Theorising David Foster Wallace's Toxic Postmodern Spaces

TL;DR

The archive's spatial reading of Infinite Jest: Hering argues that Wallace embodies the abstractions of postmodernism in the physical geography of the near-future American landscape, so that the Great Concavity becomes a toxic postmodern space — an entropic, annular-fusion wasteland that both represents and interrogates postmodern culture. Reading Bakhtin's chronotope against Fredric Jameson's account of postmodern temporality as Lacanian "schizophrenia" (a "series of pure and unrelated presents in time"), Hering maps the barren "Eliotical" Western Concavity to Modernism and the "greedily efficient", lethally lush Eastern Concavity to Postmodernism, and then reads addiction as the psychological form of this spatialized postmodern time: Randy Lenz, Poor Tony Krause, and Don Gately experience time as space, and recovery — the AA maxim "One Day At A Time", the counsel to "build a wall around each individual" day — is the method by which the addict/postmodern subject re-enters historical ("horizontal") time from the eternal present. A distinctive formal-geographical account that pairs with, and explicitly corrects, Catherine Nichols's earlier carnivalesque-chronotope reading; the best single treatment of the Concavity as an allegory of literary postmodernism.

Key claims

• Space as embodied postmodernism. Wallace's technique — "as-yet critically neglected" — is to counter postmodernism "through geographical, spatial and temporal narrative strategies", creating "geographical and psychological spatio-temporal landscapes" that carry "the potential toxicity of a culture of Postmodernism". The Great Concavity is the primary case.
• Annular fusion / decelerated time. Via the Pemulis-Arslanian exposition (IJ 572-73), the Concavity runs on "a type of fusion that can produce waste that’s fuel for a process whose waste is fuel for the fusion", spiraling out of control so the government must catapult waste in; the result is "time in flux", "decelerated time", a temporal disjuncture that is not merely "physically toxic but psychologically ruinous" (the half-spasming, half-static face).
• Correcting Nichols. Hering credits Catherine Nichols with first connecting the Concavity to the postmodern (her 2001 "Dialogizing Postmodern Carnival") but faults three points: her Concavity/Convexity terminology (the terms are relative to the speaker's position — "Concavity damn your eyes!", IJ 234 — not fixed to West/East); the need to distinguish the two zones' narrative problems; and her attribution of mere "stasis", which "underestimates the ferocity of Wallace’s entropic depiction".
• West vs. East. The "barren Eliotical wastes" (IJ 574) of the Western Concavity map to Modernist subjectivity (Eliot's Waste Land); the Eastern Concavity, "so fertilely lush it’s practically unlivable" (IJ 573), maps to Postmodernism — metafiction, poststructuralism, textual self-consciousness — as a self-consuming annular system (with a Pynchon "Entropy" analogue, via Malcolm Bradbury). Hering ties the toxic overgrowth to "E Unibus Pluram": literary postmodernism's tools "co-opted as a voraciously effective and insidious way of advertising".
• Toxic, not merely static. Against readings of postmodern "play" as harmless or stagnant, Hering insists "Postmodernism, essentially, has become toxic and dangerous as well as simply static": the Concavity's spillages, leaks, and mis-catapulted receptacles break its borders and "poison and contaminate adjacent ‘presents’".
• Addiction as spatialized postmodern time. Jameson's postmodern subject, unable to unify past/present/future, lives a "series of pure and unrelated presents in time"; the "‘cage’ of postmodernist fiction is equated to the condition of solipsism". Recovering addicts dramatize this: Lenz's watch-phobia and pulse-taking (time as dissociated instants), Poor Tony Krause's detox hallucination in which time becomes a spatial, inescapable presence, both flawed; Gately's is the successful model.
• One Day At A Time as re-entry into history. Gately engages the "trite"/"cliché" slogan "One Day At A Time" beyond dismissal; the counsel (via Joelle) to "build a wall around each individual" 24-hour period, refusing to count days, absolutely isolates the present — and thereby, paradoxically ("treating cancer by giving the cancer cells themselves cancer"), rebuilds a historical, horizontal timeline. The addict recovers their historical chronology, transgressing the Jamesonian schizophrenia.
• The novel's form mirrors the cure. Hering endorses Aubry's reading that "the temporal experience of reading this page-long sentence mimics the arduous experience of recovering in AA" (IJ 350-1), and adds that "the actual formal structure of the novel mirrors this process": a series of achronological moments the reader must order into a historical sequence — reading as the same re-entry into horizontal time.

Theories & evidence

THEORY: The Great Concavity is a spatialization of literary postmodernism itself — a toxic, entropic, annular wasteland that both embodies and interrogates the postmodern condition

• Crux: manufactured-wasteland
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [text] The annular-fusion mechanism (IJ 572-73): waste-as-fuel spiraling out of control, forcing perpetual toxic dumping — read as the self-consuming logic of metafiction/poststructuralism. [sec. Concavity]
  • [text] The West/East split: "barren Eliotical wastes" (IJ 574) = Modernism vs. "so fertilely lush it’s practically unlivable" (IJ 573) = Postmodernism; the terms Concavity/Convexity are perspectival ("Concavity damn your eyes!", IJ 234). [sec. Concavity]
  • [secondary] Jameson's postmodern temporality (Lacanian "schizophrenia", "a series of pure and unrelated presents in time") and Bakhtin's chronotope, applied to the Concavity's "decelerated time". [sec. Concavity]
  • [secondary] The "Westward The Course Of Empire Takes Its Way" precursor (via Connie Luther's essay in Hering's own edited volume): the endless Illinois corn as the "terrifyingly wide-open", disorienting postmodern landscape. [sec. Concavity]
• Notes: The fullest spatial-form statement of the manufactured-wasteland reading. Hering's distinctive contribution is the spatio-temporal chronotope apparatus and the explicit tie to "E Unibus Pluram" (advertising's co-option of postmodern tools). In-source counterweight recorded: Hering concedes Nichols's "stasis" attribution is "certainly not inaccurate", only incomplete; and that Bakhtin "does not refer here to characteristics of the postmodern narrative".

THEORY: Recovery from addiction is a spatio-temporal method of escaping the postmodern/solipsist eternal present — "walling up" each day re-establishes historical (horizontal) time

• Crux: communication-solipsism
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [text] Lenz's timepiece-phobia and pulse-taking as dissociated present-moments; Poor Tony Krause's detox in which time becomes spatial and inescapable — both flawed recoveries ending in disaster. [sec. Lenz, Krause and Gately]
  • [text] Gately's engagement with "One Day At A Time", and the counsel to "build a wall around each individual" 24-hour period (Pat's counsel, relayed by Joelle to the shot Gately, IJ 858; the time-in-recovery instruction itself cited at IJ 360), read as the paradox by which absolute isolation of the present rebuilds a horizontal, historical timeline. [sec. One Day At A Time]
  • [inference] The "‘cage’ of postmodernist fiction is equated to the condition of solipsism" — the atemporal vertical axis is "the trap of the postmodern de-historicised individual, living purely in the solipsistic present". [sec. Concavity]
• Notes: The escape-from-the-cage-of-self reading (communication-solipsism). The recovery reading is standard in the archive; Hering's addition is the Bakhtin/Jameson/Lacan spatio-temporal machinery. No in-source denial raised — Hering flags only that the AA-as-escape-from-solipsism reading "has been thoroughly critically established" and that his contribution is the under-analyzed spatio-temporal mechanism.

THEORY: The novel's achronological form enacts the recovery it depicts — reading it (ordering isolated moments into sequence) mirrors the addict's re-entry into historical time

• Crux: reading-as-rehab
• Stance: endorses
• Evidence:
  • [secondary] Aubry (endorsed): "the temporal experience of reading this page-long sentence mimics the arduous experience of recovering in AA" (IJ 350-1, as Hering cites it). [sec. One Day At A Time]
  • [inference] "the actual formal structure of the novel mirrors this process": the reader orders "a series of isolated, achronological moments in time" into a historical sequence, as the recovering addict does with days. [sec. One Day At A Time]
• Notes: A scholarly endorsement of reading-as-rehab, convergent with the same Aubry reading cited in kelly-death-of-the-author — the two essays reach Aubry's AA-sentence analysis independently (Kelly cites Aubry 210 and IJ 350-51; Hering cites Aubry 211 and IJ 350-1 — same passage, different cite styles). Also a sighting for annular-structure (the novel's achronological-then-ordered form).

Themes

Space and geography (the master theme — the Concavity as toxic postmodern space; West/East, Modernism/Postmodernism); time and the chronotope (Bakhtin's horizontal/vertical axes; Jameson's postmodern "schizophrenia"; decelerated/annular time); addiction and recovery (time-in-recovery; Lenz, Krause, Gately; One Day At A Time); communication and solipsism (the postmodern eternal present as the cage of the self); entertainment and postmodernism (the Concavity tied to E Unibus Pluram's advertising-co-option argument); form and structure (the novel's achronology mirroring recovery; reading-as-rehab).

Cross-references

• The print/journal complement to David Hering's held podcast testimony, gc-ep012-david-hering-fiction-form, and to his 2016 monograph David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form; the same scholar organized the 2009 Liverpool conference named in kelly-death-of-the-author.
• Explicitly corrects Catherine Nichols's "Dialogizing Postmodern Carnival" on the Concavity/Convexity terminology and the "stasis" reading — the two form a paired postmodern-chronotope conversation about the same geography.
• The entropic/postmodern-wasteland reading and the "Westward" precursor connect to the encyclopedic-postmodern strand: hf-theuwis-quest-encyclopedic-postmodern.
• The recovery/AA-form material sits beside the addiction-and-recovery scholarship: hf-daverman-limits-of-the-infinite-aa, hf-addiction-to-itself-thesis, dunne-pedersen-habits-ij-pragmatism.
• The E-Unibus-Pluram tie-in connects to e-unibus-pluram-ij-connections.

Notable passages

Verbatim from the essay (Hering's own prose unless marked; this raw uses curly quotes, reproduced byte-exact; IJ block-quotes carry Unicode U+2010 hyphens).

• Thesis: Wallace creates "geographical and psychological spatio-temporal landscapes" carrying "the potential toxicity of a culture of Postmodernism".
• Annular fusion (IJ 572, via Hering): "a type of fusion that can produce waste that’s fuel for a process whose waste is fuel for the fusion".
• The Eastern Concavity (IJ 573): "so fertilely lush it’s practically unlivable"; the Western, "barren Eliotical wastes" (IJ 574).
• The perspectival term (IJ 234): "Concavity damn your eyes!".
• The verdict: "Postmodernism, essentially, has become toxic and dangerous as well as simply static".
• The solipsism equation: the "‘cage’ of postmodernist fiction is equated to the condition of solipsism".
• Jameson (via Hering): the postmodern as "a series of pure and unrelated presents in time".
• Recovery: "One Day At A Time"; "build a wall around each individual" day (Joelle to Gately).
• Form: "the actual formal structure of the novel mirrors this process".