IJ study archive

Dialogizing Postmodern Carnival: David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest

source

TL;DR

An early (Fall 2001) academic article reading Infinite Jest through Bakhtin's theory of carnival. Nichols' thesis: where postmodern fiction (Reed, Carter, Burroughs, Pynchon) had used the carnivalesque as a liberatory, dialogic mode, Wallace "turns the carnivalesque against itself" — treating postmodern culture's masks, ironies, and grotesques as a permanent mask that lets people avoid reality rather than open onto it. In her reading the novel inverts every carnival trope (the mask, the grotesque body, disguise, bodily excess, the festive marketplace) so that it conceals rather than regenerates; the genuinely "radical act of dialogue" becomes the sober self-disclosure of Hal Incandenza and Don Gately, whose unmasked voices the culture reads as monstrous. Prime archive material for the irony-vs-recovery, entertainment-lethality, annular-structure, joelle-veil, communication-solipsism, and eup-connection cruxes; carries Nichols' own IJ page cites throughout.

Key claims

  • The carnival frame is bait, not the argument. IJ looks like a straightforward Bakhtinian postmodern text — O.N.A.N. presided over by a former lounge crooner (a "classic Bakhtinian inversion" of high/low), the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment foregrounding the "lower stratum," 200+ footnotes blurring foot and head, medical/AA/commercial heteroglossia, giant infants and feral hamsters. Nichols grants all this "carnivalesque" surface, then argues Wallace uses it to reveal the opposite of Bakhtin's liberatory vision (her IJ cites: Wallace 383, 573; the footnote/heteroglossia catalogue runs across her pp. on IJ's media forms — letters 1006, e-mails 138-9, transcripts 176/1026, diagrams 1023-24, etc.).
  • Wallace vs. postmodern negation. She anchors the reading in the McCaffery interview and the Hamlet title: Wallace faults postmodernism for a "penchant for ironic diagnosis of unpleasantness instead of an ambition... to redeem" (McCaffery 147) and insists "any possible human redemption requires us first to face" what is "dreadful" (McCaffery 136). IJ exposes the carnivalesque as a "literary Prozac that alters perception" instead of confronting despair.
  • The dark chasm the mosaic hides. Beneath the "kaleidoscopic edges" runs an unassimilable Otherness — Orin's roach-nightmares (42, 44, 46), the "howling fantods," the "Face in The Floor" (347), Gompert/Erdedy's "large, dark shape" (649-50), the anonymous "I" whose nightmare's essence "has been with you all along, even awake" (61). Nichols (endnote 2) glosses this via Kristeva's abject but notes IJ's characters can't marshal their Otherness into subversion.
  • Annular fusion / the Great Concavity as anti-regeneration. Where Bakhtin's bodily emissions signal renewal, annular fusion produces "waste for a process whose waste is fuel for the fusion" (572) — growth warped into stasis, splitting the terrain into the closed "self-reflexive mirror" of the Great Concavity and Great Convexity. A theory that "appears to celebrate 'excess' actually insulates and perpetuates stagnation."
  • Masks conceal what is already grotesquely open. Bakhtin's mask is permeable ("the joy of change," Rabelais 40); Wallace's masks hide. Videophony drives citizens to don celebrity cut-outs because their naked "phone-faces" read "blurred and moist-looking" (147); U.H.I.D. teaches members "to be open about their essential need for concealment" (535); the OUS casts agents in cross-gender/cross-race "costumes" that cloak a hygiene-obsessed conservative security state (419-20); the "It" scene (371) shows the mask's "joy of change" divorced from dignity.
  • Orin, JOI, and the Entertainment: openness as a technology of closure. Orin "hide[s] openly" behind a "pose of poselessness" (1048), needing the Subjects to reinscribe himself as a sealed object (566). JOI is "an amateur at any kind of real communication" (742) whose metafiction "medicate[s] rather than agitate[s]"; the lethal cartridge kills not by content but by its infant's-eye lens, keeping viewers in a comforting "liminality" that "can become an opiate of the masses" (Joelle's account, 791, 939).
  • Redemption = self-disclosure, not self-fashioning. Hal's turn to the first person and sobriety (841) and Gately's sober suffering in the hospital (1884) are read as emergence: the culture perceives Hal's sincerity as "subanimalistic" growth (14) and Gately's communication as literally unreadable, precisely because unmasked self-disclosure is the true transgression in O.N.A.N. The bedside "wraith" names the aesthetic "radical realism" (836) — LeClair's term for Wallace's own "anti-confluential" method (LeClair 32-35) — an "agora" that erupts the "anesthesia of form." In her closing formulation, "only a commitment to self-disclosure rather than self-fashioning lays the groundwork for positive change."

Theories & evidence

Locator note: the reflowed OCR strips the journal's running feet, so precise Critique print-page cites (pp. 3-16) are not recoverable per-paragraph from the archived text; blocks below locate claims by the IJ / interview page cites Nichols herself gives (those are exact) plus the argument-stage. Image->print map for anyone returning to the PNGs: img 1->p.3 ... 15->p.16.

THEORY: Wallace "dialogizes" postmodern carnival — he inverts the carnivalesque so that masks, irony, and grotesque excess conceal reality rather than open onto it, making sober self-disclosure (not transgression) the truly radical act

  • Crux: irony-vs-recovery
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] Thesis statement: in IJ "Wallace turns the carnivalesque against itself to reveal a literary vision that foregrounds the line between transgression for its own sake and the use of art for redemptive purposes"; postmodern culture becomes "a permanent, though superficially heterogenous, mask" that avoids "a wider scope of human vision than its 'cult of ambiguity' accommodates." [Nichols, opening; her IJ cite Wallace 383]
    • [text] "attempting to engage the dynamism of reality, rather than professing its fictionality, becomes a radical act of dialogue appropriate to late-twentieth-century life." [Nichols, opening]
    • [author] Wallace faults postmodernism's "penchant for ironic diagnosis of unpleasantness instead of an ambition... to redeem" and holds redemption "begins not with aesthetic nonconformity, but in the act of confronting what is truly... fearful." [McCaffery 147, 136]
    • [inference] The carnivalesque functions in IJ as "a sort of literary Prozac that alters perception rather than attends to the alienation, despair, and isolation." [Nichols, mid-argument]
  • Notes: This is the article's spine; the entertainment/mask/annular readings below are all instances of it. Adjacent thematic-critical slugs cynicism-naivete, sincerity-definition, and reader-realization all bear on this block — Nichols is an early (2001) statement of the redemption-over-diagnosis reading later codified by Boswell. Frames sincerity as coherence of inner feeling and outward expression (Hal's shrinking "discrepancy"), close to the sincerity-definition line.

THEORY: IJ executes the program of Wallace's own criticism/interview — the redemption-not-just-diagnosis project announced in the McCaffery interview and E Unibus Pluram

  • Crux: eup-connection
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [author] Wallace names "Barth and Coover and Burroughs, even Nabokov and Pynchon" as "patriarchs for his 'patricide'" now that their techniques are "co-opted by consumer culture." [McCaffery 146]
    • [author] "any possible human redemption requires us first to face what's dreadful, what we want to deny." [McCaffery 136]
    • [author] Endnote 5: Wallace's diagnosis of an art scene where "rule-breaking, the mere form of renegade avant-gardism becomes an end in itself" applies to both television and the contemporary art scene. [McCaffery 132, 136; "E Unibus Pluram" in the Works Cited]
    • [text] Wallace's declared aim that readers experience a "mediated" consciousness that "continually denies linguistic neutrality." [McCaffery 138]
  • Notes: Nichols reads the McCaffery interview and EUP as the interpretive key to the novel; a canonical instance of the eup-connection crux, from the criticism side rather than the fan side.

THEORY: The Entertainment kills by its medium, not its content — the infant's-eye lens fixes viewers in a passive "liminality" that, like the recurrent Ecstasy-of-St.-Teresa image, becomes "an opiate of the masses"

  • Crux: entertainment-lethality
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] Joelle (the only surviving witness) calls the film "nothing more than an olla podrida of depressive conceits... strung together with flashy lensmanship and perspectival novelty" (791); the lens itself, not the subject matter, is "the real star of" the cartridge. [Nichols; IJ 791, 939]
    • [inference] The lens "mimick[s] the undifferentiating gaze of an infant," ensuring viewers "remain in a perpetual state of liminality that does not require their active participation"; that this state is fatal implies "liminality itself... can become an opiate of the masses." [Nichols; McLuhan "the medium is the message"]
    • [text] JOI's metafiction generally "medicate[s] rather than agitate[s]"; the cartridge is the escapist limit-case of "polyphonic media." [Nichols; IJ 985-93]
  • Notes: Continuous-with-real-TV framing (medium-as-message, "opiate") aligns with reading the Entertainment's lethality as EUP's TV logic carried to its asymptote, rather than a sci-fi-MacGuffin explanation.

THEORY: The Entertainment's contents — Joelle filmed through a wobbled infant-perspective lens, repeatedly apologizing, with a hermaphroditic actor and recursive flux

  • Crux: entertainment-contents
  • Stance: endorses
  • Evidence:
    • [text] "one scene of Joelle whirling around a revolving doorway with a hermaphroditic actor and another in which she repeatedly apologizes to an audience whose point of view has been made, through use of a special lens, to mimic an infant's perspective." [Nichols; IJ 939]
  • Notes: Nichols has the infant-lens + Joelle-apologizing pair that the archive's account of the film's contents builds on, but she stops at "liminality"; she does NOT make the further leap that the lens projects the viewer's own mother apologizing. Recorded here as an early partial anticipation, not the full mother-projection reading.

THEORY: The novel is a closed annular system by design — "annular fusion," the Great Concavity/Convexity mirror, and the book's own full-circle shape all figure regeneration collapsed into stasis

  • Crux: annular-structure
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] Annular fusion produces "a type of fusion that can produce waste for a process whose waste is fuel for the fusion" (572) — Bakhtin's regenerative bodily emission inverted into "waste that only perpetuates stasis." [Nichols; IJ 570-73]
    • [text] The terrain is warped into the "Great Concavity" and "Great Convexity," which "combine to form the closed system of a self-reflexive mirror." [Nichols; IJ 573]
    • [inference] Hal's and Gately's metamorphoses "bring the artistic vision of Infinite Jest full circle"; the novel's opening scene "is temporally its closing scene" (the Year-of-Glad interview). [Nichols; IJ 9-14, 841]
  • Notes: Touches both the macro-shape (annular-structure, the YoG opening = chronological end) and JOI's optics/mirror obsession; Nichols reads annularity thematically (stasis/self-reflexivity) rather than as a reading-order puzzle.

THEORY: The Great Concavity is a manufactured wasteland — annular fusion's toxin-scrubbing so over-succeeds that it eliminates all growth-inhibitors, deforming the terrain

  • Crux: manufactured-wasteland
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] The process "has become so successful at ridding the environment of toxins that it has also eliminated all inhibitors to organic growth," splitting the region into "a rainforest on sterebolic anoids" (sic, as printed) and a desert. [Nichols; IJ 570-73]
  • Notes: "sterebolic anoids" is the print page's own oddity (image-verified, not OCR noise — provenance header) and is preserved cite-as-written. Supports the manufactured-wasteland reading the archive tracks oeuvre-wide.

THEORY: Masks and disguises in IJ conceal rather than liberate — U.H.I.D.'s veils, videophony masks, and OUS cross-casting invert Bakhtin's permeable, world-meeting carnival mask

  • Crux: joelle-veil
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] U.H.I.D.'s "aesthetically challenged" (187) members veil their deformities and are taught "to be open about their essential need for concealment" (535) — the opposite of carnival masking's liberatory purpose. [Nichols; IJ 187, 535]
    • [text] Videophony masks: consumers find their naked "phone-faces" "blurred and moist-looking," a "shiny pallid indefiniteness" (147), so they adopt celebrity cut-outs — masking what is already "grotesquely open." [Nichols; IJ 147]
    • [secondary] Contrast drawn from Bakhtin (the mask as "the essence of the grotesque," "the joy of change," Rabelais 40) and Harpham (the mask's bulging features "go out to meet the world," On the Grotesque 108). [Rabelais 40; Harpham 108]
  • Notes: Nichols reads Joelle's veil / U.H.I.D. purely as concealment; she takes NO position on the deformed-vs-beautiful-vs-undecidable question that anchors the archive's veil material. Her Joelle-facing claims sit mostly on the Entertainment and on Joelle-as-critic (her reading of JOI's films, 742). The OUS cross-gender/cross-race "costumes" (419-20) and Steeply's transvestism she reads as instrumental disguise cloaking a security state — NOT as the sympathetic gender-dysphoria motif of the archive's crossdressing-dysphoria slug; flagged so the sighting isn't miscounted there.

THEORY: Openness-as-closure — Orin's serial seduction and JOI's metafiction both use apparent openness/sincerity to seal the self against real communication and emotional vulnerability

  • Crux: communication-solipsism
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] Orin, "the least open man" his friend knows, picks up "the Subjects" via a "pose of poselessness" and a rhetoric of "Look-At-Me-Being-So-Totally-Open-And-Sincere" that lets him "hide openly," reinscribing himself as a sealed object (assuring himself he is "the One"). [Nichols; IJ 566, 1048]
    • [text] JOI is "a brilliant optician and technician who was an amateur at any kind of real communication" (Joelle, 742); Orin calls him "so blankly and irretrievably hidden... like autistic, almost catatonic" (737); his films "medicate rather than agitate." [Nichols; IJ 737, 742]
    • [inference] Orin's monologue spoken into a mirror (566) fuses sex with "a detached, decidedly unregenerative form of masturbation." [Nichols; IJ 566]
  • Notes: Solipsism-as-defence; aligns with the communication/solipsism spine the archive tracks oeuvre-wide. Orin's "hide openly" is the article's sharpest formulation of the whole thesis at the character level.

THEORY: Hal's collapse is emergence, not (only) damage — his turn to the first person and sobriety restores agency, and the culture reads that unmasked sincerity as monstrous

  • Crux: hal-condition
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] From 20 November YDAU (841) Hal abstains and begins using "I"; the gap between his "inner feelings and outward expressions begins to diminish." His "hilarity face" (875-76) and mirror-image ("I looked sketchy and faint to myself, tentative and ghostly," 876) mark the melting of his "hip, empty mask, ahedonia" (659). [Nichols; IJ 659, 841, 875-76]
    • [text] In the Year-of-Glad interview he insists he can "feel and believe" and is "not just a creatus, manufactured, conditioned, bred for a function" (12) — and the committee perceives him as "subanimalistic," "waggling," "some sort of awful... growth" (14), carting him off. [Nichols; IJ 9, 12, 14]
  • Notes: A clear emergence reading (self-disclosure surfacing), against the pure-damage pole of the archive's hal-condition crux; Nichols does not engage the DMZ-route question (hal-dmz) at all — Hal's crisis is, for her, the terror his sincerity provokes, not a toxicology puzzle.

THEORY: Gately's sober suffering is redemptive self-disclosure — remaining drug-free in a Demerol-saturated hospital makes his marginality (unreadable words, the pen-and-ink scrawl) itself a subversive act

  • Crux: gately-salvation
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] Gately's sobriety forces "the grotesque detail of physical injury — delirium, incontinence, I.V. needles, catheters, vomiting"; his inability to speak or write (the illegible IJ p.1884 scrawl) marks "the social as well as physical border that Don crosses by remaining sober." [Nichols; IJ 1884]
    • [inference] Like Hal, Gately's trajectory is "restoring personal agency by turning the self inside-out rather than suppressing it"; "only a commitment to self-disclosure rather than self-fashioning lays the groundwork for positive change." [Nichols, redemption section]
  • Notes: Pairs with the Hal block as the article's twin "seeds of redemption." Bears on salvation-spectrum / gately-salvation. Nichols takes no position on the gately-fate (survives-the-hospital) crux — the beach/ambulance question is outside her frame; she reads the hospital ordeal thematically.

THEORY: The bedside "wraith" voices Wallace's own aesthetic ("radical realism") and is a composite of Wallace and the late James Incandenza

  • Crux: ij-narrator
  • Stance: endorses
  • Evidence:
    • [text] The wraith desires to portray "real life's real egalitarian babble of figurantless crowds... every member of which was the central and articulate protagonist of his own entertainment" (836) and names the style "radical realism." [Nichols; IJ 836]
    • [secondary] LeClair: the "anti-confluential," history-mining, "infolding" method "produce[s], not just length, but a prodigious density" and describes Wallace's own approach. [LeClair 32-35]
    • [inference] Endnote 4: "The 'wraith,' a gangly lexical genius and former auteur, seems a combination of both Wallace and the late James Incandenza." [Nichols endnote 4]
  • Notes: Bears on ij-narrator / wraith-reality; Nichols treats the wraith as real-within-the-fiction and as the author's mouthpiece, without adjudicating the fever-hallucination question the archive tracks under wraith-reality.

THEORY: JOI's films are latter-day Barth/Pynchon metafiction co-opted into anaesthesia (Pynchon-influence sighting)

  • Crux: pynchon-influence
  • Stance: mentions
  • Evidence:
    • [secondary] LeClair: JOI's films "often resemble" — in their themes and parodic methods — "outtakes" from Gravity's Rainbow and Pynchon's other work. [LeClair 17]
  • Notes: Name-check with one secondary citation; registered for the sighting count. Ties to Wallace's "patricide" of the Pynchon/Barth generation (McCaffery 146).

THEORY: The title frames the novel via Hamlet's "fellow of infinite jest"

  • Crux: hamlet-frame
  • Stance: mentions
  • Evidence:
    • [secondary] The title's reference to Hamlet's Poor Yorick, "a fellow of infinite jest, most excellent fancy" (Shakespeare 5.1), "reflects the potential for wit to mock authority without attending to its displacement." [Nichols, opening; Shakespeare 5.1]
  • Notes: Minor for Nichols (single gloss, in service of the irony-vs-redemption point); registered so the hamlet-frame sighting is counted. JOI as the novel's self-proclaimed "infinite jester" / the medieval fool is her recurring figure.

Themes

  • Irony vs. sincerity / recovery — the article's central axis: irony and the "cult of ambiguity" as evasion, sober self-disclosure as the counter-move.
  • Entertainment as anaesthesia — the cartridge, JOI's films, television, and "liminality" as opiate; the medium over the message.
  • Addiction and recovery — drugs, denial, and depression (Gompert, Erdedy, Marathe, Kate's "Novocaine of the soul") as the flight from emotional "openness"; Ennet House and Gately's sobriety as the counter.
  • Masks / concealment / the body — U.H.I.D.'s veils, videophony masks, OUS disguises, the grotesque body; the carnival mask inverted from revelation to concealment.
  • Communication and solipsism — Orin's "hide openly," JOI as "amateur at any kind of real communication," the sealed self.
  • Structure / annularity — annular fusion, the Great Concavity/Convexity mirror, the novel's full-circle shape.
  • Family — the Incandenzas (deformed sons, absent ironist father, smothering mother) as the transmission mechanism of the culture's disease.
  • Metafiction and its exhaustion — Barth/Pynchon/Coover "patricide"; metafiction that medicates rather than agitates; "radical realism" as the exit.

Cross-references

Notable passages

Short verbatim spans (scholarly fair use; archive-local only). Nichols' own critical prose unless attributed to Wallace/IJ:

"Wallace turns the carnivalesque against itself to reveal a literary vision that foregrounds the line between transgression for its own sake and the use of art for redemptive purposes." (opening)

"attempting to engage the dynamism of reality, rather than professing its fictionality, becomes a radical act of dialogue appropriate to late-twentieth-century life." (opening)

the carnivalesque as "a sort of literary Prozac that alters perception rather than attends to the alienation, despair, and isolation" the unmedicated perceive. (mid-argument)

Orin, "the least open man" his friend knows, is able to "hide openly." (on IJ 1048)

"only a commitment to self-disclosure rather than self-fashioning lays the groundwork for positive change." (closing)

Academic apparatus

  • DOI: 10.1080/00111610109602168 · Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 43.1 (Fall 2001): 3-16 · dateline "Venice, California."
  • Works Cited highlights (archive-relevant):
    • Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Texas, 1981) and Rabelais and His World (Minnesota, 1993) — the carnival/grotesque/heteroglossia frame.
    • Larry McCaffery, "An Interview with David Foster Wallace," Review of Contemporary Fiction 13 (Summer 1993): 127-50 — the single most-cited source, supplying the redemption-over-diagnosis program (pp. 132, 136, 138, 146, 147).
    • Wallace, "E Unibus Pluram" (in A Supposedly Fun Thing..., Little, 1997) and Infinite Jest (Little, 1996).
    • Tom LeClair, "The Prodigious Fiction of Richard Powers, William Vollman, and David Foster Wallace," Critique 38 (Fall 1996): 12-37 — "radical realism," "anti-confluential," the prodigious-body footnote reading (pp. 17, 32-35, 38).
    • Grotesque/carnival theory apparatus: Geoffrey Galt Harpham, On the Grotesque (1982); M. Keith Booker, Techniques of Subversion in Modern Literature (1991); Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language (1980) and Powers of Horror (1982, for the abject, endnote 2); Peter Stallybrass & Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986, endnote 3); Dieter Meindl, American Fiction and the Metaphysics of the Grotesque (1996); Wilson Yates, "An Introduction to the Grotesque" (1997); Michel Foucault, Foucault; Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (1984, p. 74); Shakespeare, Hamlet (5.1, the title source).
  • Name inconsistency (cite-as-written): the theorist appears in-text as "Miendl" but in the Works Cited as "Meindl" — the print's own inconsistency, preserved as printed.

Advances