Interface, Excess, and Acquiring Many Exotic New Facts in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest
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2014
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Haverford College. Department of English
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Award
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eng
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Open Access
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Abstract
David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest is a text which is excessive in every sense of the word. Scholars have suggested that the size and scope of the text necessitate that readers develop strategies to "read around" the excess, glossing over excessive information in order to keep one's focus on the story. However, I argue that Infinite Jest's excess has purpose and direction, and that the text challenges us to find a way to read and understand its excess, rather than forcing us to gloss over it. To do so I draw upon the theoretical construct of interface, which orders values and allows individuals to access and transmit knowledge, so long as they play by the rules of the interface. My argument is that the text's interface is revealed in the section that tells us the "many exotic new facts" one will learn if one ever spends time at Ennet House or another similar rehab facility. The rules of Ennet House show us that the interface of the AA Program, as well as that of the text itself, both depend on a commitment to values of sincerity, which Turnbull has called an "ethics of attention." The text seeks for the reader to internalize these values, and operating within this framework then allows the reader to parse the text's excess and understand the text's depictions of characters and the way they communicate beyond Ennet House.