David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest in an Independent School Context

Spring 2015

By Madeline Nagy, Z. Bart Thornton

In the spring of 1996 — when I was 28 and in my third year of independent school teaching — I stumbled on an 1,100-page novel that “blew my mind” or, at the very least, opened it up to the limitless powers of the imagination. (It’s the Ulysses of our era.) Since first reading the text, I have desperately wanted to teach it. This fall, I will do so for the second time, in an elective called “The Postmodern Novel.” First, let me tell you about the book.

David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest unfolds in the near future. 1 The United States has merged with Canada and Mexico; northern New England has become a toxic waste dump palmed off on the Canadians. Quebecois separatists — many of them in wheelchairs — prowl the lower states, performing terrorist acts. In this subplot, Wallace presciently engages many of the ecological debates that would emerge in the early years of the 21st century. At the time of the action, the North American calendar has been sold to the highest corporate bidder, giving us the Year of the Whopper, the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad, and so on. Citizens spend their time watching entertainment cartridges. One of these cartridges — highly sought — produces in its viewer a state of blissful, but fatal, catatonia. Wary of the ways in which we surrender ourselves to commodities and cheap entertainments, Wallace seemed to foretell the world in which we now live largely (for better or worse) online.

Infinite Jest is set mainly at a Massachusetts tennis academy founded by a mad genius and at a residence for recovering addicts just down the hill. The novel explores the price we pay for our frantic pursuits. We meet intellectual tennis prodigies and wayward teenagers, professional football players, avant-garde filmmakers, and middle-aged people struggling to find a community that will lead them to the Higher Power that will help them change their lives. The novel veers from imaginative satire to gritty realism. As I explain in my course description, the novel enlightens and entertains; it challenges and provokes. And for fully engaged and open-minded readers, the novel provides a literary experience like no other. 

As rewarding as it is, this novel has its attendant difficulties. First of all, it weighs more than two pounds. Its chronology is meaningfully scrambled. Wallace employs a vocabulary that way transcends that of the SAT. The book includes dozens of key characters and almost a hundred pages of footnotes, some of which are crucial to the reader’s understanding of the novel. There are 10-page-long descriptions of tennis matches (brilliant though they are); serious discussions of the insidious nature of addiction; and a few scenes of violence, akin to the hyper-stylized sort that Quentin Tarantino and David Lynch were bringing to the cinema at the time. The novel also highlights the profound significance of familial connections. As Dave Eggers writes in a foreword to the 10th anniversary reissue of the novel, “The themes here are big, the emotions real, and the cumulative effects seismic.”  2

The novel is a puzzle and a comedy, a baffling mystery and a philosophical romp. It is a text best offered to mature students who are ready for its challenges. (Last fall, several of my seniors penned memorable college essays about their encounter with this university-level text.) I’ve spent the last few years studying the book and its critics — last May, I presented a paper on the novel in Bloomington, Illinois, and in September 2014, I presented a different essay at an international conference on Wallace in Paris, France — and I believe that the students we place in the course can handle its complexities. I think its size, scale, and shape will train its readers to analyze vast amounts of data; future lawyers, scientists, and professors will be primed by Infinite Jest. And I do my very best to help students make sense of this brilliant behemoth, which offers a profoundly panoramic take on contemporary American culture.

In weekly written reflections and longer “seminar papers” (midway through the fall semester and at the tail end), students grappled with the issues Wallace raised in the space of the novel. Having read personal essays of his (from the wonderfully titled A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again) and selections from D. T. Max’s biography of him, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, my seminarians were well prepared to make correlations between Wallace’s life, his nonfiction, and his fiction. To some extent, the course tended to be self-selecting; many of our eligible juniors and seniors read the description (1,100 pages! 388 endnotes!) and chose a different elective. Those who enrolled knew — or strongly suspected — that the course would be among the most challenging (and, I like to think, among the most compelling) of their Upper School careers. 

If other teachers choose to offer a course in Wallace’s fiction, I strongly suggest that they are completely candid with those who might enroll (and the students’ parents). Those who chose this experience were, to a person, satisfied by the experience, although it was at times more arduous than that faced by students in more conventional electives. By the end of the course, I believe that my students understood Wallace (and, certainly, Infinite Jest); I also believe that they had a more nuanced understanding of themselves and the world in which they (for better or worse) live.

Students at the Collegiate School, like most independent school products, tend to be bright, curious, ambitious, and compassionate. To be sure, Infinite Jest magnifies these qualities and characteristics. Even if many of my students can understand high school alcohol-and-drug experimentation — and, certainly, most can identify with a desire to achieve high-level athletic performance — they find themselves discomfited by the presence of characters like “Poor Tony” Krause, an addict who spends a portion of the novel incontinent in a Boston public library. Such aspects of the novel open independent school students to the sobering reality of addictive adult life. In the expansive space of the novel, Wallace argues — subtly, but surely — that we, Americans in particular, need to open ourselves to a less shallow, more spiritual paradigm if we are (any of us) to find peace.

Let me cede the discussion to one of my students, Madeline Nagy; I believe that her take on the novel, at age 18, is considerably more astute than mine, even today, at age 46. Not only does she zero in on some of the central aspects of the narrative — religion, addiction, and fate, for instance — Madeline also shows the depth and range we can expect of our finest independent school students, those who have fully absorbed our lessons regarding the interrogation(s) of literary texts and everyday realities. The following is a selection from Madeline’s essay.

Religion in Infinite Jest

Within the span of Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace uses the word “religion” a mere eleven times, a shocking number considering the gargantuan book’s 1,079 pages. However, despite the rare, spelled-out reference, Infinite Jest says much about religion, and the lack thereof, in Wallace’s predicted, dystopian future. Throughout Infinite Jest, many of the characters grapple with their fears regarding religion, replacement of traditional worship, and distrust of God.

Don Gately, a recovering addict, describes his religious experience as “[feeling] like a rat that’s learned one route in the maze to the cheese and travels that route in a ratty-type fashion and whatnot,” and “[kneeling] and [praying] or [meditating] or [trying] to achieve a Big-Picture spiritual understanding of a God as he can understand Him... [but still feeling] Nothing — not nothing but Nothing, an edgeless blankness that somehow feels worse than the sort of unconsidered atheism he Came In with” (443). …

Yet, Gately is not the only character in Infinite Jest to question traditional religion: Barry Loach’s brother leaves a seminary when he loses his faith in God’s goodwill, Hal hates talking to Mario about God’s role in their father’s death, and that same father, James Orin Incandenza, “lasted two and a half months and then drifted gradually away from [AA], turned off by the simplistic God-stuff and covert dogma” (689). However, all of these characters’ doubts originate from the fear “that God might regard the issue of whether [they] believe there’s a God or not as fairly low on his/her/its list of things s/he/it’s interested in re you” (205). In other words, many characters’ faith falters as they lose proof of God’s attention. Thus, many of Infinite Jest’s characters turn their worship towards what they know will recognize, and reward them — instant gratification, dedicated audiences, and addictive drugs. 

In his speech entitled This Is Water, David Foster Wallace comments, “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 — be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.”…

As Infinite Jest’s addicted come to realize the consequences of their drugs, many flee to Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous to find help. Unfortunately, their previous cyclical religious experiences have poisoned their faith and made them fear trusting any higher power — a justifiable fear considering that their previous reliance upon their drug-gods landed them in AA. Thus, AA’s mandated worship leaves many addicts feeling deceived and betrayed. Exemplifying this religious confusion, one Ennet House resident questions,

So, this purports to be a disease, alcoholism? A disease like a cold? Or like cancer? I have to tell you, I have never heard of anyone being told to pray for relief from cancer... So what is this? You’re ordering me to pray? Because I allegedly have a disease? I dismantle my life and career and enter nine months of low-income treatment for a disease, and I’m prescribed prayer? Does the word retrograde signify? Am I in a sociohistorical era I don’t know about? What exactly is the story here? (180)

Yet, as the addicts settle into AA’s prayer routine, they find that the worst effect of their false worship was not the lies told by their distorted gods, but the silence the drugs forced upon them. For, when they engaged in a worship of drugs, their mind followed a rigid cycle of either thinking only of how to get more of the drug, or not thinking at all because of the drug’s muzzling effects. Therefore, when the addicts leave their drugs behind, they no longer remember how to censor their thoughts, or how to deal with the mind’s constant attack of over-information, and they learn that

sometime after [their] Substance of choice has just been taken away from [them] in order to save [their] life, as [they] hunker down for required AM and PM prayers, [they] will find [themselves] beginning to pray to be allowed to literally lose [their] mind, to be able to wrap [their] mind in an old newspaper or something and leave it in an alley to shift for itself, without [them]. (201) 

Indeed, “[Gately] often found himself humbly praying for his head to finally just explode already and get it over with,” so unequipped was he to control a newly active mind after so many years of muted consciousness (466).

However, after the addicts learn that perhaps AA’s religion can help them re-train their unleashed mind, they are able to find solace within a truer form of worship, and often discover that their religion need not be to some intangible being, but “that God... speaks and acts entirely through the vehicle of human beings,” making that higher power much more attainable and accessible (205). And, after this realization, many of Infinite Jest’s former drug users learn that if God can speak to them through others, they can access some small God within themselves to help others in the same way. … And although many of the AA participants would not consider their neighbor to be the very God for whom they have been searching, Wallace combats this argument when he informs the reader “that AA and NA and CA’s ‘God’ does not apparently require that you believe in Him/Her/It before He/She/It will help you,” thereby reassuring the reader that no god abandons (201).

Finally, Wallace soothes the reader’s doubt that true faith may not be trivial, noting “that certain sincerely devout and spiritually advanced people believe that the God of their understanding helps them find parking places and gives them advice on Mass. Lottery numbers” (204). Furthermore, Wallace’s only unfalteringly religious character is Mario Incandenza, the most disfigured and regressed character. Mario is not fearful of God’s inattention — “[his] nighttime prayers take almost an hour and sometimes more and are not a chore. He doesn’t kneel; it’s more like a conversation. And he’s not crazy, it’s not like he hears anybody or anything conversing back with him,” but he still holds faith that someone is listening (590). And, Wallace proves that religion is not only for those with pure pasts by establishing Ennet House as a sanctuary for Mario, stating, 

Mario’s felt good both times in Ennet’s House because it’s very real; people are crying and making noise and getting less unhappy, and once he heard someone say God with a straight face and nobody looked at them or looked down or smiled in any sort of way where you could tell they were worried inside. (591)

Here, Wallace implies a contrast between religion in the world of the recovering (Ennet House), and religion in the world of the simply surviving, as if true religion were much harder to tangibly feel in the outside world. Yet, this contrast is not hard to discount; for example, Hal tells Mario “I’ll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I’m not crazy about. I’m pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I’m not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I, Boo” (40). Hal has never let himself be vulnerable and trusting enough to admit that he is afraid of being ignored by God, thus he turns religion into a casual statement, a joke. Moreover, Hal did not create the concept of God as merely a killer, but rather is the product of Wallace’s modern world which propagates the fallacy. For instance, during Eschaton, the narrator describes Otis P. Lord as “more or less having to play God, tallying kill-ratios and radiation-revels and parameters of fallout” (328). Hal and his friends’ Eschatonian God is an ungraceful dictator of life and death, thus it is unsurprising that they would stray away from His worship. However, Wallace reestablishes God as a savior even outside of the world of addicts and Ennet House, for, when Avril discovers that Hal has eaten mold, she yells, “God! Help! My son ate this! Help!” resorting back to God when all else seems lost (11). Thus, Wallace establishes true religion in Infinite Jest as the parachute which saves the falling when they realize that their possessions, or fans, or drugs, were only pretending to catch them.

Notes

1. David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (Boston: Little Brown, 1996).

2. David Eggers, “Foreword,” in David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (Boston: Little Brown, 10th anniversary issue, 2006). 

Madeline Nagy

Madeline Nagy, who was a student in Dr. Thornton’s seminar on Wallace and the Postmodern Novel, graduated from The Collegiate School in June 2014. She is currently an undergraduate at The University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

Z. Bart Thornton

Z. Bart Thornton, who holds a Ph.D. in American Literature from The University of Texas at Austin, currently serves as dean of faculty at The Collegiate School (Virginia). In the last year, he has presented papers on David Foster Wallace at conferences in Bloomington, Illinois and Paris, France.