In 1994, American essayist and literary critic Sven Birkerts predicted that the birth of the internet age would bring about the death of a certain reading experience: the virtuoso novels of Steinbeck or Pynchon that facilitate a prolonged, all-consuming immersion were withering away, and our attention was shifting to entertainment with a more instant gratification.
But two years later, a resuscitation occurred. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest debuted, and at nearly one thousand pages with an ensemble of over a hundred characters and an additional hundred pages of endnotes of definitions and adjunct short stories, the new novel sparked a cultish devotion. Birkets partook in the fanatical optimism too, stating that the novel used a “savvy co-optation of new media forms”, internalising electronic culture in the encyclopedic form of the novel itself. It was born out of modernity, and it was immediately resonant. Infinite Jest is now celebrating its 30th anniversary, and a new edition introduced by singer and writer Michelle Zauner hit bookstores at the beginning of February. Wallace has been effectively beatified, and Infinite Jest hailed an incredible literary accomplishment, but its current relevance isn’t merely retrospective – it’s prophetic.
Set in a dystopian, near-future America, the novel primarily focuses on two institutions in Boston, Massachusetts, the first being the Enfield Tennis Academy (E.T.A.). In the E.T.A., the main protagonist, athletic and intellectual prodigy Hal Incandenza, suffers from a uniquely American affliction. As a clandestine weed addict, he has a hollowed internal self, lacking in bona fide feeling, and he is supremely lonely. What he is lonely for, or what he dreads to confront, is his “hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia”. He is representative of the ironically detached ennui so in vogue in modern America, trapped in a lonely introspection as sincerity and presence fade out of fashion.
Wallace forces this confrontation of our hideous selves right down the hill from the E.T.A. at the Ennett House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, where Don Gately, recovering oral narcotics addict and hero of the novel, resides. As he maintains sobriety, Gately honestly surrenders himself to the cliches of the Alcoholics Anonymous Twelve Step program, confronting his flawed past with stoic lucidity. If sincerity is the key to introspection, it’s worth examining the central question of the novel that Wallace asks in earnest: what do we give ourselves to in order to live? Both the E.T.A. and Ennett House function as places of community devotion – a way to confront or escape oneself. Whether through the rigid doctrine of AA or the mentally and physically exerting game of tennis, the characters surrender themselves ritualistically to larger community imperatives.
The childhood training facility of the head coach of the E.T.A (Gerhardt Schtitt) had a sign that read “WE ARE WHAT WE WALK BETWEEN”, and the mantra echoes not just habitually in the academy’s training rooms, but also through the interpersonal relationships that dominate the novel. But community driven self-trancendence, Schtitt laments, loses weight in an individuality-driven “U.S. of modern A.” prone to solipsism. The U.S. “is not a team or a code, but a sort of sloppy intersection of desires and fears” that encourages the myopic pursuit of individual happiness. Interdependence, then, is ultimately stripped of meaning entirely, leaving us kneeling singularly at the altar of our one person alone.
This struggle between independence and interdependence takes on a more tangible political meaning within the novel as well, and it proves to be Wallace’s most prescient hyperbole of America’s current climate. Under the guise of “interdependence”, the United States has joined the vichified puppet states of Canada and Mexico into the Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N.) under the leadership of President Johnny Gentle. As a former Vegas lounge singer and germaphobe, Gentle embodies Donald Trump’s theatricality born from political entertainment media as well as his ambitions of purification, which characterise fascist and authoritarian movements. In the political sphere, interdependence is bludgeoning others into submitting to one man’s vile whims. It is a grotesquely familiar American narcissism.
In a 1993 interview, Wallace described the ethics of fiction as another facet of interdependence. He argued that while we suffer in reality solitarily, fiction is a “nourishing [and] redemptive” glimpse into the lives of varyingly eccentric and neurotic characters which makes us “less alone inside”. Yet with the proliferation of social media and short-form video content, it is perfectly possible to live a life in mindless solitude. In fact, Infinite Jest predicted such a state with its titular samizdat. In the most ludicrous plot, a terrorist gang of wheelchair-bound Quebecois separatists, Les Assassins des Fauteilles Roulants, unleash a lethally pleasurable film (referred to as The Entertainment or Infinite Jest) that renders those who watch permanently enraptured and catatonic. While Wallace was endlessly critical of TV and believed it would enable social and spiritual decay, the advent of doomscrolling becomes a more apt and odious comparison. As I trancedly scroll through an endless feed of gratifying short-form content, entirely apathetic to the passing time, I can’t help but feel that The Entertainment is only a mildly worse invention.
When I finally decided to read Infinite Jest this past summer, I was in a state of spiritual inertia. Awaiting moving abroad to Dublin, lounging on pool decks half asleep, apathetically absorbed by my phone, I wanted to give myself to something intimidating and meaningful. Wallace observed a certain dread that afflicts the average person when sitting with a piece of literature for longer than 20 minutes. Reading favours intentional focus and presence over passive cognition, and from Infinite Jest’s first page, I immediately dedicated myself to pushing through my intellectual unease. At my loneliest and most apathetic, I quickly discovered that the novel is clever and hauntingly sad. It is unrelenting in its honesty about the deepest, most shameful and grotesque parts of the human condition, but it is also uniquely hilarious. I saw myself in the anhedonic, lonely Hal, and I felt energised by Gately’s surrender to sincere self-amelioration and understanding. To use a Boston AA euphemism, I was Able To Identify. It is a novel for the lonely, for the addicted, for the obsessive, and it requires a level of attention and discernment that is basically alien in today’s world.
Towards the beginning of the novel, wheelchair assassin turned double agent Remy Marathe observed that the “U.S.A. word for fanatic” means, literally, “worshiper at the temple”. But, he finishes, “are we not all of us fanatics”? I look at Wallace’s fanbase, often mischaracterised as performative and phallocratic, and see his own disciples. While reading the novel in a cafe (it’s legal, you should try it), one man with a classic hipster look approached me to ask how I was enjoying it. The conversation struck me with how energising Infinite Jest really is, how it pulls its readers out of solitary introspection and energises them into intellectual stimulation and interpersonal connection. It is all I find myself wanting to talk or write about; it is a counter-addiction to the particularly noxious habits of the digital age.
Marathe and Wallace, by extension, leave us with a clear thesis to live by. We must “choose [our] temple of fanaticism with great care”. In the Western world, with endless choices at our lazy disposal, Wallace teaches us to use our discernment to avoid what is internally paralysing and unhealthy and instead give ourselves to something full and sincere. Thirty years after its release, I chose the right temple, and I urge you to pick it up and choose it too.
