfection that will ultimately transform them into closed, tangible objects of consumable entertainment. As fledgling professional athletes, they gained their distended limbs through the rigorous training required of those hop- ing to become stars in the international circuit, or what is regularly referred to in the novel as the Show. Wallace makes the nonempancipatory nature of such seemingly carnivalesque distortions clear in a reference to one of J ames Incan- denzas films, entitled Cage IZZ -Free Show, in which The figure of Death [. . .] presides over the front entrance of a carnival sideshow whose spectators watch performers undergo unspeakable degrada- tions so grotesquely compelling that the spectators eyes become larger and larger until the spectators themselves are transformed into gigantic eyeballs in chairs, while on the other side of the sideshow tent the figure of Life uses a megaphone to invite fairgoers to an exhibition in which, if the fairgoers consent to undergo unspeakable degradations, they can witness ordinary per- sons gradually turn into gigantic eyeballs. (988) Like the professional athletes whose ravaged bodies become sources of curiosi- ty, the figures in this spectaclized carnival are grotesques reminiscent of P. T. Barnums freak shows. And, like the participants and spectators of such shows, both are reduced to alienated objects that use the consumption of grotesquerie to further insulate themselves. For Orin Incandenza, carnivals celebration of relativistic truth now helps him to assuage his own fears of emotional vulnerability through serial womanizing. Refemng to his ongoing parade of lovers as the Subjects, he paradoxically requires their attention to continue his solipsistic denial of emotional openness. As he explains, his encounters are not about love or about whose love you deep- down desire but about assuring himself of a self-containment so airtight that he is both offense and defense and she neither and that, during sex there is now inside her a vividness vacuumed of all but his name: O.,O. That he is the One (566). The constant threat of dissolution into the frightening chasm of vulnera- 10 CRITIQUE D o w n l o a d e d
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bility that he approaches each night in his dreams attests to the necessity for Orin continually to reinscribe himself as a sealed object, or, as he explains, why, maybe, one Subject is never enough, why hand after hand must descend to pull him back fromthe endless fall. For were there for him just one, now, special and only the Onewould benot heor she but what was between them, the obliterating trinity of You and I into We. (566) The fact that this interior monologue is spoken as Orin glances at himself in the mirror (566) completes the association between sex and a detached, decidedly unregenerative form of masturbation. Orins strategy for picking up the women he needs for his analgesic purposes relies for its success on a valorization of cynicism that, like U.H.I.D.s veils, enables him to hide openly. Described by one of his former tennis colleagues as the least open man he knows, Orin nonetheless is able to pick up women by affecting a pose of poselessness that stems from an educationally adopted view of the truth as constructed rather than reported (1048). Describing Orins methodology, the friend recounts: He has a way of being almost pathologically open and sincere about the whole picking-up enterprise, but also has this quality of Look-At-Me-Being-So- Totally-Open-And-Sincere-I-Rise-Above-The-Whole-Disengenuous-Posing- Process-Of-Anracting-Someone-,-And-I-Transcend-The-Co~on-Disengen- uity In-A-Bar-Herd-In-A-Particularly-Hip-And-Witty-Self-Aware-Way-, -And-If-You-Will-Let-Me-Pick-You-Up-I-Will-Not-Only-Keep-Being-This- Hip-and-Witty-,-Transcendently-Open-, -But-Will-Bring-You-Into-This- World-Of-Social-Falshd -Transcendence. ( 1048) The irony of this passage is that, in inserting falsehood into the transcendent space formerly reserved for truth, Orin is cleverly able to sleep with women whose desire for emotional transcendence fulfills his solipsistic yearnings, while he is acquitted of the need to reciprocate those feelings by a rhetorical loophole. In that respect, Orins character provides one of the most visceral examples of the fact that physical and philosophical openness can also become a way of perpet- uating emotional closedness. The propensity for postmodern irony to entrap rather than liberate reaches its apex in the character and work of J ames Incandenza. The novels infinite jester, Incandenza, like the medieval fool, could qualify as a one-man show of enter- taining, though tautological, strategies. He not only invented the republics annular fusion energy system, directed over seventy witty, metafictional films that mirror the novels own plots and are often produced by Poor Yorick Enter- tainment (985-93); but he created the lethal Znfinife Jest entertainment car- tridge that systematically kills O.N.A.N.s citizens by rendering them helpless- ly enthralled by its recursively looping contents. That Incandenza is an optics genius fascinated by mirrors whose films, such as Cuge [. . .] a soliloquized par- FALL 2001, VOL. 43, NO. 1 11 D o w n l o a d e d
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ody of a broadcast-television advertisement for shampoo, utilizing four convex mirrors, two planar mirrors, and one actress (986), focus on self-reflexivity and mass medias mediating cultural function and make him at the very least a chimerical blend of a latter-day J ohn Barth-Thomas Pynchon disciple. As Tom LeClair has pointed out, Incandenzas films often resemble-in their themes and parodic methods-outtakes from Gravitys Rainbow and Pynchons other work (17). Wallace has declared Barth and Coover and Burroughs, even Nabokov and Pynchon as patriarchs for his patricide in an era when their techniques have been co-opted by consumer culture (McCaffery 146). Incanden- zas films and his veiled, distant personality demonstrate the way that metafic- tional forms can medicate rather than agitate. Despite his incessant production of art that foregrounds the constructed nature of reality, Incandenza is frequently described as intensely concealed. His son Orin describes him as (so blankly and irretrievably hidden that Orin said hed come to see him as like autistic, almost catatonic (737). Similarly, J oelle Van Dyne categorizes Incandenzas work as that of a brilliant optician and techni- cian who was an amateur at any kind of real communication, whose films were lampoons of inverted genres: archly funny and sometimes insightful, but with something provisional about them, like the finger exercises of someone promis- ing who refused to really sit down and play something to test that promise (742). In refusing to connect with the audience while enabling a paradoxical transcen- dence of suffering, Incandenzas films serve a purpose much in line with Orins womanizing. This transcendent quality is implied by Joelles analysis of a Blake parody aptly titled Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell. It is in this oth- erwise ironic film that J oelle notices the connection between an extended shot of Berninis Ecstasy of St. Teresa and the self-forgetting [. . .] of religiodart (742). As she explains, [tlhe mediated transcendence of self was just what the apparently decadent statue of the orgasmic nun claimed for itself as subject (742). That J oelle herself frequently envisioned the Ecstasy of St. Teresa while simultaneously inhaling crack cocaine and cleaning her apartment within an inch of its life (235) only enhances the connection between Incandenzas art and escapism. Of all of Incandenzas creations, it is the lethal Znfinite Jest entertainment car- tridge that best reveals the escapist quality of polyphonic media. For, contrary to what readers may expect from an irresistibly enthralling cinematic tour de force, this video is nothing like the blockbuster fantasies of an Aaron Spelling or Steven Spielberg. According to J oelle Van Dyne, one of the films stars-whose estima- tion is the only one the readers have to go on, due to the instant catatonia of the films viewers-it is nothing more than an olla podrida of depressive conceits strung together with flashy lensmanship and perspectival novelty (791). More specifically, it involves one scene of J oelle whirling around a revolving doorway with a hermaphroditic actor and another in which she repeatedly apologizes to an audience whose point of view has been made, through use of a special lens, to 12 CRITIQUE D o w n l o a d e d
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mimic an infants perspective (939). What becomes lethally addictive about this film affirms McLuhans claim that the medium is the message. Although the sub- ject matter, with its hybridized, amorphous hermaphrodite and its permanently recursive flux, is indeed a relativistic theme, the real star of The Entertainment is the films lens. In mimicking the undifferentiating gaze of an infant, the lens itself ensures that its viewers will remain in a perpetual state of liminality that does not require their active participation. The fact that this state renders its view- ers so enraptured that they become catatonic and eventually die implies that lim- inality itself, like the recurrent image of f i e Ecstasy of St. Teresa, can become an opiate of the masses. A constant state of uncertainty can be just as comforting as religion when it takes the form of a terminal cynicism that interdicts the ques- tion of human agency. Although the majority of Wallaces characters remain firmly entrenched i n their dogged habits of escapism, the efforts of Hal Incandenza and Don Gately to resist this end offer the seeds of redemption within Wallaces unflinching por- trayal of late-twentieth-century culture. Hal moves from experiencing life through the hip, empty mask, ahedonia, which cloaks his hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need (659), to trying to address emotional issues in his own voice; and Gately progresses from numb addiction to physical suffering as he steadfastly struggles to remain sober within a drug-lubricated society. Although these characters superficially manifest some of the same qual- ities as those retreating behind carnivals heterogeneous masks, the trajectory of their transformation is one of restoring personal agency by turning the self inside-out rather than suppressing it beneath deliberate artifice. Although both register as grotesquerie, in the concealment-obsessed, entertainment-enthralled culture of O.N.A.N. only a commitment to self-disclosure rather than self-fash- ioning lays the groundwork for positive change. Hals encounter with and expression of his own identity becomes noticeable roughly around the time he begins using the first-person pronoun and abstains from smoking marijuana on 20 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergar- ment (841). From that moment on, the discrepancy between Hals inner feelings and outward expressions begins to diminish. It is as if his poker-faced detach- ment has melted to reveal the gooey, emotional self that previously pulsed and writhed (659) beneath its cool surface. The slow metamorphosis is first noticed by a classmate who thinks that Hal is wearing a hilarity face. He tells the bewil- dered Hal, Your face is a hilarity face. [. . .] At first it merely looked a-mused. Now it is open-ly cach-inated. Youre almost doubled over (875). Even when Hal attempts to compose his face, his friend finds it mirth-ful (876). Finally, when Hal looks in the mirror, he is struck by an image not unlike those con- fronted by the video phones early adopters. He reflects, I looked sketchy and faint to myself, tentative and ghostly (876). This facial distortion reaches its apogee in the novels opening scene (which is temporally its closing scene), in which Hal tries to communicate sincerely about his feelings during a college FALL 2001, VOL. 43, NO. 1 13 D o w n l o a d e d
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entrance interview. In marked contrast to the boy who, as formerly described, had not had a bona fide intensity-of-interior-life-type emotion since he was tiny and found terms like j oi e and value to be like so many variables in rarefied equations (694), this Hal speaks with conviction. After being instructed by his elders to affect a neutral and affectless silence (9), Hal nonetheless reveals his inner thoughts, declaring, I am not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opin- ions. [. . .] Im not just a creatus, manufactured, conditioned, bred for a function. [. . .] Please dont think I dont care (12). The degree to which this transforma- tion poses a threat to the values of Infinite Jests dominant culture is underscored by the terror his spoken sentiments incur. In a manner resonant with the reaction to other unmasked images suppressed throughout the novel, Hal is perceived by the committee as subanimalistic, waggling, like some sort of awful . . . growth (14) and is eventually carted off in an ambulance to where he can no longer disrupt the anesthetic text/ure of social life. Like Hals efforts to become independently sentient, Don Gatelys commit- ment to forgoing his drug addictions ultimately renders him incomprehensible and marginalized with respect to the novels dominant culture. After receiving a gunshot wound while saving anothers life, Don struggles to remain drug-free i n a hospital environment where Demerol, like J ell-0 and I.D. bracelets, has become gratuitous. Not only does Dons sobriety force him to experience what can only be described as the grotesque detail of physical injury-delirium, incon- tinence, I.V. needles, catheters, vomiting-but his inability to either speak or write illustrates the social as well as physical border that Don crosses by remain- ing sober. For, like Hal, when Don attempts to communicate from this position of marginality, his words are literally unreadable. He becomes, like the scrawled pen-and-ink drawing that Wallace uses to convey Dons inarticulateness & 0 (l884), a messy, dramatic mark set against the streamlined symbolic order of the surrounding culture. Thus, in a radical dialogization of the tenets of postmodern carnival, Wallace associates a commitment to experiencing the world without the deliberate alterations of perceptiondrugs, veils, disguises, enter- tainments-as itself a subversive foray into the no mans land of human experi- ence. To a large extent, the resistant aspect of Don and Hals vertiginous sobriety takes on new significance within the context of Wallaces unique writing style. In a seeming contradiction, Wallace uses irony, metafiction, and polyphonic inter- textuality not only to de-center empty avant-gardism throughout Znfinite Jest, but to defamiliarize the hallmarks of classic realism. The intent of this technique is divulged by a ~rai th~ who appears at the bedside of the delirious Don Gately and expresses a lifelong artistic desire to portray real lifes real egalitarian bab- ble of figurantless crowds, of the animate worlds real agora, the babble of crowds every member of which was the central and articulate protagonist of his own entertainment (836). The wraith calls the style radical realism, and as Tom LeClair has argued, its anti-confluential yet history-mining attention to 14 CRITIQUE D o w n l o a d e d
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character, narrative, and etymology also provides an accurate description of Wal- laces own approach to crafting Infinite Jest (32-35). As LeClair explains, [tlhese methods produce, not just length, but a prodigious density because parts do not disappear into conventional and easily processed wholes but into an infolding aesthetic that disrupts the tranquilizing flow of conventional fiction (35). When viewed within that context, the transformation experienced by Hal and Don becomes one of moving through the alienation denied by their carniva- lesque masks to begin expressing themselves as vocal figurants whose inco- herent voices may eventually coalesce into an audible, collective human hum capable of restoring dialogue to a decidedly monologic culture. The metamorphoses of Hal Incandenza and Don Gately bring the artistic vision of Infinite Jest full circle through the self-consciously adopted masks of postmodern multiplicity and polyphony to arrive at a view of contemporary human reality that is more fully grotesque than its instrumentalized counter- parts. Although Bakhtins carnivalesque marketplace has furnished postmodern art with an aesthetic antidote to conformist ideology, the human agora of Wal- laces radical realism erupts the anesthesia of that entertains but fails to heal postmodern culture. This garbled, pluralistic human outburst prefigured by Don and Hals unintelligible voices provides a way out of the vicious circles that encage the environment and citizens of Infinite Jest. Clearly, Wallaces radical reality is far from the soothing naturalism that once prompted J ean-Fransois Lyotard to proclaim that so-called realistic representations can no longer evoke reality except as nostalgia or mockery (74). On the contrary, it bears estimable witness to Wallaces assertion that realistic doesnt have a uni-vocal defini- tion (McCaffery 140) and re-emphasizes the obligation once inherent within the grotesque form to reach toward more profound truths, even as it embraces ambi- guity. At a time in history when the forces of capitalism and commercial enter- tainment are fueled by the production of heterogeneous diversions, Wallace reminds us that literature has a continued responsibility not only to press beyond its own limits, but to expand the limits of human understanding. VENICE, CALIFORNIA NOTES 1. In The Prodigious Fiction of Richard Powers, William Vollman, and David Foster Wallace, Tom LeClair characterizes Wallaces use of footnotes as an articulation of a prodigiously grotesque body. He explains that Wallaces special achievement is to make the book recall and resemble a prodigious human body [. . .I. The only errata in the final section are those of readers who do not switch back and forth between the two sections and who, therefore, do not appreciate how Wallace has deformed his novel to be a gigantic analogue of the monsters-hateful and hopeful-within it (38). 2. In The Powers of Horror, J ulia Kristeva provides a context for viewing such unassimilable, hor- rific fractures as eruptions of what a dominant symbolic order excludes to maintain its proprietary FALL 2001, VOL. 43, NO. 1 15 D o w n l o a d e d
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claims to reality and truth. Kristeva calls this terrifying nodentity the abject and draws upon George Batailles research into cultural taboos and J acques Lacans psychoanalytic approach to sub- jectivity to inform her equation between horror and social Otherness. Abjection has been likened to such culturally taboo elements as feces, urine, and in feminist theory, the female body and has been used within artistic and literary spheres as a strategy of social opposition. Wallaces characters may be abject, but their inability definitively to marshal their Otherness against an oppressive social order complicates the use of abjection as a subversive strategy in Infinite Jest. 3. This particular example resonates with Peter Stallybrass and Allon Whites perception that car- nival can serve as a vehicle for the dominant culture to exorcise an Otherness it has created in the process of assuming its hegemony. As they have argued, in this situation, the dominant culture uses the whole world as its theatre in a particularly instrumental fashion, the very subjects which it polit- ically excludes becoming exotic costumes which it assumes to play out the disorders of its own iden- tity (200). 4. The wraith, a gangly lexical genius and former auteur, seems a combination of both Wallace and the late J ames Incandenza. 5. Wallace uses this term to describe television during his interview with McCaffery (136). yet it also fits his description of a contemporary art scene in which shock stops being the by-product of something else and rule-breaking, the mere form of renegade avant-gardism becomes an end in itself (McCaffery 132). WORKS CITED Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imaginution. Trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. . Rabeluis and His World. Trans. Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. Booker, M. Keith. Techniques of Subversion in Modem Literature: Transgression, Abjection and the Foucault, Michel. Language, Counter-Memory, P racrice. Ed. and trans. Donald F. Bouchard. Ithaca: Harpham, Geoffrey Galt On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contrudicrion in Art and Literature. Prince- Kristeva, J ulia. Desire in Language. Trans. Leon S . Roudiez. New York Columbia UP, 1980. . The Powers of Horror. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. LeClair, Tom. The Prodigious Fiction of Richard Powers, William Vollman, and David Foster Wal- lace. Critique 38 (Fall 1996): 12-37. Lyotard, J ean-Franqois. The Postmodem Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Benning- ton and Brian Massumi. Foreword by Fredric lameson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. McCaffery, Larry. An Interview with David Foster Wallace. Review of Contemporary Fiction 13 (Summer 1993): 127-50. Camivalesque. Gainesville: U of Florida P, 199 1. Cornell UP, 1977. ton: Princeton UP, 1982. Meindl, Dieter. American Fiction and the Metaphysics of the Grotesque. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1996. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. G.R. Hibbard. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1987. Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca: Cornell UP, Wallace, David Foster. E Unibus Pluram. A Supposedly Fun Thing Ill Never Do Again. Boston: 1986. Little, 1997. . Infinite Jest. Boston: Little, 1996. Yates, Wilson. An Introduction to the Grotesque: Theoretical and Theological Considerations. The Grotesque in Art and Literafure. Ed. Wilson Yates and J ames Luther Adams. Cambridge: Eerd- mans, 1997. 16 CRITIQUE D o w n l o a d e d