The Limits of
the Infinite:
The Use of
Alcoholics Anonymous in
Infinite Jest as
a Narrative Solution
after
Postmodernism
Brooks Daverman
Senior Honors Paper
Oberlin College
April 25, 2001
David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest seems
at first to be an unproblematic example of postmodern literary fiction. Its
language is self-conscious, ironic, and playful. Its narrative is
unconventional: the book is an ensemble of many narrative threads that are
interrelated but never come together satisfactorily. In fact, there is no
resolution to the book at all. It frustrates readers expectations with its
exploded maximalist bulk of 1079 pages. And it draws attention to itself as a
text with 388 footnotes that disrupt the already choppy narrative flow. Reviews
of the book make frequent reference to Pynchon, Gaddis, Delillo, Coover,
Bartheleme, and Barthes, all figureheads of postmodern literary fiction. In
some interviews Wallace has tried to distinguish his work from other
postmodernist fiction, but it is hard to understand the difference in the face
of so much similarity. It seems almost superfluous that there is a dissertation
devoted to detailing characteristics of Infinite Jest that are
postmodern. The author of the dissertation, Toon Theuwis, is aware that Wallace
does not fully agree with the classification of Infinite Jest as
postmodern, but he dismisses Wallace’s attempt at differentiation:
I do
not doubt that Wallace’s notion of postmodernism differs from the generation of
writers before him, but he is still so strongly influenced by that previous
generation that digressions into shades of differences would merely foreground
a generational gap in postmodernist literature that I think is ultimately
irrelevant. (6)
I disagree with Theuwis
on this issue. There are important distinctions between Wallace and earlier
postmodernists, and this paper is intended to explain why an aesthetic and
philosophical generation gap between Wallace and the early postmodernists is a
useful concept for understanding Infinite Jest.
In an interview with Larry McCaffery for the Review of
Contemporary Fiction, Wallace stated his reservations about the postmodern
genre:
For
me, the last few years of the postmodern era have seemed a bit like the way you
feel when you’re in high school and your parents go on a trip, and you throw a
party... For a while it’s great, free and freeing, parental authority gone and
overthrown, a cat’s-away-let’s-play Dionysian revel. But then time passes and
the party gets louder and louder, and you run out of drugs... and you gradually
start wishing your parents would come back and restore some fucking order in
your house... the sense I get of my generation of writers and intellectuals or
whatever is that it’s 3:00 A.M. and the couch has several burn-holes and...
we’re wishing the revel would end. (McCaffery)
In Wallace’s metaphor, postmodernism is a
disorder that was once fun, like a party, but has become too much and is now
less fun. The disorder is an expression of postmodern experimentation and
subversion of conventional narratives, which was innovative but is now
tiresome. Wallace wants to find a way to move past the disorder.
We’ve seen that you can break any or all of the rules...
but we’ve also seen the toxicity that anarchy for its own sake can yield. It’s
often useful to dispense with standard formulas, of course, but it’s just as
valuable and brave to see what can be done within a set of rules... There’s
something about free play within an ordered and disciplined structure that
resonates for readers. And there’s something about complete caprice and flux
that’s deadening. (McCaffery)
In this quotation
Wallace asserts that experimentation has its place, but it is a mistake to
continue breaking conventions forever. There must be some form for meaning to
be coherent, and that form must be to some degree shared, or conventional, for
meaning to be communicated. A metaphor from mathematics, which Wallace studied
as an undergraduate, is useful here. There are different kinds of infinities.
There is the boundless one that continues forever, and then there is the kind
of infinity within a boundary or set of limits. For example, there are an
infinite number of points within a
square. Instead of defying narrative conventions (attempting to create a
boundless infinity), Wallace is intent on discovering a good conventional
narrative system (finding bounded infinities) that he can work within. And this
is what differentiates Wallace from first-generation postmodernists.
Chris Hager, in his essay “On Speculation: Infinite
Jest and American Fiction After Postmodernism,” agrees with my
understanding of Wallace as a second-generation postmodernist. Hager rephrases
the predicament of Wallace’s generation of writers in this way: “to assimilate
the work of highly experimental postmodern precedents into more straightforward
narratives” (2). In the case of Infinite Jest, Hager concludes that
within the book there is hidden a subtle parabolic plot. He supports his theory
by a very detailed inspection of page numbers, double entendres, and other
minutia. His attractive theory does give a form to Infinite Jest, even
though it is not exactly the straightforward narrative he set out to find. But
when Hager asserts the complex structure he makes Wallace the kind of writer he
abhors: someone who treats “mere formal ingenuity as an end in itself. [Also
known as] cleveritis -- you know, the dreaded grad-school syndrome of like
‘Watch me use seventeen different points of view in this scene of a guy eating
a Saltine.’ The real point of this shit is ‘Like me because I’m clever’”
(McCaffery). Experimentalism, no matter how sophisticated, is always just
messing with form, and for Wallace form must have some purpose beyond itself.
Wallace borrows from the narrative form of Alcoholics
Anonymous to create a set of limits or rules that structure meaning in Infinite
Jest. Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) is woven throughout Infinite Jest,
and AA aesthetics become dominant in the text. In AA, narrative form is
functional; it is always used as a tool for a purpose. Both postmodern and AA
narratives are responses to disordered and fragmented subjects of the kind that
Wallace describes in his party metaphor. But where postmodern texts respond
with fragmented narratives, AA life stories are master narratives that make
fragmented subjects coherent. AA members all learn to tell their life stories
in a new way that restructures their identity. They provide a shared set of
narrative conventions that allow members to understand themselves as alcoholics
and as members of the AA group. These shared narrative conventions also
eliminate conceptual and stylistic differences between members that might block
communication. Formally innovative postmodern texts do the opposite. They
invent new conceptual and stylistic blocks that make communication more
challenging.
AA is one of many
narrative systems that exist simultaneously in Infinite Jest. In the
text, no character can stand alone; each is affiliated with a group that limits
and orders the structure of his or her life. In the text, a character remarks,
“we are all dying to give ourselves away to something, maybe. God or Satan,
politics or grammar, topology or philately -- the object seemed incidental to
the will to give oneself away, utterly” (900). The two main characters, Hal
Incandenza and Don Gately, are each fully ensconced in a group that organizes
their lives, gives meaning to their lives, and is their lives. Hal is a teenage
tennis phenom who rarely gets off the grounds of the Enfield Tennis Academy.
His friends are all students there, and his family actually runs the academy.
Hal eats, sleeps, and lives tennis; in the same way Gately is completely within
the culture of AA. He not only attends meetings daily, he has also stayed on to
work as a resident in the recovery house that he recently stayed in as a new AA
member. Tennis and AA are the two main groups in Infinite Jest. There
are many other more minor characters that belong to groups such as terrorism,
television, and therapy.
The text investigates and inhabits these groups and many
more, switching back and forth, looking for new possibilities in the narrative
form of each one. At the beginning of the book, the constant switching between
the different groups makes the text fragmented in a way that is reminiscent of
other postmodern texts. By the end of the book, even though the different
groups have not been connected into a coherent whole, the narratives of all of
the groups are found wanting. Either they do not provide a coherent structured
narrative, or they are organized but arbitrary and meaningless, or they do not
allow for communication between peers. Only AA fulfills the requirements of Infinite
Jest. By the end of the book AA is the master narrative of Infinite Jest.
The constant switching between so many different groups
at the beginning of Infinite Jest creates the kind of fragmented
disorganized text that is associated with postmodernism. AA does not get
introduced for a long time, and trying to keep up with all of the characters
and groups in the first part of the book is a difficult task. What does connect
the fragments of the story is a certain sensibility applied to the description
of all the different groups. The text is always attending to the way the formal
narrative conventions of the group work to structure member’s lives. There is a
delicate balance to be struck between having enough formal constraints to
provide a meaningful structure and having too many constraints so the
individual has no freedom at all. The self has to be bounded enough so that the
individual is not lost to solipsism, but not so bounded that the self becomes
insignificant, just an identityless cog in the narrative system. There must be
a goal for the group that is meaningful, not arbitrary. It can’t be a merely
self-serving goal, but it can’t be completely unconnected to the self either.
Most importantly, the group must provide a structure for communication between
equal members. It is apparent from early in the text that communication is very
difficult for characters in Infinite Jest. Many characters are inventive
and skilled speakers, but they can’t break out of themselves enough to gain
intersubjectivity. I will analyze the groups of tennis, terrorism, and
television because, just as in the text, the way that other narrative groups
are described sets up the sensibilities that will later be applied to AA.
The rules of tennis, including the boundary lines of the
court, are limits on the possibilities of the game. However, just like the
square with an infinite amount of points inside it, the limits of tennis allow
for an unlimited amount of possibilities within the boundaries. Jim Incandenza,
Hal’s father, is a tennis and math prodigy who realizes the infinite
possibilities of tennis. He thinks that:
beauty
and art and magic and improvement and keys to excellence and victory in the
prolix flux of match play is not a fractal matter of reducing chaos to
pattern... It was a matter not of reduction at all, but -- perversely -- of
expansion, the aleatory flutter of uncontrolled, metatastic growth -- each well
shot ball admitting of n possible response, 2n possible response to those
responses, and so on into what Incandenza would articulate to anyone who shared
both his backgrounds as a Cantorian continuum of infinities of possible move
and response, Cantorian and beautiful because infoliating, contained, this
diagnate infinity of infinities of choice and execution, mathematically
uncontrolled but humanly contained, bounded by the talent and imagination of self
and opponent, bent in on itself by the containing boundaries of skill and
imagination that brought one player finally down, that kept both from winning,
that made it, finally, a game, these boundaries of self. (82)
It is common to think
of tennis as a chaotic game that can be ordered into statistical facts. There
are a certain percentage of successful first serves, unforced errors per set,
and so on. Jim, however, conceives of tennis as beginning with an ordered
system of rules that creates focused but inconceivably complex play that
becomes infinite. It may be counterintuitive, but tennis boundaries create
possibilities rather than limit them. If the net and lines were not there, no
game could take place. Schitt, a tennis coach who works with Jim, says “without
[the boundary lines of the court] there is something bigger. Nothing to contain
and give the meaning. Verstiegenheit”
(83). The boundaries of tennis are like the form of fiction; they create
possibilities by limiting.
Form is not
enough by itself, however. Tennis is structured well, but the goal that anchors
tennis, winning, is arbitrary. Hal Incandenza is very motivated to earn
approval by succeeding, but tennis is not enough to give meaning to his life.
Hal has recurring nightmares where he has to play upon an infinitely complex
court. This nightmare vision is the flipside to his father’s understanding of
tennis. “There are lines going every which way, and they run oblique or meet
and form relationships and boxes and rivers and tributaries and systems inside
systems” (67). Where Jim sees beauty in the infinite possibilities of tennis,
Hal sees only meaningless complexity.
Another very controlled and organized narrative
system in Infinite Jest is terrorism, but terrorist groups work by
diminishing each individual self too much. The two main terrorists are Marathe,
an agent of the Canadian insurgents Les Assassins des Fauteuiles Rollents, and
Steeply, an agent of the U.S.O.U.S. Both agencies are equally grotesque. Les
Assassins has an initiation rite in which members have their legs severed by
the wheels of a rushing train, and the U.S.O.U.S. always puts its agents
through undercover operations that involve complete humiliation as well as
physical mutilation. These physical privations illustrate how the self is
always sacrificed for even the smallest needs of the group. The self is limited
and given meaning by the group, but it is so excessive that the self becomes
completely unimportant. And like winning in tennis, the goals of terrorism --
the political border wars carried out through violence -- never seem like a
worthwhile cause in Infinite Jest.
One function of the terrorists in Infinite Jest is
that they are so authoritarian in their domination of the individual self that
the importance of the group in AA is mild by comparison. The exaggerated
terrorists are a kind of upper bound of highly structured narrative. And even
though Marathe is a member of an over-authoritarian organization, his critique
of other American groups is astute. Marathe describes an American crisis of
faith. It is a succinct explanation of what is being faced by all the
characters in the book: they have too much unstructured freedom.
Someone
sometime let you forget how to choose, and what. Someone let your peoples
forget it was the only thing of importance, choosing... Someone taught you that
temples are for fanatics only and took away the temples and promised there was
no need for temples. And now there is no shelter. And no map for finding the
shelter of the temple. And you all stumble in the dark, this confusion of
permissions. The without-end pursuit of a happiness of which someone let you
forget the old things which made happiness possible. (319-320)
In this description,
Americans have nothing to believe in, have nothing to organize their lives,
because they are living in a society without limits. In the confusion of
permissions Americans belong to groups that are either meaningless, or do not
have well-defined and useful limits, or do not allow communication. This is the
lower bound of completely unstructured narrative, and it is a description of
postmodernism. These two bounds call for an intermediate narrative system, like
AA, where the self is neither completely bound nor completely unbound.
Television is a good example of the confusion of
permissions that Marathe describes. In Infinite Jest television
limitlessly provides spectators with choices. Just as cable television moved
beyond the limited choices of broadcast television, InterLace TelEntertainment
replaces cable. The InterLace ad campaign is based on providing more choices.
The cable kabal’s promise of ‘empowerment,’ the campaign
argued, was still just the invitation to choose which of the 504 visual spoon
feedings you’d sit and open wide for...And so but what if, their campaigns
appeal basically ran, instead of choosing the least of 504 infantile evils...
what if a viewer could more or less 100%
choose what's on at any given time? (416)
Interlace allows the
viewer to download or buy each entertainment separately, so that anything that
has ever been filmed is available at all times. The ad campaign is based on
“appeals to an American ideology committed to the appearance of freedom” (1031). The freedom offered by television is
apparent rather than actual because even though the offerings of InterLace are
unlimited, the only possibility that television really offers the viewer is
spectatorship. Television has no formal narrative boundaries except the
immediate wishes of a viewer. And in Infinite Jest, without boundaries
there is no way to create meaningful possibilities.
In addition to being a limitless (and therefore
uncontained and meaningless) medium, television does not allow for people to
communicate. Virtual reality is available but not popular as a form of
entertainment, in part because it has a tendency to make viewer’s eyes bleed,
but also because virtual reality involves an interactive relationship that is
less attractive than spectatorship. Television is a one-way medium that allows
people to watch without worrying about being watched. One character sums up her
attraction to television as “entertainment is blind” (237). Television viewers
are soothed by the fact that the television, and the actors on the television,
can’t stare back.
Not only does television replace interaction, the
experience of being a part of a larger group, even if the group is doing
nothing but watching, has become a rarity. The technology of television has
come so far in the world of Infinite Jest that people stay home instead
of going to movie theaters or live events. The resulting isolation makes people
wish to be part of a crowd, “Hence the new millennium’s passion for standing
live witness to things. A whole sub-rosa schedule of public spectation
opportunities, ‘spect-ops,’ the priceless chance to be part of a live crowd,
watching. (620)” Instances of crowds gathering are infrequent, however. For the
most part, entertainment has managed to separate people, make them into
passive, individual spectators with no chance for interpersonal communication.
Although every group discussed so far is in itself a
highly ordered system, the inclusion of all of them (and others too) in Infinite
Jest creates chaos, especially with the way that the text cuts back and
forth among them. The chaos of the first part of Infinite Jest is
somewhat like the present state of literature: the great critical theories have
all been debunked and everything is permitted. The idea that there could be a
single set of criteria for judging fiction has fallen apart and instead a
plurality of non-unified theoretical systems exist simultaneously. Chaos is
also the way that AA members conceive of active alcoholism.
The text of Infinite
Jest starts out incoherent, characters appear without introduction, and the
different groups all exist simultaneously, with no single narrative system in
control of the text. Even though AA is not introduced until page 137, by the
end of the book it has grown to control more of the narrative than all of the
other groups combined. For one thing, AA characters and AA scenes, though not
the focus of the early sections of the book, become more and more prevalent,
and AA aesthetics come to dominate the in-text interpretation of the
narratives.
The same thing occurs on the character level. Many
characters not associated with AA, such as Hal Incandenza, Joelle van Dyne, and
Jim Incandenza, characters who begin as skillful narrators, lose coherence as
they reach crises that their narrative abilities can not cope with, and they
can no longer synthesize meaning. Don Gately balances their fall by rising with
AA. Gately gains enough proficiency to tell his story authoritatively through
AA, and takes over the narrative of Infinite Jest.
Hal Incandenza is a verbal standout in a book where
high-speed wit and large vocabulary is the norm, but his skill with words seems
to be at least in part a compensation for his stunted emotional ability. In the
first chapter, he thinks of his recently acquired inability to communicate as
mainly a word problem: “There are, by the OED
IV’s count, nineteen nonarchaic synonyms for unresponsive, of which nine
are Latinate and four Saxonic” (17). While it is true that Hal’s incoherence is
found at the beginning of the text, it is chronologically the end. His
incoherence, therefore, is at the end of his development as a character. Hal is
a potent example of a narrative system that becomes unable to perform its
function of making coherent meaning. Hal has the most language skill of any
character in the book. He reads and memorizes the Oxford English Dictionary, he
often corrects his friend’s grammar, and he outwits the Professional Grief
Therapist, among other examples. But he does not have a narrative system that
allows him to truly communicate. By the end of Infinite Jest his attempts
at communication are misinterpreted as “’Undescribable.’ ’Like an animal.’ ’Subanimalistic noises and sounds’” (14).
As Hal disintegrates, Don Gately gains control. Gately
has been off drugs long enough for the initial physical dependence to have
subsided. He is now in the process of the more powerful, narrative conversion
of AA. His values, language, and understanding of his own life are all being
reorganized by AA narrative. So his fear of becoming an active alcoholic is
actually incorporated into a new and more abstract fear that the system of AA
might break down on him, leaving him lost and meaningless. When Gately gets
over his fears and gains faith in AA, he becomes self-assured as a narrator.
At the start of Infinite Jest, Gately is still unsure
of the narrative and language abilities that AA has given him. Gately panics
when the AA narrative is questioned by Joelle van Dyne, a new AA member. It is
actually a very small detail that she raises, a grammatical concern about an AA
cliche.
Her trouble
is that ‘But For the Grace of God’ is a subjunctive, a counterfactual, she
says, and can make sense only when introducing a conditional clause, like e.g.
‘But For the Grace of God I would have died on Molly Notkin’s bathroom floor,’
so that an indicative transposition like ‘I’m here but But For the Grace of
God’ is she says, literally senseless, and regardless of whether she hears it
or not it’s meaningless, and that the foamy enthusiasm with which these folks
can say what in fact means nothing at all makes her want to put her head in the
Radarange at the thought that Substances have brought her to the sort of pass
where this is the sort of language she has to have Blind Faith in. (366)
But for the Grace of
God is a meaningful often-repeated phrase in AA regardless of whether it makes
grammatical sense. Grammar is an interest of other narrative groups that Joelle
has been associated with, such as graduate level film criticism. So the
grammatical query is a kind of skirmish between to warring narratives, and it
affects Gately deeply: “and his own heart grips him like an infant rattling the
bars of its playpen, and he feels a greasy wave of an old and almost unfamiliar
panic, and for a second it seems inevitable that at some point he’s going to go
back out and get high again” (366). A baby in a playpen is an image that recurs
with Gately in his dreams, in a more complete form of a childhood memory of not
being able to get his mother’s attention. That he associates this image with a
fear of the breakdown of AA’s narrative system is apt because a loss of AA for
Gately would be a loss of the ability to communicate. Without AA, the limits
that organize his story would disappear, and he would be like a baby whose
uncontrolled cries are not heard.
Gately’s second big narrative showdown is against a
wraith who is the spirit of the late Jim Incandenza, a much more formidable
opponent. The wraith of Jim appears in a hospital room where Gately is
recovering from gunshot wounds. Gately is handicapped by a tube that is down
his throat, making him physically mute. The wraith communicates with Gately by
putting thoughts into Gately’s head. The wraith explicitly has the power of an
author because of this ability. The power to tell a story clearly rests with
the wraith of Jim, which is underscored by the description of the process as
“not only creepy but somehow violating, a sort of lexical rape” (832).
The wraith tries to elicit pity from Gately by telling
Gately his life story, but here Gately begins to gain authority back using the
AA narrative system. Gately rejects the wraith’s non-AA life story.
Gately’s
not too agonized and feverish not to recognize gross self-pity when he hears
it, wraith or no. As in the slogan ‘Poor Me, Poor Me, Pour Me a Drink.’ With
all due respect, pretty hard to believe this wraith could stay sober, if he
needed to get sober, with the combination of abstraction and
tragically-misunderstood-me attitude he’s betraying. (839)
Gately has grown to
become an arbiter of narrative, which reverses the dynamic Gately experienced
previously with Joelle, who is associated with Jim and his intellectual
narrative groups. After a few more protestations in favor of his story, the Jim
wraith seemlessly disappears from the scene without even an exit line as the focus
shifts completely to Gately's memories of his own life story. It is a key
victory for Gately that is built upon in the frequent chapters chronicling his
story that occur in the last hundred plus pages.
Anyone only slightly aware of AA -- say, familiar
with the phrase “Hi, my name is Blank, and I’m an alcoholic” and nothing more
-- may associate AA with a more culturallly visible recovery narrative system:
therapy. But Infinite Jest emphasizes an essential strangeness of AA to
the rest of American culture by demonstrating the differences between AA and
therapy. Although AA is based on the sharing of a life narrative, the AA
narrative is very different from the therapy narrative. Therapy is an
exploration of the self to figure out problems and then fix them. Therapy’s
focus on the self is at the same level of intensity as television. They may be
different in kind -- television tries to fulfill the self while therapy tries
to understand it -- but they both serve to inflate the importance of the self.
While not going all the way to the self-mutilation of terrorist groups, AA does
not inflate the self like television and therapy do. In the AA narrative, all
long-term decisions are no longer under the jurisdiction of the self. They are
handed over to another entity: a higher power, a personally defined god figure.
In addition, alcoholism is not an attribute of the self, like indecisiveness or
insanity. Instead it is a disease outside of the auspices of the self. The
recovering alcoholic does not, however, shrug all responsibility. He or she
just shifts all responsibility to very small units of decision-making. One AA
member explains this to Gately when Gately is new in the program.
He told Gately to just imagine he’s holding a box of Betty
Crocker Cake Mix, which represents Boston AA. The box had directions on the
side any eight-year-old could read... It didn’t matter one fuckola whether
Gately like believed a cake would
result, or whether he understood the
like fucking baking-chemistry of how
a cake would result: if you just followed the motherfucking directions... a
cake would result. (469)
Unlike in therapy, in
AA belief and understanding are not required. The recovering alcoholic does
very short-term physical tasks, like not drinking alcohol at the specific moment,
praying (which is at first just kneeling if actual prayer can’t be achieved),
and attending meetings. This reverses the system of an active alcoholic, where
the larger issues are seen to be the domain of the self, but the smaller
details are blamed on outside entities or forces. There are multiple
differences between the narrative of AA and therapy that result from the
groups’ different attitudes towards the self.
The first therapist to appear in the text is the
Professional Grief Therapist who treats Hal after Hal’s father commits suicide.
The therapist isn’t helpful to Hal at all because the narrative system of
therapy is built on a success-or-failure dichotomy that Hal is already adept at
handling. At first Hal is distraught because he can’t figure out what is
required for success in therapy’s narrative system. Hal complains that the
Grief Therapist “was my worst nightmare. Talk about self-consciousness and
fear. Here was a top-ranked authority figure and I was failing to supply what
he wanted. He made it manifestly clear I wasn’t delivering the goods. I’d never
failed to deliver the goods before” (253). In this quotation Hal shows he is
unhealthily attached to succeeding, but therapy doesn’t help him because the
Grief Therapist is equally attached to success. Instead, Hal eventually
succeeds in outwitting the therapist’s narrative system. Hal figures out that
instead of researching books on how to grieve, he has to “chew through... the
section for grief-professionals themselves...
How could I know what a professional wanted unless I knew what he was
professionally required to want” (254-255). Hal goes into his next meeting
cursing the therapist and working himself into a frenzy while “subtly inserting
certain loaded professional-grief-therapy-terms like validate, process as a
transitive verb, and toxic guilt.
These were library derived” (255). This is exactly the type of epiphany that
the therapist wants, and Hal fakes it correctly. His “traumatic grief was
professionally pronounced uncovered and countenanced and processed” (257).
Tellingly, the therapist is just as exuberant as Hal. Hal achieves success in
therapy just like he does in tennis and academics, but he only plays a
narrative game. He does not actually use the therapy’s narrative system to restructure
himself in a way that would help him grieve his father’s loss.
The AA narrative has no success-or-failure finale. AA
members are called recovering -- instead of recovered -- alcoholics, which
emphasizes the continual process of AA. If Hal entered the AA he would find
himself in an unfamiliar narrative system. There are none of the objective
exterior measures of success Hal is accustomed to achieving. Part of the
narrative system of AA is that it has no ending. This is a narrative strategy
that keeps AA members from thinking about the future and the cumulative sum of
all of the temptations and situations that the future holds. Instead, the AA
narrative system stops at the eternal present of Recovering. The AA cliche for
this is One Day At A Time, but the description of Gately in withdrawl vividly
describes it as:
Feeling
the edge of every second that went by. Taking it a second at a time. Drawing
the time in around him real tight. Withdrawing. Any one second: he remembered:
the thought of feeling like he’d be feeling this second for 60 more of these
seconds -- he couldn’t deal. He could not fucking deal. He had to build a wall
around each second just to take it. The whole first two weeks of it are
telescoped in his memory down into like one second... An endless Now stretching
its gull-wings out on either side of his heartbeat. And he’d never before or
since felt so excruciatingly alive. Living in the Present between pulses.
(859-860)
This formulation is
more extreme than the AA cliche; the second has replaced the day. It
strengthens the AA strategy of staying in the moment, but it does something
else too. Gately feels more alive than ever before. His focus is on the present
instant. By the end of Infinite Jest, Hal has stopped being motivated to
succeed, and is paralyzed by the future now that he has given up on an
organizing narrative system. “The familiarity of the Academy took on a crushing
cumulative aspect” (896). Among other images of this accumulation, Hal imagines
a pile of all the food he will eat in his lifetime. He is like the addicts
discussed elsewhere in the book who leave AA not because of the present moment,
but because they imagine their whole future. Hal needs the eternal present
aspect of AA narrative when success-or-failure fails him.
The success-or-failure aspect of therapy necessitates an
authority figure to legislate success. In the story of the Grief Therapist,
there are two separate sections of scholarship on therapy: one for patients to
read, and one for therapists themselves. There is a hierarchy of the two roles,
which is a theme continued in detail in the chapter on the psych ward M.D. and
clinically depressed Kate Gompert. In the M.D.’s interaction with Kate, the
M.D. masks his emotions: “The doctor’s interior state was somewhere between
trepidation and excitement, which manifested outwardly as a sort of blandly
deep puzzled concern” (70). The therapist does not express himself because only
Kate is supposed to talk about herself. The M.D. instead makes institutionally
approved minimal responses: “The doctor’s small nods were designed to appear
not as responses but as invitations to continue, what Dretske called
Momentumizers” (72). The limits of therapy strictly govern the M.D.’s words and
actions. As a result, the M.D. is overwhelmingly concerned with superficial
appearances. He is “hale and pink-cheeked and poreless, and... almost always
smells unusually clean and good” (68). He takes handwritten notes because he
believes laptops give “a cold impression” (73). But the M.D.’s detailed
awareness of his appearance does not allow for communication. “Katherine Anne
Gompert probably felt that here was another M.D. with zero sense of humor. This
was probably because she did not understand the strict methodological limits
that dictated how literal he, a doctor, had to be with admits on the psych
ward” (71). The therapist’s interior state is so hidden by the form of therapy
that Kate doesn’t think it exists. The interaction is, like television,
one-way; only the patient is up for discussion; the therapist is the spectator:
“Patients on other floors during other rotations had sometimes complained that
they sometimes felt like something in a jar he was studying intently through
all that glass” (72). Unfortunately, Kate already suffers from feeling alone,
and her interaction with the M.D. can only encourage the feeling since there is
no way Kate can break through the glass of the formal hierarchical situation of
therapy.
AA is, by contrast to therapy, based on a non-hierarchal
reciprocal relationship. It is the only major narrative system in Infinite
Jest without hierarchal relationships. Tennis in Infinite Jest is so
highly competitive that the athletes are always aware of their ranking.
Terrorism is completely autocratic. Television is a one-way interaction, and
even peer groups watching television together don’t occur very often in Infinite
Jest. AA is refreshingly democratic and peer-based. In AA groups, no
individual has power over another individual. There is an almost complete lack
of organizational hierarchy. Even the formal conventions of AA are called
Suggestions. The Suggestions are never enforced by the actual apparatus of AA:
“they can’t kick you out. You’re In
if you say you’re In. Nobody can get kicked out for any reason” (352).
The AA narrative system does have power behind it, but
the power comes from the outside situation. The suggestions carry a lot of
weight because recovering alcoholics are scared that they will succumb to their
addiction. One AA member explains the situation: “compare the totally optional
basic suggestion in Boston AA to, say for instance if you’re going to jump out
of an airplane, they ‘suggest’ you wear a parachute” (357). The power of AA is
“born not of zealotry or even belief but just of a chilled conviction that you
have no faith whatsoever left in yourself” (351). AA narrative has significant
power over its members because it is enforced by the members’ fear of their own
alcoholism.
Without any authority figure, and with only the power of
the recovering alcoholic’s fear of their own addiction, the system of AA is
imposed almost completely through the repetition of narratives. AA meetings are
a forum for members to meet and tell their story. Slowly, a newcomer learns to
reorganize his or her autobiography by internalizing the AA narrative pattern
so that it is in line with the examples the newcomer hears. There are also
other non-storytelling types of meetings in the real-world AA, but Infinite
Jest only includes the storytelling kind, which emphasizes how important
the narrative aspect of AA is to Infinite Jest.
The AA narrative system is homogenized, repetitive, and
not innovative. In Infinite Jest, however, the opposite of these traits
can be even worse. Dr. Rusk, the staff therapist at the tennis academy, is a
personification of therapy at its most intellectual. Her narrative system is
not simple or repetitive, it is complex and requires intelligence. Still, it is
completely unhelpful. Dr. Rusk is “regarded by the kids as whatever’s just
slightly worse than useless” (437). The reason the kids don't like her is that
she retreats into analytical and
intellectual scholarship when real people and their emotions are at stake. The
one time Dr. Rusk talks to a student in the text, she engages in total psychobabble
filled with esoteric therapy terms:
On the
level of objects and a protective infantile omnipotence where you experience
magical thinking and your thoughts and the behavior of objects’ relation to
your narcissistic wishes, the counterphobia presents as the delusion of some
special agency or control to compensate for some repressed wounded inner trauma
having to do with absence of control. (550)
The student is so lost in this that he thinks
counterphobia means fear of linoleum, but Dr. Rusk is stuck in her nonsensical
narrative system and unable to explain herself better.
I have already shown through the examples of tennis,
terrorism, and television the kind of criticisms that Infinite Jest
makes of the narrative systems it includes. Therapy is too much like these
other systems because it is based on success-failure dichotomy, it has
hierarchal relationships, and it is full of over-intellectualized meaningless
terms. Therapy is represented negatively because Infinite Jest is an
attempt to use narrative systems to talk about very specific problems in the
narratives of American culture. Therapy shares too many attributes of its
narrative system with other American narratives, so it is not a good narrative
form for Infinite Jest to appropriate.
The narrative of AA is well suited to Infinite Jest’s
situation. I have shown how AA is different from any of the other narrative
strategies of Infinite Jest, and how AA comes to dominate the text in Infinite
Jest. Now I will discuss how Infinite Jest draws from the form of AA
narratives as a way to invent a new literary aesthetic. AA style becomes a new
set of criteria for fiction, a counter against the deadening complete caprice
and flux that Wallace ascribes to postmodernism. Infinite Jest
inculcates its AA-influenced aesthetic by repetition of the AA narrative form,
just like actual AA meetings do. There are seven complete AA narratives quoted
at length in Infinite Jest, and a few more rendered indirectly. Each AA
narrative works as an example of the AA way to tell stories and hear stories.
By extension, this becomes the Infinite Jest method of writing and
reading literature.
The non-AA characters in Infinite Jest are truly
terrible listeners. Each is solipsistically alone, unable to make interpersonal
connections. In Infinite Jest’s world phones “allowed you to presume
that the other person on the other end was paying complete attention to you
while also permitting you not to have to pay anything close to complete
attention to her” (146). A new technology, videophony, is unpopular in part
because “callers now found they had to compose the same sort of earnest,
slightly overintense listeners’ expression they had to compose for in-person
exchanges” (146). The word compose hear is key, implying that nobody makes
those expressions out of actual sincere communication of interest in another
person. The motif of pretending to pay attention reoccurs throughout the book.
Within AA meetings listening is a skill that is
consciously worked on. Gately learns in AA that “it’s hard to really hear”
(365). meaning that although he could listen to the words being said at the
meeting, it was difficult for him to acknowledge an actual interpersonal
connection between himself and other recovering alcoholics. Then Gately learns
the key AA concept of Identifying. Identifying is to realize the basic human
similarity between the listener’s story and a speaker’s story. The opposite of
Identifying is Comparing. Comparing is the way listening to stories works
outside of the AA narrative system. The listener checks the story the listener
hears against the listener’s own story for similar events or attitudes as a way
to decide if there is a similarity. If the events and attitudes do not match
up, the person who Compares rejects the story as different. Gately says of his
progress in AA: “I remember for like the first fifty days or so I couldn’t hear
shit. I didn’t hear nothing. I’d just sit there and Compare, I’d go to myself,
like, ‘I never rolled a car,’ ‘I never bled from the rectum’” (365). The AA
narrative overcomes the propensity to Compare because both the speaker and the
listener organize their story along the lines of AA narratives, so their
stories follow the same narrative arc: “Identifying, unless you’ve got a stake
in Comparing, isn’t very hard to do, here [in AA]. Because if you sit up front
and listen hard, all the speakers’ stories of decline and fall and surrender
are basically alike, and like your own” (345). Recovering alcoholics can
Identify with each other’s stories because each story is organized the same
way, so that people with different experiences and personalities can all share
the same narrative.
Once Infinite Jest has sufficiently initiated the
reader into AA, it challenges the reader to Identify instead of Compare. The
first AA story to appear in Infinite Jest is by John L. The story is
very generic in its details, and outlines the basic AA form of decline,
conversion, and recovering. After John L.’s story there are a few others that
impress various points about AA narrative, and habituate the reader to the form
of AA narrative. Some of these speakers are negative examples in which the
speaker diverges from the AA narrative, and some are positive examples of an
orthodox AA narrative that works well. Then, there is the “meeting’s last and
maybe best... speaker” (376). Her story is repugnant. She was a prostitute and
freebase addict who smoked cocaine through her pregnancy, even through labor.
Her baby is stillborn, but she still keeps the little corpse with her for
months until the smell of the corpse (now actually physically stuck to her
chest) keeps her from prostituting anymore, and finally the authorities catch
up with her and send her to an asylum. This whole story is told with very few
references to her interior state and no invocations of pity from the audience.
It is mainly a chronicle of events ordered by the AA form. The audience pays
this speaker “the ultimate Boston AA compliment: they have to consciously
remember even to blink as they watch her, listening. I.D.ing without effort”
(379). The best stories in AA are the ones that make people lose their own
identity and mix with the speaker into a single group identity. The details of
the story shouldn’t matter as long as the form works. Even though her listeners
have never experienced what she has, they feel linked to it. If Infinite
Jest has succeeded in recreating AA aesthetics, then the reader will also
Identify with the speaker’s story, along with the AA audience.
It
should be apparent by now that AA narrative form is not irony. At an AA
meeting, the audience is embarrassed for a speaker who tries to use irony.
[The
speaker] is dreadfully, transparently unfunny; painfully new put pretending to
be at ease, to be an old hand, desperate to amuse and impress them. The guy’s
got the sort of professional background where he’s used to trying to impress
gatherings of persons. He’s dying to be liked up there. He’s performing. The
White Flag crowd can see all this. Even the true morons among them see right
through the guy. This is not a regular audience. A Boston AA is very sensitive
to the presence of ego. When the new guy introduces himself and makes an ironic
gesture and says ‘I’m told I’ve been given the Gift of Desperation. I’m looking
for the exchange window,’ it’s so clearly unspontaneous, rehearsed... that just
a few polite titters resound, and people shift in their seats with a slight but
signal discomfort... Speakers who are accustomed to figuring out what an
audience wants to hear and then supplying it find out quickly that this
particular audience does not want to be supplied with what someone else thinks
it wants. (367)
Irony here is professional not personal,
rehearsed not spontaneous, and definitely not sincere. This does not mean that
there are no jokes in AA. The ironic speaker’s joke doesn’t fit because it has
only one purpose, to make him look good. But the speaker is painfully new, his
life is a wreck. He is not good. So the kind of irony he affects is in a way
dishonest, and it is not part of AA narrative form.
There is a lot of irony Infinite Jest. Irony is
the environment of the book, and the habitual form that most of the characters
use. Wallace‘s style can become, like the ironic speaker above, merely about
how it making the author look good. Clair Messud remarked in her review for the
Times that “reading Infinite Jest is not unlike spending a prolonged
holiday with a precocious but exasperating adolescent boy.” Messud is reacting
to the overwelmingly impressive style of the book, which she calls adolescent
because the style seems like an effusive overcompensation for insecurity. Just
as the speaker’s joke is primarily about how it is a good joke, Wallace’s
fiction can be read as being about how it is good fiction, but that does not
account for the many passages full of earnest sincerity in Infinite Jest.
Nor does it account for Infinite Jest’s negative portrayal of the ironic
speaker.
The disputed position of irony in Infinite Jest is
part of a larger question about form and communication. Infinite Jest is
at the confluence of two narrative systems. Postmodernism is form-conscious and
concerned with formal innovation and exploration. AA narrative form is not
innovative. AA form attempts to be as unremarkable as possible, so that it does
not detract from the listener’s attention to Identifying with the story. Infinite
Jest is still very innovative in its form, but it retains the idea from AA
that narrative should have a purpose beyond itself. AA members go to meetings
daily to hear stories that all have roughly the same form. They do this because
the stories are all structured for the purpose of allowing Identification.
Identification is more than just communication. It is an experience in which
the listener forgets him or herself and fuses identity with the speaker.
Communication becomes the purpose of good narrative in Infinite Jest,
and every formal innovation must have communication as its purpose.
Some traits of the book associated with postmodernism are
actually expressions of AA aesthetics applied to the book. For example, Infinite
Jest is a bulky aggregate of innumerable detail, which can be understood in
the context of other postmodern magnum opuses. On the other hand, it may have
something to do with the way Don Gately habitually takes a front-row seat at AA
meetings. He sits “right up where he could see dentition and pores, with zero
obstructions or heads between him and the podium, so the speaker fills his
whole vision, which makes it easier to really hear” (369). The text of Infinite
Jest gives the reader all the little teeth and pores that Gately seeks at
AA meeting. The book fills the the reader’s vision with its level of detail and
its interconnected universe of subplots. The reader gets sucked in, which is to
say the reader Identifies.
Infinite Jest lacks resolution, which is another
trait it shares with a lot of postmodern literature. But where other postmodern
literature has no resolution as a way of subverting conventional narrative, Infinite
Jest’s type of lack of resolution has more in common with AA’s narrative
form. I have already explained how AA narratives have, instead of resolution,
an eternal present of recovery, because an ending is future oriented, and AA
narratives only admit of the most vague possible sense of future. Like Gately
in withdrawl, taking it one moment at a time, in Infinite Jest the
present moment is always endurable. “What was undealable-with was the thought
of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering” (860). Any
reader overly intent on the future, on finishing the book, will be distraught
to reach it and find that it does not really exist. But any reader of that sort
would probably quit a long time before reaching the end. A New York Times book
review said that “while there are many uninteresting pages in this novel, there
are not many uninteresting sentences” (McInerny). Just like in AA, the reader
of Infinite Jest has to be in the moment, otherwise the view of all
those sentences, lined up and gleaming, will overwhelm.
In AA, every member gets to tell his or her story. It’s
part of the unhierarchical nature of the program. Infinite Jest mimics
this by including the back story of an astonishing number of characters. The
text emphasizes its aesthetic by making it also a principle in the film work of
Jim Incandenza. Anti-figurant is Incandenza’s term for his film style of
multiple speaking parts. He talks about it as a response to the show Cheers! where bit-actors called
figurants would fill the tables of the bar set and mime talking but not
actually speak.
[In
reaction Jim] goddamn made bloody well sure that either the whole entertainment
was silent or else if it wasn’t silent that you could bloody well hear every
single performer’s voice, no matter how far out on the cinematographic or
narrative periphery they were; and it wasn't just the self-conscious
overlapping dialogue of a poseur like Schwulst or Altman, i.e. it wasn’t just
the crafted imitation of aural chaos: it was real life’s egalitarian babble of
figurantless crowds. (835)
It is significant that the show in which many
people are unable to tell their stories is set in a bar, the opposite social
arena from AA. In Infinite Jest, like Jim’s films, an astonishing amount
of characters get their biography inserted somewhere into the text, even if
they are quite minor characters. In this way Infinite Jest is like an AA
meeting, or a conglomeration of meetings. The fiction is a forum for every
story to get told, for every person’s life to be organized and made
communicable by narrative.
In AA, the purpose of narrative is to allow for
Identification, which creates a way of ranking narratives based on how well
they allow for identification. When Infinite Jest utilizes AA
aesthetics, reinstates a division between good and bad art that contradicts
postmodernism.
I’m
not saying I’m able to work consistently out of this premise, but it seems like
the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies somewhere in the art’s
heart’s purpose, the agenda and the consciousness behind the text. It’s got
something to do with love. With having the discipline to talk out of a part of
yourself that love can instead of the part that just wants to be loved. I know
this doesn’t sound hip at all. I don’t know. But it seems like one of the
things that the really great writers do... is ‘give’ the reader
something...What’s poisonous about the cultural environment today is that it
makes this so scary to carry out. Really good work probably comes from a
willingness to disclose yourself, open yourself up in spiritual and emotional
ways that risk making you really feel something. To be willing to sort of die
in order to move the reader, somehow. And the effort to actually do it, not
just talk about it, requires a kind of courage that I don’t seem to have yet. (McCaffery,
150)
Wanting to be loved is
wanting the reader to Compare. It is a hope that the reader will see how well
something is written and conclude that the writer is really good. But a writer
who writes with love writes to communicate, and wants the reader to Identify
with the story. The most interesting part of the quotation is that Wallace says
he does not have the courage to really do that yet, only talk about it. It is
true that for all of the ways that Infinite Jest incorporates the
meaningfulness of AA narratives, Infinite Jest itself is not an AA
narrative. And even though Infinite Jest is full of insider information
on AA, even though Infinite Jest is wholeheartedly enthusiastic about
AA, Infinite Jest still locates its perspective outside AA. The book
points out ways that people are not communicating, that systems are
meaningless, and that people aren’t feeling. Its use of AA narrative is an
elegant solution to the problems it raises. But Wallace points to the solution
without letting AA solve the problem inside text. He does not write in a fully
communicative, meaningful, and emotional way.
Charles Tavis is
a self-reflexive key to Infinite Jest’s maximalism, its bulk of 1079
dense pages, which relates to Wallace’s self criticism of his own “courage.”
Tavis, who runs the tennis academy after Jim Incandenza dies, is a maximalist
speaker because of “the pathological openness of his manner, the way he thinks
out loud about thinking out loud” (519). The most succinct example of Tavis’
speaking style is that as an adolescent he would hang around “and lurk creepily
on the fringe, listening, but that he’d always say, loudly, in the lull in the
group’s conversation something like ‘I’m afraid I’m far too self-conscious and
awkward really to join in here, so I’m just going to lurk around creepily at
the fringe and listen, if that’s all right, just so you know’” (517). Tavis’
self-reflexively questions his own motives and humbly denigrates himself so
exhaustively that his words become numbing. Tavis acknowledges his own
unintelligibility right along with everything else, of course. “He’d apologize
profusely when you had no idea what that sentence meant and say maybe the
obfuscation had been unconsciously deliberate, out of some kind of
embarrassment [on his part]” (516).
This last quotation, out of context, could also read as
an apologia for the difficulty of Infinite Jest. Infinite Jest is
just as remarkably long and difficult to understand as Tavis’ speech. The book
provoked, after all, such reviews as “Infinite Jest billows and sags in
ungainly proportion, at least a partial victim of its own ambition” (Messud)
and “Somewhere in the mess, the reader suspects, are the outlines of a great
novel... but it’s stuck there, half excavated, unable to break completely free”
(Kakutani). This seems a lot like the “little razor-to-jugular and
hangman’s-noose-over-imaginary-cross-beam motions” (287) that upperclassmen
make at Tavis’ interminable convocation address.
Perversely, Tavis’ openness is completely unattractive.
One character is prompted by the thought of Tavis to say “that pathological
openness is about as seductive as Tourette’s syndrome” (1048). The way Tavis
speaks is compared to “peeling his skull back and exposing his brain to you
without any warning or invitation” (521). Tavis is a disgusting character who
shows off the worst aspects of the book. He is a dark mirror where aspects of Infinite
Jest’s style, such as obsessive self-consciousness and verbal density, are
present only as a result of insecurity, but without any noble purpose.
Tavis is such a maximalist partially because he does not
have a set of conventions, like AA narrative, to limit his speech in a
structured but inventive way. Equally important is that despite the full verbal
disclosure that Charles Tavis always achieves, he is not actually capable of
opening up.
Tavis
is terribly shy around people and tries to hide it by being very open and
expansive and wordy and bluff... Tavis is very open and expansive and wordy,
but so clearly uses these qualities as a kind of shield that it betrays a
frightened vulnerability almost impossible not to feel for. (517)
He takes so long to be honest because every
attempt to do so raises more attempts to hide that in turn have to be exposed.
He has to tell a little girl “I’m doing my best to cast all this in terms the
you you are right now can be comfortable with, Tina. Though I need to tell you
I feel uncomfortable adjusting a presentation down or toward anyone in any way,
since I’m terribly vain of my reputation for candor” (521). For Tavis, honesty
is an empty form because he can not be honest with himself. He can only state
all the possible things he might be feeling, because he doesn’t know himself.
He wasn’t in it for the Thank-You’s, that a person who did
a service for somebody’s gratitude
was more like a 2-D cut out image than a bona fide person, at least that’s what
he thought, he said what did Hal and Avril and Mario think? was he a genuine
3-D person? Was he perhaps just rationalizing some legitimate hurt? (286)
A simpler character
would either mind or not mind doing something without receiving a thank-you, or
else mention it. Tavis wonders if he minds, wonders if he should mind, and
wonders if his motives for the action that should have been thanked were honest
in the first place.
Infinite Jest’s length also arises out of the
difficulty of being honest about an inability to be honest. The text criticizes
itself throughout in self-castigating meta-commentaries of which Tavis is only
one example. The book’s title refers to a lethally entertaining film so
engrossing that anyone who sees it never pays attention to anything else again.
The film is a nightmare version of Identification with television in the place
of a story-teller. The film raises the question of whether a big engrossing
book like Infinite Jest is wrong for taking people away from their
lives. One character becomes so obsessed with the television show M*A*S*H* that
he spends the last years of his life withdrawn from his family, scribbling
notes about the show that support a deranged theory of apocalyptic prophesies
the supposedly encoded in the show. This is a rendering of the referential
mania encouraged by Infinite Jest through the many hints of impending
apocalypse that are present in the text. Finally, the very structure of the
novel is a kind of self-criticism. It elevates a style of narrative (AA) that
is not actually its own, which creates the same apologetic situation that Tavis
is in. The force of honesty in a book that can not simply state itself honestly
causes the text to balloon out of all proportion.
The first step in the twelve steps of AA is a useful tool
for understanding how Infinite Jest invokes the narrative system of AA,
makes new aesthetic goals by metaphorically applying AA’s system to literature,
and then falls short of those very goals, but without being a failure. The
first step is to admit that there is a problem. The first step does not require
that anything be done about the problem, just that it is admitted. If Infinite
Jest is the first step in a progression, then just to realize that the
goals are being fallen short of is important. Over a thousand pages is not too
long to work out that first step. The book is big enough to create a mark where
one generation is pulling away from what has come before, stepping in a
different direction from where the momentum of the older generation is headed.
Postmodernism exposes rules and conventions, but the ironic exposing of rules
and conventions, rather than the rules and conventions themselves, is the
environment of literature currently, and to anyone who wants to do something
with the structure of narrative besides expose it, the environment is stifling.
AA is a set of rules and conventions that empower narrative to achieve some
goals not present in postmodernism.
Where the progression that begins with this first step
will really end up is uncertain. Wallace is a young enough writer that the
possibilities of what he might do in the future are almost equally as
interesting to talk about as what he has done already. His collection of short
stories, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, is inconclusive. Many of the
stories are about people who are completely self absorbed and cut off from the
world, but narrative solutions like AA are not apparent. It may be that Wallace
will get the courage to open his writing up completely to the possibility of
honest communication through the formal constraints of his choice. It isn’t
clear right now if that kind of writing would be as interesting as Infinite
Jest. His sensibilities and strengths as a writer are well suited to his
current predicament: stuck somewhere between the self-conscious, form-conscious
writing that is obviously indebted to a postmodern tradition, and a narrative
whose purpose is connection and communication.
Works Cited
Hager, Chris. “On
Speculation: Infinite Jest and American Fiction After
Postmodernism.” 1996.
<http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/8175/thesisb.htm>
Kakutani, Michiko. “A
Country Dying of Laughter. In 1,079 Pages.” Rev. of Infinite Jest.
New York Times 13 February 1996, late ed.
Messud, Claire.
“Crushed by a Killing Joke.” Rev. of Infinite Jest. The Times 6
July
1996.
McCaffery, Larry. “An
Interview with David Foster Wallace.” Review of Contemporary
Fiction 13.2 (1993): 127-50.
<http://www.centerforbookculture.org/interviews/interview_wallace.html>
McInerny, Jay. “The
Year of the Whopper.” Rev. of Infinite Jest. New York Times 3
March 1996, late ed.
Theuwis, Toon. “The
Quest for Infinite Jest.” Belgium: Ghent University
Press, 1999.
<http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/8175/toon.html>
Wallace, David Foster. Brief
Interviews with Hideous Men. Boston: Little Brown,1999.
- - - . Infinite Jest. Boston: Little Brown, 1996.