IJ study archive

Understanding David Foster Wallace (revised and expanded edition)

source

Revised and expanded edition, University of South Carolina Press, 2020 (first edition 2003). The foundational monograph of Wallace studies and the standard first critical companion to his fiction. Citations here are to this revised edition, which carries no print pagination, so its argument is cited by chapter and section. Numbers in parentheses — e.g. (318) — are Boswell’s own citations to the text of Infinite Jest; where he cites Wallace’s other books or an endnote (e.g. 1002n90) that is preserved as he gives it. The IJ chapter (ch. 4) is treated in full below; the chapters on the other books are summarized, with any passage that bears on Infinite Jest pulled out.

TL;DR

The book that founded Wallace studies and still the best single door into his work. Boswell’s governing thesis is that Wallace is neither a late modernist nor a postmodernist but the leading figure of a "third wave" — a fiction that moves through postmodern irony rather than back from it, using the tools of self-reflexive metafiction to recover sincerity, feeling, and community. Infinite Jest is his central exhibit, and Boswell’s chapter on it — a sustained reading built on Lacan (the film as a lethal promise of return to the maternal), Kierkegaard (the addict and the ironist as versions of the despairing "aesthete," AA as a genuine religion of the ethical), and Shakespeare and Dostoevsky (the novel as an act of artistic patricide) — is the most influential early account of the novel and the source a great many later readings argue with or lean on. He reads James Incandenza’s wraith as Wallace’s own avatar inside the book, the endnotes and the withheld ending as a deliberate cruelty performed for the reader’s good, and Don Gately’s final beach memory as at once a death and a rebirth.

Key claims

  • Wallace as "third wave." Born in 1962, "two years after" Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor, Wallace arrives as postmodernism is exhausting itself and positions himself as "a nervous member of some still unnamed (and perhaps unnamable) third wave of modernism", a writer who proceeds as if modernism and postmodernism are both "done" and who moves forward "hoisting the baggage of modernism and postmodernism heavily, but respectfully, on its back" (ch. 1).
  • "E Unibus Pluram" is the career’s Rosetta stone. Television co-opted postmodern irony (the self-mocking Joe Isuzu ad), draining metafiction of its subversive power; Wallace’s task is to find a fiction that neither returns to discredited realism nor re-arms the enemy’s irony. His solution is to join "cynicism and naïveté" — a phrase Boswell traces verbatim across "E Unibus Pluram," "Westward," and Infinite Jest as the core idea of the whole project (ch. 1).
  • Wittgenstein over Heidegger/Derrida. Wallace treats Philosophical Investigations as "the single most comprehensive and beautiful argument against solipsism that’s ever been made": language is public, communal, a form of life, and the literary text is therefore a "living transaction between humans" rather than a sealed funhouse (ch. 1, ch. 4).
  • The novel is diagnosis and cure at once. Infinite Jest embodies the seductive pleasure-agenda of television and pop culture "even as it embeds this agenda in a demanding and imposing fictional structure"; it is "both a diagnosis and an antidote to the culture’s addiction to pleasure" (ch. 4).
  • The Entertainment is a Lacanian trap. The film gives the viewer what the split subject has wanted all along — a return to maternal plenitude (the apologizing mother, the crib’s-eye camera) — so "the thing you desire most—Lacan’s (m)other—is the thing that will kill you." Its lethal appeal recapitulates the addictive experience (ch. 4).
  • Everyone is trying to escape the "cage" of the head. Addiction, irony, and hyper-self-consciousness are one problem — the "Disease" that "makes its command headquarters in the head" — and every apparent exit ("what looks like the cage’s exit is actually the bars of the cage") turns out to be another cage (ch. 4).
  • AA is Wallace’s tentative cure, read as a Kierkegaardian religion. Boston AA’s irony-proof clichés and its communal "Higher Power" work precisely because they demand the surrender of aesthetic sophistication; their very vapidity "is the source of their truth." Where Kierkegaard isolates the self before God, AA supplies the community Kierkegaard lacked (ch. 4).
  • Incandenza is Wallace’s postmodern father, and the wraith is Wallace’s own avatar. James Incandenza — "Pynchon, Barth, and Nabokov all rolled into one" — makes a cold, hidden, contempt-filled art that is exactly the postmodernism Wallace wants to move past; but his wraith, appearing inside comatose Gately’s head and speaking in the reader’s own "internal brain-voice," becomes "a spokesman for Wallace himself," the figure of the author entering the communal language-game (ch. 4).
  • Hamlet and Karamazov scaffold the patricide. Hal is Hamlet (Avril as Gertrude, Charles Tavis as Claudius, "Poor Yorick Entertainment," the exhumation of the father’s head); Orin/Hal/Mario echo Dmitri/Ivan/Alyosha. The Hal–Gately grave-digging is the novel’s most overt Hamlet allusion and the source of its title (ch. 4).
  • The withheld ending is purposeful cruelty. The first section is really the latest event, so the book is circular; between the ending and the beginning yawns a "void" the reader must cross. Refusing closure keeps the reader "trapped inside the novel and its protagonists’ interiors" — the reader is made to play the catatonic viewer of the Entertainment, except without the release from self (ch. 4).
  • The 2020 additions. Two new chapters (on Oblivion and The Pale King) bracket the original: Oblivion is Wallace at his bleakest, the empathetic payoff of Infinite Jest deliberately withdrawn; The Pale King is offered as its "prescriptive" corrective. Both new chapters keep returning to IJ for contrast (Preface; chs. 6–7).

Theories & evidence

THEORY: The film Infinite Jest is lethal because it grants the Lacanian wish — a return to the (m)other — so the thing most desired is the thing that kills.

  • Crux: entertainment-lethality
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] The film’s only sure content is the apologizing maternal figure (Death as "always your next life’s mother") shot from a "crib’s-eye view" through an "auto-wobble" lens mimicking neonatal vision; it offers the viewer "a return to some state of maternal connection", ending desire itself [ch. 4; IJ 788, 850, 939].
    • [text] The late "Inner Infant" support-group set piece — participants clutching teddy bears, chanting "Needs. Needs." — literalizes the diagnosis: the whole Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment is "a grown-up baby in diapers" seeking maternal plenitude [ch. 4; IJ 802, 808 → (scene 160)].
    • [secondary] Read through Lacan’s mirror stage and split subject: desire is an endless chain of substitutions (goods, people, drugs) for lost maternal wholeness; the film short-circuits the chain and so kills [ch. 4].
  • Notes: Boswell stresses the film is an "absent center" — we never see it, and the two fullest accounts of its content come from the explicitly "unreliable" Molly Notkin and from Joelle, who "admits she never saw the completed film". The lethality reading is built on deliberately ambiguous testimony, which Boswell flags rather than smooths over. The film’s actual contents stay unresolved by design — Notkin’s pregnant-Death account against Joelle’s white-gowned apology.

THEORY: Infinite Jest recovers sincerity by turning postmodern irony against itself; AA’s irony-proof clichés model the post-ironic, single-entendre speech Wallace calls for.

  • Crux: sincerity-definition
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] Addiction and irony are one disease — "the Disease [of addiction] makes its command headquarters in the head" — and Boston AA names the ironist’s defense "Analysis-Paralysis," the twin of Hal’s "paralytic thought-helix" [ch. 4; IJ 272, 335, 1002n90].
    • [text] "Wallace transforms AA from a too-easily parodied form of pop psychology to a genuine and viable Kierkegaardian religion"; accepting the banal slogan "without irony, without intellectual disdain, is to make the first gesture toward genuine openness" [ch. 4; IJ 273, 349–50].
    • [author] The McCaffery interview’s "CPR" credo — good art in dark times "locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live" — is read as the program the novel enacts [ch. 1].
  • Notes: Boswell’s own counter-pressure is built in: the AA slogans really are "banal, clichéd, or vapid—which, in many respects, they are", and "Their vapidity, however, is the source of their truth." He also marks the limit of the Kierkegaard analogy — AA is a community where Kierkegaard keeps the self isolated before God — so the cure is not simply Kierkegaardian. This is the book’s macro-thesis (the "third wave" / post-postmodernism) landing on IJ. Routing: the New Sincerity strand lives at sincerity-definition (with aa-narrative-form and reader-realization neighbors) per the standing registry ruling declining a separate new-sincerity anchor.

THEORY: Hal is a Kierkegaardian aesthete whose hyper-self-consciousness ("hiddenness") is the real condition the novel diagnoses — the same disease as addiction.

  • Crux: hal-condition
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] Hal’s "marijuana thinking" doubles back on itself into "a paralytic thought-helix"; he is "attached to the secrecy as he is to getting high", the Kierkegaardian aesthete who "use[s] self-conscious thinking in order to hide" [ch. 4; IJ 49, 335].
    • [text] Anhedonia as the aesthete’s despair: Hal "can still speak about happiness and meaning" but is "Unable To Identify," navigating with "no location" — grief reduced to "textbook-perfect symptoms" performed for the grief-therapist [ch. 4; IJ 693–95, 251–56].
  • Notes: Boswell keeps the Year-of-Glad opening in play as a symptom of this condition without deciding its mechanism (see the next theory); the aesthete reading holds whether or not Hal ingested DMZ.

THEORY: Hal’s Year-of-Glad breakdown is left deliberately undecided — either the DMZ ("Madame Psychosis") or an accidental viewing of the Entertainment.

  • Crux: hal-dmz
  • Stance: entertains
  • Evidence:
    • [text] Boswell states the two possibilities side by side and commits to neither: Hal is "unable to communicate due to his having either ingested the lethal drug DMZ … or accidentally viewed the Entertainment" [ch. 4; IJ 12].
    • [text] Registers that Pemulis’s DMZ tablets "have gone missing" as the book grinds to its anticlimax, and that "We never conclusively learn … what has happened to Hal—has he accidentally watched the film, or has he accidentally ingested the DMZ?" [ch. 4].
  • Notes: Boswell explicitly hands the question to the fan community — "Wallace’s legion of obsessive fans have combed through these issues and posted possible answers", calling the results "intriguing and maddening in their inconclusiveness." Presented as an intended aporia, not a puzzle with a solution.

THEORY: James Incandenza’s wraith is Wallace’s own authorial avatar — the figure by which the "dead" author re-enters the book and speaks in the reader’s head.

  • Crux: wraith-reality
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] The wraith speaks to comatose Gately using "somebody’s like internal brain-voice," so its "thoughts and insights … always just sound like your own thoughts, from inside your own head" — which Boswell reads as a description of reading itself, Gately as the book’s "ideal reader" [ch. 4; IJ 831].
    • [text] The art the wraith describes (giving voice to "figurants," the Cheers-barroom extras "trapped and encaged … in his mute peripheral status") "sounds less like his own work and more like the work that contains him" — i.e. it sounds like Wallace’s novel, not Incandenza’s cold films [ch. 4; IJ 835–37].
    • [author] Wallace’s amended Barthes ("Once I’m done … it becomes simply language, and language lives not just in but through the reader") plus the favorable review of H. L. Hix’s Morte d’Author underwrite the wraith-as-author move [ch. 4].
  • Notes: In the companion essay (see cross-references) Boswell floats the strong version — that "Incandenza’s ghost is a controlling presence throughout the entire text, the ghost in the machine and the narrative voice behind the narrative voice", with the second paragraph’s "I am in here" as evidence. In the book he stops short of asserting the wraith narrates the whole novel; the ontological status of the wraith (real ghost vs. Gately’s fever) is left open, and Boswell reads its appearances alongside Hal’s own worry that Hamlet "might only be feigning feigning."

THEORY: Infinite Jest is an act of artistic patricide scaffolded on Hamlet (and, more quietly, The Brothers Karamazov).

  • Crux: hamlet-frame
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] "In this configuration Hal is Hamlet," with Avril as Gertrude, Charles Tavis as Claudius, and "Poor Yorick Entertainment" as Incandenza’s production company; Hal’s seventh-grade paper on "the catatonic hero" flags the role [ch. 4; IJ 142, 5.2 of Hamlet].
    • [text] The most overt Hamlet allusion — and the source of the title — is Hal and Gately (with masked John Wayne present) digging up Incandenza’s exploded head, in which the Entertainment’s master copy "perhaps resides"; Gately dreams the "Continental Emergency" grave-dig and the shouted "Too Late" [ch. 4; IJ 16–17, 934 → (scene 175)].
    • [text] The Karamazov overlay maps Orin/Hal/Mario onto Dmitri/Ivan/Alyosha; the Barry Loach faith-wager, resolved when only Mario will shake the outstretched hand, is the Alyosha beat — "Empathy wins" [ch. 4; IJ 964–71].
  • Notes: Boswell rates the Dostoevsky references "a bit more muted and hence less important" than the Hamlet ones — a self-limiting judgment worth carrying.

THEORY: The Entertainment’s master copy is (perhaps) buried inside Incandenza’s cryonically preserved head.

  • Crux: joi-head
  • Stance: entertains
  • Evidence:
    • [text] Incandenza’s "Professional Conversation" with Hal names the racket’s "organochemically identical" composite and the "priapistic-entertainment cartridge implanted in your very own towering father’s anaplastic cerebrum"; Boswell reads it as the hint that the head holds the master [ch. 4; IJ 30–31].
    • [text] Gately’s grave-dig dream treats the buried thing as "Continental Emergency important" [ch. 4; IJ 934].
  • Notes: Hedged throughout ("perhaps resides," "possibly even the master"); Boswell notes the actual exhumation "seems to have taken place after Gately emerges from the hospital", i.e. in the novel’s unnarrated future.

THEORY: The wraith’s warnings point to Avril Incandenza’s possible entanglement with the Québécois separatists.

  • Crux: avril-afr
  • Stance: entertains
  • Evidence:
    • [text] The wraith’s postmortem appearances are read as "motivated by a desire to warn those still alive of Avril Incandenza’s possible involvement with the Quebecois terrorists"; Avril is herself Québécois and "comically" involved with Hal’s rival John "The Darkness" Wayne, a Quebec native [ch. 4; IJ 30].
    • [text] The first viewer of the Entertainment is an unnamed "Near-Eastern medical attaché" who watches on the first of April — "the French for which is “Avril.”" [ch. 4; IJ 30, 36].
  • Notes: Kept at the level of "possible involvement"; Boswell does not adjudicate Avril’s role in disseminating the film, only the wraith’s evident worry about it.

THEORY: The withheld, circular ending is deliberate — Gately’s closing beach memory reads as at once a death and a rebirth.

  • Crux: ending-missing-year (also annular-structure, gately-fate)
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] The first section is "the conclusion, or at least the latest occurrence," so the novel "is circular, beginning with its ending"; between them is "a significant gap, a void, into which all of the novel’s unanswered questions fall endlessly" [ch. 4].
    • [text] The closing Gately memory (the Dilaudid binge, the giant mirror, the lethal "Sunshine," waking "flat on his back on the beach") is read as the "death mother" killing off the addictive self — "both a death and a birth, an exhaustion and a replenishment" [ch. 4; IJ 972–81].
    • [inference] The refusal of closure is functional: it "forces the reader to play the role of one of those unfortunate viewers of the dreaded Entertainment—trapped, catatonic," but denied the film’s release from self [ch. 4].
  • Notes: Boswell raises the obvious objection through the novel itself — Hal’s worry, watching his father’s Accomplice!, that the static, repetitive ending might mean "Himself" is "simply an amazingly shitty editor of his own stuff" — and answers that Wallace "does have a theoretical end to his madness". Gately’s survival and the film’s dissemination are left genuinely open; Boswell notes that if Gately was given Dilaudid after all, "the whole “memory” is in fact a drug-induced hallucination."

Themes

Irony and sincerity / post-postmodernism (the "third wave," EUP, cynicism-and-naïveté); addiction and recovery (AA as Kierkegaardian religion, the Disease in the head); the entertainment economy and the self (the film as Lacanian (m)other, the Inner Infant, videophony’s collapse); communication and solipsism (Wittgenstein’s language-game, Hal’s caged interiority, the anhedonic "Unable To Identify"); family and patricide (Hamlet and Karamazov, Incandenza as artistic father); the author–reader contract (the endnotes, the withheld ending, the wraith as authorial avatar).

Cross-references

Notable passages

"As a result, although critics often label Wallace as a “postmodern” writer, he might best be regarded as a nervous member of some still unnamed (and perhaps unnamable) third wave of modernism." (ch. 1)

"The novel itself is an “infinite jest”—a seemingly endless source of readerly pleasure that is also, paradoxically, both a diagnosis and an antidote to the culture’s addiction to pleasure." (ch. 4)

"And yet the thing you desire most—Lacan’s (m)other—is the thing that will kill you." (ch. 4)

"Their vapidity, however, is the source of their truth." — on AA’s clichés (ch. 4)

"Hal’s suicidal father also serves as Wallace’s own postmodern father. Incandenza is Pynchon, Barth, and Nabokov all rolled into one." (ch. 4)

"In effect the dead Incandenza is reborn in the novel and transformed into a spokesman for Wallace himself, into Wallace’s own wraith." (ch. 4)

"Mario, then, is the one truly human figure in the novel, the one character who is not only in “some basic interior way forever infantile” but also unembarrassed about representing all that is “unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.”" (ch. 4)

"The ending is therefore both a death and a birth, an exhaustion and a replenishment." (ch. 4)

Citation

Boswell, Marshall. Understanding David Foster Wallace, revised and expanded edition. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2020 (first edition 2003).

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