Ira Halpern
ââŠtypes like the Ennet House types are just the sorts of people Pemulisâs talents let him get away from in terms of like social milieu and mixing and transacting; and his basic attitude with these low-rent employees is one of unfoolish discretion and like why tempt fate.â[1] The Enfield Tennis Academy of David Foster Wallaceâs Infinite Jest, where Michael Pemulis resides, is located just across the road from Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House. The two institutions are separated by economic and social distinctions. However, they do not occupy separate thematic worlds. A reading of the novel demands that each storyline in the novel be read in light of the others. While the Enfield plot and the other sports plots have largely been treated independently from the Ennet and Entertainment plots by scholars, the sports plots in Infinite Jest can be interpreted in relation to Wallaceâs themes of addiction and recovery as explored in these other two plots. In the world of Infinite Jest, sport shares much in common with addiction to substances and entertainment. In other significant respects, sport operates as a therapy, very much like the therapy offered by Ennet House. American culture deifies athletes and idolizes sports. Sport is often analyzed in a vacuum. Statistics, scores, and the celebration of athletes are the modes of understanding athleticism that dominate mainstream sports coverage in the media. By grafting patterns of addiction and therapy onto American athletics, however, Wallace demands that athleticism be interpreted in a wider cultural context.
Wallace learned to play tennis as an early teen.[2] Unfortunately, his game peaked in high school, before puberty set in, and his peers became bigger than him.[3] While Wallaceâs tennis career ended early, he expressed a profound interest in the sport as an adult in his writing. In one essay, Wallace suggests that âdeep down somewhere inside I still consider myself an extremely good tennis player, real hard to beat.â[4] Tennis remained a part of Wallaceâs identity even after his skill level peaked, and his experience of tennis both as player and spectator informs his writing. In his journalism and essays, Wallace demonstrates a keen eye for the mechanical details of the game, but he always situates the sport within a broader cultural context. He discusses, for instance, its religious dimension in âFederer as Religious Experience,â[5] its corporate dimension in âDemocracy and Commerce in the U.S. Open,â[6] and its link with fertility and growth cycles in âDerivative Sport in Tornado Alley.â[7]
In Infinite Jest, Wallace situates tennis within the particular cultural context of addiction and therapy. This context is informed not only by American culture but also by Wallaceâs personal experience. Wallaceâs exploration of marijuana coalesced with his development as an athlete.[8] One of Wallaceâs friends âremembers the tennis team doing one-hitters in the back of the bus as they rode home from a match in Danville, the coach in the front pretending not to notice.â[9] Forays into marijuana marked the beginning of Wallaceâs long and devastating journey with substance abuse. Wallace stopped schooling at Harvard in 1989 to check into a psychiatric institute in Belmont called McLean Hospital.[10] He then went to a halfway house in Brighton called Granada House, where he would attend substance abuse meetings.[11] Ennet House is the fictional counterpart of Granada House. In fact, it was at Granada House that Wallace conceived of characters such as Don Gately, based on one of the supervisors that he encountered there.[12] Wallace stated, with reference to Infinite Jest, that he ââŠwanted to do something that was very, very much about America. And the things that ended up for me being most distinctively American right now, around the millennium, had to do with both entertainment and about some kind of weird addictive, umâŠwanting to give yourself away to something.â[13] However, if Wallace set out to write a novel about America, he ended up writing a novel that is largely about himself. He followed one of the mantras of creative writing workshopsââwrite what you knowââand projected what he knew about substance addiction and recovery onto the experience of students of a tennis academy.
Infinite Jest is a sprawling, encyclopedic novel, complete with pages of footnotes, some of which contain their own footnotes. Four major plotlines in the novel can be distinguished, though there are indeed more than four. One plotline is centered upon the Enfield Tennis Academy, where elite junior tennis players such as Hal Incandenza are trained. The Enfield Tennis Academy was founded by James Incandenza, Halâs father. This storyline follows Hal and his friends as they experience life at the tennis academy and engage in the use of recreational drugs. A second plot deals with the football career of Orin Incandenza, Halâs brother. A third plot deals with Ennet House, where abusers of substances attempt recovery. A fourth plot is concerned with a mysterious and lethally addictive âentertainment cartridgeâ called Infinite Jest, created by James Incandenza, that grips the viewerâs attention at the expense of all else. Wallace gives various clues that the Enfield plot should be read in light of the other plots. He creates a âmeanwhileâ effect to connect disparate events. For instance, after describing part of the Enfield plot, Wallace writes: âAt just this moment, @1200 meters east and downhill and one level below ground, Ennet House live-in staff Don Gately lay deeply asleep.â[14] We are reminded of the geographical proximity of the two plots and the fact that events within each plot are occurring during the same timeframe. The story of Hal, junior athlete at Enfield, and that of Don Gately of Ennet House, become part of a unified frame of reference. Wallace works some obvious parallels between plots into the text. For instance, Avril Incandenza, the mother of Hal who hovers over the operations of Enfield, is described as having âthree or four cigarettes all going at once,â[15] and the spy Remy Marathe notices an addicted man about to enter Ennet with âseveral cigarettes burning at one time.â[16] Hal notes the glaring similarity between Ennet Houseâs âInner Infantâ program and the âInner Childâ sign of Dr. Dolores Rusk at Enfield.[17] Enfield, Ennet and Entertainment are suggestively alliterated: they all begin with âEn.â Wallaceâs textual clues prod the reader into making connections between plots.
However, few connections have been made by scholars between the sports plots on the one hand, and the Ennet and Entertainment plots on the other hand. When scholars do make thematic connections linking the sports plots to the Ennet and Entertainment plots, they often do so along the lines of Elizabeth Freudenthalâs comment that in Infinite Jest, âeveryone is an addict,â whether that addiction is to âcrack, Demerol, booze, elite competitive tennis, M*A*S*H, household bleach.â[18] However, this type of analysis evades the complexity of the relationship between athleticism and addiction in the novel. Tom LeClair mentions that the worlds of Enfield and Ennet cohere as a âcross-class study of parental abandonment and familial dysfunction.â[19] While this statement is true, it does not account for the patterns of addiction and recovery that also unite the two plotsâand arguably in a more substantial way. As clues within Infinite Jest indicate, a more thorough analysis of connections between plots, particularly between the sports plots on the one hand, and the Ennet House and Entertainment plots on the other hand, is essential.
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Wallace spoke of addiction with reference to the model of a continuum, suggesting that addiction is always a matter of degree. In low doses, an addictive substance can be harmless, but in high doses, it can cause serious consequences. Wallace said, âIâm not saying thereâs something sinister or horrible or wrong with entertainment. Iâm saying itâsâIâm saying itâs a continuum.â[20] In his seminal essay âE Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,â Wallace reminds the reader that something only becomes malignantly addictive once a âcertain threshold of quantity is habitually passed.â[21] The model of a continuum is a useful one for analyzing sport in Infinite Jest as well. Even for Wallace, the continuum model applied not only to entertainment, but also to drugs, and furthermore, to patterns in American life more broadly. Infinite Jest, Wallace explained, âisnât supposed to be about drugs, getting off drugs. Except as the fact that drugs are kind of a metaphor for the sort of addictive continuum that I think has to do with how we as a culture relate to things that are alive.â[22] The notion of the continuum can be applied particularly to sport in Infinite Jest. However, the model of the continuum can be extended beyond different gradations of addiction. The continuum possesses a therapeutic pole as well. Indeed, as will be explored later in this essay, sport in high doses can become addictive, and the obsessive consumption of sport as entertainment resonates with substance addiction. However, Wallace also suggests that in some respects, tennis resembles not addiction but therapy.
In Infinite Jest, â[b]eing an active member of a Boston AA Group is probably a little bit like being a serious musician or like athlete, in terms of constant travel.â[23] This clue leads to a larger realization that athleticism and substance recovery are similar in more ways than one. The plots of Ennet and Enfield, LeClair suggests, are linked by the concept of âconditioning.â[24] LeClair draws a parallel between the students at Enfield who are physically conditioned for success in the Show, and the Ennet House residents who have been conditioned by parents and the media to be âproviders of sexual pleasure or consumers of reductive entertainment.â[25] Perhaps more fundamentally, Ennet itself is a place of ritualized conditioning. Wallace is deeply concerned with conditioning rituals in Infinite Jest. He devotes pages to descriptions of tennis drills at Enfield,[26] and describes Gatelyâs systematically ritualized chores at Ennet.[27] Wallace is not trying to bore the reader with his long descriptions of rituals. Rather, he is attempting to make the reading experience the replication of the rituals that the text describes. Reading about the rituals at Ennet and Enfield becomes a ritual in and of itself. As places of ritualized conditioning, Ennet and Enfield both become substitutes for religious ritual. They offer stability and comfort, not only for the recovering addicts at Ennet and the tennis players at Enfield, but also for readers of the novel.
The programs of Ennet and Enfield both require the surrendering of the mind and a forgoing of autonomy. In addition to the primary role of Ennet as a rehabilitation center, both Enfield and Ennet offer therapies for hyper-consciousness and over-intellectualization. The programs of both institutions demand the suppression of the conscious mind and the intellect. The process of recovery from addiction at Ennet is predicated on what Freudenthal calls âanti-interiority.â[28] At this recovery house, one repeats until one believes.[29] Physical speech precedes cognition, understanding, and faith. Freudenthal suggests that for Gately, prayer is a ârepetitive, performative, bodily ritual.â[30] Gately does not believe in God, but hopes that by using his body as a âfunctional instrumentâ of prayer he will improve his well-being.[31] Wallace writes that âmost Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking.â[32] The âAnalysis-Paralysisâ warned against by the Ennet program recalls Halâs âparalytic thought-helix.â[33] It also evokes the âpseudophilosophical mental labyrinth that Bob Hope-smokers are always wandering intoâŠ.â[34] Wallace writes â[t]hat it is statistically easier for low-IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high-IQ peopleâ[35] and that âthe Disease makes its command headquarters in the head.â[36] Mantras are supposed to trump critical thought for Ennet residents, and one such mantra is, in fact, âMy Best Thinking Got Me Here.â[37] The mind must be surrendered in order to fight substance addiction.
According to Jimâs father, the mind must also be surrendered to win a game of tennis. Jimâs father explains: âSon, youâre a body, sonâŠ.Head is bodyâŠ.youâre a machine a body an object, no less than this rutilant Montclair, this coil of hose here or that rake there for the front yardâs gravel or sweet Jesus this nasty fat spiderâŠ.â[38] Cartesian dualism is succinctly collapsed by the phrase âhead is bodyâ and replaced by a materialistic view of the human brain. The tennis ball itself is then equated with the body: âA tennis ball is the ultimate body, kid.â[39] In a bodily, out-of-mind state on the court, Jimâs father recounts feeling his âheart pounding like a heart.â[40] The use of a simile with the same anatomical vehicle and tenorââheartâ and âheartââhelps represent the extent to which the experience of sport is an embodied one. Orin Incandenza has a similar out-of-mind experience playing football: ââŠhe literally could not hear himself think out there, maybe a clichĂ©, but out there transformed, his own self transcendedâŠ.â[41] In his essay entitled âTennis Player Michael Joyceâs Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff About Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie and Human Completeness,â Wallace writes: âThe sort of thinking involved [in playing tennis] is the sort that can be done only by a living and highly conscious entity, and then only unconsciously, i.e. by combining talent with repetition to such an extent that the variables are combined and controlled without conscious thought. In other words, serious tennis is a kind of art.â[42] The act of playing tennis is certainly not a passive exercise, but it involves a type of mental state requiring diminished consciousness. Tennis requires a particular mode of unconsciousness that is practiced and targeted rather than purely passive. This form of deliberate unconsciousness is an art, and it is a component of both substance recovery and sport at a high level.
The programs of both Ennet and Enfield use repetition of clichĂ©s to convey truths. Alcoholics Anonymous meetings are filled with repetition: one is inculcated with the same dogma at these meetings again and again. When Hal goes to a professional grief therapist, he mocks the sort of earnest clichĂ©s that serve as the foundations of AA. âNotice I was subtly inserting certain loaded professional-grief-therapy terms like validate, process as a transitive verb, and toxic guilt,â he says. âThese were library-derived.â[43] However, in order to be cured of the âDisease,â one must accept precisely these types of âlibrary-derivedâ clichĂ©s. At Ennet, Gately overhears a revealing snippet of a conversation: âSo then at forty-six years of age I came here to learn to live by clichĂ©sâŠ.One day at a time. Easy does it. First things first. Courage is fear that has said its prayers. Ask for help. Thy will not mine be done. It works if you work it. Grow or go. Keep coming back.â[44] Whereas Hal believes that there is no substance to clichĂ©s, at AA they possess deep meaning. Gately realizes that âthe vapider the AA clichĂ©, the sharper the canines of the real truth it covers.â[45] ClichĂ©s become a means of accessing truth. A similar process of repetition of clichĂ©s is required to learn tennis at Enfield. Ted Schacht explains: âBoys, what it is Iâll tell you is repetition. First last always. Itâs hearing the same motivational stuff over and over till sheer repetitive weight makes it sink down into the gut.â[46] While âsinking down into the gutâ is an idiomatic expression, the anatomical language signifies a link between repetition and the embodied nature of athletics at a high level. Repetition is a tool used to foster the type of unconsciousness required to play tennis. This form of repetition is essential to advancement in the programs of both Ennet and Enfield.
Life at both Ennet and Enfield requires that the participant or member give himself or herself up to something greater. For Katherine Hayles, both tennis at Enfield and recovery at Ennet are intended âto cure the dysfunctionalities of autonomous selfhoodâ; at these institutions, the liberal subjectâso valued by Americansâis replaced by collective will.[47] One resident at Ennet says, âI know part of this process is learning to live in a community.â[48] One is not alone at Ennet: âYou are not uniqueâŠthis initial hopelessness unites every soul in this broad cold salad-barâd hall.â[49] Ennet, in addition to its primary role as a rehabilitation house, attempts to offer a potential solution to the problem of loneliness in America, a problem with which Wallace was deeply concerned.[50] Just as residents of Ennet give themselves up to their communities, junior athletes at Enfield give themselves up to their teams. Gerhardt Schitt speaks about a philosophy of sport that is about giving oneself up to greater powers. For Schtitt, âjr. athletics was basically just training for citizenship⊠jr. athletics was about learning to sacrifice the hot narrow imperatives of the Selfâthe needs, the desires, the fears, the multiform cravings of the individual appetitive willâto the larger imperatives of a team (OK, the State) and a set of delineating rules (OK, the Law).â[51] The students at Enfield are indeed representing larger teams. Even though tennis is a sport in which the team consists of either an individual or only a pair of individuals, players at Enfield must in fact give themselves up to larger communities and structures. They must give themselves up to the capitalist corporations with which their clothing is branded.[52] They must give themselves up to their academy, which they represent. They must give themselves up to their nation, which values the spectacle of sport so greatly. Wallace makes two explicit references to the fact that Americans, and people in general, feel the need to give themselves up to something greater. Early in the text, Wallace states, in reference to Halâs use of recreational drugs: âAmerican experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels.â[53] Later, Wallace states, âWe are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybeâŠ.To games or needles, to some other person.â[54] These instances, near the beginning and end of the text, are examples of Wallace at his most thematically explicit. The need to give oneself away to something greater fascinated Wallace, and Enfield and Ennet both offer therapies for the primal human need of connectivity in an America characterized by loneliness.
These are therapies for not only a lonely but also a largely secular American northeast. The Ennet program and sport both require the individual to give him or herself up to God. There is a god at AA. He might be called the âbenign anarchy of subjective spirit,â but he is a god nonetheless.[55] Sport, too, can serve as a religious medium. In Orinâs transcendent experience of athletics, the âcrowd-soundâ is âcongregationalâ and the ball inscribes a âcathedran archâ over the field.[56] âHimselfâ of Enfield seems godly, especially when considered in light of the similarly capitalized âHim/Her/Itâ of AA. In âFederer as Religious Experience,â Wallace posits precisely what the title of the essay suggestsâthat the ecstasy of the game is akin to the ecstasy of religious transcendence.[57] Similarly, both substance therapy and sport in Infinite Jest, with their embodied rituals, their repetition of dogma, and their formation of community structures, are substitutes for religion in a secular culture. Although âthe Ennet House types are just the sorts of people Pemulisâs talents let him get away from,â[58] Pemulis might discover, if he spent some time at Ennet House, that its program shares much in common with that of the elite tennis academy that he attends.
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While Infinite Jest links sport with therapy, sport can also become a dangerous addiction, both for the players and their audiences. When asked why he chose to include Enfield in his novel, Wallace stated that âI wanted to do something with sport and the idea of dedication to a pursuit being kind of like an addiction.â[59] In fact, both the pursuit of tennis and the consumption of tennis as entertainment are framed in Infinite Jest as potentially addictive. In Crack Wars: Literature Addiction Mania, Avital Ronell muses:
On generalizing the notion of addiction. Our âdrugsâ uncover an implicit structure that was thought to be one technological extension among others, one legal struggle, or one form of cultural aberration. Classifiable in the plural (drugs: a singular plural), they were nonetheless expected to take place within a restricted economy.
What if âdrugsâ named a special mode of addiction, however, or the structure that is philosophically and metaphysically at the basis of our culture?[60]
Wallace, like Ronell, frames patterns related to substances merely as a substructure upon which American society is based. According to Timothy Medley, Americans ânow claim to be addicted to behaviors that once epitomized individual autonomy.â[61] He refers to âexercise addiction,â âworkaholism,â âshopaholism,â and âsexual compulsivenessâ as characterizing this widespread American zeitgeist.[62] Addiction to sport, closely related to exercise addiction, could easily be added to this list. Sport in Infinite Jest can take the form of a dangerous addiction, both for the athletes and for the audience, when performed or experienced in great quantities. Medley suggests the pervasive sense in America that addiction is at once âutterly normal and dangerously pathological.â[63] While the dangers of addiction are rendered pathologically at Ennet, the Enfield plot presents addictive tendencies in a more normalized setting. However, even when addiction is normal in the world of Infinite Jest, it nevertheless poses a serious threat to American culture.
Halâs cerebral personality represents the means of perceiving the world that is anathema to the Ennet program. In his spare time, Hal reads Hamlet, whose modern history of interpretation has explored the title characterâs inability to take decisive action as a result of over-thinking. This type of over-thinking is conducive to sustaining an addiction to a substance. A link is established between Halâs use of LSD and his feeling while proving himself a gifted child.[64] Addiction to the expansion of oneâs mind through substances is connected with addiction to the expansion of the intellect. Whereas Hal is deeply ironic, Boston AA is an â[i]rony-free zone.â[65] Irony involves an advanced form of cognition that is not welcome at the Ennet program. Ironic detachment for the young tennis players is a way of fitting in. It is a way of not being alone. However, Ennet makes a similar promiseâthat everyone is welcomeâwhile keeping hip irony absent from its premises. The Eschaton game played by the athletes in training at Enfield provides another point of contrast between Enfieldâs culture and Ennetâs program. Eschaton is a highly complex game. One footnote in particular outlines a series of mathematical equations involved in the game that lasts for pages.[66] The amount of detail might seem superfluous, but it serves a purpose. Wallace forces the reader to perform the same cerebral processing that is performed by the players of the gameâor at least try to do so. The Eschaton game sequence immediately precedes a description of a Boston AA meeting, and it is an essential point of contrast to the type of non-analytical perspective that AA attempts to inculcate. In fact, Wallace makes direct comparisons between the Eschaton game and substances. He describes the students becoming âblackly drunk with thantoptic furyâ and refers to the game as âalmost narcotized-looking.â[67] Wallace posits an association between cerebral thinking and drugs and alcohol. While the official program at Enfield is akin to therapyâwith its emphasis on ritual, repetition and communityâthe culture of Enfield created by its young students is actually conducive to addiction.
There is also something about the very essence of the game of tennis that resembles substance addiction. Indeed, the status of tennis as an embodied ritual resonates with the therapeutic process, but there is another side to tennis that resonates with addiction. Both sport and substances can be self-destructive in a very direct sense. Consider, for instance, Jimâs fatherâs line: âhow the drunk and the maimed both are dragged forward out of the arena like a boneless ChristâŠ.â[68] However, substance addiction and tennis are tragic in a more subtle way, as a result of the circularity of the processes by which they operate. The experience of substance addiction is described in these terms: âWhat looks like the cageâs exit is actually the bars of the cage.â[69] It is also described as a âgerbil-wheel of addictive pain.â[70] Wallace emphasizes circular entrapment. Indeed, for Wallace, part of the definition of an addiction is that âit offers itself as a relief from the very problems it causes.â[71] Gerhardt Schtitt explains, using similar terms, how âtennis is an essentially tragic enterprise, to improve and grow as a serious junior, with ambitions. You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely.â[72] The tragic pattern of endless circularity that defines substance addiction also defines competitive sport at a high level. Perhaps this endless circularity is what Wallace was referring to when he suggested that in Infinite Jest, âthereâs all this stuff about movement within limits and whether you can puncture the limits or not.â[73] Both tennis and substance addiction are defined by an irresistible attraction paired with an impossibility of escape. The singular focus on tennis of the junior athletes at Enfieldâthe competitive obsession of which Wallace was deeply wearyâbecomes an addiction of its own.
Another resonance between the Enfield plot and drug culture relates to pharmaceutical drugs. Eric A. Thomas suggests that in Infinite Jest, the character Kate Gompert, a depressed woman who has attempted suicide, is âcommercially brandedâ by her medication names.[74] Wallaceâs footnotes support this branded reading: âParnateâSmithKline Beecham’s product-name for tranylcypromine sulfateâ and âZoloftâŠnot all that dissimilar to Prozac, manufactured by Pfizer-Roerig.â[75] It is significant that Wallace makes a special effort to mention the brands of these medications in his footnotes. And Wallace brands the players at Enfield in a manner that is similar to his branding of drugs. At Enfield, âCoyle is Prince and Reebok, as is Trevor Axford. John Wayne is Dunlop and AdidasâŠ.Hal Incandenza is Dunlop and lightweight Nike hightops and an Air Stirrup brace for his dicky ankleâŠâ and so forth.[76] The syntactic structure of these phrases suggests that these characters are their brands. The players become the companies that they represent. They become branded substances to be consumed as entertainment by audiences. Both pharmaceutical drugs intended to cure depression, and tennis, intended to entertain, are bound up in the capitalist system of branding. In the world of Infinite Jest, Americaâs manifold addictions are shaped by the nationâs capitalist economy.
The Enfield plot also contains thematic connections with the Entertainment cartridge plot. The lethal Entertainment cartridge, Infinite Jest, is characterized by the extreme state of passivity that it induces: viewers are destined to watch the cartridge until death. Other forms of entertainment, in the world of the novel Infinite Jest, are also immensely passive. The attachĂ© character, for instance, has a âcomplexly molded dinner tray over his head so that his shoulders support the tray and allow it to project into space just below his chin, that he may enjoy his hot dinner without having to remove his eyes from whatever entertainment is up and playing.â[77] On the other hand, tennis is characterized by activity. Certain entertainment and games are forbidden at Enfield because they âencourage a stuporous passivity that E.T.A.âs philosophy now regards as venomous to the whole set of reasons the kids are enrolled there in the first place.â[78] When Hal watches an entertainment cartridge, he feels almost entirely âhorizontal,â an image that is contrasted with the vertically upright tennis player.[79] However, despite the active nature of tennis, Enfield students are being trained to become entertainers for a passive America hungry for spectacle. Tennis as an object of consumption, as opposed to an activity, is presented as a form of addictive entertainment. There is an âEntertainment Requirementâ at Enfield because students are training to become âentertainers, albeit of a deep and special sort.â[80] Orin and Joelle van Dyne, athlete and cheerleader, try to make their âspectacleâ âas entertaining as possible.â[81] While sport itself is active, as a product of consumption it induces pure passivity. The ultimate goal for Enfieldâs students is to become pictures âin shiny magazinesâ and performers in the Show.[82] Rather than succumbing to entertainment, Wallaceâs athletes are merely subsumed by it, perpetuating a society governed by its addictions.
Both entertainment and Enfield tennis can be infantilizing addictions. Marathe says, with reference to the Entertainment cartridge, that Americans âwould die for this chance to be fed this death of pleasure with spoons.â[83] The metaphor of spoon-feeding suggests the maternal, infantilizing nature of the cartridge. The content of the Entertainment is centered on a mother. It is rendered through a âmilky blur,â evocative of a motherâs milk.[84] It is shot from a âcribâs eye view.â[85] The adult Ennet residents watch a show that appears to be a childrenâs program, called âThe Mr. Bouncety-Bounce Daily Program.â[86] For Wallace, television in the age of postmodernism offered âa self-mocking invitation to itself as indulgence, transgression, a glorious âgiving inâ (again, not exactly foreign to addictive cycles).â[87] The postmodern irony adopted by commercial televisionâWallace cites the example of a puppet for an Alf commercial advising him to âEat a whole lot of food and stare at the TVââserves this purpose as well, providing âan ironic permission-slip to do what I do best whenever I feel confused and guilty: assume, inside, a sort of fetal position, a pose of passive reception to comfort, escape, reassurance.â[88] Enfield is similarly infantilizing. As a rite of passage, it should perhaps be a place where boys become men, but it seems that the boys there remain boys, abusing recreational substances, and constantly operating in a state of play. Halâs own mother, âthe Moms,â hovers over the entire operation, managing details as minute as the punctuation on the milk signage in the dining hall.[89] As Marshall Boswell suggests, ânearly everyone in the significantly designated Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment is a grownup baby in diapers, crawling on all fours in search of something or someone to fill that need for maternal plentitude for wholeness, or, at the very least, someone or something to blame for his or her own unhappiness.â[90] The Enfield plot, then, serves as a useful point of comparison to the Entertainment plot. Wallace portrays an America that desires to be infantilized and craves maternal figures. These are needs that are provided by both the addictive Entertainment cartridge and the Enfield Tennis Academy.
This longing for maternal origins is intimately bound up with a regressive death drive. Wallaceâs suggestion that â[w]e are all dying to give our lives away to somethingâ can be taken quite literally.[91] The Entertainment cartridge is addictive to the point of lethality, as represented by van Dyne, who signifies both maternity and âDeath incarnate.â[92] Drugs, of course, can also result in death. Van Dyne, for instance, tries to kill herself with a cocaine overdose.[93] But the death drive encompasses more than the desire to die. It is also characterized by the desire not to propagate life. The character Ken Erdedy, for instance, prefers masturbation to sex while he is high on marijuana.[94] When substances are involved, the death drive overpowers the drive toward sexual reproduction. Similarly, in the lives of competitive athletes, the death drive sometimes overrides the drive to live, leading to suicides.[95] The Enfield plot can be interpreted as a point of comparison to the plots relating to substances and entertainment. In all three cases, an addiction spirals out of control and leads to death, or at leastâin the case of Erdedyâto the lack of desire to create new life.
American addictions to both entertainment and beauty are represented by the figure of van Dyne, the mysterious seductress of the Entertainment. However, Gately experiences a vision in which he imagines van Dyneâs veiled face, in contrast to her attractive body, as taking on the likeness of âfucking Winston Churchill, complete with cigar and jowls and bulldog scowl.â[96] It is important that van Dyneâs face is Winston Churchillâs face as opposed to that of some other rotund man. Churchill is known for fighting against Nazi fascism, and there is a certain fascism to the allure of van Dyneâs beauty. American culture, the novel suggests, is fascist in the primacy it places on the physical body. The cult surrounding beauty, like a fascist dictator, tells Americans what to think, and how to perceive the world. It is for this reason that the juxtapositional image of Churchill is so startling. The Enfield plot speaks to the concern of fascism as well, and it does so through the same imagery. Enfield student Ortho Stice has a âbeautiful sports body, lithe and tapered and sleekly muscled, smoothâlike a Polycleitos body, Hermes or Theseus before his trialsâon whose graceful neck sits the face of a ravaged Winston Churchill, broad and slab-featured, swart, fleshy, large-pored, with a mottled forehead under the crew cutâs V-shaped hairline, and eye-pouches, and jowlsâŠâ.[97] Churchillâs face is not welcome at Enfield, where Gerhard Schtitt, one of the patriarchs of the academy, is described as âproto-fascist.â[98] Sticeâs head is out of place because it represents a threat to the fascist system of the academy. Nowhere is the creeping fascism of American life more clearly threatened than by the faces of Churchill on the beautifully constructed bodies of van Dyne and Stice. The imagery of Churchillâs face on beautiful bodies serves as another example of an instance in which the Enfield plot is a helpful key into the text as a whole, shedding light on the nature of Americaâs manifold addictions. Americaâs addictionsâincluding addictions to both beauty and sportâare rendered here as fascist threats to a country that prides itself on democracy.
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Infinite Jest presents sport both as a therapy in certain contexts and as an addiction in certain contexts. However, Wallace does not go so for as to suggest that sport is as effective a therapy as that offered by Ennet House, nor that, as an addiction, sport is as debilitating as a substance. Wallace is drawn to the beauty of the essence of sport, and he suggests its therapeutic potential for the players. However, as Mark Bresnan suggests, there is a sense that Ennet surpasses Enfield as a site of play: whereas work, rules and familial obligations permeate the play that takes place at Enfield, the freer âserious playâ that takes place at Ennet actually accomplishes its goal of aiding recovery.[99] Enfield does not surpass Ennet as a therapeutic method. It is not positioned as Ennetâs substitute. Nor is Enfield tennis or culture equivalent to substance addiction. Indeed, in addition to framing sport as a potential therapy for the players, Wallace challenges the fascist idolization of sport in America by implicitly suggesting its resonances with substance addiction. While sport can be therapeutic, when consumed in extremely high dosesâparticularly when it begins to dominate oneâs lifeâit can resemble an addiction in its endless circular entrapment. It can also resemble an addiction for those who passively watch âthe Show.â However, Wallace does not go far as to suggest that sport, either as an activity or as a product of consumption, is always as dangerous as substance addiction (though, when it comes to athletes committing suicide because of the pressure of athletics, sport can indeed become just as dangerous). Wallace poses a complicated and nuanced framework for interpreting American sports culture, but it is clear that he desires sport to be situated within a broader analytical framework.
Speaking about the themes of entertainment and addiction in the novel, Wallace stated that he felt âstupid talking about it this way. Because, itâs like, because I donât have a diagnosis. I donât have a system of prescriptions. I donât have four things that I think are wrong. I donât have four differentâŠopinions about it. It seems to me that itâs more of a feeling, a sort of texture of feeling.â[100] The notion of textures of feeling provides a useful way of conceptualizing the theme of sport in the novel as well. Sport is framed by the textures of feeling that also frame patterns of addiction and therapeutic recovery. Wallace articulated a conception of his novel as being âmore like a piece of music than like a book, so a lot of it consists of leitmotifs and things that curve back.â[101] Wallace portrays the leitmotifs of American culture in his fiction, without offering specific advice as to how to move forward. Wallace does not provide a prescription about the place of sport in American culture. What Wallace does demand is that we examine sport through the lens of the fundamental substructures of American life â those of addiction and therapy. Whether sport is an addiction or a therapy, and the degree to which sport is addictive or therapeutic, is always a matter of context.
In his essay entitled âDerivative Sport in Tornado Alley,â Wallace meditates on the lines involved in the game of tennis.
A tennis court, 78â X 27â, looks, from above, with its slender rectangles of double alleys flanking its whole length, like a cardboard carton with flaps folded back. The net, 3.5 feet high at the posts, divides the court widthwise in half; the service lines divide each half again into backcourt and fore-. In the two forecourts, lines that run from the base of the netâs center to the service lines divide them into 21â X 13.5′ service boxes. The sharply precise divisions and boundaries, together with the fact thatâwind and your more exotic-type spins asideâballs can be made to travel in straight lines only, make textbook tennis plane geometry.[102]
Wallace had a keen eye for the mechanics of tennis, and in these passages he meditates on the beauty of the geometry of the gameâparticularly on the beauty of tennis as a game of lines. However, Wallaceâs discussion of the mathematical details of the game is combined with analysis of sport in light of broader cultural issues. In the same essay wherein Wallace muses about the geometrical lines of the tennis court, he situates his late puberty and its effect on his tennis game within the context of the âMidwestâs communal psychic energyâŠinformed by growth and fertility.â[103] He later qualifies his comment, suggesting that â[a]lienation-from-Midwest-as-fertility-grid might be a little on the overmetaphysical side.â[104] Wallace is caught between an understanding and appreciation of sport on its own terms and a desire to situate sport within a broader analytical framework. The situation of sport within this broader framework is often expressed along with some skepticism. For instance, in âFederer as Religious Experience,â after acknowledging that â[j]ournalistically speaking, there is no hot news to offer you about Roger Federer,â Wallace sets up the purpose of his article: âThis present article is more about a spectatorâs experience of Federer, and its context.â[105] Indeed, Wallace does two things in the essay: through painstaking detail, he demonstrates an appreciation for sport on its own terms, and he also situates tennis within the context of religious experience. However, Wallace qualifies the notion of tennis as religious experience at the beginning of the essay by suggesting that it might be âjust one more of the overheated tropes that people resort to to describe the feeling of Federer Moments.â[106] Skepticism toward situating tennis in a cultural framework is built into the beginning of the essay. By the end of the essay, the cultural resonances of the sport are thoroughly embraced.
This duality between appreciation of sport on its own terms and the contextualization of sport within a broader analytical framework is also manifest in Infinite Jest. At times, for instance, when Wallace devotes pages and pages to tennis drills, the description of the mechanics of tennis training can become tedious to read. These passages help us understand the game and the training involved on its own terms. However, this attention to the details of the sport is paired with moments that pulsate throughout the text wherein the notion of sport as an insular world implodes, and sport becomes linked to broader problems of American life. These moments are not necessarily explicit, but are rather based on âtextures of feelingâ that unite the sports plots to other plots in the text. The larger cultural picture within which sport is situated is framed by patterns of addiction and recovery. Wallaceâs portrayal of the dangers of addiction is conveyed most hyperbolically in the science-fiction Entertainment plot, and in most pathological terms in the Ennet plot. But patterns of addiction and recovery do not only appear in a science-fiction plot, nor do they only appear among those of the lowest echelon of American societyâamong addicts who have wound up at a rehabilitation house. They also appear at an institution representing the cultural heights of America: an elite, wealthy tennis academy. Though Wallace is not interested in equating sport with substance addiction or rehabilitation, he is interested in broadening the scope of these terms. For Wallace, addiction and therapy are the very organizing principles of modern American life, permeating even its idealized sports culture. Though the novel demonstrates a great appreciation of sport, Infinite Jest provokes an engagement with sport that goes beyond the celebration of its games on their own terms. A sport, for David Foster Wallace, is much more than a game.
[1] Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest (New York: Back Bay Books, 1996), 171.
[2] Max, D.T. Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (New York: Penguin, 2012), 8.
[4] Wallace, David Foster. A Supposedly Fun Thing Iâll Never Do Again (New York: Back Bay Books, 1997), 244.
[5] Wallace, David Foster. âFederer as Religious Experience,â New York Times 20 August 2006.
[6] Wallace, David Foster. Both Flesh and Not (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2012).
[13] Lipsky, David. Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace (New York: Broadway Books, 2010), 82.
[18] Freudenthal, Elizabeth. âAnti-Interiority: Compulsiveness, Objectification and Identity in Infinite Jest,â New Literary History 41:1, 2010, 191.
[19] LeClair, Tom.âThe Prodigious Fiction of Richard Powers, William Vollman, and David Foster Wallace,â Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 38:1, 1996, 32.
[47] Hayles, N. Katherine.âThe Illusion of Autonomy and the Fact of Recursivity: Virtual Ecologies, Entertainment, and Infinite Jest,â New Literary History 30:3, 1999, 694.
[50] Kennedy, Hugh and Geoffrey Polk. âLooking for a Garde of Which to Be Avant: An Interview with David Foster Wallace,â in Conversations with David Foster Wallace, ed. Stephen J. Burn (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 16.
[59] Miller, Laura. âThe Salon Interview: David Foster Wallace,â in Conversations with David Foster Wallace, ed. Stephen J. Burn (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 64.
[60] Ronell, Avital. Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 13.
[61] Medley, Timothy. âA Terminal Case: William Burroughs and the Logic of Addiction,â in High Anxieties: Cultural Studies in Addiction, ed. Janet Farrell Brody and Marc Redfield (California: University of California Press, 2002), 39.
[73] Donahue, Anne Marie.âDavid Foster Wallace Winces at the Suggestion That His Book is Sloppy in Any Sense,â in Conversations with David Foster Wallace, ed. Stephen J. Burn (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012),71.
[74] Thomas, Eric A.ââPsychotic Depressionâ and Suicide in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest,ââ Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 54:3, 2013, 279.
[99] Bresnan, Mark. âThe Work of Play in David Foster Wallaceâs Infinite Jest,â Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 50:1, 2008, 54.
Works Cited
Boswell, Marshall. Understanding David Foster Wallace. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003. Print.
Bresnan, Mark. âThe Work of Play in David Foster Wallaceâs Infinite Jest.â Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 50.1 (2008): 51-68. Web. 15 Oct. 2014.
Donahue, Anne Marie. âDavid Foster Wallace Winces at the Suggestion That His Book is Sloppy in Any Sense.â Conversations with David Foster Wallace. Ed. Stephen J. Burn. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012. 70-72. Print.
Freudenthal, Elizabeth. âAnti-Interiority: Compulsiveness, Objectification and Identity in Infinite Jest.â New Literary History 41.1 (2010): 191-211. Web. 17 Oct. 2014.
Hayles, N. Katherine. âThe Illusion of Autonomy and the Fact of Recursivity: Virtual Ecologies, Entertainment, and Infinite Jest.â New Literary History 30.3 (1999): 675-697. Web. 17 Oct. 2014.
Kennedy, Hugh and Geoffrey Polk. âLooking for a Garde of Which to Be Avant: An Interview with David Foster Wallace.â Conversations with David Foster Wallace. Ed. Stephen J. Burn. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012. 11-20. Print.
LeClair, Tom. âThe Prodigious Fiction of Richard Powers, William Vollman, and David Foster Wallace. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 38.1 (1996): 12-37. Web. 15 Oct. 2014.
Lipsky, David. Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace. New York: Broadway Books, 2010. Print.
Max, D.T. Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace. New York: Penguin, 2012. Print.
McCaffery, Larry. âAn Expanded Interview with David Foster Wallace.â Conversations with David Foster Wallace. Ed. Stephen J. Burn. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012. 21-52. Print.
Medley, Timothy. âA Terminal Case: William Burroughs and the Logic of Addiction.â High Anxieties: Cultural Studies in Addiction. Ed. Janet Farrell Brody and Marc Redfield. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. 38-60. Web. 15 Oct. 2014.
Miller, Laura. âThe Salon Interview: David Foster Wallace.â Conversations with David Foster Wallace. Ed. Stephen J. Burn. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012. 58-65. Print.
Ronell, Avital. Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. Print.
Thomas, Eric A. ââPsychotic Depressionâ and Suicide in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.â Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 54.3 (2013): 276-291. Web. 27 Sep. 2014
Wallace, David Foster. A Supposedly Fun Thing Iâll Never Do Again. New York: Back Bay Books, 1997. Print.
Wallace, David Foster. Both Flesh and Not. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2012. Print.
Wallace, David Foster. âFederer as Religious Experience.â New York Times 20 August 2006. Web. 15 Oct. 2014.
Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest. New York: Back Bay Books, 1996. Print.
Ira Halpern is a student at the University of Toronto. He is particularly interested in David Foster Wallace, including issues in his fiction such as addiction and therapy, as expressed in this essay. He recently had an essay published on Edith Wharton in the journal The Explicator, entitled âSecret Love, Private Space, and Inner Sanctuary: The Concealed in THE AGE OF INNOCENCE.â Ira is an associate editor for a student English journal published at the University of Toronto.