Girl With Curious Hair and Infinite Jest: the exorcism and the answer

TL;DR

In Girl With Curious Hair (1989) Wallace built the tools Infinite Jest would later use at novel scale. Its closing novella, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, is the clearest single case: Wallace called it his attempt to blow up the self-referential fiction he had inherited, and out of that demolition he stated — as an adman's fantasy and a young writer's creed — almost every idea the big novel would dramatize. A final commercial after which "no one will ever leave" is the lethal Entertainment arrived at from the advertising side. A creed of fiction "that stabs you in the heart" is the anti-Entertainment aesthetic IJ enacts against the pacifying cartridge inside it. A blocked young archer who cannot reach his own feelings is Hal's condition sketched seven years early. And the whole collection rehearses the move IJ completes: getting past a corrosive, sincerity-mocking irony to something an addict can say and mean. This essay traces those wires — but it also honors the archive's own restraint, which held most of them at "shared preoccupation" rather than direct prophecy, and declined the tempting reading (the westward frame, the annular imagery) that the text will not actually bear.

The exorcism: Westward as the book Infinite Jest answers

The plainest statement of the link is Wallace's own, given while he was drafting the novel. In the interview that ran alongside E Unibus Pluram in 1993, he describes Westward as his attempt to "detonate metafiction" — "metafiction's real end has always been Armageddon" — so that he could then, "out of the rubble reaffirm the idea of art being a living transaction between humans" (mccaffery-1993-interview). The novella is that detonation performed in public. Its cast studies under the famous metafictionist "Dr. C—— Ambrose," author of "Lost in the Funhouse," and the story argues with Barth-style postmodernism as a Barth-style postmodern text (gwch-westward) — Barth being the writer the same interview names as the "patriarch for my patricide" (mccaffery-1993-interview). The title's governing epigraph is lifted straight from Barth: "For whom is the Funhouse fun?" (gwch-westward).

Three years later, on the Infinite Jest book tour, Wallace told the same story stripped of the formal dress: he "had kind of written my homage and also patricidal killing thing to Barth"; the novella "was really meant to be extremely sad. And to sort of be a kind of suicide note"; "it’s simultaneously absolutely homicidal and a fawning homage"; and, on the cost of writing it, "I really felt like I’d killed this huge part of myself doing it" (lipsky-becoming-yourself, whose own back matter glosses the novella as "a kind of sequel to John Barth’s ‘Lost in the Funhouse.’"). The suicide-note framing is worth carrying through everything below: the demolition was a self-amputation, not an exercise, and Infinite Jest is what got built with what was left.

What makes the novella an exorcism rather than a homage is the verdict it passes on the mode it imitates. Metafiction, it says, "is untrue, as a lover. It cannot betray. It can only reveal" — it is "the act of a lonely solipsist's self-love" (gwch-westward). Against that dead end the young archer Mark Nechtr formulates a counter-program: "Make the reader a lover, who wants to be inside. Then do him," in pursuit of the ambition to "write something that stabs you in the heart" (gwch-westward). This is not a claim about Infinite Jest — the archive's reading of the novella carries no interpretive thesis, only method — but it is the method: a fiction that wounds the reader awake instead of lulling him, which is exactly the aesthetic stance IJ takes against the seductive-passive Entertainment it depicts. The interview supplies the ethic in the first person: good work comes from being "willing to sort of die in order to move the reader" (mccaffery-1993-interview), and the novel's difficulty — its withheld connections, its endnotes — is that ethic made formal. The relation to the essay is symmetrical: E Unibus Pluram diagnoses the disease and prophesies an "anti-rebel" cure, and Westward, published four years before the essay in the same collection's spirit, is the cure attempted in fiction (e-unibus-pluram-ij-connections). The through-line runs essay → novella → novel: a program stated, rehearsed, then executed at length. (The sincerity side of this program is the subject of irony-and-sincerity; the anti-Entertainment aesthetic itself is developed in entertainment-and-the-self.)

The Entertainment, arrived at from the advertising side

IJ's central device — a filmed entertainment so perfect that anyone who begins it cannot stop and is consumed — appears in Westward as an adman's manifesto. J.D. Steelritter, staging a mass "Reunion of Everyone Who's Ever Appeared in a McDonald's Commercial," foresees a final advertisement after which "No one will ever leave the rose farm's Reunion," the crowd "succumbing, as one"; "Advertising will have finally arrived at the death that's been its object all along... The last commercial" (gwch-westward). This is the samizdat's logic exactly — an entertainment whose perfect success is the terminal consumption of its audience — but reached from the commercial rather than the auteur-film side. The archive weights it as prefiguration precisely because it is a manifesto: comic and apocalyptic, never dramatized as a working artifact the way the cartridge is, but stating the thesis outright (gwch-westward). And the wire now runs forward into the novel's own self-description: on the 1996 tour Wallace said "the original title was A Failed Entertainment. The idea is that the book is structured as an entertainment that doesn’t work" (lipsky-becoming-yourself) — the adman's dream of the entertainment that works terminally, answered seven years later by a book designed as one that doesn't.

Westward also rehearses what happens to art once it escapes its maker. J.D. has licensed Ambrose's Funhouse story as the model for a national franchise of discotheques — "It sold books, it'll sell mirrored discotheque franchises"; the "For Whom" story is the thing he had "to use to blueprint the franchise campaign off of" — the self-referential art object turned mass venue, its author's intent beside the point (gwch-westward). That is the samizdat's career in miniature: JOI's private, desperate art-object ends the novel as a commodity contended for by states and terrorists. The archive holds this wire, like most here, at shared preoccupation rather than prophecy.

The collection sketches the same object in miniature elsewhere. In Little Expressionless Animals, the industry dreams of a performer who is "like some lens, a filter for that great unorganized force that some in the industry have spent their whole lives trying to locate and focus" — an entertainment refined until facts acquire "the capacity of facts to transcend their internal factual limitations and become, in and of themselves, meaning, feeling" (girl-with-curious-hair). That is the Entertainment's promise stated as a game-show executive's fantasy. The same story carries the collection's darkest image of what spectation costs: in a 1970 movie theater, "The child's eyes enter the cartoon" while in the next seat a stranger molests her mother in the dark, the mother sitting silent so the absorbed child won't turn around — entertainment holding every eye while the harm happens beside it, the origin of the story's whole chain of damage (girl-with-curious-hair). And in the title story, the affectless narrator keeps "the English Leather Cologne commercial taped on my new Toshiba VCR" and watches it compulsively, to the exclusion of a live partner (girl-with-curious-hair) — the Entertainment-object in cameo, and pointedly an advertisement, which is what ties it to the media critique the whole collection is rehearsing. Even the grotesque John Billy carries the pacification logic in farce: a bootleg liquor that keeps a population "glazed and politically inactive" (girl-with-curious-hair), which is the Armée des Fauteuils Rollents' logic for the Entertainment played as a tall tale.

Underneath all of these is the definition E Unibus Pluram gives and IJ builds on: something is malignantly addictive when "it causes real problems for the addict, and (2) it offers itself as relief from the very problems it causes," so that the era's representative art-object becomes "a fiction analogue of the best drug you ever took" (e-unibus-pluram-ij-connections). The samizdat is that definition run to its asymptote; Westward's last commercial is the same asymptote imagined from inside the ad agency. The fuller account of the Entertainment as a device belongs to entertainment-and-the-self; what Girl With Curious Hair contributes is the prototype and the paper trail.

Irony as armor, and the sincerity the novel is reaching for

The collection's other great rehearsal is the irony problem. My Appearance — the story the E Unibus Pluram material names as the essay's fiction companion — dramatizes, in 1989, the thesis the essay would argue in 1993. A television actress is coached to survive a Letterman appearance by a husband whose doctrine is that "The joke is now on people who're sincere," and that one must therefore be "not-sincere" first, ridiculing oneself before the show can (girl-with-curious-hair). The trap is airless: "even if something's an anti-show, if it's a hit, it's a show," and the host is "making money ridiculing the exact things that have put him in a position to make money ridiculing things" (girl-with-curious-hair) — rebellion co-opted, sold back, inescapable through more irony. The story even stages irony's metaphysical endpoint: "no one is really the way they have to be seen," because of the ironist television will "make it true. By watching him" (girl-with-curious-hair) — a self with no authentic interior behind the performance. Wallace never stopped naming that host as the problem's face: on the 1996 tour, "if there were one, like, archangel of this mentality, it’s Letterman" — "the master of the deadpan, ironic echo of old truisms, that expose their vacuity" (lipsky-becoming-yourself). The story had seated its actress across the desk from that archangel seven years before the diagnosis got its formal statement.

This is the cage IJ writes against, and Wallace named the cage in the same terms in both 1993 texts. The interview: postmodern irony has "gone from liberating to enslaving," and he quotes the line about "irony being the song of the prisoner who's come to love his cage" (mccaffery-1993-interview); the essay adopts Hyde's near-identical verdict that irony carried over time "is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage," and that in the culture it has produced "the crime is naïveté" (e-unibus-pluram-ij-connections). IJ's answer is the recovery material: the banal, single-entendre clichés of the AA rooms work because they are past irony, in a place where the question of whether you mean it is life-or-death; Mario is the novel's one un-ironic figure; and the whole book is the attempted execution of the essay's anti-rebel prophecy (e-unibus-pluram-ij-connections). Wallace's baseline commitment behind all of it, from the interview: "Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being" (mccaffery-1993-interview). Girl With Curious Hair diagnoses the disease; Infinite Jest attempts the cure. The sincerity-after-irony debate in full is the province of irony-and-sincerity.

Mark Nechtr, and the interior that cannot be reached

The most precise single prefiguration is a character. Mark Nechtr, Westward's blocked archer, is described in language that reads as a first draft of Hal's condition: "When he has emotions, it's like he's denied access to them," he "feels disembodied, other," and — in the story's flat summary — "either he doesn't feel anything, or he doesn't feel anything" (gwch-westward). This is the exact double-bind that defines Hal: a rich felt interior sealed off from any outward expression or even from the self's own possession of it, a man who appears cool and cheery while inwardly estranged from everything he feels. The archive records the link as prefiguration of the condition, with the direction shared but not identical — Mark's estrangement is soothed when he shoots, whereas Hal's case runs toward the terminal (gwch-westward).

The affect-dead interior recurs across the collection, always slightly turned. The title story's narrator cannot be reached by drugs or feeling — "LSD and other controlled substances unfortunately do not affect me" — and is read by an acquaintance as radiating something "so totally happy," the void mistaken for wellness (girl-with-curious-hair). The figurant preoccupation is here too: Little Expressionless Animals studies faces that move only "through different configurations of blankness" (girl-with-curious-hair), the surface with nothing behind it that IJ will develop into the wraith's account of background people filmed as human furniture. These are the early sightings of the anhedonia material IJ builds around Kate Gompert and refracts through Hal; the archive is careful to hold them as shared preoccupation, since Wallace's recurring figure of the affect-dead interior points in several directions at once (girl-with-curious-hair). The novel's own two-species theory of that interior is worked out in depression-anhedonia.

Solipsism, and the voice that says "you are loved"

If there is a single problem the whole collection shares with the novel, it is solipsism — the impossibility of reaching another self across the gap. Westward states it at both poles at once. Its Burgess epigraph: "As we are all solipsists, and all die, the world dies with us. Only very minor literature aims at apocalypse" (gwch-westward). Mark's "central delusion" is that he is "the only person in the world who feels like the only person in the world" — while the adman inverts the same fact into a sales tool: "Solipsism binds us together" (gwch-westward). That is the loneliness IJ's entertainment-culture both produces and sells back to itself, and it is the Wittgensteinian ground Wallace claimed for the whole project: the interview calls the Investigations "the single most comprehensive and beautiful argument against solipsism that's ever been made" (mccaffery-1993-interview). Television, on the same account, "help[s] us deny that we're lonely" by supplying "the facsimile of a relationship without the work of a real relationship" (mccaffery-1993-interview) — the anesthetic that the Entertainment perfects. The solipsism theme in full is communication-and-solipsism.

The most startling rhyme is the novella's ending. Westward closes on a second-person seduction — "It's a love song," resolving into the passive "You are loved" (gwch-westward) — a caregiver's voice addressed to a reclining, passive listener. That is uncannily close to how IJ theorizes the Entertainment's fatal content: a veiled maternal figure, filmed from a crib's-eye view, telling the infantilized viewer that they are loved. The collection keeps circling the same infantile comfort: Westward's defense of rerun television as "A womb with a view" (gwch-westward) is the regressive passivity the Entertainment weaponizes, and J.D.'s doctrine that "We produce what makes you want to need to consume" (gwch-westward) is the manufacture of appetite the novel inherits. The archive is scrupulous that this address is a tonal device in Westward, not a described lethal artifact, and that the IJ-content reading is itself a theory rather than settled text — so the "you are loved" wire is logged as shared preoccupation, the strongest of the soft links rather than a hard prophecy (gwch-westward).

Points of friction — how much weight the link bears

• Most of the wires are kinship, not prophecy. The archive's own reading of the collection is conspicuously restrained: of its many cross-corpus connections, only a handful sit at "prefiguration," and the rest are held at "shared preoccupation" — the shared problem rather than a prefigured scene (girl-with-curious-hair, gwch-westward). The genealogy is firmest exactly where an external text makes it explicit: where E Unibus Pluram, the McCaffery interview, or the 1996 tour tapes state the program in Wallace's own voice (e-unibus-pluram-ij-connections, mccaffery-1993-interview, lipsky-becoming-yourself). Elsewhere the honest claim is that the two works press the same nerve, not that one planted the other.

• The westward frame does not map onto the novel. It is tempting to read the novella's title and cross-country drive as structurally significant to IJ, but the archive reads the westward-empire frame as having no strong echo — IJ is not organized around westward expansion — and confines the transferable residue to the annular/spin image (the wheel that seems to "spin against the spin"), which recurs but does not make Westward itself annular the way the whole of IJ is (gwch-westward). The structural reading proper lives in annularity; the westward frame is a place the connection is declined, not asserted.

• Direction and register differ, sometimes sharply. The affect-dead figures are not interchangeable: the title story's narrator is a cheerful psychopath whose numbness is unfelt, where IJ's anhedonia is suffered (girl-with-curious-hair); Mark's estrangement is soothable, Hal's is not (gwch-westward); John Billy's pacifying liquor is grotesque farce where the Entertainment is dramatized as lethal (girl-with-curious-hair). The resemblances are real, but they are resemblances of preoccupation across a change of key.

• The text argues with its own thesis. Westward is not a tract; it plants its own rebuttals. J.D.'s doctrine that fear and desire are manufactured is answered inside the story by Magda's "Fear and desire are already married. Freely" (gwch-westward), and the whole novella is a metafiction attacking metafiction. Reading it as a straight blueprint for IJ flattens a text whose method is self-contradiction; the safest claim is that it is where Wallace rehearsed the arguments the novel would stage, not a key that decodes it.

• A note on the evidence base. The collection survives in the archive as reflowed electronic text with no fixed print pagination, so its quoted spans are located by paragraph index rather than page; every span above is verified word-for-word against that text, and the collection advances no interpretive claim about any IJ crux — its entire novel-bearing signal is carried as documented connection, not as argument (girl-with-curious-hair, gwch-westward).

Sources

• gwch-westward — the archive's standalone record of the closing novella: the "last commercial" Entertainment prototype, the "stabs you in the heart" anti-metafiction creed, Mark Nechtr's sealed interior, the solipsism poles, the licensed-Funhouse commerce knot, and the "you are loved" close, with the weighting of each link.
• girl-with-curious-hair — the archive's record of the collection (stories 1–9): the Little Expressionless Animals "lens/filter" entertainment fantasy and theater scene, Girl's taped commercial and affectless narrator, My Appearance's irony-as-armor doctrine, John Billy's pacifying liquor, the figurant sightings.
• mccaffery-1993-interview — Wallace's mid-drafting statement of the program in the first person: Westward as an attempt to "detonate metafiction," Barth as "patriarch for my patricide," irony as the prisoner's cage, fiction as a "living transaction between humans," the willingness "to sort of die in order to move the reader," Wittgenstein against solipsism.
• lipsky-becoming-yourself — the 1996 tour tapes: the "patricidal killing thing" / "a kind of suicide note" account of Westward in Wallace's own unguarded voice, "I really felt like I'd killed this huge part of myself doing it"; the Failed Entertainment title statement; Letterman as the irony problem's "archangel."
• e-unibus-pluram-ij-connections — the essay Westward twins: the malignant-addiction definition, the "best drug you ever took" art-object, Hyde on irony's cage, "the crime is naïveté," and the anti-rebel program IJ attempts to execute.

The essay above stays in paraphrase; the novel's own words on all this are gathered, page-cited, on the entertainment-self quotation page.