Watching television with David Foster Wallace

Abstract

The exegesis argues that David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite jest is largely concerned with the addictive nature of television and entertainment The novel examines the possibility of addictive viewing by representing it metaphorically through "Infinite Jest," a film so entertaining it proves lethal; Joelle Van Dyne, a character that embodies the seductive yet crippling aspects of entertainment; and InterLace, an advanced television network/device that permits convenient access to an unprecedented amount of televised content. Current scholarship attempts seriously to qualify the role of television and entertainment in Infinite jest by looking closely at these three metaphorical representations. Yet a survey of current research in media theory reveals a level of sophistication in the novel's treatment of addictive viewing that could not have been recognized in the decade following its publication. By uniting these two bodies of scholarship, this exegesis will show how David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite jest was able in many ways to imagine, and in some cases predict, the evolution of television and entertainment. In doing so, Wallace is also able to dramatize our culture's relationship with television and entertainment as we know them today, devoting specific attention to the corrosive and detrimental effects of addictive viewing. Novel My novel, Slow Progress North, is directly influenced by Infinite jest. As such, it is devoted significantly to viewers' relationship with television and entertainment James North, twenty-five years old, is stricken with grief when his mother, Sarah, dies after a battle with cancer. At the reading of her will, James is shocked to see his estranged father, Richard. James and his mother moved to San Diego to escape his father's destructive alcoholism. And though James believed his parents' marriage ended at that moment, a series of letters left to him by his mother proves his parents had been in correspondence ever since. As James reads the letters, he comes to understand the nature of their marriage, and the possibility that he has misunderstood his own past James is forced to confront his childhood. His father, a successful advertising executive, often used James in his research. James was bullied into watching commercials so that his father could assess their effects on him. As an adult, James begins to realize that his father still exerts a powerful influence over him, which is not restricted to his relationship with television. James's job at You Co., a small self-help company, helps him in some ways to deal with his grief. But it is his girlfriend, Kristen, who helps James to reconcile his past. James, at the mercy, perhaps, of the very addiction that destroyed his family, decides finally that he must resolve years of anger and regret if he is truly to understand his inheritance. His mother, it turns out, willed him more than two stacks of tattered letters.