Infinite Jest in the American Literary Canon

- 10 minutes read - 2024 words

In my previous posts, I introduced Infinite Jest and provided a roadmap for navigating its Sierpiński triangle structure. Now, I want to place Wallace’s magnum opus in its proper literary context - both as the quintessential Generation X novel and as a worthy entrant into the American literary canon.

The Voice of a Generation(-X)

Generation X - those born roughly between 1965 and 1980 - came of age during a unique historical moment. It was a period of shifting dyads:

War

We watched the Cold War end under Reagan, to see new distributed warfare (e.g. terrorism in 9/11, “cyber-warfare,” disinformation/ideological campaigns) that was cheaper, more-pervasive, and whose victory was less-defined come to hold sway under presidents Bush, Clinton, Bush II, Trump, and Biden.

Knowledge

While we grew up writing research papers knowing how to use card catalogs and learned to type on typewriters, we also witnessed and participated in the proliferation of the technical internet and its ancillary culture.

Amusement

Our entertainment touchstones were:

  • MTV (that (still) showed music videos)
  • Network TV,
  • Cable TV
  • Teen magazines
  • and invitations by phone to get together and do something, even when the something was nothing

But today:

  • MTV no longer shows videos
  • the networks are stuffed-shills for their corporate ownership
  • cable TV is now partisan echo chambers of cynical engagement (as is its successor, “social media”)
  • magazines are gone for entrepreneurial, self-branded influencer content baked in home bedrooms in front of Chinese-made ring lights
  • and phones, well they’re for watching TV YouTube, and texting

In short, for GenX the monoculture was culture. While society is atomized in Infinite Jest, entertainment seems to be, still, on the blockbuster, Hollywood model. In Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story this will not be the case.

Sex

Oooh! This is a fun one.

Our Boomer parents had a healthier (although zealously counter-reactive to the oppression of the 1950s) relationship to sex. They were unafraid to have that wet, sloppy, flappy, sweaty, human, animal, affirming, embracing kind of skin-to-skin intimacy. Hell, they used the term “make love” unironically.

By GenX’s time, thanks to the AIDS crisis and the panics around it, we were scared to use our genitals and or participate the affirming, beautiful, tender social rites that lead to pairing them for “normal sex.” Salt-n-Pepa were going to talk about sex, but not without talking about the latex condom.

But the urge has to go somewhere: the latex catsuits, the rise of BDSM, and nascent computer porn all rose on our low-sex generational identity. 1989’s loose Motley Crue priapism of boobs and bouncy-bouncy couldn’t have found a tighter, more controlled counter than the late 90s’ Nine Inch Nails.

In GenX, sex went from a way to make kids and (shh!) it’s kind fun to a forbidden fruit and then quickly to a sellable commodity wrapped in weird artifice.

Porky’s was regressive and juvenile with some deeply problematic messages, but it was human and warm blooded. Compare this with late-GenX’s “Basic Instinct” which seems as icy and cold as watching snakes mate.

This should suffice. Wallace, born in 1962, stood at the vanguard of this generation. In Infinite Jest, he captures the peculiar generational ethos through characters who:

  • Are hyper-educated yet directionless
  • Display ironic detachment while secretly yearning for authentic connection
  • Are effectively celibate (or, its other extreme vacuously sex addicted, labeling partners as “Experiments”)
  • Possess encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture and media theory and lens their own lives with it
  • Struggle with a deep sense of emptiness despite material comfort
  • Navigate a world where sincerity has become suspect

The Incandenza family - particularly Hal, the gifted tennis player and semiotic genius who cannot genuinely connect with others - embodies this generational predicament and seems to be Wallace’s doppelganger.

Hal’s interior monologue, rich with literary and cultural references yet emotionally stunted, mirrors the Generation X dilemma: how to feel authentically in a world that has trained you to analyze everything and wash it in irony. Hal’s generational fellow and occasional foil is his brother Orin who’s taken the irony and cynicism and welded it into an armor of cynicism if not outright nihilism.

The better angel of Generation X is Joelle van Dyne (AKA Madame Psychosis, the prettiest girl of all time) whose stunning beauty and later facial veil served to create a wall around her and hold her away from genuine human connection. If Hal’s choices represent one tendency, Joelle’s represent another: a suggestion of human contact, a suggestion of the folk and authenticity movements of the late 1990s like “Lilith Fair.” Unable to bear the inauthenticity of it all she goes to yet-another grad student party and decides to commit suicide there. Because maybe if she can’t connect with people in an unendurable life, she can at least die near some (she doesn’t succeed, thankfully).

Between Hal and Joelle and their associated interactions, it feels like you’ve walked in the late 1990s, like you’ve lived the GenX perspective for a while. It all rang true to me.

Let me grant, Wallace’s perspective is definitely of a certain class and race as I’ll discuss later.

The Great American Novel Tradition

In a previous reflection on American novels, I proposed that the great threads of our national literature center on three timeless questions:

  1. Materialism: How does a nation of such incredible wealth have such intractable poverty that is (seemingly) winkingly tolerated under a rubric of social Darwinism?

  2. Religion: How does a nation that purports to be pluralistic in its religious quilt deal with the fact that one religion is prima inter pares? And how does evangelical Christianity square with the deeper religion that seems to drive her citizenry: capitalism? And when that religion demands social Darwinism against a religious preference that demands service to the destitute, how do the adherents simply look away in their hypocrisy?

  3. The Shadow of Slavery: While there’s certainly some room for historians to disagree about the purpose of America and its bond to the peculiar institution, there’s no doubt that many of the institutions and edifices of our “free” continent are inextricably tied to slavery; whose hands built the White House and Wall Street? On top of that, Americans and precious few of her leaders are willing to stare this historical bubo on our body politic square on and build/present a narrative on how to treat it

From Melville’s Moby Dick to Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, from Ellison’s Invisible Man to Morrison’s Beloved, the Great American Novel has always captured or operated within the boundaries of these national-identity-defining historical motifs.

Reckoning with Race

Let me point out that Wallace does a poor job at handling the “Shadow of Slavery” issue. He is aware that anything about America has to address it, but he addresses it ineptly. There’s much discussion about his writing the interior monologue of Wardine (a poor, Black girl who is being sexually abused). Reading it put my teeth on edge like reading Huckleberry Finn. Wallace also features a heroin-abusing transvestite/transsexual character called Poor Tony. Tony’s life is often farcical – because life as a junkie is absurd, as Wallace tells us. The question is are we laughing at a Black trans* character or are we laughing with another human trying to be its best self while also wrestling with addiction (arguably the principal theme of the book). I’m not entirely sure Wallace threaded the needle on these. That said, in 1995, thinking about experience-as-a-Black-child or experience-as-a-Black-gender-minority were not common practice among glittering authors of the era. So while Wallace may have handled their threads ineptly, he knows they are part of the tapestry of America.

Additionally, Wallace may have largely skirted race beyond these experiments because he’s caught up in the Clinton-era notion of racial progress being achieved by virtue of big capital smushing all citizens into commercial grist for the mill. Wallace then takes some of the interesting economic dehumanization from Invisible Man and applies it to everyone. Flattened into one big pool of attention designed to be gotten and trapped, capital doesn’t see color. That’s naive, we would later understand; it sees colors and segments advertisements accordingly. Only after the web’s scale showed us how cleanly and heartlessly segmentation could be done did we realize that the “race” field in your Facebook third-party advertisement campaign was too useful/profitable to be transcended.

Mammon and God

As just hinted, on the topics of materialism and religion, Wallace truly shines. In Wallace, like DeLillo, the material stuff that the Boomers left everywhere has reached farcically awful condition (it must be launched by industrial slingshot into what was once, La Belle Provençe, Quebec; remember, Wallace is funny). In addition, in the semi-fascist/captialist authoritarianism of the Gentle administration sees sponsorships buying the light of the Statue of Liberty and instead having her advertise the product of the year (remember, Wallace is funny).

And there, in this dystopian setting, Wallace tracks two stories designed to focus on the spiritual/religious element that’s left to a hollowed volk. The ultimate commodity in religion and capital (and they’re the same thing) is attention. Most of the deepest meditations on this occur on a rock outcropping in Arizona between an FBI agent called Steeply and an assassin called Remy. If there’s any religious transcendence in this world it might be the life-ending and life-affirming Entertainment: a movie so satisfying people would rather die than stop watching that features a beautiful, nude young woman channeling the Mother Goddess apologizing for this whole messy and sad experience known as life, over and over, from the perspective of a newborn.

Remember, both the attention-addicted and the drug-addicted are following the same path out of Hell while desperate for love and apology.

If these considerations of Infinite Jest as GenX “voice of a generation” and Great American Novel have swayed you, dear reader, then know that they do not sway in a vacuum. Rather my childhood and teens are wrapped around the cultural totems that made Wallace’s and his characters’ worldviews.

Personal

As a late GenX-er or an early-Millennial, I have a foot in both generational camps, but when I read Infinite Jest I knew I was reading the great American novel of my older cousin’s part of the GenX cohort. She took me to see “E.T.”, she saw original lineup Van Halen, she was the age of every girl in “Valley Girl” or “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” This is their book, but it also prefigures my cohort too. One can date early GenX to “Saw ‘Star Wars’ in theatre,” core GenX to “Saw ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ in theatre, and late GenX to “Saw ‘Return of the Jedi’ in the theatre.” I’m technically that second one, but I don’t remember it. I, on the other hand, definitely recall seeing “Jedi” in a movie theatre in Amarillo, TX.

What happened when Duckie from “Pretty in Pink” or Samantha from “16 Candles” graduated from college and found that “Morning in America” wasn’t quite holding up as well as it had during their teens. A wrong twist of fate or two and either could have wound up in Infinite Jest’s Enfield Halfway house ruing the American dream and its costs.

In my personal canon of Great American Novels by generation, it stands proudly alongside Ellison’s Invisible Man (the Post-War Generation), DeLillo’s Underworld (the Boomers), and Everett’s James (the Millennials).

Wallace understood that avoiding the dystopic hell he portrayed required making conscious choices that American capitalism actively discourages – and thus the circle is round, another annular loop in a book full of them. And here’s a preliminary glimpse of the genius of writing working hand-in-glove with the book’s structure: if the social problem I just detailed is a loop, shouldn’t the book itself be delivered as a loop? In a world of vicious circles, the book is written in a circle. At the opening, one protagonist is shuttled out of a vicious circumstance and urged to sleep; at the end, another protagonist awakens from a nightmare of emotional trauma and drug use. They meet where? Of course, in the middle. The more you pick at the puzzle-box, the more intricate and fascinating the recurrent, fractal loops are.