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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
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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
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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
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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-
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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-
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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-
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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).
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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
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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.
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