When the writer David Foster Wallace died in 2008, he left behind a manuscript for an unfinished novel, The Pale King, as well as an oeuvre that has come to define him as the voice of a generation: three labyrinthine novels, a trilogy of short-story collections, a bevy of sprawling nonfiction and a sprig of academic miscellanea that broaches topics from rap music to Cantorian mathematics.
His monumental Infinite Jest, a 1,079-page dystopian satire set in a near-future Boston, stands out from this work. Across interweaving storylines, the text follows the students of an elite tennis academy poised for the big time; the trials undergone by addicts in a neighbouring halfway house; and the spectre of a film so intoxicatingly entertaining that those who set their eyes on it are doomed to watch until death. Recently, Infinite Jest celebrated 30 years since its original publication—and the developments in technology, US politics and our relationship with entertainment since then have only confirmed its alarming prescience.
At a glance, Wallace’s speculation on the changing shape of technology and entertainment can seem like the most striking thing about Infinite Jest. In his fictionalised Boston, where political extremism, rampant marketing and climate collapse are pervasive, day-to-day communication has been replaced by video calls, or “videophony”, while terrestrial television and cinemas have been usurped by streaming services—utilities not unlike the Zoom or Netflix apps that have become ubiquitous in the past 15 years.
More than just exploring what the technology of the future might look like, however, Wallace wanted to highlight how these technologies could fundamentally change us. In videophony, he envisioned a system in which users fell into self-conscious spirals, focused more on how they appear than what they are saying: “The real coffin-nail for videophony involved the way callers’ faces looked on their TP screen, during calls. Not their callers’ faces, but their own,” he wrote. “People were horrified at how their own faces appeared on a TP screen… Even with high-end TPs’ high-def viewer-screens, consumers perceived something essentially blurred and moist-looking about their phone-faces, a shiny pallid indefiniteness that struck them as not just unflattering but somehow evasive, furtive, untrustworthy, unlikable.”
From this alienation from the self follows the threat of an even greater alienation from society at large: Infinite Jest’s MacGuffin, a film so entertaining it leaves viewers catatonic, is described by one character as “what has happened when a people choose nothing over themselves to love”. And here we can deduce something of an argument by Wallace: that when society allows accelerating technological innovation to converge with increasingly seductive commercial entertainment, it becomes “easier, and more convenient, and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money,” as Wallace noted in 1996.
‘We’re all lonely for something we don’t know we’re lonely for…’
Most of the characters in Infinite Jest try to grapple with this alienation by leading heavily regimented lives, but this on its own does little to improve their lot. Ensconced in an elite tennis academy, child prodigy Hal Incandenza is accomplished, supremely talented and intelligent, yet still he is lonely and disillusioned, opting for chronic cannabis consumption to detach himself further: “We’re all lonely for something we don’t know we’re lonely for,” he ponders while getting high. “When I started the book the only idea I had was that I wanted to do something about America that was sad,” Wallace said in a radio interview in 1996. “Most of my friends are extremely bright, privileged, well-educated Americans who are sad on some level, and it has something to do with loneliness… I think somehow the culture has taught us, or we’ve allowed the culture to teach us, that the point of living is to get as much as you can and experience as much pleasure as you can, and that the implicit promise is that will make you happy.”
Yet even from within this gloomy diagnosis of a lonely society, Infinite Jest offers glimpses of a way out. When hulking opiate addict Don Gately is checked into a halfway house, he acknowledges that he must give himself up to something and that can only be a life of sobriety and connection. After initially baulking at the seemingly banal clichés of the 12-step recovery programme—“how much he hates this limp AA drivel about gratitude and humility and miracles”—Gately gives himself up to the process, participating in prayer and accepting the platitudes, eventually working as a live-in staffer to assist his fellow housemates. When newcomers are brought under his care, Gately empathises with their feelings of despondency because he felt the same, but he is clear that the only way to be healed is to give themselves up to something greater than the solipsism of detachment. Gately takes them aside, “It’s all optional; do it or die.”
It’s perhaps in Gateley’s attempts to reconnect with the world that we find the reason Infinite Jest continues to resonate 30 years later: Wallace showed us just how much the struggle against loneliness is, in essence, a search for meaning in a society that provides none. In the optimistic, irony-drenched 1990s this was a nascent, overly sentimental idea destined for derision or ridicule. Today, in a more politically volatile era, it is not only self-evident but comes attached with a warning. If society is no longer governed by meaningful values, then who, or what, does shape it?
