IJ study archive

The Infinite Jest Liveblog: What Happened, Pt. 2

source

TL;DR

The "why" companion to Pt. 1's "what": Moats's unified theory that IJ is Wallace's attempt to both manifest and dramatize the post-ironic fiction he called for in "E Unibus Pluram" — an antidote to TV-trained ironic detachment. Hal's arc dramatizes the emergence of a new, sincere voice that the establishment literally cannot understand. The strongest informal statement of the ending-as-literary-manifesto reading, with a character-by-character allegorical key.

Key claims

  • Disclaims a single "real meaning" — the book is about many things and resolves none of them — then argues the third way between "about everything" and "about nothing": IJ enacts the New Sincerity program of "E Unibus Pluram" (and "Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young," 1988: "the state of general affairs that explains a nihilistic artistic outlook makes it imperative that art not be nihilistic").
  • EUP rundown as applied: TV meets the criteria of an addiction (creates the loneliness it then medicates); its defense mechanism is ironic, self-referential knowingness; fiction's irony was co-opted by the thing it parodied; quotes Lewis Hyde via DFW — "Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage."
  • Against the misconception of DFW as arch-ironist: IJ's difficulty is meant to force active engagement ("something harder and more active than just watching"), and its content is single-entendre: "Addiction is bad; sobriety is good... Brothers should be nice to each other." The Ennet/Gately strand alone would be a deeply moving recovery novel.
  • Hal as the dramatization: opening scene = the new voice meeting institutional terror. Year-of-Glad Hal ("I'm not a machine. I feel and believe") inverts p. 694 Hal (no bona fide emotion, "pretty much nothing at all" inside). The deans freak out at admissions of feeling. Setting it at the University of Arizona — where Wallace's own MFA experimentalism met institutional resistance — is no accident. The novel "begins in earnest" at "So yo then man what's your story?": the book is Hal's answer, the new voice's story.
  • Allegorical key (correlations "strong to weak to strange"):
    • Mario = the book-in-progress, via DFW's beloved Mao II metaphor of the hideously damaged, dribbling infant that wants love; also the novel's most earnest character (cf. Marathe's wife).
    • The Hamlet/generations machinery = anxiety of influence: JOI's experimental filmography as the prior avant-garde generation the young must converse with and surpass; Orin as the failure mode — ex-player turned punter (purely passive handover role), imitator and keeper of the Master Copy, reduced to re-enacting a scene from 1984, "voicing nothing original at all."
    • The Entertainment: JOI made it to draw Hal out, to keep him from becoming "a silenced figurant in his own life" — and instead made the perfect passive entertainment that saps everyone's voice; maps onto JOI's cosmology (what you love kills you; what kills you mothers you in the next life = the artistic process of consuming and then abandoning one's influences).
    • Tennis styles = fiction styles: Wayne's stark efficiency as the technically proficient "Bad Carver" minimalism; Pemulis's one-trick lob; Chu's fame-obsession; Troeltsch's commentary; Schacht's resignation — "substitute 'writing' for 'tennis game' and you have a list of common anxieties in any American creative writing program." Hal's no-style, passive, plateaued game = the celebrated young writer stuck after early success.
    • Pemulis = Mark Leyner: the drug-supplier urging chemical fixes, as Leyner's image-fiction recreates TV to cure TV; cites DFW calling Leyner "a kind of antichrist" (1992) and Pemulis "one of the book's Antichrists" (2003).
  • Credits Samuel Cohen's "To Wish to Try to Sing to the Next Generation" and D.T. Max's biography for the literary-history framing; closes on the dark biographical edge — Wallace's happiness tracking his fiction output, IJ as a story he gave to fiction itself "about itself."
  • Best comment (Nicholas, 2014): what if Year-of-Glad Hal isn't crazy at all, but functioning like a feeling human — and the deans are the ones incapable of communicating?

Themes

  • Entertainment/irony (the central subject); communication/solipsism (the new voice as unintelligible); family (anxiety of influence as generational trauma); addiction (TV-as-addiction model unifying the drug and entertainment plots).

Cross-references

  • Direct sequel to fiction-advocate-what-happened-pt1.
  • Gives the thematic "why" for the plot mechanics in swartz-ij-ending; converges with the meaning-over-plot stance of infinite-tasks-endings-ii.
  • The post-postmodern Hal reading is independently reinvented in general online discussion (OP's "POST-post-modern man in a post-modern world").
  • Key external texts: "E Unibus Pluram," "Fictional Futures," Samuel Cohen in The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, D.T. Max's Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way."

Notable passages

"The theory is this: Infinite Jest is Wallace's attempt to both manifest and dramatize a revolutionary fiction style that he called for in his essay 'E Unibus Pluram'... He was trying to create an entertainment that would get us talking again." — Moats

"Wallace doesn't try to proscribe what that voice would exactly be like, only that it would be unsettling and challenging." — Moats on Hal's new voice

"Fiction was his great love, so he gave it the best thing he could think of: a story about itself, that is made up of the best fiction he could create, and helps sustain the enterprise for a new generation." — Moats