IJ study archive

'An Anguish Become Thing': Narrative as Performance in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest

source

Reference note — no local source. Paywalled on JSTOR (Narrative, Vol. 8, No. 2, May 2000, pp. 161–181; Ohio State University Press). The CWU institutional repository entry (https://digitalcommons.cwu.edu/cahfac_english/11/) confirms no free full text. Get via JSTOR (free account allows limited monthly reads) or ILL.

TL;DR

One of the earliest serious scholarly articles on IJ (2000) and still a touchstone. Cioffi argues the novel doesn't just depict performance — it is one: the text behaves as a performative event that acts on and discomfits the reader, making reading itself an experience of the anxieties (addiction, compulsion, entrapment) the book describes.

Key claims (from abstract and citations in later scholarship)

  • IJ thematizes performance across its three plot strands: the tennis prodigies (performance and the obsessive practice that must precede it), the Québécois terrorists (the twisted narrative spun around performance), and the addicts / lethal Entertainment (performance as possibly lethal entrapment).
  • The novel functions as "narrative as performance": its difficulty, recursive structure, and affective intensity stage an event for the reader rather than delivering a representation at arm's length — the reader is implicated the way spectators and viewers are within the story.
  • Reading IJ produces a kind of productive discomfort; the title phrase ("an anguish become thing") names how the book reifies anguish into a textual object the reader must handle.
  • Frequently cited as an early statement of the now-standard claim that IJ's form forces the reader to enact its themes (predecessor to Hayles's recursivity argument and the reader-work readings).

Themes

Entertainment and spectatorship; addiction; tennis as performance discipline; the reader's role; form-as-content.

Cross-references

Citation

Cioffi, Frank Louis. "'An Anguish Become Thing': Narrative as Performance in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest." Narrative 8.2 (May 2000): 161–181. JSTOR 20107209.