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Thinking About Not Thinking in Infinite Jest

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Thinking About Not Thinking in Infinite Jest City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works Dissertations and Theses City College of New York 2019 "The Hazards of Being Free": Thinking About Not Thinking in Infinite Jest Josh Cunningham CUNY City College How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cc_etds_theses/739 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] !1 “The Hazards of Being Free”: Thinking About Not Thinking in Infinite Jest by Josh Cunningham faculty mentor: Prof. Vaclav Paris second reader: Prof. Harold Veeser Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Master of Arts of the City College of the City University of New York !2 This paper is about self-consciousness and how it figures in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Because Infinite Jest is such a large novel (1079 pages, including the indispensable footnotes), it serves, like other large novels before it, as a kind of encyclopedia of contemporary culture.1 The novel, in large part, treats self-consciousness—a distinctly human phenomenon, one which certainly accounts for our dominance as a species—as a problem (on both an individual and collective level) that needs to be overcome. This is because, as it turns out, self consciousness, when it becomes epidemic, is as much a boon as it is a blow to the species. This paper will unfold in five sections. The first section introduces the problem of self- consciousness as one of the chronological starting points of Infinite Jest, showing its centrality to the work as a whole. The second section expands this problem in relation to Wallace’s apparently conservative version of postmodernism. Sections three, four, and five explore the problem through detailed close readings of the text, showing some of its richness as well as drawing attention to some of its ramifications. 1. Freedom and The Problem of Self-consciousness Infinite Jest’s opening episode, in which Hal waggles during his admission interview at the University of Arizona, is actually the novel’s last episode chronologically. As Stephen Burn shows, the novel’s storyline actually begins in 1933, when James Incandenza’s father injures himself playing tennis while his own father (that would be Hal, Mario, and Orin’s great- 1 For Stephen Burn, Infinite Jest appears near the end in a line of “encyclopedic” novels written in the twentieth century. This line includes James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Finnegan’s Wake (1939), William Gaddis’s The Recognitions (1955) and JR (1975), Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow ( 1973 ), and Don DeLillo's Underworld ( 1997) (19). !3 grandfather) looks on (82). The two episodes are closely related, however, like opposite ends of a family history: the episode in 1933 sets up an important theme, what I term, the problem of self- consciousness, which sheds light on Hal’s situation almost a century later.2 The goal of this paper is to trace the problem of self-consciousness through the course of the novel, to see how this works. Along the way, I will show how Wallace uses the problem of self-consciousness to critique what the novel presents as a particularly American and modern view of freedom, a view that fails to recognize what Steeply terms, “the hazards of being free.” Self-consciousness is, in a literal sense, a state of mind; put simply, I take it to be the act of recognizing oneself as a self. More abstractly though, self-consciousness figures in Infinite Jest as the site of one’s perpetual confrontation with oneself; it is where self-doubt festers, a kind of psychological wasteland, from which the novel’s many characters, almost all of them drug and alcohol addicts, are trying to escape. For the Incandenza men, it is a problem passed from one generation to the next, almost like a disease. One’s inability to escape this wasteland is paradoxical: after all, if you are trapped inside your head—if you cannot, but wish you could ignore, as Wallace puts it, “the constant monologue inside your head” (This Is Water, 50)—you are not really trapped at all; you are only inwardly conflicted, and this conflict persists and is even exacerbated the more you think about it. Self-consciousness is, in this way, a self-perpetuating condition; in a way, it is a matter of will. Which means solving the problem of self-consciousness has something to do with changing the 2 As Burn shows, the last episode of the novel, chronologically, is Hal’s admission interview at the University of Arizona, Year of Glad (2010). See “Appendix: The Chronology of Infinite Jest” (81) in A Reader’s Guide to Infinite Jest. !4 way you think—which, to be sure, is not an easy pill to swallow: no one wants to be told how to think. But Wallace wants to challenge us on this point. Sometimes freedom—or rather, freedom as we commonly conceive of it—works against us. Sometimes a person can have too much of it. This may, on the face of it, offend our modern liberal sensibilities, but it is an idea featured throughout Infinite Jest. Having too much freedom is in fact how Marathe characterizes the American people, all of whom would apparently rather die watching the samizdat unendingly than live without it. He compares the American people to a child whose father “cries out ‘Freedom!’ and allows his child to choose only what is sweet, eating only candy, not pea soup and bread and eggs, so his child becomes weak and sick.” In other words, if Americans are addicted to the pleasures of entertainment, it is because they—like the child gorging herself on candy—lack a kind of fatherly guidance. “How to choose any but a child’s greedy choices,” he asks Steeply, “if there is no loving-filled father to guide, inform, teach the person how to choose? How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?” (320). On this point Steeply argues that Americans do not need or want a state-sponsored program, or something like this, “to paternalistically do their thinking and choosing for them” (321). “These things you find so weak and contemptible in us,” he argues, “these are just the hazards of being free” (320). But perhaps the “hazards of being free” are greater than Steeply realizes. Left alone to their devices, human beings tend to make bad decisions; this is a basic premise of the novel. “Not all compulsion comes from without,” Marathe warns; a person may be politically, or even physically free, but psychologically (maybe even spiritually) a slave to !5 their baser instincts and desires; in such a case, a person may very well need someone or something to “paternalistically do their thinking and choosing for them.” In my close reading below I will show how the logic of Hal’s suffering—a suffering passed on to him from his father and father’s father—reflects this predicament; Marathe is in fact describing a cultural condition that figures in the lives of the Incandenza men. It is important that Marathe refers to fatherly guidance here, because paternalism is closely linked with the problem of self-consciousness in the course of the novel. If Marathe’s diagnosis of American society is correct, Americans, it seems, are more in need of (fatherly) guidance than they want to admit or realize. 2. Wallace’s Postmodern Conservatism James K.A. Smith argues that Wallace’s work, often offhandedly categorized as postmodern, is in fact a kind of hybrid, stylistically postmodern but expressing a decidedly anti- nihilistic moral sensibility, which accounts for what he terms Wallace’s “postmodern conservatism.” Although Wallace’s early work, particularly his first novel, The Broom of The System (1987), clearly trafficked in the postmodern hijinks the postmodern literary fathers, such as Barthelme and Pynchon, are known for—“literature that exposed and undercut the very mechanisms of story-telling”—by the time he published Infinite Jest (1996) it was no longer enough, for Wallace, that a novelist point out the arbitrariness and constructedness of the stories and ideologies people believe to make sense of modern life; rather, the novelist should also offer a meaningful, if not hopeful, way forward out of the rubble of disillusionment. !6 Smith points to a now famous interview Wallace had with Larry McCaffery three years before Infinite Jest’s publication, in which he argued, [W]e’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. (Conversations, 26) Here, Wallace indicates what Smith deems the “moral purpose of his fiction,” and the basis for the “postmodern conservatism” Smith sees in his work; that good fiction should actually care about the reader’s well-being, helping her explore what it means to be human in an age that is in many ways dehumanizing. For Smith, that Wallace thinks a distinctly human way of life is even worth exploring— indeed, that there might even be a distinctly human way of life—is evidence that he has a kind of faith, in literature and in life, in a way that makes him, though not necessarily religious,3 still a firm anti-nihilist; he is willing to search for meaning where there is supposed to be none.
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