The Art's Heart's Purpose- Braving the Narcissistic Loop of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest

8/11/2019 The Art's Heart's Purpose- Braving the Narcissistic Loop of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest

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"The Art's Heart's Purpose":Braving the Narcissistic Loop of David Foster Wallace's InfiniteJestMary K. Holland aa Trinity University, San Antonio, TexasPublished online: 07 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Mary K. Holland (2006) "The Art's Heart's Purpose": Bravingthe Narcissistic Loop of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest , Critique: Studies inContemporary Fiction, 47:3, 218-242, DOI: 10.3200/CRIT.47.3.218-242

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218 CRITIQUE

The Arts Hearts Purpose:Braving the Narcissistic Loop ofDavid Foster Wallaces Infinite Jest

MARY K. H OLLAND

e come to David Foster Wallaces fiction through the lens of irony,a tricky, risky, even at times useless lens. We refract our reading inthis way because Wallace instructs us to, which puts us and his fic-

tion in a precarious position. Wallace is the sort of writer, rare these days, whopens not only fiction but also manifestos for fiction, and Infinite Jest is a novelconceived in the fire of such a manifesto. We cannot help but read this novel onlyin the context of the agenda that Wallace so clearly and passionately articulatedshortly before its publication and by considering its success in implementing thatagenda. To date, critical consensus deems Jest an impressive, if troubled, success.I argue, however, that Infinite Jest fails to deliver on the agenda that Wallace setfor it, not only because it fails to eschew empty irony for the earnestness that Wal-lace imagines but also, and more importantly, because it fails to recognize andaddress the cultural drive toward narcissism that fuels and is fueled by that irony.

In a 1993 interview with Larry McCaffery and in E Unibus Pluram: Televi-sion and U.S. Fiction, Wallace characterizes his writerly position as a third- orfourth-generation postmodern novelist, who has inherited a world of problemsfrom his literary ancestors, most fundamentally in the form of irony. Although itwas just what the U. S. hypocrisy of the fifties and sixties called for, irony hasbecome, according to Wallace, an end in itself, a measure of hip sophisticationand literary savvy (McCaffery 147). This fall from biting instrumentality intothe vapid mimesis of an intellectually dead culture is inescapable, Wallace pointsout, because of ironys exclusively negative nature: Its critical and destructive,a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. Butironys singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the

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hypocrisies it debunks (E Unibus Pluram 183). Having done its jobclearingthe literary landscape and imagination of outdated assumptions about art and theworldirony is left to chatter away in toothless self-reflexivity. Further, Wallaceestablishes a crucial link between irony and mediation that exposes exactly theself-reflexive loop he must escape if he is to make a difference in his novels.Irony, he claims, lost its critical teeth when it became the aura that surroundsus1 a reversal of its predecessor, earnestnessthat could occur only throughthe magical ubiquity of television. 2 Televisions adoption of irony as its dominantmode in both advertising and programming ruined the constructive possibilitiesof irony, making it such an invisible part of our environment that it was trans-formed from reactionary to the norm. The castration of irony is, for Wallace, animportant example of the destructiveness of unconscious mediationof the abil-ity for the medium to eclipse the message: television destroys all authority andthen replaces it with itself, so that whatever it transmits disappears in irrelevancein the shadow of the authoritative fact of its transmission. Irony, as televisionsregular rhetoric, becomes, then, no longer a tool either in- or outside its wavesand radiation but only fuel for the mediating machine. How can fiction devotedto the same techniques of irony and mediation convey more than its medium?

Wallaces stated solution to the late postmodernists quandary is to turn awayfrom the ironic quicksand that he inherited and return to the kind of writing hisancestors left behinda return to emotion, earnestness, belief, and straightfor-wardness (E Unibus Pluram 19293). He strives to write fiction that demandsthat its reader recognizes its mediating voices, thereby inviting the reader tomake an emotional investment in it. According to Wallace, the only way to con-struct a novel that enables the reader to do this, is for the author to demand of himself the same painful emotional investment and reaching out:

It seems like the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies some-where in the arts hearts purpose, the agenda of the consciousness behindthe text. Its got something to do with love. With having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that can love instead of the part that just wants to

be loved. (McCaffery 148)

At the end of the McCaffery interview, Wallace goes so far as to characterize theproper work of the contemporary writer as a kind of parenting, a cleaning up of the mess inherited from the writers raucous predecessors that implies a need forthe authority and responsibility of which postmodernism in general is happy tohave rid itself. Through all of these surprisingly traditional tasks that he assignsto the contemporary writer runs the same implacable current: the writers need toforgo the solipsistic disaffection that has become identical with postmodern ironyand reach out to the reader and create characters that also can reach out to eachother in earnest connection.

But before he has even finished his manifesto, Wallace begins to demonstratethe difficultyperhaps the impossibilityof being earnestly other-directed in a

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culture defined by disaffected irony and self-interest. In the interview withMcCaffery, he mocks his own sincere investment in writing with lovecallingfor an accompaniment of woodwinds, apologizing for being sappyand wor-ries about the unhipness of his arts hearts purpose (148, 149). Rather than endhis television essay on the near-lyrical vision of a next generation of postmodernwriters willing to risk sentimentality, melodrama. Credulity, Wallace resorts toa snide example of exactly the I dont really mean what I say variety of ironythat he has criticized so strongly in this same essay: Todays most engagedyoung fiction does seem like some kind of lines ends end. I guess that meanswe all get to draw our own conclusions. Have to. Are you immensely pleased(193). The ironic uncertainty that he expresses here in both content and gram-matical evasivenesswith the missing final question markundercuts all theheartfelt assertions about selflessness and love that have come before. How cana writer, however well intentioned, survive his own unconscious addiction toirony? How can a society? Wallace asks these questions through Infinite Jest ,with a predictably bleak answer. His greatest accomplishment in the novel willbe to construct not a character strong enough to escape the ironic trap that thenovel has set, but rather one earnest enough to suffer the irony and brave enoughto struggle heroically to escape it, but still doomed, almost sadistically so, by anauthor who cannot overcome his own ironic ambivalence.

This ironic conundrum is particularly striking and stubborn because it persistsin spite of Wallaces clear acknowledgment of it: [T]his stuff has permeated theculture. Its become our language; were so in it we dont even see that its oneperspective, one among many possible ways of seeing. Postmodern ironysbecome our environment (McCaffery 14748). Wallace uses a similar metaphorto describe drug addiction in Infinite Jest , when Don Gately recalls a joke told bya long-time Alcoholics Anonymous veteran after newcomer Gately has ragedagainst the program: This wise old whiskery fish swims up to three young fishand goes, Morning, boys, hows the water? and swims away; and the threeyoung fish watch him swim away and look at each other and go, What the fuck is water? and swim away (445). That night Gately dreams of being in waterthe same temperature he is (449), signaling his dawning awareness of thetreachery of an addiction so thoroughly permeating that one can no longer per-ceive where the addiction ends and the self begins. The fish joke diagnoses theproblem of addiction; Gatelys astute dream begins to move him from diagnosisto solution. Wallaces alignment of ironic disaffection with unconscious addic-tion through this metaphor shared by interview and novel suggests his hope(quite in contrast to the evidence of interview and essay) that a similar awarenessthat we all are swimming in irony may lead to our own growth out of it. So hiscreation of Hal Incandenza and Don Gately as characters in Infinite Jest who reg-ister the threat of irony and apathy and struggle to swim against the tide indicates,as critics have noted, the novels clear intent to enact Wallaces agenda forredemptive postmodern fiction. But, neither in the McCaffery interview nor in

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writing his novel does Wallace seem to consider the difficulty of positioning him-self outside the society that he consciously critiques or the impossibility of suc-cessfully critiquing a society whose sinister and powerful underpinnings remainunacknowledged: not just destructive irony but the pathological narcissism thatmakes us feel, when we try to reach out to others through earnest communica-tion, like fish out of water.

Narcissism as Postmodern Despair

Everything that David Foster Wallace needed to know about the peculiarlypostmodern angst of late-twentieth-century American culture he found on acruise ship. In A Supposedly Fun Thing Ill Never Do Again, 3 the eponymousessay in a collection examining absurdities and grotesqueries of American cul-ture, Wallace embarks on a mission for Harpers magazine to apply his quirkywisdom to a seemingly innocuous American experience. Instead, gradually, hefinds in the nonstop flow of staffers servitude and guests indulgences the secretto our American brand of despair. His essay and trip begin with a keen sense of despair, of the usual modernist-existential sort; associating it with the oceanaround him, he refers to it la Hemingway, as primordial nada (262). Accord-ingly, he reads the ships ubiquitous YOU ARE HERE maps as reorientation,not on the ships decks but in the universe, as reassurance of the passengers mereexistence (264 n.8). When his despair only deepens and ripens over two weeksof uninterrupted self-indulgence, Wallace begins to understand that cruise-shipculture breeds a particular kind of despair, rooted not in existential angst but inthe solipsistic narcissism of contemporary American culture: his need to validatehis existence ceases when he learns from the cruise the superior reassurance of ceasing to need.

Wallace finds that the cruise line promises exactly this needlessness with itsauthoritarian advertising strategy, the near-imperative use of the second per-son (267), which dictates not only what readers will experience on the cruise butalso how they will perceive and interpret it. This promise to relieve the passen-ger of all obligation not just for orchestrating a good time but for having it as wellWallace calls near-parental, an assumption of responsibility so absolute as toremove him as a thinking adult from the entire experience. He realizes that infan-tilizing removal of responsibility for the self is exactly the point, is both sign andend goal of the ultimate luxury of doing Absolutely Nothing (268, emphasis inoriginal):

How long has it been since you did Absolutely Nothing? I know exactly howlong its been for me. I know how long its been since I had every need metchoicelessly from someplace outside me, without my having to ask or evenacknowledge that I needed. And that time I was floating, too, and the fluidwas salty, and warm but not too, and if I was conscious at all Im sure I

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felt dreadless, and was having a really good time, and would have sent post-cards to everyone wishing they were here. (268)

What the ship promises with its obsessive desire to relieve the passenger of alldecisions and duties that both stress and denote adult life is the chance to with-draw entirely from a world in which we owe ourselves to others and to indulgein one in which we must do nothing but satisfy ourselves. Thus, its offer topamper us implies, as Wallace cleverly points out, a promise to swaddleordiaperus in the bliss of the infants narcissistic existence (261). To some extentthe ship fulfills its promise to mimic the mothers womb: Wallace admits that hesleeps marvelously on the heavy seas, for in heavy seas you feel rocked to sleep,with the windows spume a gentle shushing, the engines throb a mothers pulse(285). But ultimately he comes to understand that this promise to give us exact-ly what we wantfreedom from all needoperates as the source of the shipsproduction of despair.

After days of being almost forcibly gratified, cleaned-up after, and guided,Wallace finds himself looking longingly from his own island of luxury to a farsuperior and more luxurioushe thinkscruise ship anchored nearby. In thislonging, he realizes the sinister result of his pampered days: He is desperatelydissatisfied. Here, then, is the psychological syndrome thats got them all chat-ting like lunatics in the Lido Loungethe longer they are indulged, the greatertheir dissatisfaction becomes, until grievances that started picayune [. . .] quick-ly become nearly despair-grade (315). So, part of the problem lies in thepromise that one can be truly, wholly, unendingly satisfied. But a more terrifyingelement of the problem is how very much we want to believe such satisfaction ispossibleour willingness to believe the lie, our need to believe it, a need thatWallace identifies as a definitively American one: [T]he source of all the dis-satisfactions isnt the Nadir at all but [. . .] that ur-American part of me thatcraves and responds to pampering and passive pleasure: the Dissatisfied Infantpart of me, the part that always and indiscriminately WANTS (31516, empha-sis in original). Wanting alone, of course, poses no threat: we are born wanting;our insatiability is a priori (317). But despair grows out of our willingness tobelieve not just a big one told by the cruise company but the Big One, the lieat the heart of a whole culture of despair: that my Infantile part will be sated(316, emphasis in original). His is a postmodern, consumer-culture reworking of modernist, existential despair after it has been thoroughly reshaped by theauthoritarian hand of this floating model of contemporary society.

The cruise ship as Wallace experiences it does not delineate a thorough micro-cosm of American society, but it certainly represents that portion with the con-

sumer power to influence what we call American society. It carries a self-selectedcollection of people whose main goals while on the ship consist of consuming(food, drinks, passive entertainment, material goods) and being waited on, andwhose desire for passivity extends to the willingness to be disempowered by the

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decision-making, care-taking staff of the ship. The passengers probably have beendrawn to the cruise experience by the same highly mediating and manipulativeadvertising materials that Wallace details in his essay: they come on the ship hop-ing to become the happy people in the ads, whose images reflect for them the iden-tity they lack in their real lives but hope to attain during the unreal life of thecruise. As such the people are models of what happens in American culture whenone submits to the promises of consumption, disempowerment, and mediation asavenues to selfhood and self-fulfillment: one becomes caught in the cycle of need-ing to consume and merge into media to compensate for the social and individualidentities that one lacks, and then one withdraws further to deny that the cravingcontinues. In other words, they model the crisis of contemporary American cul-ture outlined by Christopher Lasch in The Culture of Narcissism and depicted byWallace in Infinite Jest .

Although Laschs social critique has failed to gain wide academic acceptance(his nostalgia for paternalism and tendency to confuse women and children intheir need of it go a long way toward explaining why), his examination of nar-cissism in late-twentieth-century American culture proves useful in explainingthe phenomenon of postmodern despair articulated so clearly in Wallaces cruiseship essay and demonstrated by his novel. According to Lasch, our epidemic of narcissism accompanies an epidemic of self loss; both arise out of our mediaage. He turns to Susan Sontags description of the modern world as the societyof the spectacle to point out the cultures crippling dependence on images of the world to validate its realities, on images of the self to infuse individuals witha sense of selfhood (4748). Lasch cites the individuals uncertainty aboutwhat is real as a societal consequence of this culture of reproduction, media-tion, and the image (90). 4 It is a short step from losing a sense of reality to los-ing the sense that anything is significant, and one made by both Lasch and Wal-lace: Lasch warns of the same cultural and individual disaffection bred by aculture of mediation that Wallace strives to banish with his own earnest writing(McCaffery 148). Also like Wallace in E Unibus Pluram, Lasch blames theculture of consumption, enabled by a culture of mediation, for exacerbating thisdisaffection; a culture of consumption promises to fill the aching void that itcreates and steadfastly refuses to fill (72). But Laschs critique goes further thanWallace does in the essay and interview that claim to establish an agendaof writing earnestly to give the reader something, and to ask the reader really tofeel something (McCaffery 148, 149, emphasis in original)for his next cre-ative work. Ultimately, Lasch declares that all we can feel is a longing to befree from longing (241), the desire to escape this endless escalation of unful-fillable desire. This desire to be free from desire, Lasch recognizes, is really adesire to be an infant again, caressed in a womb of absolute self-fulfillment.Thus, Laschs analysis centers on a cultural phenomenon that Wallaces pre- Infi-nite Jest critique elides: infantilizing narcissism as a central feature of modernAmerican society.

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An overused and overgeneralized word, narcissism as defined by Freudtakes two significantly distinct forms: primary and secondary. Essentially thedirecting of libidinal energy back toward the self rather than attaching it to exter-nal objects, narcissism begins in the human infant as a normal stage of psycho-logical development: The infant first expresses sexual (externally directed)instincts purely in the service of satisfying the ego instincts. Therefore, the earli-est sexual object, or object of libidinal attachment, is the mother, who satisfies allneeds and whom the infant perceives as being part of him- or herself (On Nar-cissism 88). In desiring the mother, the infant is simply desiring the self andexisting in a closed loop of constant fulfillment that seems to flow from no exter-nal source. Once the infant perceives his or her separation from the mother, how-ever, the unassailable libidinal position of absolute self-fulfillment is no longerpossible. So Freud posits a secondary narcissism, in which adults who remaindedicated to the satisfaction of the self create an ideal ego out of all they valuein themselves and extend their libidinal energy to that ideal. In other words, adultnarcissists love others for reflecting what they perceive as best about themselvesin an attempt to approximate that closed-loop bliss of infantile self-fulfillmentthat ego formation forces them to abandon.

Lasch expands this theory of secondary or pathological narcissism through thework of Melanie Klein, who locates the rage and aggressivity toward the origi-nal libidinal object that later accompanies the adults pathological re-creation of the narcissistic state in that early separation of infant from mother. Having inter-nalized the feelings of disappointment and aggression first extended to the moth-er, the child feels threatened by them and so attempts to compensate himself forhis experiences of rage and envy with fantasies of wealth, beauty, and omnipo-tence. Not surprisingly, Lasch asserts that intense feelings of emptiness andinauthenticity accompany these images of greatness, a result of the egos obses-sion with the inability of external objects to fulfill it (39). Reading the pathologyof the individual as the key to an entire society (a methodology modeled forLasch by Freud himself), Lasch thus explains the shallow and endless cravingsof a society based on consumption and mediating images through the impossibledesires of the individual who longs to return to the bliss of infantile narcissism.

Evidence of this desire, and of its pathologically compensatory adult narcis-sism, permeates Infinite Jest : it is the reason the residents at Ennet House havebecome addicted to drugs and the reason many of the residents at the Ennet Ten-nis Academy (E. T. A.) play competitive tennis. So, it is significant that, for allhis careful commentary in 1993 on the threats against our humanity lurking incontemporary American society, Wallace does not consciously grapple with thedespair-inducing seduction of narcissism until his 1996 cruise ship essay. 5 Infact, it is as if two weeks of cruising enable him finally to articulate what shad-owed his novelistic writing for several years and to define what murkily troublesan otherwise comic novel. Whereas Wallace devotes constant attention in Jest , asin his critiques, to the problems of irony and mediation, infantilization and nar-

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cissism emerge in the novel not so much as problems consciously to be solved asa deadly undertow against which the novel strugglesand, I argue, failstomake forward progress. I argue that this unconscious stagnation in the culture of narcissism ultimately prevents the novel from fully accomplishing the goals thatWallace sets forth in his agenda for novelistic redemption: The nagging compul-sion of narcissism, left unfaced and unresolved, quietly but insistently over-whelms the considerable bravery exhibited by the novel, its author, and its char-acters as they labor to re-create individual integrity and communal connectionfrom their cultural ruins.

Surprisingly, critical treatment of the novel largely ignores the treachery of thisnarcissistic desire. Thus far, critics of Infinite Jest overwhelmingly read the noveloptimistically, finding in it strong evidence that Wallace has succeeded in fulfill-ing the artistic agenda he set out in his 1993 interview and essay. 6 N. KatherineHayless argument comes closest to acknowledging the psychological dilemma atthe heart of the novel, by reading in the text repeated evidence of the illusion of autonomyor our inability to fulfill ourselves completely and the fact of recursivityor our need to extend ourselves to others to function not just as asociety but also as sane and healthy individuals (678). Rather than view recursivi-ty as the novels noble end goal, I point out that this illusion of autonomy, so clear-ly and consciously dashed, as Hayles rightly claims, by instances of the fact of recursivity in the novel, still persists through narcissistic desire as an irrational,largely unconscious longing that relentlessly afflicts characters despite theirattempts to deny or escape it. In this way, recursivity manifests itself not only asa method of escaping an illusion of the autonomous self but also, and even moreforcefully, as evidence of the destructive implications of a culture that counters thepotentially solipsistic autonomy of the individual with the self-obliterating inva-sion of the self through mediation. In this culture and this novel, the extreme oppo-site of autonomy does not lie in healthy, life-enhancing relationships with theworld and others, but in the crippling, utterly solipsistic trap of dependence: It isnot for nothing that the bulk of the novels action occur during The Year of theDepend Adult Undergarment, and that virtually every attempt to resist externallymediating forceswhether drugs, coaching, or screaming cultural productionssuch as entertainment and advertisingresult only in further dependence. There-fore, even as Wallace struggles to create for his characters a way out of the cultur-al quagmire in which his novel places them, Infinite Jest depicts what happenswhen recursivity, through the society of consumption and mediation, becomespathologicaltrapping one within the self rather than freeing one from it.

The Legacy of Pathological Narcissism

The pathological recursivity of secondary narcissism presents as the novelsfoundation the sickness from which, historically, all else in the novel springs.

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Tucked, seemingly at random, into the chronological disarray, the novels tem-porally initial moment establishes the pattern of parental selfishness that will poi-son generations in its relentless cycle: WINTER B. S. 1960TUCSON AZoffers the childhood story of Jim Incandenza, Hals father, through the impossi-ble point of view of a man in such pain that he orchestrated a way to die byexploding his head in a microwave oven. The persistence of his voice frombeyond the grave speaks to his undying effect on the boys he ushered into theworld, an effect we see from the seeds of fears, abilities, and sure self-destruc-tion that Jims father passes on to them. 7 Wallaces careful placement of thisepisode affirms, or foreshadows, its function as the root cause in the narrative: itfollows on the heels of the first account of Hals rocketing explosion of tennispotential and accurately suggests what awaits him on his way down.

Not only is the novel aware of this cycle of narcissistic parental crueltydepicting it as equally compelling and inescapable, if not more so, than the morecommonly recognized cycles of drug addiction and physical abusebut the chil-dren who suffer it and pass it on also prove aware of it. The Incandenza boysmake their own behind-the-scenes film of the world of junior tennis titled Ten-nis and the Feral Prodigy 8; the title itself suggests the paradoxical reality thatprodigies are pathologically constructed, not born. Written by Mario and voicedby Hal, the film re-creates the making of a tennis star, from keeping ones keyson the floor to nurturing that one great arm through constant ball squeezing. Butbefore a boy can get to these practices one other thing must happen; he must[h]ave a father whose own father lost what was there (173). Bringing far morebitterness to their documentation of their fathers near-abusive attempts to reflectthemselves in their lives are the boys at M. I. T., whose on-air performances of Those Were the Legends That Formerly Were convey both their keen aware-ness that their fathers own failures stand behind the abuse stands, and their ownsteadfast refusal to bow to that pressure.

Fathers are not the only perpetrators of this abuse, and Avril provides thenovels key model of the self-indulgent mother. Joelle remembers that Orindescribed his childhoods mother as his emotional sun (738), unwittingly pro-viding the perfect metaphor for a woman who extends her emotional energy to herchildren only so that they could reflect it back to her. In adulthood, Orin contraststhis innocent childs vision of his mother with a more astute vision of her as TheBlack Hole of Human Attention (521). Hal describes the same selfish tendencywhen he notes that to report any sort of need or problem is to mug her (523).

True to form, Avrils central failure as a parent is her absolute inability to puther own needs aside to answer her childrens. As foundational to the novel andits Incandenza narrative as Jims recollections of his father is the story of Halseating basement mold, a defining family fable that reappears several timesthroughout the novel, most significantly in the episode that opens the novel butends the story. In this account, always presented through Orins mediation as amoment of intense dramatic import, Avril is working in her garden plot in her

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obsessive-compulsive way, wearing layers of bags and plastic and a face mask tokeep herself clean (an obsession that runs throughout the novel in ironic contrastto the constant seepage of waste going on all around her). Into the scene toddlesfour-year-old Hal, carrying a rhombusoid patch of fungus [. . .] sort of nasalgreen, black-speckled, hairy like a peach is hairy [. . .] a patch of very bad-news-type mold (1042 n. 234). When he declares, I ate this, the purpose of the scenebecomes clear: not the trauma of Hals eating mold but the trauma of Avril in herperfect box of string (1043 n. 234) dealing with her childs disgusting trans-gression. 9 She cannot bring herself to touch either Hal or the mold but runs fromhim, screaming, while he follows her crying, until a neighbor finally arrives totake care of everyone. It is a formative memory for Orin, who repeats it in detailin response to questions about his family and for Hal, who explains to the Ari-zona recruiters his utter incoherence and disaffection, the ruination of his mind,as something I ate (10). This something is both the mold of his childhoodand the ruinous realization of his mothers absolute self-absorption that the moldrevealed, as well as the DMZ we can assume that he ingested shortly before thisinterview. Their conflation as the source of his destruction points to the link between childhood abandonment by self-absorbed parents and the drug addictionthat weaves its way through the novel.

The effects of this double dose of narcissistic parents are clear in both Orin andHal, although the sons develop in opposite ways in response to their parentalexperience. Orin learns to mimic the self-absorption he has been taught, becom-ing what one of his closest friends describes as the least open man I know(1048 n. 269, emphasis in original)a charge that could easily be extended tohis father Jim. Meanwhile, his sexual penchant for young mothersgoing so faras to ask them to scatter photos of their children around the room during sexreveals both the roots of this need to validate himself by pretending to love oth-ers and his desperate striving to gain the mothers love he never received. 10

Unlike Orin, Hal, rather than mimic his parents pathologically narcissisticmediation of others, remains stuck in the role of mirror that his parents hadassigned him throughout childhood. Even as a toddler, his monomaniacallyobsessive interest and effort, as if Hal were trying as if his very life were in thebalance to please some person or persons was such that he was alternativelydiagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder and Gifted. In school, he considersacademic competitions approval-fest[s], later comparing the intense pleasurederived from correctly answering questions to the pale sweet aura that an LSDafterglow conferred, some milky corona, like almost a halo of approved grace(999 n. 76). Long before turning to the escape of tennis (also characterized as aform of self-forgetting, [635]) or finally of marijuana and DMZ, Hal haslearned that pleasure comes most certainly from pleasing others and pathologi-cally forgetting the self. 11 Wallace most vividly illustrates this tendency to self-forgetting in Hals perverted experience of grief therapy after finding theexploded head of his father. His sole purpose in the therapy is to empathize with

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the grief-therapist and deliver the emotional goods that will please him (255,254). Unable to mediate others, but himself in need of constant mediation fromwithout, Hal remains caught in the same cycle of pathological recursivity thatentraps his obsessively mediating brother Orin. It is no wonder, then, that Halsdedication to self-forgetting should leave him in exactly the state that Laschidentifies as the vulnerable position of the narcissistic American: feeling a hugehole that is going to get a little bigger every day until I fly apart in differentdirections (785). He attempts not to fill that holea task that seems impossiblein a world made of images and similarly hollow peoplebut to forget.

The Cycle of Infantile Narcissism

Even more compelling than these specific examples of adult narcissistic behav-ior is the novels argument that narcissistic culture remains terrifyinglyinescapable because of the relentless, unprocessed infantile impulses that under-lie adult narcissistic behavior. 12 In other words, the novel compels and unsettlesus not because it reflects an already self-consciously self-reflecting world, butbecause it paints as the underbelly of that world an unstoppable welling up of infantile suffering of which neither the novel nor the world is fully conscious orcan control. Like Lasch, Wallace understands that, although the possibility of secondary narcissism has existed as long as humans have enjoyed and sufferedtheir self-conscious independence from the world around them, this pathologybegan to define an entire culture only when that culture became a machine thatreproduced for its members the need for and promise of infantile satisfaction.

Wallaces construction of a culture that both produces and experiences thedesire for infantile satisfaction through technological evolution echoes Laschsinterpretation of our experience of modern technology. In the novel and the socialcommentary, our development of machines that make us increasingly dependenton their work, their products that promise fulfillment, and their contribution toour image-based society through massive reproduction, acts as a key catalyst of our feelings of infantilization and our desire for those feelings. As his most bit-ing example, Wallace offers a history of the videophone, whose lifespan was cutsurprisingly short by the American obsession that bore it: our love affair withimage. Wallace brilliantly illustrates through this vignette how easily a culturalneed to indulge infantile fantasies trumps even our American fascination withtechnological advancement. No amount of technologically-induced pleasuregained by the new devices could make up for the profound loss of self-centered-ness that they caused: The bilateral illusion of unilateral attention [conveyed bya standard telephone] was almost infantilely gratifying from an emotional stand-point: you got to believe you were receiving somebodys complete attentionwithout having to return it (146). The videophone destroyed that illusion and,worse, forced callers to pay attention to each other, to reach out of their previ-

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ously sightless, narcissistic wombs. Further, callers suddenly had to worry abouthow they appeared to each other. Their eventual response to these dilemmas, con-cocted, of course, through further technological advancements, consisted of altering their appearances to convey the self-image they preferred to transmit andthe illusion of their attention. First, electronically altering their videophoneimages, then wearing high-definition masks to mimic on the phone their pre-sentable appearances, they eventually demanded masks that improved theirappearances (making them reluctant to show their real selves in public); finally,they hid in their homes behind full-body representations of themselves. People,whose need for absolute security in and approval of their inner-directed selves,having been stymied by technological development, turned back to technology tore-create wombs in which to hide.

Even the emergence of the novels film cartridge technology and its eventualprominence came about because of the American desire to be fully in control of and satisfied by a technology that allowed the user to make all demands and beasked nothing in return. In InterLace TelEntertainments ad campaign, whichfinally killed off the already ailing Big Four broadcast Networks (414), the pitchto abandon network stations and even cable as highly passive entertainmentexperiences allowing the viewer only a limited number of choices ironically fore-shadows the extreme passivity that this technology will engender in the lethal Infi-nite Jest cartridge, creating a society of individuals fixated behind closed doors onmachines streaming entertainment designed to fulfill their every desire. 13

In the looping form that is characteristic of the novel, need for infantile ful-fillment both feeds technological evolution (as in the cases of the videophone andfilm cartridge entertainment) and is further produced by the technology. Wallaceoffers, as gross evidence of the cultures production of infantile needs, the giantInfant spawned out of the looping, waste-fueled and waste-producing process of annular fusion in the Concavity. 14 Wandering the waste-land, leaving scat pilesas big as houses and keening for its lost parents (Hayles 689), this monstrous,terrified, and terrifying baby represents both the inconsolable pain and thedestructiveness of the infantile needs that this culture and its technology producein their dictatorial, Frankensteinian ways. The cultural poisoning also registers inskull-less, extra-eyed newborns, forever trapped in the dependency of infancy,birthed in the fumes of a societys waste.

But, lest the novel seem exclusively to blame technologies of modernizationfor this narcissistic bind, Wallace cannily diversifies culpability by accusing thecontemporary arts of popularizing the ironic culture that also leads to these infan-tile cravings: [T]he lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and inter-nal emptiness as hip and cool (694). Further, the association of hip apathy withthe cultural umbrella of the arts explains not only how a widespread perceptionof emptiness leading to infantile regression is produced, but also how this pro-duction simultaneously results in its own denial. Hipness implies a kind of mature resistance to feeling for oneself and others, so that all expression of

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human need and pain is seen as infantile; yet, such hip emptiness encourages just this need to release oneself into the pure need of the infant. Wallace seemsto refer directly to his assessment, in the McCaffery interview, of the dehuman-izing problem of irony, when, in Infinite Jest , Hal links cynicism with fear of infantilization:

[W]hat passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kindof fear of being really human, since to be really human [. . .] is probably tobe unavoidably sentimental and nave and goo-prone and generally pathetic,is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with bigwet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. (69495)

Registering here, but not in Wallaces account of irony in his interview and essayon television, is the insidious way in which infantile, narcissistic need catalyzesthe constant production of disaffected irony. Hal reveals that hip cynicism actu-ally operates as a way of masking our simultaneous desire and despising for whatwe are really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment andneed, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia (695).This culture characterizes, at every turn, the thing it despises as infantile, incon-tinent, full of need, while recognizing in the unmistakable reference to the mon-strous infants that this infantile need is exactly what it produces. Through thisconvoluted interdependence of insistent repetition and repression, Wallacedepicts infantile narcissism as the disturbingly omnipresent element in a cultur-al machine whose constant denial ensures its troubling ubiquity.

Contributing to the sense of the cultures culpability in this vicious cycle is thefact that, in a novel filled with people both modeling hipness and craving infan-tile regression, only those who somehow remain outside or rejected from main-stream American culture perceive and consistently resist its pathetic state. Mario,of course, represents the novels key critic of ironic culture, loving Madame Psy-chosiss radio show because it is increasingly hard to find valid art that is aboutstuff that is real in this way and noticing that [i]ts like theres some rule thatreal stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a waythat isnt happy (592). Marathelegless and wheelchair-boundoffers thenovels other substantial defense of earnestness, wondering why he feels [a]naftertaste of shame after revealing passion of any belief and type when withAmericans, as if he had made flatulence instead of had revealed belief (318).But Marios vast collection of physical deformities, extreme even in the contextof the widespread grotesqueries in this novel, means that he inhabits a thorough-ly marginalized role throughout the narrative. And Marathe, of course, is Cana-dian and even then a member of a self-ostracizing group, Les Assassins desFauteils Rollents (A. F. R.) of Quebec, which seeks separation not just fromO.N.A.N. (Organization of North American Nations), a union of America, Cana-da, and Mexico, but from its own country. So rather than celebrateas Wallace

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does in his critiquethose who resist the infantile fear of earnest emotion andthe desire to protect themselves from the unpleasure of pain, the novel onlypunishes them. Indeed, every character in Infinite Jest who struggles against aculture of narcissismalso the sweat-licking gym guru Lyle and Gately in hisfinal fight against the pleasure of medical drugssuffers both emotionally andphysically in ways that define him as grotesque and so socially unacknowledged.

Therefore, as with any repressed and unacknowledged force, this craving forinfantile satisfaction bubbles up compulsively throughout the narrative, whichdenies it. Again and again, characters experience adult traumas through the unre-solved pain of their childhoods, in the context of the original infant trauma of dis-covering the parents disappointing inability or refusal to provide total satisfac-tion. Not surprisingly, these memories of disturbed infantile states emergeorresist emergingas the adult struggles to process the more conscious secondary,pathologically narcissistic behavior to which that early trauma has led. Wallacecreates key examples of depressionas ubiquitous in the novel as the addictionto which depression usually leadsspecifically in terms of adult reactions to theinfants loss of total comfort and sense of the self as complete (as in GeoffreyDays early experience of the large dark billowing shape [that] came billowingout of some corner in [his] mind [649]), 15 and the childs horrific betrayal andabandonment by the parent (as is the case for the deeply repressed Bruce Green[578]). Most poignantly, Wallace depicts the resilience of the dream of absolutelove and fulfillment offered by infanthood and dashed by our entrance into adult-hood by presenting, in one of the books most startlingly earnest moments, areturn to the safe haven of mothers love as the surest escape from the sufferingof this world. As Lucien Antitoi endures the unimaginable pain of being skew-ered mouth to anus with his own broom handle by members of the A. F. R., hismind fills instinctively with his mothers linen apron, her kind red face abovehis crib (488); and when he mercifully emerges into death he finds his gut andthroat again and newly whole, clean and unimpeded, a newborn babe returninghome and sounding a bell-clear and nearly maternal alarmed call-to-arms in allthe worlds well-known tongues (488, 489).

Clearly, then, Infinite Jest remains conscious of infantile narcissism as aninescapable element of contemporary culture. Although the novel argues unmis-takably that instinctive desire for infantile fulfillment both contributes to thepathological narcissism that adults fall into and continues to be an unspoiledhope despite the impossibility of its fulfillment, the novel remains ambivalentabout how best to treat this problem. The complex and pathos-filled scene inwhich Hal mistakenly attends a mens support group meeting best exemplifiesthe difficulty of dealing with the pain of our lost infantile fulfillment in a culturethat both denies and reproduces that loss. In a rare expression of self-awarenessthat one might expect a novel full of unprocessed need to celebrate, Kevin Bainexpresses his adult feelings of anxiety and loss explicitly in terms of infantileneed: Im feeling my Inner Infant standing holding the bars of his crib and

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looking out of the bars . . . bars of his crib and crying for his Mommy and Daddyto come hold him and nurture him. [. . .] And nobodys coming! he sobs (802,emphasis in original). Although the men in the group, also clutching teddy bearsto symbolize their Inner Infants, shower Kevin with empathy and, as the leaderputs it, nonjudgmentally listen to Kevins Inner Infant expressing his grief andloss (800), Hal feels nothing but ever-intensifying discomfort and then disgustat the sight of these middle-aged, middle-class men in their sweaters so earnest-ly emoting. On one obvious level, Hal simply represents a cynical societys dis-approval of this tiny subculture of earnestness. But when he mentally articulateshis objection to the groups exercise, he also reveals a reasonable critique of itsoversimplification:

All through his own infancy and toddlerhood, Hal had continually been heldand dandled and told at high volume that he was loved, and he feels like hecould have told K. Bains Inner Infant that getting held and told you wereloved didnt automatically seem like it rendered you emotionally whole orSubstance-free. (805)

This critique exposes the groups core belief in the sanctity and rationality of ourneed for infantile satisfaction as the fantasy that it isone that will not be ful-filled no matter how active we become in our pursuit of this fulfillment, as thegroup leader teaches his members to do. Yet the tone of the scene remains mixed,conveying the real and affecting pathos of Kevins pain as clearly as the ratio-nality of Hals objection.

The scene also reveals an ironic ambivalence about our ability to heal this needthrough the one method in the novel that seems to offer solace. The therapeutic,talking-cure approach of the group, although uncomfortable for an outsider towitness, clearly works for the men involved. Yet, in this case, therapy also servesas part of the problem: Kevin felt abandoned as a child because his parents lefthim and his brother with Hispanic nannies while they devoted themselves totheir jobs and various types of psychotherapy and support groups. In fact, Kevinbecomes completely abandoned at the age of eight when his parents are crushedin their car by a falling radio traffic helicopter on the Jamaica Way on the wayto Couples Counselling (803). Therapy and the talking cure, here, seem to offercures as destructive as the disease they are meant to cure, simply because each of these cures contains the risk of narcissism. 16

Significantly, the same looping pathology defines and calls into question theculture of recovery represented in the novel by the Alcoholics Anonymous pro-gram. In equally powerful and less subtle ways than do the Incandenza family,the novels drug addicts, recovering and not, further illustrate the pathologicalrecursivity of narcissism, in which narcissism operates as both the cause andeffect of their addictions. They, like Hal, are born of families for whom self-cen-teredness is an ubiquitous abuse, if the least of much worse ones; and they turnto drugs out of the narcissists ultimate need to escape a self that can no longer

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find sustenance in the world. In their absolute inability to put any need abovetheir need to duck into the nihilism of a good drug binge, these addicts becomefor Jest the ultimate example of the solipsism of narcissism, and in their physi-cal and mental debilitations, the worst possible result of pathological recursivity,in which one is unable to extend oneself out of ones own head because othershave extended themselves too far into it. 17

Then, it is ironic that a collection of people defined by their solipsism shouldendeavor to cure themselves chiefly through an appeal to empathy. The BostonAlcoholics Anonymous program as presented in this novel privileges above allelse the sheer power of bringing sufferers together to connect with each otherspain. Ennet House requires all residents to attend an AA or NA (NarcoticsAnonymous) meeting every night and encourages them to sit right up at thefront of the hall where they can see the pores in the speakers nose and try toIdentify instead of Compare. [. . .] Identify means empathize (345, emphasis inoriginal). The narrative notes, reassuringly, that identifying is easy, because allthe speakers stories of decline and fall and surrender are basically alike, and likeyour own (345). A core bit of the AA message, relentlessly repeated night afternight by various speakers at the meetings, is that You are not unique (349). Allthe stories hit the same narrative highs and lows with a good deal of sufferingalong the way, and the members job is not to figure out his or her story or pathto recovery but blindly to submit his or her will to the universal experience of theprogram. When the program asks its members to Identify with each other, it isrequiring them to empathize with this standard story that each member tells, withtheir own story, with themselves. In this way, the AA and NA programs ulti-mately ask not that members reach out to empathize with strangers but that theyrecognize their own place in this infinitely repeating sameness, the recursivity of addiction. A perfect example of the solipsism members exhibit even as theybelieve they are progressing through a program of empathetic growth occurs atthe first meeting that Ken Erdedy attends. When, out of confusion and discom-fort, he withdraws from the concluding circle of eager hugging, Roy Tony, in allthe terrifying empathy of his reform, virtually throttles Erdedy into expressingempathy: you gone risk vulnerability and discomfort and hug my ass or do Igone fucking rip your head off and shit down your neck? (506, emphasis inoriginal). As a solution to the solipsism of the story of drug addiction, the AAprogram provides an alternative to that addiction, an alternative way of forgettingthe self: the Program as stand-in for the drug. 18

Just as the Incandenza family illustrates pathological narcissism as a cycle inwhich solipsists break out of themselves only to infect other people with theirdisease, the culture of both drugs and drug recovery unfolds as its own relentlesscycle, both spawned and propelled by this narcissism in which even earnestattempts to escape only lead back to new manifestations of the solipsistic loop.This pathological recursivity is the legacy, the novel seems to say, of our cultureof pathological narcissism. That the conscious attempts in Infinite Jest to under-

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stand, escape from, or heal this legacyJims films, Hals tennis and drugs, theAA programthemselves inflict or indulge the same narcissistic tendencies sug-gests that something remains, unprocessed and powerful, that locks the charac-ters in their closed loops.

Escaping the Loop, Escaping into the Loop

Still, critics have consistently read the novel as fundamentally a narrative of hopein the face of the depressed, addicted, self-involved future that the novel predictsfor America. The basis of these readings is the valiant attempts by the novels twomain characters, Hal Incandenza and Don Gately, to develop in traditionally nar-rative ways toward self-awareness and community-mindedness. I agree thatwithin the novels context of compulsive narcissism, Gatelys ability to transformfrom a drug addict so self-centered that he cannot bring himself to intervene inhis colleagues gruesome torture to a kind of den mother caring for other drugaddicts provides clear evidence of growth toward community-mindedness evenin the midst of this suffocatingly solipsistic culture. To an assessment of the novelas a whole and the key question of the development of Hal Incandenza and DonGately, I hope that my exploration of the relentless pull of infantile narcissismadds an awareness of the powerful ways in which this unprocessed pull towardsolipsism ultimately thwarts any attempt to grow free of the clutches of a cultureof narcissism.

Hals nightmarish experience at his university interview, which opens the plotand closes the story, specifically frames the pages that follow in terms of a jour-ney leading to Hals utter detachment from the external world: Hals last wordsin the story imagine an orderly in the hospital where he will likely be institu-tionalized asking, whats your story? (17, emphasis in original), and the infi-nite jestor, as LeClair points out, gest or story (35)is off and running.The classic version of the infinite gest is The Arabian Nights (also called,tellingly, The Thousand and One Nights ), in which Shahrazad tells one story afteranother to postpone her death; in this sense, her story is also a jest or joke thatshe perpetrates against her captor. The joke of this novel, then, lies in the factthat, from the moment we meet Hal, we know that he is doomed to the solipsis-tic death of his pathological society, yet the novel defers for as long as possibleour understanding of this culture and this moment, parsing out seemingly infi-nitely repeating examples of its recursive loop over more than a thousand and onepages of Hals story, a story told, in essence, to postpone his own certain death.

Hayles points out that two Bottoms (AA-speak for the low point an addicthits before accepting the need to make radical changes) frame the novels loop-ing structure (694), and certainly Hals animalistic performance in this scene isone. But the question remains: is this a Bottom from which he can rebound, asthe AA reference implies, or, as I argue, one toward which the trajectory of the

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novel has been aiming all along, out of which no amount of looping repetitionwill lift him? His prodigious linguistic giftswhich the novel offers, as does The

Arabian Nights , as one potential avenue for salvation in a culture collapsing intosolipsism clearly have been destroyed by the drug that he has taken in his flightfrom the suffering of tennis and the sufferings masked by tennis; he can no longerwrite or speak coherently. Without that gift, his one defense against the worldlystimulations to which he cannot respond is [a] neutral and affectless silence(9), essentially the pain of mimicking disaffection without the salve of expressedirony. Crouching in this pain, unable to communicate it and so heal from it, Halsuccumbs to that greatest of all drugs, the call of the promise of infantile fulfill-ment and freedom from the pain of need. In the ambulance that takes him towardinstitutions and away from the world of human discourse, he asserts: I havebecome an infantophile (16).

In contrast to this clear, voluntary, and conscious descent into the unrecover-able Bottom of infantile narcissism, Don Gatelys final narrative experienceillustrates the threat posed by this ultimate drug, even in the face of heroicattempts to oppose it. On the one hand, Gatelys extended hospital stay is a tes-tament to his courageous resistance to the infantilized role inflicted on him bythe medical staff and offered by the drugs that various doctors repeatedlyencourage him to take. Although he experiences his medical incapacitation asphysically infantilizing throughout, repeatedly referring to his railed bed as hiscrib, Gatelys thoughts (inexpressible because he has been intubated) indicatehis constant struggle against the indignities inflicted on him while he lies help-less in bed. Further, even in his disabled state he acts as confessor to a stream of visitors, who narcissistically take advantage of his muteness, and worriesparentally about the addicts he had been caring for at Ennet House. He also con-tinues the work begun in sobriety of making conscious for the first time the for-mative traumas, centering on his mother and her beatings that led to his self-abandonment in drugs.

But, stealthily interwoven with these acts and thoughts of personal growth andcaring for others runs the thread of infantile desire. Again and again, Gately expe-riences his current suffering in terms of the terror and emotional need he felt as anabandoned toddler who, with plastic film bulging and receding over a hole in theceiling above him, envisioned a monstrous vacuole inhaling and exhaling (809),ready to eat him alive. This infant version of existentialismterror of losing theself with the absence of the motherplagues him throughout his illness withincreasing frequency and urgency, eventually expanding into a dream/memory inwhich his mother is sucked out of existence by a tornado that the toddler Gatelyescapes by hiding in the dark expanse of the ocean. The projected allusion to Wal-laces characterization of the ocean in A Supposedly Fun Thing as primordialnada is unmistakable; Gately, no longer clear if he was little Bimmy or thegrown man Don (816), is haunted then and now by the loss of self implied andrepresented by his mothers abandoning of him. His earnest attempts to work

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through the trauma of this abandonment lead to an eerie channeling of the Infinite Jest film, in which he receives the apology of the films mother as Death, the pureabsolution of the mothers guilt for her sons pain; he enters the films milky fil-ter to become the baby and asks Death to set him free and be his mother (851).In this way, Gately experiences the film with its promise of infantile fulfillment asone possible solution to his infant experience of loss.

Although Gatelys journey in the hospital bed emerges as his struggle betweenthese two competing impulsestoward emotional maturity and reaching out toothers and toward infantile regression to self-absorptionthe final moments of hisnarrative suggest that the seduction of infantile narcissism proves irresistibly com-pelling. First, he experiences two wakings, once into a memory of the Bottomexperience that drove him to recovery, in which he witnessed, through a drug-induced stupor, the torture of a colleague and finally into his dream/memory of hismothers total abandonment of him. Rather than signal the kind of heroic awak-enings that one would hope for at the end of a struggle such as Gatelys, theseironic wakings void any notion of heroic transformation. His waking into the mem-ory of drugs, fear, and suffering is really a waking into the memory of the merci-ful unconsciousness brought by the drug Sunshine. Rather than recalling the drugindignantly, as the source of his inability to come to his associates aid, Gatelyremembers it as delicious and obscenely pleasant (979, 981), a welcomeescape from the horror being staged around him. Thus, Gatelys return to this mem-ory does not even represent a neurotic (and necessarily doomed) attempt retroac-tively to prevent its trauma by generating the anxiety that was initially lacking, asFreud theorizes the repetition compulsion in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (21); itmerely repeats his indulgence in the mind-numbing pleasure of the drug itself. Inthis way, his waking into this memory functions as an alternative to taking thedrugs that his doctors offer as an escape from sufferingheroic in its small way,perhaps, but, nevertheless, indulging the infantile desire to escape the pain of theworld. Then, Gatelys waking from the self-forgetting of Dilaudid and Sun-shine is not more promising; it only underscores the reason for the drugs attrac-tion during the binge and for his return to the memory of it while suffering in thehospital. He comes to out of the drug stupor and into his memory/dream of child-hood abandonment, flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it wasraining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out (981). Providing Gatelys nar-rative end as well as the novels actual end, this image of the abandoned child fullof fear and need indicates what remains most true and present for both individualand culture, regardless of attempts to deny or resist that fear and need.

Uniting Hal and Don in their regression toward infantile narcissismand, tomy mind, further underscoring the novels insinuation that this regression seri-ously thwarts all attempts to overcome cultural irony and apathy and the narcis-sism that underlies themis an ominous, inexplicably shared mental quest forthe ultimate narcissistic drug of the Infinite Jest film. Gately, in a fevered stupor,dreams hes with a very sad kid and theyre in a graveyard digging some dead

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guys head up and its really important (934); Hal envisions, on his way to thehospital, John N. R. Wayne [. . .] standing watch in a mask as Donald Gatelyand I dig up my fathers head (1617). Most interesting about this mysteriousintersection between the two main characters are the narrative implicationsbrought by the Hamlet motif that unites them. Having run quietly through thenovel in connection to the film (whose title, obviously, refers to the playsgravedigger scene), the Hamlet allusion becomes, through these charactersshared desire, a final suggestion of narrative departure from the classic Oedipal

journey of progressive enlightenment in favor of a looping descent into solip-sism. Just as the underlying Oedipal story of Hamlet a son overcoming his lovefor his mother to avenge his father and secure his rightful adult identity as kingis hijacked by young Hamlets increasingly complex acting out of his own self-obsessed needs, so this lethal film derails any potential Oedipal narrative of lin-ear progress from infantile satisfaction to mature separation into another-directed self. We see the promise of Oedipal struggle and personal growthdisplaced by the desire for regression to infantile solipsism, not only in the per-sistence of infantophilia in Hals and Gatelys ends but also, quite cleverly, in thedesire that finally brings the two characters togethertheir desire to dig up JimIncandenzas headless body and so the film that was buried with him in theheads stead. The film, with its promise of absolute satisfaction as infantile love,is what both are after. Not even Hal oedipally pursues the head of his father; hechooses instead the film that has taken its place.

This film represents the novels core expression of the closed loop of infantilenarcissism; its lethality stems from its irresistible offer of the opportunity toinhabit the longing-free space of infanthood and receive an apology for the orig-inal trauma of having to leave that space. In this way, the film does not functionsimply as a representation of the experience of infantile narcissism that the cul-ture craves: It offers, rather, both the experience of being a knowing adult,already separated from the mother and suffering from that separation of longingand loss of self in a culture that only exacerbates that suffering and the experi-ence of receiving the apology that could ease the suffering. It provides an attemptto reproduce the experience of infantile fulfillment without the anxiety that leadsto later pathology, to bypass the experience of original loss and free the viewerto enter adulthood without the burden of the resentment and inconsolability thatsends him or her looping back into narcissism.

Jim Incandenza seems to intend his final film to accomplish exactly that kindof healing, as he explains to Don Gately, through the wraith:

[H]e spent the whole sober last ninety days of his animate life working tire-lessly to contrive a medium via which he and the muted son could simplyconverse . [. . .] His last resort: entertainment. Make something so bloodycompelling it would reverse thrust on a young selfs fall into the womb of solipsism, anhedonia, death in life. A magically entertaining toy to dangle atthe infant still somewhere alive in the boy, to make its eyes light and tooth-

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less mouth open unconsciously, to laugh. To bring him out of himself, asthey say. The womb could be used both ways. A way to say I AM SO VERY,VERY SORRY and have it heard . (83839, emphasis in original)

The wraith notes that Jim hopes most fundamentally to bring Hal out of theinfants mute solipsism and into the symbolic order, reconnecting him to the larg-er world. But even in this description, we find the same ambivalence of intentionsthat shapes the inescapable loop of this novel: while claiming that Jim sought pri-marily to bring [Hal] out of himself, the wraith characterizes Jims method asone that seeks to make Hal unconscious, to bring him to life by putting him inthe position of an unthinking, pleasure-filled infant. One could argue, to save thefather from the accusation of intending to harm his son, that his mistake lay inbelieving that speaking to his son by means of the mute solipsism into which he

had descended would allow him finally to hear his father, freed, perhaps, fromthe Oedipal resentment that accompanies the exit from that solipsism. But thefilms wake of destruction testifies that, to the adult plagued by longing and lossin this culture of irony, mediation, and narcissism, the chance to remain the bliss-fully entertained infant is more compelling than hearing that apology and joiningthe adult community. Thus the film, itself endlessly looping, reproduces theclosed loop of infantile narcissism, the repetition compulsion in which all char-acters are stuck as they yearn for infants comfort, unwilling to endure the pain,or unpleasure, necessary to break out of it.

In his interview with McCaffery, Wallace describes his frustration with his lit-erary inheritance from postmodern writers, enthralled with the empty, self-reflexive wit of irony, as a teenagers eventual irritation with marauding friends:For a while its great, free and freeing, parental authority gone and overthrown,but then you gradually start wishing your parents would come back and restoresome fucking order in your house (150). Infinite Jest , with its parodic medita-tions on apathetic irony and rampant mediation, clearly emerges as Wallacesresponsible response to the realization that parents in fact arent ever comingback[that] were going to have to be the parents (150, emphasis in original).

Being the parent in this novel means reaching outside oneself and takingresponsibility for oneself and others as they negotiate the seductive cycles of nar-cissism in which everyone takes a wild ride. That is the alternative to succumb-ing to narcissism, the only course of action that seems to offer a method for mak-ing and maintaining human relationships in an intensely infantile and solipsisticworld. The novel, like Wallaces cruise-ship critique, proceeds according to thisbinary of infant and parent, positing transformation from one to the other, how-ever halting and imperfect, as evidence of individual growth: Gatelys paternalresponsibility for his fellow addicts at Ennet House proves his heroic advance-

ment out of the infantile solipsism of drug addiction; Incandenzas attempt tomove his son out of anhedonia and into the symbolic order indicates his hopethat Lacanian growth out of the preverbal imaginary and into language, the Lawof the Father, can save him. The novel even describes Hals final, devastating

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decision to choose infantophilia as a turning away from adult responsibilities toothers, away from the paternal head, by replacing the paternal head he pursueswith the infantilizing film.

Then, it is, perhaps, most ironic that this novel, earnestly pursuing parentalauthority, never manages to produce an unqualified care-taking parent or func-tional family, instead locking its characters in endless loops of infantile desire. Ihave argued that, given the inescapability of the drive to infantile self-satisfactionthat permeates this novel, regardless of its near-heroic attempts to break freefrom its culture of disaffection and irony, Infinite Jest captures American societyafter the party is over and while everyone is standing around waiting for parentswho will never come: The selfish chaos no longer feels like fun, but no one hasyet grown up enough to clean up the mess. Wallace has gamely jumped into thefray, perhaps through the character of Gately, knee-deep in filth but unable sin-gle-handedly to stave off the wave of waste and suffering that bears down uponhis fellow orphans. Committed to the imagist agenda of reimposing boundariesbetween the real and the fictitious (E Unibus Pluram 173), he has instead cre-ated a world in which even the most self-aware and well-intentioned characterfinds solace in the infantile retreat that blurs the boundary between self andworld. Indeed, Wallace has managed in Infinite Jest the patricidal liberation of eliminating one key purveyor of self-reflexive schlock, Jim Incandenza, but hasleft in his place through Incandenzas final film an ill-guided and failed attemptat healing whose clean-up attempt that only begets more solipsistic mess. It stillremains for Wallace to create a new paternal head to right the transgressions of the one that he has exploded.

TRINITY UNIVERSITYSAN ANTONIO , TEXAS

NOTES

1, Here, he identified the aura that fixates Murray before the Most Popular Barn America inWhite Noise as not the missing Benjaminian aura of authenticity, but as what has replaced it: ironyitself (E Unibus Pluram 17071).

2. Precisely because of this binary-driven definition of irony that he employs throughout inter-view and novel, Wallace is to some extent responsible for designing the ironic trap from which, Iargue, he cannot escape. This is exactly the paralyzing view of irony that Michael Roth exploded inThe Ironists Cage, as did Linda Hutcheon in A Poetics of Postmodernism.

3. Originally published in Harpers Magazine (January 1996) as Shipping Out, or the (NearlyFatal) Luxuries of a Comfort Cruise.

4 Here, Lasch cites Goffman, comparing Goffmans assessment of absurdist characters to thetheatrical approach to existence that reenters daily life (56).

5. See Steven Moores account of the novels writing and publication process. Moore read a com-plete working draft of the novel in the fall of 1993, Wallace had largely completed Infinite Jest by thetime he wrote the essay (or participated in the interview) that appeared in the 1993 Review of Con-temporary Fiction, and he had delivered the finished novel to Little, Brown by mid-1995, around

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the time that he went on the cruise (May 1995) and considerably before the publication of the origi-nal essay that resulted from the cruise (January 1996).

6. Timothy Jacobs reads the novels main accomplishment as its ability to establish, as in Wal-laces agenda, a conversation between writer and reader, symbolized most powerfully in the novel byJim Incandenzas final film, which is intended to be a form of communication, a conversation,between the director and his youngest son, Hal ( Infinite Jest 224). Of course, the film accomplish-es the opposite, and, as I argue here, becomes instead the novels central symbol of the charactersresistance to human conversation and preference for the fulfillment of solipsism.

Catherine Nichols locates the characters victories precisely in their eventual withdrawal from thesymbolic order toward an inner earnestness and self-expression, which she characterizes as virtuousin the context of such a symbolically minded culture. But I would argue that such a withdrawal fromlanguage not only contradicts the goals that Wallace sets forth so clearly in his 1993 critique, but alsovalorizes what amounts to embracing a presymbolic real at the price of a return to the presymbol-ic infantile state. Both Hal and Gately pay this price, as I argue here, so that their escape from thesymbolic hardly seems a victory.

N. Katherine Hayles argues, convincingly, that Gately at least illustrates one possible escape fromthe cultural traps through which he strugglesletting go of the self (recognizing the illusion of autonomy) as the AA program insists that he do and recognizing his interdependence on thosearound him. My argument that the novel enacts an inescapable pathological recursivity, however,suggests that shed[ding] the illusion of autonomous selfhood also carries ominous implications forthe self in this culture of narcissism and dependence (693).

Thomas LeClair calls Infinite Jest a hopeful monster because of its ability to, as Wallace suggestsin his interview, defamiliarize the ordinary and to familiarize the exotic for his vast list of novelis-tic participants, both pedestrian and grotesque, in the spirit of the wraiths radical realism (34, 35).But LeClair seems to locate this hope in the novels ability to allow each character a voice throughwhich he or she might accomplish this defamiliarizing, in a kind of talking cure. Indeed, LeClaircompares the novel to an AA meeting (34), suggesting that it provides a forum in which each char-acter may work through the traumas of his or her childhood roots (32). But I argue against both thiscomparison of the novel to an AA meeting and the efficacy of the AA meeting itself as talking cure.

7. Jim learns from his father that You are going to be a great tennis player. I was near-great. Youwill be truly great, a dictate and obsession that Jim passed on to Hal (158); he learns his phobia of spiders, which he passed on as a roach phobia to Orin and is one that determines Orins narrativeend; he learns to view drugs as an alternative or equivalent to the pain of athletic performance; andhe learns to pass these traits on to his own boys in the name of his own retrospective need to con-struct an accomplished self through the mirrors of his children, as Jims father clearly attempts in thismoment to do with him.

8. In doing so, the boys also mimic their fathers self-obsessive tendency to mediate his own lifeby remaking it as film, in further evidence of his pathologically recursive narcissism. Many of theepisodes described in Jims vast filmography are filmic retellings of events contained in the novel.

9. Wallace extends the cruelty of Avrils obsessively self-interested limitations to Mario as well:He was involuntarily incontinent into his early teens, but his mother never once cared for theseneeds: she couldnt handle diapers (768).

10. At the same time, Avrils sexual preferences speak to her own (most likely unconscious andclearly pathological) desire to extend herself to her sons: when Pemulis finds her and Wayne in a sex-ual encounter in her office, Wayne, a tennis player, is dressed like Avrils football-playing son, andAvril wears the costume of Orins girlfriend Joelle, a cheerleader.

11. Here I say pathologically, because the novel does not characterize self-forgetting as uni-formly negative. Indeed, Lyle, the quasimystical guru of the locker room, coaches a student, who isworrying over the dangers of fame, to forget the self in a healthy attempt to avoid the kind of narcis-sism that fame can bring (388). But, as I will argue in this essay, by making Lylea man who lickssweat off players bodies in exchange for his words of wisdomthe spokesperson for positive self-forgetting, Wallace seems to imply the foreignness and oddity of such a concept in a society that con-sistently endorses and encourages the kind of pathological self-forgetting embraced by Hal.

12. In this way, I agree whole-heartedly with Nicholss claim that the novel forces us to attend toits grotesqueries, in the form of Otherness, which the novel does not absorb into its highly process-ing linguistic structure (6). Rather than read the novel as offering this Otherness as evidence of hopethat the characters might escape the symbolic order for the utopia of the Other, I argue that the novel,

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with its insistence on redeeming through language, experiences these unprocessable psychic elementsas resistances to its attempt to bring its characters out of themselves and into meaningful relationshipswith each other.

13. Wallace gestures toward the solipsism of this massively entertained world when he contraststwo disturbing cultural proclivities by laying them side-by-side: first, he describes the inevitability of the societys addiction to film cartridge entertainment (Saying this is bad is like saying traffic is bad,or health-care surtaxes, or the hazards of annular fusion: nobody but Ludditic granola-crunchingfreaks would call bad what no one can imagine being without, [620]). He, then, moves to a DeLil-lo-like assessment of [t]he fellowship and anonymous communion of being part of a watchingcrowd, a mass of eyes all not at home, all out in the world and pointed the same way (621). Evenoutside, in public, surrounded by masses, we find comfort and perverted fellowship in remainingas alone as we are in front of our entertainment units.

14. For a discussion of the r

Documents

The Art's Heart's Purpose- Braving the Narcissistic Loop of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest