The Killing Vision: David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest

The Killing Vision: David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest

Stefano Ercolino

In this essay I propose to look at the imaginary film Infinite Jest, described in the homonymous novel by David Foster Wallace, interpreting it as a postmodern rewriting of the ancient topos of the killing vision.1 In the novel, Infinite Jest is a film realized by the brilliant physicist and “après-garde” filmmaker James O. Incandenza. It is so entertaining, and so great is the pleasure it provides, that whoever watches Infinite Jest dies, unwilling to stop the screening. Within the symbolic perimeter traced by the film Infinite Jest, two themes fundamental to Wallace’s novel are developed: the first is about the disturbing addiction to narcotic substances of the most varied type, endemic to contemporary society (a theme which, in the novel, ultimately turns out to be a radical criticism of Jacque Lacan’s thinking); the second regards the unlimited power that images hold in postmodern culture. Both themes merge in a dense rewriting of the topos of the killing vision. I shall individuate the origins of this topos in Greek myth, then briefly trace its development in the Western arts, highlighting some of its modern and postmodern articulations. After outlining the core features of the film Infinite Jest, with reference to an episode narrated by Giorgio Vasari in his Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, and to cinematographic reinterpretations of the topos of the killing vision (the most significant of which is represented by David Cronenberg’s Videodrome), I shall propose a definition of the topos as a figure of modern and postmodern scopic complexity. While embodying a quintessen- tially anti-ocularcentric discourse – particularly influential in postmodernity, as Martin Jay has shown, but, as Stuart Clark has recently argued, a discourse that is not as marginal to modernity as it is generally reputed to be – the topos of the killing vision magnifies the power of vision, presenting itself as the dialecti- cal image of the opposing forces of ocularcentrism and anti-ocularcentrism that collide within the modern and postmodern visual sphere.2 In this sense, The topos of the killing vision can be defined as a figure of visual totality.

1 David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (1996), intro. Dave Eggers, New York: Back Bay Books/Little, 2006. 2 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (1993), Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1994; Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

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At the center of the narrative and symbolic architecture of Infinite Jest is the homonymous imaginary film, Infinite Jest. Realized by the brilliant filmmaker and physicist James O. Incandenza, it is a cartridge whose content is largely unknown – unknown out of necessity. Indeed, the film Infinite Jest is so entertaining that all who watch it cannot stop and so slowly wither away in front of their teleputers,3 actually dying of pleasure. Although nobody could survive the screening of the film, and consequently could not testify as to its content, a number of features of the samizdat are clearly outlined throughout the novel. James Incandenza produced his last version of Infinite Jest in the Year of the Trial-Sized Dove Bar,4 three months before committing suicide by exploding his head in a microwave oven. According to the mock filmography of Incandenza’s works, all the four versions of the film are categorized as “unfin- ished, unseen” by the narrator.5 The only actress listed as starring in the film is Madame Psychosis – Joelle Van Dyne. According to Molly Notkin’s dubious account of Infinite Jest given to the u.s.o.u.s.6 – dubious because of her pos- sible involvement with the terrorist group of Québecois separatists labeled a.f.r. (Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents) – Jeolle is alleged to portray:

…some kind of maternal instantiation of the archetypal figure of Death, sitting naked, corporeally gorgeous, ravishing, hugely pregnant, her hideously deformed face either veiled or blanked out by undulating computer- generated squares of color or anamorphosized into unrecognizability as any kind of face by the camera’s apparently very strange and novel lens, sitting there nude, explaining in a very simple childlike language to whomever the film’s camera represents that Death is always female, and

3 The teleputer is a hybrid between the television and the computer, which has substituted television in Infinite Jest’s semi-futuristic setting. Today, the teleputer as conceived by Wallace is a reality, but in 1996, when the novel appeared, it was still imaginary. For a suggestion about a likely source of inspiration for both Wallace’s technological imagination and this visual device in particular, see Wallace’s discussion of George Gilder’s Life After Television in David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and u.s. Fiction”, in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments (1990), New York and Boston: Little, 1997, 70–76. 4 According to the mock dating system of the Subsidized Time adopted by the o.n.a.n. (Organization of North American Nations) from a certain time on. For a detailed chronology of the Subsidized Time, see Stephen J. Burn, David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest”: A Reader’s Guide, New York and London: Continuum, 2003, 81–92. 5 Wallace, Infinite Jest, 993n. 6 The United States Office of Unspecified Services, the government organization parodying the cia and the nsa.