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“Mathematically uncontrolled but humanly contained”: Sublime Potential in

David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest

B029656

English Literature MA (Hons)

Dr Simon Malpas

Total Word Count: 10,000

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Abstract

This dissertation reads David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest through the framework of the sublime. In light of Derrida’s formulation of the sublime, Wallace is seen to frame abstract pattern as an inadequate, yet necessary, presentation of human subjectivity. The sublime experience is evoked in Wallace’s work to expose pattern to uncertainty and loss for the sake of positive indeterminacy. Lyotard’s theory of the sublime is used to illuminate Wallace’s approach to the “communication game” as involving two incommensurable systems of inadequate presentation. Engaging the unmappable limit between the presentable and unpresentable, Wallace presents communication as occurring through the sublime: at the limit between a system and that which exceeds it. Lyotard’s sublime is brought together with Hayles’ theory of mutation to explore the positive potential in sublime experience: of the creative possibilities that can arise in the interruption and redirection of a system. This provides an illuminating framework through which Wallace is seen to interrogate the possibility of sublime narratives to express and interrogate human patterns of narrative and action, and open them up to new futures.

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Contents

Abstract".................................................................................................................................................."3"

List"of"Figures"........................................................................................................................................."5"

List"of"Abbreviations".............................................................................................................................."6"

Introduction"..........................................................................................................................................."7"

Chapter"1."At"the"Limit:"Reframing"the"Sublime".................................................................................."10"

Chapter"2."“Transcend"the"self”:"The"Communication"Game".............................................................."18"

Chapter"3."Mystery"and"Mutation"in"AA"Narratives"............................................................................"28"

Conclusion:"From"Closed"Circles"to"the"Möbius"Strip".........................................................................."38"

Works"Cited"........................................................................................................................................."40"

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List of Figures

Fig.1 A Venn diagram illustrating Cantor’s intersection of two sets, A and B

Fig.2 A ray diagram of a convex lens

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List of Abbreviations

Primary Texts

IJ Wallace, Infinite Jest

GON Wallace, “Good Old Neon”

LEA Wallace, “Little Expressionless Animals”

Reference Texts

EM Wallace, Everything and More

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Introduction

The sublime refers to the experience of that which goes beyond the grasp of human

comprehensibility. For Kant, it describes the frustration of the human faculty of imagination

in the face of that which is infinitely and immeasurably vast (the mathematically sublime), or

that which is so immensely powerful (the dynamically sublime) it denies the human subject

any sense of autonomous will (250-61). The sublime thereby becomes an applicable

framework for the contemporary human subject’s inability to fully comprehend the global,

decentred networks of technology and communication in which they are sutured. What was,

for the Romantics, an evocation of the transcendent and all-encompassing power of Nature

and God, is now one of emergent distributed systems of great complexity. In recent criticism,

postmodern and posthuman theorists alike have described such networks in terms of their

vastness and incomprehensibility. Whether it is due to late consumer capitalism (Jameson

77), the rising ubiquity of techno-science (Lyotard, Inhuman 2), or developments in

cybernetic theory (Hayles, Posthuman 3), all agree upon the subsequent fragmentation and

decentralisation of the human subject. In the face of invisible and infinite networks, the

human is no longer understood to be the knowable master of its own environment or destiny.

David Foster Wallace engages specifically with characterising human experience in the

contemporary world of decentred networks. From the ‘fact of recursivity’ (Hayles, “Illusion

of Autonomy” 678) and networks of ‘affinity’ (Kaiser 56) to the subversion of technocratic

pattern with traditional sentimentalism (Giles 333), Wallace is understood to dramatize those

forces that place us in dehumanising processes, and find ways in which the decentred human

can escape solipsism by finding a way for his characters to connect, or acknowledge the

connections that were already there.

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The question that arises, however, is to what extent narrative is able to give the reader

‘imaginative access to other selves’ (Wallace qtd. in McCaffery 22) after poststructuralist

“lack”. While Wallace indeed places his characters in these networks, he is also occupied

with this issue. Wallace is concerned with the inherent potential in narrative to provide a

means of mutual connection and understanding, without reducing the complexity of human

experience or the world in which we live. I argue that this is achieved in Infinite Jest through

an evocation of the sublime.

In Chapter 1, I explore how Wallace expresses the sublime as a means to escape the

dehumanising abstraction that occurs when one attempts to “map” the world. In light of two

of Wallace’s short stories, “Good Old Neon” and “Little Expressionless Animals”, I argue

that Derrida’s sublime is a useful framework through which we can approach Wallace’s

engagement with the potential for abstraction to provide possibility rather than reduction in

Infinite Jest.

For Wallace, as for Derrida and Lyotard, any system of representation is rendered

inadequate in the face of human experience. Chapter 2 engages with Wallace’s consequent

approach to the possibility of interpersonal communication in Infinite Jest as an ongoing and

interactive “game” between two inadequate systems, each working at their respective limits

to engage with that which lies beyond.

Chapter 3 draws parallels between Lyotard’s sublime and Hayles’ understanding of

informational mutation, outlining the way in which sublime narratives in Infinite Jest are able

to provoke change in the lives of Wallace’s characters. Through the reassertion of sublime

potential, Wallace gives a hopeful account of the role narrative can play in expressing, and

guiding, human lives.

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Chapter 1. At the Limit: Reframing the Sublime "

Wallace’s approach to the issue of abstraction is one of seeming tension: while some have

argued that he presents abstract pattern in order subvert it with sentiment (Giles 333), others

suggest that his evocation of mathematical abstraction aims to find better terms with which to

‘map’ the mind (Natalini 45). Limitations associated with abstraction in Wallace’s texts are

intrinsically linked to his portrayal of a world where human experience is reduced to the

dehumanising and determining patterns. His approach to abstraction in its prospects,

however, is far more complex. Neither accepting the possibility of “mapping” experience, nor

expressing traditional human sentiment, Wallace presents that which is “human” in his works

as “unpresentable”, exceeding any form of presentation.

Envisioning a world in Infinite Jest where humans are tied into systems of which they

have little knowledge or power, Wallace shows how networks flow within and through the

subject, undermining any concept of autonomous will. James Incandenza’s (J.O.I.) lethal film

cartridge is the manifestation of this terror, enrapturing its viewers absolutely in its endless,

recursive cycles until their lives rapidly come to an end. As the myth of autonomy turns

against the subject in an act of self-destruction, the cartridge disrupts any notion of human

power. Determining cycles occur throughout the novel; characters are consistently formed

according to the repetitive activities in which they are immersed, be it cycles of addiction for

those at Ennet House, or repetitive routines in the Enfield Tennis Academy (E.T.A.). The

effect is depersonalisation: the E.T.A. program is referred to as ‘a progression toward self-

forgetting’ (IJ 635) until, as Hal suspects, the boys exist only as ‘postures and little routines,

locked down and stored and call-uppable for rebroadcast’ (966). Schacht describes the

program as

repetitive movements and motions for their own sake, over and over until the accretive weight

of the reps sinks the movements themselves down under your like consciousness into the more

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nether regions, through repetition they sink and soak into the hardware, the C.P.S. The machine-

language. (117)

Repetition sinks beneath ‘consciousness’: the faculties of the mind are made irrelevant in

cyclical determination. The tennis players become, as J.O.I.’s father describes, ‘a machine a

body an object’; a ‘machine in the ghost’ (160), suggesting a loss of any sense of “human”

beyond iteration.

For Jameson, the complexity of decentred networks has forced the human subject into a

paralysing state of ‘confusion’ (92). The role of art and literature must therefore expose the

subject’s position; to provide an ‘aesthetic of cognitive mapping’ by which they can reassert

their capacity for action and struggle (Jameson 92). Patterns are to be traced through art, for it

is ‘not that we cannot know the world and its totality in some abstract or “scientific” way’

(91). The world is not ‘unknowable’, but merely ‘unrepresentable’ (Jameson 91). This echoes

Kant’s own formulation of the ‘sublime turn’: in the face of the infinite, the inadequacy of

our imaginative faculties gives way to the pleasurable recognition of the superiority of human

reason, capable of conceptualising infinity in its supersensible totality (Kant 261). It is this

ability to conceptualise complexity that situates, for Kant, the human over nature. Latent in

both Jameson’s and Kant’s ideas is the notion that through a reaffirmation of our cognitive

powers of abstraction, the human subject is able to reassert power over its destiny.

Wallace, however, undermines attempts to “map” human subjectivity. The reduction of

human experience into abstract pattern dehumanises Wallace’s characters. In “Good Old

Neon”, the unnamed narrator recalls being translated into predictable and linear code by his

psychoanalyst, Dr. Gustafson. Gustafson interprets the narrator’s experiences according to

formulaic categories such as ‘American men’ and masculine ‘validity’ (GON 164). Adopting

terms associated with formal logic, his theory that ‘in logical terms, [the] domains [of love

and fear] were exhaustive and mutually exclusive’ (164) assumes that someone’s

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‘psychological makeup’ (169) can be rationally explained, its origins found and its causal

process mapped. The implication that human subjectivity can be logically charted in this way

appears limited and reductive, just as the narrator himself is accused of reading Beverley ‘as a

sequence of processes and codes . . . like she was a puzzle or problem I was figuring out’

(165). In his reliance on rational predictability, Gustafson’s ‘big logical insight’ (153) is in

turn predicted by the narrator.

That this interaction leaves the narrator feeling ‘bleak’ emptiness ‘inside’ (GON 153)

reflects the connection between abstraction and anhedonia in Infinite Jest. ‘Anhedonia’, a

condition linked to depression and the inability to experience pleasure, is described as the

‘radical abstracting of everything, a hollowing out of stuff that used to have affective content’

(IJ 693). For sufferers of the condition, ‘full and fleshy’ terms are ‘stripped to their skeletons

and reduced to abstract ideas. They have, as it were, denotation but not connotation’ (693).

Reality is lost to a transcendent realm of inadequate representations: both words and bodies

thereby become ‘shell[s]’ (508) and ‘outlines’ (693), emptying any notion of a “human”

beyond pattern. That abstraction becomes the very barrier to pleasure in Infinite Jest has

further repercussions for Kant’s sublime turn. The pleasure derived from the superiority of

reason over the inadequacy of imagination is, here, interchanged. Kant’s belief that it is

man’s unique relation to the supersensory realm that allows the retrieval of their autonomy

and power over nature—to view themselves as subjects rather than objects of nature—is

denied. For Wallace, when reality is reduced to abstract determination, human beings become

more like ‘things’ than ever: reduced to pattern, they become an ‘object’, ‘machine’ (160), or

‘empty shell’ (509).

More recent formulations of the sublime shift from a reassertion of an innate ‘higher

faculty’ to a realisation of the inadequacy of any presentation of the boundless and infinite

(Shaw 115). For Derrida, no system can assure a stable origin from within itself: noumena

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and phenomena can never be fully reconciled (Shaw 129). Reality always exceeds

presentation, and presentation can never transcend its own boundaries. Any attempt to

conceptualise the infinite, then, is marked by its own inadequacy, ‘cis[ing] and incis[ing]

itself as incommensurable with the without-cise’ (Derrida 132). At the same time, infinity is

not ‘simply unpresentable’ but rather ‘almost unpresentable’ (Malpas 154, italics in original).

As Malpas notes, Derrida’s formulation of the limit between a finite system and infinity is

one that marks ‘what is at once a crossing and an interruption of that limit’: a ‘cise’ and a

‘pas’ is simultaneously a ‘not’, ‘passage’, and ‘step’ (156). This limit can thus be read as the

parergon or frame through which ‘spurious’ infinity and ‘true’ infinity are simultaneously

brought together and denied conciliation (158-9). The limit between the presentable and

unpresentable is configured as a simultaneous ‘abyss’ and connection. The sublime, in

evoking this limit, thus opens up the finite system to both ‘loss’ and potential (159).

Instead of seeing Wallace’s portrayal of dehumanising patterns as merely one of

subversion or rejection in order to express a ‘nostalgia’ for traditional human identity (Giles

335), I argue that Wallace’s approach to abstraction is far more evocative of Derrida’s

sublime. In “Good Old Neon”, Wallace expresses human subjectivity that is neither “absent”

nor knowable in its totality. What ‘goes on inside’ (GON 151) for the narrator exceeds the

limits of presentation in its greatness in size, complexity, and eternality, described as ‘the

universes inside you, all the endless inbent fractals of connection and symphonies of different

voices, the infinities you can never show another soul’ (179). Here, the ‘infinities’ inside you

can never be revealed to ‘another soul’, yet the entire passage attempts to do so: it contains

within it, as with Derrida’s sublime, a reflection upon its own inadequacy. Any attempt is

described as a ‘tiny keyhole’ (179) in terms of both space and time, its translation described

as a linearising process that has ‘little relation’ to ‘the most important impressions and

thoughts in a person’s life’ (150). The keyhole thus evokes the framing parergon; the

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limitations that come to view when trying to present the infinite. One can only ‘squeez[e it]

through’ (179) a ‘tiny’ hole, in the creation of a frame that acts as both a barrier to and a

connection with the unpresentable.

Human consciousness is presented in “Good Old Neon” as infinite and simultaneous: it is

‘true everywhere and all the time’, like a ‘theorem’s proof’ (GON 167). The protagonist,

whilst expressing its insufficiencies, states that abstract language and ‘logical symbolism

really would be the best way to express it, because logic is totally abstract and outside what

we think of as time. It’s the closest thing to what it’s really like’ (167). It is this seemingly

paradoxical approach that characterises Wallace’s writing: the duality of delimitation and

necessity. Wallace does not present a form through which we can comprehend the human

subject in its totality. In presenting abstract notions as inadequate frames of the

unpresentable, Wallace denies their essential relation to phenomena and uses them instead as

a narrative tool to evoke a sublime experience for the reader. Paradoxes appear throughout

his writing, referring to a system’s limits in any attempt to comprehend and communicate

reality. Wallace himself explains that ‘some fissure or crevasse always opens up in the move

from particular cases of knowing/relating to knowledge/relation in abstractus’ (EM 56).!

Rather than a direct “mapping” of reality, abstraction is presented as creating an abyssal

moment that must be worked against, as well as through.

The sublime experience of the presentational limit opens up the system to ‘loss’ (Malpas

159). It is this dual movement of opening and closing that frees Wallace’s texts in expressing

that which is “human”. In “Little Expressionless Animals”, Julia becomes a manifestation of

the sublime aesthetic as she embodies

the capacity of facts to transcend the internal factual limitations and become, in and of

themselves, meaning, feeling . . . She makes it human, something with the power to emote,

evoke, induce, cathart. She gives the game the simultaneous transparency and mystery all of us

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in the industry have groped for, for decades . . . She is, or can become, the game show incarnate.

She is mystery. (LEA 25)

Julia makes the Jeopardy! game show ‘human’ by giving ‘facts’ the power to go beyond

linear connotation, provoking further processes in its viewers. The game becomes

‘transparency and mystery’; the transcendence of ‘limitations’ characterised by visibility and

obscurity alike. Abstract fact is denied the capacity to present ‘human’ experience not only

because it is spatially and temporally beyond its comprehensive hold; it is unable to contain

within it the complexity provided by ‘incarnation’. Here, Wallace’s evocation of the sublime

does not express transcendent knowledge; rather he acknowledges the complexities that exist

outside of abstract presentation, and the impossibility in ever successfully expressing

“territory” in any “map”.

In the E.T.A.’s game of Eschaton in Infinite Jest, the “map” is denied its purity as the

random factors of the real world are increasingly brought into play. Pemulis’ belief that

‘Eschaton gentlemen is about logic and axiom and mathematical probity and discipline and

verity and order’ (IJ 338) is undermined as the ‘order’ of the game is increasingly disrupted

by snow, making ‘everything gauzy and terribly clear at the same time’ (341), expressing

again the ‘transparency and mystery’ (LEA 25) that occurs when abstraction is brought into

play with material reality. Pemulis’ insistence that ‘[p]layers aren’t inside the goddamn game.

Players are part of the apparatus of the game. They’re part of the map, not the cluster-fucking

territory’ (IJ 338) neglects the material reality of its human players and the conditions that

bring the game to a ‘degenerative chaos so complex’ that ‘it’s hard to tell whether it seems

choreographed or simply chaotically disordered’ (341). As Eschaton’s logical system is

interrupted by factors unrepresented by the system itself, the boundary between order and

disorder becomes fluid and impossible to place. In such a condition, the game reveals itself to

Hal to have ‘almost infinite-seeming implications’ (341). “True” infinity occurs in the

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meeting of abstraction and reality; where the ‘restricted economy’ (Malpas 159) of the

system is opened up to unpredictability.

Schtitt emphasises the view that limits can be engaged in the expansion of possibility

rather than the reduction of certainty. Tennis, as a manifestation of ‘prolix flux’ (IJ 82) rather

than order, is

a matter not of reduction at all, but—perversely—of expansion, the aleatory flutter of

uncontrolled, metatastic growth—each well shot ball admitting of n possible response, 2n

possible response to those responses, and so on into what Incandenza would articulate to

anyone who shared both his backgrounds as a Cantorian continuum of infinities of possible

move and response, Cantorian and beautiful because infoliating, contained, this diagnate

infinity of infinities of choice and execution, mathematically uncontrolled but humanly

contained . . . (82)

Approaching the game from the point of view of a ‘pure mathematician’ rather than a

‘technician’ (81), Schttit is not interested in viewing the bounds of abstraction as a reductive

map with which to calculate the world with certainty. He sees that the game is about the ‘not-

order, limit, the places where things broke down, fragmented into beauty’ (81), through the

interplay between the ‘uncontrolled’ and the ‘contained’. In Wallace’s book-length essay on

infinity, Everything and More, he describes Cantor as having ‘bequeath[ed] a world with no

finite circumference. One that spins, now, in a new kind of all-formal Void.’ (EM 305).

Wallace reframes abstraction as a method of creating boundaries which give rise to

possibility; creating limits, as Cantor did, from which we engage with infinite complexity.

The “human” is lost in Wallace’s works when abstraction determines. Logic, having been

ousted from its position of certainty, is revealed to be limited in the expression of the infinite

complexities of a reality in flux. Human experience can never be “mapped” in its totality.

However, in reading Wallace’s stance through Derrida’s formulation of the sublime, the

inadequacy of such presentations may be approached as frames through which we can begin

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to engage with complexity. As the metaphysical becomes an inadequate presentation of the

human, it also becomes a limit, not for the sake of reduction, but for the sake of indeterminate

possibility. In the sublime experience, the world is no longer a closed circle with ‘finite

circumference’ (Wallace, EM 305), and in the ‘abyssal moment’, human certainty opens up to

‘loss' as we are pushed to the limits of our comprehensive capacities (Malpas 159).

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Chapter 2. “Transcend the self”: The Communication Game

For Lyotard, the contemporary techno-scientific system is based on a reverence for

rational certainty that is one of a multiplicity of inadequate systems by which humans

understand themselves and those around them. The sublime can therefore also be experienced

in the collision of heterogeneous and incommensurable representational systems; the

unpresentable arises out of the abyss that lies not only between finitude and the infinite, but

also between two ways of thinking. Using Lyotard’s theories as a framework, Wallace can be

viewed as evoking the gap—or rather, the limit—between different systems of presentation

and comprehension. Successful connection is denied throughout Infinite Jest due to the

inability of his characters to acknowledge that which exceeds their solipsistic cycles.

Communication, for Wallace, is like a game: an interaction that necessitates two players,

mutually working at their limits.

Lyotard’s sublime is intrinsically linked to his theory of the differend. For Lyotard, the

postmodern condition is characterised by a heterogeneity of language games or phrase

regimes. Language is indeterminate: the primary unit of language is referred to as a ‘phrase’

or ‘event’ that is not determined by a stable referent (“Presentation” 69). Meaning is not

denied in its totality, but unfixed and opened out to multiple possibilities, temporarily

contained by the situation in which it is presented. As all systems are rendered equivocal and

conditional, any “map” is denied a predominant relationship with reality. The differend

occurs when meaning cannot be reconciled between incommensurable systems of handling

signification, and thus becomes ‘unpresentable’ (Lyotard, “Sublime Feeling” 260-1). From

this perspective, the sublime does not necessitate an experience of absolute vastness in size or

power; the differend is enough to remind the subject of the inadequacy and contingency of

one’s own representation system.

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Schtitt similarly views the Cantorian ‘possibilities’ (IJ 82) that transpire in tennis as

formed not only by the boundary lines on the court, but the conditional boundaries of the

players involved. The game is

bounded by the talent and imagination of self and opponent, bent in on itself by the containing

boundaries of skill and imagination that brought one player finally down, that kept both from

winning, that made it, finally, a game, these boundaries of self. (82)

This is one of many descriptions of tennis in Infinite Jest that can be understood as a

metaphor for the communication game involving two systems. Of course, the idea of

language as a “game” already expresses the influence of Wittgenstein’s language games on

Wallace. Language is not a concrete system with a one-to-one, linear relationship with its

referential reality, but rather a set of boundaries through which a multiplicity of meanings is

made possible. Here, the ‘containing boundaries’ that induce possibility are the ‘boundaries

of self’. The communication game is one of fluidity, not only of ‘free play and closed

structures’ (Giles 335) but a game between two separate, humanly bound systems. The lines

on the court do not define the game; it is also the interaction of two players – each with their

own set of boundaries – that make it ‘finally, a game’. It is this that makes it ‘mathematically

controlled but humanly contained’ (IJ 82); the interaction of two players working at their

respective limits, and the combined interaction of those limits.

Intriguingly, this passage also subverts Kant’s formulation of the sublime as involving the

faculties of reason and imagination. The game’s mathematically uncontrolled ‘expansion’ is

evoked by the limits of the ‘talent and imagination’ of both players, which later becomes

‘skill and imagination’ (82). Reason is replaced by an ability that is honed through experience

and repetition—‘skill’—evoking the Wittgensteinian notion of language as learnt through

use. This further emphasises Lyotard’s notion of the contingency of systems that guide

human understanding. Transcendence, here, does not refer to reason as a pathway to higher

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knowledge, but rather the transcendence of one’s learnt and contingent limits in interacting

with another’s: it is transcendence towards difference.

It is the search for semantic certainty that results in the solipsism that so many of

Wallace’s characters experience. Hal’s obsession with the O.E.D. is the manifestation of a

desire to retain a linear trajectory between a word and referential origin by relating to an

external source; it is no wonder the others refer to him as ‘the machine’ (IJ 1007n110). Hal

dreams of a tennis court where the lines that ‘bound and define play’ (67) are multiple and

complex:

There are lines going every which way, and they run oblique or meet and form relationships

and boxes and rivers and tributaries and systems inside systems: lines, corners, alleys and

angles deliquesce into a blur at the horizon of the distant net . . . I never get quite to see the

distant opponent, for all the apparatus of the game. (67-8)

The more one attempts to control and define play, the less the game becomes about the

interaction of two players. Hal’s attempt to delimit the possibilities involved in linguistic play

results in an interaction not between himself and another, but between himself and his own

system. Hal turns increasingly inward as he tries to prevent ambiguity in his own linguistic

system. When, finally, he is so inward-bent that he has lost almost all ability to communicate,

he is at least able to recount that ‘[t]here are, by the OED IV’s count, nineteen nonarchaic

synonyms for unresponsive, of which nine are Latinate and four Saxonic’ (17). This further

affirms that “mapping” a problem does not lead to a cure. In the search for certainty and

stability, Hal turns increasingly away from communicative possibility.

For Wallace, certainty and predictability are not only no longer a necessary factor in

language, they also prevent the possibility for successful communication. The problem with

many of the interpersonal interactions in Infinite Jest is that the characters, in thinking that

their systems are ubiquitous, do not mutually work at the limits of their ‘skill and

imagination’ (IJ 82). The tennis game necessitates the mutually bounding limits of ‘self and

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opponent’ (82, emphasis added) in order for possibility, rather than reduction, to transpire.

For Schtitt, the other player is not your ‘opponent’ but your ‘partner in the dance’ (84). A

successful communicative game thus necessitates the transcendence of solipsism:

interpersonal communication can only occur if it involves the mutual interaction of two

representational systems, each working at their “limit” in order to reveal the possibility of

crossing the divide, rather than attempting to control uncertainty.

The aim of the game, to ‘send from yourself what you hope will not return’ (IJ 176) is

consistently denied as what Wallace’s characters ‘send’ from themselves often remains in the

confines of their own systems of presentation and comprehension. What is sent out towards

the “other” is often intended to return to its point of origin, to complete the self-feeding cycle

or ‘narcissistic loop’ (Holland 218). Avril never gains imaginative access to Hal, despite

thinking that she knows him ‘inside out as a human being’ (694), because she fails to

transcend the limits of her own narcissistic system: she hears only ‘her own echoes inside

him and thinks what she hears is him’ (694). Her failure to transcend her own limits only

emphasises the boundary between them as an ‘abyss’ or ‘cut,’ rather than a space for

potential passage. Such interactions cause Hal to ‘feel the one thing he feels to the limit,

lately: he is lonely’ (694). In neglecting to ‘transcend the self’ (84), Avril thereby treats Hal

as a means to her narcissistic ends. Orin evokes this idea in his comparison of Avril to a kind

of ‘philanthropist’ who ‘views the recipients of his charity not as persons so much as pieces

of exercise equipment on which he can develop and demonstrate his own virtue’ (1052n269).

The interaction between two “players” is thus transformed into a solo exercise, as each

subject remains within closed cycles of thought and intention that end where they began: in

the self. Avril’s effect on those around her is described in such cyclical terms, as ‘[w]hen

Avril entered a room, any sort of pacing reduced to orbiting’ (522). Avril occupies her own

centre of concentric circles in any interaction, as all others are forced into orbit around her

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status as simultaneous sun—‘the family’s light and pulse and the centre that held tight’

(747)—and ‘Black Hole of Human Attention’ (521). There is only space for one cyclical

system with Avril, and this is perhaps the reason behind Orin and Hal’s nickname for her. It

is as if there are enough ‘Moms’ to play the communication game: her opponent remains

merely an imagined ‘echo’ of herself.

Marathe describes this form of interaction as one where ‘[y]ou speak to yourself, inventing

sides. This itself is the habit of children: lazy, lonely, self. I am not even here, possibly, for

listening to’ (IJ 320). Further than Holland’s accusation that Wallace traps his characters into

self-feeding loops of ‘infantile narcissism’ (224), I argue that Wallace also expresses the

worst kind of interpersonal contact as the meeting of two solipsistic echo-chambers of

representational systems. This explains why Wallace’s characters so often find themselves

trapped in cycles of self-reflexivity. The “Good Old Neon” narrator finds himself caught in

infinite regress as his actions and words are founded upon how he imagines them to be

received by the other person. By ‘inventing sides,’ he prevents any means of genuine

communication, tying the interaction to his own cycles of thought and intention. J.O.I. as a

‘wraith’ tells Gately that “Infinite Jest” was an attempt to ‘contrive a medium via which he

and [Hal] could simply converse’; to ‘[m]ake something so bloody compelling it would

reverse thrust on a young self’s fall into the womb of solipsism, anhedonia, death in life’ and

to bring him ‘out of himself’ (IJ 839). Yet this intention is entirely undermined in his

consistent self-reference. In describing his goal to bring Hal ‘out of himself’, J.O.I. never

describes the equally necessary process of reaching ‘out’ from his own ‘self’ in conversation.

Instead, the wraith insists on having his apology ‘heard’ (839), and refers to his own ‘life-

long dream’ and ‘most serious wish…to entertain’ (839). J.O.I. thus not only fails to escape

his own self-serving loops, but fails to understand that to ‘entertain’—a one way

interaction—is not the same as attempting to converse. It is unsurprising, then, that the

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cartridge itself is made up of recursive loops: like Avril, it draws its viewers into its own

inescapable cycles.

Wallace thus presents an explicit need for the communication game to not only involve at

least two players, but two interacting systems of representation and intention. His subjects

must, as Schtitt describes, ‘seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make

the game possible in the first place’ (84). Successful communication in Wallace’s texts

therefore necessarily involves an experience of the sublime; of the simultaneous engagement

of limit and potential in attempting to transcend the limitations of one’s system of

understanding. Wallace himself admits that ‘true empathy is impossible’ (qtd. in McCaffery

22)—we can never know the other person in their totality—but his belief that narrative can

also provide access to other selves means that his approach to interpersonal communication is

more complex than the inevitability of narcissistic entrapment. As one can only tend towards

infinity, and as Derrida’s parergon marks a simultaneous passage and abyssal moment, so

Wallace’s characters are faced with inadequacy and possibility, ‘simultaneous transparency

and mystery’ (LEA 25).

Schtitt’s understanding of tennis in terms of Cantorian infinities finds its origins in

Wallace’s own interest in Cantor. For Wallace, Cantor’s set theory provided a way in which

the ‘dead end’ of Vicious Infinite Regress could be overcome when talking about infinity

(Natalini 46). Referred to in Infinite Jest as ‘the man who proved some infinities were bigger

than other infinities’ (994n35), Cantor established a theory by which one could talk about

different sets of infinities, and formulate their possible interactions. Cantorian mathematics

thus provides an illuminating framework through which to approach Wallace’s understanding

of communicative possibility, not only in the possibilities that arise through the bounding of

infinity, but by providing a way to articulate the relationship between different sets. Indeed,

Cantor’s intersection theorem allows for the correspondence of two sets of infinity to be

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found, illustrated by the Venn diagram (see fig. 1). Here, the intersection of two sets, A and

B, is the set of elements that are common to both A and B, written as A∩B. As a visual

metaphor, the Venn diagram of intersection highlights the nature of Wallace’s approach to

genuine communication as indeterminate. What is shared is always inadequate, only ever

partially presenting from the intersection of the two systems of representation: the remainders

of A and B outside the intersection remain a ‘mystery’ to one another. Indeed the notion of

intersection demonstrates a further acknowledgement of the sublime experience as the

simultaneous drawing together (‘passage’), and separation (‘cut’), of two kinds of infinities

(Malpas 156). Intersection provides a boundary through which correspondence can occur

without the swallowing of one set into the other, as with Avril’s concentric circles of ‘orbit’

(IJ 522). It thereby illustrates the way in which, through Lyotard’s formulation of the

sublime, ‘heterogenous ways of thinking’ can meet, ‘without…reducing their differend in the

least’ (Lyotard, “Sublime Feeling” 261).

Fig. 1. A Venn diagram illustrating Cantor’s intersection of two sets,

A and B; Own reproduction.

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The Venn diagram is also a significant geometric metaphor for Wallace’s approach to

communication, for the intersection of two sets creates a shape suggestive of a double-convex

lens (see fig. 2). The lens motif, along with convexity and concavity in general, reappears

throughout Wallace’s writing, most often related to expression, communication, and the

relationship between two subjects. James Incandenza is fascinated by light refraction as a

child, owning a Columbia Guide to Refractive Indices Second Edition (IJ 161), and calls his

first production company ‘Meniscus Films’ (985n24) after a meniscus convex-concave lens.

Julie in “Little Expressionless Animals” is described as moving from ‘concavity’ to ‘convex’

whenever she performs live on the game show (LEA 17). As a double convex lens acts as a

site through which light rays converge to a focal point, the moment Julie becomes ‘convex’

she is described as ‘some lens’ that is able to temporarily focus a ‘great unorganised force’

(24). Convexity provides the means for forces to converge to a focal point, beyond its own

boundaries, thus allowing a through-flow at the “limit”. Wallace responds to questions

regarding the Infinite Jest’s lack of resolution in the same terms:

There is an ending as far as I’m concerned. Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start

converging in such a way that an “end” can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the

right frame. If no such convergence or projection occurred to you, then the book’s failed for

you. (qtd. in Max 321n19)

More than a rejection of narrative determinacy, Wallace presents the novel as something that

allows forces to flow through it. It is the permeable and inherently inactive conditions of the

convex lens that characterises Wallace’s approach to the possibilities created by inadequate

presentations. As an external device through which ‘unorganised’ forces flow, it does not

contain meaning within it. Double convexity—and thus the potential for convergence—can

only exist in the intersection of two systems. For Wallace, the aesthetic experience can only

create meaning through the ‘living interaction’ (Boswell 171) between language and reader.

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In the AA meetings portrayed in Infinite Jest, this crossing of permeable thresholds is what

separates positive from negative forms of communication. The counsellors suggest that

attendees ‘sit right up at the front of the hall where they can see the pores in the speaker’s

nose and try to Identify instead of Compare’ (345). Gately’s description of Comparing is that

of being unable to hear: ‘I couldn’t hear shit. I didn’t hear nothing. I’d just sit there and

Compare, I’d go to myself, like, “I never rolled a car,” “I never bled from the rectum”’ (365).

Gately’s impermeable deafness in ‘Comparing’ is thus associated with the inability to escape

from the confines of his system of self-reference, whereas ‘Identification’ is associated with

‘listen[ing] without blinking, looking not just at the speaker’s face but into it’ (379). Where

‘Comparing’ is looking inward, ‘Identification’ is associated with looking in. The line of

sight, channelled through the audience’s open and unblinking eyes and through the threshold

of another, allows for genuine connection. The contained systems of presentation are thus

able to flow into one another, because ‘if you sit up front and listen hard, all the speaker’s

stories of decline and fall and surrender are basically alike, and like your own’ (345).

Fig. 2. A ray diagram of a convex lens; One-School; One-school.net; Web; 22 Mar. 2016.

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This further expresses the permeable boundaries of signifying systems for Wallace. As he

describes his own writing process: ‘[o]nce I’m done with the thing, I’m basically dead, and

probably the text’s dead: it becomes simply language, and language lies not just in but

through the reader’ (qtd. in McCaffery 40, italics in original). This ‘ghost-like’ intervention

(Timmer 353), is configured in J.O.I.’s communication with Gately as a ‘wraith’ which

had no out-loud voice of its own, and had to use somebody’s like internal brain-voice if it

wanted to try to communicate something, which is why thoughts and insights that were

coming from some wraith always just sound like your own thoughts, from inside your own

head . . . (IJ 831)

Just as the ‘dead’ text, J.O.I., after death, can only express himself through language that is

experienced internally by the receiver. His interactions are received in an inseparable mixture

of Gately and not-Gately: ‘thoughts’ coming from the wraith come from ‘inside’ Gately,

rendering their voices indistinguishable.

In such an interaction, no opposition between internal and external can be easily

demarcated: what is A and what is B is impossible to separate in the intersection. This is the

paradox that defines a reader who is ‘marooned in her skull’ and yet able to gain ‘imaginative

access to other selves’ (Wallace qtd. in McCaffery 22). As with Derrida’s parergon, it is this

that allows for Lyotard’s sublime to be both a connection between differing systems, whilst

retaining the ‘dissensus’ of the differend (Rancière 9): it is inseparability and irresolvability

in one.

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Chapter 3. Mystery and Mutation in AA Narratives

Lyotard departs from Kant further in his reassessment of the sublime as an aesthetic

experience that has the power to work through the irresolvability of the differend. Where

Kant formulates the beautiful as the basis from which we may deduce a common sense,

Lyotard’s sublime reminds us of that which exceeds representation and our abilities to grasp

events in their totality, and thus the limitations of any emergent common sense (Crome and

Williams 289). As described in Chapter 2, the sublime reveals the incommensurability of

heterogeneous narratives; systems of presentation are brought to collision and prevented from

reconciliation in the face of the differend. As such, Lyotard brings a practical element to his

aesthetics that can also be applied to Infinite Jest’s AA narrative. It is the completion of loops

that Wallace denies; the ‘finite circumference’ of a closed circle (Wallace, EM 305). If

systems are opened up to indeterminacy, they may engage in the possibility of difference.

For Lyotard, the sublime, in revealing the limits of rationality and the techno-scientific

system, may provide human beings with alternative destinies to that of the solely functional

‘inhuman’ (Martin 69). A work of art’s power lies in its resistance to any notion of a

totalising common sense: it reminds the viewer of the possibility of alternative and new forms

of thought, representation, and action. The aesthetic experience is thus obligated to be of the

irresolvable sublime, for ‘determination should never exhaust birth’ (Lyotard, “On What is

‘Art’” 349). This dialectic of ‘birth’ and ‘determination’ is evoked throughout Infinite Jest.

Life cycles become closed loops as birth and death collapse into one another in the same

point of origin. Avril is described as a source of life and death in one, at once a sun towards

whom others ‘lean like heliotropes’ (IJ 745), and a ‘Black Hole’ (521). Dr Rusk probes Hal

on what she calls his ‘Coaticue Complex’ (516), which refers to the Aztec mother goddess of

the Earth, a deity of both fertility and destruction, uniting birth and death in one. The irony of

J.O.I.’s cartridge is that it incites, in content and form, the very notion of ‘death in life’ (839)

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that he was attempting to counteract. In the film, Joelle enacts a ‘mother-death cosmology’

(230), whereby the woman who killed you in one life gives birth to you in the next. As a

‘Death-Mother figure’ (789) she repeats this cosmology, apologising ‘over and over, inclined

over that auto-wobbled lens propped up in the plaid-sided pram’ (230), conflating the cycles

of birth and death in one point of origin, repeatedly closing the loop. Contrary to Lyotard’s

aesthetics, J.O.I.’s film fails to provide true ‘birth’ in the repeated determination of its cycles.

Its viewers in turn are prevented from action, and in their state of infantile paralysis, fast-

approach their deaths: thus bringing the spiritual ‘death in life’ from art, into reality.

Wallace also relates ‘death in life’ with the inescapable cycles of addiction. In an AA

meeting, John describes how ‘[w]hen I was drunk I wanted to get sober and when I was sober

I wanted to get drunk . . . I lived that way for years, and I submit to you that’s not livin, that’s

a fuckin death-in-life’ (IJ 346). Substance addiction is associated with the closed loops of

action and desire, a pattern which ends up replacing the living ‘self’ as it was (347): the

substance reveals itself to be neither an external ‘true friend’ nor a source of relief from

yourself, but ‘has devoured or replaced and become you’ (347, italics in original). Wallace

himself describes the difficulty in avoiding ‘death in life’ in his commencement speech: it is

‘unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in day out’ (Wallace “Kenyon

Address”). The paralysis afforded by closed circles, as seen in Chapter 1 and 2, results in

solipsism and anhedonia. A loss of consciousness equivalent to ‘death-in-life’ occurs when

all that makes up human ‘life’ as it is is taken away to leave the ‘skeletons’ (IJ 693) of

unchanging patterns.

According to Lyotard, the techno-scientific system’s progression is based on seeking an

ideal akin to Leibniz’s monad (Lyotard, “Time Today” 271). The perfect monad, analogous

to God, would retain the ‘totality of information constituting the world’ at once, denying

differentiations throughout space and time (271). The more complete a monad, the more

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capable it is of mediating what occurs: God experiences information in its simultaneous

totality (271). In such a system, if one wished to control a process, the ‘present’ would

thereby be subordinated to a predetermined ‘future’: a step towards a determined end goal

(271). It follows that in the ideal techno-scientific apparatus, the future is fixed, whist the

present ‘cease[s] opening up onto an uncertain and contingent “afterwards”’ (271). For

Lyotard, however, contingency—the future as ‘destination’ rather than ‘destiny’—is what

marks the human project (273-4). The sublime experience therefore works by evoking the

uncertainty of the present:

[w]hat is sublime is the feeling that something will happen, despite everything, within this

threatening void, that something will take “place” and will announce that everything is not over.

That place is a mere “here”, the most minimal occurrence. (Lyotard, “Newman” 335)

Rather than seeing the present as part of an inevitable progression, the sublime induces an

absence of certainty and the Burkean ‘terror’ of opening up to a void. The pleasure gained,

in this sense, is the relief that something is ‘happening’, though ‘we know not what’

(Crome and Williams 291). Through such an evocation, the sublime is able to suggest a

possible subversion from an expected ‘future’.

Gately’s experience of withdrawal is portrayed in terms intensely evocative of

Lyotard’s sublime. As he describes the ‘endless Now stretching its gullwings out on either

side of his heartbeat’ (IJ 859), his terror is related to the infinite ‘space between two

heartbeats’ (860), a terror of boundlessness shared by Hal when he is forced to give up his

own substance addiction: ‘I feel a hole . . . And the hole’s going to get a little bigger every

day until I fly apart in different directions’ (785). AA, however, sees this ‘inter-beat

Present’ as a ‘gift, the Now; it’s AA’s real gift: it’s no accident they call it The Present’

(860, italics in original). For Wallace, the irrelevance of the present in the determined

progression characterises the collapse of future into present; of death into life. It is the

thought of ‘all the instants lined up and stretching ahead, glittering’ (86) that Gately fears;

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the idea that the ‘instant’ will repeat itself in a linear and unchanging process. AA’s

reference to the abyssal moment between moments as a ‘gift’ (860) instead reframes it as a

site of a potential, albeit terrifying, change in pattern for Wallace’s characters, towards the

birth of new futures.

Interestingly, Lyotard’s theory has much in common with Hayles’ postulation of mutation.

For Hayles, ‘randomness’ is phenomena that either ‘cannot be rendered coherent by a given

system’s organisation’ or cannot be perceived by the system at all (Posthuman 286).

Mutation refers to when a random event, upon entering pattern, ‘causes the system to evolve

in a new direction’ so that ‘the expectation of continuous replication can no longer be

sustained’ (33). Hayles, like Lyotard, sees this as a positive disruption, ‘located at a specific

moment’ (33), with creative repercussions: the entrance of randomness can lead to the

‘evolution of complex systems’ (286). Randomness is thus seen ‘not simply as the lack of

pattern but as the creative ground from which pattern can emerge’ (286). As with Derrida’s

parergon, that which exists beyond the system comes into play with the system itself,

preventing any postulation of one without the other. The sublime no longer refers to the

immeasurably great, but points towards difference: it is the transcendence of determined and

‘continuous replication’ (Hayles 33), tending instead towards uncertain futures.

In Gregory Bateson’s cybernetic epistemology, change within a system occurs as

‘flexibility’—that is, an ‘uncommitted potentiality for change’ (Bateson 505, italics in

original). Studying the ‘theology’ of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bateson suggests that it is only

by ‘spiritual experience’ that recovery is possible, referring not to a divine power but to the

experience of ‘involuntary change’ in ‘deep unconscious epistemology’ (331). The

experience of an alcoholic who has ‘hit bottom’ is based on a conception of the ‘self’ as

falsely pitted against, rather than part of, a larger system of ‘interlocking processes’ (331); it

is a sublime ‘panic of discovering that it [the system] . . . is bigger than he is’ (330, italics in

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original). Alcoholics Anonymous is instead based on the formation of a new, shared,

‘thinking-and-acting system’ in which the ‘self’ is redefined as part of a whole, and must

thereby acknowledge a greater ‘Power’ than itself (332). It thereby shifts the relationship

between self and environment from one of attempted control and division, to a

‘noncompetitive’ relationship of interconnectedness (335).

Wallace often describes the importance of transcending the “self” in Infinite Jest in terms

of spirituality. Marathe criticises what he sees as the U.S. myth of individualism, arguing the

need to have ‘[s]omething bigger than the self’ (IJ 107), for otherwise ‘your temple is self and

sentiment . . . You are by yourself and alone, kneeling to yourself’ (108). Spirituality must be

redirected towards something outside of the falsely deified ‘individual appetitive will’ (82).

For Orin, punting’s ‘pull’ is that it gives him a feeling that is ‘emotional and/or even, if there

was such a thing anymore, spiritual’ (295). The combination of ‘30,000 voices, souls, voicing

approval as One Soul’ becomes ‘the voice of what might as well be God’ (295). The football

field is transformed into a place of worship as Orin feels ‘a sense of presence in the sky, the

crown-sound congregational’ and the ball ‘inscribe[s] a catheran arch’ (296). This spirituality

is linked to transcendence and transformation alike, as Orin feels himself to be ‘out there

transformed, his own self transcended’ (295). Language associated with divine worship is

brought to the transcendence achieved through the absorbance of an individual into a larger

whole, where voices and souls ‘ceas[e] to be numerically distinct’ (295). This composes the

‘denial of silence’ (295) for Orin: the potential void beyond the delimited self is instead filled

with a sense of interconnectedness: ‘One Soul’ (295).

Boston AA is similarly characterised by a narrative of spirituality. As with Orin’s

experience, the ritual of daily prayers is no longer an expression of belief in a divine power:

you keep getting ritually down on your big knees every morning and night asking for help

from a sky that still seems a burnished shield against all who would ask aid of it—but how can

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you pray to a ‘God’ you believe only morons believe in, still?—but the old guys say it doesn’t

yet matter what you believe or don’t believe, Just Do It they say, and like a shock-trained

organism without any kind of independent human will you do exactly like you’re told . . .

(350)

Belief, here, is irrelevant; it is doing that matters, where one’s actions are not as an

‘independent human’ but rather giving up one’s assumption of autonomy to the power of

‘involuntary change’ (Bateson 331). Indeed, ‘your own personal will’ that is the ‘web your

Disease sits and spins in’ (357); the ‘illusion of autonomy’ that results in toxic cycles

(Hayles, “Illusion of Autonomy” 692).

The AA narrative in Infinite Jest thus engages with presenting an ‘unpresentable presence’

(Lyotard, “Sublime Feeling” 260). By evoking Bateson’s power of ‘involuntary change’

(331), but refusing to name that power by anything other than a ‘God’ you don’t believe in,

mystery is retained, and thus refuses to link the cause of recovery to any stable point of

origin. The AA thereby engages with the paradox of the sublime: through ‘Blind Faith’ you

become ‘weirdly unblinded, which is good’ (351). Faith in one’s individual senses is replaced

with ‘an almost classic sort of Blind Faith in the older guys, a Blind Faith in them born not

out of zealotry or even belief but just of a chilled conviction that you have no faith

whatsoever left in yourself’ (351). Faith is thereby born out of loss, as the lack of faith in

oneself allows for something else to enter the abyss that remains. Personal will is surrendered

to a ‘Group conscience’ (357) based on mystery, as it ‘seemed to be impossible to figure out

just how AA worked . . . Nobody’s ever been able to figure AA out, is another binding

commonality’ (350). The community is bounded by the suspension of certainty and

knowledge, as it blinds and ‘unites them, nervously’ (350), and the feeling that something

may happen in the ‘threatening void’ (Lyotard, “Newman” 335) manifests itself as a

‘tentative assemblage of possible glimmers of something like hope’ (IJ 350). In this sense, it

is as Schtitt explains: ‘[a]ny something. The what: this is more unimportant than that there is

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something’ (83, italics in original). With AA, Wallace presents a sublime narrative system in

its awareness of its own inadequacy: its logic remains indeterminate.

By opening a system to indeterminacy, one opens up to the possibility of mutation.

Lyotard and Hayles share the belief that the disruption of a system in the present, can lead

to productive uncertainty for its future. As a system opens up to a force outside its

confines, it allows for the recursive flow between bounded pattern and boundless

randomness, thus preventing the continuation of unchanging and predictable cycles. This

therefore postulates the need for the recursivity of feedback loops over self-feeding loops

of determined repetition. The AA in Infinite Jest provides a transcendence of one’s self-

feeding cycles, I argue, through a recursive process encompassing narrative and action.

Gately expresses the importance of repetition in the AA narrative; the need to ‘keep

coming’ (IJ 350) and repeat the clichés. Recovery involves not a total transcendence of

repetition, merely one of a different nature. Where the cycles of substance addiction is ‘like

attending Black Mass but you still can’t stop’ (347), the routines of the AA tend towards a

hesitant future with glimmers of ‘hope’ (350). Gately describes the process as one where

you ‘keep coming and coming, nightly’ and ‘Hang In and Hang In’: until eventually, ‘not

only does the urge to get high stay more or less away’ but ‘things seem to get progressively

better, inside’ (351). The boundary between what one is told to do, and what one wants to

do, becomes increasingly blurred as what was previously seen as an individual autonomy is

revealed to be shaped by external, repetitive action, until ‘the agonising desire to ingest

synthetic narcotics [is] mysteriously magically removed’ (466). As Boswell notes, the

paradox of the AA community is that one enters a ‘refuge’ in order to ‘open oneself’ (145):

to “Come In” is simultaneously to “get out” of one’s cycles.

Transcendence is not defined as breaking cleanly out of a system towards a higher

‘truth’ (Boswell 145), but through the potential for real change, as provided by the repeated

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feedback loops of recursivity. Recursive mutation occurs through the interaction between

what was previously in the system and what enters from outside the system, evoking

Derrida’s parergon as the moment a system’s ‘restricted economy’ opens itself to the

possibility of ‘loss’ (Malpas 159). In this moment, the sublime engages with a

boundlessness that is perpetually framed and reframed at the limit (Cheetham 107). Orin’s

inability to truly connect to another manifests itself in his tendency to draw lemniscates on

the bodies of his sexual “Subjects”. The infinity symbol—as the visual entity of conjoined

circles—only ever remains on the surface. This is due to the fear that if he were to stick to

one ‘Subject’, he would be absorbed into the ‘obliterating trinity of You and I into We’, a

transcendence of ‘I’ that Orin experienced once, and ‘has never recovered’ (IJ 566-67).

True transcendence thus occurs as both an ‘obliteration’ and a transformation in the

framing process.

The “magic” of this kind of transcendence is thus related to the acknowledgement that events

always exceed our hold on them, but we can invite the possibility of new systems.When

Gately first arrives to the AA, Pat tells him that ‘it didn’t matter at this point what he thought

or believed or even said. . . . If he did the right things, and kept doing them for long enough,

what Gately thought and believed would magically change. Even what he said’ (IJ 466). AA

recovery is not caused from within the system: it is at the limit of one’s system, the disruption

of a pattern, that allows for things to ‘magically change’: the ‘not-order, limit, places where

things broke down’ (81). This is why Gately is also required to be ‘minimally open’ and

‘willing to persistently ask some extremely vague Higher Power’ (466) to remove his desire

for narcotics. It is neither an essential, individual “will” nor a ‘God-ish figure’ (466) that

achieves this, but his being ‘open’ to the mutation of his system through feedback loops.

Belief, thought and action here are blurred into an interconnected process of recursivity and

mutual effect. Change is derived from both within and without the subject as pattern and

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randomness flow into one another at the limit. Change is derived from both within and

without the subject: pattern and randomness flow into one another at the limit to evoke the

inside/outside recursivity of a Möbius strip.

The AA narrative in Infinite Jest presents the possibilities that arise when the system of

the “self” gives up its will to the unknowable power of randomness. It thus presents a

reformulation of human subjectivity more akin to Bateson’s or Hayles’ notion of the

human as existing within a wider system of interlocking networks, with porous and

unmappable boundaries. We return, then, to the sublime as the experience of

incomprehensible boundlessness as mentioned in Chapter 1, but here, it is both

acknowledged and revered. Wallace’s proclamation against the flatness of postmodern

irony is applicable here: ‘[w]e can solve the problem by celebrating it. Transcend feelings

of mass-defined angst by genuflecting to them. We can be reverently ironic’ (“E Unibus

Pluram” 189-90, italics in original). Instead of viewing the loss of total autonomy in

decentred networks as a source of terror, one transcends angst through tentative reverence.

Schtitt’s reverence for the potential provided by randomness is apparent in his interest in

Extra-Linear Dynamics, described as ‘the pure branch of math that deals with systems and

phenomena whose chaos is beyond even Mandelbrotian math’s Strange Equations and

Random Attractants’ (IJ 994n34). In this way, tennis becomes a metaphor for the true magic

of the sublime: its ability to not only place the human subject in awe, but to destabilise its

systems for the sake of engaging with what lies beyond the limit: ‘[y]ou compete with your

own limits to transcend the self in imagination and execution. . . . You seek to vanquish and

transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place’ (84). The

other player is the ‘occasion for meeting the self’ (84, italics in original), so that the

‘animating limits…within’ are ‘to be killed and mourned, over and over again’ (84). The

game is a constant, unstable process of framing and reframing limits.

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Wallace thus brings the posthuman notion of automatism and repetition into the realm of

hope. It is through the recursive relationship between “self” and “otherness”, pattern and

randomness, that something may begin to change within the subject for the better: what is

‘within’ thereby becomes a ‘better metaphor for the complexities without’ (Hayles,

Posthuman 287). Wallace presents the AA narrative as provoking the abyssal moment at

which a system and otherness interact, and thus the possibility for the transcendence of a

fixed pattern through mutation: a ‘difference that makes a difference’ (Bateson 459).

Possibility for difference is thus found in the interactive tension between binaries—

pattern/randomness, self/other, order/chaos, finite/infinite—where the line that previously

divided them acts more like an unmappable “limit”: a simultaneous passage and cut; a

paradox of preservation and transcendence. Joelle in Infinite Jest muses on the outcomes of

such synthesis:

What if heredity, instead of linear, is branching? . . . What if in fact, there were ever only like two really

distinct individual people walking around back there in history’s mist? That all difference descends from

this difference? The whole and the partial. The damaged and the intact. . . . The hidden and blindingly

open. The performer and the audience. No Zen-type One, always rather Two, one upside down in a

convex lens (IJ 220).

In Wallace’s texts it is the very presentation of the unpresentable that allows for potentially

positive and uncontrolled interactions between contained systems: between human beings,

human beings and their environment, and between author and reader. Language may in this

way flow through his readers, destabilising the limits within them.

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Conclusion: From Closed Circles to the Möbius Strip

Wallace’s characters are consistently faced with the threat of reductive and determined

patterning in both their lives and the narratives by which they understand their lives. Any

hope for human subjectivity to be expressed, found, and acted upon in Wallace’s texts must

therefore engage the aesthetics of the sublime, opening up to the complex interplay of forces

that cannot ever be “mapped” into the mind of someone else. The reader is unable to escape

from being trapped in her own skull, according to Wallace, but one may be able to gain

access to other selves and other lives, if only we let ourselves work at, and through, the limit

of our patterns. The sublime necessitates the experience of difference, and the hope is that

such an experience will in turn, make a difference. It is this that characterises Wallace’s work

as engaged with the possibility provided by the aesthetic experience of art and literature, of

making sense of culture as well as making it (Hutcheon 21).

Wallace’s approach to structures and abstract patterning can be seen in many ways

through his evocation of circular geometry: from the singularity of circles and spirals, to the

intersections and interactions provided by Venn diagrams, lemniscates and the Möbius strip.

His stance, I have argued, is against the human tendency to face away from the uncertain flux

outside circular systems. In Infinite Jest, Wallace provides an alternative approach to the void

left behind by poststructuralist lack; transforming it as a positive and necessary space for the

unpresentable to enter a system, thus providing the potential to escape from the solipsism and

anhedonia of closed circles through the ‘fact of recursivity’ (Hayles 678).

Infinite Jest begins with Hal, trapped in the solipsism of a closed system, and ends with

Gately, left out in the metaphorical void, on cold sand and ‘the tide way out’ (IJ 981).

Wallace presents, in the pages between, a constant interrogation of the limit between pattern

and randomness, order and disorder, finite and infinite. The novel evokes the sublime

experience at this limit; the possibilities that occur in the reader’s interaction with it. His

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hope, therefore, is to evoke the Möbius strip as far more than a trapping infinite regress.

Instead, it describes a recursive relationship between what is internal—in his characters, his

texts, and the representational systems they embody—and its on-going relationship and

mutual interaction with the external, through the lens of language. It is seeing ‘humanly

contained’ (IJ 82) structures as eternally indeterminate that allows for patterns of narrative

and action to engage with the ‘prolix flux’ (82) of reality and human experience: to see

patterning as a means to an indefinite and ‘mathematically uncontrolled’ (82) end, full of

potential and possibility.

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Works Cited

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