Infinite Jest

Infinite Jest

Author	David Foster Wallace
Language	English
Genre	New sincerity metamodernism literary fiction post-postmodernism encyclopedic novel
Publisher	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date	February 1, 1996
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (hardcover · paperback)
Pages	1,079
ISBN	978-0-316-92004-9
Dewey Decimal	813/.54 20
LC Class	PS3573.A425635

Infinite Jest is a 1996 novel by American writer David Foster Wallace. Often considered Wallace’s magnum opus, the book has been categorized as an encyclopedic novel due to its unconventional narrative structure and hundreds of extensive endnotes, some with footnotes of their own.

A literary fiction bestseller after having sold 44,000 hardcover copies in its first year of publication, Infinite Jest has since sold more than a million copies worldwide. Since its initial publication it has been published with forewords by Dave Eggers, Tom Bissell, and Michelle Zauner for its 10th, 20th, and 30th anniversaries, respectively.

Development

Wallace began Infinite Jest, "or something like it", several times between 1986 and 1989. His efforts in 1991–92 were more productive; by the end of 1993, he had a working draft of the novel.

From early 1992 until the novel's publication, excerpts from various drafts appeared sporadically in magazines and literary journals including Harvard Review, Grand Street, Conjunctions, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Harper's Magazine, The Iowa Review, The New Yorker and the Los Angeles Times Magazine.

The book was edited by Michael Pietsch of Little, Brown and Company. Pietsch made suggestions and recommendations to Wallace, but every editing decision was Wallace's. He accepted cuts amounting to around 250 manuscript pages from his original submission. He resisted many changes for reasons he usually explained.

The novel gets its name from Hamlet, Act V, Scene 1, in which Prince Hamlet holds the skull of the court jester, Yorick, and says, "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is!"

Wallace's working title for Infinite Jest was A Failed Entertainment.

Setting

In the novel's future world, the United States, Canada, and Mexico together compose a unified North American superstate known as the Organization of North American Nations, or O.N.A.N. (an allusion to onanism). Corporations are allowed the opportunity to bid for and purchase naming rights for each calendar year, replacing traditional numerical designations with ostensibly honorary monikers bearing corporate names. Although the narrative is fragmented and spans several "named" years, most of the story takes place during "The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment" (Y.D.A.U.).

On the orders of U.S. President Johnny Gentle (a germaphobic singer and politician who campaigned on the platform of cleaning up the U.S. while ensuring that no American would be caused any discomfort in the process), much of what used to be the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada has become a giant hazardous waste dump, an area "given" to Canada and known as the "Great Concavity" by Americans due to the resulting displacement of the border.

Plot

There are several major interwoven narratives, including:

• A fringe group of Québécois radicals, Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents (lit. 'The Wheelchair Assassins'; A.F.R.), planning a violent coup to free Quebec from O.N.A.N.
• Addicts living in Boston reaching "rock bottom" with substance abuse before entering a residential drug-and-alcohol-recovery program, Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, where they progress in recovery through Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and Narcotics Anonymous (NA).
• Students training and studying at the Enfield Tennis Academy (E.T.A.), founded by James Incandenza and now run by Avril Incandenza and Avril's adopted brother Charles Tavis.
• The personal drama of the Incandenza family, centering around Hal's struggles to live up to high expectations of academic and athletic success amid wider dysfunction.

These narratives are connected via a film, Infinite Jest, also called "the Entertainment" or "the samizdat". The film is so compelling that its viewers lose all interest in anything other than repeatedly viewing it, and thus eventually die. It was James Incandenza's final work. He completed it during a period of sobriety that was insisted upon by its lead actress, Joelle van Dyne. The Québécois separatists seek a replicable master copy of the work to aid in acts of terrorism against the United States.

The United States Office of Unspecified Services (U.S.O.U.S.), a new government agency that combines the duties of the National Security Agency, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Drug Enforcement Administration, Central Intelligence Agency, Office of Naval Research, and Secret Service, aims to intercept the master copy to prevent mass dissemination and the destabilization of the Organization of North American Nations, or else to find or produce an anti-entertainment that can counter the film's effects. Joelle seeks treatment for substance abuse problems at Ennet House. A.F.R. member (and possible O.U.S. double agent) Rémy Marathe visits Ennet House, aiming to find Joelle and a lead to the master copy of "the Entertainment".

The novel ends without directly resolving several of its central plotlines.

Major characters

Style

Infinite Jest is a postmodern encyclopedic novel, famous for its length, detail, and digressions involving 388 endnotes, some of which themselves have footnotes. It has also been called metamodernist and hysterical realist. Wallace's "encyclopedic display of knowledge" incorporates media theory, linguistics, film studies, sport, addiction, science, and issues of national identity. The book is often humorous, yet explores melancholy deeply. The novel's narration mostly alternates between third-person limited and omniscient points of view, but also includes several first-person accounts.

Eschewing chronological plot development and straightforward resolution—a concern often mentioned in reviews—the novel supports a wide range of readings. At various times Wallace said that he intended for the novel's plot to resolve, but indirectly; responding to his editor's concerns about the lack of resolution, he said "the answers all [exist], but just past the last page". Long after publication Wallace maintained this position, saying that the novel "does resolve, but it resolves ... outside of the right frame of the picture. You can get a pretty good idea, I think, of what happens". Critical reviews and a reader's guide have provided insight, but Stephen Burn notes that Wallace privately conceded to Jonathan Franzen that "the story can't fully be made sense of".

In an interview, Wallace said the novel's heavy use of endnotes was a way to disrupt the linearity of the text while maintaining some sense of narrative cohesion. In another interview, he said the plotting and notes had a fractal structure modeled after the Sierpiński gasket.

English critic James Wood called the novel an exemplar of "hysterical realism", a term he also applied to works by Zadie Smith, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo. He criticized these novelists for seeking to "turn fiction into social theory" and as "evasive of reality".

Themes

The novel touches on many topics, including addiction (to drugs, sex, and fame), withdrawal, recovery, twelve-step programs, death, family relationships, absent or dead parents, mental health, suicide, sadness, entertainment, film theory, media theory, linguistics, science, Quebec separatism, national identity, and tennis as a metaphysical activity.

The book's various plot threads, including Hal's struggle to succeed in a competitive academic and athletic environment, Gately's recovery from addiction, and the film Infinite Jest as an all-consuming form of entertainment, are tied together by an overarching theme of addiction and devotion. Conversations between Marathe, a double agent betraying the Quebecois separatist movement for the sake of his wife, and Steeply, an American agent and Marathe's contact, serve as a chorus for the story, with interludes where the two discuss the nature of entertainment and worship in American culture.

A form of addiction or devotion is central to nearly every character's life; literary critic Paul Curtis argues that addiction, "however abnormal, is the norm of the novel." Dependency recurs throughout the novel in forms beyond drugs and alcohol, including sex, achievement, and sports. The conversations between Marathe and Steeply contrast the pursuit of individual pleasure with the capacity to choose what to devote oneself to.

Worship and addiction remained a central theme of Wallace's work. In his 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, he said: "Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship".

Critics have discussed the novel in relation to Wallace's ambivalent attitude toward postmodern irony. Infinite Jest makes extensive use of irony and self-conscious literary techniques, but Iannis Goerlandt and Christopher Bartlett have argued that it also explores the limitations of ironic detachment and attempts to establish more sincere forms of communication. The Alcoholics Anonymous sections have been particularly important to these readings, with characters encouraged to accept "clichéd" language and practices rather than maintaining a skeptical distance from them.

This interpretation has been challenged by others who argue that the novel's apparent "New Sincerity", particularly in the AA scenes, privileges the experiences of white male characters at the expense of Black characters and women.

Literary connections

Infinite Jest draws explicitly or allusively on many previous works of literature.

As its title implies, the novel is in part based on the play Hamlet. Enfield Tennis Academy corresponds to Denmark, ruled by James (King Hamlet) and Avril (Queen Gertrude). When James dies, he is replaced by Charles (Claudius), the uncle of Avril's gifted son Hal (Prince Hamlet). As in the play, the son's task is to fight incipient mental breakdown in order to redeem his father's reputation.

Another link is to the Odyssey, wherein the son Telemachus (Hal) has to grow apart from his dominating mother Penelope (Avril) and discover the truth about his absent father Odysseus (James). (That pattern is also reproduced in the novel Ulysses, set in a realistic version of Dublin populated by a wide range of inhabitants, just as Infinite Jest is mostly in a realistic Boston with a varied population.) In one scene, Hal, on the phone with Orin, says that clipping his toenails into a wastebasket "now seems like an exercise in telemachry." Orin then asks whether Hal meant telemetry. Christopher Bartlett has argued that Hal's mistake is a direct reference to Telemachus, who in the first four books of the Odyssey believes his father is dead.

The links between Ulysses and Infinite Jest have also been pointed out by academics. Stephen J. Burn argues that Wallace's explicit use of Joycean language—including compound words like "scrotumtightening"—make its "Joycean heritage explicit". Dominik Steinhilber notes structural parallels between the two novels, including the dispersal of narration among numerous characters and the pairing of a young intellectual (Hal Incandenza or Stephen Dedalus) with an older, less educated, but more socially adept man (Don Gately or Leopold Bloom).

Steinhilber argues more broadly that Infinite Jest adapts Joyce's motif of "parallax"—shifts in perspective—and unusual structure to explore how different characters perceive and experience reality.

Links to The Brothers Karamazov have been analyzed by Timothy Jacobs, who sees Orin representing the nihilistic Dmitri, Hal standing for Ivan and Mario the simple and good Alyosha. Ellen Chances has also identified references to Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and Demons.

The film so entertaining that its viewers lose interest in anything else has been likened to the Monty Python sketch "The Funniest Joke in the World", as well as to the "experience machine", a thought experiment by Robert Nozick.

Similarly, writer Hernan Díaz has drawn a parallel between Infinite Jest's "Entertainment" and Borges's short story The Zahir, in which a fictionalized version of Borges fixates on a coin so obsessively that it progressively displaces all other thought until the narrator anticipates perceiving nothing else. The story, which explores questions of free will that also run through Infinite Jest, was briefly referenced by Wallace in a New York Times review of a Borges biography.

Graham Foster has identified a number of parallels with Don DeLillo's 1972 novel End Zone, including the enclosed sporting environments of Logos College, End Zone's fictional university, and Infinite Jest's Enfield Tennis Academy. Foster also interprets the Eschaton sequence as an allusion to a war game played by characters in End Zone, with both games blurring the distinction between simulated and real violence.

Critical reception

Infinite Jest was marketed heavily, and the publicity, which included a 10-city book tour and numerous interviews for Wallace, forced him to adapt to being a public figure. The publisher, Little, Brown, credited the book's success to this campaign, which included a series of cryptic teaser postcards to 4,000 people, announcing a novel of "infinite pleasure" and "infinite style". Rolling Stone sent reporter David Lipsky to follow Wallace on his "triumphant" book tour—the first time the magazine had sent a reporter to profile a young author in 10 years. The interview was never published in the magazine but became Lipsky's New York Times-bestselling book Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (2010), of which the 2015 movie The End of the Tour is an adaptation.

Early reviews contributed to Infinite Jest's hype, many of them describing it as a momentous literary event.

In the Review of Contemporary Fiction, Steven Moore called the book "so brilliant you need sunglasses to read it, but it has a heart as well as a brain. Infinite Jest is both a tragicomic epic and a profound study of the postmodern condition." In 2004, Chad Harbach wrote that, in retrospect, Infinite Jest "now looks like the central American novel of the past thirty years, a dense star for lesser work to orbit".

In a 2008 retrospective, The New York Times called the book "a masterpiece that's also a monster—nearly 1,100 pages of mind-blowing inventiveness and disarming sweetness. Its size and complexity make it forbidding and esoteric."

Time magazine included the novel in its list of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005.

As Wallace's magnum opus, Infinite Jest was viewed as the center of the new discipline of "Wallace Studies", which, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, "is on its way to becoming a robust scholarly enterprise."

Not all critics were as laudatory. Some early reviews, such as Michiko Kakutani's in The New York Times, were mixed, recognizing the inventiveness of the writing but criticizing the length and plot. She called the novel "a vast, encyclopedic compendium of whatever seems to have crossed Wallace's mind." In the London Review of Books, Dale Peck wrote of the novel, "it is, in a word, terrible. Other words I might use include bloated, boring, gratuitous, and—perhaps especially—uncontrolled." Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University, called it "just awful" and written with "no discernible talent" (in the novel, Bloom's own work is called "turgid"). In a 2000 review of Wallace's work to date, A. O. Scott wrote in The New York Review of Books, "[T]he novel's Pynchonesque elements [...] feel rather willed and secondhand. They are impressive in the manner of a precocious child's performance at a dinner party, and, in the same way, ultimately irritating: they seem motivated, mostly, by a desire to show off."

Some critics subsequently qualified their initial stances. In 2008, Scott, writing for Slate, called Infinite Jest an "enormous, zeitgeist-gobbling novel that set his generation's benchmark for literary ambition" and Wallace "the best mind of his generation". In 2018, Wood said he regretted his negative review: "I wish I'd slowed down a bit more with David Foster Wallace." Infinite Jest is one of the recommendations in Kakutani's book Ex Libris: 100 Books to Read and Reread.

Adaptations

Playwright Ken Campbell worked on an adaptation of Infinite Jest for the Millennium. His concept was to have 1,000 performers who each paid $23 to take part in the event, which would last a week. It did not come to fruition. German theatrical company Hebbel am Ufer produced a 24-hour avant-garde open-air theatre adaptation in 2012.

Infinite Jest was adapted in Finnish for radio and broadcast in six episodes by Yle in January 2023.

In popular culture

• The Parks and Recreation episode "Partridge" contains various references to the novel. For example, Ann and Chris take the "Incandenza-Pemulis Parenting Compatibility Quiz", and Ann's fertility counselor, Dr. Van Dyne, works at the C. T. Tavis Medical Center.
• The video for the Decemberists' "Calamity Song", directed by Parks and Recreation co-creator Michael Schur, recreates the novel's Eschaton chapter.
• The music video for MC Lars and Wheatus's "Finite Jest" recounts the plot of Wallace's novel from Hal's perspective, recreating scenes from the book.
• The Infinite Summer project, an online book group with the goal of reading Infinite Jest over a single summer, took place in 2009. It included daily commentary from well-known writers, musicians and media personalities.
• The indie pop rock band the 1975's song title "Surrounded by Heads and Bodies" was inspired by the novel's opening line. The band's lead singer, Matty Healy, was reading the book while in rehab.

Translations

Infinite Jest has been translated:

• Blumenbach, Ulrich (2009). Unendlicher Spaß (in German). Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. ISBN 978-3-462-04112-5.
  • In 2010, Blumenbach received the Leipzig Book Fair Prize and the Kurd Laßwitz Award for the translation.
• Nesi, Edoardo; Villoresi, Annalisa; Giua, Grazia (2000). Infinite Jest (in Italian). Roma: Fandango Libri. ISBN 978-88-87517-10-1.
• Telles de Menezes, Salvato; Teles de Menezes, Vasco (2012). A Piada Infinita (in Portuguese). Quetzal. ISBN 978-989-722-063-0.
• Covián, Marcelo; Calvo, Javier (2002). La broma infinita (in Spanish). Barcelona: Mondadori. ISBN 978-84-397-0236-8.
• Galindo, Caetano W. (2014). Graça Infinita (in Brazilian Portuguese). Companhia das Letras. ISBN 978-85-3592-504-3.
• Kerline, Francis (2015). L'infinie comédie (in French). Éditions de l'Olivier. ISBN 978-28-7929-982-2.
• Kemény, Lili; Sipos, Balázs (2018). Végtelen tréfa (in Hungarian). Jelenkor Kiadó. ISBN 978-9-636-76614-6.
• Polyarinov, Alexey; Karpov, Sergey (2018). Бесконечная Шутка (in Russian). AST. ISBN 978-5-17-096355-3.
• Valkonen, Tero (2020). Päättymätön riemu (in Finnish). Siltala / Sanavalinta. ISBN 978-952-234-653-7.
  • In 2021, Valkonen was awarded the Mikael Agricola Prize.
• Kozak, Jolanta (2022). Niewyczerpany żart (in Polish). Wydawnictwo W.A.B. ISBN 978-83-83180-26-7.
• Književnost, Svetska; Naslovi, Novi (2022). Beskrajna Lakrdija (in Serbian). Kontrast. ISBN 9788660361655.
• Yu, Bingxia (2023). 无尽的玩笑 (in Chinese (China)). 上海人民出版社 (Shanghai People's Publishing House). ISBN 9787208161757.
• Sapir, Michal (2023). "מהתלה אינסופית" (in Hebrew). Hakibutz Hameuchad.
• Farrokhi, Moeen (2024). "مزاح-بی‌پایان" (in Persian). Borj. ISBN 978-6227280708
• Henkes, Robbert-Jan (2026). "Eindeloos vertier" (in Dutch). Uitgeverij Koppernik.
• Matar, Adham Wahib (2022). Duʿāba lā tantahī دعابة لا تنتهي (in Arabic). Damascus: Dar Ninawa. ISBN 978-9933-38-281-0.
• Tarashchuk, Petro (2026). Neskinchennyi zhart Нескінченний жарт (in Ukrainian). Kyiv: Vydavnytstvo Zhupanskoho. ISBN 978-617-83-3653-0.

See also

• Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself
• The End of the Tour
• Something to Do with Paying Attention
• Infinite Summer
• Hysterical realism
• Postmodern literature
• "The Zahir"

Notes

References

Further reading

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Infinite Jest.

• The Infinite Jest Wiki
• "Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace" by Ted Gioia (The New Canon)
• Infinite Atlas An interactive map of all the characters, places, and events in Infinite Jest