weirdly old-fashioned and wildly uneven – David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest at 30
- Written by Julian Murphet, Jury Professor of English and Language and Literature, Adelaide University
Thirty years ago, living in Cambridge, England, I wandered into Heffers Bookshop and picked up a monstrous new novel on the display table. It had a title out of Hamlet, a Simpsons-sky dustjacket, hundreds of endnotes, and ran to almost 1,100 pages. Infinite Jest occupied much of that cold February and March, and to this day I remember finishing it with a sensation of frustrated exhaustion.
It seemed then (as it does now) a wildly uneven book held together by something new in American fiction of the postmodern age: a white-hot purity of moral purpose that made it seem weirdly old-fashioned, despite all the bells and whistles of its cumbersome near-future satire about a nation amusing itself to death.
It was, undoubtedly, a major achievement, though it was also clear that something was not quite right with its writer, David Foster Wallace. Aesthetic misjudgements had led to so many wincing misfires, lapses of taste and tedious longueurs that it all seemed indicative of a deeper subjective disequilibrium.
In that sense, the book was “true” in a way the author’s journalism (to which one turned with curiosity) was not. In those snappy features, written for Esquire, Rolling Stone, Première and other glossy magazines, the ardent moral vision is worn as a winning professional mask. It speaks in a voice mixed of pedantry, whimsy and stern judgement.
Smart, alert, observant, mordantly funny, the Wallace of the non-fiction also came across as a bit of an asshole. And an asshole, it turned out, he was. But more of that later.
Literature of exhaustion
Twelve years later in 2008, Wallace was dead at age 46. That suicide has subsequently woven something of a halo over the bandanaed-average-Joe-nice-rural-Midwest-boy image cultivated by the author while alive. Posthumous books, a film and a veritable industry of critical approbation have only contributed to his cult status.
Today, Wallace lives online as a saintly, almost Buddhist YouTuber, dropping bromides and sallies of wisdom, looking always earnest and sincere, if not clean-cut. It is a sad fate for a writer who, at one point, was the great hope of American letters.
What are Wallace’s claims to our attention today? And what of Infinite Jest itself, the work by which he will and should be judged, on which he worked on and off for a decade? What have 30 years done to that achievement?
David Foster Wallace in 2006.
Steve Rhodes, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY
The fixed terms
“We all suffer alone in the real world,” Wallace once said; “true empathy’s impossible.” These are the fixed terms of his art, and of the “new sincerity” itself.
The postmodern offended him because it seemed to have capitulated in advance to the wickedest tendencies of the culture. What we needed was a literature that could fashion a plausible enough verisimilitude of empathy, sufficient to keep its hope alive in the howling snowstorms of contemporary nihilism.
Wallace was an old-fashioned American conservative. He voted for Reagan’s second term and venerated Republicans like John McCain. He had no sense of politics as a passionate collective struggle over resources and values. The values were already consecrated in the US Constitution; it was bad actors who were gobbling up too many of the resources – not a class enemy.
Like Cormac McCarthy, Wallace was a serious moralist with zero political vision: witness the cynical collapsing of Left and Right in Infinite Jest and the witlessly two-dimensional image it presents of collective commitments beyond a functioning bureaucracy.
Wallace’s interest rests with the individuals who suffer the consequences of a rapid dismantling of the hard-won cultural consensus of the postwar pax Americana. Their misery, their exploitation by interests that care nothing for psychic cohesion, real personal choice or emotional fulfilment, is his only true concern.
At Wallace’s funeral, DeLillo said: “He wanted to be equal to the vast, babbling, spin-out sweep of contemporary culture.” But did he? He seemed blind to the gathering forces of much that has been inspiring about that culture since: Black Lives Matter, antifa, queer and trans activism, and of course feminism.
Wallace’s women are, well, a problem. Like Salinger, McCarthy and Updike before him, he knew how to do men, especially younger ones, but his women are lamentable. Avatars of the polymorphously perverse and brilliant women of Pynchon, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow are sketched in, but with woeful incompetence. You get the sense that if he’d ever read any Adrienne Rich or Audre Lorde, it might have killed him.
There is an interview with Charlie Rose (remember him?) where Wallace casually observes that, unforgivably, “females” just don’t like Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven. “Females.” What’s with them?
The lethal Entertainment, it turns out, features one such “female”, an impossibly attractive one in a white gown, leaning into a crib and mouthing the words “I’m so sorry” – as if the most blissful thing imaginable were a female’s apology for the crime of having given you birth, separated from you, and then cock-teasing you for the rest of your life, before killing you off.
The woman playing this Madonna says of herself: “I’m perfect. I’m so beautiful I drive anybody with a nervous system out of their fucking mind!” She wears a veil as a favour to the world of men whom she would otherwise disable by virtue of being “perfect”, whatever that means.
The uninterrogated assumptions at work here amount to a kind of “incel” misogyny. As for the rest, Megan Garber has observed, “women’s stories get treated as one of Wallace’s trademark footnotes might be: decorative, dexterous, whimsical, trivial. Pretty afterthoughts. Optional.”
The #MeToo revelations by ex-girlfriend Mary Karr that Wallace was obsessively predatory, violently combustible, a stalker and a serial disposer of young groupies, have rocked his reputation to the extent that Yale professor Amy Hungerford posted a withering article about “not reading Infinite Jest” and the Guardian published a story that claimed “reading the ultimately heartless and intellectually empty Infinite Jest was the biggest waste of a summer I ever spent”.
Is that right? It is always best to make literary judgements on the basis of reading.
I’ve slogged through Infinite Jest twice (so you don’t have to!) and my critical sense that it is not a good book has only been confirmed. There are good things in it, but they are drowned out by noise, a truly exasperating authorial style, ridiculous plot elements unworthy of serious fiction, and an ambient misogyny. One finally wishes for a violently edited, 250-page collection of short stories that focused on the addicts of Ennet House.
A year later in 1997, I returned to Heffers to buy a copy of the long-awaited Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon. Here, it seemed to me then and has seemed to me every day since, was a novel so incandescently great, so towering and substantial, so rich with imagined worlds and teeming with political implication, that Infinite Jest must disappear forever in its shadow. Yet Infinite Jest is the book that has exerted by far the greater influence over the course of literature since, for better or for worse.
Authors: Julian Murphet, Jury Professor of English and Language and Literature, Adelaide University
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