Four Theories Toward the Timeless Brilliance of Infinite Jest

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TL;DR

The canonical craft-appreciation of Infinite Jest: Tom Bissell's introduction to the 2016 twentieth-anniversary edition (collected in Magic Hours, 2018), which offers four overlapping accounts of why the book still feels "transcendently, electrically alive". (1) It is "the first great Internet novel," a warning about the virality of entertainment written before social media made it literal. (2) It is "a genuinely groundbreaking novel of language" whose high/low register-range outdoes Joyce, Bellow, and Amis. (3) It is "a peerlessly gripping novel of character," using free indirect style to grant even minor figures full inner life (the Ken Erdedy marijuana-waiting sequence as exhibit A). (4) It is "unquestionably the novel of its generation," one that rewired how its readers perceive language — Bissell's coinage "the Wallaceian." Three of the four are craft/aesthetic appreciation rather than plot-crux arguments; the parts that touch the archive's interpretive cruxes are the Internet-prescience reading and his framing of the book's non-resolution as intrinsic design. The positive pole of the reception debate, and a direct foil to the Murphet dissent.

Key claims

Aging and endurance (frame): a novel "is perishable only by virtue of being stored in such a leaky cask: our heads"; mere predictiveness is not the mark of endurance ("If that were the mark of enduring fiction, Philip K. Dick would be the greatest novelist of all time"). IJ is "very much a novel of its time" — its "corporatism run amok" embeds it in the early-to-mid 1990s "as firmly and emblematically as The Simpsons and grunge music" — yet still feels alive.
The DeLillo standard: Bissell opens on Wallace's own essay praise (written while at work on IJ) for Don DeLillo's "oracular foresight", and Wallace's warning that the "mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons" by lesser writers "compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always where it ought to reside" — then notes the irony that IJ itself rarely resides in that Platonic Always, "which Wallace rejected in any event."
Theory one — Internet novel: IJ "is the first great Internet novel." Bissell concedes Gibson (Neuromancer) and Stephenson (Snow Crash) "may have gotten there first" on what the Internet would look like, and that Wallace "failed to anticipate the break from cartridge- and disc-based entertainment," but credits IJ with warning "against the insidious virality of popular entertainment long before anyone but the most Delphic philosophers of technology." The book withholds "the core pleasures of mainstream novelistic entertainment" — "a graspable central narrative line, identifiable movement through time, and any resolution of its quadrumvirate plotlines" — which he reads as itself Internet-like ("Both are too big. Both contain too much. Both welcome you in. Both push you away").
Theory two — language: "a genuinely groundbreaking novel of language." Wallace "spelunked the OED and fearlessly neologized, nouning verbs, verbing nouns, creating less a novel of language than a brand-new lexicographical reality." But words need sentences to "display-case" them, and here too the novel "surpasses almost every novel written in the last century" in descriptive mastery. Bissell calls Wallace "a religious writer" whose "religion … was a religion of language." (He quotes the sunset "radiating knives of light" and the burglar-with-the-square-head sentences as specimens.)
Theory three — character: "a peerlessly gripping novel of character." Invoking James Wood on Forster's flat/round distinction, Bissell argues Wallace's "flat, minor, one-note characters walk as tall as anyone, peacocks of diverse idiosyncrasy." The craft term is free indirect style, but Wallace "had to somehow psychically become his characters" — "the closest thing to a method actor in American literature". The eleven-page Ken Erdedy pot-waiting interlude ("Where was the woman who said she'd come") is the exemplar: "I know of nothing else in the entirety of literature that so convincingly inhabits a drug-smashed consciousness while remaining a model of empathetic clarity."
Theory four — generational novel / "the Wallaceian": IJ is "unquestionably the novel of its generation." Its signature innovation is "the revelatory power of freakishly thorough noticing"; unlike Kafkaesque/Orwellian/Dickensian (labels for "mood … situation … civic decay"), "the Wallaceian" names "something that happens ecstatically within, a state of apprehension (in both senses) and understanding." "He didn't name a condition … He created one."
On Wallace's arc: all stylists become "prisoners of their style", but Wallace escaped it — he "never finished another novel," and split his career so that the essays "got better and funnier … while the fiction got darker and more theoretically severe, even if so much of it was excellent." The world "remains as Wallaceian as ever—Donald Trump, meet President Johnny Gentle—and now we're all reading his unwritten books in our heads." Closes on the loss of the unwritten next novel ("now we're all reading his unwritten books in our heads") and a Yorick-graveside address ("David, where be your gibes now?").

Theories & evidence

The essay's four titular "theories" are, in three of four cases, aesthetic/craft appreciation (language, character, generational significance) rather than interpretive claims about a plot or reading crux — recorded above in Key claims. The two crux-scoped readings:

THEORY: IJ is the first great "Internet novel" — it foresaw the virality and self-enslaving pull of networked entertainment before the technology arrived

Crux: media-prescience
Stance: advances
Evidence:
- [text] "as a novel about an “entertainment” weaponized to enslave and destroy all who look upon it, Infinite Jest is the first great Internet novel." [sec. Theory one]
- [inference] The catalog of things "Wallace somehow knew … was coming": "Sharing videos, binge-watching Netflix, the resultant neuro-pudding at the end of an epic gaming marathon, the perverse seduction of recording and devouring our most ordinary human thoughts on Facebook and Instagram". [sec. Theory one]
- [text] "But Infinite Jest warned against the insidious virality of popular entertainment long before anyone but the most Delphic philosophers of technology." [sec. Theory one]
Notes: Bissell hedges the prescience himself (the counterevidence clause): Gibson and Stephenson "may have gotten there first" on the look of the Internet, and "Wallace, among other things, failed to anticipate the break from cartridge- and disc-based entertainment." So the claim is precise — prescient about entertainment's virality and compulsion, not about the medium. A reception-side prescience sighting (positive valence), the mirror image of the hardware-anachronism point other sources raise. The closing Trump/Gentle pairing ("Donald Trump, meet President Johnny Gentle") is a second, political prescience datum in the same essay.

THEORY: IJ's refusal to resolve its plotlines is constitutive design, not failure — the withholding is the point

Crux: designed-holes
Stance: entertains
Evidence:
- [text] The book is "an endlessly, compulsively entertaining book that stingily withholds from readers the core pleasures of mainstream novelistic entertainment, among them a graspable central narrative line, identifiable movement through time, and any resolution of its quadrumvirate plotlines." [sec. Theory one]
- [inference] The non-agreement about meaning is itself intrinsic: "The fact that twenty years have gone by and we still do not agree what this novel means, or what exactly it was trying to say, despite saying (seemingly) everything about everything, is yet another perfect analogy for the Internet." [sec. Theory one]
- [inference] "the book bears being read, and reread, with Talmudic focus and devotion" — rereading as the demanded mode, not a remedy for a defect. [sec. Theory one]
Notes: Bissell treats the withholding as a feature (the compulsively-entertaining-yet-stingily-withholding paradox) rather than arguing the gaps are a puzzle to be solved — closer to the constitutive-design pole of designed-holes than to the reconstruction pole. He also concedes the cost: "Infinite Jest … can be exceedingly frustrating," and "For many Wallace readers this is asking too much" — the essay's own registered counterweight. Stance kept at entertains (sympathetic framing, not an argued thesis about the ending's mechanics).

Themes

Entertainment / spectation and media-prescience (the "Internet novel" reading; entertainment's virality and self-enslavement); irony-sincerity and the-self (Wallace's higher purpose for fiction — "Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being"); language / craft (the neologizing, register-range, the "religion of language"); character and narration (free indirect style; the Erdedy interlude; Wallace as "method actor"); addiction (the drug-smashed consciousness of the Erdedy pot-waiting sequence, "which I cannot imagine was without its subtle traumas" for its author); reception and legacy (the generational-novel claim, "the Wallaceian," the Trump/Gentle pairing, the unwritten next book).

Cross-references

The positive pole of the anniversary reception debate — a direct foil to the hostile reassessments; where the dissent charges weak plotting and a narcissistic centre, Bissell reframes the same withholding as design and the same difficulty as demand.
The "Internet novel" / entertainment-virality reading overlaps the broader prescience takes (video-sharing, binge-watching, social media as fulfilled satire); "Donald Trump, meet President Johnny Gentle" is the political limb of the same claim.
The Erdedy free-indirect-style / "method actor" point is a craft-of-narration observation about who-sees and how the third person gets "microscopically close" — bears on any narration note.
Quotes the McCaffery-interview line "Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being" (also the closing note of Chapman's embodiment reading) and John Jeremiah Sullivan's post-death tribute ("being so inventive a writer that when you die, the language is impoverished").

Notable passages

Verbatim from the essay (Bissell's own prose unless marked as a quotation he carries).

"Infinite Jest is the first great Internet novel."
"But Infinite Jest warned against the insidious virality of popular entertainment long before anyone but the most Delphic philosophers of technology."
"an endlessly, compulsively entertaining book that stingily withholds from readers the core pleasures of mainstream novelistic entertainment, among them a graspable central narrative line, identifiable movement through time, and any resolution of its quadrumvirate plotlines."
"Wallace spelunked the OED and fearlessly neologized, nouning verbs, verbing nouns, creating less a novel of language than a brand-new lexicographical reality."
"he makes an almost metaphysical commitment to see reality through their eyes."
"even when you're not reading him, he trains you to study the real world through the lens of his prose."
"He didn't name a condition, in other words. He created one."
"His great gift is that the world remains as Wallaceian as ever—Donald Trump, meet President Johnny Gentle—and now we're all reading his unwritten books in our heads."
(Bissell quoting Wallace, via the McCaffery interview:) "Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being."