Name
ENGL 450
14 December 2016
The Trail of the Wraith: Hyperreality and Authorship in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest
“In this age of ours serious people are more serious than they ever were . . .” - Saul Bellow, 1959 (Bellow 1)
	Buoyed both by David Foster Wallace’s posthumous surge in literary reputation and the development of various perspectives on the social and intellectual climate of the 2010’s, Wallace’s sprawling, convoluted novel Infinite Jest (1996) has acquired a hallowed, almost prophetic and yet still uncertain place in the canon of “modern” American literature. Indeed, the fragile “post-subsidization” American society depicted at length in the novel, apparently hovering on the verge of apocalypse, does have a number of features that mesh conveniently with postmodern theories of communication and semiotics. The aura of detachment and automation that pervades the overlapping lives of the characters of Infinite Jest offers insight into the field of media ecology, following the pioneering (1980’s) work of Neil Postman on the downfall of “reason” to hyperreality. Considered a work of “hysterical realism,” Infinite Jest’s prodigious theoretical self-awareness renders the oncology of the work mystifying in ways so complicated that their explication in scholarship can become reductive to the study of  novel itself, though I do not suggest that Infinite Jest should be studied in a vacuum - quite the opposite.

A more formalist approach to the enigma of Infinite Jest is necessary in order to delineate the complicated poetics of the novel, an approach potentially more rewarding for the critic and philosopher than the best application of N. Katherine Hayles and others’ overhead approaches to ideology, as this manner of “cutting room floor” work can trace these ideas into substance as opposed to just tracing the garbled Chimeric shadow of ideology. As Richard Stock observes in the preamble to his analysis of Infinite Jest’s end note #123, modern narratology, following the work of Barthes, Todorov, and lastly Genette does not provide a working framework for reading a novel - and yet a work like Infinite Jest manages to maintain his cohesion with its plethora of digressions and red herrings (Stock 377. 389). In short, the novel has an amplitude of wasted space, existing theory cannot hold it together, and yet Infinite Jest remains compelling. Though daring in its enterprise and reasonably well vested in its theoretical sources, Stock’s argument hinges on a rather poor textual example, as Stock, dealing with the immensely convoluted narrative status of the endnote, is forced to conclude that “. . . Narratology provides little help to explain what kind of “grammar of narrative” this piece of text adheres to. However, and crucially, within the context of the novel, it makes perfect sense” (Stock 384). Stock’s argument bears an unfortunate resemblance to assertions of a text’s “unity” or “disunity,” which lends an uneasy subjectivity to the essay’s means of analysis and the critic’s choice of evidence. Like Hayles, Stock spends precious little time addressing the “Eschaton/dictation” endnote in comparison to his narratological heritage and the exposition of plot and narrative quirks required to introduce the scene. Can an example so brief and oddly anecdotal do this level of damage to the entire methodology of narratology? Quite possibly, as more recent structuralist theorists like Jonathan Culler argue persuasively that the “last wave” of serious narratological interest in the 1970’s and 80’s sought to “apply a narrative to narratology” (Culler qtd. In Stock 372) thus returning us to the all-consuming loop of self-reflexivity created by Hayles’s philosophical analysis and the sheer scope and heft of the novel. Culler defines the last vestiges of formalism and structuralism as “scapegoats” in the contexts of modern scholarly narrative, on the grounds that “. . . narratology has been in the doldrums, seen as a product of the structuralism that a poststructuralist age believes itself to have outgrown” (Culler 911). Following this line of thought, I argue that a large part of the difficulty of applying theory to a work like Infinite Jest stems from the perception, not wholly without merit, that a complicated work of three or four times (or whatever) [post] modern literature must be explained by a body of new theory of equal intricacy, for it has “outgrown” other standards. This unwritten law of subjective scholarly thought probably does not do anyone much good, as the conundrums it creates draw a greater curtain of elitism between theory and those “uninitiated;” therefore, a return to narrative form as a point of understanding can help readers and critics make more imaginative forays into the realms of reality and possibility buried in Wallace’s Infinite Jest.  I propose that an “escape” from these scholarly quagmires, the narratological “missing link,” so to speak, can be found through the anecdote contained between pages 828 and 840 of the novel, in which the novel appears to briefly abandon all simulacra of reality by creating a narrative obstruction in the form of the dead author’s “wraith,” an apparition of ambiguous purposes that represents the pivotal absent character and narrative of the novel.
Rather than a “hysterical” realism, I propose “hyperrealism” as a more profitable literary descriptor to attach to the conventions of a work as simultaneously unique and universal in scope as Infinite Jest. I argue that applying a lense of hyperreality (as informed by Postman and Baudrillard) to Infinite Jest allows for a more nuanced reading of this strange and evidently unjustifiable moment of the novel, as opposed to attempting to highlight the success or failure of tertiary developments in postmodern narratology (Culler 914). In an allegedly drug-addled fever dream beginning on page 828, the two main parallel plot arcs of Infinite Jest begin to overlap with the appearance of the  self-professed “wraith” of Himself (James Incandenza, a deceased and comically obscure post-modern filmmaker)  to Emmitt House’s Don Gately, a drug-addicted burglar finally on the straight edge, who now lies convalescing from a Canadian bullet he took on behalf of a man he hated. The wraith of “Himself” engages in the narrative entirely through the indirect speech of Gately’s hyperreal fugue and, with great dramatic irony, proceeds to give his/its own idiosyncratic view of the situation, in language and content that cannot mesh with Gately’s understanding in a meaningful way (Postman 103). This passage marks an  abrupt departure from the ongoing simulacra of realism that the novel, elsewhere, follows to a T pseudo parodically, i.e. without taking itself too seriously; the answer, I believe stems around the scene’s suggestion of a shadow narrative - it opens up the possibility that, apparently, the auteur Himself has had a sinister hand in proceedings the whole time. Semiotically, none of this can add up, and the looming influence of the wraith and its professed past-life deals with the awkward, isolated, and pretentiously cryptic prospect of authorship in a state of perpetual hyperreality where the sincere is so thoroughly absent that the author cannot just die, because it must be infinitely more complicated than that. Tracing the trail of Himself’s “wraith” offers some narrative explication of the more jarring vagaries of the novel’s plot and their relation to the hyperrealization and dissociation of purpose that has created the titular Entertainment.
“This figure in this dream”
The presence of the wraith subsumes Don Gately’s persona and abortively reroutes the novel’s narrative energy to feed the grandeur behind the “misunderstood” spirit’s rampaging design. Building on Genette’s centralizing work on focalization, Stock calls attention to the presence of a “meta-narrator” that ties disparate strands of narrative together (Stock 381), a central consciousness in the form of a “speaker” in the conventions of classical narratology. The meta-narrator of Infinite Jest seems to inhabit Don Gately over course of his sublimely detailed dream, granting his mind an outlook at once reflexive and blatantly literary: “ . . . it occurred to Gately  that you don’t normally think of wraiths or ghost-ish phantasms as being tall or short, or having bad posture, or wearing certain colored socks. Much less anything as specific  as extrusive nostril hair. There was a degree of, what, specificness about this figure in this dream that Gately found troubling” (Wallace 830). The hyperreality of Gately’s dream state makes itself clear in its comically exaggerated level of detail; Gately experiences a lucidity so vivid that he feels uncomfortable believing it, thus initiating a “conversation[s] so pretentious that” Gately, in this case, “. . . literally could not believe it” (Wallace 120). The panorama of the wraith’s scene engages in pastiche with the demeanor of Himself’s films, leaving little doubt about the phantasmal being’s identity, but sewing new doubts on its/his/the character’s purpose and irony or seriousness thereof (Holland 227). The hyperreal specificity of the self-professed wraith jars ironically with the entity’s post-mortem addiction to self-pity, as the apparition makes repeated assertions eulogizing his life as a “figurant,”indulging in slices of over-academic film studies jargon that “Himself” goes to great lengths to explain to the underprivileged and uneducated Gately when the wraith “. . . assures Gately he can more than Identify with an animate man’s feelings of communicative impotence and mute strangulation. Gately’s thoughts become agitated as he tries to yell mentally that he never said a fucking thing about impotence“ (Wallace 834). The wraith’s stream of self-pitying rationalization, formulated extensively in Himself’s mind over the three months it supposedly takes him to manifest in a corporeal form, comes across to the down-to-earth Gately as little more than “limp” artsy grandstanding masking the same old evasions of any old addict off the street.
At any rate, the wraith has caught Gately off guard with this moment of  overt, half-ironic empathy - the spirit has violated his mental space and drawn connections between them that defy the bounds of logical realism. The high-brow nature of these intrusions creates linguistic and dramatic tension that hangs like an unfinished question over the surreal scene. Gately finds the “academic” flavor of the wraith’s evasive maneuvers particularly heinous, a sentiment that applies equally well to the fractal, absent character of “Himself” and his wraith; the post-mortem diffusion of his mind and matter calls attention to how the “auteur” has become not so much disillusioned from the real “reality” as blissfully unaware of it and uninterested in taking responsibility or worrying about earthly consequences. From a narratological standpoint, the osmosis between Gately’s mind and the wraith takes on special significance, as it allows a form of sparse, unfounded narration not easily attributable to either Gately or the wraith’s consciousness to creep in, a reminder of the novel’s omniscient central consciousness and its interpolation in free indirect statements like “No way for the figurant to win. No possible voice or focus for the encaged figurant” (Wallace 835). These statements take a morphological form that classical narratologists like Barthes and Todorov designate as having no direct, literal relation in the text (Barthes 372). They represent the thoughts of the global narrator, as directed by Foster Wallace, and thus do not literally relate to the exact situation present in the novel, so the statements seem to act as a symposium or middle ground between Gately and his “dream” of the wraith, an effective way to gauge the novel’s apparent larger themes of addiction and familial cycles in their most direct inclusion into the novel; this is likely the author’s private philosophizing. The revelation of this frame of mind of “thinking aloud” as he does to Gately, mirrored by Foster Wallace’s narrator, in the deceased Himself has an integral role in efforts to understand the novel’s internal philosophy when dealing with the self-reflexive “Entertainment.”
The vast majority of the “first generation” of scholarship on Infinite Jest, perhaps best exemplified by N. Katherine Hayles’s influential 1999 article on the novel’s links to recursion and illusory autonomy in modern philosophy, delves into a theoretical background so varied, discursive, and plain extensive that it overshadows any hope of analyzing the text as a work of literature. Despite the sagacity of Hayles’s insight into the complicated post-poststructuralist arena of modern philosophy, her essay relishes precious little of its energy or even word count on textual features, providing only rather cursory explanations of a few of the novel’s multitude of characters, explanations really only differentiated from those one could find on a semi-reputable summary website by the heft of the language and its vested interest in drawing the argument to its philosophical overpinnings (Hayles 682-7, Nichols 12). Greater efforts should be made analytically, theoretically, and socially to treat even the most “hysterical” of modern long-form art as works of literature rather than mere thought experiments, a disparate assembly of ideologies and evasions. It is rather an inconsistency of the “early” scholarship on Infinite Jest (Hayles, Leclair, Jacobs, and others) that the most innovative features of the text are routinely dismissed or described in insufficient detail in favor of wrangling with the novel’s theoretical red herrings.
The uncanny specificity of the wraith and its ambiguous purpose has associative links with the web of philosophy behind Infinite Jest’s “Entertainment” and its creator. The established scholarly repertoire of deconstructive and/ideological readings of Infinite Jest concern themselves too much with outside systems of philosophy. Even in the best of cases, this is a recipe for confusion as the set of assumptions made by Hayles (1999) and Burn (2003) deals with established works of theory (which ordinarily would be effective practice) that crucial characters and consciousnesses of the novel fail to understand, or else fail to live out (Burn 226, Postman 99). Himself’s personal philosophy becomes suspiciously well-defined and specific over the course of the novel, appearing here and there in little glimpses and, on rare occasions, as a consuming force. I argue that Himself and/or his wraith understand a few things in ways specifically wrong and vague enough to escape detection - as not much scholarly attention has focused in on this character and this aspect of the novel without the work’s focus reaching toward a higher theoretical goal. The wraith’s description of his goals, dreams, and aspirations rings markedly incomplete, to the point of unreliability. The confluence of hyperreality and diffusion of purpose behind the wraith/James Incandenza/himself again has its root in the character’s inferiority complex and apathy, psychological factors that render him apt to see himself as a “figurant” (Wallace 835).  His fears on the behalf of “his youngest son” i.e. the protagonist Hal, becoming a figurant due to their (in the wraith’s mind) essential similarity once again activate Gately’s exasperation at the self-pity of it all, forcing the former thief to conclude that he really has no idea what is going on and to drift into memories of his own semi-relevant father figure, a taciturn, wife-beating product of  James Wood’s “hysterical realism” known simply as the MP. At this moment, the wraith’s self-fulfilling prophecy is realized and the being becomes an actual figurant to Gately and Himself’s presence vanishes from any further vocal role in the novel. The novel establishes this figurantic aspect of Himself’s life by the means of numerous exposition drops touching on the wasted polymath’s lazy attendance of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in the nineteen nineties and early subsidized years - the habit some of the more annoying AA crowd members and speakers have of addressing “Jim” at moments of dire import stands as an ironic, roundabout portrayal of the character’s absence; he was present, sometimes, but the meetings just washed through him (Wallace 694-7; Burn 200). His ghostly, uncorporeal form presents an ironic twist, almost akin to poetic justice; not much, evidently, has changed for him.
The Philosophy of Figurantism and The Entertainment
Oddly enough, the philosophy for functionable success followed by Himself and his followers lionizes a form of the figurantism the wraith finds such a terrifying and ignoble prospect. Gerhard Schtitt’s oddly theoretical approach to tennis trains ETA students to not think, to trust in their ability to “occur” and materialize where the ball will be, and to do what must be done and so forth (Wallace 136, 330). This method of insulating oneself from reality proves a traumatic experience to even the best of Schtitt’s/Himself’s students, with even the precocious Hal evidently unable to match the demands of “occurrence” without medicating himself with cannabis. Schtitt’s fringe ideology, lack of direct support, and brutal training regimen has links with the bizarre mini narrative, too early in the book to make narratological sense on the first read through, in which Himself’s father (the man from Glad) usurps control of the narrative voice to lecture his about his future in tennis, how he must realize that he has “got a body” and must bend it to his will without consciously bending it to his will (Wallace 60). The contours of this line of thinking, replete with ulterior motives, should make readers versed in media ecology or even psychoanalysis uneasy, as the shadow of cyclical projection colors every action taken by any male member of the Incandenza family on account of the looming spectre of their father’s quite possibly insane philosophy. Following the advent and disappearance of the wraith scene, the vaguely peripheral ETA student, Ortho “The Darkness” Stice (his monikker, like his importance, is a late addition) launches into the spotlight, occupying a strange, deutero antagonistic role to Hal culminating as his success as the ultimate student of Schtitt/Himself, a boy who manages to detach his brain and function as a body, he “occurs” and nearly defeats the withdrawn Hal, an impossible feat while Hal was regularly getting high. Shortly thereafter, the “historical likeness of Winston Churchill” faced Stice (an epithet he shares with Joanne van Dynee in Gately’s first-hand (possibly?) experience with the entertainment, gets his face stuck to a window allegedly due to supernatural command, suggesting that the wraith/Himself has a bitter streak and pride in his son (Wallace 907-9). A plethora of questions that critics and reviewers alike have asked since the novel’s 1996 release regarding “Himself” can be averaged out to produce something like “is he [himself] actually insane?” The “wraith” passage, allowing Himself his first opportunity to speak (albeit through indirect dialogue) in over six hundred pages and constitutes the reader’s longest and most affecting amount of exposure to him. Reviewers dismissive of Himself and Infinite Jest like the legendarily no-nonsense Michiko Kakutani seem to interpret the character’s painful lack of awareness as, if not insanity, a mark of the inherent victory of the larger postmodern condition which Kakutani attributes to a certain laziness and caprice on the author’s behalf (Kakutani 23). In some ways, this functional assessment of Himself (although Kakutani projects this vice a little too much into unrelated dimensions of the text) does form a key philosophical structure of the novel and its world, but the critical distance detracts somewhat from what we can glean from perhaps the most emotional moment of Gately’s interface with the wraith:
“The wrath on the monitor now bends sharply at the waist, way over forward so his face
is upside-down only cm. From Gately’s face - the wraith’s face is only about half the size
of Gately’s face, and has no odor - and responds vehemently that No! No! Any
conversation or interchange is better than none at all, to trust him on this, that the worst
kind of gut-wrenching intergenerational interface is better than withdrawal or hiddenness
on either side. The wraith apparently can’t tell the difference between Gately just
thinking to himself and Gately using his brain-voice to think at the wraith. His shoulder
suddenly sends up a flare of pain so sickening Gately’s afraid he might shit the bed. The
wraith gasps and almost falls off the monitor as if he can totally empathize with the
dextral flare.” (Wallace 839)
Socially awkward in death, the wraith reveals Himself’s essential drive to make events happen, to occur, so-to-speak, and his desperate apathy toward consequences. The strain of this line of supporting this line of thinking psychologically damages Hal, in spite of his efforts - again, rather a self-fulfilling prophecy (Nichols 8). The interruption in the form of the “flare” of pain complicates the narrative situation and forces both characters to react in ways not particularly conducive to storytelling; here they are saying and sharing that which can be neither. In this moment, the wraith, so frail and unearthly compared to Gately, has mentally adopted the convalescing addict as his son - all the while, outside, Hal and Orin Incandenza drift toward disaster and “technical interview” over their (probably nonexistent) knowledge of the Entertainment. Some quirks of the language of this passage once again call to mind the novel’s hyperreal superstructure, with the wraith “on the monitor” in a way that could be read as him being a technological simulation, a character from one of Himself’s figurant-less films (but if no one is a figurant, does that not make everyone just equally unimportant?) while the inclusion of the adverb “totally” applies a shade of irony to the scene, a touch of the quasi-cheesy, quasi-deadly pathos of Boston’s AA meetings as filtered through Gately’s functional cynicism (Henry 487). The scene dissolves here because the wraith has failed to “occur” in the proper way, but an attempt was made at least, following Himself’s coplanar attempt to rationalize his creation of “the Entertainment.”
	A fairly persuasive indicator of Himself’s/the wraith’s insanity lies in the depths of his unawareness where his “Entertainment” is concerned, as well as his apparent immunity from the effects of the film. In a 2004 review of Foster Wallace’s Oblivion, a collection of short stories, Wood criticizes the collection not only for failing to measure up to Infinite Jest but that these stories, like his magnum opus, “strangely reproduce the extreme coldness they abhor” (Wood 6). The chilling side of Himself’s bumbling genius and “hysterically” realistic powers of polymathy, as Mary Holland words it, seems to stem from the novel’s meta-unawareness of “ . . . the cultural drive toward narcissism that fuels and is fueled by irony.” (Holland 220) despite Foster Wallace’s philosophical and conventional statements otherwise, i.e. against irony. Through the intermittent pastiche of Himself’s absurdly prolific filmmaking career (his entire filmography, provided in endnote 24 and with its own footnotes, includes such titles as Annular Fusion Is Our Friend and The Medusa v. the Odalisque) Foster Wallace frames the Incandenza patriarch’s filmic pursuits as impenetrable, hollow, and ultimately unrelatable - yet the wraith claims that “the scholars and Foundations and disseminators never saw what his most serious wish was: to entertain” (Wallace 839). Himself has a case of the intentional fallacy so severe that it persists after the death of the author, with the Entertainment persisting as a carnivorous monument to the danger he courted and the forces that took advantage of his cluelessness. This fallacious line of thinking pervades the novel’s meta-narrative, most strongly in the characters of Himself and Hal, as well as in discussions of Foster Wallace’s intentions and later “revisions” in interviews and other work. Baudrillard’s notion of the hyperreality of a novel applies here to this difficulty of analyzing the text; the characters are “real” and yet they cannot, exactly, have agency. They must act as if they have agency whether they do (or think they do) or not. The debate on interpreting the cohesion of a novel of this scale could also do from analyzing character’s meta-intentions or lack thereof- I do not necessarily propose this as a “solution” to what narratologists like Stock and Barthes characterize the impossibility of reading a modern novel and taxonomizing; I suggest that authors having meta-awareness of this fallacy, in the age of creative writing workshops, should definitely be taken into consideration more often. Like a normal reality or a “continuous dream,” hyperreality can unfold as a construction of something self-assured, on supposedly ontological grounds, of its own reality (Baudrillard 23, Mendoza 47).  The existence of the Entertainment as a real danger, disseminating itself through the actions of Orin, the ghostly influence of Himself, and the wheelchair assassins, but one that ultimately proves meaningless, leaving the novel unfinished and yet strangely coherent:“If the book encourages me to remember, to think again, to re-read, to construct my own meanings from the components the book provides, how is this deathlike?” (Stock 380). Note how the ethereal existence of the wraith operates only in the indirect dialogue of the mind, allowing Wallace to attempt to explore the relationship between audience, author, and fictional author.
The wraith of “Himself” engages in the narrative entirely through the indirect speech of Gately’s hyperreal fugue and, with great dramatic irony, proceeds to give his/its own idiosyncratic view of the situation, in language and content that cannot mesh with Gately’s understanding in a meaningful way (Postman 103). This passage marks an  abrupt departure from the ongoing simulacra of realism that the novel, elsewhere, follows to a T pseudo parodically, i.e. without taking itself too seriously; the answer, I believe stems around the scene’s suggestion of a shadow narrative - it opens up the possibility that, apparently, the auteur Himself has had a sinister hand in proceedings the whole time. Semiotically, none of this can add up, and the looming influence of the wraith and its professed past-life deals with the awkward, isolated, and pretentiously cryptic prospect of authorship in a state of perpetual hyperreality where the sincere is so thoroughly absent that the author cannot just die, because it must be infinitely more complicated than that. Tracing the trail of Himself’s “wraith” offers some narrative explication of the more jarring vagaries of the novel’s plot and their relation to the hyperrealization and dissociation of purpose that has created the titular Entertainment. The Entertainment, denoted as “Infinite Jest” by the novel, cannot fully represent or fail to represent all of the abstractions with which it has been loaded, and therefore the narrative arc spirals out of control in a mimesis of the essential Brownian motion of everyday life in a culture arguably only slightly distorted from our own. The subsumption of the “intentional fallacy” into a hyperreal world confusingly blurs the line between text, story, author, and fictional author in order to reflect the power of delusion, as tantamount in the sudden appearance of an alleged supernatural being in an otherwise quasi- realistic novel. The narratology of such a piece, while labyrinthine and daunting, is not necessarily insurmountable, this process just requires careful attention to textuality and the difficulties that analysis represents.



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