The Woman Within Wallace’s Lit Bro Bible, Infinite Jest
What to do with an author who is at once a revered genius and a documented abuser?
I kept myself from reading about the specifics of David Foster Wallace’s patterns of abuse until after I finished Infinite Jest. The novel was tough enough to trudge through, with hundreds of pages of footnotes and the density of a bad biscuit. For one, I didn’t want my experience of the novel to be colored too opaquely by Wallace’s biography, which I knew the basics of. On the other hand, I didn’t need another reason to put down the 2-pound book. Wrangling the prose sometimes felt like when I tried to read Don Quixote in Spanish even though I never made it out of technicolor textbooks at university or past the first verse of Despacito in the car. After I finished the novel, I did a deep read of the specifics of Wallace’s abuse. The specifics are specifically terrifying. That he positioned himself as a looming threat over ex-girlfriend Mary Karr by attempting to buy a gun; that he scaled her safety, erasing her sense of home by climbing up the side of her house; that he followed her son home from school to create the sense of his ever-presence in her life; that he threw a coffee table and tried to push her out of a moving car is only a quick gloss of his behavioral history.
All of the things I loved about Infinite Jest melted away to reveal the existence of a menacing alterior — like, when you get into your favorite bar in Allston, only to be stopped inside — tripping over tequila and dubstep — by an undercover cop. Wallace’s writing began to feel invasive, especially because I found that much of the merit of his work was that it trained me to think like him. I sat on the Green line going towards Hynes while Gatey was on the exact same route; I bought Takis from the Father & Son Market, and the world around me was tinged in a Wallacian skepticism and fascination. The other thing I loved about the novel was that it described human suffering with proximity. Wallace’s acute understanding of the human psyche, and awareness for the way people think is evidenced through the sensitivity of the prose in Infinite Jest. I see Wallace, ironically, as a cross between a Lobster (who with his hypersensitive antennae map out his world), and as a Stephen Daedalus (who feels Church sermons so intensely he hallucinates). Wallace’s presumptive sensitivity to the world makes his real-life actions even more sinister and tragic given that he probably deeply understood — more than anyone — the intricacies of their psychological impact. How could I think, “I want to write like him,” lust over his literary prowess, and make him out to be a hero like so many hyper-educated bros before me, given his gross objectification, obsession, and impression of himself on Mary Karr, and other women? It’s hard for me to grapple with the two simultaneously-true ideas that I love Wallace’s work, and that he was an abuser.
On top of all this, during the three months I read Infinite Jest — which required carrying the novel with me almost everywhere — the book seemed to signal a hyper-masculine thrill in a number of boys I encountered. The book was like Axe body spray. You smell it, and nearby is a man who is about to talk to you. Some pressed me to discuss it when I was busy, some puffed up at the sight of the book despite never having opened it — some had untouched copies on their sticky coffee tables, and one was mean to an old lady who mistook his airplane seat for hers and proceeded to tap me on the shoulder every 30 minutes during a 6-hour-long humid JetBlue flight to Puerto Rico try to talk about it while I was trying to read. In between dismissing my interest in the novel, and analyzing specific scenes, he bombarded me with personal anecdotes: “YO you know that one scene where the guy is so high and is masterbating and just starts freaking out?! That happens to me all the time!” An aspect of the novel that permeates the real and lived process of reading it, is the fact that it seems to invite unwanted male attention almost everywhere — the novel was hyper-mediated through my physical experience of it embodying the book as I carried it at my side.
I’m not going to lay out a conclusive way forward in thinking about Wallace’s abuse, because I don’t know what it would be. I’m not going to tell you what I did to get men to stop talking to me (look mean), but I will provide an examination of the main feminine presence in Infinite Jest, Joelle van Dyne. Though she is a complex character that cannot be fully explicated in one go, I did pick up on a few noteworthy things that can be helpful in the infinite task of analyzing the novel. First, Joelle seems to exist only as an aesthetic object for Orin and Himself, and is a source of entertainment and attachment for other characters. Given evidence that the character of Joelle is at least partially inspired by Mary Karr (“His relationship with Mary Karr was volatile. She inspired a character in the novel — a radio host named Madame Psychosis who ends up in a halfway house.” “Wallace once suggested that the writing of Infinite Jest was a grand gesture meant to impress Karr: ‘a means to her end (as it were)’”) whom Wallace abused, her existence within the novel is made even more complicated. What does it mean for Wallace to invade Karr’s life with threats and guns and then invade her again by writing her?
Joelle, for much of the novel, disappears into the language, and psyche of others. Joelle is both Orin’s first “subject” and his father’s most important “subject.” Orin calls his sexual conquests “subjects” and his father, Himself, is a filmmaker. The connection between this verbiage employed in both sexual and cartridge/entertainment-related scenarios throughout the novel suggests an overlap in both Orin and Himself’s interpretation and use of her body. Both conquering Joelle as a sexual “subject” and capturing her as a “subject” in film involve a certain amount of taking of her identity, and exploitation of her vulnerability. Later in the novel, the word “subject” appears again in a more conventional context. It’s used by Joelle to mean a point of discussion. The reader receives Joelle’s interiority during the Incandenza Thanksgiving. The narrator states “never trust a man on the subject of his own parents … Though its not as if you could trust parents on the subject of their memory of their own children either,” (Wallace 739). “Subject” here is presented as something whose meaning can be explicitly manipulated, changed, lost in language, and lost in the speaker’s own subjectivity. A “subject” is shown to be constructed by language and therefore not immune to language’s insufficiencies and status as untrustable. The next way in which Joelle becomes dehumanized (or, transhumanized as she is described as being endowed with “transhuman beauty” (Wallace 290)) and anonymized into language is in Orin’s persistent reference to her as “the P.G.O.A.T,” or “the Prettiest Girl of All Time.” In being endowed with transhuman beauty, stripped of her personhood, and turned into a linguistic metaphor, the P.G.O.A.T. showcases the way in which quantifying a person by language is problematic, and the way in which even our humanity can easily be transposed into a slice of entertainment. Joelle — being constituted rhetorically in this way for Orin — dies and gets reborn as “subject” and “P.G.O.A.T.”
The reader’s first introduction to Joelle is that she “was Orin Incandenza’s only lover for twenty-six months and his father’s optical beloved for twenty-one,” (Wallace 229). Joelle is set up as existing only as the object of another character — or, as the recipient of another character’s possession. To exist she is either possessed by Orin or Himself, or both in overlap — but never herself. Joelle seems to be aware of her status as easily objectified, as she is self conscious about why Orin is pulled to her. Orin later is revealed to be infatuated with the idea that “Himself would want to use her. In the Work. She was too pretty for somebody not to want to arrange, capture,” (Wallace 739). Joelle, in this instance, is showcased as a mutable being, one whose parts can be captured then arranged to another’s liking because of her genetic existence.
In the preface to Joelle’s attempted suicide at a party, Molly Notkin recalls — in a clinical way that suggests even she now thinks of Joelle solely through cartridges — Himself’s use of Joelle in one of his cartridges. There can no longer be separation between Joelle the person and Joelle the subject once she has been captured, instead, they are one. Notkin says “Joelle’s always viewed as either terribly stupid or terribly brave, the girl raising her striped arms in triumph of artless thanks, fo rbeing constructed this way, these ‘tits,’ built by whom and for whom never occuring, artlessly estatic” (Wallace 230). Her body — specifically her “tits” are described as being built by a person and for a person, furthering the idea that her body, as a subject, is something that exists to exist for another, and is able to be built and arranged for the spectation of another. She is construed as a fluid ground for observation and viewing in the context of Himself’s work. Within Orin’s world, she exists in a similar way. She is an object of observation for the people around her, not someone to be interfaced with. When Orin finally begins to interface with her (markedly, only after she endows him with a bit of superhumanness himself by asking for his autograph after a Boston University football game), and “[meets] her eye and not [drown], his dread now transformed into whatever it had been dread of,” marking a sort of transcendence for him, “since no other Terrier could bring himself within four meters of her,” (Wallace 295). Even the source of seemingly her most power — her beauty — becomes abducted as a source of power for someone else, Orin in this case. This is somewhat reversed at the end of the novel. A scene with Joelle, in the reader’s first meeting with her and at the beginning of her and Orin’s relationship showcases the way that she starts to film him as he plays football. She “gets it all, zooming in from the opposite end zone … Joelle gets him sprinting, three-meter lateral burst as he avoids the first few sets of hands and the beefy curling lips .. Of particular interest are the eyes” (Wallace 299). Joelle focuses the film on Orin’s eyes, which are the means by which Orin sees and becomes enchanted by her, then dehumanizes her. The eyes are an interesting site for Joelle, as both the beginning of her power, and the end of her power considering how her beauty is used against her and for the pleasure and becoming of others. Eventually, in veiling herself, Joelle attempts to negate this dynamic, but, does not completely escape it as not knowing and only being able to guess at what she looks like — at what kind of deformity lies beneath her coverage — makes her even more erotic to some characters. The last the reader hears of Orin in the whole novel, he is behind glass, trying to kick his way out, while being watched by “the Subject,” “when he recognized that the subject was looking at his eyes rather than into them as previously,” (Wallace 972). The very cryptic, heavy line, at least partially plays the part of showcasing the difference between being looked at and looked into — the eyes either looked at in a spur of capturing and owning on the part of the viewer, or looked into on the part of an equal in interfacing. In the beginning of the novel Orin sees Joelle as a prettiness that no one could resist wanting to arrange and capture. Joelle captures his eyes on film, then Orin ends up captured, and his eyes are rendered a mysterious status as objects looked at rather than into. With abject horror, Orin loses his own humanness.
In the cartridge Notkin describes at the party, Joelle pronounces “beautiful like the former interested in four syllables, splitting the diphthong,” (Wallace 230). In equating Joelle’s pronunciation of beautiful and interested, the narrator draws a parallel between “beauty” and “interest,” which can be tracked throughout the novel. Wallace was extremely interested in what people choose to pay attention to. He even has Marathe and Steeply (double, triple, quadruple secret agents?) talk about attention for a long time, saying, “Attachments are of great seriousness, choose your attachments carefully. Choose our temple of fanaticism with great care,” (Wallace 107). Something interesting is happening with interest, subjectivity, and viewership here. Joelle’s beauty within the cartridge is posited as “interesting.” In doing so, the narrator makes a claim about beauty. Beauty is posited as being precedented on some interested viewer. That interested viewer is what makes something worthy of consumption. Beauty is both something that is quantified by its ability to hold someone’s attention, and is reliant on a viewer — therefore within the logic of the novel — another’s beauty may be conceived or construed as partially owned by that viewer because it would not exist without his interest. So, beauty becomes a way that one’s being can be consumed and owned by others. Ken Eredy showcases the way in which Joelle’s aesthetics become a source of entertainment and interest for the characters in the novel. The narrator states “part of this new Joelle girl’s pull for Ken Erdedy isn’t just the sexual thing of her body, which he finds made way sexier by the way the overly large blue coffee-stained sweater tries to downplay the body thing without being so hubristic as to hide its — sloppy sexiness pulls Erdedy in like a well-groomed moth to a lit window — but it’s also the veil, wondering what horrific contrast to the body’s allure lies swollen or askew under that veil; it gives the pull a perverse sideways slant that makes it even more distracting,” (Wallace 365). In this reflection, Joelle is posited as an object meant for viewing given that her body is described as a “body thing.” She is reviewed coldly, and selfishly just as one would review a source of entertainment: in meaning made through contrast that is meant to be noted, in the excitement that a piece of entertainment can bring to a viewer through hiddenness, or the horrific. In his Entertainment, Himself makes work focused on the same sort of contrast, as he “hoped the audience would find at once self-consciously non illusory and wildly entertaining” (Wallace 945). By making Joelle’s identity disappear into language by calling her “the P.G.O.A.T” and positing her beauty as intimately relating to the interest of viewers, the narrator shows Joelle’s beauty as existing to be possessed by others. Joelle seems to understand this, as when she describes what’s under her veil to Gately, she states “I’m perfect. I’m so beautiful I drive anybody with a nervous system out of their fucking mind. Once they’ve seen me they can’t think of anything else and don’t want to look at anything else and stop carrying out normal responsibilities and believe that if they can only have me right there with them at all times everything will be alright” (Wallace 538).
Joelle, in Infinite Jest, exists partially as an aesthetic object, an entertainment, and a captivator of intense interest given that interest is shown to be intimately related to beauty. Could, when Joelle explains her beauty as able to drive people mad, Wallace be leaning toward an autobiographical description of his relationship with Mary Karr? Could he be suggesting he has an addiction to her beauty as the subject of his infinite interest — that not having her drove him crazy, and that he perceived owning her as a cure to his troubles? If that is true, Wallace’s forcing Joelle to live veiled in order to go about her life, and in order to not drive all of his characters mad becomes especially erie in the post #MeToo era where victim-blaming has been exposed and questions like “well, what were you wearing when it happened?” have been explicated as troublesome and problematic for absolving abusers of their responsibility. If she has not been deformed by acid (as hinted at later on in the novel), is veiling Joelle’s beauty another “don’t wear something so revealing,” or, normalizing masculine possession of femininity? Either way, Wallace’s writing of Mary Karr into the character of Joelle seems like another sort of invasion, especially given the close proximity with which Wallace operates in relation to her body. When we first meet Joelle at Mary Notkin’s party, Wallace’s narrator is literally inside of her mouth as he states “a good muddy juice fills Joelle’s mouth with spit that’s as good as the juice, and her linen veil is drying and beginning once again comfortingly to flutter with her breath,” (Wallace 229). All of this information makes reading Wallace’s Infinite Jest, infinitely more complex and unpacking Infinite Jest’s existence as a sort of male token of desire even more interesting, and necessary.
