The Iron Bars of Freedom: David Foster Wallace and the Postmodern Self [1 ed.] 9783898219549, 9783838259543

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Stefan Hirt

The Iron Bars of Freedom David Foster Wallace and the Postmodern Self

I am grateful to Professor Engler of the University of Tübingen for his support and his trust in my abilities. I am also grateful to Nick Maniatis and all the contributors to "The Howling Fantods", without which I would have never been able to write this study. I also want to thank Sara Azarmi, Florian Binder, Meredith Collier, Daniel Gietz, Tobias Lux and Stefanie Schleker for their help and encouragement. Finally, I would like to thank my Parents for their support.

Stefan Hirt

THE IRON BARS OF FREEDOM David Foster Wallace and the Postmodern Self

ibidem-Verlag Stuttgart

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

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ISBN-13: 978-3-8382-5954-3 © ibidem-Verlag

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Foreword On September 12th, 2008, David Foster Wallace, aged 46, hung himself in his house in Pomona, California. The news came as a shock to his fans and the literary establishment in general. It came as a shock to me, who had, on that weekend, celebrated my graduation from the University of Tübingen in Germany - a graduation that I achieved with a study of Infinite Jest, Wallace's opus magnum. This study, which focuses on his treatment of such topics as depression, despair and anxiety, suddenly seemed different to me. I had to read it again, as I read so many of his stories and essays again in these last few weeks after his suicide. Not that news about Wallace's depression surprised his readers - quite on the contrary, more than any contemporary author I know did he dare to write about such difficult topics as the troubles of the individual soul in postmodern society. I could not grasp the news of his suicide because, despite his rather dark thematic concerns, he always seemed to possess a certain amount of optimism that shines through most of his texts. What I loved about Wallace's work was that it helped me identify my own inner demons, helped me realize that my troubles were shared and understood, and helped me face these troubles, thus making me, I believe, a stronger person. What seemed hard to grasp was that all his insights about the logic of contemporary individual despair in the end couldn't help him. As he once said in an interview, literature can be a means to "be less alone inside". He conceived of writing as a friendship between author and reader, and for him empathy was vital in this relationship. As he made clear with the example of Kate Gompert in Infinite Jest, merely knowing the facts and words doesn't provide one with a real understanding of a phenomenon. What he was trying to achieve was to activate the reader's empathy, make him truly experience the fictional worlds he created, because what he meant to communicate were exactly those inner pains, those "infinities you can never show another soul", which could only be alleviated by being shared. To quote from one of his short stories: "The depressed person confessed to the therapist i

that what she felt truly starved for and really truly fantasized about was having the ability to somehow really truly literally "share" it (i.e., the chronic depression's ceaseless torment)." That is why so many texts of his deal with depression, despair and the horrors of a postmodern hyper-self-consciousness. They, like his short story "The Depressed Person", from which I have just quoted, can be a painful experience for the reader, as they directly expose the terror inside despairing individuals. It is not an easy friendship that Wallace offers to us - it can be painful, and it requires our constant work and empathy. Yet it is worth the effort. We may learn that our own inner demons, which we are often too ashamed to acknowledge even to ourselves, are shared, and that we are not alone in this world. In one of his best short stories, "Good Old Neon", he exposes his concern with empathy most explicitly. Its narrator, one "David Wallace", attempts to understand the suicide of a former schoolmate by imagining the inner suffering that may have led him to this decision. It is this act of imaginative understanding, this bridge between the living and the dead, that frees the narrator from his own solipsistic despair: "As though inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if we are all trying to see through these tiny keyholes. But it does have a knob, the door can open." So his narrator, David Wallace, turns this experience into a story, to communicate it to someone who in his turn might identify with the despair, selfdoubt and insecurity which he describes. Wallace, the real Wallace, used writing as a means of self-therapy: objectifying and communicating his experiences with the depression from which he suffered for two decades. Maybe that is also why so many of his texts contain biographical elements. Like Hal Incandenza, one of Infinite Jest's protagonists, he was born into an intellectual family, was a highly talented tennis player and had a keen interest in language. The pressures that came with athletic success were later replaced by the high expectations to which his outstanding academic achievements in the fields of logical philosophy and ii

creative writing gave rise. Publishing his first novel The Broom of the System at the age of 24, he was considered by many to be one of the most gifted talents of his generation. In Infinite Jest, Hal attempted to escape the pressure that comes with success (a pressure, one may not forget, that he himself at least intensifies) by the means of drugs, and maybe that was one of the many reasons why Wallace eventually resorted to drug abuse as well, thus also resembling the other protagonist of Infinite Jest, Don Gately. His novel can thus be seen, not as an autobiographical history, but as a recapitulation of experiences made with addiction and despair, and with Alcoholics Anonymous, who have helped him on his way towards a new life. A biographical reading of Infinite Jest would be an impossible and futile task. After all, Wallace was too ingenous a writer, too much rooted in Postmodernism and just too much of a jester to make things all so simple for us. But it should nevertheless be pointed out that many of Wallace's texts are suffused with biographical experiences. Wallace, like no other person I know, was able to analyze and understand the often vague and shadowy demons that may torment one's soul. What is more, he pointed them out to us readers, made them understandable, and, most importantly, he found a way to make us experience such otherwise incommunicable pains through the complexity of his language and fictional worlds. One of the twelve steps of AA is "to spread the message", "to pay the loan of sobriety back". Wallace does exactly that with Infinite Jest, and to mention only the most obvious case way in which it worked for me: after reading it, I finally, after a dozen or so vain attempts, was able to quit smoking, backed up by my new knowledge about the logic of addiction. And yet Wallace eventually succumbed to his inner demons. Reading "Good Old Neon" again I cannot help but see the parallels with this "luminous guy" who seemed so happy to its narrator, yet killed himself far back in 1981. David Wallace, the narrator of the story, tries hard to imagine "whatever on the interior must have driven him to kill himself in such a dramatic and doubtlessly painful way." We, as readers, are now in the position of Wallace the narrator, who is "aware that the cliché that you can't ever truly know what's going on inside somebody else is hoary and insipid and yet at the same time trying very iii

consciously to prohibit that awareness from mocking the attempt or sending the whole line of thought into the sort of inbent spiral that keeps you from ever getting anywhere." But what are we, in retrospect, to make of these following lines: "considerable time having passed since 1981, of course, and David Wallace having emerged from years of literally indescribable war against himself with quite a bit more firepower than he'd had at Aurora West." Wallace the narrator believes himself to have come out of these wars against himself stronger than his schoolmate - but in the case of the real life David Foster Wallace, the firepower didn't suffice, and we can only surmise from a distance how painful it must have been to endure 20 years of depression as he has. "Not another word" is the last we hear of the narrator in "Good Old Neon", and it is now our task to take Wallace's lead and imagine what must have driven him to his end, hoping to overcome our and his loneliness and emerging out of this experience with enough firepower to come to terms with our own demons. The depressed person in the story of the same title remains depressed because she is trapped inside her own narcissism, endlessly circling around her pains and never once listening to the troubles of those friends who have remained with her over the years. She speaks and speaks, but never once listens, thus failing in empathy and remaining utterly alone inside. That is why Wallace makes us listen to the pains of other people, and that is why he ends this story in medias res with the depressed person desperately asking her best friend for her honest opinion about her. Through this clever textual strategy, it is all of a sudden the reader who is addressed and asked to assume the role of the friend, and it is now his job to take up an attitude, to connect empathically with the depressed person and do his share in overcoming her (and his) isolation. Wallace's suicide may foster tendencies to interpret his work as that of a world-weary pessimist. I hope that this study achieves the contrary. I hope it can contribute to illuminate his indefatigable belief in the possibilities and the magic of human existence. His purpose of writing was therapeutic - for him and for us, and almost all of his texts provide glimpses of hope, solutions to the problems they present. As he once said in an interview: "In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. iv

Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'll find a way both to depict this dark world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it." His death leaves us, the readers of his works, a little lonelier in this world. Yet, "Death is not the end", as one of his stories is entitled. His words have not lost any of their value, and they may still ring true to that reader who is willing to empathize with the characters which Wallace created for us. And, so I believe, if we take this task of empathy seriously, we may also encounter the truly infinite part of Wallace's mind. In Infinite Jest, James Incandenza returns after his suicide as a ghost to get in contact with Don Gately. Their minds fuse and Gately's language is all of a sudden enriched by James, who tells him that "his best thoughts were really communiqués from the patient and Abiding dead". By finally being able, thanks to the dead "auteur" of "Infinite Jest" (the film in the novel), to name, objectify and make sense of his pains and experiences, Gately is freed from the iron cage of despair and addiction. David Foster Wallace may be dead now, but that does not mean that he has stopped communicating with us. His thoughts and words are still there. They ask us to listen - and to respond.

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Introduction I. David Foster Wallace and Postmodernism A. Wallace's Justification of Postmodernism B. Wallace's Social Criticism C. Postmodernism and Power II. An Existentialist Reading of Infinite Jest A. Sören Kierkegaard B. Jean-Paul Sartre C. Diagnosis 1. Addiction a. Addiction to the Self b. Addiction to Objects (1) TV and Consumption (2) Substances 2. Anhedonia and Desire 3. "Anxiety" and "Despair" a. "Anxiety" b. Escape from "Anxiety" 4. "Unconscious Despair" in Infinite Jest a. Escape into the Finite b. Escape into the Infinite 5. "Shame" and "The Look" 6. "Conscious Despair" in Infinite Jest 7. "Freedom in Chains" 8. Self-Consciousness, "Nausea" and Addiction 9. Addiction as "Despair" 10. "Despair of Weakness and Defiance" 11. Postmodernism and "Despair" 12. "Abjection" D. Therapy 1. Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents 2. The Enfield Tennis Academy 3. Alcoholics Anonymous a. Self-Surrender b. Authority c. The "Illusion of Autonomy" d. Honesty, Openness and Clichés e. Choice f. Concrete vs. Abstract g. AA and American Freedom 4. Alcoholics Anonymous and T.S. Eliot III. Wallace's Aesthetics in Infinite Jest A. Literature B. Poststructuralism C. Ludwig Wittgenstein

3 5 6 6 8 11 15 21 25 25 26 35 35 36 42 44 44 48 49 49 51 54 57 64 68 71 75 79 92 95 96 97 99 100 101 103 105 108 112 115 117 120 120 123 126 1

D. Mikhail Bakhtin E. Alcoholics Anonymous as a Narrative Model F. Infinite Jest and Postmodernism G. Postmodernism or "New Realism"? Summary List of Works Cited

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128 131 134 142 147 150

Introduction Since the 1960s, Postmodernism has been a dominant field in U.S. literature. With the 1980s, however, there commenced a cultural backlash against the self-reflexive postmodern avant-garde, as "minimalist" writers demanded an artistic return to "reality" and theorists such as Fredric Jameson, Gerald Graff, Zygmunt Bauman or Slavoj Žižek questioned the broadly accepted narrative of the postmodern "liberation." The following decade, then, witnessed the emergence of more complex representational works, such as Jonathan Franzen's The Confessions or Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex. At the center of the literary reaction toward Postmodernism lies Infinite Jest, a novel by David Foster Wallace, which, despite its scope of 1,079 pages, attracted a large number of readers after its publication in 1996. In contrast to "classic" postmodern works of literature, it deals earnestly with the concrete ethical, cultural and personal issues facing individuals in contemporary society, and has inspired the works of Franzen and other contemporary novelists, as Stephen Burn remarked in a review for a new edition of the novel. Yet whereas MARSHALL BOSWELL calls him "the foremost writer of a remarkable generation of ambitious new novelists,"1 Wallace's oeuvre has only hesitantly been accepted by academia. However, interest has started to grow, and there are already two books on Infinite Jest and one monograph focusing on his work in general. In addition, there are a number of articles in periodicals and several essays and papers collected on Nick Maniatis' website The Howling Fantods. To all these, this paper is heavily indebted. The overall tendency of academic works on Wallace is to focus on his relation to Postmodernism, as he repeatedly addresses the issue in both expository and fictional texts. This paper, however, does not intend to answer the task of a categorization of Infinite Jest, but restricts itself to an analysis of Wallace's critique of Postmodernism and a comparison between his agenda and that of the "predecessing" literary period. To do so, the novel is read through the lens of the existentialist philosophies of Sören Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre. It will be argued that their ideas lie at the core of Infinite Jest and that Wallace uses them to challenge the postmodern influence in culture, society and academia. Believing Postmodernism to be exhausted and absorbed by mass culture, he considers it no longer a mode of liberation and renewal, but a source of entrapment, passivity and despair. Therefore he fuses an existing postmodern literary discourse with existentialist ideas to breathe new life into the formerly creative and critical postmodern agenda. Taking into account Linda Hutcheon's A Poetics of 1

Boswell 117 3

Postmodernism, this paper holds that Infinite Jest is neither wholly outside of Postmodernism, nor another direct expression of it. Wallace's ideas concerning literature and theory are inherently related to his social criticism. He addresses problems of contemporary existence and relates them to the dominant postmodern discourse in his culture, diagnosing his society with, foremost, narcissism, utilitarianism and hedonism. His writing is primarily concerned with individual freedom, one of the principal elements of U.S. ideology, yet his approach rather signifies a re-negotiation of the concept, an "update" for the post-industrial U.S. society approaching the millennium. Wallace's central concern is with selfhood and identity, according to Douglas Kellner one of the most pressing topics today.2 Infinite Jest depicts the state of the postmodern self in the American society of the 1990s, contrasting it with existentialist concepts of subjectivity and identity construction. This paper will first present Wallace's explicit ideas about Postmodernism, before supplying a short introduction to the novel and the philosophies of Kierkegaard and Sartre, respectively. Next, an existentialist reading of Infinite Jest, divided between a diagnosis and a therapeutic "advice" will be conducted, focusing on the themes of narcissism, addiction, television, "anxiety" and "despair". Finally, Wallace's aesthetics in the novel will be analyzed with the help of concepts from Ludwig Wittgenstein and Mikhail Bakhtin. The poetry and aesthetics of T.S. Eliot and Julia Kristeva's theory of "abjection" will be employed to further highlight the existentialist issues behind the novel. One of the principal studies of Infinite Jest to be used will be an essay by N. Katherine Hayles, as it touches on most concepts treated here. Merely to simplify matters, and not to imply a personal preference or ideology, the masculine pronoun will be applied throughout. Likewise, although this study is solely concerned with U.S. society, this should not mean that the issues addressed in it cannot be found in other societies as well, as it merely follows the focus of Wallace's novel. In several instances, I quote from works of German scholars. My translations of these quotes can be found in the respective footnotes.

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Kellner 258

I. David Foster Wallace and Postmodernism Commentators on Wallace's work tend to focus on the question of its periodization. While this paper does not intend to participate in the discussion, the general tendency of reviewers to classify him as belonging to a new literary generation should be noted. Wallace himself considers his work a response to his postmodern forefathers, and especially to John Barth.3 It can be seen as an attempt to find novel ways of written expression, a move against an artistic generation whose techniques have become socially acceptable and culturally dominant, thereby losing their subversive and innovative edge. Such an analysis, however, demands awareness of the difficulty of the term "Postmodernism". Despite its ubiquity in academic writing, no single satisfying and commonly accepted definition has emerged that could sufficiently grasp "Postmodernism" in all its complexity:4 "Of all the terms bandied about in both current cultural theory and contemporary writing on the arts, Postmodernism must be the most over- and under-defined,"5 says HUTCHEON. The problem lies in the nature of Postmodernism itself: as many theorists have agreed upon, it is ambiguous and paradoxical to such an extent that it eludes easy observation. Postmodernism is furthermore conscious of itself as a construct of the academic establishment and inimical toward any attempt at a clear definition, as such would result in a weakening of its very source of energy. Again HUTCHEON: "Postmodernism is a contradictory phenomenon, one that uses and abuses, installs and then subverts the very concepts it challenges."6 As this paper is concerned with Wallace's reaction to Postmodernism, it will follow his more traditional concept, which encompasses "black humour" literature and the selfreflexive "meta-aesthetic" avant-garde writers of the 1960s and 1970s, who employed metafiction and irony to expose the fictionality of their culture. Similar to Barth's claim about the exhaustion of traditional literary modes, Wallace believes Postmodernism itself to be exhausted. He mounted his attacks in several interviews and an essay entitled "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction", a personal statement of aesthetic ideas that were subsequently applied to his novel Infinite Jest.7

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Boswell 9 In literary studies, theorists are concerned with the question of the "Post-" in the term: is it really a revolutionary new literary period or merely a continuation of Modernism? Is it actually a historical phenomenon or in fact an aesthetic style? Likewise, it remains unclear which artistic expressions since the 1960s may be considered postmodern. 5 Hutcheon, Poetics 3 6 ibd. 7 Holland 218 4

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A. Wallace's Justification of Postmodernism Despite his outspoken critique of Postmodernism, Wallace is not opposed to it per se, as he admits that there were good reasons for its emergence. Like Barth, he believes that Modernism after World War II was exhausted and had to be replaced by more open artistic forms of expression suited to the new times. Speaking about postmodern selfreflexivity in an interview with Larry McCaffery: "I still believe the move to involution had value: it helped writers break free of some long-standing flat-earth-type taboos. It was standing in line to happen."8 Modernism had ceased to be a rebellious artistic movement and had instead become the supreme form of cultural expression in AngloAmerican cultures, its closed forms and conventions becoming a burden for subsequent artists. As BOSWELL writes in his monography on Wallace: "For him, the self-referential quality of John Barth's work, the way it unseats our belief in literature's ability to address directly the world outside itself and replaces epistemology with temporal ontology, serves as a necessary and even useful response to the Modernist project."9 Furthermore, for WALLACE, postmodern "[i]rony and cynicism were just what the US hypocrisy of the Fifties and Sixties called for. That's what made the early Postmodernists great artists."10 B. Wallace's Social Criticism Yet Wallace, close to Fredric Jameson's critique of Postmodernism and Zygmunt Bauman's account of "Liquid Modernity", makes the postmodern dominance in part responsible for a growing social tendency toward hedonism and empty materialism, analogous to MATEI CALINESCU'S description of the postmodern era as a "cult of instant joy, fun morality, and the generalized confusion between self-realization and simple selfgratification."11 Contemporary western societies have become heterogeneous and "multioptional," while traditional institutions like state, church or family, which once supplied the individual with ethics, normative models of behaviour and practical orientation, have lost their authority. Especially postmodern philosophers, artists and theorists have challenged the "foundationalist" assumptions behind traditional "objective" value and belief systems, yet the liberation of the individual from these norms has not led to a more responsible and enlightened humanity, but in many cases imprisoned him inside an empty pursuit of happiness and the powerful persuasiveness of the media and 8

McCaffery 134 Boswell 12 10 McCaffery 147 11 Calinescu 7 9

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commercial culture in general. As WALLACE once stated in an interview: "All that stuff is now pulling against what I think in my generation and yours is very different from, say, our grandparents' - an immense, gnawing, craving hunger for pleasure, and a real feeling of deprivation when we're not experiencing it."12 The individual today is confronted with a large variety of choices, and he no longer seems to know his way inside an unprecedented sociocultural freedom in which he is constantly forced to make decisions for himself. Postmodern literature, with its emphasis on itself as a linguistic and (inter-)textual construct, its ironic and cynical refusal of textual meaning, and its neglect of representationality and ethical issues in favour of an abstract focus on theoretical and linguistic concerns, likewise no longer provides the individual with any orientation. Thus, it often makes him subject to those forces willing to fill this new "authority vacuum," most importantly the media and commercial culture. Corresponding to the desire for pleasure, WALLACE identifies an equally strong urge to repress any sign of illness or mortality: In most other cultures, if you hurt, if you have a symptom that's causing you to suffer, they view this as basically healthy and natural, a sign that your nervous system knows something's wrong. [...] But if you just look at the number of ways that we try like hell to alleviate mere symptoms in this country - from fast-fast-fast-relief antacids to the popularity of lighthreaded musicals during the Depression - you can see an almost compulsive tendency to regard pain itself as the problem. And so pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself.13

In his view, pain in U.S. society is more and more seen as an impediment instead of an important element of existence. Television is identified as a major contributor to this state of affairs, as it supports a denial of mortality and thus of any teleology that could provide a self with meaningful orientation in life.14 He considers his contemporary culture as a "...near-parental [...] machine that produces the need for and promise of infantile satisfaction."15 According to MARY K. HOLLAND, it "provides the needlessness of validating one's existence,"16 almost pampering the individual who chooses to follow the road of consumption and desire toward self-fulfillment. Apparently, Wallace does not share the optimism of early postmodernists such as Ihab Hassan or Leslie Fiedler. 12

Wiley McCaffery 128-29 14 Wallace, "Fictional Futures" 15 Holland 229 16 ibd. 13

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Whereas they were expecting the emergence of a new mode of consciousness, Wallace finds merely empty materialism, passivity, a loss of selfhood and a society that spends averagely six hours a day in front of the TV. In a similar vein runs the argument of Žižek against the narrative of the postmodern liberation: For Žižek, the so-called postmodern age in which we live fools us into thinking we are behaving in a radically free, ironic and post-ideological manner. We have lost our faith in an eternal and incontrovertible law, and accordingly believe ourselves able to build new discourses, freedoms and communities simply on the basis of an ever more innovative set of social practices and identities. The disastrous consequence of this misguided belief is that the acknowledged, symbolic authoritarian father-figure of the past becomes transformed into its disavowed double: the obscene, but ultimately totalitarian, father. Able to absorb all manners of cultural subversions, reconfigurations and transgressions without feeling in the least threatened, this far more dangerous silent father, or empty law, does continue fiercely to dictate its demands; it commands the apparently liberated subject to accomplish a blind duty to pure enjoyment, no matter what the price.17

Wallace does not make postmodern literature the sole scapegoat of his diagnosis, although he implies that it contributed to this state of affairs, and he does not desire a return to pre-postmodern times. What he criticizes is that writers of his generation still adhere to the postmodern agenda, unaware of its exhaustion and the loss of its subversive and redemptive power. C. Postmodernism and Power By the time Wallace entered university, Postmodernism had become an established factor in the curricula of literature departments. Yet far more consequential in WALLACE'S eyes was the absorption of postmodern irony and self-reflexivity by the media and commercial culture:18 "For at least ten years now, television has been ingeniously absorbing, homogenizing, and representing the very same cynical postmodern aesthetic that was once the best alternative to the appeal of low, over-easy, mass-marketed narrative."19 Television, most importantly, employs these modes to shield itself from external criticism by openly referring to its own persuasive agenda and low standards, thereby both presenting itself as a honest and trustworthy medium and 17

Drexler 239 Boswell 13 19 Wallace, "E Unibus Pluram" 52 18

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helping the viewer to laugh away his bad conscience about watching TV.20 It pursues a strategy of "...heaping scorn on pretentions to those old commercial virtues of authority and sincerity - thus (1) shielding the heaper of scorn from scorn and (2) congratulating the patron of scorn for rising above the mass of people who still fall for outmoded pretensions."21 This marks an important reversion, since Postmodernism used such techniques to criticize TV and commercial culture in the first place.22 However, the relation between Postmodernism and commercial culture is more complex, as Postmodernism's attack on authority and "arbitrary" conventions such as "depth", "truth" or "meaning"23 could be used to justify its "low" art directed at pure pleasure: Its promulgation of cynicism about authority works to the general advantage of television on a number of levels. First, to the extent that TV can ridicule old-fashioned conventions right off the map, it can create an authority vacuum. And then guess what fills it. The real authority on a world we now view as constructed and not depicted becomes the medium that constructs our world-view. Second, to the extent that TV can refer exclusively to itself and debunk conventional standards as hollow, it is invulnerable to critics' charges that what's on is shallow or crass or bad, since any such judgments appeal to conventional, extratelevisual standards about depth, taste, quality. Too, the ironic tone of TV's self-reference means that no one can accuse TV of trying to put anything over on anybody. As essayist Lewis Hyde points out, self-mocking irony is always 'Sincerity with a motive.'24

The "authority vacuum" following the emergence of Postmodernism was filled by commercial culture and its monetary agenda, employing postmodern techniques to their exhaustion. Yet there is more to Wallace's critique, as he considers the ruling ironic tone of his society as contributing to solipsism and despair. Irony becomes a mask of cynical un-earnestness behind which the individual can hide: "I think the people like my age and younger relate to irony, which is largely unconscious and largely is used as a mechanism for avoiding some really thorny issues -- I think that's toxic [sic]."25 This quote already signals his existentialist agenda. WALLACE considers irony an apparently easy way out for individuals trained by TV to avoid appearing naive, an escape that leads to a 20

cf. Lasch ibd. 61 22 ibd. 66 23 Poststructuralism's liberation of the "signifier" from the "signified". See Calinescu's analysis of kitsch. 24 ibd. 62-63 25 Wiley 21

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detachment from the world: "The most frightening prospect, for the well-conditioned viewer, becomes leaving oneself open to others' ridicule by betraying passé expressions of value, emotion, or vulnerability. Other people become judges; the crime is naiveté."26 He asserts that irony was a necessary mode of U.S. fiction and an efficient means to challenge hypocrisy: Irony in postwar art and culture started out the same way youthful rebellion did. It was difficult and painful, and productive - a grim diagnosis of a long-denied disease. The assumptions behind early postmodern irony, on the other hand, were still frankly idealistic: it was assumed that etiology and diagnosis pointed toward cure, that a revelation of imprisonment led to freedom. So then how have irony, irreverence, and rebellion come to be not liberating but enfeebling in the culture today's avant-garde tries to write about?27

He gives the answer immediately: "'Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is 'the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.' This is because irony [...] serves an almost exclusively negative function. It's critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. [...] But irony's singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks."28 For him, self-reflexivity and irony have become "agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture."29 Postmodernism's repeated deconstruction of any kind of authority, belief system and master narrative has become routine and its alleged liberation has thus turned into a new kind of oppression: "The forms of our best rebellious art have become mere gestures, schticks, not only sterile but perversely enslaving. [...] If anarchy actually wins, if rulelessness becomes the rule, then protest and change become not just impossible but incoherent."30 As GRAFF writes about the postmodern era: There is a tendency to view the loss of a significant external reality as a form of liberation, a release from a binding tradition, a determinate moral order, and an a priori definition of selfhood. On the other hand, the sense of being liberated from ancient obligations 26

Wallace, "E Unibus Pluram" 63 ibd. 66-67 28 ibd. 68 29 ibd. 49. Cf. MIRZOEFF: "The once all-pervasive postmodern irony no longer works as an effective tool of dissent." (72) 30 ibd. 68. In an essay on DeLillo's Libra, Timothy Parrish argues that the C.I.A. achieves its purpose when all narratives can be deconstructed (89). Similar arguments are provided in the writings of Žižek, Jameson and Mirzoeff. 27

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can easily turn into a sense of isolation and betrayal directed at the world's failure to yield an objective teleological order.31

Graff describes a common aspect of postmodern despair, yet, for Wallace, the non-existence of such an objective order is a fact one has to accept. TV and mass culture in general, however, provide not an awareness of this contingency, but only more soothing illusions. Postmodernism, in Wallace's opinion, is exhausted and needs to be replaced by a more constructive poetics, one that is engaged with concrete social reality. In both his expository and literary texts, he presents his society as addicted to entertainment, and he diagnoses it with apathy, narcissism and solipsism. These claims have been made by earlier theorists such as Guy Debord or Horkheimer and Adorno. Wallace's criticism resembles their arguments, yet he extends their ideas to the postmodern cultural discourse. As this paper argues, Wallace fuses this discourse with existentialist philosophy to create a newly compelling, innovative and potent work of art. Such an analysis requires first a summary of Infinite Jest. II. An Existentialist Reading of Infinite Jest Infinite Jest makes use of a wide variety of literary genres and tropes, from sci-fi quest novel to bildungsroman, from satire to an earnest exploration of contemporary U.S. life. The story is set in the near-future and in spite of several crucial differences its setting is still recognizable for the contemporary reader. In the novel, the growing demand for energy and the staggering amounts of waste produced posed serious problems for the U.S. society of the 1990s. It was apparently solved by the development of annular fusion, a process of energy generation that feeds on its own waste. This cycle, however, is not self-sufficient, but escalating, as ever more amounts of waste are needed for the process,32 which sucks all natural toxins out of the surrounding land, such as would inhibit natural growth and stabilize the ecological balance. The government, led by the hygiene-anxious President Johnny Gentle and his Clean U.S. Party, combined the problems of waste and ecological disaster for a common solution: waste is added (literally catapulted) to the "Concavity", the region of roughly four New England States affected by annular fusion. Gentle, under immense political pressure, then forced neighboring Canada to accept the territory as a "gift," thereby "exporting" the ecological 31 32

Graff 225 Hayles 688 11

problem. To secure his influence on Canadian politics, he created a system of Interdependence with the establishment of the Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N.). As the expensive process of annular fusion and the loss of a huge terrain put the federal budget under enormous stress, Gentle's advisors came up with the idea of subsidized time: instead of continuing the Gregorian calendar, each year is "sold" to the highest-bidding company, so that, for example, most of the novel takes place in the "Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (Y.D.A.U.)." Infinite Jest is centered on two protagonists whose stories are only roughly related to each other and who probably33 never meet in the course of the novel. Hal Incandenza is a seventeen year old tennis prodigy who lives at the Enfield, Ma. Tennis Academy (E.T.A.), which was established by his multi-talented parents James O. and Avril Incandenza. His father, who committed suicide some years prior to the main plot, was a physicist specializing in optics. He contributed significantly to the development of annular fusion before he established the Academy in the vicinity of Boston. After this, Incandenza turned all his energies into avant-garde film-making, without ever achieving much success or gaining more than a careful critical acceptance. Never having recovered from a traumatic childhood, he was also a serious alcoholic who found it difficult to establish direct and open relations with those around him. His father's suicide and his mother's extra-marital affairs put an enormous stress on Hal, as do the high expectations set on him due to his privileged education and his being the youngest son and only hope of fulfilling the family promises. He has two older brothers, Mario, a severely deformed hydrocephalic, and Orin, a successful football punter, who has severed all ties to his family and spends most of his personal life imitating his mother's promiscuity. Hal deals with the pressure and his insecurity by escaping into encyclopedic learning, athletic success and marijuana abuse. His gradual descent into addiction is paralleled by the narcotics withdrawal of Don Gately, the second protagonist of the novel, who, after a terrible childhood and a short career as a burglar, inhabits and works for the Ennet Halfway House for recovering addicts in Enfield. He is frequently portrayed as huge, strong and intelligent, despite his lack of sufficient education. A third main plot concerns the last film of James Incandenza, "Infinite Jest", which is so entertaining that it puts its viewers in a state of ultimate bliss, leaving them catatonically in front of the TV, watching the film in an endless loop, until eventually dehydrating or starving. In the world of the novel, movies are watched on 33

This possibility is only hinted at in the novel

12

"cartridges," which are either master copies or read-only copies. By the time of Y.D.A.U., several read-only copies of the movie are disseminated by an unknown source throughout the U.S., and several organizations, most prominently the Québécois terrorist group A.F.R., attempt to gain a master copy of the film, which could be used to distribute it on a wider scale and blackmail the U.S. The opponent of the A.F.R. is the American Office of Unspecified Services (O.U.S.), in the novel represented by Hugh Steeply. Major sections of the text involve Steeply conversing with the Québécois "quadruple" agent Rémy Marathe, who, although critical of U.S. policy, agreed to work for him in order to secure a treatment for his ill and deformed wife.34 Linking these plots and the characters who inhabit them are the common themes of contemporary despair, depression and addiction: "Wallace's novel is at once a dense compendium of American neuroses and addiction, an astute examination of the insatiable American proclivity of the pursuit of happiness – "happification" – in an age of infinite stimulative choice, and a latent aesthetic allegory,"35 writes Timothy Jacobs. In its fictional treatment of the contemporary U.S., it presents "a population of lonely, solipsistic voyeurs, an entire nation – continent, rather – overdosing on non-stop entertainment and information."36 To the lack of orientation common to all characters usually comes a traumatic or troubling childhood in a dysfunctional family. The novel deals with these issues earnestly, giving each character room to express his story, and in addition addresses several ways of how to come to terms with the spiritual and personal emptiness pervading O.N.A.N. The novel opens with its chronological end, the climax of Hal's story, in which he narrates his interview for admission at the University of Arizona. While his perceptions and reasoning seem perfectly normal, albeit unusually detached and detailed, and not much appears out of the ordinary with the replies he reports, his interviewers react with terror, believe that he has a seizure, and then physically restrain and hospitalize him, all this narrated in a cold and impersonal way. It is unclear if Hal's perception can be trusted, and the reader is likely to expect some explanation for the strange and thrilling scene from the following pages. However, they add only more to the initial confusion. While they sketch Hal's descent into addiction and solipsism, they only hint at several possibilities without providing clear and unambiguous evidence for either one. Despite 34

Due to annular fusion in and around the Concavity, many people in the regions experience physical deformation 35 Jacobs 215 36 Boswell 124 13

the prominence of this mystery, the novel's main concern lies in the origin and development of his addiction to marijuana. While the narrator makes the question of Hal's fate a pressing one and provides the reader with some weak clues, it appears that this is a strategy to lure the reader into an addiction with the text, giving him a sense of the subject matter simultaneous to his reading experience.37 The novel ends months before these events, without any useful hints for a satisfactory interpretation, and the reader is forced to return to the beginning to find an answer he did not find there in the first place, but which he nevertheless tends to expect.38 The clues that the narrator gives do not serve as possible explanations but rather as another addictive element of the text. The other main plots lack resolution as well. Gately, on his way toward a clean life, receives a gunshot wound while protecting a fellow resident of Ennet House. Frequently passing between reality and dream in a hospital, it remains unclear if he dies, recovers, or is subjected to the substance of his addiction, the narcotic Demerol. At about the same time, the terrorists of the A.F.R. launch an attack on E.T.A. in order to capture a master copy of the film, and Hal is in grave danger, yet the outcome is left uncertain as well. Thus, despite the almost encyclopedic amount of information that the novel provides, its main storylines remain unresolved. As the case of Hal's narration already suggests, much of the information given is highly dubious, as it is always mediated by a biased subjective consciousness. The novel employs many focalizers, whose thoughts, perceptions and language mix with those of the narrator of Infinite Jest, who remains ambiguous as well.39 The reader may thus not trust the information he receives and is forced to work out an understanding for himself, especially considering the fragmentary and non-linear way in which the information is provided. As this paper analyzes Wallace's novel with the philosophies of Kierkegaard and Sartre, a short comprehensive account of their core ideas relevant to Infinite Jest needs to be given.

37

Note that the novel and the lethally addictive film share the same name cf. Burn, Goerlandt (321) 39 On the surface omniscient, there are also instances of First-Person-narration, and the narrator's voice changes with each protagonist. Greg Carlisle assumes that there are several narrators. 38

14

A. Sören Kierkegaard Kierkegaard's philosophy laid the foundation for the various schools of Existentialism that emerged during the first half of the twentieth century. In contrast to philosophical tradition and German Idealism en vogue at his time, he applied a psychological lens to analyze the modern individual. Not only were his concepts of "anxiety" and "despair" highly influential in subsequent thought, they also remain relevant in our times, as Infinite Jest shows. His philosophy is at the heart of Wallace's account of the postmodern self and the contemporary U.S. society. In contrast to the classical western concept of a coherent and substantial self, one that Postmodernism also challenged, but which still appears to be pervading the popular mind, Kierkegaard posited an idea of the self as non-identical and differentiated from itself, an elusive entity engaged in a dialectical process of self-reflexive synthesis that needs to be constantly actualized by the individual. This synthesis is one between the outer poles of human nature, the finite and the infinite, or the body and the spirit. The self is not the synthesis of these poles, but its self-reflexive and self-conscious relation to itself as the producer of this synthesis: The self is a relation which relates to itself, or that in the relation which is its relating to itself. The self is not the relation but the relation’s relating to itself."40 This refers to, on the one hand, one's conscious and concrete affirmation of one's finite and mundane existence, delimited by the facts of one's concrete material existence and sociocultural context, and, on the other hand, the conscious relation to one's infinite soul, distinguished by immaterial possibility. This implies that the individual has to constantly establish this synthesis between its infinite powers of consciousness and its finite and concrete existence. The self is a volatile construction engaged in a constant movement toward itself, yet never arriving at a fixed point of identity. It always comes too late and in fact it is just this coming-too-late, this relation to itself through a conscious distance to itself: "Im Selbst ist eine Negativität, die es in ständiger Bewegung auf sich zu hält," says RINGLEBEN,41 and he terms it an "identity in difference." It is an active and self-reflexive process that needs to be continually actualized, as the self comes into being in each moment: "Der Mensch ist nicht wie ein Ding festgestellt, sondern unbestimmt," he argues, following KIERKEGAARD: "Das Selbst ist nur [...] im ständigen Sich-Übernehmen." It is not a given, but an obligation,42 and it has to be consciously chosen by the subject: "Nur 40

Kierkegaard, Sickness 43 Ringleben 71. (There is a negativity in the self that keeps it in constant movement towards itself) 42 cf. Beabout 41

15

indem es sich selbst, und d.h. bewußt, will, ist es auch es selbst."43 If choice and synthesis are neglected, the individual loses touch with himself and "despair" surfaces: If one were to imagine a house consisting of basement, ground floor and first floor, […] and if now one were to compare being a human being with such a house, then the sorry and ludicrous fact with most people is, alas, that in their own house they prefer to live in the basement. Every human being is the psycho-physical synthesis planned as spirit; this is the building, but he prefers living in the basement, that is, in the categories of sensation.44

The self as a relation, however, is never autonomous and self-sufficient, but already brought into existence by God, the origin of one's consciousness and thus one's freedom: "For this latter formula is the expression of the relation’s (the self’s) total dependence, the expression of the fact that the self cannot by itself arrive at or remain in equilibrium and rest, but only, in relating to itself, by relating to that which has established the whole relation."45 As God had set man free, obedience to him means not a loss of freedom, but its actualization by consciously relating it to and receiving it from its source. Man is responsible for his own existence, and he comes to an awareness of his freedom by his belief in the Absolute from which it stems. For Kierkegaard, "despair" was the principal state of affairs in his society. It is brought about by the experience of "anxiety",46 a sublime encounter with freedom that entails the obligation of conscious selfhood. The subject in "anxiety" is attracted to and at the same time repulsed from the burden of his consciousness, the awareness of his freedom. He experiences a dizzying horror vacui, his unfinished and fleeting self with all the contingency it implies: "The actuality of the spirit constantly shows itself as a form that tempts its possibility but disappears as soon as it seeks to grasp for it, and it is a nothing that can only bring anxiety."47 "Anxiety" and "despair" are symptoms of a desire for the release from this burden, and they often lead to anhedonia.48 "Despair" is "misslingendes Selbstsein,"49 a neglect of the synthesis and one's personal freedom, and thus a loss of selfhood. 43

Ringleben 133 (Unlike an object, man is indefinite. The self is only self when it constantly adopts itself. Only through a conscious will to be itself can it be itself) 44 Kierkegaard, Sickness 73-74 45 Kierkegaard, Sickness 44 46 Beabout 127 47 Kierkegaard, Anxiety 42 48 Kierkegaard, Journals 76 49 Ringleben 16

Kierkegaard knew five modes of "despair".50 While the first two are unconscious, the others, moving in self-escalating vicious cycles, are a conscious and "impotent selfconsuming:"51 Yet despair is exactly a consumption of the self, but an impotent self-consumption not capable of doing what it wants. But what it wants is to consume itself, which it cannot do, and this impotence is a new form of self-consumption, but in which despair is once again incapable of doing what it wants, to consume itself. This is a heightening of despair, or the law for the heightening of despair. This is the hot incitement or the cold fire in despair, this incessantly inward gnawing, deeper and deeper in impotent self-consumption. […] For what he – not despaired but – despairs over is precisely this: that he cannot consume himself, cannot be rid of himself, cannot become nothing.52

The self struggles against itself in order to escape from itself, thereby only strengthening its hold on itself and intensifying its "despair". Like Narcissus in Ovid's Metamorphoses, the despairing self cannot recognize its antagonist as itself. "Despair" may thus be characterized with KONRAD LIESSMANN as a crisis in identity: "Verzweiflung ist Resultat eines Bewußtseins, das sich nicht zu Ende denken kann."53 Likewise, THILO WESCHE describes it as an experience of the indeterminacy of the self.54 The individual despairs about the elusiveness of his self and is ignorant about his being grounded in God, missing the synthesis of his dialectic nature and failing in concretely actualizing his self: The self is the conscious synthesis of infinitude and finitude, which relates to itself, whose task is to become itself, which can only be done in the relationship to God. To become oneself, however, is to become something concrete. But to become something concrete is neither to become finite nor to become infinite, for that which is to become concrete is indeed a synthesis. […]Yet a self, every moment it exists, is in a process of becoming […] In so far, then, as the self does not become itself, it is not itself; but not to be oneself is exactly despair.55

50

cf. Beabout Beabout 98 52 Kierkegaard, Sickness 58-59 53 Liessmann 128 (Despair originates in consciousness, which cannot grasp itself in its totality) 54 Wesche, Kierkegaard 32 55 Kierkegaard, Sickness 59-60 51

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Forming one's self and relating to it self-reflexively means actively choosing oneself in each moment, assuming responsibility for oneself and validating oneself and one's possibilities in the world. As Kierkegaard remarked, "despair" need not be conscious, as one may actually be in "despair" while not being aware of any pain at all. This is the case in his first two modes of "despair", which stem from a crisis in the synthesis of the finite and the infinite that leads to an overemphasis of either extreme. "Despair of the infinite" marks an ignorance of the self's actual, material existence and its limits in favor of grand illusions. The individual loses himself in the numerous abstract possibilities of existence that modern society offers without ever concretely choosing one, his self remaining an abstraction that gradually fades away, yet never fully disappearing. While this "despair" is one of an aesthetic individualism that may in its extreme forms turn into hedonism, "despair of the finite" is the opposite, a loss of individuality or spirituality, and it can be witnessed in its extreme forms in fatalists or philistines. As Kierkegaard pointed out, "despair of the finite" often appears in society as a mark of success due to its emphasis on material concerns.56 The individual ignores his infinite nature, and thus his possibilities, as his concern remains fixed on his finite existence: "But the only life wasted is the life of one who so lived it, deceived by life’s pleasure or its sorrows, that he never became decisively, eternally, conscious of himself as spirit, as self, or, what is the same, he never became aware […] that there is a God there and that ‘he’, himself, his self, exists before this God."57 Only in the third mode of "despair" does the illness come to the individual's consciousness, as in this case he realizes his lack of selfhood. He despairs over this awareness, yet still does not come to understand the elusive nature of his self and his own obligation of forming it in the first place. Passively he experiences an inner lack which he self-pityingly circles, turning outward only in his desperate search for a cause of his suffering or for something to fill his inner void. Often following this mode are the fourth and fifth modes of "despair", viz. those of "weakness" and "defiance". In the fourth mode, the individual despairs even more about his lack of selfhood and the burden of his consciousness, and he desires to become another self. KIERKEGAARD deemed this impossible, as the self's ties run deeper than modern man in his materialism believes: "For the immediate person doesn’t know himself; he quite literally only knows

56 57

ibd. 64 ibd. 57

18

himself by his coat, he knows what it is to have a self […] only in the externals."58 Still, this belief is widely held in Modernity and in itself already a symptom of "despair". The constant disappointment of desire and the growing distance to one's no longer validated self fuels it further, until the afflicted eventually desires to become no one, for Kierkegaard just another impossibility. The despairing subject may retreat into himself in self-consuming circles, or turn radically outward, fleeing his inner being altogether and drowning his self in mundane concerns: "he neither was nor became a self but now carries on living, merely in the category of the immediate."59 In some cases, however, he may realize that he is despairing over his own weakness. While it is of the utmost necessity to discover the nature of one's affliction, mere awareness often intensifies it, as one might then either despair about one's inability or, in a proud reversal, respond with defiance: "But if, dialectically, just one single further step is taken, then the person who despairs in this way comes to the consciousness of why he does not want to be himself. Then the whole thing turns around, defiance is there, just because now he wants in despair to be himself."60 The individual reacts hubristically with an affirmation of himself and his autonomous power, again missing the true nature of his affliction, as he challenges the infinite Absolute, from which he originates: And it is this self the despairer wants to be, severing the self from any relation to the power which has established it, or severing it from the conception that there is such a power. By means of this infinite form, the self wants in despair to rule over himself, or create himself, make this self the self he wants to be, determine what he will have and what he will not have in his concrete self. […] [N]o derived self, by taking notice of itself, can make itself more than it already is; it remains itself from first to last, in its self-duplication it still becomes neither more nor less than the self. In so far as the self, in the despairing endeavour of its wish to be itself, works its way into the exact opposite, it really becomes no self.61

When the individual "despairs" and renounces his infinite nature, when he believes himself to be completely autonomous, then this "despair" becomes a sin before God. For the free will of the afflicted is already in the grasp of "despair", and the belief in one's power of reasoning adds only fuel to the flame: "he stands there pointing to something that is not despair, explaining that he is in despair, and yet, sure enough, the 58

ibd. 84 ibd. 83 60 ibd. 98 61 ibd. 99-100 59

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despair is going on behind him unawares."62 While a recognition of the individual's power of choosing himself is a positive aspect of this mode of "despair", his disregard of the origin of his freedom and his own limits intensifies it. The fifth mode is one of a solipsistic narcissism, and the belief in one's autonomous power yet another expression of it. In many cases, the despairing self separates itself more and more from its society, circling endlessly around itself, consuming itself and yet never dying. In others, it returns to society in order to suppress its unformed self. Lacking any earnestness toward itself, it becomes a shifting, ironic persona: If the despairing self is active, then really it is constantly relating to itself only experimentally. […] It recognizes no power over itself; therefore in the final instance it lacks seriousness, even when it bestows upon its experiments its greatest possible attention. […] The self is its own master, absolutely (as one says) its own master; and exactly this is the despair […] that this absolute ruler is a king without a country, that really he rules over nothing.63

It is only when the subject realizes how deeply he is pervaded by "despair", recognizes the illnesses' disguises, comes to distrust his own rationalizations,64 and gives up the proud belief in his autonomous self-sufficiency, that he can find a way out of "despair". The subject needs to understand that he is the origin of his illness, in each moment that he gives in to its reasoning: "Despair over sin is an attempt to keep going by sinking even deeper. […] he sinks though in the belief, to be sure, that he is rising – and indeed he does become lighter."65 "Despair" is strongest when in disguise, especially when an individual considers himself free from it, or ignores that the condition is a selfperpetuating activity: "If a person in despair is, as he thinks, aware of his despair and doesn’t refer to it mindlessly as something that happens to him […] and wants now on his own, all on his own, and with all his might to remove the despair, then he is still in despair and through all his seeming effort only works himself all the more deeply into a deeper despair."66 What is important for the afflicted to realize: "Every actual moment of despair is to be referred back to its possibility; every moment he despairs he brings it upon himself; the time is constantly the present; nothing actual, past and done with, 62

ibd. 82 ibd. 100 64 In Freud's sense of the term 65 ibd. 142-43 66 ibd. 44 63

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comes about."67 The individual is not the passive victim, but the active offender. His existence is based on his choice, and even neglecting this choice is a choice made by the individual. Possibility exists for him in each moment, merely waiting to be actualized. In order to be set free, he needs to give up his trust in his infected reasoning, an almost paradoxical move: "‘the self must be broken down to become itself, just stop despairing over it’."68 Sin is a higher form of "despair", in which God and Christianity are renounced by the individual, a particular phenomenon of Modernity. "Despair" turns into sin when he is aware of God's existence, yet remains inside his defiant autonomy, thereby losing the freedom he wants to assert by rebelling against its source. For the healthy self is free because it is grounded in the Absolute: "...in relating to itself and in wanting to be itself, the self is grounded transparently in the power that established it. […] Where then does despair come from? From the relation in which the synthesis relates to itself, from the fact that God, who made man this relation, as it were lets go of it; that is, from the relation’s relating to itself."69 God had set man free by providing him with consciousness and thus with the possibility of "despair", the illness being in fact an important step toward selfhood. Man despairs when he becomes aware of his possibilities and his existential task, yet ignores this obligation of selfhood and never assumes responsibility for his existence: "having a self, being a self, is the greatest, the infinite, concession that has been made to man, but also eternity’s claim on him."70 In each mode, "despair" appears as a narcissistic addiction to one's superficial existence, which matches Wallace's concern in "E Unibus Pluram", an account of a society in which concrete choice and self-validation are neglected. B. Jean-Paul Sartre Although Sartre's philosophy was deeply inspired by Kierkegaard, there are nevertheless important differences between their philosophical systems, the most obvious being Sartre's atheism. As this paper focuses on Kierkegaard's work, only those concepts of Sartre's thought will be introduced that may either serve as a link between the former's writings and Infinite Jest, or which add new relevant concepts to an existential reading of Wallace's opus magnum. 67

ibd. 47 ibd. 96 69 ibd. 44-46 70 ibd. 51 68

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Sartre came closest to Kierkegaard in his ideas of the self and its inherent freedom. Like Kierkegaard, he broke with the Cartesian self, as he posited a dialectic interrelation between Being and Nothingness, connecting the latter to consciousness: "Nothingness is the putting into question of being by being - that is, precisely consciousness or for-self."71 Consciousness is not only an agent of perception and reason, but most importantly of negation. The individual does not perceive the world as a whole, as he has to constantly focus and re-focus on particular objects, negating the existence of preceding objects, or even all present objects in the cases of memory or anticipation. Consciousness thus brings entities into existence and non-existence, it structures the world into meaningful patterns and is a source of transcendence and freedom: "Ein Felsblock zum Beispiel, der mir im Wege steht, hat ein gewisses Gewicht, und von einer bestimmten Größe an kann der Mensch ihn nicht mehr hinwegheben [...] Aber: dieser 'Koeffizient des Widerstands der Dinge insbesondere kann kein Argument gegen unsere Freiheit sein, denn nur durch uns, d.h. durch das vorgängige Setzen eines Zieles, taucht dieser Koeffizient auf."72

Man's freedom consists in creating necessities, productive limits to his existence, as he shapes the vast space around himself into a meaningful and stable road on which he can move toward a chosen telos. Similar to Postmodernism, both Kierkegaard and Sartre considered existence to be basically meaningless and contingent, yet unlike Postmodernism and its "liberation" from "arbitrary" belief systems and master narratives, they embraced the idea of freedom as dependent on limits. In addition, the specific structure of human consciousness prevents the establishment of a substantial identity: "Human reality is a perpetual surpassing toward a coincidence with itself which is never given."73 It is this process of transcendence and negation, this impossible identity with oneself, missed and yet realized in constant selfvalidation, that is the self. Man is not so much provided with freedom as sentenced to it, thrown into a contingent existence, his freedom a necessity he cannot evade, and he 71

Sartre, Being 79 Hengelbrock 116-17 (A rock, for instance, which is standing in my way, has a certain weight, and from a certain size on man cannot carry it away. But: this coefficient of adversity of objects cannot be an argument against our freedom, because it is only through us, that is, through an anterior establishment of a destination, a goal, that this coefficient emerges in the first place.) 73 Sartre, Being 89 72

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experiences his judgment with the feeling of "nausea". Whereas "anxiety" is a sense of dizzying fear in the face of manifold possibilities, Sartre's concept implies disgust with the contingency of existence, and a strong desire to drop out of it altogether. In his novel Nausea, the protagonist Antoine Roquentin describes the paradox of this anhedonic desire: If I could keep myself from thinking. [...] My thought, that is me; that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think...and I can't stop myself from thinking. At this very moment - it's frightful - if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire: the hatred, the disgust of existing, there are as many ways to make myself exist, to thrust myself into existence.74

Like "despair", "nausea" follows a self-perpetuating circle, and it is likewise related to consciousness. When man is faced with contingency, he either desires to become no one or to become God, the causa sui of his existence, a desire that Kierkegaard would term "despair of defiance". Both emphasized man's task of constantly establishing his self by concrete choice. Sartre did not understand freedom as the realization of one's goals and desires, but as the act of choosing a goal in the first place, of establishing convictions and ideals, "necessities." What matters is the autonomy of choice and its subsequent validation by concrete activity. In this way, the contingent world is stabilized and shaped around one's evolving existence, the autonomous subject setting the limits inside which he may occur: "Obwohl doch die Naturdinge [...] von Anfang an unsere Handlungsfreiheit begrenzen können, muß doch unsere Freiheit selbst vorläufig den Rahmen, das Verfahren und die Ziele schaffen, in bezug auf welche sie sich als Begrenzungen kundgeben [...] unsere Freiheit konstituiert also die Grenzen, auf die sie in der Folge trifft."75 Freedom thus entails both choice and action: "Wenn Freiheit aber mehr bedeutet als die bloße Wahl einer bewußten Einstellung zu dem, was in mir und um mich herum ohnehin geschieht, dann muß sie in irgendeiner Weise Orientierungen - Ziele - setzen und im Bereich des

74

ibd., Nausea 99-100. Cf. Kierkegaard's Aesthete: "if only I could forget – this is the desire of all people!" (Either/Or I 293) 75 ibd., Das Sein und das Nichts 611. (Even though the natural objects may inhibit our freedom of action from the beginning, it is our freedom which creates the framework, the procedure and the goals, in relation to which they emerge as limitations. Our freedom, therefore, creates its own boundaries. 23

An-Sich-Seins auch verwirklichen können."76 Sartre focused primarily on Kierkegaard's first two modes of "despair", stressing man's freedom and the necessity to choose and act. Of course, there are already such resistances in the subject's world. Yet his freedom consists not in overcoming them, but in rendering them meaningful: Das Ziel ist nichts anderes als der Entwurf einer Ordnung der daseienden Dinge [...] dergestalt, daß die Widerstände, die die Freiheit im Seienden enthüllt, weit davon entfernt sind, eine Gefahr für die Freiheit zu sein, vielmehr es ihr erst ermöglichen, als Freiheit aufzutauchen. Es kann ein freies Für-Sich nur als eingesetzt in eine Widerstand leistende Welt geben. Außerhalb dieses Eingesetztseins verlieren Notwendigkeit an Wert, sogar ihren Sinn.77

die

Begriffe

Freiheit,

Determiniertheit,

While Kierkegaard believed the self to be limited by God, in Sartre's system it finds its limits not in a metaphysical entity, but in the immanent contingency of the world and the two poles of Being and Nothingness. Yet another principal delimiting force for Sartre was "the other", who enters one's consciousness by his "look". The self, focus of the "look", becomes aware of "the other's" consciousness, and thus of his freedom and its own status as object for "the other", thereby suffering a loss of freedom. The coherent space that it has created around itself dissolves, as it realizes, through the negating "look," "the other's" freedom and power to structure this same space autonomously for and around himself. "The other" negates the self's possibility of transcendence and fixes it as static object inside its finite place. He signifies a radical alterity, and with the "look" erupts an intersubjective competition between him and the self, which can defend itself only by likewise objectifying "the other". Despite this competitiveness and the feeling of "shame" accompanying the subjection to the "look", it is necessary for the subject's existence and especially his self-consciousness, for only the experience of the "look" enables him to arrive at an awareness of himself. In fact, it is only in the intersubjective realm that the individual comes to an understanding of himself as a conscious and free subject, and thus of his own power of negation and 76

Hengelbrock 115. (If freedom, however, means more than the mere choice of a conscious attitude towards that which happens in and around me, than it needs to somehow set marks of orientation goals - and also be able to realize them in the realm of the Being-In-Itself.) 77 Sartre, Das Sein und das Nichts 612. (The goal is exactly the design, the chart of an order of existing things in that sense that the adversities, which freedom uncovers inside existence, are far from signifying a threat to freedom, they rather enable it to emerge as freedom in the first place. A free Being-For-Itself can only exist inside a world of resistances. Outside of this world, the terms "freedom", "determination", "necessity" lose their validity, even their meaning.) 24

transcendence. His existential freedom, his power to choose and to act upon it, is contextual and depends on "the other". After having discussed Wallace's ideas about Postmodernism, his novel Infinite Jest, and the central ideas of Kierkegaard and Sartre, an analysis of the novel will be conducted on the basis of this discussion. C. Diagnosis In "E Unibus Pluram", Wallace compares the work of his ideal author with that of a therapist. In his opinion, a writer should analyse the symptoms of his culture's illness, find its repressed origins and then give advice for its cure. This model resembles Kierkegaard's and Wittgenstein's conception of writing,78 just one of the manifold affinities between Wallace and these authors. Consequently, it seems accurate to divide an existentialist reading of Infinite Jest into two sections, focusing on diagnosis and therapy respectively. The following chapter will explore Wallace's diagnostic social criticism by focusing on two related symptoms that he detects in contemporary U.S. culture, addiction and narcissism. 1. Addiction Infinite Jest is a novel about addiction and the constant desire for pleasure that Wallace discerns in his society, and he is interested in finding the common causes for the self-destructive and addictive behavior of his characters. Most of them are addicted, and not necessesarily to substances, since, as the narrator frequently makes clear, one can be addicted to anything that works as an "emotional escape."79 Foremost are addictions to oneself, to substances and to television. The subsequent section will analyze Wallace's novel with a broad concept of narcissism that has been employed by Christopher Lasch and Richard Sennett in their respective accounts of the post-industrial U.S. society. This concept is not restricted to the phenomenon of self-love, but concerns the manifold kinds of self-absorption, egocentrism and desire for pleasure presented in Infinite Jest.

78 79

The Sickness unto Death and The Philosophical Investigations were meant as such a therapy Infinite Jest 202 25

a. Addiction to the Self Wallace frequently addresses the hedonistic tendencies that he perceives in his society. Next to "E Unibus Pluram", his essays "Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young" and "Big Red Son" deal with the dark undersides of a pursuit of happiness80 that is no longer bound to cultural or social ethics, but solely to individual pleasure. In his view, Postmodernism and U.S. culture in general have done away with traditional limitations of the self in order to provide the individual with the right of self-fulfillment, which in many cases has come to signify "immediate gratification."81 As already discussed, he considers Postmodernism's "liberation" to be subverted by the forces of consumption and turned into a new prison for the individual. In Infinite Jest, the narrator identifies the individual as contributing to his own entrapment, as he may become addictively imprisoned inside his own narcissistic drives.82 This is especially the case in a postmodern culture that has deconstructed most of the ethical authorities, value systems and master narratives that used to provide the self with meaning or a teleology beyond itself. His critique finds its parallel in Kierkegaard, who also attacked the hedonistic trends of his times and the illusory belief in their liberating nature, as aesthetic individualism, an existence restricted by no binding communal beliefs, traditions and norms, stands for his first mode of "despair". He likewise identified narcissism, avant-lalettre, as related to this affliction. Freedom is an essential aspect of U.S. culture, and it is symbolized most prominently in the Statue of Liberty. In Infinite Jest, however, the statue has degenerated into a mere symbol for advertising: "NNYC's [New New York City] harbor's Liberty Island's gigantic Lady has the sun for a crown and holds what looks like a huge photo album under one iron arm, and the other arm holds aloft a product. The product is changed each 1 Jan. by brave men with pitons and cranes."83 Likewise, the Christian calendar has been commodified, the name of each year being sold to the highest bidding company. The narrator thus employs key aspects of U.S. ideology to symbolize its corruption by financial interests. The myth of freedom still subsists, but it is used to hide the self's captivity in desire, while the right for personal pleasure and happiness is replaced by the social compulsion to consume. Gerhart Schtitt, Austrian-born tennis 80

This term originally denoted the right to pursue economic wealth and prosperity Following statistics referred to by Best and Kellner, Americans spend more money on entertainment than on clothes or health care (228-29) 82 As Sennett argues, the sexual revolution, for instance, has in many cases led to a confusion of the self by mobilizing its inherent narcissistic energies (21) 83 Infinite Jest 367 81

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coach at E.T.A., repeatedly echoes Wallace criticism from "E Unibus Pluram": "A U.S. of modern A. where the state is not a team or a code, but a sort of sloppy intersection of desires and fears, where the only public consensus a boy must surrender to is the acknowledged primacy of straight-line pursuing this flat and short-sighted idea of personal happiness."84 This "cult of instant gratification" is one example of the narcissism at work in the novel's society, as Holland declares, and she calls it the cause and end of its character's addictions. Sennett, who also believes that the current U.S. culture mobilizes narcissism,85 connects both issues when he declares that pleasure is one of the prime aims of a narcissist. According to him, a narcissist projects his self onto the world, unable to see anything than himself in it.86 It is quite telling that in the novel the political system established by the U.S. is called O.N.A.N., referring to the autoerotic and selfinvolved act that resembles the mythological Narcissus' love of himself. The system of O.N.A.N. is founded on the process of annular fusion, the supposedly self-enclosed cycle of energy generation. As Hayles explains, this process fails because it is built on an "illusion of autonomy" that is pervading the contemporary U.S. This illusion disregards the "fact of recursivity" in society and nature, in effect severely damaging the ecological and intersubjective balance. The hygiene anxiety from which many Americans in the novel suffer is reflected in O.N.A.N.'s "illusion of autonomy", its obsession with cleanliness, and its belief that exporting the problem of waste would be a real solution. As HAYLES points out, the problem involves more than ecopolitics, "for the dump is not only about technology and ecology but also about how the illusion of autonomy poisons family relations, creating failures of communication so extreme they become tragic."87 O.N.A.N. may thus be seen as an instance of Kierkegaard's fifth mode of "despair", one that is related to narcissism and the individual in today's western societies, who tends to believe himself independent from tradition, authority, and "the other" in general. LASCH ascribes the origins of the narcissism with which he diagnoses the U.S., to postmodern culture and explicitly mentions Fiedlers "New Age of Faith" and the "cult of expanded consciousness." He characterizes U.S. culture as exhibiting a "therapeutic sensibility,"88 an ideology of superficial self-actualization and liberation of the individual by the "immediate gratification" of his impulses. This ideology, so Lasch, only elicits 84

ibd. 83 Sennett 355 86 Sennett 365 87 Hayles 689 88 Lasch 7. "Therapy" here is not understood in a Kierkegaardian sense. 85

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narcissistic desires that leave the individual with an insatiable void inside. In his description, it resembles "despair": consumption and the cult of individuality leave the subject with an underestablished self and addictively entangled in its burning desires evoked by commercial culture. Lasch attributes a "waning sense of historical time" to contemporary narcissistic society, in which one rather lives for the pleasure of the moment than in consideration of past traditions or future effects.89 This description fits both the accounts of the postmodern anti-historicism by Fiedler and Hassan, and those of Kierkegaard's ethicist in Either/Or. A similar "loss of teleology" in U.S. society has been diagnosed by Wallace in "Fictional Futures". In Infinite Jest, it is symbolized by the demise of the Christian calendar, as each year no longer denotes a succession in time from one fixed point in the past to an end point in the future, but simply a product of consumption unrelated to either past or future.90 As several theorists have observed, the temporality of today's postmodern society is no longer marked by progress, but by a transition from one holiday to the next in a "frenzy of consumption."91 For Wallace, a lack of teleology in a society guided by a narcissistic pursuit of happiness poses a grave danger. The Québécois terrorist Rémy Marathe is another critic of U.S. society in Infinite Jest. Whereas Steeply defends the ideology of his home country by referring to an "enlightened self-interest" guiding its pursuit of happiness, Marathe doubts the existence of such individual responsibility nowadays. In a culture of immediate satisfaction, in which individuals are no longer checked by any ethics or authority besides the judicial law, it is conceivable that some opt for pleasure against their own interests, even choosing "death by pleasure if it is available to choose."92 This term is an adequate description for the movie "Infinite Jest". Since each of its viewers immediately falls into a state of catatonic inaction and muteness, the reader never learns for sure about its plot. Yet there are indications that it features a veiled woman, who in the first scene is following somebody in a revolving door, both almost endlessly circling and missing 89

Orin and Hal Incandenza's mother Avril neatly fits the pattern of Lasch's typical American mother, whom he views as one of the origins of his culture's narcissism. He attributes to her a "lack of affect" in favor of a desire for perfection and absolute correctness. Viewing the child as an "extension of herself," she robs it of its initiative. Similar to Žižek, he connects the fact of the absent father in the postmodern U.S. society to a loss of ethics and a shift from the superego to the Id, thus accounting for its hedonism. 90 The "timelessness" of consumption is further evidenced by the constant loop of the film "Infinite Jest". Likewise, the addicts are in a state of "eternal return". 91 cf. Mirzoeff, Sloterdijk (200) and Debord 92 Infinite Jest 319. There are instances of characters deciding to watch the movie in full knowledge of its lethal effects. 28

each other, until, in another scene, she talks down to the camera, repeating the word's "I am sorry" over and over. One of the principal sources of this information is Joelle van Dyne, the actress who played the woman with the veil, which she also wears in her real life. Her motives remain unclear, as she might wear it because of her guilty feelings concerning the suicide of the film's director, because she has been facially deformed in an accident or because she is "The Prettiest Girl of All Time" and afraid of her beauty's effect on others, in fact, according to the narrator, inducing an "Actaeon Complex" in other men.93 The latter term is derived from Being and Nothingness, where it is used to account for the narcissistic processes in the constitution of selfhood, in which the self "violently" appropriates "the other" with the "look". This desire for the objectification of "the other" in order to establish oneself at the center of the world may turn selfdestructive, as its fulfillment is constantly delayed. "The other" is not an object, but a source of constant transcendence and negation, and he represents, like the second person in the revolving door, a fleeting subjectivity that cannot be grasped in its entirety. What is more, objectification of "the other" is only a secondary impulse, derived from the individual's narcissistic desire to be "Being-in-and-for-itself", to experience a complete personal wholeness. Sartre here combined narcissistic desire with the "look" of the subject, and it is only apt that Wallace uses his concept to represent television as a force dependent on the narcissism that it evokes in its viewers. As he argues in "E Unibus Pluram", television gratifies the "look" of the viewer by presenting to him a "watchable" object without exposing him to an equivalent "look". Furthermore, the person on TV seems to exist for the single viewer only, in effect gratifying his narcissism. The narrator makes the same point in his account of the short-lived technology of videophony, which failed because it challenged the narcissistic illusion of the user to be the sole object of "the other's" attention, one that could be upheld with the conventional phone: "This bilateral illusion of unilateral attention was almost infantilely gratifying from an emotional standpoint: you got to believe you were receiving somebody's complete attention without having to return it. [...] It would be like being able both to lie and to trust other people at the same time."94 Incandenza's movie, a literalization of Neil Postman's idea of the "amusement to death," points toward the narcissism that TV induces in its viewers while simultaneously proclaiming their free choice. In this case, the choice is one to end all choices, and it is related to the lack of teleology that Wallace and CALINESCU ascribe to the modern era of immanence: 93 94

ibd. 290 ibd 146. Attention here does not imply being subjected to "the look ". 29

The modern utopist cannot afford to follow Lessing, who in his famous apologue imagines himself choosing, at God's invitation, between all Truth and just the active search for Truth (with the condition of never finding it). It was not too difficult for Lessing to make up his mind and, without hesitating, take the active, though endless, search-for 'absolute Truth belongs to Thee alone' he told God. [...] Lessing's way of putting the problem would hardly make sense in a world were God - even as an abstraction or working hypothesis - is dead and everybody knows it. The heroic optimism of infinite search justified by the sheer greatness of a transcendent goal has been lost by Modernity. The goals of the modern utopist are supposedly immanent and within reach."95

Keeping in mind that truth was often depicted as female and veiled, his statement fits the movie and the novel, in which people opt for instant pleasure even though it may be a final decision. Since narcissism emanates in early childhood, its desires are often of an infantile nature, and for both Wallace and Lasch it is deeply related to an infantilization at work in contemporary culture. According to Holland, this is the basic argument of the novel. Once again, the narrator employs the Statue of Liberty symbolically: "To say nothing of the arresting image of the idolatrous West's most famous and self-congratulating idol, the colossal Libertine Statue, wearing some type of enormous adult-design diaper."96 The year in which the novel takes place has been sold to advertise the "Depend Adult Undergarment," and the diaper emphasizes the degree of regression that the narrator's culture has reached. Infantile gratification is another cause for the lethal appeal of the movie. Apparently, Incandenza had developed a peculiar lens with which he shot his film. As Joelle says during an interview with the O.U.S.: "I don't think there's much doubt the lens was supposed to reproduce an infantile visual field."97 Not only does the film fuel narcissism by providing the viewer with the illusion of being in the sole focus of an "actaeonizingly" beautiful woman, who is often, in addition, described as maternal, it moreover creates for him the illusion of being a child again. The film thus serves as a concise critique of television, as, according to Wallace, one of TV's most devastating effects is that it allows for complete passivity and infantile absorption. Boswell has accurately observed that Wallace here provides a parody of Jacques Lacan's theories, yet 95

Calinescu 67 Infinite Jest 33. See Carlisle 34. 97 ibd. 940 96

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for Wallace parody is not merely ridicule, but at the same time an earnest revivification of older ideas, an instance of the combination of cynicism and naiveté which Boswell finds at the core of Wallace's aesthetics. The existential void inside the characters manifests itself as a Lacanian "manque", an insatiability that fuels the U.S. pursuit of happiness. Joelle's appeal to narcissists is highlighted in her relationship to Orin, eldest son of the film's director and one of the prime narcissists in the novel. Having met at university after his escape from his family and the Academy in favor of varsity football, she was the only person he ever truly fell in love with. The narrator illustrates Orin's narcissism with his personal addiction, the desperate need to be the sole object of a woman's love:98 "...the Subject's [his term for the women he sleeps with] pleasure in him has become his food."99 Yet, like every addiction, this desire remains unfulfilled and leaves him empty and alone after each "success," as he at bottom craves only for the acceptance and attention of his mother. Following SARTRE, one important aspect of existence is the wish for totality, a wholeness often allegorized as female. What is more: "der Liebende 'will das Objekt sein, in dem die Freiheit des Anderen sich zu verlieren hinnimmt, das Objekt, in dem der Andere so etwas wie seine zweite Faktizität, sein Sein und seinen Daseinsgrund zu finden hinnimmt.'"100 Orin's oedipal desire is an instance of such narcissistic craving. To complicate matters, Orin seems to be aware of psychoanalytical and especially Lacan's poststructuralist ideas, and he employs them to rationalize and excuse his behavior with a pseudo-scientific theorizing of his strategies.101 He is thus an instance of the exhaustion of Postmodernism, which has lost its subversive edge and become for many a means to rationalize their own egocentrism. While in fact many characters display narcissistic traits, some serve as prime examples. Orin repeatedly watches short clips of himself playing football, and they "unfolded like time-lapsing flowers and seemed to reveal him in ways he could never have engineered. Sometimes he got an erection."102 Narcissism lies at the heart of most addictions in the novel, and its "idolatry of uniqueness,"103 as the narrator once calls it, Hayles' "illusion of autonomy", is one of the strongest barriers the characters build up 98

ibd. 634 ibd. 596 100 Hengelbrock 104 (The Lover wants to be the object, in which "the other's" freedom decides to lose itself, the object in which "the other" resolves to find something like his second factuality, his being and reason for his existence.) 101 Boswell 102 Infinite Jest 298. In another instance the narrator describes punting as "a solo dance." 103 ibd. 604 99

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against therapy. Randy Lenz, cocaine-addict and new resident at Ennet House, does not submit to therapy because he considers himself exempt from the advice of the various self-help groups and the experiences of their members.104 His feeling of superiority persists even when he degenerates into a mugger, as one scene of an encounter with a bum illustrates: "The man had a string tie and fingerless little gloves, and he stepped back from the wall to examine his pink circles and almost collided with Lenz, and they both looked at each other and shook their heads like Look at this poor son of an urban bitch I'm on the same street with."105 Such self-delusion is displayed throughout the novel. It is condensed in a story about the A.F.R., who employed it for its own purposes: it once positioned huge mirrors across poorly-travelled Adirondack interstates, so that an oncoming driver, not recognizing himself in the mirror, would flash his lights in warning, and, seeing "the other" just flashing back without changing lanes or altering course, turn the wheel and crash into the chasm next to the road. According to Holland, Lenz behaves like a typical narcissist when he compensates for his experience of weakness and inferiority during his withdrawal with fantasies of omnipotence, most obviously by developing the compulsion to kill street animals in order to express his "internalized rage and disappointment,"106 a term he found in the psychology textbook that he uses not for self-knowledge but to rationalize his behavior: "some line in the book had arrested Lenz's attention: something about the more basically Powerless an individual feels, the more the likelihood for the propensity for violent acting-out – and Lenz found the observation to be sound."107 Behind Orin's desires, too, lie feelings of weakness, yet of a more oedipal nature, for he prefers to pursue young mothers with sons,108 desperately craving to be at the center of their attention. Despite existentialist and postmodernist critiques of the coherent humanist self, today's subject still tends to believe in himself as the sole and autonomous center of the world, an assumption that Wallace considers natural but unhealthy, and one that he repeatedly challenges. In a speech he gave in front of an audience of graduates at Kenyon University, he warned against such narcissistic egocentrism:

104

ibd. 557 ibd. 718 106 ibd. 541 107 ibd. 546. Lenz also uses a book by William James to rationalize his behavior as a "Catharsis of resolving." 108 ibd. 566. Again, this matches Lacan's theory. 105

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Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth.109

Avril Incandenza exemplifies this narcissism with her compulsion to always "establishing herself in the exact center of any room she was in, so that from any angle she was somehow in the line of all sight."110 As the example of Lenz shows, the belief in one's autonomy is in some cases an attempt to repress and deny weakness. In White Noise, Don DeLillo, who frequently describes the traumatizing effects of postmodern culture on individuals, presents death as the ultimate enemy of man's illusion of power, and he links his culture's repression of death with the experience of his protagonist's powerlessness in the face of the invisible and abstract forces determining contemporary individual existence.111 Such fear of death resembles the horror vacui so often addressed in modern literature. In the "despair of defiance", man, confronted with the absolute power of God and his dependence on it, reacts with proud hubris and an egocentric belief in his own power. In Sartre's philosophy, this desire is a necessity: man needs to believe in himself as the causa sui of his existence. The death of God and man's desire for sovereignty is a central characteristic of Modernity. If man can no longer achieve autonomy, he needs to create the illusion of it. As BAUDELAIRE has already noted, drugs provide the self with a fake transcendence and a deceptive impression of being God: "Der Mensch hat zum Gott werden wollen, und da ist er bald, einem unkontrollierbaren moralischen Gesetz zufolge, noch unter das Niveau seiner wirklichen Natur herabgefallen."112 The advent of postmodern culture has only intensified this anxiety that stems from modern man's experience of his impotence over existence in general and his own in particular. Combined with the traditional U.S. ideology of rugged individualism and self-reliance, the postmodern destruction of authorities and boundaries of the self can be seen as contributing to the "despair of defiance", the "illusion of autonomy" and 109

Wallace, "Kenyon Address". Carlisle argues that the themes of the Address are closely connected to the novel. 110 Infinite Jest 521 111 In this novel, television and consumption are presented as means of escaping the awareness of mortality 112 Baudelaire 271 (Man had desired to become God, and thus he has, according to an uncontrollable moral law, fallen below the level of his real nature.) 33

the "idolatry of uniqueness" that Wallace witnesses in his society. His idea of therapy is not bound to a restitution of a pre-postmodern authority, religiosity or master narrative, but to a surrender of such egocentrism in favor of a recognition of the individual's interrelatedness with "the other", Hayles' "fact of recursivity". In Infinite Jest, such recursivity informs the existence of all characters, who nevertheless cling to their illusory autonomy. Thus, the Gentle administration dumps its waste into the Concavity, without realizing that it "always creeps back" to infiltrate O.N.A.N. Their denial of the problem leads to an environmental catastrophe, just as, on the intersubjective level, "valuing autonomy without attending to recursivity leads to destructive behaviors that are unlikely to change unless we are willing to rethink what it means to be a subject in the contemporary world."113 Actions have consequences, yet these consequences are mostly ignored in favor of a hubristic and ultimately solipsistic belief in one's detachment from others. Seen in this light, the extreme forms of postmodern metafiction may appear as a symptom of cultural narcissism. Obsessed with self-reflexivity, it moves in self-absorbed vicious cycles around itself as both origin and object of its textual desire, always eluding itself. The protagonist of Barth's "Lost in the Funhouse" may therefore be characterized as representing another case of "despair", as he loses himself in the labyrinthine mirror house of literature and radical self-consciousness, like Joelle's character in "Infinite Jest" hunting a vanishing figure inside a revolving door. For Wallace, metafiction does not equal sincerity, but "sincerity with a motive." The most obvious exponent of this phenonemon is Charles Tavis, James Incandenza's brother-in-law and Headmaster at E.T.A., who employs radical openness and self-reflexivity as a way to hide himself.114 He already exhibited this radical self-consciousness in childhood, as his adoptive sister Avril remembers: ...the child C.T. had been too self-conscious and awkward to join right in with any group of the kids clustered around, talking or plotting or whatever, and so Avril said she'd watch him just kind of drift from cluster to cluster and lurk around creepily on the fringe, listening, but that he'd always say, loudly, in some lull in the group's conversation, something like 'I'm afraid I'm

113

ibd. 678 Infinite Jest 517. Avril Incandenza also tends to employ this "sincerity with a motive," albeit less obvious. 114

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really far too self-conscious to join in here, so I'm just going to lurk creepily at the fringe and listen, if that's all right, just so you know,' and so on.115

Tavis is a parody on metafiction, and most of his appearances in the novel serve that function. In quite another manner, Orin employs sincerity with a motive as one of his strategies to seduce women.116 In the view of Holland, postmodern irony is significantly related to narcissism. For Lasch, escape via irony remains an illusion and instead generates an expanding "cycle of self-consciousness," resembling the vicious cycles of self-loathing from which some of Barth's Funhouse -narrators suffer. This is reminiscent of O.N.A.N.'s allegedly autonomous, yet self-escalating system of annulation, and points toward the current socioculturally dominant self-reflexivity. Lasch argues that this vicious cycle inhibits the individual's spontaneity and intensifies his "feeling of inauthenticity", finally leading to inner emptiness and despair. As HOLLAND paraphrases him: "Our epidemic of narcissism accompanies an epidemic of self loss."117 b. Addiction to Objects (1) TV and Consumption The preceding section has dealt with the addictiveness of movies, using the example of "Infinite Jest." Yet there are also cases of characters who are addicted to regular TV shows. As Steeply relates to Marathe, his own father had at some point become obsessed with the series "M.A.S.H." The show offered him a fantasy world to live in, disintegrating the distinction between reality and illusion, as he spent more and more time re-running it on his television, eventually writing letters to the characters and using names of the show's locations for his real-life surroundings. Escaping from the stressful complexities of adult life, Steeply's father found an alternative world in which he did not have to make choices and invest himself in concrete actions, but could passively rest on his couch, gradually regressing into an infantile state. Similarly, in O.N.A.N. most of the cultural entertainment takes place at home, which people, descending into solipsistic narcissism, rarely ever leave.118 In "E Unibus Pluram", Wallace characterizes TV as providing soothing closed narratives, which he considers to 115

ibd. ibd. 1048 117 Holland 223 118 Infinite Jest 620 116

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be fuel for narcissism, infantilization and addiction.119 Yet his critique is not restricted to TV, but applies to commercial culture in general. Consumption shares many traits with narcissism and addiction, and it is related to TV by its infantilizing advertisement strategies. The objects of consumption promise comfort, passivity and escape from responsibility, yet are unable to permanently supply the consumer with inner fulfillment. As the narrator remarks: "...it is often more fun to want something than to have it."120 Since the U.S. economy is to a large extent based on perpetual consumption, advertisement constantly creates anxieties in the viewer in order to encourage his purchasing of products, putting him inside a vicious cycle of constantly delayed desire. In HOLLAND'S paraphrasing of Lasch, this is "a culture of consumption that pretends to fill the void that it steadfastly creates."121 The consumer, so Lasch, is left "perpetually unsatisfied, restless, anxious and bored," as the advertising industry manufactures "pseudo-needs" and an "unappeasable appetite for new experiences and personal fulfillment."122 In his view, such a culture succeeds because it presents consumption as a way to authentic selfhood, liberation and emancipation.123 In Infinite Jest, the Interlace Cartridge System celebrates itself as a liberator of the viewer, who is "empowered" to be his own "programming director," able to choose from all existing programs at any time.124 Yet this freedom to choose is only a shallow liberation, as the free will of the individual is often undermined by those advertisements themselves. TV's rhetoric of liberation feeds the viewer's narcissistic "illusion of autonomy", perpetuating addiction as the dominant social mode by providing him with a rationale for his "pursuit of happiness", replacing the often difficult choices one faces in real life, and the choice of a self, with the false choices of consumption. (2) Substances The most important addictions in Infinite Jest are those to substances, as most characters may either look back on a career of drug dependence, or are still in the throes of the habit. Hal develops an increasing addiction to marijuana, while Gately gradually comes clean from narcotics. While both belong to different social strata, Wallace uses 119

Wallace, "E Unibus Pluram" 69 Infinite Jest 205 121 Holland 223 122 Lasch 72 123 According to both Mirzoeff and Kellner (247-55), advertisements tend to present objects as symbols of freedom 124 Infinite Jest 416 120

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these characters to indicate that substance addiction is common to all social spheres. However, as many students at E.T.A. resort "only" to a playful experimentation with light drugs and hallucinogens, it is in the story of Gately that Wallace elaborates most on the topic of substance addiction. Ennet House, where Gately lives and works, is the focal point of most addictions treated in the novel. Here, the various addicts meet, and in their frequent visits of Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous meetings they get to share their personal experiences of substance dependence. Combined, the plots of Gately and Hal may serve as illustrations of the beginning and end of drug addiction. As with the case of the voluntary viewers of "Infinite Jest", Wallace's claim of the end of teleology is relevant to drug abuse. The narrator exemplifies this with the tattoos most Ennet House residents display: ...but the chilling thing about the intoxication is that it seems to make you consider only the adrenaline of the moment itself, not (in any depth) the irrevocability that produces the adrenaline. It's like the intoxication keeps your tattoo-type-class-person from being able to project his imagination past the adrenaline of the impulse and even consider the permanent consequences that are producing the buzz of excitement.125

Thus, many residents regret getting a particular tattoo, their tattoos representing the permanent damage that a narcissistic focus on the present moment alone can inflict. Addiction is time and again treated as an illness of the mind: "It's the newcomers with some education that are the worst, according to Gene M. They identify their whole selves with their head, and the Disease makes its command headquarters in the head."126 The addict may no longer trust his own thoughts, as they are permeated by the addiction, which constantly delivers new reasons for its continuation. The story of the marijuanadependent Ken Erdedy provides some of the most intense insights into the cycle of addiction. At the beginning of the novel, the reader finds him waiting for his dealer, already sick of the drug and his situation: He began to grow disgusted with himself for waiting so anxiously for the promised arrival of something that had stopped being fun anyway. He didn't even know why he liked it anymore. It made his mouth dry and his eyes dry and red and his face sag, and he hated it when his face sagged, it was as if all the integrity of all the muscles in his face was eroded by 125 126

Infinite Jest 206 ibd. 272 37

marijuana, and he got terribly self-conscious about the fact that his face was sagging [...] It made his thoughts jut out crazily in jagged directions and made him stare raptly like an unbright child at entertainment cartridges.127

In this state, many of the novel's addicts realize the loss of their free will. Nevertheless, Erdedy is still led astray by his own reasoning, as he resolves to "cure himself by excess": ...he gathered his intellect, will, self-knowledge, and conviction and determined that when this latest woman came as surely would this would simply be his very last marijuana debauch. He'd simply smoke so much so fast that it would be so unpleasant and the memory of it so repulsive that once he'd consumed it and gotten it out of his home and his life as quickly as possible he would never want to do it again.128

This is one instance of the rationalizations so typical for the novel's addicts. It is telling that Erdedy gathers his "intellect, will, self-knowledge, and conviction," which are traditionally the instruments for self-awareness and freedom, yet in the case of the addict exactly the means of his imprisonment. Ironically, marijuana used to be celebrated as a means of liberation by the 1960s counterculture, out of which literary Postmodernism emerged, yet here it has turned into a confinement, a cage, as Joelle puts it: What looks like the cage's exit is actually the bars of the cage. [...] The entrance says EXIT. There isn't an exit. [...] It is the cage that has entered her, somehow. The ingenuity of the whole thing is beyond her. [...] She's lost the ability to lie to herself about being able to quit, or even about enjoying it, still. It no longer delimits and fills the hole. It no longer delimits the hole.129

Joelle learns this alongside the realization that the bars of her cage are in fact mirrors, her addiction a room closed off from the world, and that all her self-loathing may lead her only back to herself: "You are behind bars; you are in a cage and can see only bars in every direction,"130 as another character explains. She feels trapped inside her addiction and believes that the only way out would be suicide. As the narrator 127

ibd. 21-22 ibd. 22 129 ibd. 222 130 ibd. 347 128

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remarks: "...once you are sufficiently enslaved by a Substance to need to quit the Substance in order to save your life, the enslaving Substance has become so deeply important to you that you will all but lose your mind when it is taken away from you."131 Like Erdedy, Joelle does not come to distrust her own reasoning, she is not able to envision a life without cocaine, and after having reached the stage at which her addiction itself is a source of despair, suicide seems to be the only option. Addiction appears as a living organism of its own, making its nest in the mind, and it insidiously struggles to stay alive by blocking all threatening ratiocinations: Eugenio Martinez over at Ennet House never tires of pointing out that your personal will is the web your Disease sits and spins in, still. The will you call your own ceased to be yours as of who knows how many Substance-drenched years ago. It's now shot through with the spidered fibrosis of your Disease. His own experience's term for the Disease is: The Spider.132

The "spider" works in rationalizations and denial, and it is fueled by the unchallenged and narcissistic belief in one's individual autonomy. Analogous to other addictions, substance abuse is infantilizing, as it supplies its subjects with a "womblike" experience.133 Abusers under the influence are often described as fetal-positioned and in a state of passivity and absorption, and the narrator repeatedly compares their feelings with that of being underwater.134 One of the veterans of NA tells Gately an allegoric joke: "This wise old whiskery fish swims up to three young fish and goes, 'Morning, boys, how's the water?' and swims away; and the three young fish watch him swim away and look at each other and go, 'What the fuck is water?' and swim away."135 Although Gately does not get the "joke" at first, he senses its signification: "And his dreams late that night […] seem to set him under a sort of sea, at terrific depths, the water all around him silent and dim and the same temperature he is."136 Like the fish in the story, addicts spend their lives "underwater," separated from reality and unaware of it. The sea, traditionally a maternal symbol, resembles a womb, just as the drug abusers regress into psychic infancy. Joelle, before her final abuse of

131

ibd. 201 ibd. 357 133 ibd. 890, 938 134 ibd. 934-35 135 ibd. 445 136 ibd. 449 132

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cocaine, is depicted as a diver "preparing for a long descent."137 Fackelmann, a friend of Gately's, "comes back on air" after a heavy dose of narcotics, and Doony Glynn, another ex-addict, says that "the sky became the color of deep water" after he took the drug DMZ. Also, as though drowning, Hal and Gately frequently exhibit trouble breathing, as Carlisle points out. Substance addiction, by feeding the infantile desires of its users, thus corresponds to TV and consumption and may be regarded as one more instance of Lasch's "culture of narcissism." BAUDELAIRE has already pointed out the narcissism underlying drug abuse: "Soll ich noch hinzufügen, daß der Haschisch, wie alle einsamen Freuden, das Individuum untauglich für die Menschheit und die Gesellschaft überflüssig für das Individuum macht, indem er dieses zwingt, unaufhörlich sich selber zu bewundern, und es Tag für Tag dem lichtschimmernden Abgrund zutreibt, worin es mit Bewunderung sein Narzissus-Antlitz anschaut?"138 Marijuana in particular is depicted as a substance contributing to narcissism and self-involved paralysis: "the cute Boston AA term for addictive-type thinking is: Analysis-Paralysis. [...] 99% of compulsive thinkers' thinking is about themselves [...] 99% of this self-directed thinking consists of imagining and then getting ready for things that are going to happen to them."139 Another designation frequently employed for this phenomenon is "marijuana thinking," a "paralytic thought-helix,"140 denoting "the increasing emotional abstraction, poverty of affect, and then total emotional catalepsy – the obsessive analyzing, finally the paralytic stasis that results from the obsessive analysis of all possible implications of both getting up from the couch and not getting up."141 The term "marijuana thinking" signifies an extreme self-reflexivity and fascination with theoretical abstraction that is also associated with radical metafiction. Self-consciousness can easily grow into an expanding vicious cycle, trapping the subject and inhibiting any action on his part. When a session of Eschaton, the favorite game at E.T.A., dissolves into chaos, and violence erupts, Hal, responsible for some of the participants, his "Little Buddies", is under the influence, does not intervene, and merely watches:

137

ibd. 230 Baudelaire 275 (Should I add that hashish, as with all lonely pleasures, renders the individual unfit for humanity and society superfluous for the individual, by forcing the individual to constantly admire himself, as he, day by day, floats towards the luminous abyss, wherein he admiringly gazes at his narcissus-face.) 139 Infinite Jest 203 140 ibd. 335 141 ibd. 503 138

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Hal finds himself riveted at something about the degenerating game that seems so terribly abstract and fraught with implications and consequences that even thinking about how to articulate it seems so complexly stressful that being almost incapacitated with absorption is almost the only way out of the complex stress. [...] Troeltsch says he for his own part wouldn't be just sitting and lying there if any of the Little Buddies under his personal charge were out there getting potentially injured, and Hal reflects that he does feel a certain sort of intense anxiety, but can't sort through the almost infinite-seeming implications of what Troeltsch is saying fast enough to determine whether the anxiety is over something about what he's seeing or something in the connection between what Troeltsch is saying and the degree to which he's absorbed in what's going on.142

Similar to other objects of addiction, the effects of marijuana are passivity and absorption. Marlon Bain, close friend of Orin, describes marijuana thinking as "the sort of pseudophilosophical mental labyrinth that Bob Hope-smokers are always wandering into and getting trapped in and wasting huge amounts of time inside an intellectual room they cannot negotiate their way out of."143 Hope, which constantly encourages desire, is essential for addiction in Infinite Jest, and it is telling that marijuana in the novel is at times referred to as "Bob Hope." Addiction is maintained by hope, while hope is itself perpetually brought about by the "spider," one's own infected ratiocinations. The desire for ever more and new modes of excitement is characteristic of a culture of consumption, and it is reflected in Erdedy's behavior toward movie cartridges: "he was unable to distract himself with [the cartridge viewer] because he was unable to stay with any one entertainment cartridge for more than a few seconds. The moment he recognized what exacly was on one cartridge he had a strong anxious feeling that there was something more entertaining on another cartridge and that he was potentially missing it."144 Similarly, Orin is driven by hope to pursue his female "subjects," even though this hope is never satisfied and he always experiences a post-coital loss of it: "Rarely a feeling of outright unalloyed sadness as such, afterward – just an abrupt loss of hope."145

142

ibd. 340-41 ibd. 1048 144 ibd. 25-26 145 ibd. 596. Cf. 181 143

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2. Anhedonia and Desire The theme of anhedonia is prominent in Modernity, and it has been taken up by T.S. Eliot, who found his culture's "dissociation of sensibility", a condition of inner fragmentation and spiritual death, responsible for this psychological disease. With "The Waste Land" he portrayed modern Europe as a culture consumed by constantly displaced desire. Sex and abuse govern this morally contaminated society, bred by a "memory and desire" of a lost wholeness. In this sense, the poem fits many of Wallace's characters, who suffer from intense longing and anhedonia.146 "The Waste Land" suffers from spiritual aridity, burning desire has left it dry and sterile, and its inhabitants are "human engines,"147 awaiting their death148 in the "Unreal City."149 "'Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?'" one character asks her lover, and another girl relates: "I could not speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither living nor dead, and I knew nothing."150 In "The Hollow Men", Eliot's speaker focuses on the emptiness of modern individuals: "Shape without form, shade without color, paralysed force, gesture without motion"151 These men, in their inaction resembling Infinite Jest's addicts, inhabit a dark dream world, they are undead and, like victims of "despair" they hope for death as their final redemption, "the hope only of empty men."152 Communication in this modern waste land breaks down, as they "grope together and avoid speech,"153 while spirituality has vanished: "Lips that would kiss form prayers to broken stone."154 Desire and anhedonia are central issues of Wallace's novel, in which addiction gradually hollows the individual out. One of the students at E.T.A feels an intense craving for popularity and success in tennis: "He wants to get to the Show so bad like it's eating him alive."155 Anhedonia is inherently related to addiction, as one participant of an AA meeting illustrates: "'When I was drunk I wanted to get sober and when I was sober I wanted to get drunk,' John L. says; 'I lived that way for years, and I submit to you that's not livin, that's a fuckin death-in-life. [...] A fuckin livin death, I tell you it's not 146

cf. Infinite Jest 688 Eliot, Poems 71 148 "We who were living are now dying." (ibd. 76) 149 ibd. 150 ibd. 64 151 ibd. 89 152 ibd. 91 153 ibd. 154 ibd. 155 Infinite Jest 388 147

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being near alive, by the end I was undead, not alive.'"156 Another prime example is Kate Gompert, cocaine- and marijuana-dependent. As the narrator describes her case: It's a kind of spiritual torpor in which one loses the ability to feel pleasure or attachment to things formerly important. [...] [A] kind of emotional novocaine, this form of depression [...] Gompert's always thought of this anhedonic state as a kind of radical abstracting of everything, a hollowing out of stuff that used to have affective content. [...] The world becomes a map of the world."157

This description resembles avant-garde postmodern literature with its predilection for theoretical abstraction and its emphasis on the fictional nature of reality.158 Indeed, on some occasions the narrator explicitly relates anhedonia to contemporary U.S. culture: "the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. [...] Maybe it's the fact that most of the arts here are produced by worldweary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip."159 James Incandenza's films serve him to illuminate the relationship between self-absorbed Postmodernism and "hip anhedonia": Technically gorgeous, the Work, with lighting and angles planned out to the frame. But oddly hollow, empty, no sense of dramatic towardness - no narrative movement toward a real story; no emotional movement toward an audience. Like conversing with a prisoner through that plastic screen using phones, the upperclassman Molly Notkin had said of Incandenza's early oeuvre. Joelle thought them more like a very smart person conversing with himself.160

Throughout his own oeuvre, Wallace voices similar attacks on Postmodernism as abstract and solipsistic. In their conversation about the fatal film, which soon develops into a discussion about U.S. ideology, Marathe characterizes the U.S. thus: "'You cannot kill what is already dead. [...] This appetite to choose death by pleasure if it is available to choose - this appetite of your people unable to choose appetites, this is the death.'"161 156

ibd. 346-47 ibd. 692-93 158 Radicalized in the philosophy of Baudrillard. Cf. Jorge Luis Borges' story "On Exactitude in Science". 159 Infinite Jest 694 160 ibd. 740 161 ibd. 320 157

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For him, the U.S. in general suffers from anhedonia, epitomized and perpetuated by the various addictions of many of its citizens. Behind these addictions, however, lie "anxiety" and "despair". 3. "Anxiety" and "Despair" In the account of his contemporary society, Kierkegaard found "anxiety" and "despair" at the core of modern existence, while Sartre developed the concept of "nausea" to describe individual existence in the early twentieth century. These ideas are relevant to the narrator's depiction of U.S. society and his treatment of failed selfhood and self-destructive addiction. In his study, Boswell explicitly refers to "despair", and Holland likewise argues that Wallace's novel "is a postmodern, consumer-culture reworking of modernist, existential despair."162 The following analysis will therefore focus on Wallace's use of these and related existentialist concepts in Infinite Jest. It will be argued that he employs these concepts to diagnose his society, and the period of Postmodernism, with "despair". a. "Anxiety" According to Kierkegaard, "anxiety" is universal; it is inevitably conjoined with human freedom163 and it affects every individual at one point or another. It makes itself felt as an experience of an inner void, as the self is not a substantial and self-identical entity, but always distanced from itself by consciousness: Man is a synthesis of the psychical and the physical; however, a synthesis is unthinkable if the two are not united in a third. This third is spirit. […] So spirit is present, but as immediate, as dreaming. Inasmuch as it is now present, it is in a sense a hostile power, for it constantly disturbs the relation between soul and body, a relation that indeed has persistence and yet does not have endurance, inasmuch as it first receives the latter by the spirit. […] What, then, is man’s relation to this ambiguous power? How does spirit relate to itself and to its conditionality? It relates itself as anxiety.164

Similarly, SARTRE speaks of the self as an identity in difference, a process of "Vergegenwärtigung, in dem ich mich erfasse als einen das Selbst Suchenden in dieser 162

Holland 222 Beabout 39-49 164 Kierkegaard, Anxiety 43-44 163

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Form des In-der-Welt-Seins, ohne dieses Selbst je wirklich zu sein, denn ich bin stets 'anderswo'. Persönlichkeit bedeutet [...] freier Bezug zu sich selbst."165 In this sense, man is free, as it is his possibility, and even his responsibility, to establish his self and actualize it in every moment. In "anxiety", man experiences this freedom as a horrifying contingency; he discerns the manifold possibilities of his existence and fearfully shrinks away from them: "Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. […] Hence anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself. Freedom succumbs in this dizziness."166 Man's task is to actualize the possibilities of his existence, thereby overcoming the paralyzing "anxiety" of the nothingness he faces - he has to "leap" into existence. Yet, most subjects in modern societies are used to approaching selfhood passively, picturing it as a substantial given, and they experience "anxiety" not as freedom and possibility, but as a fundamental lack. In many cases, "anxiety" emerges early in life, in a period KIERKEGAARD termed "innocence": "In this state there is peace and repose, but there is simultaneously something else that is not contention and strife […] What, then, is it? Nothing. But what effect does nothing have? It begets anxiety."167 Kierkegaard stressed the importance of the leap into existence over the abyss of "possibility" and "anxiety", of actualizing freedom and consciously establishing a self. Several characters in Infinite Jest experience "anxiety" and try to evade it. Hal was confronted with an "evil" nothingness around him during his first night at E.T.A.: Your first nightmare away from home and folks, your first night at the Academy, it was there all along: the dream is that you awaken from a deep sleep, wake up suddenly damp and panicked and are overwhelmed with the sudden feeling that there is a distillation of total evil in this dark strange subdorm room with you, that evil's essence and center is right here, in this room, right now. And is for you alone.168

This scene resembles Kierkegaard's account of the emergence of "anxiety" in a subject's pre-self-conscious state, emanating from the dark nothingness that surrounds it, 165

Hengelbrock 95 (A process of self-reflexion in which I understand myself as in pursuit of the self in this mode of Being-In-The-World, without ever really being this self, since I am always somewhere else. Personality signifies a free attitude in relation to oneself.) 166 Kierkegaard, Anxiety 61 167 Kierkegaard, Anxiety 41 168 Infinite Jest 61-63. It is not clear if this is indeed Hal. This paper follows Carlisle's interpretation here. 45

and which it cannot grasp. On his own and without any soothing distractions, Hal was faced with his elusive self and the world's contingency, and he chose to ignore his experience and suppress any awareness of his non-achieved selfhood. Similarly, Gately, as a child, encountered "nothingness" and spent most of his life forgetting this episode of "anxiety": The guy that owned the little cottages off the dunes had stapled thick clear polyurethane sheeting across the room's ceiling. It was an attempt to deal with the hole. The polyurethane bulged and settled in the North Shore wind and seemed like some monstrous vacuole inhaling and exhaling directly over little Gately, lying there, wide-eyed. The breathing polyurethane vacuole had seemed like it developed a character and personality as winter deepened and the winds grew worse. Gately, age like four, had regarded the vacuole as a living thing, and had named it Herman, and had been afraid of it.169

Gately's horror vacui, which he tried to soften by personifying and naming it,170 was worse during night-time and, as with Hal, it tended to erupt when he was alone and confronted with himself: "just like the secret dread he's always felt whenever everybody happened to ever leave the room and left him alone in a room, a terrible stomach-sinking dread171 that probably dates all the way back to being alone in his XXL Dentons and crib below Herman the Ceiling That Breathed."172 A third important and more intense instance of "anxiety" is reported by Geoffrey Day, one of the inhabitants of Ennet House: 'But on this one afternoon, the fan's vibration combined with some certain set of notes I was practicing on the violin, and the two vibrations set up a resonance that made something happen in my head. It is impossible really to explain it, but it was a certain quality of this resonance that produced it. […] As the two vibrations combined, it was as if a large dark billowing shape came billowing out of some corner in my mind. […] It was all horror everywhere, distilled and given form. It rose in me, out of me, summoned somehow by the odd confluence of the fan and those notes. It rose and grew larger and became engulfing and more horrible than I shall ever have the power to convey. [...] It was a bit like a sail, or a small part of the wing of something far too large to be seen in totality. It was total psychic horror: death, 169

Infinite Jest 809 According to Lacan, the "symbolic order", and thus language, develops out of a horror vacui 171 "Dread" is a term that is often used for "anxiety" 172 ibd. 923 170

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decay, dissolution, cold empty black malevont lonely voided space. It was the worst thing I have ever confronted.'173

Day's moment of anxiety was much more intense, as it made him not just aware of the contingency of existence, but of his self as a processual synthesis between his material existence and an ungraspable beyond, the finite and the infinite. Day, as a citizen of a materialist society, cannot embrace, much less understand, the experience of the infinite, and he begins to despair: "'There is no possible way death can feel as bad.'"174 This episode is reminiscent of Eliot's poem "The Dry Salvages": "music heard so deeply / That it is not heard at all, but you are the music / While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses / Hints followed by guesses [...] Here the impossible union / Of spheres of existence is actual."175 Eliot's "Four Quartets", to which this poem belongs, have been influenced by Kierkegaard, and they are likewise concerned with selfhood:176 "We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time."177 In "The Dry Salvages", the speaker places much emphasis on the "point of intersection of the timeless / With time"178, a moment that KIERKEGAARD knows as "the moment": "The moment is that ambiguity in which time and eternity touch each other."179 It is an intersection in time, yet pointing beyond time toward eternity, and as a synthesis it is related to the self: "As soon as the spirit is posited, the moment is present."180 Both "spirit" and "moment" depend on the infinite: The synthesis of the psychical and the physical is to be posited by spirit; but spirit is eternal, and the synthesis is, therefore, only when spirit posits the first synthesis along with the second synthesis of the temporal and the eternal. As long as the eternal is not introduced, the moment is not, or is only a discrimen. [...] Just as [...] the spirit, when it is about to be posited in the synthesis, or, more correctly, when it is about to be posited in the individuality, expresses itself as anxiety, so here the future in turn is the eternal's (freedom's) possibility in the

173

ibd. 649-50 Infinite Jest 650 175 Eliot, Collected Poems 213 176 Murray 177 Eliot 222 178 ibd. 212 179 Kierkegaard, Anxiety 89 180 ibd. 88 174

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individuality expressed as anxiety. As freedom's possibility manifests itself for freedom, freedom succumbs, and temporality emerges.181

Thus, while in the former instance of "anxiety" the individual shrinks back from the abyss of freedom by clinging to materiality or escaping into possibility, in the case of the "Augenblick" he resorts to the finite, mundane moment in his ignorance and fear of the infinite. b. Escape from "Anxiety" Yet the individual at one point or another is faced with the burden of establishing his self. Shying away from himself would lead him nowhere: "Do away with itself, the spirit cannot; lay hold of itself, it cannot, as long as it has itself outside of itself. Nor can man sink down into the vegetative, for he is qualified as spirit."182 Humans nevertheless may ignore the obligation of establishing their selves with self-deception, denial or rationalizations. The more an individual neglects selfhood, the more he despairs. It is common, so Kierkegaard, to respond to "anxiety" with a strong desire for an innocent, pre-conscious existence, a desire that is a symptom of "despair". As such, it resembles the infantile narcissism that the narrator discerns in O.N.A.N.183 What Kierkegaard deemed impossible, the narrator makes feasible in his account of U.S. society, as drugs and TV allow for an existence of unconscious passivity, and there is in fact a facility for "catatonics and various vegetabilish, fetal-positioned mental patients"184 next to Ennet House. The film "Infinite Jest" epitomizes this desire for an escape from consciousness into womblike passivity. In his conversation with Marathe, Steeply mentions the "antianxiety medication"185 that his mother took in reaction to his father's TV addiction, another hint at the frantic yearning of contemporary subjects to flee the responsibility for themselves and their task of selfhood. This is an instance of a pervading "unconscious despair" in the society of O.N.A.N.

181

ibd. 90-91 ibd. 44 183 About Orin, Carlisle states that he "wants to act on compulsion" and "wants to have no choice" (318) 184 Infinite Jest 196 185 ibd. 645 182

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4. "Unconscious Despair" in Infinite Jest a. Escape into the Finite This form of "despair" is unconscious insofar as the afflicted subject is not aware of his elusive self waiting to be established, and thus pursues a spiritless, yet often materially successful and seemingly happy existence: "Not being in despair is not like not being ill, for, after all, not being ill cannot be being ill, whereas not being in despair may exactly be to be in despair."186 The subject flees his existential obligation, either covering up his hollowness or attempting to achieve selfhood with material means, not having to face the difficult task of a synthesis with the infinite, or a conscious relation with himself as body and spirit. Society provides manifold means of such self-forgetting. The narrator of Sartre's Nausea delves into the study of a historical figure: "Monsieur de Rollebon was my partner; he needed me in order to exist and I needed im so as not to feel my existence. I furnished the raw material, the material I had to re-sell, which I didn't know what to do with: existence, my existence. I did not notice that I existed anymore, I no longer existed in myself, but in him."187 This mode of "despair" is deceptive. Orin is an accomplished football player and popular with women, yet, as he secretly has to acknowledge to himself, every day of his life is an attempt to cover up his inner void.188 As KIERKEGAARD put it: "The despair that not only does not cause any inconvenience in life, but makes life convenient and comfortable, is naturally enough in no way regarded as despair."189 Orin's brother Hal is one of the principal characters exhibiting symptoms of this "despair". Throughout his childhood he committed most of his time to reading, and by the time of the novel's main plot he has already acquired an impressive learning: "'The boy reads like a vacuum. Digests things,'"190 as one character describes him. Hal's cardinal obsession, however, is with dictionaries. Influenced by his mother, who holds a doctorate in linguistics, he knows the lexical definitions of words and their etymologies almost by heart, and he is fond of impressing his fellows with his knowledge of abstract definitions and cold facts. Yet this fascination cannot provide him with a deeper understanding of himself, and, as Burn notes, Hal appears more and more like his namesake in Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey, a processor of pure data incapable of any emotion or real

186

Kierkegaard, Sickness 55 Sartre, Nausea 98 188 Infinite Jest 46 189 Kierkegaard, Sickness 64 190 Infinite Jest 15 187

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comprehension. "A list of words is not enough to make a self,"191 says BURN, who considers Hal's "encyclopedism" another form of addiction. What is more, Hal is ranked as the third best tennis player at E.T.A., yet aware of the fact that his success is only an escape. In a film his brother Mario made about Academy routine, Hal's narration resembles Kierkegaard's account of the common reaction to "anxiety": Here is how to avoid thinking about any of this by practicing and playing until everything runs on autopilot and talent's unconscious exercise becomes a way to escape yourself, a long waking dream of pure play. The irony is that this makes you very good, and you start to become regarded as having a prodigious talent to live up to. [...] If you are an adolescent, here is the trick to being neither quite a nerd nor quite a jock: be no one. It is easier than you think. [...] The game is about managed fear."192

Hal wishes to be free from the burden of consciousness, a desire that is shared by some of the self-loathing narrators of Barth's Funhouse-stories. The quote also reveals E.T.A.'s philosophy: self-trancendence by pain. After the student has reached a certain niveau, the coaches focus on his mind, suppressing his self until he turns into a perfect, automatic player, free from the impediments to his physical perfection that come with consciousness. BURN even calls this "search for machine-like perfection" a "distinctly American obsession."193 In this light, it is significant that Hal's surprising success in tennis came after his father's suicide. Sent to a "grief therapist" in order to cope with the situation, he learned how to pretend, to "deliver the goods." The therapist at first not satisfied with his development, Hal began to exasperate: "Here was a top-rank authority figure and I was failing to supply what he wanted. He made it manifestly clear I wasn't delivering the goods. I'd never failed to deliver the goods before. [...] I'd become obsessed with the fear that I was somehow going to flunk grief-therapy."194 Hal approached therapy exactly the wrong way. Craving his whole life for acceptance from others,195 he did not open up, but only hid his feelings of inadequacy even further in his desperate attempt to conform to others' apparent expectations. He eventually deceived his therapist by consulting scientific literature and then acting as a textbook case. Similar to Lenz and Orin, he used psychoanalysis not for a better understanding of himself, but 191

Burn 40 Infinite Jest 173-76 193 Burn 44 194 Infinite Jest 253-54 195 ibd. 999 192

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to immerse himself deeper inside "despair". Disregarding the self seems for many characters an easy way out of their existential obligation. Instead of facing their self, they choose to evade it and follow the way toward material success. Comparable to Hal's "competitive explosion" after learning to "deliver the goods," many players at E.T.A. develop their tennis game around their flaws, turning them into an apparent advantage that, however, bars the further development of their game.196 b. Escape into the Infinite One may likewise escape into the infinite, remaining in the abstract abundance of possibilities without ever concretely choosing and realizing any. Kierkegaard terms this mode "despair of the infinite", and the aesthete in Either/Or is a prime example of it. Yet living inside abstract and fantastic possibilities may turn into a horrific burden as well: Now if possibility outstrips necessity, the self runs away from itself in possibility so that it has no necessity to return to. This then is possibility’s despair. Here the self becomes an abstract possibility; […] Thus possibility seems greater and greater to the self; more and more becomes possible because nothing becomes actual. In the end it seems as though everything were possible, but that is the very moment that the self is swallowed up in the abyss.197

The individual is numbed by his freedom, and the more he remains mesmerized by its illusions, the harder he finds it to resume activity. His freedom exerts a paralyzing force, as the individual ignores the concrete "necessities" of his existence, while being overwhelmed with possibilities which he lacks the resolution to realize. This is reminiscent of Wallace's account of Postmodernism as a movement of liberation that has turned oppressive. Marathe echoes this criticism, arguing that "enlightened self-interest" has been replaced by a hedonistic narcissism: '...what has happened when a people choose nothing over themselves to love, each one. A U.S.A. that would die - and let its children die, each one - for the so-called perfect Entertainment, this film. [...] Who has taught them to choose with care? [...] [S]omeone sometime let you forget how to choose, and what. Someone let your people forget it was the only thing of importance, choosing. [...] Someone taught that temples are for fanatics only and took away the temples and promised there was no need for temples. And now there is no 196 197

cf. Infinite Jest 116 Kierkegaard, Sickness 66 51

shelter. [...] And you all stumble about in the dark, this confusion of permissions. The withoutend pursuit of a happiness of which someone let you forget the old things which made happiness possible.'198

Existentialist ideas are reflected in his attack on a pursuit of happiness that has turned into a mere desire for pleasure, resulting in a choice that ends all choices, the cage of addiction and regression. Indeed, KIERKEGAARD'S account of this "despair" may fit today's "society of the spectacle" with its "permeations of secondary realities":199 Even a small possibility needs some time to become actual. But eventually the time that should be spent on actuality gets shorter and shorter, everything becomes more and more momentary. Although possibility becomes more and more intensive, it is in possibility’s sense, not actuality’s; […] Just when one thing seems possible some new possibility arises, and finally these phantasms succeed one another with such speed that it seems as though everything were possible, and that is the very moment the individual himself has finally become nothing but an atmospheric illusion.200

Next to the example of the movie "Infinite Jest", Wallace's novel presents many characters who elude reality with their absorption in TV- or substance-induced fantasies, as e.g. Steeply's father or most drug addicts. InterLace, the home video system that has replaced broadcast TV, provides its user with "screens so high-def you might as well be there,"201 promoting "isolation of the user into a private world that requires an absolute minimum of active behavior or connection with people and events outside the self: a regression to an infantile state of feeling like all needs are met."202 It need not be so obvious, however, as this "despair" manifests itself also in small doses of everyday selfdelusion, to which many of the characters succumb. What they lack is a recognition of the necessities essential to their freedom, the obligation of selfhood and the limits of their specific existence: No, actuality is the unity of possibility and necessity. [...] What is really missing is the strength to obey, to yield to the necessary in one's self, what might be called one's limits. Nor

198

Infinite Jest 318-20 Hutcheon, Poetics 5 200 Kierkegaard, Sickness 66 201 Infinite Jest 60 202 Carlisle 57 199

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therefore is it the misfortune of such a self to have become anything in the world; no, the misfortune is that he did not become aware of himself, that the self he is is a quite definite something, and thus the necessary. Instead, through this self's fantastically reflecting itself in possibility, he lost himself.203

The individual loses himself and his freedom paradoxically by clinging to his freedom, gradually disappearing from reality, imprisoned by seductive possibilities that he can no longer actualize. Infinitity entails its dialectical opposite finity and vice versa, and Sartre equally emphasized the necessity of limits, which the subject, in his free exercise of "negation", creates in order to establish a meaningful existence. Only in a synthesis of both poles may a self exist. Again, Marathe resembles Kierkegaard: 'Your freedom is the freedom-from: no one tells your precious individual U.S.A. selves what they must do. [...] But what of the freedom-to? Not just freedom-from. Not all compulsion comes from without. [...] How for the person to freely choose? How to choose any but a child's greedy choices if there is no loving-filled father to guide, inform, teach the person how to choose? How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?'204

Wallace has this mode of "despair" in mind when he criticizes Postmodernism's deconstruction of authorities and their replacement with a pleasure-principle that is no longer guided by any teleology, ethics or idea about the self with all its necessities and boundaries. One commentator on Kierkegaard also establishes the connection between this form of "despair" and contemporary society: 'Das Phantastische ist überhaupt dasjenige, was einen Menschen dergestalt ins Unendliche hinausführt, daß es ihn lediglich von ihm selber fortführt und ihn dadurch abhält zu sich selbst zurückzukehren.' Es erübrigt sich wohl zu bemerken, daß diese Verzweiflung gegenwärtig durch die von elektronischen und digitalen Medien künstlich erzeugten kollektiven Phantasien nicht gemildert, sondern noch einmal dramatisch verstärkt wird.205

203

Kierkegaard, Sickness 66-67 Infinite Jest 320 205 Liessmann, 130-31. ('The fantastic is that which leads a human being in such a way into the infinite, that it merely leads him away from himself and thus keeps him from ever returning to himself.' It is innecessary to remark that this form of despair is currently not mitigated but dramatically increased vy the collective fantasies artificially created by the electronic and digital media) 204

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In Wallace's novel, "despair of the infinite" is closely related to television and regression, yet in this existentialist analysis, TV bears a further significance. 5. "Shame" and the "Look" In the preceding chapters, television has been related to "unconscious despair" and narcissism. In both cases it provides an escape from "anxiety" and the burdens of freedom and existential responsibility, and in both it defers an actualization of selfhood, as an application of SARTRE'S concept of the "look" might demonstrate. According to him, authentic selfhood is essentially based on "the other": So bekommt die Entwicklung der Persönlichkeit (d.h. meiner Selbstgegenwärtigkeit und meiner freien Einstellung zu mir selbst) ihre wesentlichen Anstöße durch den Blick des Anderen. Daher ist 'der Andere unerläßlich für meine Existenz, ebenso übrigens für meine Erkenntnis, die ich von mir selbst habe...So entdecken wir sofort eine Welt, die wir die Intersubjektivität nennen werden, und in dieser Welt entscheidet der Mensch, was er ist und was die Anderen sind.'206

"The other" challenges a subject's egocentrism. Meeting his eye, one realizes "the other's" consciousness and one's interrelation with him. The subject is thus forced to abandon the "illusion of autonomy". At Kenyon, Wallace spoke about the importance of recognizing others as human beings, an awareness that leads to a recognition of oneself as a free subjectivity, following SARTRE: "Meine Persönlichkeit entwickelt sich in Auseinandersetzung mit dem, was der Blick des Anderen aus mir macht. Der Andere ist der Schlüssel zu meinem Sein."207 "The other" is essential for consciousness and hence for freedom, yet also posing a threat to one's narcissism, and as such may provoke solipsism and the "despair of defiance". Sartre's concept is also related to the "despair of the infinite" and Wallace's critique of television, as the French philosopher termed the narcissistic repudiation of "the other" as a free subject "the eye of the camera". The camera allows the viewer to safely objectify the characters on the screen without being himself subjected to their objectifying "look". The "illusion of autonomy" is thereby 206

Hengelbrock 100. (Thus the development of my personality (i.e., my being conscious of myself and my free attitude towards myself) depends siginificantly upon "the other's" look. That is why "the other" is indispensable to my existence, as in fact to my self-awareness. We thus discover a world that we will call intersubjectivity, and in this world man decides what he is and what "the others" are.) 207 Hengelbrock 102 (My personality develops in contest with that what "the other's" look makes out of me. "The other" is the key to my existence.) 54

maintained, and the subject enabled to avoid his existential freedom and responsibility, while still clinging to the belief in his autonomy. A passage from "E Unibus Pluram" further hints at this: The television screen affords access only one-way. A psychic ball-check valve. We can see Them: They can't see Us. We can relax, unobserved, as we ogle. [...] Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline the psychic costs of being around other humans. [...] Let's call the average U.S. lonely person Joe Briefcase. Joe Briefcase fears and loathes the strain of the special self-consciousness which seems to afflict him only when other real human beings are around, staring, their human sense-antennae abristle.208

An illustrative example of such solipsism is the speaker of Eliot's poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". His "Love Song" is rather a monologue, an imagination of a potential amorous confession to an unnamed woman that is never realized, as he loses himself in his dream world, nevertheless constantly assuring himself that "there will be time"209 to act at some indefinite point. Suffering from the "despair of the infinite", Prufrock escapes into an underwater fantasy world that recalls the metaphor of addicts as fish inside a womblike ocean, yet being constantly threatened by reality: "We have lingered in the chambers of the sea / By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown / Till human voices wake us, and we drown."210 He avoids the obligation of actualizing his possibilities and fears the objectifying "look" of "the other": "The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, / And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, / Then how should I begin / To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?"211 His awareness of the "look" leaves him selfconsciously paralyzed, and he resorts to solipsistic monologues, as he fears that he can no longer truly express himself. In this sense, he resembles Hal at the novel's beginning, and also Shakespeare's Hamlet, even though he self-mockingly denies the heroism inherent in the latter analogy. Hamlet likewise resorts to monologues, overwhelmed by his task and the many questions it entails, never choosing any route of action and eventually quitting communication altogether: "Oh, I could tell you, [...] but let be," his last words being "the rest is silence."212 As several critics of Infinite Jest have observed, 208

Wallace, "E Unibus Pluram" 22-23 Eliot, Collected Poems 14 210 ibd. 17 211 ibd. 15 212 Shakespeare 821 209

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the novel frequently alludes to Shakespeare's play, and its title is derived from its gravedigging scene. Most of all, it is Hal who resembles Hamlet, most significantly by his descent into passivity, silence and solipsism toward the end of the plot. Overwhelmed by pressing issues that demand choice and action, he escapes into a monologuous self-consciousness. This development already takes place much earlier in the novel's plot.213 Frequently consuming marijuana in the tunnels of the academy, Hal at one point admits that he is probably more attracted to the secrecy of his behavior than to the substance itself: "This obsession is almost irresistible in its force. [...] Hal has no idea why this is, or whence, this obsession with the secrecy of it."214 There are several instances of such a solipsistic urge for hiddenness in the novel. Joelle belongs to the "Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed,"215 a group of people who constantly wear a veil, not to hide a facial deformity or ugliness, but to "'you hide your hiding. And you do this out of shame [...] U.H.I.D.'s First Step is admission of powerlessness over the need to hide. [...] In other words we don the veil."216 The group rationalizes its shame as a necessity by hiding openly, similar to "sincerity with a motive," another disguise designed as apparent openness. In Sartre's system, "shame", which lies behind this desire to hide, is a common reaction to the "look". Similarly, Kierkegaard considered shame to be a symptom of the lack of selfhood. Wallace envisions several possibilities of evading the "look", such as U.H.I.D. or an escape into the fantasy worlds of television. There are, in addition, numerous cases of more or less literal mask-wearing that can be interpreted as attempts of escaping the "look", most overtly in the narrator's digression on videophony. With this technology, viewers suddenly found themselves under an enormous stress concerning their appearance on the screen: "People were horrified at how their own faces appeared on a TP screen. [...] The proposed solution [...] was, of course, the advent of High-Definition-Masking."217 This development, though, soon went out of control: ...it turned out that consumers' instinctively skewed self-perception, plus vanity-related stress, meant that they began preferring and then outright demanding videophone masks that were really quite a lot better-looking than they themselves were in person. [...] Most consumers were now using masks so undeniably better-looking on videophones than their real faces were 213

cf. Infinite Jest 838 Infinite Jest 54 215 ibd. 533 216 ibd. 535 217 Infinite Jest 157 214

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in person [...] that enormous psychosocial stress began to result, large numbers of phone-users suddenly reluctant to leave home and interface personally with people.218

Although parodically exaggerated, the narrator here depicts a development which Wallace elaborates on in "Fictional Futures", namely TV's basic suggestion that "the most significant feature of persons is watchableness."219 Television, he claims, makes people more self-conscious of their appearance, fueling their self-doubt to such an extent that they eventually desire to be free from their self-consciousness. In Kierkegaard's account, solipsism and shame are particular symptoms of "despair", and Boswell explicitly relates U.H.I.D. to the former's concept of "inclosing reserve."220 As BEABOUT explicates, "despair of defiance", as a solipsistic "closing oneself in on oneself",221 is one of the means that an individual employs to "shy away" from itself. In KIERKEGAARD'S words: "Inclosing reserve is the effect of the negative self-relation in the individuality."222 This quote reflects Hayles' "illusion of autonomy", which she sees at the heart of U.S. culture. In this respect, Wallace's novel both questions the traditional U.S. ideology of individualism and self-reliance, and the contemporary solipsism reinforced by postmodern culture and mass media. Yet, while "unconscious despair" seems to pervade the contemporary U.S., there are also instances of "conscious despair", as this mode signifies an intensification of the affliction and thus "naturally" follows the former mode. 6. "Conscious Despair" in Infinite Jest This "despair" signifies the conscious awareness of one's lack of selfhood. It is experienced as a persistent inner void, one that is harder to ignore, since "the more consciousness the more intense the despair."223 The self needs to be actualized, yet in this case the subject considers himself helplessly entrapped, not realizing that he suffers "merely" from an illness of the mind: "So the fact that the despairer is ignorant of his state as being one of despair is nothing to the point, he is in despair just the same."224 "Conscious despair" is a self-perpetuating vicious cycle, strengthened by one's 218

ibd. 158-59 Wallace, "Fictional Futures" 42 220 Boswell 141 221 Beabout 110 222 Kierkegaard, Anxiety 129 223 Kierkegaard, Sickness 72 224 ibd. 74 219

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ignorance. As he gradually withdraws from marijuana, Hal becomes aware of his nonestablished selfhood: "It's weird to feel like you miss someone you're not even sure you know,"225 he says at one point. By constantly "delivering," fulfilling the high expectations set on him and wearing a mask for others, his personality decomposes, as he loses touch with his outward appearance: "Hal finds he can be confident of his face's symmetry and saliva only when he sits there with his right hand over his left cheek."226 The pressure to deliver rises when Hal is forced to quit marijuana and still compete in an oncoming tennis tournament, as he confesses to his brother Mario: "I feel a hole. It's going to be a huge hole, in a month. [...] And the hole's going to get a little bigger every day until I fly apart in different directions. I'll fly apart in midair."227 He is convinced that he can no longer exist without the drug, and the Academy's awareness of his habit threatens his urge for secrecy as well. Hal's fragile self is built on a solipsistic "inclosing reserve" that is characteristic of the society which the narrator depicts. As Nichols argues, most characters hide behind masks or escape from openness with substances, and the closed system of annular fusion symbolizes this pervasive impulse on a sociocultural level.228 Hal's substance abuse helps him to ignore his existential obligation and his "despair", issues that inhibit his performance at the Academy: "'You just never quite occurred out there, kid'" one assistant coach tells him after Hal, now in withdrawal, barely wins a match against a younger player, unwittingly indicating his vanishing existence. Hal can no longer keep up his surface persona, he is overwhelmed by the situation he finds himself in and the pressing problems which demand immediate action. Like Prufrock and Hamlet, he eventually ceases communication and activity altogether, lying passively on the floor and resembling a ghost more than a human being.229 At his story's end, Hal still exists, yet in a strange condition. The dissembling of his personality has continued, and he resembles more than ever his namesake from Kubrick's film, as he reports cold factual data without any emotional investment, "pure objectivity", as Burn calls it: I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies. My posture is consciously congruent to the shape of my hard chair. [...] I believe I appear neutral, maybe even pleasant,

225

Infinite Jest 589. See Burn 39. ibd. 517 227 ibd. 785 228 Nichols 7-8 229 Infinite Jest 876 226

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though I've been coached to err on the side of neutrality [...] 62.5% of the room's faces are directed my way, pleasantly expectant. [...] I compose what I project will be seen as a smile.230

Instead of a smile, his face is perceived as a painful grimace, implying the decomposition of his personality based on pretense and "delivery." He cannot express himself, the panic of "feeling misperceived is rising,"231 and his words are understood as shrill animal sounds. At this time, his disintegration is almost complete, as he can no longer control his actions or perceive them adequately. Continuously satisfying the demand of others,232 he neglected his selfhood by pursuing a superficial existence and a desire for "machine-like perfection:"233 "Hal himself hasn't had a bona fide intensity-ofinterior-life-type emotion since he was tiny; he finds terms like joie and value to be like so many variables in rarified equations, and he can manipulate them well enough to satisfy everyone but himself that he's in there, inside his own hull, as a human being but in fact he's far more robotic than John Wayne."234 BURN calls the novel a reversed bildungsroman, as it "charts the progressive erasure of identity by the pressures of family and Academy."235 Hal derives a sense of the meaning and value of his existence only from the judgments of other people.236 Interestingly, what the Deans of the University interpret as "shrill sounds" is a critique of the meritocracy to which they belong: "'I am not just a boy who plays tennis. I have an intricate history. Experiences and feelings. I'm complex. [...] I'm not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. [...] I'm not what you see and hear.'"237 E.T.A. is the vehicle for the narrator's critique of the American meritocracy. "'Hal here functions,'"238 one of his coaches tries to assure the Deans after the interview, hinting at the true nature of their interest. Like Hal, the other top-ranked players at E.T.A. are frequently characterized as near-perfect machines: "If you could open Stice's head you'd see a wheel inside another wheel, gears and cogs being widgeted into place."239 On the same page the narrator explains that "The whole Tavis/Schtitt program here is supposedly a progression toward self-forgetting." "Self230

ibd. 1-5 ibd. 8. Cf. Prufrock's "It is impossible to say just what I mean!" (16) 232 cf. ibd. 999 233 Burn 44 234 Infinite Jest 694. John Wayne is a fellow student at the Academy and No. 1 in the internal rankings. 235 ibd. 50 236 Harold Bloom characterizes Hamlet similarly as a mere "function" in the "scheme" of others 237 Infinite Jest 11-13 238 ibd. 15 239 ibd. 635 231

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transcendence through pain,"240 Schtitt paraphrases his program: "The true opponent, the enfolding boundary, is the player himself. Always and only the self out there, on court, to be met, fought, brought to the table to hammer out terms. [...] You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self."241 The Academy wants to turn the players into flawless athletes, machines with infinite possibilities, conforming to E.T.A.'s motto: "The man who knows his limitations has none."242 Since its discovery, America has been depicted as the land of infinite possibility, yet the unhealthy emphasis on "possibility" may lead to a negligence of "necessity". What for the early immigrants had meant freedom has nowadays become a hollowed-out obsession. Whereas the Puritan pilgrims in Massachusetts pursued spiritual goals and had a teleology guiding their new-found liberty, the narrator in his times finds only empty consumerism, the Protestant project and the tradition of the "pursuit of happiness" functionalized into an empty utilitarianism and a constant desire for entertainment. The contemporary dream of infinity is of an inherently finite and material nature. The narrator highlights this with the location of E.T.A. in the vicinity of Boston: "Gately's been told that the school's maze of tennis courts lies now on what used to be the hill's hilltop before the Academy's burly cigarchomping tennis-court contractors shaved the curved top off and rolled the new top flat."243 John Winthrop's "City upon a Hill" has been flattened into a meritocratic facility. Hal is aware that worldly success is not capable of providing him with a sense of personal fulfillment, as Carlisle remarks: "Hal observes that his father 'lived up to his own promise and then found thing after thing to meet and surpass the expectations of his promise in, and didn't seem just a whole hell of a lot happier or tighter wrapped than his own failed father,' which leaves Hal in 'a kind of feral and flux-ridden state with respect to talent.'"244 As his experience suggests, success at the Academy depends on selferasure, and BURN refers to E.T.A.'s approach to their students' characters as "twodimensional."245 This lack of depth is exemplified in Hal's behavior toward the end of his story, his conscious wish of becoming "horizontal," pure surface. Such depersonalization is also parodically exhibited in a scene with Tavis, who clumsily tries to explain the Academy's philosophy to the young applicant Tina Echt: "'What actually we do for you here is to break you down in very carefully selected ways, take you apart 240

ibd. 660 ibd. 84 242 ibd. 81 243 ibd. 198 244 Carlisle 124 245 Burn 42-46 241

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as a little girl and put you back together as a tennis player who can take the court against any little girl in North America without fear of limitation.'"246 Yet Tina begins to cry on this disclosure, unwittingly revealing the true state of affairs through her unfamiliarity with figurative language. This particular methodical angle was bestowed on the Academy by its founder James Incandenza, who learned it from his father, himself a failed tennis player and alcoholic: Son, you're a body, son. [...] [T]hose thoughts in your mind are just the sound of your head revving, and head is still just body, Jim. Commit this to memory. Head is body. Jim, brace yourself against my shoulders here for this hard news, at ten: you're a machine a body an object [...] [A] tennis ball is the ultimate body. Perfectly round. Even distribution of mass. But empty inside, utterly, a vacuum. Susceptible only to whim, spin, to force - used well or poorly. It will reflect your own character. Characterless itself. Pure potential. [...] Imagine what it feels like to be this ball, Jim. Total physicality. No revving head. Complete presence. Absolute potential.247

"Absolute potential" is what the Academy and the meritocratic society that the narrator depicts strive for, and this telos implies a renunciation of consciousness. Paradoxically, infinite possibility is sought by an absolute emphasis on finite materiality, in effect losing what Kierkegaard considered the truly infinite, namely the immaterial and free self behind the body. James cried at his father's announcement, yet, years later and an alcoholic himself, he implements this utilitarian "religion of the physical"248 as the Academy's main doctrine. The student Jim Troeltsch describes its routine as "sheer mindless repeated motions. The machine-language of the muscles. Until you can do it without thinking about it, play. [This frees up] a whole shitload of head-space you don't need for the mechanics [...] Until then you might as well be machines."249 Hal's behavior at the beginning is not a result of his marijuana withdrawal or a possible experimentation with the drug DMZ, but the logical result, carried to extremes, of a philosophy based on self-erasure, one that considers infinite, yet material, possibility its highest goal, and outward performance the only indication of value: "This endless tension among E.T.A.s

246

Infinite Jest 520 ibd. 159-60. Such "materialism" is a family tradition. Hal's great-grandfather apparently was an inventor of "X-Ray specs", symbolizing the 2-Dimensional image of man to which this family adheres. (see Burn) 248 ibd. 169. Cf. Joelle's self-definition as pure material 234-39. 249 ibd. 118 (quoted from Carlisle) 247

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about how the coaches are seeing you, gauging your progress – is your stock going up or down."250 Although Hal feels hollowed out and realizes that for a long time he has been playing tennis without any pleasure, he still clings to it, as he, in "conscious despair", fears that a resignation of the Academy, which for years has been the center of his existence, would lead to a complete loss of his identity. Hal's fear can be witnessed in his reaction to his father's movie "Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat". Analogous to Hal, its protagonist finds himself in a situation that forces him to make a decision. On his way to a job which demands his flawless effectivity, and which he risks losing if he arrived late, he collides with a little boy on the subway platform: The film's bureaucrat's buggy eyes keep going back and forth between the train's open doors and the little kid, who's looking steadily up at him. [...] It's a clear internal-conflict moment [...] The bureaucrat's eyes suddenly recede back into their normal places in his sockets. He turns from the fluorescent doors and bends to the kid and asks if he's OK and says it'll all be OK."251

Unlike Hal, the bureaucrat manages to make a choice. What is important, however, is Hal's interpretation: "Though to Mario he always maintains it's basically goo, Hal secretly likes it, too, the cartridge, and likes to project himself imaginatively into the ex-bureaucrat's character on the leisurely drive home toward ontological erasure."252 Hal cannot imagine a life outside the system that defines him, despite his awareness of the emptiness of material success; he interprets the bureaucrat's choice not as leading to a new existence but as a termination of existence. Dreading his own "ontological erasure," he remains at E.T.A., even when he seems less and less capable of satisfying its demands. He shrinks away from his freedom and his obligation of selfvalidation, and escapes into materiality: He has no consciousness of a self that is won by infinite abstraction from all externality. This self, naked and abstract, in contrast to the fully clothed self of immediacy, is the first form of the infinite self and the progressive impulse in the entire process through which a self infinitely takes possession of its actual self along with its difficulties and advantages.253 250

ibd. 686 ibd. 688 252 ibd. 689 253 Kierkegaard, Sickness 86 251

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It is important to add that in the last scene of the film the camera is on top of the subway train, and thus revealed as part of the system that the bureaucrat, slowly fading out of view, has just renounced. His former existence was related to his being-seen, and his visual disappearance equals the "ontological erasure" that Hal attests to him. Like his fellow students and their concern about being judged by others, Hal makes his personal worth dependent on others' evaluations, and it is no coincidence that at E.T.A. the system of professional tennis is called "The Show" and the players at the Academy are called "performers." The "look" objectifies the subject, which is not necessarily a negative experience, as it also relieves a subject from the burden of its existental freedom. In some cases, then, being seen can be an addictive escape, too. Yet the students' focus on "watchableness" reflects Wallace's critique of TV and the irony and anhedonia that it promotes in society. While Hal "delivers" in order to be accepted by others, he also fashions a mask of detached and cool indifference. His emphasis on his outer appearance leads to "despair", as he neglects his true selfhood. "Be no one" is the advice Hal gives to other adolescents at E.T.A. wishing for acceptance from their fellow students. Today, says Wallace, "the crime is naiveté," and indeed Hal manages to be no one, his self steadily vanishing. The meritocratic system of E.T.A. and, by implication, that of the contemporary U.S., operates by suppressing individual choice and personal selfhood with its objective insistence on effectivity and outward performance. SENNETT argues that the current U.S. inhibits selfhood "indem es das Ich einem Angemessenheitsdruck unterwirft."254 About Avril "Orin states that 'the only reason she's never been diagnosed or treated' for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder is that it 'doesn't prevent her from functioning.'"255 Despite the freedom and the many choices that this society offers its citizens, they become encaged in "despair", since they do not learn how to deal with and actualize this freedom, i.e. choosing responsibly and establishing a coherent self that would be able to perpetuate it. The narrator illustrates this with Hal, who pursues an empty life that he never chose to lead. Both the utilitarianism that Wallace finds dominant in his society and the supremacy of television in the U.S. contribute to a "flattening" of the self into a horizontal figure, hollowed out and "occurring" only on the surface. Personality in the age of television "becomes 'vastly spectatorial,'"256 and watchableness an important 254

Sennett 372 (by creating an anxiety of inadequacy in the self) Carlisle 304 256 Burn 16 255

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characteristic.257 Significantly, it is not success at tennis that Tavis predicts for Tina, but a career as an object of a narcissistic "entertainment, engaging people's attention. As a high-velocity object people can project themselves onto, forgetting their own limitations in the face of the nearly limitless potential someone as young as yourself represents.'"258 This "flattening" of the self results in an "Entmündigung"259 of the subject and thus a loss of concrete freedom, a "freedom in chains." 7. "Freedom in Chains" Wallace does not disapprove of today's freedom when he portrays characters overwhelmed by manifold possibilities, but he does accuse his society of ignorance toward the necessities its freedom implies, like responsible selfhood, awareness of individual limits and the task of continuously actualizing its freedom. Steeply emphasizes the "enlightened self-interest" on which the U.S. concept of freedom is based. Yet there are only rare cases of such personal enlightenment in Infinite Jest, as most characters live in a world devoid of spiritual or moral significance, lacking any ethics, teleology or idea of self-validation that would provide them with orientation and enable them to choose beyond the desire for pleasure or material success. In a heterogeneous and "multi-optional" postmodern society that lacks any "objective" guarantors of ethics and beliefs, it is the individual who is responsible for his choices and actions. Yet a materialistic meritocracy is not capable of teaching its members to choose, as it is based on a suppression of individual choice: "'Utilitarienne. Maximize pleasure, minimize displeasure: result: what is good: This is the U.S.A. of you,'"260 Marathe challenges Steeply's ideas and, indirectly, the Academy.261 As Beabout argues, the citizens of the postmodern society are trained to be selfindulgent and passive. The postmodern renunciation of past and future in favor of the present moment, Wallace's "lack of teleology," and the ignorance of the task of selfhood and the infinite in man, are symptoms of a broad cultural "despair".262 Beabout finds the escape from responsibility and concrete choice especially striking. The narrator's depiction of postmodern anhedonia and individual paralysis points in the same direction. The characters are overwhelmed by an anxiety of possibility, what KIERKEGAARD called 257

Wallace, "E Unibus Pluram" 26 Infinite Jest 524 259 The term refers to Kant and Adorno and means a loss of self-ownership or tutelage 260 Infinite Jest 423 261 Burn 46 262 Beabout 62 258

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"freedom in chains:" "Anxiety is neither a category of necessity nor a category of freedom; it is entangled freedom, where freedom is not free in itself but entangled, not by necessity, but by itself."263 Freedom is not a substantial given, but needs to be actualized constantly. It entails not only possibility, but necessity as well, and is in fact a synthesis of both. "Anxiety" appears conjoined with freedom, and it may only be overcome by concrete action: "Viewed intellectually, the content of freedom is truth, and truth makes man free. For this reason, truth is the work of freedom, and in such a way that freedom constantly brings forth truth."264 An individual is only free when he puts his freedom into practice, when he makes free choices and acts upon them. This leads to concrete selfhood and terminates "anxiety": "As soon as the actuality of freedom and of spirit is posited, anxiety is canceled."265 Yet "anxiety" induces paralysis, creating a selfpropelling vicious cycle of "despair" that enchains the individual inside self-loathing abstraction and passivity. The case of Kate Gompert reflects this interconnection between paralyzing "anxiety" and self-fueled "despair": "The conversation seemed to have helped her focus. Like most clinically depressed patients, she appeared to function better in focused activity than in stasis. Their normal paralyzed stasis allowed these patients' own minds to chew them apart."266 The bureaucrat in Incandenza's film is another example, as he escapes his paralysis with concrete choice. Most of the characters, however, lack such resolution. Erdedy, waiting for his dealer whom he either expects to call on the phone or ring at the door, is paralyzed as suddenly ...at this precise time his telephone and his intercom to the front door's buzzer both sounded at the same time [...] and he moved first toward the telephone console, then over toward his intercom module, then convulsively back toward the sounding phone, and then tried somehow to move toward both at once, finally, so that he stood splaylegged, arms wildly out as if something's been flung, splayed, entombed between the two sounds, without a thought in his head.267

Likewise, the viewers of Incandenza's film are described by Steeply as "'Not inanimate. More like the opposite. More as if…stuck in some way. […] Stuck. Fixed. Held. Trapped. As in trapped in some sort of middle. Between two things. Pulled apart 263

Kierkegaard, Anxiety 49 ibd. 138 265 ibd. 96 266 Infinite Jest 72 267 ibd. 27 264

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in different directions.'"268 Addiction is a force strong enough to draw the addict from his self-interest, petrifying him between his desire for the substance and his conscious existence. Likewise, during the session of Eschaton, Hal is self-reflexively absorbed by abstraction and his own cognitions. Marijuana enables him to escape choice and his existential freedom; he finds himself increasingly unable to come to a decision about the pressing issues facing him and eventually escapes into quasi-catatonia: "It had begun to occur to me, driving back from Natick on Tuesday, that if it came down to a choice between continuing to play competitive tennis and continuing to be able to get high, it would be a nearly impossible choice to make. The distant way in which this fact appalled me itself appalled me."269 He slips more and more into solipsistic muteness: "I could see my asking him where he'd been all week leading to so many different possible responses and further questions that the prospect was almost overwhelming, so enervating I could barely get out that I'd just been lying here on the floor."270 Hal loses himself in abstract possibilities, just as he realizes that he never truly wanted to play tennis. This new awareness offers him a glimpse at his existential freedom, and he experiences the "lucidity of the world." However, this experience immediately tips over into "anxiety": Something like a shadow flanked the vividness and lucidity of the world. The concentration of attention did something to it. What didn't seem fresh and unfamiliar seemed suddenly old as stone. [...] The familiarity of Academy routine took on a crushing cumulative aspect. […] Maybe the worst part of the cognitions involved the incredible volume of food I was going to have to consume over the rest of my life. Meal after meal, plus snacks. Day after day after day. Experiencing this food in toto.271

The moment possibilities are not actualized by concrete choice, they accumulate and overwhelm the self. Hal continues his "horizontality" while musing upon the possibilities of his existence. His freedom is lost, as his "possibilities" become solely a perpetuation of his current life at the Academy. He can no longer imagine a life outside the system that defines his current existence, and his freedom tips over into an oppressive burden. His possibilities are restricted by a system he never chose, and his freedom becomes enchained by itself. Lying passively on the floor gives him an illusion 268

ibd. 647 ibd. 898 270 ibd. 907 271 ibd. 896-97 269

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of power and solidity in the wake of his experience of his freedom and the contingency it entails: "I felt denser now; I felt more solidly composed, now that I was horizontal. I was impossible to knock down."272 Similar to the aesthete, he shies away from concrete action, desperately clinging to the last remnants of his present "existence." Paralysis and the inability to choose are not caused by substance addiction only. As Wallace and Beabout make clear, they originate in "despair" 273 and "anxiety".274 As Wallace claims in his essays, passivity is one of the major problems facing contemporary society. The movie "Infinite Jest" represents many Americans' current dependence on television, their absorption into a second world that no longer demands any choice at all: "The film reverses the Genesis archetype in that choosing to eat of the fruit – that is, to watch the film, consigns one to infantilism, whereas refusing the temptation grants one adultlike control over one's will and affirms one's obligation to something other than one's own pleasure."275 As Marathe asks Steeply: "'Who teaches your U.S.A. children how to choose their temple?'"276 What is dangerous in his eyes is not the lethal movie, but the fact that many Americans nowadays would voluntarily choose to watch it in their lack of ethics and their desperate desire for a relief from the burden of choice and self-consciousness. Likewise, WALLACE argues in "E Unibus Pluram": "Jacking the number of choices and options up with better tech will remedy exactly nothing so long as no sources of insight on comparative worth, no guides to why and how to choose among experiences, fantasies, beliefs, and predilections, are permitted serious consideration in U.S. culture."277 The neglect of choice and self-validation leads to the self-perpetuating circle of "despair", and consequently to a loss of freedom. Regression or responsible selfhood are the options that the narrator presents.278 His characters are submerged by the manifold possibilities and choices facing them, and they anxiously shy away from them. Drugs and TV provide the means to effectively blot out consciousness and one's existential burden.279 As the following sections attempt to 272

ibd. 902 cf. the case of Anton Doucette ( 390) 274 cf. the example of plagiarism at E.T.A. (1061) 275 Boswell 135 276 Infinite Jest 319 277 Wallace, "E Unibus Pluram" 75-76 278 CARLISLE says that one of the novel's major themes is "the significance of making a voluntary choice rather than following an involuntary compulsion." (89) 279 Alain Ehrenberg considers depression to be one of the most significant illnesses of our times. Similar to Wallace, he relates it to today's state of unprecedented freedom in Western societies. Claiming that the traditional disciplinary social model has been replaced by a new model of interiority and the demand to "be yourself", he believes this freedom to be just as entrapping as the 273

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demonstrate, addiction in the novel is another instance of "despair", a paralyzing and self-consuming circle triggered by the experience of "anxiety". This point has already been made by NOAH RAIZMAN, who argues that "the fear of the Darkness evinced by so many of the novel's addicts is really a fear of being human - that is, of being a character with agency and free will. The addict's choice is to not-choose." 8. Self-Consciousness, "Nausea" and Addiction Most characters in Infinite Jest resort to drug abuse to escape their responsibility and their existential freedom. Consistent with the imagery of submersion, Gately encounters a sky that turns as blue as water when he ingests narcotics, and which, in contrast to his experience of "anxiety", no longer breathes.280 Also, characters use drugs to flee from the inhuman pressures of their utilitarian society. As the narrator knows: Recreational drugs are more or less traditional at any U.S. secondary school. [...] [T]here's always been a certain percentage of the high-caliber adolescent players at E.T.A. who manage their internal weathers chemically. Much of this is good clean temporary fun; but a traditionally smaller and harder-core set tends to rely on personal chemistry to manage E.T.A.'s special demands.281

Many critics have noted the void inside most characters, who use addictive substances to cover up their hollowness, escape from "despair" or erase their consciousness, which is a tendency that Kierkegaard's ethicist also knows: "He feels that he has lost himself, and once this is the case, strong opiates are needed as a depressant."282 Being haunted by a recurring dream that confronted him with his descent into solipsism, Hal escaped into marijuana abuse in order to remain successful: Bridget Boone [...] invited me to consider a couple of late-night bongs, as a kind of psychodysleptic Sominex, to help me sleep [...] finally, all the way through a really unpleasant

old disciplinary model. What is interesting in his analysis is that it parallels Wallace's analysis in many instances. Like him, Ehrenberg believes that drug abuse is principally a means to cover up the inner emptiness of the depressed person, and he likewise relates contemporary depression to narcissism, feelings of impotence and inadequacy, and the inability to choose and to accept the limits of the self and of the exterior world. 280 Infinite Jest 892-93 281 Infinite Jest 52-53. Cf. 155 282 Kierkegaard, Either/Or II 119 68

dream that had been recurring nightly and waking me up in medias for weeks and was beginning to grind me down and to cause some slight deterioration in performance or rank.283

A cure from "despair" is a painful process, as the ethicist recognizes: "…alone in one’s boat, alone with one’s sorrow, alone with one’s despair – which one is cowardly enough to prefer to keep rather than submit to the pain of healing."284 Hal clings to E.T.A., which seems to provide him with a definition of himself. However, he is aware of the cracks inside his personality, as his substance of choice cannot guarantee an escape from his mind, since it sometimes provokes an extreme self-consciousness that only increases his "anxiety".285 As WALLACE in "E Unibus Pluram" defines, "something is malignantly addictive if (1) it causes real problems for the addict, and (2) it offers itself as a relief from the very problems it causes."286 In this light, addiction, like an object of consumption, provokes a vicious cycle and is thus a failed attempt at escape, as it only intensifies the need for escape. Joelle's exit sign turns out to be only a deeper way into her cage, and the addicts in the novel resemble some of the narrators of Lost in the Funhouse, deeply absorbed in their circular self-loathing: "Self-consciousness thus becomes a nightmarish hall of mirrors, a Barthian funhouse that has ceased to be any fun at all."287 Radical metafiction resembles the analysis-paralysis experienced by addicts, and, as Wallace argues, it causes more problems than it solves. It leaves its subject hollowed out by a replacement of experience with abstract observation, circling around himself without arriving anywhere. Keeping in mind his account of contemporary solipsism and narcissism, it appears that metafiction shares some characteristics with the vicious cycle of substance addiction, and especially with the "analysis-paralysis" of marijuana abuse. Marijuana was one of the drugs celebrated by the 1960s counterculture in its search for new experiences of the self. In the novel, however, it cannot provide its user with a concrete self, but rather replaces it,288 thereby creating an addictive circle. Beginning to withdraw, Hal realizes: "It occurred to me that without some one-hitters to be able to look forward to smoking alone in the tunnel I was waking up every day

283

Infinite Jest 67 Kierkegaard, Either/Or II 84 285 Infinite Jest 503-04. See also Carlisle 141. 286 Wallace, "E Unibus Pluram" 38 287 Boswell 140 288 Infinite Jest 347 284

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feeling as though there was nothing in the day to anticipate or lend anything any meaning."289 As Kierkegaard made clear, a subject overwhelmed by possibility in "anxiety" is likely to escape and eradicate its freedom and consciousness.290 Unable to cope with the abundant choices that constitute today's society, many of the characters renounce their freedom in one ultimate choice. As LASCH argues: "Contemporary man, tortured [...] by self-consciousness, turns to new cults and therapies [...] to find meaning and purpose in life. [...] [H]e would willingly exchange his self-consciousness for oblivion and his freedom to create new roles for some form of external dictation."291 Incandenza's suicide during his sobriety is a case in point, as is Gompert, who voluntarily opts for a lethal viewing of his film. Hospitalized after a suicide attempt, she describes her "anxiety" and desire for unconsciousness: "'I wanted to just stop being conscious. [...] I wanted to stop feeling this way. If I could have just put myself in a really long coma, I would have done that. [...] I just didn't want to feel this way anymore. I don't...I didn't believe this feeling would ever go away. I don't. I still don't. I'd rather feel nothing than this.'"292 Her description resembles Kierkegaard's definition of "despair" as "sickness unto death", an anhedonic disease in which death appears as the only hope.293 Her doctor diagnoses her with "anxiety", yet this does not lead to an empathic understanding of her individual case. Rather, his use of this label only creates a distance between them, abstracting the pain which she herself can only express indirectly, knowing that no generalizing term really fits it: "'I don't know what I could call it. It's like I can't get enough outside it to call it anything. It's like horror more than sadness. [...] It's like something horrible is about to happen, the most horrible thing you can imagine.'"294 As the subsequent sections are meant to demonstrate, Wallace suggests other means of therapy. Keeping in mind the generality of the terms, it suffices this paper's theoretical interest to diagnose her with "anxiety" and "nausea": "I would so like to let myself go, forget myself, sleep. But I can't, I'm suffocating: existence penetrates me everywhere, through the eyes, the nose, the mouth,"295 the narrator of Nausea states. He knows that his self-loathing is an escalating vicious cycle leading him only deeper into his affliction. "Nausea" and 289

ibd. 853 cf. footnote 167 in this paper 291 Lasch 99. A similar point is made by Fromm 292 Infinite Jest 72-73 293 cf. the sybil in the epigraph to Eliot's "The Waste Land", whose only wish is to die 294 ibd. 295 Sartre, Nausea 126 290

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"despair" move in self-perpetuating cycles of extreme self-consciousness, similar to the endless "thought-helixes" of some of Barth's and Wallace's characters. Similarly, metafiction does not provide an escape, but works only to intensify the narrator's presence. It is thus that it most resembles the "spider" of addiction and Kierkegaardian "despair". 9. Addiction as "Despair" The term "spider" points toward the logic of addiction, which entangles its subject in a web of rationalizations and denial, as each addict is ingenous in finding reasons for a continuation of his habit. In order to truly quit an addiction, one needs to be aware of the spider's power inside one's reasoning, instead of blindly trusting one's free will. Randy Lenz excuses his return to cocaine abuse with the rationalization that it would help him deal with other residents of Ennet House and thus in his withdrawal: "Far from your scenario of relapsing, the [cocaine] is medicinal support for assertively sharing his need for aloneness with Green, so that issues of early sobriety can get resolved before standing in the way of spiritual growth – Lenz will use cocaine in the very interests of sobriety and growth itself."296 Like Kierkegaard, the narrator frequently points out that addiction is interwoven with the mind.297 As the philosopher argued in The Sickness unto Death: "No human being is able to say, of his own and by himself, what sin is, for sin is the very thing he is in. All his talk about sin is at bottom a glossing over of sin."298 Thus, one of the residents of Ennet House is conflicted because he is convinced of his resolution to quit his substance, yet still pursues the habit: "'But I think I already want to stop. How come I'd even be here if I didn't want to stop? Isn't being here proof I want to stop? But then so how come I can't stop, if I want to stop, is the thing.'"299 As RINGLEBEN describes "despair's" logic of denial, which resembles the "sincerity with a motive" of metafiction: "Die Dialektik der Verzweiflung bringt es mit sich, daß, indem sie direkt angesprochen zu werden scheint, sie sich eben darin versteckt. Sich scheinbar zu zeigen, ist so die raffinierteste Weise der Verborgenheit."300 It also operates with rationalizations, as the ethicist points out:

296

Infinite Jest 555 cf. the slogan of Alcoholics Anonymous: "My Best Thinking Got Me Here." (1026) 298 Kierkegaard, Sickness 127 299 Infinite Jest 179 300 Ringleben 87. (It is characteristic of despair's dialectic that it hides behind any direct address. Pretending to reveal itself is thus the most sophisticated kind of hiddenness.) 297

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There is a restlessness in you over which consciousness nevertheless hovers, bright and clear; your whole soul is concentrated upon this single point, your understanding contrives a hundred plans; you arrange everything for the attack, but it miscarries at a single point and then your almost diabolical dialectic is instantly ready to explain what happened in such a way that it will benefit the new plan of operation. You continually hover over yourself, and no matter how crucial each step, you always keep for yourself a possibility of interpretation that with one word can change everything.301

Many of the inhabitants of Ennet House pursue such rationalizations at the beginning of their residency, as they use an apparent frankness about their state of addiction to shield themselves from a real awareness of the extent to which the "spider" has imbued their mind,302 whereas others deny their substance dependence altogether. "Addiction is deadly," says HAYLES, "because it infects the will; once reason has been coopted, it uses the power of ratiocination in the service of the Disease, inventing rationalizations that continue to operate until the Substance kills the Subject."303 Gately regularly observes Hayles' "illusion of autonomy" in the new residents, a solipsistic denial that inhibits relationships to others and thus the possibility of learning from their experiences. This is in fact another mechanism of the "spider" struggling to stay in control: Their early-recovery Denial makes it impossible for them to imagine their own car getting towed instead of, say, somebody else's car. […] They'll piss and moan your ear off if somebody else fucks with the rules, but they don't deep down see themselves subject to them, the same rules. And they're constitutionally unable to learn from anybody else's experience. […] It's like a kind of idolatry of uniqueness.304

Gately here implicitly draws a connection between drug abuse, narcissism and the U.S. ideology of individualism that Wallace's Kenyon Address and Hayles' essay challenge. This narcissistic emphasis of uniqueness feeds the spider and fuels "despair". Hayles contrasts the "illusion of autonomy" with the "fact of recursivity", similar to Sartre's "Being-For-Others". Sartre judged such narcissistic illusion a grave danger, and Wallace follows his lead in his portrayal of addiction. The subject in "despair" often 301

Kierkegaard, Either/Or II 11 cf. Infinite Jest 366 303 Hayles 693 304 Infinite Jest 604 302

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appears unafflicted, upholding a "cool" mask such as Wallace detects in his contemporary society:305 "But precisely the more spiritual the despair becomes, the more it attends with demonic cleverness to keep the despair enclosed in its reserve, and the more it therefore attends to neutralizing the externalities, making them as insignificant and inconsequential as possible."306 When the subject is in "conscious despair", his awareness only fuels the affliction, as he now self-loathingly despairs about his weakness.307 As Gompert relates her experiences with marijuana: "I'm getting more and more miserable and fed up with myself for smoking so much [...] and I start getting high and thinking about nothing except how I have to quit smoking all this Bob."308 The development into further entanglement moves in rationalizations as well: 2No dialectic is capable of defeating the sophism that crazed repentance is capable of producing at every moment. […] (it is remarkable what persuasive powers, what eloquence such repentance possesses to disarm all objections and to convince all who come close to it, only to despair of itself again when this diversion is over)."309 Like addiction and marijuana thinking, "despair" is a vicious cycle, enforced in each moment the subject does not leap out of it.310 Since it originates from a lack of selfhood, "despair" intensifies when the existential obligation is neglected and freedom not actualized: "At last, repentance must become an object to itself, inasmuch as the moment of repentance becomes a deficit of action."311 Here the significance of the paralyzing force of addictive substances becomes clear. Paralysis is the common effect of all addictions treated in Infinite Jest, and it is also the cause for a further entanglement in addiction. Drug abuse appears as an escape from real-life problems, but the longer addicts remain in passivity, the worse these problems become, only intensifying the urge to escape. This vicious cycle resembles the self-propelled, yet self-escalating system of annular fusion, a resemblance that hints at the roots of the character's addictions in their culture. In Wallace's novel, addictive desire is often symbolized by fire, and as one character puts it: "'What fire dies when you feed it?'"312 Similarly, KIERKEGAARD speaks 305

cf. Infinite Jest 39 Kierkegaard, Sickness 104 307 "‘Here’s a curious muddle, a curious sort of knot, for the whole sorry business is really due to how thought twists things’ (ibd. 96) 308 Infinite Jest 77 309 Kierkegaard, Anxiety 116 310 cf. footnote 68 in this paper 311 ibd. 118 312 Infinite Jest 389 306

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of "despair" as a "cold fire.313 Just as "despair" can only be terminated by a leap into concrete existence and conscious, responsible selfhood, the paralyzing spell of addiction, with all its rationalizations and masks of denial, must be broken by a step-by-step awareness of its logic and a subsequent resolute activity. Paralysis and the inability to choose function as fuel for "despair" and addiction, as the examples of Erdedy, Hal and the catatonic viewers of "Infinite Jest" suggest. Gompert describes her anhedonia …as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency – sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying – are not just unpleasant but literally horrible. [...] Everything is part of the problem, and there is no solution. […] It's a closed circuit: the current is both applied and received from within.314

The narrator, similar to Kierkegaard, emphasizes the danger of "causal attribution," a tendency that intensifies the illness further, as the subject obscures itself as the origin of its affliction and instead self-pityingly blames outside causes, disregarding its own freedom of choice and remaining in passivity: So but also know that causal attribution, like irony, is death, speaking-on-Commitmentswise. [AA Veterans'] temple-veins will actually stand out and pulse with irritation if you start blaming your Disease on some cause or other [...] The Why of the Disease is a labyrinth it is strongly suggested all AAs boycott, inhabited as the maze is by the twin minotaurs of Why Me? and Why Not?, a.k.a. Self-Pity and Denial.315

Likewise, Kierkegaard stated that "guilt never has an external occasion, and whoever yields to temptation is himself guilty of the temptation."316 Like "despair", addiction is a vicious cycle, a consequence in itself. Following Wallace's definition of addiction, the apparent way out is only a further way in, as only a paradoxical "leap", as the narrator also calls it,317 may set the subject free. Joelle's eventual breakdown, nevertheless, brings her to a recognition of her true state and toward a possible liberation. Equal to Kierkegaard, the AA veterans stress that "desperation" is a gift, as

313

cf. footnote 52 in this paper ibd. 696. Cf. Marathe's account of his anhedonia (777). In Gompert's description it also resembles annulation. 315 ibd. 370-74 316 Kierkegaard, Anxiety 109. 317 Infinite Jest 860 314

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only its experience can lead to a healthy self.318 In order to be cured, however, the self needs to pass through all five modes of "despair", including the last two modes. 10. "Despair of Weakness and Defiance" These are the most intense forms of "despair". Here the afflicted individual is aware of his lack of concrete selfhood, yet still fearfully avoids his task, which threatens his momentary identity based on either infinite possibility or finite spiritlessness.319 As Kierkegaard and Sartre pointed out, selfhood is a process distinguished by inner tension; it requires concrete responsible activity and constant actualization of oneself and one's freedom in every moment. Yet the subject of this "despair" is likely to turn to other, apparently easier, means of selfhood. In the "despair of weakness" he desires to become somebody else, either by imitation of a person with a supposedly strong self, or by founding his existence on fame and popularity. The subject superficially believes that fame signifies a concrete selfhood worth imitating, and in today's "televisual" society there are many instances of this "despair". Mass media not only portray personalities with supposedly "fuller" lives, but also promote "watchableness" as the essential feature of a self. The subject suffering from this "despair" believes that his pain will cease as soon as he has either become the idolized other, or experiences a similar idolization by the anonymous "look" of the masses. The significance that younger players at E.T.A. attribute to "watchableness" has been mentioned before, and the Academy itself sees them as "entertainers."320 One almost "dies" from the desire to be on "The Show," and his interlocutor recognizes this as a symptom of "despair": 'There is much fear in fame. Terrible and heavy fear to be pulled and held, carried. […] Do not believe the photographs. Fame is not the exit from any cage.' 'So I'm stuck in the cage from either side. Fame or tortured envy of fame. There's no way out.' 'You might consider how escape from a cage must surely require, foremost, awareness of the fact of the cage.321

This answer reflects Kierkegaard's emphasis on the awareness of "despair" as the necessary first step toward freedom, which likewise recalls the fish "joke" from above.

318

cf. Infinite Jest 354 Ringleben 178-96 320 Infinite Jest 661. This is in contrast to coach Schtitt's philosophy. 321 ibd. 389 319

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James Incandenza's father had once expressed to his son that "'I'm so scared of dying without ever being really seen.'"322 Suffering from "despair" and alcoholism, he neglected his selfhood by his focus on material success and "watchableness." He had passed on this materialistic doctrine to his heirs, who subsequently replaced their selfhood with substances and material success as well. At the heart of their desperate desires lies the unfulfilled wish for parental acceptance. James and his father had both felt like failures, while Hal never managed a real conversation with James and feels constantly pressured by the high expectations of his mother. Orin also feels such a craving for acceptance in his obsession with young mothers. This longing drives him to athletic success, as the anonymous "look" of the fans in the stadium provides him with an experience he calls "transcendent:" ...here were upwards of 30,000 voices, souls, voicing approval as One Soul. [...] Audience exhortations and approvals so total they ceased to be numerically distinct and melded into a sort of single coital moan, one big vowel, the sound of the womb, the roar gathering, tidal, amniotic, the voice of what might as well be God. […] Orin said the thing he thought he liked was he literally could not hear himself think out there, maybe a cliché, but out there transformed, his own self transcended as he'd never escaped himself on the court.323

Again, Orin's desire is inherently oedipal, directed at a suspension of his conscious self in his mother's total approval, in a tidal womb of acceptance which in his imagery recalls the addicts' submersion under water.324 Like the addicts' desire, it is narcissistic, especially considering that he is stimulated by a crowd voicing the "one big vowel," the "womb"-like O of his name which, however, signifies his inner void and empty circle of unfulfillable desire rather than maternal plenitude.325 The Lacanian "gaze", one that satisfies the desire of the narcissistic individual, evolves into Sartre's "look", which imparts a sense of personality and at the same time a freedom from subjective consciousness. Wallace accounts for this blend of narcissism and "despair" in "E Unibus Pluram": "...the deep message of television w/r/t these ads looks to be that Joe Briefcase's ontological status as just one in a reactive watching mass is at some basic level shaky, contingent, and that true actualization of self would ultimately consist in 322

ibd. 168 ibd. 295-96 324 Orin's punting stance is described as "not unlike a diver's" (Carlisle 179). The sea traditionally symbolizes both maternity and death. Both symbols merge in the film "Infinite Jest". 325 In his paper, Chris Hager discusses the "O" in Infinite Jest more extensively 323

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Joe's becoming one of the images that are the objects of this great herd-like watching."326 Similarly, Hal speaks about his success at tennis as the basis of his existence: "'...you are loved for winning only. The two and three wins created you, for people. […] You must keep winning to keep the existence of love and endorsements and the shiny magazines wanting your profile.'"327 This intense craving for acceptance is shared by most of the characters. The society that the narrator depicts is one of "cool anhedonia," in which ironic masks are worn and acceptance no longer conveyed intersubjectively. U.H.I.D. symbolizes the self-conscious feeling of inadequacy with all its self-perpetuating force, as its members hide their shame behind blank veils. Joelle sees her desire for acceptance as a reason for her cocaine-abuse: "The 'base frees and condenses [...] an afflated orgasm of the heart that makes her feel, truly, attractive, sheltered by limits, deveiled and loved, observed and alone and sufficient and female, full, as if watched for an instant by God."328 She wishes to be freed from her solipsism, Kierkegaard's narcissistic "inclosing reserve": "behind it the self sits, as it were, keeping watch on itself, preoccupied or filling time with not wanting to be itself, yet still self enough to love itself. This is what is called being reserved.."329 When the individual becomes aware of suffering from this "despair", a reversal takes place and he begins to despair over his own weakness. Again, it is the illness' hideous logic that this development only leads deeper into the cage: "this, his despair over sin, very far from being a specification of the good, is a heightened specification of sin, the intensity of which is a deeper absorption in sin. The point is that, […] he became proud of himself."330 The subject uses his "despair" as an instrument of denial: "it could not possibly be pride, since it is precisely his own weakness that he despairs over – as if it was not pride that put such immense emphasis on the weakness, as though it wasn’t because he wanted to be proud of his own self that he found this consciousness of his own weakness unbearable."331 The case of Lenz is one example of such "despair of defiance". Ringleben calls this mode a naive trust in one's own abilities, whereas one's freedom is in fact derived from others,332 hinting at Kierkegaard's concept of the relation to God, Sartre's relation to "the other" and Hayles' "fact of recursivity". The defiant self 326

Wallace, "E Unibus Pluram" 56 ibd. 677 328 ibd. 235. Recall that Orin also mentions God. Cf. Baudelaire's account of the effects of "Haschisch." 329 Kierkegaard, Sickness 94 330 ibd. 144-45 331 ibd. 96 332 Ringleben 61 327

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in its hubristic "illusion of autonomy" desires to be its own causa sui in a futile reaction against the experience of contingency and personal impotence common to many subjects in a postmodern society. Thus, Orin severs all ties to his family, while Lenz believes himself to be guided by his free will, clinging to the illusion of power he experiences in killing small street animals, hissing 'There' over and over: "The 'There' turned out to be crucial for the sense of brisance and closure and resolving issues of impotent rage and powerless fear that like accrued in Lenz all day being trapped in the northeastern portions of a squalid halfway house all day fearing for his life."333 This illusion is essentially based on a desire for power and control: "Deciding to go ahead and think somebody's a stand-up guy: it's like you drop something, you give up all of your power over it: you have to stand there impotent waiting for it to hit the ground: all you can do is brace and wince. It kind of enrages Lenz to like somebody."334 "The other" poses a threat to one's egocentrism, and it likewise threatens the "inclosing reserve" of "despair". The narrator employs the urban legend of a brick layer who almost kills himself in his attempt to "do the job alone"335 for the same purpose. The "illusion of autonomy" is thus both an instance of narcissism and of the "despair of defiance". It is dangerous in that it closes the afflicted person off from all outside help, while it leads him to the infected ways of his mind, persuading him that only these are to be trusted. Kierkegaard considered this a helpless and impotent struggle against God, the power which provided him with his freedom in the first place. This "despair" is reflected in the film "Infinite Jest" and in the various instances of drug abuse in the novel, a choice against the self's power to choose, and thus a choice to end all choices. As Lyle, the spiritual counselor at E.T.A., never tires of pointing out: "'Let not the weight thou wouldst pull to thyself exceed thine own weight,'"336 a phrase that fits perfectly with the narrator's example of the brick layer. Yet Wallace does not merely suggest Kierkegaardian religion as a cure, as his use of the latter's ideas, combined with the atheistic philosophy of Sartre, is rather directed against the narcissism that he detects in his times. The "liberation" of the subject from traditional conventions and norms, and the American ideology of individualism work against an awareness of the self's limits, while TV and postmodern skepticism promote solipsism instead of an awareness of the "fact of recursivity" and intersubjectivity. Yet Postmodernism and "despair" have more in common. 333

Infinite Jest 541 ibd. 554 335 ibd. 138-40 336 Infinite Jest 128 334

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11. Postmodernism and "Despair" Postmodern "despair" in Wallace's work is informed by an intense selfconsciousness and an intense awareness of the constructedness of truths, norms and the human self. As the cultural era that replaced metaphysics and religion with "joyful immanence," "depth" with "surface" and textual meaning with a "pure play of signifiers," Postmodernism resembles Kierkegaard's "despair of defiance".337 The latter's social critique shares many concerns with Wallace's account of his society, e.g. solipsism, self-reflexivity and a radical and destructive skepticism.338 Nietzsche's "Tod Gottes" and his conception of the "superman" have furthered the conviction that man is autonomous and inherently free: "das Selbst will verzweifelt die ganze Genugtuung genießen, dass es sich zu sich selber macht."339 This is a belief that is reflected in the quest for new experiences of the self in the 1960s and the "New Age" movement, yet constitutive of Modernity in general.340 The radical separation of individual and society lay at the heart of Romanticism and found more vigorous expression in Modernism. In the extreme epistemological skepticism of Postmodernism, however, it was radicalized, as the individual was inevitably separated from most possibilities of meaningfully interacting with the outer world. Most concepts of the self in the twentieth century thus emphasized the individual's incoherence and fragmentation. While this was seen as a cause for lament in literary Modernism, early Postmodernists celebrated this development toward a "protean" self as a liberation. "Die Postmoderne hat das Sein vergessen," states BRUNO LATOUR, a loss which it provided with a positive value.341 Wallace's use of existentialist ideas thus signifies an effective challenge against Postmodernism, which Latour frequently characterizes as an instance of despair.342 According to Kierkegaard, man cannot provide himself with freedom because he is limited by God, from whom it is derived.343 Postmodernism has not only done away with a transcendent higher power, but also with "the other" as an entity capable of delimiting, interacting with, and shaping the self. In its epistemological skepticism, it 337

Nichols also accounts for the "social reality" as the source of despair in the novel (6) "To a degree, existence is undermined by the subjects' doubt; isolation continually gains the upper hand more and more (Either/Or I 141) 339 ibd. 80. (The self desperately wants to enjoy the satisfaction of being its own origin). Sennett actually considers the fear of limitations a primary symptom of narcissism (21). 340 cf. Sennett 341 Latour 91. (Postmodernism has forgotten Being) 342 ibd. 92 343 cf. footnote 45 in this paper 338

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radically disconnected the subject from the world, yet "the isolated self simply does not, cannot exist," says WAYNE C. BOOTH, and "to do it alone is to destroy a self one never possessed in the first place."344 Today's unprecedented freedom from outside forces did not liberate man, but rather encaged him inside an experience of disorientation, a feeling of inauthenticity, and an authority vacuum that was gradually filled by mass media and commercial culture. Jameson and Žižek argue that Postmodernism's anarchic spirit is in effect reactionary, as it leaves the subject helpless in the face of capitalist and political forces. The exit sign of Joelle's cage is as deceptive as the alleged freedom in today's society, in which too many choices and a lack of teleology and ethical convictions generate an empty law of hedonism and an unbound narcissism,345 Žižek's silent totalitarian father who dictates a "blind duty to enjoyment." Wallace does not attack the personal freedom in current western societies, nor does he advocate a blind return to religiosity or other former guarantors of norms and "truth". What he criticizes is that people have not learned to apply and actualize their freedom responsibly, thus losing it to stronger, impersonal forces. Similar to Horkheimer and Adorno's critique of the "culture industry", he challenges the "Entmündigung" of the subject by mass media and commercial culture. Following the demise of master narratives as legitimations of formerly "absolute" belief systems, it is nowadays the individual who is responsible to provide his existence with meaning and to choose his own route of action. Yet this responsibility for himself and his freedom is largely ignored in the contemporary cultural discourse. Postmodern literature, in Wallace's conceptualization, does not provide the individual with ethics, value systems, or with ideas of how to establish such personal ethics autonomously. Rather, in most cases it merely repeats its abstract and cynical treatment of the contingency and fictionality of the world, and refuses to offer the reader any meaning. As Hal realizes toward the end of the novel: "We are all dying to give ourselves away to something,"346 a recognition that is often neglected by the individual in the current consumer society. The lack of ethics that many critics attest to the postmodern era, and which Kierkegaard also witnessed in his society,347 turns the freedom of choice into a compulsion to consume, eventually leading to a "freedom in chains:" "Dekonstruktion und Theorien der Subjektsauflösung spielen in die Hände des 344

Booth 238-40 Jacobs 215 346 Infinite Jest 900 347 "Our age reminds one very much of the disintegration of the Greek state; everything continues, and yet there is no one who believes in it. The invisible spiritual bond that gives it validity has vanished, and thus the whole age is simultaneously comic and tragic." (Either/Or II 19) 345

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globalen Kapitals [...] indem sie unter dem Deckmantel der freien Wahl und des freien Marktes ehemalige substanzielle Möglichkeiten der Identifizierung als phantasmatische Waren für den Konsum gestalten."348 The postmodern "liberation", as Jameson argues as well, has not been followed by a reconstructive period, but has instead given way to a materialist consumer society, which uses postmodernist insights and the concept of a depthless self as rationalizations for an empty pursuit of pleasure. There is hardly any "enlightened self-interest" in a society that neglects to establish a coherent and meaningful boundary of the self which could check the infantile narcissism nourished by the media. Such neglect may lead to regression and passivity. A constant gratification of narcissistic desires signifies an abuse of freedom and eventually its loss, as the basic choice behind all choices is disregarded. This increasing inability to maintain responsible selfhood is hidden behind an ideological rhetoric of possibility and individualism, the formerly politico-economical "pursuit of happiness" now rationalized into a "cult of instant joy and gratification." At Kenyon, Wallace asserted that being a responsible adult in today's open societies demands self-control and conscious choices about oneself and one's relation to the world instead of merely following one's natural narcissism: To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. [...] [T]he so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation.349

Likewise, Sartre repeatedly emphasized the limits and necessities inherent in freedom. Man is not the origin of his freedom, but condemned to it, thrown into a contingent world of constant confrontation with "the other", on whom he is dependent for his consciousness and thus his freedom. Furthermore, it is man himself who creates the limits of his existence, the space in which he may occur. Postmodern attacks on "necessities" such as ethics, validity, coherence and "the other" are considered 348

Vogt/Silverman 62. (Deconstruction and theories of the dissolution of the subject play into the hands of global capital […] by, under the guise of free choice and the free market, designing former substantial possibilities of identification as phantasmatic goods for consumption.) 349 Wallace, "Kenyon Address" 81

insufficient by Wallace. In his view, these limits to the self are necessary, since they provide orientation and freedom in the first place, and they help to check its inherent narcissism. Personal freedom in Infinite Jest is a case of "gefesselte Freiheit." In the radical heterogeneity of the postmodern age, making a choice becomes an overwhelming task and often results in passive apathy. In his analysis of contemporary cynisism, Peter Sloterdijk comes to the conclusion that the project of Enlightenment has not been fully realized, as its movement of disillusionment has come to a cynical standstill: today's subjects are aware of the emptiness of master narratives, yet they still pursue a life according to standards they no longer believe in but feel unable to alter, shielding their hypocrisy and desire for comfort with the means of irony and cynicism, principal elements of postmodern aesthetics. The cynical subject pretends to know the emptiness behind most truths and reacts to the insights of enlightenment with apathy. Thus, in an essay on the TV hero after Postmodernism, Hal argues that "We await, I predict, the hero of non-action, the catatonic hero, the one beyond calm, divorced from all stimulus."350 Writers like Don DeLillo or Thomas Pynchon frequently portray characters succumbing to paranoia in the face of a chaotic world ruled by either chance or invisible forces. Tyrone Slothrop, protagonist of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, is on a quest for his identity in Post-War Germany, yet at the end disappears completely inside the anarchic "Zone," resembling Kierkegaard's "atmospheric illusion," i.e. the self overwhelmed by its freedom and the contingency of existence. Whereas traditional literary "schools" were concerned with the constitution of subjectivity, postmodern literature focuses on the deconstruction of subjectivity in the face of a radical chaotic heterogeneity.351 "Slothrop anticipates the invention of the postmodern self," argue STEVEN BEST and DOUGLAS KELLNER. His "psychological disintegration is symptomatic of the fate of the postmodern self whose personal power is understood as arbitrary choice and whose identity is chipped away through the bombardment of signifiers within electronic and digital culture."352 As a postmodern update on Kierkegaard, Slothrop's fate can also be seen, in the interpretation of PARRISH, to signify the "failed attempt to avoid the fate of becoming merely the implication of a particular technology."353 Later postmodernists emphasized man's loss of power and freedom in the face of "codes and 350

Infinite Jest 142 Zima 195-200 352 Best and Kellner 45 353 Parrish 83 351

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conventions,"354 multinational corporations, media simulations, or a discoursive "force", impersonal forces ungraspable for the single subject. The development away from a belief in essential or transcendental subjectivity led to a "despair of the finite" underlying the largely materialistic society of today. Postmodernism challenged the belief in a coherent subject with the concepts of a "protean" self, not authentic but always arbitrarily constructed, with Baudrillard even arguing for a renunciation of the idea of the human subject altogether.355 This tendency may be read with Kierkegaard as a rationalization of Modernity's disregard of man's existential obligation, his subsequent fragmentation into "atmospheric illusions," his growing emphasis on finity and immanence, and his evolving dependence on bureaucratic, political and capitalist forces. Kierkegaard and Sartre attacked the coherent subject of the Cartesian tradition, while arguing for a concept of the self as an active and reflexive project, whereas postmodernists replaced the Sartrean notion of existential necessity with an ironic play of identities free of any "necessity." Recognizing the influence of social, linguistic and cultural elements upon identity construction, they came to drop the idea of a threedimensional identity altogether, focusing solely on the self's surface and its incoherence in the postmodern culture of the image. Yet claims of the disappearance of the human subject overemphasized the roles such cultural images play in identity construction, blind for the continuities behind the protean mask. They underestimated the active part of the subject, which may creatively choose among the various social and cultural representations and role models, and synthesize them in the process of shaping its existence. As Kellner argues, images do not so much destabilize the subject, as help it in its task of identity construction.356 In fact, it can be argued with Wallace and Jameson that it was Postmodernism's promulgation of the concept of protean selfhood357 and the correspondent rejection of ethics that has contributed to the contemporary crisis in identity and the loss of personal freedom. Instead of the liberation of the signifier and the self, its advocates have furthered the interests of economic forces and helped to rationalize a mindless pursuit of happiness that led to a loss of selfhood and thus to "despair". Instead of reverting the modern tendency of dehumanization identified by Horkheimer and Adorno, postmodernist ideas can thus be seen to have furthered this development due to their determinstic emphasis on nonhuman factors as shapers of 354

Boswell 183, Kellner 234 Best and Kellner 269 356 Kellner 257 357 Kellner 233 355

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identity, thus excusing the individual self from its obligation of selfhood. The protean self is marked foremost by passivity and apathy.358 With the concept of the human subject, so Baudrillard, disappear agency and choice.359 Postmodernism in this sense can also be considered reactionary, as the self loses its subjectivity and thus power of critical reason. Hal, whom Boswell calls Postmodernism's personalized prodigy, is devoid of inner life, he understands himself as a mere function of the system, considers an opting out of it "ontological erasure," and blindly seeks to conform to its standards and expectations. E.T.A.'s horizontal approach toward the self is quite postmodern in its emphasis on pure surface, its "religion of the physical" reminiscent of Nietzsche's and Foucault's focus on the body and Kierkegaard's "despair of the finite". A quote from Either/Or may further illuminate the relation between the protean self and "despair": "Or can you think of anything more appalling than having it all end with the disintegration of your essence into a multiplicity, so that you actually became several, just as that unhappy demoniac became a legion, and thus you would have lost what is the most inward and holy in a human being, the binding power of the personality?"360 The postmodern self so far has been characterized by its alleged insubstantiality as well as its egocentric narcissism and hubristic belief in its individual autonomy, aspects which only appear to run counter to each other, as ŽIŽEK argues: …is the basic characteristic of today's 'postmodern' subject not the exact opposite of the free subject who experienced himself as ultimately responsible for his fate, namely the subject who grounds the authority of his speech on his status of a victim of circumstances beyond his control? [...] This notion of the subject as an irresponsible victim involves the extreme Narcissistic perspective from which every encounter with the Other appears as a potential threat to the subject's precarious imaginary balance; as such, it is not the opposite, but, rather, the inherent supplement of the liberal free subject: in today's predominant form of individuality, the self-centered assertion of the psychological subject paradoxically overlaps with the perception of oneself as a victim of circumstances.361

Thus, the Foucauldian "death of the humanist self" is used as a rationalization by the postmodern subject without accepting the full implication of this predicament. While still clinging to a certain extent to the "illusion of autonomy", it likewise narcissistically 358

Sennett 373 Stearns 96 360 Kierkegaard, Either/Or II 160 361 Žižek 124 359

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endorses its victimization and the relief from its existential obligation. This is again an instance of the contemporary cynicism which SLOTERDIJK discusses, a "hellsichtiges Kokettieren mit der eigenen Schizophrenie."362 The cynical self uses such insights to escape the obligation of conscious selfhood and the task of concretely acting on the insights of Enlightenment and the postmodern deconstruction of master narratives, thus aiming to maintain its comfortable lifestyle in a culture of consumption. The self chooses unconsciousness.363 Hal's development toward machinehood may be considered another result of a postmodern culture with its "waning of affect"364 and disregard of depth and interiority. Having inherited the knowledge that "truth" is an arbitrary fiction, the inhabitants of O.N.A.N. give up any attempt at honesty in favor of mere appearance, again rationalizing Postmodernism's doctrines.365 Orin, like Avril, considers truth as "constructed" rather than "reported" and, as Hal remembers, he "'lied with a really pathological intensity, growing up.'"366 Hal is depressed by the frequent lies he encounters within his family. The fact that Postmodernism's lessons about the fictionality of the world has depressing effects on individuals is implied in Gompert's description of anhedonia as a state in which "the world becomes a map of the world."367 "Wallace associates aesthetic existence with a particular brand of postmodern sophistication that treats reality […] as a simulacrum, or as a pastiche of various phony conventions," says BOSWELL. "Behind that ironic sophistication, however, lurks despair, the sort of despair that leads, say, to drug addiction."368 Baudrillard's theory of simulacra attests a de-realization (or "hyper-realization") to western culture, and many react to such insights with a pessimism such as expressed by HOLLAND: "if nothing is real, then nothing is significant."369 Wallace at least partially considers his culture devoid of reality, due to the dominant role TV and mass media fictions play in it. Lasch's use of Debord's term "society of the spectacle" highlights the correlation between TV and "despair": in such a society, selfhood is less an active obligation and more an easy and 362

Sloterdijk 235. (A clairvoyant flirtation with one's own schizophrenia) ibd. 241 364 A term from Jameson. Lasch attributes a "lack of affect" to the postmodern mother. Hyper-selfconsciousness and the law of political correctness according to him undermine spontaneity and may lead to inauthenticity. Kierkegaard's ethicist regards the lack of emotion as another symptom of despair. 365 cf. Goerlandt 366 Infinite Jest 771 367 ibd. 693. Nichols states that Postmodernism "flees reality." (6) 368 Boswell 138 369 Holland 221 363

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superficial imitation of mediated "role-models" that is achieved not by personal choice but by passive viewing. This road, however, does not lead to a fuller selfhood, but furthers the neglect of freedom and the infinite, i.e. the insubstantial consciousness behind the image. In his analysis of U.S. television in the 1950s, Adorno identified as one of TV's most essential characteristics its promulgation of a static and essentialist concept of selfhood, one that is diametrically opposed to existentialist concepts.370 Yet postmodernist claims about the fictionality of the world do not necessarily exclude possibilities of meaningful existence. In contrast, such a belief falls prey to the same logic of rationalization and denial that Wallace's characters employ. Believing fictionality and truthfulness to be mutually exclusive, they rationalize the lessons of Postmodernism as excuses for hedonism, passivity and dishonesty, relinquishing their existential responsibility and task of selfhood. According to Boswell, postmodern subjects "abdicate will or self-responsibility," important aspects of selfhood, by taking comfort, "even refuge, in regarding themselves as mere matrices of cultural forces [...] quite as they have been taught to do by [...] postmodern theory."371 Orin's friend Marlon implicitly relates the former's "sincerity with a motive" to postmodern ideas: "because the whole openness-demeanor-thing is itself a purposive social falsehood; it is a pose of poselessness; Orin Incandenza is the least open man I know. [...] [H]e has come to regard the truth as constructed instead of reported."372 Self-reflexive truthfulness may be another instrument of deception, as Orin uses it as a strategy to seduce women. Related to this aspect is irony, which the characters employ to shield themselves from honesty and openness. LASCH connects irony to narcissism when he considers it "the dominant style of everyday intercourse."373 As Goerlandt argues, irony is the dominant mode of Infinite Jest's society, and often used to laugh away uncomfortable truths. Umberto Eco once claimed that the only way one could express love today would be to put it in quotation marks, signaling an awareness of the exhaustion of the term in order to prevent any appearance of naive sentimentality. The characters of Infinite Jest share this ironic awareness of sociocultural and linguistic conventions, yet this does not liberate them or render their actions more authentic, as instead they become only further detached from their feelings and themselves. Their apparently open acknowledgement triggers a self-perpetuating cycle of "analysis-paralysis" and a feeling of inauthenticity. 370

Adorno, Fernsehen und Ideologie ibd. 191 372 ibd. 1048. He also adds that Orin "came by this idea idea educationally". 373 Lasch 94-96 371

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Such feelings derive from a culture's awareness of itself as a construct, an intense selfconsciousness that also contributed to the development toward radical self-reflexivity in the arts and the various exhaustions of traditional elements of western cultures in the 1960s, including the belief in the impossibility of creating authentic art inside older structures.374 Kierkegaard, albeit a champion of irony, considered a complete lack of earnestness a grave danger, and he related it to a lack of selfhood. What is more, he viewed das lack von interiority and earnestness as one aspect of the "despair of the finite": "Some deny the eternal in man. […] this denial of the eternal may express itself directly or indirectly in many various ways, as mockery, as prosaic intoxication with common sense, as busyness, as enthusiasm for the temporal, etc."375 This account is an accurate description of the experimental postmodern avant-garde with its emphasis on immanence and its playful, anti-rationalist and at times almost meaningless destruction of conventions, as the ideas of "depth" and "meaning" have been eradicated from the postmodernist glossary of terms. The subject in "despair of defiance" is equally characterized as lacking such earnestness: "It recognizes no power over itself; therefore in the final instance it lacks seriousness and can only conjure forth an appearance of seriousness, even when it bestows upon its experiments its greatest possible attention."376 Significantly, Kierkegaard called the existence of this subject a continual "experiment," already pointing toward the protean self of Postmodernism. Wallace's attack against the dominance of irony is reflected in these statements. As he argues in "E Unibus Pluram", irony is nowadays predominantly used to "avoid thorny issues," an instrument of denial and "despair". In Infinite Jest, this criticism is most overtly realized with James Incandenza, a personalization of a postmodern artist, narcissistically self-involved and lacking emotional warmth and concern for others. His avant-garde works were mostly mere exemplifications of theoretical ideas and a rationalization for his obsession: [He] had apparently thought the stilted, wooden quality of nonprofessionals helped to strip away the pernicious illusion of realism and to remind the audience that they were in reality watching actors acting and not people behaving. […] [T]he real truth was that the early [James]

374

cf. Roland Barthes' "Death of the author", Foucault's "Death of Man" and Ronald Sukenick's "Death of the Novel" 375 Kierkegaard, Anxiety 151-52 376 Kierkegaard, Sickness 100 87

hadn't wanted skilled or believeable acting to get in the way of the abstract ideas and technical innovations.377

Wallace describes the postmodern avant-garde as "interested in neither plot nor character, whose books' movement and appeal depend entirely on rarefied meta-aesthetic agendas."378 Similar to the use of irony, its abstraction from concrete personal and ethical issues is similar to "despair", and CARLISLE calls its "radical abstracting of everything" an instance of anhedonia.379 Abstraction can be employed to escape "anxiety" and the burden of selfhood, as KIERKEGAARD'S ethicist remarks: "...there is scarcely any means as dulling and deadening as abstract thibnking, for it is a matter of conducting oneself as impersonally as possible."380 What is more, Joelle attributes a desire for secrecy to James not unlike his son's, a fear of being compromised by his emotions. Replying to her son Mario's question about other people's sadness, Avril states that "There are, apparently, persons who are deeply afraid of their own emotions [...] As if something truly and thoroughly felt would have no end or bottom. Would become infinite and engulf them...[S]uch persons usually have a very fragile sense of themselves as persons. As existing at all."381 Her account also recalls Kierkegaard's ideas. Postmodern metafiction is often termed by Wallace "sincerity with a motive" and exposed as even more dishonest than Realism. As Boswell points out, self-reflexivity is not an exit from any cage,382 as many of Infinite Jest's characters employ it for deception: "Sincerity with an ulterior motive is something these tough ravaged people [at an AA meeting] know and fear, all of them trained to remember the coyly sincere, ironic, self-presenting fortifications they'd had to construct in order to carry on Out There."383 Such pseudo-sincerity is an instrument of the spider and a symptom of "despair". A phrase from KIERKEGAARD may illuminate this relationship: "Disclosure may already have conquered; however, at the same moment, inclosing reserve ventures the last attempt and is ingenious enough to transform the disclosure itself into a mystification, and inclosing reserve has conquered."384 "Disclosure" for him is necessary to escape the cage of "despair," yet the illness finds ever more ingenious ways of leading 377

Infinite Jest 944. Burn interprets Incandenza's films as an escape from his self (42). Wallace, "Dostoevsky" 264 379 Carlisle 349 380 Kierkegaard, Either/Or II 212 381 Infinite Jest 765. This description reflects Geoffrey Day's experience of anxiety cited above. 382 Boswell, 140-42 383 Infinite Jest 369. "Out There" meaning the highly cynical society of the novel. 384 Kierkegaard, Anxiety 128 378

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the afflicted back into solipsism. According to LASCH, postmodern literature suffers from such dishonest narcissism in its self-reflexive "pseudo-awareness."385 Although his overall account of metafiction is rather short-sighted, he nevertheless points toward the problems underlying this mode. Writing about the "cage" of literature may appear as an exit, yet it may also signify the peak of "despair" in the guise of a postmodern "beyond," just as a denial of selfhood may serve as an excuse for irresponsible hedonism. After all, Hal's denial of selfhood leads to his short-term success, as long-term succeeding is of less interest in a society lacking a teleology. The narrator further mounts his critique of the postmodern avant-garde with the example of a session of Eschaton that gets completely out of hand. The game is a simulation of a nuclear apocalypse, tennis courts represent the world, and the players launch "warheads" (tennis balls) with their rackets. As JACOBS explains: "Eschaton is a metaphor for art's 'Armageddon' (McCaffery 134), the inevitable terminality of continually involutedly self-conscious art."386 During the game, as snowfall sets in, the students are less and less able to distinguish between reality and fiction, similar to metafiction's blurring of these boundaries, and some even want to erase them altogether, as the discussion arises whether the snow falling on the courts belongs to the simulation, the represented "territory," or not: "'The real world's what the map here stands for […] Real-world snow isn't a factor if it's falling on the fucking map' [...] Pemulis is telling Penn that there's a critical distinction between horning in and letting asswipes like Jeffrey Joseph Penn run roughshod over the delimiting boundaries that are Eschaton's very life-blood."387 Yet Pemulis' argument for the necessity of boundaries remains unheard, as the game-master, significantly a student by the name of Otis P. Lord, gradually loses his authority and one of the students carries the logic further and starts to launch at another player: "No Eschaton Combatant has ever intentionally struck another Combatant's physical person with a 5-megaton thermonuclear weapon. No matter how frayed players' nerves, it's never made a lick of sense. […] It's been like this unspoken but very basic rule."388 Pemulis tries to save the game by making another distinction between map and territory, signifier and signified:

385

Lasch 96-97 Jacobs 222 387 Infinite Jest 334-35. As Carlisle remarks, to kill somebody is in the novel often referred to "eliminate a map" (101). 388 ibd. 335. Note how Wallace employs this blurring of boundaries himself to lead it ad absurdum. 386

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Players themselves can't be valid targets. Player's aren't inside the goddamn game. Players are part of the apparatus of the game. They're part of the map. It's snowing on the players but not on the territory. They're part of the map, not the clusterfucking territory. You can only launch against the territory. Not against the map. It's like the ground-rule boundary that keeps Eschaton from degenerating into chaos.' […] LaMont Chu says how come pointvalues for actual players have never been assigned, then, for Pete's sake, and Pemulis shouts across that that's so totally beside the point it doesn't matter, that the reason players aren't explicitly exempted in the ESCHAX.DIR is that their exemption is what makes Eschaton and its axioms fucking possible in the first place.389

Literature degenerates into chaos when it turns back on itself and becomes primarily concerned with itself as an artificial creation and its own deconstruction. Wallace argues in "E Unibus Pluram" that "If anarchy actually wins, if rulelessness becomes the rule, then protest and change become not just impossible but incoherent."390 Deconstruction per se is acceptable to him, as long as it does not become the dominant mode and the overall game of literature, including its constructive fictions, is left intact. Like irony, it needs to be balanced by a constructive complementary mode. Postmodern literature has become self-consciously obsessed with itself, a tendency that leads to "Armageddon," as he argued in the interview with McCaffery and presents in his Eschaton example: "The color monitor lands on its back with its screen blinking ERROR at the white sky. […] Lord does indeed go headfirst down through the monitor's screen, and stays there, his sneakers in the air."391 Still, while the debacle serves as a lesson against radical metafiction, it is likewise a warning against the naive Realism to which many of its players succumb. Pemulis' hint that the boundaries between reality and fiction, signifier and signified, are absolutely necessary for the existence of literature and intersubjective communication may be read as an argument for a limited metafiction, one that points toward the constructedness of a text while still representing a world beyond the text. In addition, and in a slightly different vein, the example of Eschaton can be interpreted as a depiction of the culture of "hyperreal", which, in its blurring of the boundary between reality and its image, is presented as one source of the disintegration of both society and the individual. While postmodernists have identified 389

ibd. 338 Wallace, "E Unibus Pluram" 68 391 ibd. 342. ELIOT, writing about Paul Valéry, had already hinted at the problematic aspects of "dies Fortschreiten des Selbstbewußtseins, diese äußerste Steigerung des Wissens um die Sprache." (268; this expansion of self-consciousness, this extreme escalation of our knowledge about language) 390

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this state of affairs, their diagnosis, so Wallace, needs to be supplemented by a "therapeutic" advice, providing constructive ideas of how to live in such a culture.392 Otherwise, their texts become mere cynical expressions, rationalizing and contributing to this disintegration and the loss of selfhood. As the novel implies, postmodern art with its turn away from subjectivity, meaning and concrete issues of contemporary existence toward an overemphasis on radical irony, experimentation and metafiction, has not been able to counter the "logocentric" or "mechanistic" techniques of dehumanization in western cultures.393 Giving up its former role of providing meaning and orientation by either a self-reflexive movement toward abstraction, or one toward depthless entertainment and kitsch, it left the subject vulnerable to more hidden forces of authority and persuasion. While at first illuminating the extent to which fact and fiction became blurred, Postmodernism furthered this tendency by restricting itself to a repetition of the formerly subversive techniques of irony, cynicism and self-reflexivity. The disappearance of the boundary between fact and fiction, surface and depth serves not only the individual, but also, if not constructively counterbalanced, an ideology of consumption, and it may also contribute to personal and political apathy. Thus, whereas the postmodern subject believes in his freedom from older "arbitrary" conventions, this idea of freedom is rather shortsighted,394 ignoring the forces of, most importantly, the media and commercial culture. Literature's resignation of ethics and representationality has created an authority vacuum filled by the entertainment industry. Interpreted with Kierkegaard, Postmodernism's emphasis on pure materiality signifies a failed synthesis and thus a loss of authentic selfhood, as the immaterial, "unwatchable" aspects of the individual are suppressed in favor of its finite existence. Neither the belief in a radically autonomous self nor material determinism can provide the self with the freedom that is lost with its relation to norms, ethics, or a teleology beyond itself. As RINGLEBEN maintains: "das Selbst entsteht im Sich-Abstoßen von allem Endlichen, [...] in der Distanz zu sich."395 Paradoxically, then, today's narcissism and obsession with freedom and with oneself leads to a loss of selfhood. This is reflected in Barth's Funhouse, whose narrator entangles himself in a self-reflexive mental cage, just as the marijuana addicts in Infinite Jest lose touch with themselves in the abstract "thought-helixes" of "marijuana 392

cf. Best and Kellner, Sloterdijk cf. Horkheimer/Adorno or early accounts of Postmodernism by Hassan and Sontag 394 cf. Fromm 395 Ringleben 90. (The self comes into being in its distance to everything finite […] in its distance toward itself) 393

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thinking." It is no accident that some of Incandenza's movies are called "The Cage", as his self-reflexive abstraction never allowed him to open his own mental cage, even though he also desired to escape his consciousness.396 Similar to Wallace's account of irony, then, it is argued in the novel that formerly subversive postmodern ideas have been co-opted by dominant media and economic forces and are no longer liberating or challenging, but entrapping. The characters of Infinite Jest employ postmodern insights as rationalizations for their narcissism and consumerism, just as irony is used to escape their existential obligation. Likewise, Orin and Lenz both rationalize psychoanalytical theories to excuse their own egoistic behavior, and many characters celebrate the concept of a "relativistic truth" as a license for deception.397 The once uncomfortable insights of Postmodernism have been exhausted and become means of consolidating a utilitarian and consumerist society. The protean self is no longer a challenge to a centralized power, but one of its instruments. As Nichols remarks in a study of the novel, the postmodern carnivalesque was intended as a liberation from restrictive definitions of subjectivity, yet in O.N.A.N. it is a method of social control. Wallace's sociocultural diagnosis has now been sufficiently analyzed. Before the "Therapy"-section will address his constructive counter-proposals, with which he challenges the postmodern ideas prevalent in contemporary U.S. culture, society and academia, Julia Kristeva's concept of "abjection" will be discussed and related to his novel, since it may serve as a useful link between the society of O.N.A.N., the "illusion of autonomy", narcissism and failed selfhood. 12. "Abjection" According to Kristeva, "abjection" is the radical act of exlusion of something one would like to keep in order to establish one's autonomous existence. Once excluded, the "abject" hovers at the brink of consciousness, a threatening, uncanny and ungraspable presence eluding any clear classification. It is beyond the borders which make up identity, and is in fact constitutive of these borders in the first place. Waste is a prime example of an "abject", and MAUD ELLMANN, in her study of Eliot's "The Waste Land", defines it as "what a culture casts away in order to determine what is not itself, and thus to establish its own limits. In the same way, the subject defines the limits of its body

396 397

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cf. Infinite Jest 742 cf. Boswell 152

through the violent expulsion of its own excess."398 "Abjection" is fundamentally related to the mother, who must be "abjected" by the infant to constitute its identity. Yet on some level the subject desires to retain the "abject" and keeps it in sight. Kristeva's concept serves as a link to Eliot, whose "The Waste Land", a poem that ELLMANN calls "one of the most abject texts in English literature,"399 depicts the traumatic breakdown of boundaries in Modernity. Significantly, Hal's and Orin's mother is called Avril, reminiscent of the opening lines of the poem: "April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire."400 Avril haunts the memories of her children, she "breeds" Orin's intense desire, and it was on April 1st that her husband committed suicide. The "abject" signifies a constant threat to one's fragile identity, and the closer it hovers, the more likely that it creeps back and destroys it. Excessive "abjection" may therefore be seen as a symptom of an underestablished selfhood, a frantic attempt to establish clear and coherent boundaries in the face of their possible breakdown. Infantile narcissism is a case in point here, as its desire keeps the "abject" close to itself, thus also intensifying the necessity for further exclusion. The narcissistic society of O.N.A.N. displays manifold symptoms of "abjection". Similar to the U.S. dichotomy of "Good" vs. "Evil" in world politics during the Cold War and the current "War on Terror", the hygiene-anxious President Gentle, head of the Clean U.S. Party,401 realized that an establishment of O.N.A.N. depends on a demonized other: "The Johnny Gentle, Chief Executive who pounds a rubber-gloved fist on the podium so hard it knocks the Seal askew and declares that Dammit there just must be some people besides each other of us to blame. To unite in opposition to."402 The system of Interdependence was created to provide the U.S. with a more efficient means of "abjecting" its waste, which is catapulted into the "barren Eliotical wastes of the western Concavity"403 "to keep fueling a process that constantly demands more toxic waste and grows progressively harder to control,"404 thereby also creating the "other" of Québécois separatists. HAYLES also mentions "abjection":

398

Ellmann 261 ibd. 261 400 Eliot 63 401 As the success of this party suggests, hygiene anxiety is a widespread affliction in Infinite Jest 402 Infinite Jest 384. The heraldic sign of O.N.A.N. features an eagle with a broom and a can of disinfectant. 403 ibd. 574 404 Hayles 688 399

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Like Onan wasting his seed upon the ground, the cycle of imperialism and experialism uses the Other merely as an occasion for a masturbatory engagement with one's own interests. There is no real "inter" in this version of Interdependence, only a pretense of hygiene created by the refusal to recognize those parts of oneself which are considered unclean, a process that, when it takes place in the psychological realm, is known as abjection.405

The wastes of the Concavity return in the form of herds of mutated "feral hamsters" or a spreading ecological imbalance that cannot be kept at bay by the walls or the large numbers of fans established along the border. Joelle once overhears a Canadian film scholar advising his U.S. colleague: "'You cannot give away your filth and prevent all creepage, no? Filth by its very nature is a thing that is creeping always back."406 The identity of the narcissistic society of O.N.A.N. is only weakly established, a fact that holds true for its citizens as well. Orin struggles with roaches that creep out of the sewers in his house,407 and his break-off from any communication with his mother, as well as his success at punting (reminiscent of the catapulted waste), represent his desperate attempts at "abjection". The hygiene-anxiety from which many characters suffer can equally be regarded as a symptom of failed selfhood. As ELLMANN remarks, citing Kristeva: "the abject emerges when exclusions fail, in the sickening collapse of limits. Rather than disease or filth or putrefaction, the abject is that which 'disturbs identity, system, order': it is the 'inbetween, the ambiguous, the composite.'"408 Thus, excessive "abjection" fits the society of Infinite Jest, in which boundaries blur and its members lose the ability to re-establish them. "Abjection" and weak selfhood are tied to the desire for authority and totality expressed by many of the characters, who seek a coherent identity in fascist terrorist groups, the "machine-like perfection" of tennis (Hal actually describes the object of tennis as "to send from yourself what you hope will not return"409) or drug abuse. HAYLES further relates "abjection" to the "illusion of autonomy": Another way to think about abjection is as an attempt to preserve the autonomy of the self in the face of an unavoidable confrontation with interconnection. [...] The large project of Infinite Jest is to demonstrate the fallacy of the dump by exploring the underground-seepages and labyrinthine pathways through which the abjected always returns in recursive cycles of 405

ibd. 685 Infinite Jest 233 407 ibd. 44-46 408 Ellmann 261 409 Infinite Jest 176 406

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interconnection. [...] The culprit is no single person, family or even nation, but rather an ideology that celebrates an autonomous, independent subject who is free to engage in the pursuit of happiness, a subject who has the right to grab what pleasure he can without regard for the cost of that pursuit to others.410

"Abjection" and failed selfhood are here related to U.S. ideology, narcissism and the lack of ethics and boundaries of the self that Wallace witnesses in his society. Schtitt even puts "abjection" in connection to the utilitarianism he is so fond of criticizing: "'Am realizing whole myth of efficiency and no waste that is making this continent of countries we are in.'"411 Indeed, the American demand for energy creates the system of annulation, the ultimate symbol of "abjection" in the novel. Like Hal's neglect of selfhood in favor of short-term success, the U.S. under Gentle ignores that something is rotten in the States, merely "abjecting" the symptoms instead of searching for the underlying causes, struggling to keep its system intact in the face of an expanding environmental catastrophe. Wallace diagnoses his society as suffering from, most importantly, narcissism, "anxiety" and "despair". As the latter affliction is a result of non-established selfhood, it is also reflected in the novel's structure, which, following Carlisle, in mid-section separates a chapter focusing on the body from one purely concerned with the mind,412 thus implying a failed Kierkegaardian synthesis. Possible therapeutic methods have already been hinted at in the preceding sections, and the oncoming half of this paper will analyze the ways toward a cure that Wallace's novel presents. D. Therapy There are various ways in which the characters attempt to deal with "despair" and addiction. Infinite Jest presents three principal "technologies of the self," i.e. means of constructing a meaningful identity. The concepts that A.F.R., E.T.A. and AA offer are similar in their common opposition toward a hedonist desire for pleasure that leads to addiction and a loss of freedom. In a society that no longer supplies its members with ethics and a coherent teleology, they provide the individual with an artificial authority to delimit the desiring self with humility, discipline, and a concrete ethical telos beyond it. Both the humanist self of Enlightenment, responsible only to itself and its free will, and 410

Hayles 685-88. Carlisle describes the structure of Wallace's novel as exemplifying such interconnectedness. 411 Infinite Jest 80 412 Carlisle 273 95

the postmodern self, free of any responsibility, have led to a state of widespread "despair": "If the problem originates in the presumption of autonomy that is the founding principle for the liberal humanist self, then nothing less than a reconceptualization of subjectivity can offer a solution."413 Yet while all three concepts recognize the encaging power of "freedom-from," they nevertheless differ in important respects. Thus, E.T.A. and the A.F.R. are totalitarian concepts, grounded on a suppression of the individual and his personal freedom, whereas AA is presented as a democratic institution capable of dealing with "despair" without diminishing the freedom that a pluralistic society offers. "Despair" is tied to consciousness, and it is intensified in a postmodern context, a society free from most ethical and religious constraints and aware of the constructedness of the world and the self. Similar to television and drugs, E.T.A. and the A.F.R. present themselves as a release from the "anxiety" of such freedom, sociocultural "relativism" and ontological contingency. Erich Fromm analyzed man's desire to escape the burden of freedom as a reason for the emergence of fascism in twentieth century Europe, and his insights apply to O.N.A.N. as well. Gentle's election makes this clear: "A President J.G., F.C. who said he wasn't going to stand here and ask us to make some tough choices because he was standing here promising he was going to make them for us. Who asked us simply to sit back and enjoy the show."414 In a time of low voter turnout, Americans, conditioned to passive entertainment instead of an active and responsible engagement with their freedom, cast a vote for no more choices. Next to addiction and the vote for a totalitarian government, Infinite Jests presents other means of dealing with "despair" and "anxiety". 1. Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents (A.F.R.) One of the most prominent means is the Canadian terrorist organisation A.F.R., in the novel mostly represented by Marathe. He is aware of the dangers inherent in the freedom of the U.S., yet the A.F.R. is merely its negative image, delivering the self from "anxiety" and "despair" only by a complete suppression of the self and its freedom, as it preaches rigorous discipline and a radical self-abandonment for a "higher" cause: "the terrorist sect that Marathe sees as freeing him from isolation merely displays another form of O.N.A.N.ism, pursuing their objectives without regard for the pain and suffering they inflict on others. The A.F.R. is not so much an alternative to Gentle's administration

413 414

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Hayles 693 Infinite Jest 383

as a mirror to it."415 Marathe is proud of its fascist doctrines of self-denial, which supposedly free the subject from destructive desire, but which in fact are nothing else than an empty radicalization of his necessity for a purpose in life. Their hollowness is underscored by Marathe's apparent choice for love over politics, as he saves the life of a deformed woman and rationally decides to "love" and devote his existence to her, betraying his compatriots to Steeply in order to secure a clinical treatment for her. What they want is merely another escape from existential selfhood, a desire they rationalize as a superior mode of existence devoted to a teleology beyond the self. 2. The Enfield Tennis Academy (E.T.A.) Similar to the A.F.R., the Academy teaches "self-transcendence through pain," a relief from the task of selfhood and the self's desire for pleasure by humility and strict discipline: "'it's about how to reach down into parts of yourself you didn't know were there and get down in there and live inside these parts. And the only way to get to them: Sacrifice. Suffer. Deny."416 Schtitt is aware of the necessity of providing his players with a telos beyond themselves, as he quasi-mystically advises his students to surrender to "the game." His idea of tennis as an infinity inside boundaries is a reaction to the freedom-from of his society, a recognition of the necessity of limits that constitute freedom in the first place: '...the aleatory flutter of uncontrolled, metastatic growth - each well-shot ball admitting of n possible responses, 2n possible responses to those responses, and on into what Incandenza would articulate to anyone who shared both his backgrounds as a Cantorian35 continuum of infinities of possible move and response, Cantorian and beautiful because infoliating, contained, this diagnate infinity of choice and execution, mathematically uncontrolled but humanly contained, bounded by the talent and imagination of self and opponent, bent in on itself by the containing boundaries of skill and imagination that brought one player finally down, that kept both from winning, that made it, finally a game, these boundaries of self. [...] '[W]hat are those boundaries, if they're not baselines, that contain and direct its infinite expansion inward, that make tennis like chess on the run, beautiful and infinitely dense?'417

415

Hayles 695 ibd. 119 417 ibd. 81-84 416

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"The other" is of prime importance in this system and he is treated not as an opponent, but as a partner in the player's "chance to occur."418 Schtitt's ideas resemble the role SARTRE assigned to "the other" in the constitution of subjectivity and his emphasis on the self's dependence on meaningful limits: Jener Felsblock, der einen unermeßlichen Widerstand bekundet, wenn ich ihn fortbewegen will, ist dagegen eine wertvolle Hilfe, wenn ich hinaufklettern und die Landschaft betrachten will. An und für sich [...] ist er neutral, das heißt, er wartet darauf, durch ein Ziel erhellt zu werden. [...] [D]aher sind die Widerstände, die die Freiheit im Existierenden enthüllt, keineswegs eine Gefahr für die Freiheit, sie erlauben ihr nur, als Freiheit aufzutauchen. Ein freies Für-sich kann es nur geben als eingebunden in die Welt, die widersteht.419

Thus, the subject constructs "roads" leading to a certain telos, which it not so much creates as cuts out of the chaotic and contingent whole of Being: "...unsere Freiheit konstituiert also die Grenzen, auf die sie nachher trifft."420 Without limits, the world loses its significance, and the self vanishes together with its freedom. As the Eschaton debacle shows, a blurring of boundaries leads to disorder, not just chaos as the dialectical other of order, but chaos as a threat to the existence of the whole game. Boundaries, according to Sartre and Schtitt, do not restrict possibilities, but expand them. This is the advantage which E.T.A. has over O.N.A.N. Yet, in the end, it equally signifies an escape from conscious selfhood and freedom.421 Similar to the A.F.R., its therapy is merely superficial, not treating "anxiety", but restricting a student's freedom and consciousness. It fails to provide the self with a meaningful existence, as athletic success still leaves the players empty, wherefore some decide to follow alternate means of escape and succumb to addiction. Furthermore, E.T.A. also suppresses individual choice, as RAIZMAN knows: "…free will is not an issue. E.T.A. provides an environment where its participants grow up without having considered choices."422 Different from these totalitarian "technologies of the self" in the novel is the institution of Alcoholics Anonymous. 418

ibd. 459 Sartre, Das Sein und das Nichts 611-13 (That rock, which appears to me as an insurmountable resistance when I intent to move it, can become a valuable help to me in case I want to climb on top and look at the landscape. In and for itself […] it is neutral, that is, it waits to be illuminated by an end. […] That is why the adversities, which freedom reveals in existence, pose no danger for freedom, as they rather help her come into being as existence. A free Being-For-Itself can only exist inside a world that gives resistance.) 420 Sartre, Das Sein und das Nichts 611 (Our freedom constitutes its limits) 421 cf. Holland and Raizman 422 Raizman 419

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3. Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) In Infinite Jest, AA functions as the narrator's therapeutic paradigm, and, as Boswell points out, it is related to Kierkegaardian religion. In contrast to the aforementioned "technologies of the self," AA emphasizes individual choice, as it forms a synthesis of necessity and possibility. Like the members of E.T.A. and the A.F.R., its participants are required to surrender their wills, yet not to a totalitarian power, but to the other members and the twelve steps of the program. Choice is underlined, as one may only escape the "spider" and the "illusion of autonomy" by one's own conscious will and the establishment of such a will in the first place. AA supports the individual in his task of selfhood with its principle of a constant repetition of rituals that teach humility, responsibility and self-reliance. Its concept recalls Kierkegaard's and Sartre's ideas of the self as a self-reflexive process. In an essay on Kafka, WALLACE remarked: It's not that students don't 'get' Kafka's humour, but that we've taught them to see humour as something you get the same way we've taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.423

Wallace's idea of a self resembles Kierkegaard's, and it is no accident that he uses Kafka as an example, who was inspired by the Danish philosopher. Thus, as the self is not an essential given, but something established during lifetime, every visitor is repeatedly required to "wake up to his history"424 and fashion it into a meaningful narrative, while listening to the other's stories and identifying with them. This supports an awareness of the self and provides an escape from solipsism. As Kierkegaard emphasized the role that "hiddenness" plays in "despair", irony and other instruments of "inclosing reserve" are frowned upon. Instead, AA's method of empathy helps the self to open up, admit and accept its shortcomings instead of constructing masks and remaining in denial. Significantly, it works without exertion of centralized power, the only authority being the other members. Its aim is to free the individual from "despair" and addiction, to supply him with an awareness of freedom and to teach him to choose responsibly, thus providing him with the means of achieving a selfhood adapted to 423 424

Wallace, "Kafka's Funniness" 64-65 As Chris Hager terms it 99

today's open societies. AA itself follows a democratic spirit, as "nobody can kick you out" and every visitor acts without outer compulsion, merely following the advice of more experienced members, which is in many cases codified in clichés and terms like "Starving The Spider" or "Surrender Your Self". a. Self-Surrender The term is used to denote the addict's surrender of his infected will, by which all his rationalizations and denials are circumvented: "The ego must be abandoned to break through the endless cycle of addiction,"425 says GOERLANDT. The self's "despair" is no longer fed, but gradually quenched by the addict's submission to the program. As the prime exponent of AA philosophy in the novel, Gately, who resembles the mythological Hercules in many respects,426 undergoes the twelve steps just as his Greek counterpart meets his twelve trials, at the end experiencing a metempsychosis toward a new self.427 The narcissistic desires of the self are given up in a radical move toward selfabandonment,428 yet not in favor of a totalitarian ideology, but of a Kierkegaardian concept of freedom: The most tremendous thing which has been granted to man is: the choice, freedom. And if you desire to save it and preserve it there is only one way: in the very same second unconditionally and in complete resignation to give it back to God, and yourself with it. If the sight of what is granted to you tempts you, and if you give way to the temptation and look with egoistic desire upon the freedom of choice, then you lose your freedom.429

Kierkegaard argued that man's freedom is lost as soon as the proud self begins to cling to it. Only if one is willing to give one's self away to something beyond the self may an individual prevent his entrapment by the "spider" or the "illusion of autonomy", both variations of "despair". "Gerade in der Hingabe seines Selbst gewinne man das Selbst. [...] Da wo es in die letzte Grenze seines Selbstvollzugs stößt, gerade da kann es

425

Goerlandt 318 cf. Burn and Carlisle 427 See Carlisle. "Metempsychosis" is an important term in the novel: "Madame Psychosis" is Joelle's stage name and also the street term for the hallucinogen DMZ. 428 cf. Infinite Jest 137 429 Kierkegaard, Journals 206 426

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sich ermächtigt zu Selbstständigkeit erfahren."430 As another commentator states: "Darin liegt die eigentliche Paradoxie, daß sich die Individualität, um sich zu konstituieren, vernichten muß; daß sie, um bei sich zu sein, außer sich sein muß."431 Similar to his idea of synthesis, an ultimately free existence recognizes the dialectical relationship between choice and authority: "...and the true holding on is the power that was capable of relinquishing and now expresses itself in holding on, and only in this lies he true freedom in holding on, the true, secure soaring."432 Infinite freedom needs boundaries in order to constitute and actualize itself. Kierkegaard proposed God as the ultimate limit. AA embraces a similar, yet more postmodern, concept of a delimiting authority. b. Authority In relating to itself and in wanting to be itself, the self is grounded transparently in the power that established it. [...] [F]or the self is only healthy and free from despair when, precisely by having despaired, it is grounded transparently in God."433 Yet the origin of freedom need not be metaphysical, as Sartre related it to consciousness, "the other" and the contingency of existence. AA's concept of "God" is an instrument against the narcissism and the "illusion of autonomy" fueling desire and addiction. Narcissists, Wallace believes, are unable to deal with negative experiences and the non-fulfillment of their desires. The "God" of AA is not metaphysical, but pragmatic, a "necessary fiction," as Boswell calls it, providing the insatiable postmodern self with a delimiting authority. Members are required to choose a "Higher Power" to which they submit and pray for their sobriety each day: "'God' in the slogan being just shorthand for a totally subjective and up-to-you 'Higher Power' and AA being merely spiritual instead of dogmatically religious, a sort of benign anarchy of subjective spirit."434 The "God" of AA is more a personified authority than a metaphysical entity, there to help the addict ritualistically stick to the twelve steps and abandon his "illusion of autonomy" that fuels his addiction. It is a concept suitable for the heterogeneous postmodern society: "It's supposed to be one of AA's major selling points that you get to choose your own God. You get to make

430

Ringleben 122 (It is exactly in the process of letting go of the self that one acquires a self. […] There, where it reaches the final limit of its becoming is where it may experience itself as provided with independence) 431 Liessmann 122 (Therein lies the true paradox, that the individuality, to constitute itself, needs to destroy itself; that it, in order to be with itself, needs to be outside of itself.) 432 Kierkegaard, Either/Or II 97 433 ibd., Sickness 44 and 60. Cf. Beabout 91. 434 Infinite Jest 366 101

up your own understanding of God or a Higher Power or Whom-/whatever."435 While this kind of religiosity may seem artificial, it nevertheless works, as the ritualistic repetitions of humility indeed starve the addicts' spider: ...the agonizing desire to ingest synthetic narcotics had been mysteriously magically removed from Don Gately, just like the House Staff and the [Veterans] at the White Flag Group had said it would if he pounded out the nightly meetings and stayed minimally open and willing to persistently ask some extremely vague Higher Power to remove it. [...] They suggested he keep his shoes and keys under the bed to help him remember to get on his knees. [...] Pat had said it didn't matter at this point what he thought or believed or even said. All that mattered was that he did.436

As ŽIŽEK claims, despite the alleged irreligiosity of postmodern subjects, they still believe: One can believe in ghosts without having faith in them [...] and, in a more tricky but crucial opposite case, one can believe in (have faith in) X without believing in X. The latter, for Lacan, is the very case of the big Other, the symbolic Order: 'There is no Big Other,' it is just a virtual order, a shared fiction, we do not have to believe IN IT in order to believe IT, to feel bound by some symbolic commitment.437

Any authority, no matter how artificial, may provide the self with meaning, ethics and a purpose beyond itself. Žižek cites the rise of cults in the supposedly skeptical age of Postmodernity.438 Likewise and close to his concept of AA, WALLACE stated in his Kenyon Address that There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship [...] is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. [...] [We] all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.439 435

ibd. 443 ibd. 466 437 Žižek, On Belief 109-10 438 In one instance, Randy Lenz provides a list of religious cults (561-62) 439 Wallace, "Kenyon Address" 436

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The "God" of AA helps its participants to focus on themselves and to stick to the program, and it further gives them a rationale for no longer following the pursuit of "mindless pleasure." As CARLISLE remarks: "Gately's consistent physical action of getting on his knees to pray leads to the recovery of his memories and his mental stability. Gately's mind-body interconnection is presumably triggered by a spiritual force."440 The interconnection that Carlisle mentions signifies the synthesis of the finite and the infinite in relation to the Absolute, and thus true selfhood in a Kierkegaardian sense. In addition, AA's religiosity also teaches its members humility and to surrender their "illusion of autonomy". c. The "Illusion of Autonomy" Many characters in the novel are victims of this illusion, most overtly the bricklayer who attempts to pull more weight than he can carry and "tries to do the job alone," almost killing himself in the attempt.441 The AA slogan "Ask For Help" is directed against this illusory feeling of omnipotence. Only by admitting his powerlessness may the subject overcome his proud solipsism and open up, accepting himself in all his shortcomings and realize his interconnectedness with others. The narrator describes the difficulty of such openness with "the delicate etiquette" at E.T.A. concerning misshot balls: "...you suspend play and get other people's balls for them, if they come rolling across, and shoot them back over to the court of origin. The way to signal for this sort of help is to yell 'Sorry!' or "'A little help on Three?' or something. But both Hal and Axford seem constitutionally unable of doing this, asking for help."442 Kierkegaard addresses such pride in the "despair of defiance".443 Similar is the aesthete's description of the "illusion of autonomy": "...when someone wishes to gain himself in the superhuman way our age tries to do it, he loses himself and becomes comic. Every individual, however original he is, is still a child of God, of his age, of his nation, of his family, of his friends, and only in them does he have his truth."444 AA helps its participants to escape this encaging illusion with its slogans: "It's a myth no one misses it. Their particular Substance. [...] You just have to Ask For Help and like Turn It Over,

440

Carlisle 273 Infinite Jest 139 442 ibd. 1035 443 cf. footnote 67 in this paper 444 Kierkegaard, Either/Or I 145 441

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the loss and pain, to Keep Coming, show up, pray, Ask For Help."445 While this directive supports the addict in opening up to others in complete honesty, relinquishing his mask, he is likewise required to actively participate (instead of merely listening passively) by sharing his story: 'You give it up to get it back to give it away.' Sobriety in Boston AA is regarded as less a gift than a sort of cosmic loan. You can't pay the loan back, but you can pay it forward, by spreading the message that despite all appearances AA works. [...] The only way to hang onto sobriety is to give it away, and even just 24 hours of sobriety is worth doing anything for, a sober day being nothing short of a daily miracle if you've got the Disease.446

As with Kierkegaardian freedom, sobriety is treated as a gift from a Higher Power. Like a sacrifice, AA members are constantly required to act on its slogans, gradually building up an intersubjective community based on storytelling. Such directives are "not about explaining what caused your Disease. It's about a goofily simple practical recipe for how to remember you've got the Disease day by day and how to treat the Disease day by day, how to keep the seductive ghost of a bliss long absconded from baiting you and hooking you and pulling you back Out and eating your heart raw."447 This fits in with existential selfhood and freedom, which both need to be continually established and actualized. Sartre's "other" is also of importance in AA, as he is for Schtitt: "The competing boy on the net's other side: he is not the foe: he is more the partner in the dance. He is the what is the word excuse or occasion for meeting the self. As you are his occasion."448 One of the principal strengths of AA is that it not merely advises to ignore one's infected reasoning, but that it eludes reason altogether, like Kierkegaard's paradox of faith: "Nobody's ever been able to figure AA out,"449 the narrator remarks, similar to Gately's experience: ...by now you have no faith in your own sense of what's really improbable and what isn't, since AA seems, improbable enough, to be working, and with no faith in your own senses you're confused, flummoxed, and when people with AA time strongly advise you to keep 445

Infinite Jest 273 ibd. 344 447 ibd. 374 448 ibd. 84 449 Infinite Jest 349 446

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coming you nod robotically and keep coming, and you sweep floors and scrub out ashtrays and fill stained steel urns with hideous coffee, and you keep getting ritually down on your big knees every morning and night asking for help from a sky that still seems a burnished shield against all who would ask aid of it - how can you pray to a 'God' you believe only morons believe in, still?450

These ritualistic actions resemble the methods of the A.F.R., a notion that is addressed as well: "There are some definite cultish, brainwashy elements to the AA program [...] and Gately tries to be candid with his residents re this issue. [...] But he tells his residents he's thinking now that the Program might be more like deprogramming than actually washing, considering the psychic job the Disease's Spider has done on them all."451 The difference to A.F.R. and E.T.A. is the choice with which all AA visitors are confronted, as they may decide to drop out of the program whenever they choose to. Most, however, remain in it, because they fear their addiction. Choice is emphasized in AA, where the addict learns to mistrust his own rationalizations, at the end learning to be a self-aware and responsible citizen in an open society. d. Honesty, Openness and Clichés Responsibility in this sense signifies an awareness of one's actions and a willingness to face its consequences, and it is both related to the "fact of recursivity" and to "abjection". Most of the addicts hardly remember their past lives, as their substance abuse blots out anything not related to the drug. In sobriety, however, they "wake up" to their history and learn to live with the consequences of their former deeds. Ennet House requires that its residents find a job immediately, and Gately's is to shrub bathroom floors in a nearby facility, literally cleaning others' "abjects", just as he begins to understand that he has "to take care of his own shit." Addicts under the influence are often portrayed as sitting passively in their excrements, and they yet have to learn to take on responsibility for their actions and carry their consequences: "He's still pretty new himself: wanting somebody else to take care of his mess, somebody else to keep him out of his various cages. It's the same delusion as the basic addictive-Substance-delusion."452 Close to "abjection" is the metaphor of smoking: "Life is an endless search for an ashtray," Joelle overhears someone saying. AA is often described as a place full of 450

ibd. 350 ibd. 452 ibd. 864 451

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ashtrays,453 where people can share their stories, i.e. where one's past life and what remains of it, the ash left from their burning desire, is acknowledged and accepted without ridicule or contempt. Instead of O.N.A.N.'s "abjection", AA members learn to face and accept their selves wholeheartedly and to recognize the "fact of recursivity". However, AA requires complete openness. Its veterans have learnt to detect fake stories, and its newcomers soon find out that at a meeting it is not about being a successful speaker, but about being honest, as only this may free them from their mental cage, their fortifications of rationalization and denial: ...it has to be the truth to really go over, here. It can't be a calculated crowd-pleaser, and it has to be the truth unslanted, unfortified. And maximally unironic. An ironist in a Boston AA meeting is a witch in church. Irony-free zone. Same with sly disingenous manipulative pseudosincerity. Sincerity with an ulterior motive is something these tough ravaged people know and fear.454

KIERKEGAARD'S ethicist also knows about the importance of openness: "It takes courage to be willing to appear as one really is; it takes courage not to want to buy oneself off from a little humiliation when one can do this by a certain secretiveness, not to want to buy a little more stature when one can't by being inclosedly reserved. It takes courage to will to be sound, honestly and sincerely to will the true."455 Irony is exposed as an instrument of the "spider," and, correspondingly, the ethicist relates it to "despair": "...you are no enemy of marriage, but you misuse your ironic look and your sarcastic taunting to ridicule it. […] Your life will amount to nothing but tentative efforts at living. [...] You completely envelop yourself, as it were, in the sheerest cobweb and then sit in wait."456 Both writers contrast irony and cynicism with religious faith, and in Infinite Jest characters are often unable to stand the "trite" word "God."457 Cynical mockery in Kierkegaard's writing is frequently contrasted with religious earnestness, which may free a self from "despair", while cynicism in Wallace's novel is mostly related to the proud and narcissistic self in denial, as it desperately tries to shield itself off from the truth by joking about it.458 Similarly, the aesthete in 453

ibd. 591 Infinite Jest 369 455 Kierkegaard, Either/Or II 105 456 ibd. 6-7 457 cf. Infinite Jest 362 458 cf. Goerlandt 454

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Either/Or relates a moral tale: "In a theater, it happened that a fire started offstage. The clown came out to tell the audience. They thought it was a joke and applauded. He told them again, and they became still more hilarious. This is the way, I suppose, that the world will be destroyed – amid the universal hilarity of wits and ags who think it is all a joke."459 Incandenza's film "The Joke" is directed against such irony. Its advertisement strongly recommends not to see the film. Those who do, reading the ad ironically, soon regret it, as the whole film consists only of a live view on the film's surprised and soon angry audience.460 If irony becomes the predominant mode of discourse and perception, it inhibits intersubjective communication and supports the self in its denial. It thus becomes a protective tool of "despair" and addiction, as only empathy and identification enable a listener to relate another's narrative to his own grim life story: Everybody in the audience is aiming for total empathy with the speaker; that way they'll be able to receive the AA message he's here to carry. Empathy, in Boston AA, is called Identification. [...] Identify instead of Compare. Again, Identify means empathize. Identifying, unless you've got a stake in Comparing, isn't very hard to do, here. Because if you sit up front and listen hard, all the speaker's stories of decline and fall and surrender are basically alike, and like your own.461

This is another challenge against postmodern aesthetics, as here similarity is emphasized over difference. BOSWELL also connects irony to Postmodernism and contrasts it with the AA clichés: Inasmuch as the postmodern self-consciousness teaches us to be wary of clichés and to detect and decode ideologically interested metanarratives that pass themselves off as essentially present, it also blinds us to the positive and simple truths that often lie behind those clichés and metanarratives, however constructed and contingent they may be.462

It is thus easier for uneducated people to return to sobriety, as intellectual knowledge is often used to ridicule the slogans. However, once an addict faithfully adheres to the clichés, they help him in his struggle toward freedom: "...you feel weirdly 459

Kierkegaard, Either/Or I 30 cf. Goerlandt 461 Infinite Jest 345. Comparing is frowned upon because its a means of distancing. 462 Boswell 138 460

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unblinded [...] and at this point you've started to have an almost classic sort of Blind Faith in the older guys [...] and now if the older guys say Jump you ask them to hold their hand at the desired height, and now they've got you, and you're free."463 Instead of sophisticated postmodern skepticism, then, AA proposes a "leap of faith" into a belief in simple truths. This "leap" is accomplished by concrete choice. e. Choice Self-surrender is required by all "technologies of the self" in the novel, yet AA is distinct in that it constantly requires the addict's choice and its subsequent realization: "The bitch of the thing is you have to want to,"464 the narrator remarks. There is no real outside pressure on the subject, who is gradually taught to choose his own route of action: There are, by ratified tradition, no 'musts' in Boston AA: No doctrine or dogma or rules. They can't kick you out. You don't have to do what they say. Do exactly as you please - if you still trust what seems to please you. [...] AA stresses the utter autonomy of the individual member. Please say and do whatever you wish. Of course there are about a dozen basic suggestions.465

Many newcomers put this freedom to test and try to provoke their listeners when it is their turn of speaking: "Gately says he defies the new Ennet House residents to try and shock the smiles off these Boston AA's faces. Can't be done, he says. These folks have literally heard it all."466 Slowly, the newcomers come to appreciate and trust the experience of AA veterans, and they begin to follow their suggestions closely, while being confronted with their choice in each moment. After all, their addiction has not vanished and needs to be checked constantly. As Joelle realizes during her first week at Ennet House: "'I get to choose how to do it, and they'll help me stick to the choice. I don't think I'd realized before that I could - I can really do this. I can do this for one endless day.'"467 What Gately above called "deprogramming" is actually a re-building of the self, beginning with self-surrender, a gradual awareness of the logic of addiction, and a realization of one's limits: 463

Infinite Jest 351 ibd. 357 465 ibd. 356 466 ibd. 352 467 ibd. 357 464

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You have to want to surrender your will to people who know how to Starve the Spider. You have to want to take the suggestions, want to abide by the traditions of anonymity, humility, surrender to the Group conscience. If you don't obey, nobody will kick you out. They won't have to. You'll end up kicking yourself out, if you steer by your own sick will.468

The emphasis on personal choice is made by both Sartre and Kierkegaard. For the former, freedom meant not achieving one's goals, but resolving to choose a goal in the first place. And the ethicist states: "Therefore, the point is still not that of choosing something; the point is not the reality of that which is chosen but the reality of choosing."469 Likewise, Beabout, discussing Kierkegaardian freedom, argues that the principal choice is the one that produces the further availability of choice. The only criterion for these choices, so Beabout further, is self-actualization,470 a conscious relation to oneself immediately realized in action. This means choosing one's way of looking at the world, consciously building up personal ethics and convictions, and acting upon them responsibly. Marathe's choice, in contrast, is only a new way of evading the "anxiety" of freedom, a choice to end all choices.471 In Either/Or, the ethicist explains freedom and the necessity of choice to the aesthete, whom he tries to draw out of his paralysis: "The choice itself is crucial for the content of the personality: through the choice the personality submerges itself in that which is being chosen, and when it does not choose, it withers away in atrophy."472 Selfhood and freedom need to be chosen and actualized constantly in each moment: If one belives that at some moment a person can keep his personality completely blank and bare or that in the strictest sense one can halt and discontinue personal life, one certainly is mistaken. Already prior to one’s choosing, the personality is interested in the choice, and if one puts off the choice, the personality or the obscure forces within it unconsciously chooses. [...]

468

ibd. Kierkegaard, Either/Or II 176 470 Beabout 152 471 As Beabout knows, even submitting to God can be another escape from choice (152) 472 Kierkegaard, Either/Or II 163. Although one should differentiate between the ethicist and Kierkegaard, the former's reflexions resemble in large parts the accounts of the latter's The Sickness Unto Death; The main difference is that in this later work of Kierkegaard, he assumes a position above those of the ethicist, namely a religious one, albeit incorporating many of his ideas. 469

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There are stories about human beings whom mermaids or mermen have subjected to their power with their demonic music.473

Similar to Wallace, the ethicist warns that the self may fall prey to its narcissistic drives. If it neglects to choose consciously, other forces may take over, as in the novel happens most overtly in the cases of substance addiction. His reference to fairy tales furthermore points toward drug addicts, who, in the imagery of Infinite Jest, are drawn under water by their substance. KIERKEGAARD'S idea of choice is similar to Wallace's at Kenyon, a conscious and affirmative relation to the way one looks at the world and acts in it, realizing the recursivity of one's actions and one's responsibility: "Rather than designating the choice between good and evil, my Either/Or designates the choice by which one chooses good and evil or rules them out. Here the question is under what qualifications one will view all existence and personally live. […] Therefore, it is not so much a matter of choosing between willing good or willing evil as of choosing to will "474 Similarly, Wallace argues that ...learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. [...] The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it. [...] It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out.475

The aesthete, who resembles Hal in many respects, has lost this ability to choose, he hovers like an "atmospheric illusion" above reality, caught inside his own illusions and "thought-helixes." His existence, lacking any boundaries, signifies an endless void, and he has almost disappeared from it, as his skepticism prevents any synthesis that could lead to a concrete selfhood: "I lie prostrate, inert; the only thing I see is emptiness, the only thing I live on is emptiness, the only thing I move in is emtpiness. I do not even suffer pain. [...] [I]f I were to become aware of an idea that joined the finite and the infinite. But my soul's poisonous doubt consumes everything."476 Likewise, the 473

ibd. 164 ibd. 169 475 Wallace, "Kenyon Address" 476 Kierkegaard, Either/Or I 37 474

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postmodern subject neglects to choose himself consciously. Choice is a synthesis of necessity and possibility, and a concrete actualization of the freedom of consciousness, and only this can free a subject in "despair": Not until a person in his choice has taken himself upon himself, has put on himself, has totally interpenetrated himself so that every movement he makes is accompanied by a consciousness of responsibility for himself – not until then has a person chosem himself ethically, not until then has he repented himself, not until then is he concrete, not until then is he in his total isolation in absolute continuity with the actuality to which he belongs.477

This idea of self-responsibility resembles the importance of individual choice in AA, which is supposed to bring the addict into a realization of his responsibility: "'It's my own side of the street I need to clean.'"478 However, this utmost stress on personal choice can be tough. After Gately has been shot, he lies in a hospital, almost dying from the pain of his wound alone, yet, as an ex-narcotics addict, he has to refuse pain-relief medication. His doctors, acknowledging his bravery but ignorant about the power of his addiction, offer him the former substance of his dependence, while his refusals are almost inarticulate. In one crucial instance, his AA sponsor Francis G. reacts stoically to the request of a doctor uncertain about Gately's reply: "'Not my business to say one way or the other. Kid's gonna do what he decides he needs to do for himself. He's the one that's feeling it. He's the only one can decide.'"479 While this may appear cruel, it is the only way to keep Gately's "spider" at bay, as his sobriety and health are based on his new-found awareness of his freedom to choose and his responsibility for himself. This centrality of choice, responsibility and engagement in AA reveals its democratic nature and furthermore attests to its relevance, not just for cases of addiction, but for life in a democratic society in general, especially regarding the prevalence of "despair", passivity, and soothing mass media fantasies today.

477

Kierkegaard, Either/Or II 248 Infinite Jest 963 479 idb. 889 478

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f. Concrete vs. Abstract Instead of living in infinite abstractions like the aesthete and many characters of the novel, the free self needs to actualize its freedom immediately: "...he can remain in his freedom only by continually realizing it. He who has chosen himself on this basis is eo ipso one who acts,"480 says the ethicist, and he further stresses: "... only a concrete individual is a free individual."481 This implies the demand to live in the "eternal present," the "moment", yet not the one of the aesthete or the addicts, whose isolated moments deprive them of a personal history and contribute to their loss of selfhood: "...you are at all times only in the moment, and for that reason your life disintegrates, and it is impossible for you to explain it."482 Living in the moment of desire implies a loss of history and responsibility, it is a mere pursuit of pleasure that is frequently to be found in modern society: "The person who lives esthetically tries as far as possible to be engrossed completely in the mood. He tries to bury himself completely in it […] The dimmer the presence of the personality in the mood, the more the individual is in the instant […] This accounts for the enormous fluctuations to which one who lives esthetically is exposed."483 The aesthete resembles the protean self, a concept of selfhood that is often used to rationalize a life in the moment. DEREK F. WAYNE quotes Ursula Heise, who "writes that postmodern time is characterized by an entrapment in a present 'without any possibility of linkage to past or future, and with at best a promise of meaning that is never fulfilled' (58). This is a fairly apt description for the viewer's addiction."484 The consequences of such a life can be perceived in the fate of the addicts, whose living for the pleasure of the moment has entrapped them inside the cage of addiction. Following Wayne, this state leads to a loss of the present, as the addict "hovers" between present and future,485 always hoping for the arrival of the desired satisfaction, the filling of a void that was created in the past. In the description of the aesthete: "When a spider flings itself from a fixed point down into its consequences, it continually sees before it an empty space in which it can find no foothold, however much it stretches. So it 480

Kierkegaard, Either/Or II 232 ibd. 247 482 ibd. 179 483 ibd. 229-30 484 Wayne. Debord (170) and Mirzoeff likewise describe the postmodern era as a timeless frenzy of consumption. 485 Wayne calls it "near-future," an "an unsatisfied position facing the future with a buried or destroyed past and a detached present. 481

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is with me; before me is continually an empty space, and I am propelled by a consequence that lies behind me. This life is turned around and dreadful, not to be endured."486

As has been discussed above, addiction and despair are fueled by hope.487 At AA meetings, the addict learns to give up his anticipation of the future and return to the present "Augenblick" of his concrete existence. Suffering from his gunshot wound, Gately …had to build a wall around each second just to take it. The whole first two weeks of it are telescoped in his memory down into like one second - less: the space between two heartbeats. A breath and a second, the pause and gather between each cramp. An endless Now stretching its gull-wings out on either side of his heartbeat. And he'd never before or since felt so excruciatingly alive. Living in the Present between pulses. What the White Flaggers talk about: living completely In The Moment. [...] [W]hat kind of impossible leap it would take to live that way all the time, by choice, straight: in the second, the Now, walled and contained between slow heartbeats. [...] It's a gift, the Now: it's AA's real gift: it's no accident they call it The Present.488

This concept of time is opposed to Hal's abstract accumulation of his present existence into the future, by which he loses all resolution. Whereas Gately learns to live in the present consciously, a state of existence that enables activity, Hal and the aesthete are lost in the passive speculations of their self-consciousness: "You pursue every mood, every idea, good or bad, happy or sad, to its outermost limit, but n such a way that it happens more in abstracto than in concreto, so that this pursuit is itself more a mood, from which nothing more results than a knowledge of it,"489 as the ethicist characterizes his friend. As he further remarks: "Your mistake is that you do not think historically."490 Living consciously in the moment paradoxically requires at first an acceptance of one's history, and it is thus related to selfhood and to AA. Most of the novel's addicts can 486

Kierkegaard, Either/Or I 24 To quit marijuana in the novel is referred to as to "abandon all hope". E.T.A. student Schacht, having given up hope for a career in tennis after an injury, feels no desire for substances (267-68). On p. 216 hope is tacitly related to personal insecurity. Note that this concept of hope is related to desire (Eliot's "hope for the wrong thing" in the "Four Quartets") and not to Kierkegaard's religious hope for redemption. While the former is tied to the finite ego, the latter is tied to the self as a synthesis, which has surrendered itself to the Absolute. 488 Infinite Jest 860 489 Kierkegaard, Either/Or II 17 490 ibd. 128 487

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hardly remember their past, and Hal likewise has trouble with his memory,491 while Gately starts to remember and feel remorse for his deeds, yet none that inhibits any action on his part, as this would again be a symptom of "despair": "Wirklich gelebte Subjektivität tendiert dazu, die Vergangenheit durchzustreichen und die Zukunft nicht vorwegzunehmen,"492 as LIESSMANN explains the "Augenblick". One does not come clean with one's personal history by suppressing and denying, but by accepting it. This is especially essential for the constitution of a responsible and free selfhood: A human being’s eternal dignity lies precisely in this, that he can gain a history [,…] can give this history continuity, because it gains that, not when it is a summary of what has taken place or has happened to me, but only when it is my personal deed in such a way that evenm that which has happened to me is transformed and transferred from necessity to freedom. [..] to appropriate in freedom everything that comes to him.493

Whereas the lack of teleology, which Wallace attests to his society, may lead to a hedonist pursuit of happiness and in many cases to an entrapping addiction, a consciously chosen selfhood inheres such a teleology, one which the subject freely chooses and relates to himself in his own concrete existence. Thus, the end of the novel is not as pessimistic as most commentators believe. While in a crucial condition, Gately remembers several days of incessant abuse of drugs, which his friend Fackelmann had stolen from his boss. The consequence was his murder by the latter's hitmen, which Gately, under the influence, was forced to watch. The novel's last sentence, immediately after this scene, reads: "And when [Gately] came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out."494 Chris Hager is one of the few who recognizes the optimism inherent in this ending, and, as he interprets it, Gately's waking on the beach signifies his "awakening to history." CARLISLE points out that this memory marks the beginning of Gately's sobriety, as it concerns the rock bottom of his addiction. After Fackelmann's death, Gately resolves to quit narcotics and leave the womblike ocean of narcissistic illusion and substance dependence. Having become conscious of his state of existence, like the fish in the joke, he manages to pass the final test for his metempsychosis and his new life in 491

Infinite Jest 951 Liessmann 52. (Truly lived subjectivity tends to cross out the past and to avoid living in the future). 493 Kierkegaard, Either/Or II 250 494 Infinite Jest 981 492

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freedom, namely his conscious choice for a life in reality, despite its grim painfulness. The scene at the beach seems frightening and dispiriting, yet it marks the end of all the comforting lies in which the narcotics, the "illusion of autonomy" and the culture of narcissism have entangled him, and it also signifies Wallace's refusal to provide the reader with the soothing fantasies of TV or Realist literature. For Wallace, life is a continuous struggle consisting of 49% pleasure and 51% pain, and one should be aware of the difficulties and complexitities inherent in each moment. 495 This is especially important in a democratic and pluralistic society marked by an unprecedented political freedom and a sociocultural heterogeneity. g. AA and American Freedom For coach Schtitt, ...jr. athletics was basically just training for citizenship, [...] about learning to sacrifice the hot narrow imperatives of the Self - the needs, the desires, the fears, the multiform cravings of the individual appetite will - to the larger imperatives of a team. [...] [T]he well-disciplined boy begins assembling the more abstract, gratification-delaying skills necessary for being a 'team player' in a larger arena: the even more subtly diffracted moral chaos of full-service citizenship in a State.496

Likewise, HAYLES considers the AA program as training for life in a pluralistic and open society: Gately's struggle reveals what it means to attempt on a daily basis to shed the illusion of autonomous selfhood and accept citizenship in a world in which actions have consequences that rebound to the self because everything is connected with everything else. There are no simple or easy solutions, Gately discovers...'497

As BEABOUT argues: "since the self is self-reflexive, social and religious, freedom is being oneself, that is taking responsibility for one's choices while living and acting in right relation to others and to God."498 WALLACE reveals his concern with the difficulties of life in a democracy in another essay: 495

McCaffery 128. See also Boswell 119. Infinite Jest 82-83 497 Hayles 693-94 498 Beabout 92 496

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A Democratic Spirit is one that combines rigor and humility, i.e. passionate conviction plus a sedulous respect for the convictions of others. As any American knows, this is a difficult spirit to cultivate and maintain, particularly when it comes to issues you feel strongly about. Equally tough is a [Democratic Spirit's] criterion of 100 percent intellectual integrity - you have to be willing to look honestly at yourself and at your motives for believing what you believe, and to do it more or less continually. This kind of stuff is advanced US citizenship.499

Such tolerance and honesty are based on actual choice, as he made clear in his Kenyon Address. The veterans of AA learn to consciously relate to their selves and establish personal convictions. In addition, they are made aware of the necessity of acting according to these convictions, checking their own reasoning and remaining open for the opinions and experiences of others. Their repetitive rituals imply not a negligence of freedom, but train them to use their freedom responsibly and thus to retain it: Even if that action seems repetitive and pointless, it is better to abide moment-tomoment than to succumb to the passivity of paralyzed stasis. Making these choices does not diminish our compulsive and selfish tendencies. Therefore, keeping these choices in mind and acting on them is forever difficult, and there is no guarantee that we will maintain the discipline to act on these choices each day.500

The seemingly depressing end is not the closure of a story about the characters' "despair", but an assignment to the reader to face the difficulties of life in a heterogeneous society and to accept the responsibilities that come with the freedom in the U.S. However, Wallace finds many things at fault in this freedom, which for him is dangerously one-sided. Marathe voices this concern to Steeply: 'Always with you this freedom! For your walled-up country, always to shout 'Freedom! Freedom!' as if it were obvious to all people what it wants to mean, this word. But look: it is not so simple as that. Your freedom is the freedom-from: no one tells your precious individual U.S.A. selves what they must do. It is this meaning only, this freedom from constraint and forced duress. [...] But what of the freedom-to? Not just free-from. Not all compulsion comes from without. You pretend you do not see this. What of freedom-to. How for the person to freely choose? How to choose any but a child's greedy choices if there is no loving-filled father 499 500

Wallace, "Authority" 72 Carlisle 487

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to guide, inform, teach the person how to choose? How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?'501

The same differentiation is made by BEABOUT in his account of "anxiety" in the postmodern U.S.: An overemphasis on 'freedom from' ends up making real freedom impossible. Freedom from external constraint leaves one bound up with oneself. [...] [W]hen there are no external constraints, this kind of freedom offers no guidance about how to live well. The result is a feeling of being alone, lost in a world of possibility. Having freed itself from others, the self ends up feeling alone, absorbed in itself until the self begins to run away from itself.502

Such an understanding of freedom leads the self into narcissism and "despair": "if freedom comes to be associated solely with freedom from external constraint, the self is left either escaping its own freedom or defiantly misusing it. So the freedom from undue external constraints is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for true freedom."503 What BEABOUT and Wallace propose is that "an account of freedom from external constraint should be followed by an account of free and active choice."504 4. Alcoholics Anonymous and T.S. Eliot The various relations between Infinite Jest and T.S. Eliot have been frequently mentioned in this paper, and a short comparison between AA and the latter's work may be further helpful for an understanding of Wallace's therapeutic "advice," especially since Eliot himself has been inspired by Kierkegaard.505 His poetry is "all about the wheel of desire," the movement around the void that also signifies the desperate narcissistic circling of oneself.506 Prufrock's self-consciousness, so one commentator, moves in a wheel, similar to Wallace's addicts: "The characters in Eliot's early poems incessantly crave sensual gratification, which breeds attachment to ephemeral things in them. Consequently, their craving or thirst is never satisfied and their lives are full of

501

Infinite Jest 320. A similar claim is made by Žižek in On Belief (28). Beabout 137 503 ibd. 157 504 ibd. 138 505 Murray 108. There are important differences between both, though. 506 Recall that Orin feels total approval when the crowd voices the vowel O, both his initial and a circle 502

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suffering."507 He often depicts desire as a burning fire, reminiscent of Kierkegaard's "despair". Likewise, the Hollow Men "go round and round the prickly pear, unable to undo their own past,"508 never waking up to their history. Whereas Prufrock, in "despair of the infinite", is undone by possibilities on which he never acts, the Hollow Men have lost all hope, yet also never manage a concrete existence, being lost in their meaningless and abstract self-loathing: "Between the idea and the reality / Between the motion and the act / Falls the shadow,"509 one that signals the abyss between possibility and reality, which can only be crossed by a leap into existence. Like the addicts in Infinite Jest, they hover between present and future. In "The Waste Land", desire is an endless chain of unsatisfactory substitutes for a self which demands evermore substitutes, as Charles Altieri argues. Yet, the poem already hints at the possibility of redemption, as its speaker escapes the prison of his craving self by learning to "give," "sympathize" and "control," principles that form the core of AA philosophy:510 "By this, and this only, we have existed."511 Such freedom from desire is most explicitly realized in Eliot's "Ash Wednesday", the poem following his religious conversion. The speaker reaches "the still point of the turning world" by a surrender to the divine will512 and a recognition of his limits: "By performing our deeds without desire for the fruits, we may rise above the Karma that binds us to the world and be free. We have to renounce our ego or lower self and surrender to our higher self."513 This is what AA teaches its members: a surrender of one's ostensible self that paradoxically leads to a fuller selfhood. The speaker of "Ash Wednesday" achieves such surrender by renouncing the finite hope that fuels all desire: "Because I do not hope to turn again [...] Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope / I no longer strive to strive toward such things [...] Why should I mourn the vanished power of the usual reign [...] Because I know that time is always time / and place is always and only place and what is actual is actual only for one time and only for one place."514 In Eliot's "Four Quartets", the speaker also renounces hope and desire in favor of the spiritual moment, the "Augenblick": "To apprehend / the point of intersection of the timeless / With time, is an occupation for the saint - / No occupation either, but 507

Sri 61 ibd. 30 509 Eliot, Collected Poems 91-92 510 i.e. Give It Away, Identify, Surrender (control is here understood as refering to the ego's desires) 511 ibd. 78 512 Sri 48-49 513 ibd. 108 514 Eliot, Collected Poems 95 508

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something given / And taken, in a lifetime's death in love, / Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender."515 Again, self-surrender is stressed: "In order to arrive there, / To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not, / You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy. [...] In order to possess what you do not possess / You must go by the way of dispossession. / In order to arrive at what you are not / You must go through the way in which you are not."516 There is no ecstasy in Gately's surrender, as there is no paradise waiting at the end of his journey. Yet each day in sobriety is a miracle for him, and at the end he does seem to achieve concrete selfhood, whereas Hal's avoidance of his self in favor of short-term material success only leads him deeper into "despair". Still, his plot, despite the fact that the narrator leaves him lying passively on the floor, ends not as pessimistic as most commentators believe: "The end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time,"517 the speaker of one of the "Four Quartets" says, a statement fitting the circular structure of Wallace's novel, as "[t]he end of Infinite Jest brings us back to the beginning."518 Beginning and end complement each other, as Gately at the end remembers the rock bottom of his addiction and Hal, at the beginning, the chronological end of his plot, reaches his. Gately's account is immediately followed by his symbolical waking up to reality, his metempsychosis toward a new and free life.519 The end of the novel thus points back to its beginning, and the reader now will be able to "know the place for the first time," as it implies the possibility of redemption for Hal subsequent to his breakdown. After all, "despair" is a gift, because it may lead to full selfhood, "which infinite gain is never come by except through despair."520 Likewise, "grim honesty and hopelessness were the only things you need to start recovering from Substance-addiction, but that without these qualities you were totally up the creek. Desperation helped also."521 The preceding pages attempted to provide a concise analysis of Wallace's therapeutic ideas following his sociocultural diagnosis. As the following sections are meant to demonstrate, he also gives his "advice" on a formal and aesthetic level.

515

ibd. 212 ibd. 201 517 ibd. 222 518 Carlisle 474 519 The "intolerable shirt of flame" in the "Four Quartets" (221) hints at the metempsychosis of Hercules 520 Kierkegaard, Sickness 57 521 Infinite Jest 464 516

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III. Wallace's Aesthetics in Infinite Jest A. Literature Wallace beliefs literature to be not a medium of abstract experimentation, but one that deals with concrete existence: "The primary aim of all fiction," as BOSWELL defines his agenda, quoting from an interview, is "to articulate 'what it is to be a fucking human being.'"522 Literature for Wallace is not, however, a pedagogical medium, but one of critical engagement. It is not supposed to teach, but to deal with issues of contemporary life. Says NICHOLS: "Wallace establishes a setting where attempting to engage the dynamism of reality, rather than professing its fictionality, becomes a radical act of dialogue appropriate to late-twentieth-century life."523 She argues that Wallace's artistic purpose is "redemptive," and "redemption begins not with aesthetic nonconformity, but in the act of confronting what is truly, perhaps existentially, fearful."524After Postmodernism's ground-clearing, he believes that fiction needs to be relevant and meaningful again, wherefore he tries to abstain from the pitfalls of radical self-reflexivity and naive mimesis, while still retaining some useful elements of both: ...there's a degree of self-consciousness culturally now that makes classic Realistic stuff seem to me to be either very naive or manipulative. And at least what I'm trying to do in my own stuff [...] involves trying to write fiction that works both ways. Because one of the things that we've learned is that what we imagined to be reality is more and more a linguistic enterprise. The same way we found out that the observer in an experiment affects the experiment. [...] But then on the other hand, writers I admire [...] seem to me to be able to create compelling narratives that make you feel something for these characters and know them in a way that like you and I could never know each other -- and at the same time not being in any way manipulative or old-fashioned or falsely naive about the way language can stretch that world in which they live.525

Whereas Realism's "objectivity" and blind trust in language are no longer acceptable to him, Postmodernism's self-reflexivity and its abstraction from plot and characterization often leave the reader empty or adrift. Furthermore, writing in one of these ways is no longer possible for an artist with a sociocritical agenda, since not only postmodern techniques, but also those of Realism, have been exhausted by mass culture: 522

Boswell 18, quoted from the McCaffery interview (131) Nichols 4 524 ibd. 6 525 Wiley 523

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"the big R's form has now been absorbed and suborned by commercial entertainment. The classical Realist form is soothing, familiar and anesthetic; it drops us right into spectation."526 Both Realism and television invite passive enjoyment; they simulate an impossible "objective viewpoint" and tranquilize the reader by presenting closed linear plots.527 WALLACE'S postmodern background comes to the fore when he states that "TVtype art's biggest hook is that it's figured out ways to reward passive spectation. A certain amout of the form-conscious stuff I write is trying - with whatever success - to do the opposite. It's supposed to be uneasy."528 For him, TV, Realism, and postmodern selfreflexivity are monologic, unlike his idea of literature as communication, and they shield the reader from an awareness of "the other". While the mimetic side of Wallace's work is restricted and not meant to represent an "objective" reality, he likewise does not refuse to provide the reader with concrete and coherent narratives about contemporary life and a free subjective existence. If literature wants to be true to this agenda, it needs to abandon its superior position and grant the reader his freedom of interpretation, who thus becomes the co-creator of the text. The reader is central in Wallace's aesthetics, no longer as consumer or silent addressee, but as the partner in an active, twodirectional and unhierarchical communicative process. The uneasiness of WALLACE'S texts is thus an attempt to draw the reader out of his TV-induced passivity and "to prohibit [her] from forgetting that she's receiving heavily mediated data, that this process is a relationship between the writer's consciousness and her own, and that in order for it to be anything like a real full human relationship, she's going to have to put in her share of the linguistic work."529 Addressing the issue of writing, WALLACE frequently employs an analogy to parenting as well: The last few years of the Postmodern era have seemed a bit like the way you feel when you're in High School and your parents go on a trip and you throw a party. [...] [F]or a while it's great, free and freeing, parental authority gone and overthrown, [...] but the sense I get of my generation of writers and intellectuals or whatever is that it's 3:00 a.m. and the couch has several burn-holes and somebody's thrown up in the umbrella stand and we're wishing the revel would end. The Postmodern founder's patricidal work was great, but patricide produces 526

McCaffery 138 cf. Jacobs 225 and Carlisle 15, 18 528 McCaffery 137 527

529

ibd. 137-38. Cf. ADORNO: "Unter der Massenkultur werden die Menschen zu bloßen Empfangsapparaten. [...] [D]as schwierige Kunstwerk, das Konzentration und Arbeit vom Aufnehmenden verlangt, ist Gleichnis des mächtigen Subjekts, das nicht kapituliert." ("Der Artist als Statthalter"). (In mass culture people become mere apparatuses of machine-like reception. […] The difficult work of art, which demands concentration and work from the recipient, symbolizes the powerful subject who does not surrender)

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orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We're kind of wishing some parents would come back. [...] And then the uneasiest feeling of all, as we start gradually realizing that the parents in fact aren't ever coming back - which means we're going to have to be the parents.530

According to him, a good writer is one who loves his reader enough to be cruel to him. Just as fulfilling a child's every wish would in effect turn out bad for it, so would it to provide the reader with closed and undemanding narratives. His ideal writer resembles Kierkegaard's God, as he sentences the reader to his freedom, refusing to lead him by the hand through a text that is open, ambiguous and that needs the reader's work of actualization to become meaningful. True pleasure, so Wallace, comes with hard work, yet in times of the total availability of easy entertainment most people are no longer used to put any effort into their pleasure. "Our only health is the disease / If we obey the dying nurse / Whose constant care is not to please / But to remind of our, and Adam's curse, / And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse,"532 the speaker of Eliot's "East Coker" knows. Wallace does not provide the reader with an easy reading experience, sentencing him instead to his freedom of choice. According to Boswell, this fits with the novel's end, which equally refuses any soothing resolutions. Quite on the contrary, the radical openness of the book and its painful ending challenge the reader, as Hayles argues. They interrogate and compel him to engage with the novel: 531

Successful fiction forces a recognition of our mortality by communicating with the reader. Only then can we begin to live, not through the simulacra of television and the internet which purport to take us out of ourselves, but only provide the image of reality, not the experience [...] Wallace's aesthetic requires that fiction disturb our staid existence and propel us into the common experiences of human life.533

But, in order to convince the reader that it is worthwhile for him to work through the text, an author has to establish his authority and credibility, his ethos, first, and he has to convince the reader of his authorial competence and the story's relevance.534 This,

530

McCaffery 150 As one of the characters of his short story "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way" declares. The story can be read as an early aesthetic statement directed against John Barth. 532 Eliot, Complete Poems 201 533 Jacobs 219 534 cf. Lasch: "Truth has given way to credibility." (74) 531

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WALLACE says in an essay on American Usage, is one of the central requirements of our age: ...'authority' is no longer something a lexicographer can just presume ex officio. In fact, a large part of the project of any contemporary usage dictionary will consist in establishing this authority. [...] The lexicographer's challenge now is to be not just accurate and comprehensive but credible. That in the absence of unquestioned, capital-A Authority in language, the reader must now be moved or persuaded to grant a dictionary its authority, freely and for what appear to be good reasons.535

Especially when an apparently more honest technique such as metafiction has become a fashionable pose, the issue of credibility is difficult. The following sections will present Wallace's aesthetics in more detail, yet first a discussion of the principal elements of poststructuralist theory is necessary in order to provide the background against which the form and style of Infinite Jest may appear more clearly. B. Poststructuralism Emerging in the 1960s, Poststructuralism became highly influential, radically altering substantial assumptions about language and culture. From its predecessor Structuralism it inherited the idea of the linguistic nature of the world, albeit radicalizing it. Instead of referring to a "signified", the linguistic sign, according to Jacques Derrida's famous dictum "Il n'y a pas de-hors texte", refers only to other signs. Meaning is thus never found, but always delayed in an endless chain of signifiers, a process Derrida called "différance". In the concise description of HUBERT ZAPF: Die Zeichen verlieren ihre Transparenz auf eine außer ihnen bestehende Erfahrungswelt, zu der sie eine illusionäre Zugänglichkeit suggerieren. Sie folgen nicht einer nach Außen gerichteten Logik der Mimesis, sondern beziehen sich in vielfältiger und letztlich nicht kontrollierbarer und überschaubarer Weise aufeinander. [...] Die Praxis kultureller Zeichenverwendung verweist nicht über sich hinaus, sondern expliziert nur ihren eigenen Prozeß, ihre eigene Aktivität.536

535

Wallace, "Authority" 121-22. This statement points toward the new relevance of "Rhetorics" today. The idea of "ethos" applied here is in fact one of the central concepts of this field of study. 536 Zapf 192. (The signifiers lose their transparency toward a world of experience that exists outside of them, and to which they suggest an illusionary access. They do not follow an outward-bound mimetic logic, but refer to each other in a multiform and eventually uncontrollable and 123

A text thus never carries one stable meaning but a multiplicity of meanings generated in each process of reading: "Es gibt keine Identität, sondern nur Differenz, keine Kernpunkte des Denkens, sondern nur ein Netzwerk aufeinander bezogener Zeichen, eine unendliche Kette immer weiterverweisender Signifikanten. 'Bedeutung' ergibt sich nur aus dieser Beziehung und Differenz zwischen den Zeichen."537 Since for Poststructuralism the world is a text, traditional concepts like "truth" or "meaning" are seen as arbitrary constructions and rejected in favor of a plurality of heterogeneous and dynamic discourses, whose significance must always elude the human subject. The epistemological skepticism of Modernism is here radicalized: there is no longer a world that one cannot sufficiently grasp, but there are many worlds that are constructed linguistically. Any totalizing scheme is exposed as "logocentrism," an alleged tendency in western thought that encompasses metaphysics, centrality, originality, presence and identity. In contrast, Poststructuralism posits the concepts of absence and play: "Spiel bedeutet für Derrida die 'Abwesenheit eines Zentrums,' und diese Annahme einer Abwesenheit dessen, was in traditionellem Denken als präsent und substantiell gesetzt wurde, ist eine grundlegende Wendung des poststrukturalen Denkens."538 Process is emphasized instead of stasis, and poiesis instead of mimesis: man is a fiction-maker, his world and self are constructed and never given or natural. In literary studies, this means the rejection of the ideas of the author and a stable textual meaning in favor of an emphasis on the process of reading and the concepts of intertextuality and deconstruction, whereby texts are read "against themselves." Deconstruction subverts the surface meaning of a text, delaying any fixed significance ad infinitum, just as language, so Derrida, defers significance and identity. Postmodern art informed by Poststructuralism thus tends to address its artificiality and the impossibility of representation and communication, and its focus lies mostly on itself as an artificial construct. While some theorists view this as a strategy to force the reader into an active engagement with the text, many readers rather tend to surrender in the face of a chaotic unmanageable way. […] The cultural use of signs refers not to a realm beyond itself, but represents merely its own process, its own activity.) 537 Zapf 200. (There is no identity, only difference, there are no fixed points for thought, but only a network of interrelated signs, an infinite chain of constantly referring signifiers. ‘Meaning’ emerges only out of this interplay of relation and difference between the signs.) 538 Zapf 193. (For Derrida, play means the ‘absence of a center,’ and this absence of something that has been proclaimed as present and substantial in traditional thought, represents one of the fundamental turns of Poststructural thought.) 124

heterogeneity of possible meanings and understandings. What once was original about Postmodernism, Wallace argues, has been repeated to the exhaustion of itself and the reader. The acknowledgment of the arbitrariness of language and the assertion of the impossibility of communication becomes incoherent and solipsistic if it is not complemented with a constructive obligation to the reader to actively engage in a new and conscious establishment of subjectivity, ethics and meaning. The reader should neither receive these passively from "objective" sources of legitimation such as master narratives, nor should literature refuse to participate in this conscious re-construction. Wallace concedes to the postmodern avant-garde that its emergence was necessary, but he argues that its self-reflexive irony has only negative, corrective function, and needs to be followed by more constructive works of art. A mere deconstruction of truths and conventions may become an end in itself and an escape from responsibility. As Nichols puts it: "a constant state of uncertainty can be just as comforting as religion when it takes the form of a terminal cynicism that interdicts the question of human agency."539 And SLOTERDIJK states: Vielleicht war es Nietzsches theoretischer Leichtsinn, der ihn glauben ließ, dass Philosophie sich in provokativen Diagnosen erschöpfen dürfe, ohne zugleich verbindlich an Therapie zu denken. Den Teufel darf nur beim Namen nennen, wer eine Abreaktion für ihn weiß; ihn nennen [...] heißt, seine Realität anerkennen, sie anerkennen heißt, sie "entfesseln.540

This account resembles the cynical rationalizations with which the characters of Infinite Jest employ postmodern insights for their own purposes. KIERKEGAARD'S ethicist accuses the aesthete similarly, thus diagnosing it as another symptom of "despair" and denial: On the whole, you are tireless in tracking down illusions in order to smash them to pieces. You talk so sensibly, with such experience, that anyone who does not know you better must believe that you are a steady man. But you have by no means arrived at what is true. You

539

Nichols 13 Sloterdijk 389-90. (Maybe it was Nietzsche’s theoretical carelessness that made him believe that philosophy could be allowed to exhaust itself in provocative diagnoses without at the same time honestly considering therapy. Calling the devil may only be done by that man who knows an antidote; calling him […] means asserting his reality, and asserting his reality means, setting him free.) 540

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stopped with destroying the illusion, and since you did it in every conceivable direction, you actually have worked your way into a new illusion – that one can stop with this.541

Wallace stresses the need to replace poststructuralist aesthetics with fresher forms of writing in order to bring the reader into an active engagement with the text. He provides him with meaningful narratives about contemporary existence, not shying away from "banned" subjects such as ethics or religiosity, in order to help him identify with and actualize the text in his concrete reading experience and thus to arrive at a coproduced textual validity. His theoretical model is different from that of Poststructuralism and derived from other sources. C. Ludwig Wittgenstein RAIZMAN reads Infinite Jest as a departure from poststructuralist aesthetics by applying the philosophy of the later Wittgenstein and the literary theory of Mikhail Bakhtin onto the text: "Wallace's ingenious use of Wittgenstein is a rejection, in a manner of speaking, of the cynicism of Postmoderism's world of simulacra and structures lacking inherent meaning." Likewise, Boswell argues that Wallace abandons Derrida and Heidegger in favor of the Austrian philosopher.542 Instead of an endless deferral of meaning, Wittgenstein, in the Philosophical Investigations, posited an emergence of meaning in the concrete processes of intersubjective communication. Meaning is arbitrary, yet closely tied to the actual lives of human beings, and thus still carries significance. He divided the heterogeneous social world into multiple languagegames, inside which utterances derive their meaning not from their difference to other signs, but from their use in the game: "the meaning of a word is its use in the language."543 For WALLACE, this idea is "the single most comprehensive and beautiful argument against solipsism that's ever been made."544 Whereas Poststructuralism believed language incapable of ever adequately expressing inner states, Wittgenstein argued that such inner states are always already derived from an intersubjective language game, from one of the communities to which the individual belongs. Utterances are meaningful because they are part of a system of language, and this system is always

541

Kierkegaard Either/Or II 78-79 Boswell 18-19. It should be pointed out that Wittgenstein is not in radical opposition to Poststructuralism, as there are many similarities between his philosophy and that of Derrida. 543 Wittgenstein 43 544 McCaffery 143 542

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intersubjective: "You learned the concept 'pain' when you learned language."545 As WALLACE paraphrases it: "there is no such thing as a private language,"546 since language is always an intersubjective process. Several of his characters despair because they believe themselves to be closed off from the outer world, without any way of meaningfully communicating with it: "This line of thinking is sort of like the adolescent pot-smoker's terror that his own inner experience is both private and unverifiable, a syndrome that is technically known as Cannabic Solipsism."547 As such it resembles the self-involved narcissism of Hal, Gompert and many narrators of radical metafiction.548 In contrast, WITTGENSTEIN'S model is communal, and he identified his aim in philosophy as "To shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle."549 Furthermore, he viewed language as fundamental for concrete human existence: "the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life."550 While Poststructuralism, so RAIZMAN, sought "chimeras" in its radical abstraction of language, Wittgenstein returned language to its concrete use in human affairs: "In Wittgenstein's methodology, we must describe language as it occurs in everyday use because to analyze it formally is to seek for something that does not exist, a chimera."551 In his philosophy, meaning is closely related to the "truth" of a subject matter: "'So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?' - It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in forms of life."552 RAIZMAN discusses several language games in Wallace's novel, and he attributes the success of AA to its ability to replace the language game of addiction with its own language game of faith: "Belief only comes once the language-game has been accepted and internalized - then God comes to have a meaning." Each member has a different idea of "God", and their religious convictions are rather vague, yet what is decisive is the constant use of the concept of "God" as a teacher of humility and as a defining limit to the self. Wittgenstein's later philosophy thus leaves more room for optimism than Poststructuralism. In contrast to the latter's project of delimitation, it

545

Wittgenstein 384 Wallace, "Authority" 87 547 ibd. 548 Some of Barth's characters move in endless circles of self-loathing because of their alleged inability to communicate 549 Wittgenstein 309. Cf. the scene with marijuana addict Ken Erdedy and the fly (18). 550 ibd. 23 551 Raizman 552 ibd. 241 546

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stresses the necessity of limits. Like tennis in Schtitt's553 concept, language games are made up of rules without which they degenerate into chaos and cease to exist, as it is a set of rules that constitutes a game in the first place. Meaning is established by the use of words according to the rules of a language game. Whereas Poststructuralism stressed the arbitrariness of such rules, Wittgenstein emphasized their importance. Wallace, influenced by Cantorian mathematics, likewise views such limits as constitutive and freeing, as they provide an infinity of immaterial possibilities. His focus lies not in the deconstruction of meaning, but on the ways it is established intersubjectively. To this end, he combines his use of Wittgenstein's language philosophy with Bakhtin's concept of "dialogism". D. Mikhail Bakhtin Both Raizman and Nichols analyze Infinite Jest according to this theory, presented by the Russian in his analysis of Dostoevsky's poetics. According to Bakhtin, Dostoevsky was a new kind of author, no longer "monologic", but "dialogic" and double-voiced, one who granted his characters absolute sovereignty. In fact, so Bakhtin, he appeared to be many authors simultaneously, as he slipped into the different voices of his characters, each of whom was allowed to express his own belief system, which was only possible by an adequate representation of his language and an authorial selfrestraint. His novels exhibit a multitude of equal, yet separate, subjective worlds represented by individual voices: "Der Held ist vollberechtigter Träger des eigenen Worts,"554 he is acknowledged by the author as a free subjectivity and thus provided with existential freedom.555 "Each character, then, represents his or her own ideology and engages in dialogue - with the author, with other characters, and even in an internal, soliloquistic sense. The plot is the result of the interplay between autonomous characters who, in Bakhtin's formulation, truly determine their own fate in the novel. [...] [T]he authorial consciousness no longer dictates to the characters, but they exist together as a multiplicity of separate consciousnesses, autonomous and interacting." In Infinite Jest, the romantic author of self-expression and originality is still dead,556 but he has been replaced with a Bakhtinian conductor of voices, as WAYNE, citing the Russian formalist, 553

Who, like Wittgenstein, is an Austrian Bakhtin 73 (The hero is a fully entitled bearer of his own words) 555 Dostoevsky has been influenced by Kierkegaard. This may explain the affinity between dialogism and existential freedom. Kierkegaard himself related solipsistic "being in reserve" with "monologism" in The Concept of Anxiety. 556 Following Barthes 554

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describes it: "The author is the collector and organizer of various voices and accompanying fictions; he is the novel's conductor who 'orchestrates all its themes, the totality of the world of objects and ideas depicted and expressed in it, by means of the social diversity of speech types and by the differing individual voices that flourish under such conditions.'" In contrast to "monologic" novels, "dialogism", or "polyphony", represents the world as a cosmos of "heteroglossia", i.e. speech diversity. Such "heteroglossia" is one of the most overt stylistic features of Wallace's oeuvre, as each character is distinguished by his unique language. NICHOLS accounts for his heavy use of jargon and considers the novel a "superdialogized textual landscape."557 Its narrator is highly elusive, as he constantly blends into the voice of each focalizer, the novel thus exhibiting a radical double-voicedness. Such "heteroglossia" in today's heterogeneous society is more realistic than ever: "The world of language in which we live, though, is a world of many different languages, one of 'heteroglossia.' The polyphonic novel is a representation of a heteroglot world in that each autonomous voice in the novel utilizes a specific mix of languages, each embodying an ideology."558 As with language games, "dialogism" is presented most explicitly in AA, an institution that resembles the narrator in that it allows each member to speak his own language, voicing his own ideology and experience. In the account of Wayne: "AA is a vocal democracy, a heteroglot fusion of high, low, and middle accents, and Wallace calls attention to his authorial dissociation from their real plights."559 The narrator frequently accounts for his intrusions on the characters' speech by acknowledging in footnotes that e.g. "None of these are Don Gately's terms"560 or that "Pemulis doesn't actually say 'breath and bread.'"561 He attempts to be more sincere than radical metafiction, acknowledging his limitations and intrusions in his attempt to establish his ethos and to render his act of storytelling a "true human communication" with all this entails: "Wallace's modified self-consciousness primarily demonstrates an awareness of linguistic limitations; as his voice of authority weakens, the character's voices strengthen and distinguish themselves. This liberates the reader, too, who contributes to the chorus."562 The reader not only contributes, he is also made aware of his freedom by the way the author liberates his characters. To be a free determiner of one's fate, in Bakhtin's words, means to consciously relate one's 557

Nichols 6 Raizman 559 Wayne 560 Infinite Jest 1026 561 ibd. 1025 562 Wayne 558

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personality and actions to oneself. The "dialogic" author of Infinite Jest, like a loving parent or Kierkegaard's God, condemns his characters to a free and self-responsible existence. Just as the latter exists imperceptibly inside the individual, the narrator's voice is submerged, yet vibrant, inside each character. However, unlike Kierkegaard's God, the narrator is not perfect and still happens to intrude on his characters, yet honestly acknowledging these encroachments. This strengthens his authority, as it helps the reader to develop faith in him. Next to AA, the ghost of James Incandenza, who appears later in the novel to communicate with the hospitalized Gately, represents the concept of "dialogism". The "wraith" sets up a connection with Gately's consciousness and, like the narrator, supplies him with new vocabulary that helps the mute ex-addict to put into words, and thus make sense of, his feelings and past experiences.563 Despite the proximity of Bakhtin's "dialogism" to postmodern aesthetics, Wallace's "heteroglot" novel rather signifies a departure from most classical postmodern texts, in which the narrator's focus is not so much on his characters, as rather on himself, his text or abstract theoretical concerns. Again, Lost in the Funhouse serves as a good example, as some of its narrators struggle against their author in their desire to be free autonomous subjects, while always remaining flat emblems of his thematic concern, i.e. an allegorization of narrativization:564 "The characters have no autonomy but are merely puppets of the author, scurrying through the preconceived plot according to the author's whims."565 Raizman's description of the "monologic" novel fits Barth's story cycle. Wallace's representation of the richness of individual worlds, in spite of sociolinguistic barriers, provides the reader with an awareness of his own possibilities, without relieving him from the anxiety of his existential obligation. While Barth fell prey to the postmodern tendency toward abstraction, Wallace depicts the concrete existence of his characters, their convictions and language, "creating themselves as they go, living in a world not of any formal language, but of continually evolving dialogue."566 Wittgenstein and Bakhtin provide theoretical models for a discussion of Wallace's aesthetic ideas. Yet the text of Infinite Jest itself provides such a counter-model.

563

Wayne cf. Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative 565 Raizman 566 ibd. 564

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E. Alcoholics Anonymous as Narrative Model In a paper on Infinite Jest, BROOKS DAVERMAN proposes that Wallace uses the concept of AA as a "narrative solution after Postmodernism:" ...AA aesthetics become dominant in the text. In AA, narrative form is functional; it is always used as a tool for a purpose. Both postmodern and AA narratives are responses to disordered and fragmented subjects. [...] But where postmodern texts respond with fragmented narratives, AA life stories are master narratives that make fragmented subjects coherent. AA members all learn to tell their life stories in a new way that restructures their identity. They provide a shared set of narrative conventions that allow members to understand themselves as alcoholics and as members of the AA group. These shared narrative conventions also eliminate conceptual and stylistic differences between members that might block communication. Formally innovative postmodern texts do the opposite. They invent new conceptual and stylistic blocks that make communication more challenging.567

Important to note is the self-imposition of limits by the AA members in order to achieve personal and narrative coherence. In contrast to the postmodern avant-garde, which mostly refuses to posit any meaning or help the reader in deriving a textual validity, Wallace's goal is to bring him into an active participation with the communicative process that the text opens up. This process is central for his aesthetics, and he repeatedly criticizes postmodern writers for employing stylistic and formal devices devoid of any function beyond authorial blatancy or formal ingenuity. Likewise, so DAVERMAN, his characters "are inventive and skilled speakers, but they can't break out of themselves enough to gain intersubjectivity."568 To counter such narcissistic solipsism, AA embraces the concept of identification: "AA members go to meetings daily to hear stories that all have roughly the same form. They do this because the stories are all structured for the purpose of allowing Identification. [...] Communication becomes the purpose of good narrative in Infinite Jest, and every formal innovation must have communication as its purpose."569 In contrast to postmodern irony and parody, Wallace believes in the necessity to re-establish coherent meaning. Narrativization is presented as the supreme instrument for making sense of one's life, and limits created by narrative principles need not be restrictive, as they may form a space inside which an ungraspable personal infinity may occur and resound. 567

Daverman ibd. 569 ibd. 568

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AA's conventions and slogans resemble Eliot's idea of depersonalization. In opposition to romantic self-expression, he developed the concept of the "objective correlative", a writer's "escape from emotion," to counter his culture's "dissociation of sensibility."570 Likewise, the newcomers at AA are overwhelmed by their emotions and prone to rationalize their actions, and they tend to resort to monologic performance when unbound by any conventions that may help them to fashion their experiences into coherent narratives intended for communication. Only by following impersonal principles that inhibit denial and self-deception do they cease to be misled by the "spider" and their own desires. As Altieri argues, Eliot's replacement of romantic confession with impersonal ritual triggers an awareness of the transpersonal aspects of desire, where attention can be paid to shared needs and shared despair.571 Eliot's concept denotes a continual surrender of the speaker, just as AA requires its members to surrender their self-involved surface personalities to the program. Another essential concept from Eliot to be found in Infinite Jest is tradition. The mature poet, so Eliot in "Tradition and the Individual Talent", is aware of the past and his relation to it. When Incandenza returns as a ghost and communicates with Gately, he becomes the embodiment of such a tradition, supplying the latter with a vocabulary that helps him express and understand his past life. He explains to Gately that his "best thoughts were really communiqués from the patient and Abiding dead," just as the best works for Eliot were those in which literary ancestors "assert their immortality."572 The dead, so the ghost, are beyond all linguistic barriers, again reminiscent of Eliot: "And what the dead had no speech for, when living, / They can tell you, being dead: the communication / Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the / living."573 BOSWELL refers to a line in Wallace's novel when he argues that the latter's aesthetics is a blend of cynicism and naiveté, or "employs cynicism [...] to recover a learned form of heartfelt naiveté."574 Similarly, in "E Unibus Pluram" Wallace describes his ideal writer as one who is able to risk sentimentality and naiveté in an age as ironic as his. As irony is a principal instrument of addiction and "despair", AA eschews it wholeheartedly. However, Wallace still employs irony in his novel, and Holland accuses him of failing the agenda set forth in his essay. Yet she ignores that his aesthetics is not directed against irony per se, but rather against its envenoming dominance in his culture 570

Eliot, "Hamlet" Altieri. Cf. Wittgenstein's language games 572 Eliot, "Tradition" 573 Eliot, Collected Poems 215 574 Boswell 17 571

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and the fact that it has only destructive use and needs to be balanced by more constructive modes of writing. Applying the various forms of irony that Hutcheon lists in Irony's Edge, it becomes clear that he challenges only those modes of irony which he considers instruments of "despair", namely Hutcheon's "distancing," "self-protective" and "provisional" irony. While "distancing irony" signifies "a refusal to be pinned down,"575 and contributes to solipsism, "self-protective irony" is likewise in support of "despair", as it is a "defense mechanism" that can be employed for denial. As WALLACE explained in an interview: The problem is that when irony becomes in and of itself just a mode of social discourse, that is it's not really about causing any sort of change any more, it's just sort of a hip, cool way to do it -- to speak and to act, to sort of make fun of everything and yourself and being really afraid of being made fun of. [...] DeLillo and Pynchon and Gaddis and a lot of those guys I think called the situation a long time ago. What's ironic is that the stuff they're talking about is still going on but their ironic, sarcastic voice we have adopted as a way to protect ourselves from responsibility to the situation.576

Similarly, many addicts protect themselves from an awareness of their state and the necessity of killing "the spider" by ridiculing the naive clichés of AA. Especially better educated addicts refuse to believe in them because of their unsophisticated and banal appearance, yet they too gradually learn their validity. Being initially approached with the ironic detachment for which Eco argued, the slogans unfold their power the instant the speaker sets aside the quotation marks with which he initially brackets them. The "provisional" mode of irony, finally, is a symptom of "despair" in that it helps the speaker to escape concrete choice and avoid responsibility. It contains "a kind of built-in conditional stipulation that undermines any firm and fixed stand" and allows "a speaker to address remarks to a recipient which the latter will understand quite well, be known to understand, know that he is known to understand; and yet neither participant will be able to hold the other responsible for what has been understood." This, so HUTCHEON referring to Goffman, is "the attitude of one, who, when confronted with the choice of two things that are mutually exclusive, chooses both. Which is but another way of saying that he chooses neither. He cannot bring himself to give up one for the other, and he gives up both. But he reserves the right to derive from each the greatest possible passive 575 576

Hutcheon, Irony's Edge 50 Wiley 133

enjoyment."577 Her description resembles the "despair of the infinite" that Wallace attributes to his society: a desire for passive enjoyment and an escape from responsibility, personal choice and the burden of freedom. For him, metafiction, abstraction, cynicism, and irony are the principal stylistic features of postmodern literature. A discussion of his artistic reaction to Postmodernism that is meant to do justice to the complexity of his relationship to his literary predecessors should take into account not just his own ideas about this period, but also a theoretical model. Hutcheon's Poetics of Postmodernism will serve to illuminate Wallace's relation to it. As it turns out, Infinite Jest is neither radically different from other postmodern texts, nor may be easily subsumed under this category.

F. Infinite Jest and Postmodernism Hutcheon treats Postmodernism as a cultural dominant and she follows Brian McHale's distinction between Modernism's epistemological concern and Postmodernism's ontological focus, although she prefers the more unequivocal term "Metafiction". She contrasts earlier accounts of it as a new epoch or "paradigm"578 with a concept that has at its heart its resistance to any such totalizing conceptualizations. Postmodernism in her view is pluralistic and paradoxical, and "because it is contradictory and works within the very systems it attempts to subvert, Postmodernism can probably not be considered a new paradigm. [...] It refuses to posit any structure or, what Lyotard calls, master narrative – such as art or myth – which, for such Modernists [T.S. Eliot and James Joyce.], would have been consolatory."579 Like McHale, she sees postmodern art as mimetic in form, as it, in his terms, "mirrors the pluralistic and anarchistic ontological landscape of advanced industrial cultures"580 with its "permeations of secondary realities,"581 i.e. mass-media fictions. Furthermore, HUTCHEON considers parody and irony as two of Postmodernism's central aspects: "Parody is a perfect postmodern form, in some senses, for it paradoxically both incorporates and challenges that which it parodies. It also forces a reconsideration of the idea of origin or originality that is compatible with other postmodern interrogations of

577

ibd. 51 Most prominently made by critics of the 1960s such as Hassan, Sontag and Fiedler 579 Hutcheon, Poetics 4-6 580 ibd. 581 ibd. 578

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liberal humanist assumptions."582 Her concept is very much influenced by Poststructuralism: "Postmodern art similarly asserts and then deliberately undermines such principles as value, order, meaning, control, and identity […] that have been the basic premises of bourgeois liberalism. Those humanistic principles are still operative in our culture, but for many they are no longer seen as eternal and unchallengeable."583 In contrast to the radical avant-garde, which for Hutcheon is merely destructive, Postmodernism in her theory is destructive and productive at the same time, a movement between both poles that never arrives at a consolatory "truth." She adopts Charles Jencks' dichotomy between postmodern and "late-modern" when she calls extreme forms such as Surfiction, the French Nouveau Roman, or purely metafictional works, radicalized expressions of Modernist self-reflexion.584 Whereas Hassan witnessed a destructive "will toward unmaking" in Postmodernism, Hutcheon sees his concept as yet another totalization, and she instead emphasizes Postmodernism's provisionality and its voluntary playfulness that "undercuts even this will."585 In this way, she argues, it exposes the fictionality of all human constructs, while nevertheless stressing our need for such fictions. It therefore does not desire to end all fictions, but to keep on playing, keeping in mind that it's all a construction: The Postmodern is in no way absolutist; it does not say that 'it is both impossible and useless to try and establish some hierarchical order, some system of priorities in life.' What it does say is that there are all kinds of orders and systems in our world - and that we create them all. That is their justification and their limitation. They do not exist 'out there,' fixed, given, universal, eternal; they are human constructs in history. This does not make them any the less necessary or desireable.586

An essential characteristic of postmodern literature in her conceptualization is therefore, next to irony and provisionality, metafiction, a technique by which a text acknowledges its own artificiality and the fictionality of the "objective" world. When reality has been destabilized and fragmented into multiple fictions, metafiction replaces objective mimesis as the prime telos of narration. What is more, the "Death of the 582

ibd. 11 ibd. 13 584 ibd. 40. This distinguishes Hutcheon's concept from earlier influential concepts of Postmodernism by Hassan, Fiedler and Graff, which rather apply to those "late-modern" avantgarde works. 585 ibd. 48 586 ibd. 43 583

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Author" and narrative self-reflexivity, so Hutcheon, contribute to the liberation of the reader, who is no longer supposed to adhere to one single meaning behind a text, but instead free to follow own strategies of sense-making. Postmodern literature assists him in this task by its open and playful form, and often even forces him to actively work through the text with its radical ambiguity, unreliable narration, disruptions of the linear flow of the narrative and its frequent crossings of ontological boundaries. The value of Hutcheon's concept lies in its openness. Considering the phenomenon a provisional, paradoxical and contradictory mode, her concept is able to encompass more than just specific artistic expressions, namely phenomena of the whole cultural domain. As such, it eludes a merely static opposition to Modernism that would still partake in "logocentric" binarisms and fail to do justice to the complex relationship between both epochs. Criticizing this tendency in Hassan, Hutcheon asserts that the Postmodern is not "either/or" but "both/and."587 Still, her idea of Postmodernism is different from Wallace's, as his critique is rather directed against those avant-garde schools which Hutcheon calls "late-modern". In fact, Wallace's critique of the destructiveness of avant-gardistic cultural expressions encompasses not merely postmodern literature, but much of the "tradition of the new" of Modernity. His demand for a new relevance of content, representationality and the idea of a communication with the reader may separate him from many postmodern classics, but not from Hutcheon's concept, as indeed many elements of her poetics can be found in his novel. Infinite Jest is made up of fragmented narratives that need to be connected by the reader, who "is responsible for ordering the work's jumbled chronological sequence, often overwhelming array of information and detail, numerous narratorial perspectives, and unsettling (or defamiliarizing) juxtaposition of the comic and grotesque."588 The text does not follow a linear chronology, but challenges commonplace cause-and-effect schemes and sets up a "simultaneity of events," as CARLISLE terms it. He identifies the structure of Infinite Jest as that of a Sierpinski Gasket, thus accounting for Wallace's indirect negative method: "Analogous to the patterned creation of holes in a Sierpinksi Gasket or to weaving something that is intended to remain incomplete, Wallace creates patterned holes by cutting out pieces of narrative, so that the reader constructs a narrative 'as much out of what's missing as what's there.'"589 Furthermore, Wallace's intent is to bring the reader to an active participation with the text, another prime element of 587

Hutcheon, Poetics 49 Jacobs 225 589 ibd. 404 588

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Hutcheon's concept. Likewise, despite his desire for the reader to identify with his story, he employs metafictional techniques to remind him of the fictionality of the text and the mediating subjectivity behind it.590 Boswell remarks that the footnotes work as a metafictional device, pointing to the constructedness of the text and the limitations of its narrator. Other important postmodern features of the text are its double-voicedness, the openness of its plots and the ambiguos status of the narrator. Nevertheless, there are essential differences between Hutcheon's account and his aesthetics, concering primarily the issue of metafiction. While she views it as the defining element of Postmodernism, Wallace sees it in a more critical light, and his use of metafiction is different from those which she mentions. In Narcissistic Narrative, she defines it as a text's "commentary on its own status as fiction," and as making "readers aware of their role in meaning-creation."591 According to her, this liberates the reader and turns him from consumer into a collaborator, as it is his work of actualization which completes the literary text.592 Yet metafiction likewise works to create a distance between reader and text, preventing any identification.593 While Wallace also underlines the importance of the reader, he criticizes this wall that a self-reflexive text erects with its constant assertions of its fictionality. For him, metafiction is mostly directed inward, to itself as a construct and its narrator as the prime focus of its narcissistic interest and desire. In the late 1960s, Barth believed metafiction to be the only way to write serious literature after the exhaustion of traditional literary forms, yet for Wallace, it has now become a "sincerity with a motive," a hollow stylistic game often devoid of any thematic function, pointing merely to an author's ingenuity. His story "Octet" addresses this issue more clearly: ...the old 'meta'-device desire to puncture some sort of fourth wall of realist pretense, although it seems like the latter is less a puncturing of any sort of real wall and more a puncturing of the veil of impersonality or effacement around the writer himself, i.e. with the now-tired S.O.P. 'meta'-stuff it's more the dramatist himself coming onstage from the wings and reminding you that what's going on is artificial, [...] an 'honesty' which personally you've always had the feeling is actually a highly rhetorical sham-honesty that's designed to get you to like him and approve of him [...] and feel flattered that he apparently thinks you're enough of a

590

As Nichols remarks, most of the text's information is presented as filtered or mediated (5) Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative xii 592 ibd. 39 593 cf. Lasch (97) and Wallace's statement quoted on p. 34 of this paper 591

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grownup to handle being reminded that what you're in the middle of is artificial (like you didn't know that already, like you needed to be reminded of it over and over again).594

Concern for the reader in radical works of self-reflexivity such as Barth's Funhouse-collection is hard to find. Since those works were useful to point to the arbitrariness of language, the textuality of culture and the fictionality of their society, Wallace considers them a necessary ground-clearing, after which, however, newly coherent and constructive attempts should be made, since diagnosis alone has not led to a cure. Writers like Barth, Donald Barthelme or Robert Coover emphasized the role of human beings as fiction-makers, a fact that Wallace embraces with his concept of AA and the role which he assigns to his reader in actualizing the text. His emphasis on the redemptive powers of narrative in fact echo some of the theoretical ideas of Barth, and even though he repeatedly criticizes the latter's self-reflexivity, they both have more in common than at first appears, as Barth's narrator in "Life Story" seems himself aware of the solipsistic and futile cycle of literary self-reflexivity, which he almost leads ad absurdum. Wallace's issue with metafiction rather concerns the fact that Barth and other writers radicalized and repeated this mode without much of a thematic motivation, leading to a monologic and abstract literary culture that is aware of the reader's existence, yet does not accept him as a partner in the game. In contrast, Wallace's novel asks the reader to actively engage in and identify with its characters' stories, providing not the freedom-from arbitrary conventions of Postmodernism's ironic "groundclearing," but a freedom-to engage in coherent, yet constructed, fictional worlds. "Be Your Own Author" is both a postmodern and an existentialist demand made on the reader. Yet whereas Postmodernism challenged traditional assumptions about language, culture and the possibility of communication, Wallace, growing up with these lessons, criticizes their onesidedness, while nevertheless keeping them in mind. Belonging to a new generation, he attempts to show that human existence and intersubjective communication, despite their contingency and arbitrariness, are still possible, by providing the reader with coherent and representational master narratives, which, however, are metafictionally restricted so as not to claim any absolute, objective validity. Quite often, his characters are afflicted with a specific kind of postmodern despair, in which they suffer from an extreme self-consciousness about their being "enmeshed" in 594

Wallace, "Octet" 125

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arbitrary "codes and conventions,"595 thus lacking, but still desiring, authentic selfhood. Their radical self-awareness signifies a distance from themselves and their actions, and it renders all their activity an "unnatural" and "calculating" performance for others, similar to Hal's "delivering."596 Wallace is no longer interested in the deconstruction of illusions, but in the ways one can live meaningfully with the lessons of his postmodern forefathers: "Of course you're a fraud, of course what people see is never you,"597 the narrator of his story "Good Old Neon" realizes. This fits in with Hutcheon's idea of Postmodernism as pointing out the constructedness of the sociocultural realm without diminishing its relevance. Influenced by Wittgenstein, Wallace accepts the arbitrariness of truth and meaning, yet argues that these are still relevant concepts, as they are created intersubjectively for specific purposes of our existence. Following the various postmodern deconstructions, he attempts to re-install a constructive discourse on individual subjectivity and ethics.598 In contrast to a monologic and destructive selfreflexivity, he employs a restricted metafiction that does not inhibit, but further the possibilities of his reader's identification with the text. It contributes to the establishment of his ethos, i.e. the credibility and authority that is necessary for a reader's active participation, especially since the postmodern age, following Lyotard, is marked by an "incredulity" toward master narratives. His use of metafiction signals his awareness of Poststructuralism's lessons and of his limitations as author and speaker, while nevertheless treating his subject matters earnestly. While metafiction initially might have signified honesty on part of the narrator, it is often a "sincerity with a motive" that fails to attract the reader's attention, let alone his engagement and identification. This is the dilemma of the narrator of "Octet", who starts out with the desire to write a story that should address the reader and his ethics, yet in midst realizes his failure and resorts to a metafictional commentary. Wallace's use of metafiction is motivated by the story's content, which deals with the self-reflexive postmodern despair and self-loathing as it afflicts the narrator, who despairs only more because of his escape into metafiction, "which in the late 1990s, when even Wes Craven is cashing in on metafictional self-reference, might come off lame and tired and facile, and also runs the risk of compromising the queer urgency about whatever it is you feel 595

Boswell 183 Such a feeling of inadequacy and inaccuracy is a symptom of "despair", as, in Kierkegaard's terms, it reflects a lack of conscious relation to oneself, i.e. acceptance of one's self and its limits. Cf. the narrator of Barth's "Autobiography". 597 Wallace, "Good Old Neon" 179 598 cf. Goerlandt 309 596

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you want the pieces to interrogate in whoever's reading them."599 Yet Wallace's narrator escapes the self-perpetuating cycle of solipsistic "despair" by abandoning this only more dishonest self-reflexive circle and opening up to the reader, honestly sharing his own inabilities and weaknesses, and asking him for help.600 "Asking For Help" and conceding one's weakness is one of the prime directives of AA to abandon the "illusion of autonomy" and the "despair of defiance". The story, so GOERLANDT, is "[a] literary attempt to reinstall [a] mutual understanding between reader and narrator"601 and it needs the reader's work of identifying with and actualizing it. The narrator struggles to persuade the reader to participate in this process of the construction of a textual validity, first by presenting short moral tales about contemporary solipsism, then by his metafictional commentary, and finally by addressing him directly and asking for his trust.602 In his "despair", "Asking For Help" appears the only way out of his cage, and it is thus that the story becomes relevant to the reader, who can equally open up to the narrator's confession and identify with his feelings of shame, inadequacy and inauthenticity. Yet, as he concedes, this is a risky strategy, as readers today are used to metafiction as a self-involved performance of the author. As in the cases of "despair" and AA narratives, honesty and admittance of one's weakness is the only way out of this "labyrinth" of self-loathing, and readers, like AA veterans, can detect when speakers replace communication with performance: ...address the reader directly and ask her straight out whether she's feeling anything like what you feel. The trick to this solution is that you'd have to be 100% honest. Meaning not just sincere but almost naked. Worse than naked - more like unarmed. Defenseless. 'This thing I feel, I can't name it straight out but it seems important, do you feel it too?' [...] Anything less than completely naked helpless pathetic sincerity and you're right back in the pernicious conundrum. You'll have to come to her 100% hat in hand.603

The poselessness of AA speakers testifies to their sincerity, one that is credible because it does not enhance their image, but merely asks for empathy, and such admittance is an effective component of their therapy. Likewise, Wallace's narrators in 599

ibd. 124 Recall that disclosure is one of the means of escaping "monologic" despair, following Kierkegaard 601 Goerlandt 309 602 This is also the reason why Wallace employs Second-Person-Narration in this story 603 Wallace, "Octet" 131. Honesty, though, does not equal total unambiguousity on the part of the narrator. 600

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"Octet" and Infinite Jest, providing the reader with one more example of the way out of self-involved "despair", attempt to establish an ethos by honestly pointing to their limitations as narrators and to the ungraspable and free "infinity" inside their characters. Instead of radical, self-involved metafiction, Wallace's self-reflexivity serves a concrete function and is directed toward the reader as a participant in the "dialogic" communicative process that the text initiates. The reader is not so much forced to work, as asked to contribute to the story as a "living transaction between human beings," one that requires mutual respect and honesty. Like AA, Wallace's model is democratic, in that it erases the traditional hierarchy between author and reader: ...it's going to make you [the author] look fundamentally lost and confused [...] and unsure about whether to trust even your most fundamental intuitions about urgency and sameness and whether other people deep inside experience things in anything like the same way you do...more like a reader [...] down here quivering in the mud of the trench with the rest of us, instead of a Writer, whom we imagine to be clean and dry and radiant of command presence and unwavering conviction as he coordinates the whole campaign from back at some gleaming abstract Olympian HQ.604

Wallace's idea of literature as an unhierarchical living transaction resembles Booth's concept of reading as friendship. According to him, the implied author of a text offers his friendship to the reader, and the more the reader is required to work, i.e. participate mentally in the production of meaning, the more he is able to identify with the implied author, thus "realizing" the text in his own life.605 In contrast to the abstract and self-reflexive postmodern avant-garde, then, BOOTH accounts for most readers' desire for an "intense engagement in a story, [as they] long for a coherent story of our own lives."606 His standards of friendship are characterized by intensity, reciprocity (i.e., reader-activation) and the authorial ethos. Postmodernism has challenged established authorities and conventions, so that nowadays each authority needs to establish itself and its credibility anew. For Wallace, this is a difficult business, as he attempts to write about ethics, religiosity and "despair", topics which in a cynical age appear to many to be outdated. Furthermore, the heavy and often unmotivated use of metafiction has exhausted this device. His attempt at a 604

ibd. 136 Booth 169-97 606 ibd. 192 605

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metafictionally restricted representationality is risky, as it depends on an identification by the reader and thus on his text's credibility. He therefore employs metafiction "overtly" to establish his ethos, and "covertly,"607 with the use of AA, to give the reader advice for making sense of his text. His use of self-reflexivity is directed toward him, "whose powers of empathy it wants to challenge,"608 and not toward itself.609 As an offer of friendship to the reader, his writing is concerned with the possibility of twodirectional communication in spite of linguistic and sociocultural arbitrariness. According to Boswell, this transaction resembles Wittgenstein's "language community." G. Postmodernism or "New Realism"? In an essay on "New Realist" writing after Postmodernism, GÜNTER LEYPOLDT quotes Robert Rebein: "Contemporary realist writers 'have not simply gone back' to the naive realism of former times, but instead 'absorbed Postmodernism's lasting contributions and gone on to forge a New Realism,' which is both 'reportorial' and 'selfconscious about language and the limits of mimesis (20).'"610 Although this may apply to some aspects of Wallace's work, the task of its categorization is complex, and ever since the publication of Infinite Jest readers and critics have focused on this question with different results. While his frequent statements against "Postmodernism" certainly point toward his status as a "Post-Postmodernist," his narratives about contemporary existence, personal despair and ethics invite interpretations that would put him into the category of a new school of Realism.611 According to LEYPOLDT, such a "New Realism" still deploys "classic postmodern devices," while at the same time aiming for "narrative closure and relative stylistic accessibility that leaves the reader's perceptive powers focused on the concepts, propositions and values inherent in the textual fictional worlds."612 This description applies to many of the mimetic and postmodern elements in Wallace's work, which, however, tends to lack such narrative closure. Similar to his combination of "cynicism and naiveté," it exhibits a blend of experimental postmodern writing and Realism's representational narratives, "fictions that work both ways," as he 607

In Hutcheon's terminology Boswell 194 609 Similar to the solipsistic cage in Infinite Jest, Wallace calls Postmodernist self-referentiality a "trap" (Boswell 18) 610 Leypoldt 22 611 "Wallace's 'radical Realism' is a call for a return to mimetic representation." (Jacobs 225) In contrast, Boswell, Hager and Daverman consider Wallace to belong to a new generation of Postmodernists. 612 Leypoldt 24-25 608

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acknowledges. Recognizing the exhaustion of these schools, he employs elements from both, which in his text mutually enforce and check each other. While its classic postmodern features force the reader into an active engagement with the text, assert the narrator's awareness of its arbitrariness and provide playful, parodic entertainment, the representational aspects attest to the text's relevance to the reader. Furthermore, they fulfill the role Wallace attributes to an author, by providing the reader with coherent narratives inside a textual heterotopia that may serve as examples of how to make sense of a disordered and fragmented pluralistic world. Following Gleason's description of the novels of DeLillo, one could say that Wallace still believes in language's ability to "interpret personal and historical experience."613 In an essay on a biography on Dostoevsky, he laments that hardly anyone today dares to write honestly about deep-felt issues like the Russian did: ...he appears to possess degrees of passion, conviction, and engagement with deep moral issues that we - here, today - cannot or do not permit ourselves. [...] Frank's bio prompts to ask ourselves why we seem to require of our art an ironic distance from deep convictions or desperate questions, so that contemporary writers have to either make jokes of them or else try to work them in under cover of some formal trick. [...] He wrote fiction about identity, moral value, death, will, sexual vs. spiritual love, greed, freedom, obsession, reason, faith, suicide. And he did it without ever reducing his characters to mouthpieces or his books to tracts. His concern was always what it is to be a human being - that is, how to be an actual person, someone whose life is informed by values and principles.614

This description reflects the existential and ethical themes in Wallace's writing, who is also concerned with concrete human existence. In opposition to those works of art which employ the postmodern stylistic repertoire merely for display, he employs it to activate the reader and provide him with the freedom to make the text his own. In other words, he delivers formally on the issues he addresses on the level of plot. Just as he considers empathy one of the most important abilities in a democratic society,615 he urges the reader to identify with his stories and characters. This concern, quite opposed to Postmodernism, is reflected in the successful method of AA, and also, as Wayne argues, in the narrative itself, which he views as an "experiential act" to indirectly represent the inner pains of others. Referring to "Octet", BOSWELL states that "Wallace 613

Gleason 140 Wallace, "Dostoevsky" 271, 265 615 cf. his "Kenyon Address" 614

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achieves what he sees as the primary aim of fiction, which is to 'allow us imaginatively to identify with characters' pain' so that 'we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside.'"616 As this quote makes clear, in this possibility of identification lies the principal and positive value of breaking the solipsistic "illusion of autonomy" and the cycle of "despair" in favor of a recognition of the "fact of recursivity" and Sartre's intersubjectivity. The narrator's metafictional "honesty" further reflects Wallace's model of a "true human relationship." Equally dissimilar to the postmodern avant-garde, yet in tune with Hutcheon's concept, is Wallace's reassertion of subjectivity. After the "ground-clearing" of Postmodernism, Wallace proceeds to re-establish subjectivity on the basis of the contingency of existence and the arbitrariness of culture. Sartre's ideas about existential freedom and choice inside an utterly contingent world serves as an example for the possibility of living consciously and meaningfully inside a multiverse that is both real and fictional. Wallace's aim is to constructively deal with the possibilities of concrete and free human existence inside the fictions that Postmodernism has exposed, avoiding both the nostalgia for a lost pre-reflexive paradise and the fatalism or hedonism of a "nothing matters." After all, the lessons of Postmodernism imply not only the fictitiousness of our world, but equally our necessity for such fictions. The loss of the objective world does not necessarily lead to the disappearance of values, norms and ethics, as it rather implies a demand to the subjects of a postmodern society to establish such ethics themselves. If society, culture and the self are nowadays devoid of their traditional objective sources of legitimation,617 the subject of today's heterogeneous democracies is required to create values and norms for and with himself and his society: "The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it," WALLACE stated in his Kenyon Address. As in a language-game, meaning and validity in the communal model he presents are generated inside an intersubjective process. The rules of a specific game, agreed upon by its players, makes certain "truths" visible, valid and meaningful for this communal space, yet the truth that never changes is that each player has the possibility to choose his "game" and the way he participates in it. In his essay on Usage, Wallace defined linguistic rules and social norms as "something that people have agreed on as the optimal way to do things for certain purposes. [...] The whole point of establishing norms is to help us evaluate our actions according to what 616 617

Boswell 189 Such as e.g. religion or master narratives in Lyotard's sense

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we as a community have decided our real interests and purposes are."618 Like Žižek's "shared fiction" of Lacan's symbolic order, norms are arbitrary in the sense that they lack any objective legitimation. The crisis of authority and ethics in Modernity is connected to the loss of the forces of legitimation. After the exposure of the arbitrariness of institutional authorities, norms, traditions, morals, and other pillars of the sociocultural reality formerly believed to be objectively given, new ways of establishing authority and ethics need to be found. Wallace, close to Mead's and Blumer's sociological concept of "symbolic interactionism", suggests the communal and intersubjective model of Wittgenstein's language games, in which "meaning is use" and democratically established by all participants in an open and recursive society. Wittgenstein's emphasis on use runs parallel to Kierkegaard's idea of truth as brought forth by one's own actions. The subject is not helpless in the face of an elusive and impossible truth, but an active co-creator in the establishment of meaning. The finite limits of consciously created boundaries of a game constitute an infinite space in which free subjects may occur and interact. Wallace likewise employs Kierkegaard's and Sartre's idea of subjectivity, according to which a self's conscious existence is not only dependent on "the other", but itself always "for-others". His proposal thus represents an ethical turn in American cultural discourse, as it attempts to re-establish the possibility of a literary treatment of subjectivity and ethics. Coherent ethical and sociocultural meaning nowadays is largely established by the media, as the various forms of Reality TV and "docutainment" provide the subject of a heterogeneous society with concrete narratives and value systems that guide him in his everyday choices. Wallace's aim is to re-claim this subject for literature: "insights and guides to value used to be among literature's jobs, didn't they?"619 he remarks in "E Unibus Pluram", and as he likewise stated in an interview: In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'll find a way both to depict this dark world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.620

618

Wallace, "Authority" 89-90 Wallace, "E Unibus" 75-76 620 McCaffery 131 619

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His narrator's self-reflexive honesty, his awareness of the limits of his language and understanding, and the creation of a textual ethos is one example of how a postmodern authority in an open and pluralistic society may proceed to establish a language-game with delimiting rules that can provide the playground for a human self to occur. As his use of existentialist philosophy, "dialogism", and the model of AA suggest, his idea of authority is not monologic or totalitarian, but essentially tied to "the other" inside one of the many communities a subject may choose to participate in. The protagonist of Michelangelo Antonioni's film Blow Up comes to similar conclusions. Having to realize the extent to which he constructs his reality, he is saved from despair by a group of pantomimes whom he watches simulating a match of tennis. Close to Schtitt's idea of the sport and Wittgenstein's concept of language-games, the match develops into a metaphor for human existence, as players and spectators act in perfect unison, despite their lack of apparatus, guided only by the rules of the game and their shared experience. Despite the disappearance of "objective reality" in Postmodernity, the protagonist learns, communication and social interaction are still possible, if the rules of the game, in spite of one's knowledge of their arbitrariness, remain intact and the game may continue. While Wallace's novel eludes easy classification, it can be situated within a cultural debate that, according to Mirzoeff, took place in the U.S. during the 1990s, one between a "closed circuit culture" and a vision of a "global network society", prompted by the emergence of the Internet and globalization, and inspired by novels such as William Gibson's Neuromancer.621 Its challenge of the "illusion of autonomy" in favor of a recognition of the "fact of recursivity" is also a critique of the traditional U.S. ideology of individualism and self-reliance. It may thus also be considered, next to works by Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers and Richard Ford, as part of a literary reevaluation, influenced by Existentialism, of the American Dream and the state of U.S. freedom around the millennium.

621

Mirzoeff 121 and 169. Cf. Gompert's description of anhedonia as a "closed circuit" (696). While such a closed culture is characterized by the passivity of its members, Mirzoeff's concept of open culture requires from its participants engagement and a sense of ethical obligation. 146

Summary Today's postmodern culture represents a special case of "despair", as its consciousness of the contingency of the world and of the constructedness of society, culture and identity, brings about a new awareness of human freedom that often leads to "anxiety" and paralysis.622 Postmodernism's lessons, so Wallace's artistic statement, should neither be used as an excuse for hedonism, individual irresponsibility and materialism, nor for aesthetic irrelevance, abstraction and solipsism, but as a challenge to create new and coherent possibilities of subjective human existence inside a community. The exhaustion of the postmodern mode, its absorption by the mass media and the use of its insights as rationalizations of narcissistic or irresponsible behavior, demands novel artistic approaches such as his. This explains his complex relationship with Postmodernism: while sharing many of its ideas and visions, he nevertheless recognizes the necessity for fresh artistic approaches with the ability to challenge and interrogate the reader. His agenda is to follow the postmodern "freedom-from" with a complementary account of a "freedom-to" inside a heterogeneous and open democratic society. Instead of avoiding difficult issues about contemporary life, he addresses the question of individual existence in today's world. Not merely diagnosing the fragmentation of the postmodern self, Wallace points to some possible causes for its current disintegration and provides the reader with the possibility of reclaiming his subjectivity. He replaces the solipsistic and merely destructive epistemological skepticism of Postmodernism with an account of the importance of intersubjectivity, an articulated demand for empathy, and a text that provides a demanding, yet overall coherent narrative intented to establish a twodirectional communicative "friendship" between author and reader. His emphasis on interrelatedness and communal experience signifies not a demand for conformity, but rather a plea to establish new possibilities of subjectivity and personal freedom. Wallace follows the postmodern deconstruction of truth and meaning with the concept of a "truth" that is established in an intersubjective discourse, and a textual "validity" that is likewise created in an intersubjective process between author and reader. Opposed to radical relativism, he asserts the existence of one fundamental truth, the conscious and free choice that belongs to human beings and that underlies all other social "truths," ethics or belief systems. Our only moral today, our only conscience, Martin Heidegger wrote in Sein und Zeit, is to live consciously. This plea is echoed in Wallace's novel. 622

cf. Lasch (32) and Sloterdijk 147

Despite its destructive force, Postmodernism has played into the hands of the dominant forces, just as "artistic expressions have become commodities"623 and ceased to be forms of renewal and change. This critique encompasses not just Postmodernism, but parts of the cultural avant-garde in Modernity, the "tradition of the new" that had once begun as a radical movement against the absorption of art by capitalism, yet paradoxically came to destroy not just its delimiting conventions and its revolutionary and redemptive abilities,624 but in effect itself. Nowadays, only few boundaries exist which can be crossed or used to distinguish the work of art from a product of consumption,625 while mere provocative gestures or destructions of conventions have become a standard in the art world. ECO had already realized the end of the avant-garde and the need for new artistic expressions outside the "tradition of the new" in 1965: Was ein paar Jahre zuvor noch dissonant geklungen hatte, wurde zum Ohrenschmaus. Daraus gab es, folgerte ich, nur einen Schluss zu ziehen: die Inakzeptabilität der Botschaft sei nicht mehr länger das Hauptkriterium für experimentelles Erzählen. [...] Was sich abzeichne, sei ein versöhntes Zurück zu neuen Formen von Akzeptablem und Vergnüglichem. [...] Ich glaube nämlich, dass es möglich sein wird, Elemente von Bruch und Infragestellung auch in Werken zu finden, die sich scheinbar zu leichtem Konsum anbieten, und, demgegenüber festzuhalten, dass manche provokatorisch erscheinende Werke [...] in Wahrheit gar nichts in Frage stellen.626

Wallace follows neither Eco's argument for consumer-oriented "low" art, nor Horkheimer and Adorno's request for "high" art to challenge the consumer's apathy. His novel does not exhibit the "Modernist" either/or-dichotomy, which was still employed by early postmodernists, but rather the both/and-structure of Hutcheon's 623

McCaffery 133. As Jameson notes, the avant-gardistic impetus resembles a capitalist pattern of innovation. 624 Baudrillard argues that the "tradition of the new" vanishes in the age of the "hyperreal" 625 cf. Horkheimer and Adorno. Especially important to note here are Marcel Duchamp, the Dadaists, and later Andy Warhol. Wallace attacks the avant-garde in the interview with McCaffery. See also Calinescu's analysis of kitsch. According to Baudrillard, art has become indifferent and almost disappeared because of the lack of fundamental values and the unprecendented liberation of forms, styles and cultures (Stearns). 626 Eco 73-74. (What had sounded dissonant a few years ago, has become pleasurable. There was, so I reasoned, just one conclusion to draw: the nonacceptability of the nessage were no longer the main criterion for experimental narration. […] What were about to come would be a reconciled return to new forms of acceptable and enjoyable story-telling, […] For I believe that it will also be possible to find elements of rupture and critical inquiry in works which appear to lend themselves to easy consumption, and, in contrast, to observe that some seemingly provocative works […] in truth do not question anything.) 148

conceptualization of Postmodernism. It blends an earnest and entertaining representational narrative with theoretical reflections, social critique and a demanding form. This combination of textual "pleasure and pain," and his concern with human subjectivity and ethics, signifies an original and serious artistic gesture. His critique of Postmodernism is directed against the metafictional and cynical avant-garde, and it serves to carve out a territory for a newly engaged and earnest literature willing to constructively interrogate issues of contemporary existence. Already in 1988, he wrote about the "abiding faith that the conscientious, talented and lucky artist of our age retains the power to effect change, [...] to color cats, to order chaos, to transform the void: into floor and debt into treasure."627

627

"Fictional Futures" 52-53 149

List of Works Cited Works by David Foster Wallace: "Authority and American Usage." Consider the Lobster and Other Essays. London: Abacus, 2005. 66-127. "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction." A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. London: Abacus, 1997. 21-82. "Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young." The Review of Contemporary Fiction Vol. 8, No. 3 (Fall 1988): 36-53. "Good Old Neon." Oblivion: Stories. London: Abacus, 2004. 141-81. Infinite Jest. London: Abacus, 1996. "Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky." Consider the Lobster and Other Essays. London: Abacus, 2005. 255-274. "Kenyon Commencement Address. May 21st, 2005." January 29th, 2008. . "Octet." Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. London: Abacus, 1999. 111-36. "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness From Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed." Consider the Lobster and Other Essays. London: Abacus, 2005. 60-65. Works From Other Authors: Adorno, Theodor W. "Der Artist als Statthalter." Gesammelte Schriften Band II: Noten zur Literatur. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974. 114-28. ---, "Fernsehen und Ideologie." Tiedemann, Rolf. Theodor W. Adorno. Eine Auswahl. Frankfurt: Büchergilde Gutenberg, 1971. 277-91. Altieri, Charles. "The Theory of Emotions in Eliot's Poetics". February, 15th, 2008. http://socrates.berkeley.edu/%7Ealtieri/manuscripts/ELIOTMLA.html>. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Probleme der Poetik Dostoevskijs. München: Hanser, 1971. Barth, John. Lost in the Funhouse. New York: Bantam Books, 1978. Baudelaire, Charles. "Die Dichtung vom Haschisch." Der Künstler Und Das Moderne Leben: Essays, >Salons