Infinite Jest at 30: David Foster Wallace’s Guide to Life in the Age of Entertainment Excess

With the 30 year anniversary of Infinite Jest approaching, it's time to look back on Wallace's 1996 magnum opus and uncover what it can teach us about life in America, now.

Infinite Jest is a sprawling, mammoth novel about addiction, the pursuit of meaning, and our relationship to media and entertainment. It takes place sometime in a semi-dystopian future, 2002-2009 (the book itself published in 1996), and primarily focuses on a hilltop tennis academy, the addicts’ halfway house at the bottom of the hill, and the subterfuge between American and Québécois Separatists both in pursuit of a weapon that could cause destruction equivalent to a worldwide nuclear catastrophe. The narrative unravels at fragmented, non-chronological intervals, jumping between characters, years, and locations and leaving the reader on their own to parse it all out and piece it together. The book refuses to talk down to the reader, throws them right in, in medias res, and expects them to know the characters and players, the world, and the vernacular. Scattered through the book’s 1,079 pages are 388 footnotes–some with footnotes of their own–and although one might think this 96-page appendix would clarify the story, it often serves to obscure, frustrate, or raise further questions. This is by design. Through the complex, weaving structure, Wallace forces the reader not only to interact with the text, but also with the physical book itself, thereby refusing the passive narrative engagement prevalent in so much of modern entertainment media—making Infinite Jest Wallace’s guide (and antidote) to life in the modern world of constant, narcotizing entertainment and pleasure.

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INFINITE JEST

Infinite Jest ends on a dour note. Teenage tennis prodigy Hal Incandenza, the closest the book comes to a true protagonist, has lost his ability to communicate. Internally, it’s clear he’s some kind of genius—he discourses on the philosophy of Rousseau and Camus and Kierkegaard at a level far above the adults around him and clearly has an expansive vocabulary (12)—but when he opens his mouth, it’s just noise. It’s garbled, animalistic grunting that results in him being restrained, strapped to a hospital gurney, and whisked off to an emergency room for an immediate medical evaluation. Hal is trapped in his own head and frustrated with his inability to communicate.

In the sky above, “...some sort of ultra-mach fighter too high overhead to hear slices the sky from south to north” (16). A possible war has just begun between the modern, post-NWO USA called the Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N.) and a terrorist sect of Québécois separatists known as les Assassins Fateuils Rolents (AFR), whose goal is to bring about the destruction of O.N.A.N. by releasing “The Entertainment,” a video cartridge so compelling and addicting that once the viewer watches it, they will never want to do anything more than watch the video again and again until they die. The Entertainment, titled Infinite Jest, is the final work of Hal’s late father, James Incandenza, a brilliant optician and filmmaker who is buried in Canada, allegedly with the Master Copy of The Entertainment interred alongside him, lodged in his skull.

Strapped to the gurney, Hal remembers digging up his deceased father’s head, which we later find out happened sometime in the previous year with the book’s deuteragonist, reformed addict Don Gately. In Gately’s fever dream, “[Hal] is trying to scream at Gately that the important thing was buried in the guy’s head and to divert the Continental Emergency to start digging the guy’s head up before it’s too late, but… [Hal] holds something terrible up by the hair and makes the face of somebody shouting in panic: Too Late” (934).

Hal and Gately dig up James Incandenza’s body in search of the Master Copy of The Entertainment, but it’s already too late. Someone has beaten them to the punch and the Master Copy is gone. The implication of the fighter jet flying northward at the end of the narrative is that the AFR has retrieved the Master Copy and released The Entertainment onto the world; it is too late to stop the oncoming flood of The Entertainment.

If true, this is quite a bleak ending. The protagonist has lost his ability to communicate, several key characters are unaccounted for and possibly dead, and a terrorist cell has just unleashed an Entertainment that promises to turn the majority of the country’s population into drooling lobotomites wanting only to be mindlessly entertained on repeat, pleasuring themselves to death.

However, in the background, Hugh Steeply, an agent of the newly-formed United States Office of Unspecified Services (U.S.O.U.S., similar to the modern FBI), is on the search for a rumored “anti-Entertainment,” that could counter the infantilizing effects of the all-consuming Entertainment. As he says in one of the book’s early chapters, “Does this quote ‘anti’-Entertainment the film’s director supposedly made to counter the lethality: does it really exist? … As some kind of remedy or antidote.” (126). To which Marathe, an AFR quadruple-agent replies that he has no evidence beyond rumors. It’s only mentioned once, early in the book, and doesn’t seem to be tangible in the world of the story. However, it begs the question: does this Anti-Entertainment exist?

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PREDICTIONS OR PROPHECIES?

The fictional dystopia of Infinite Jest is here today in the United States in full form. In Wallace’s interpretation, the USA, Canada, and Mexico have come together into a continental supernation known as the Organization of North American Nations, O.N.A.N, at the behest of the longshot presidential candidate Johnny Gentle. Gentle was a famous crooner (a male singer popular in the 1940s-1960s, ala Frank Sinatra or Bing Crosby), known for his showmanship, previous career in entertainment, his “dusty, brick-colored tan,” (383) and his ability to unite politically disillusioned Americans, both the far right and the far left, under the guise of finding a common enemy and massively trimming down national spending. Wallace describes his unexpected rise to power as this: “

…[Gentle] suddenly swept to quadrennial victory in an angry reactionary voter-spasm… as the Dems and G.O.P.s stood on either side watching dumbly, like doubles partners who each think the other’s surely got it, the two established mainstream parties split open along tired philosophical lines…” (382)

Johnny Gentle was a fringe candidate, not taken seriously as a politician because of his career in entertainment and his gaudy public persona, who quickly swept a divided nation up in a political fervor and rode all the way to the highest office in America with the help of P. Tom Veals, a savvy advertising executive (not unlike a Roger Stone type), and a message of a newer, cleaner America. Gentle and his team work closely with the founder of InterLace Spontaneous Dissemination TelEntertainment (the company that has a monopoly on streaming), fully aware of how important image and entertainment will be in the upcoming administration.

Shortly after he took office, a series of shortsighted political maneuverings landed Gentle in hot water. Despite the country’s reluctance, Gentle strongarms Canada into joining the USA and Mexico to form O.N.A.N. The province of Québéc resists heavily, and it’s from this forced “Interdependence,” that the AFR and Québécois Separatists form.

The Gentle Administration pivots the majority of their nation’s energy reliance onto a process called Annular Fusion, which Hal’s father James helped to discover; however, the byproduct of annular fusion is a massive amount of toxic, radioactive waste. Gentle makes the executive decision to pile all the waste together into something he calls, “The Great Concavity,” which is basically the northern part of upstate New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, and “gift” it to Canada. Neither Canada nor the USA really want to claim this toxic land as their own, so it hangs in limbo between them.

Gentle and his team create whole intricate systems of waste-disposal fans (literally, giant, building-sized fans) to blow the toxic winds back up north toward Canada, and extensive systems of literal catapults to vault massive ton-sized bricks of garbage northward. Out of sight, out of mind! To pay for all of this incredibly expensive sanitation equipment and geographic reconfiguration, and to make up for the loss of income from four states now ceded to toxic waste disposal, Johnny Gentle and his team come up with the concept of “Subsidized Time.”

Subsidized Time is as follows. Each year is sponsored, and the old way of numbering years (2001, 2002, etc.) has been cast aside in favor of naming each subsequent year after their annual corporate sponsor, e.g. “Year of the Whopper,” or, “Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland.” Not only is it unwieldy and hard to keep track of, Wallace highlights this absurdity by having AD 2007 now branded as, “Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office Or Mobile.” In O.N.A.N., the government is not interested in solving the nation’s clear problems of drug addiction, homelessness, political unrest, or pollution. They have literally sold out their citizens and given time itself to the highest bidder. Nowhere is this more clear than on page 367:

“NNYC[New-New York City]’s harbor’s Liberty Island’s gigantic Lady has the sun for a crown and holds what looks like a huge photo album under one iron arm, and the other arm holds aloft a product. The product is changed each 1 Jan. by brave men with pitons and cranes.”

The acronym of this new nation bears a common name with Onan, the biblical figure who God smote for spilling his own seed instead of impregnating his brother’s widow (Genesis 38:1-10). Christian theologists including Epiphanius of Salamis and Clement of Alexandria have tied this biblical story of Onan to the modern act of masturbation and argued it was a sin to partake in self-pleasure without the goal of conception. Wallace transforms this idea of “Onanism” to “O.N.A.N.ism.” Put more aptly, in Infinite Jest Wallace imagines the very country we live in now based on this idea of constant and short-sighted self-pleasure.

Whether it’s drugs, sex, fame, domination of sport, or mastery of your field, the world of Infinite Jest is a world of self-pleasure. Everybody pursues what they think will maximize their own pleasure, from the rigorous athletics of the Enfield Tennis Academy and the pursuit of professional fame in Pro Tennis (“the Show”), to the dirtied back-alleys of Metro Boston and the myriad alcoholics and drug addicts who roam them searching for their next score, each main character pursues what they think will bring them the most happiness.

U.S.O.U.S. Agent Steeply and AFR traitor Marathe discourse on this subject throughout their chapters, particularly pg. 418-430, wondering if this nation’s utilitarian view on maximizing the pleasure and minimizing the pain for their citizens is the worldview that will lead to the best outcome for its people. At the end of their discussion, Marathe challenges Steeply’s O.N.A.N.ite ideals. He asks why Steeply and his government are trying to stop the dissemination of The Entertainment if ultimately they believe it’s each individual’s choice, as private USA citizens, to pursue their own definition of maximal pleasure; Marathe argues that giving into The Entertainment’s siren song would directly provide the country with that maximal pleasure they’re so eagerly seeking. Steeply counters, saying the “insidious enslaving process,” of The Entertainment isn’t comparable to normal pleasure-seeking choices like sugar or drugs USA citizens are encouraged to seek as part of their freedom-loving, pleasure-maximizing ideology. Marathe wonders then, why Steeply and his government still wouldn’t give their citizens the choice of watching this all-consuming Entertainment or abstaining: if the modern USA truly believed in giving their citizens complete freedom of choice that could lead to his or her maximal pleasure and minimal pain, then why not allow The Entertainment to be freely distributed? Why not let the people choose?

Later on, we get the answer from Steeply. He recalls a story about a science experiment where rats were given levers that, once pulled, activated the ‘p-terminal,’ the pleasure sensor in their brain.

“…the Canadians found that if they rigged an auto-stimulation lever, the rat would press the lever to stimulate his p-terminal over and over, thousands of times an hour, over and over, ignoring food and female rats in heat, completely fixated on the lever’s stimulation, day and night, stopping only when the rat finally died of dehydration or simple fatigue” (471). Word leaks about this surgery and a potential clinical trial on humans. Rather than fear of the study or repulsion at the ethics of it all, the Canadian lab where the experiment was taking place found a huge number of volunteers lining down the block, eager to participate in a study that could maximize their pleasure, even if it meant their certain loss of humanity to said pleasure and consequent death. Steeply imagines a world where this p-terminal surgery is widely available:

“Picture millions of average nonabnormal North Americans… all with electronic access to their own personal p-terminals, never leaving home, thumbing their personal stimulation levers over and over” (471).

This is why Steeply can’t rebuke Marathe’s question about allowing people to choose for themselves whether they want to watch the Entertainment; if the choice is available, people will choose it. How could they resist?

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THE ENTERTAINMENT

Wallace didn’t just predict the rise of a semi-fascist corporate-backed USA and the entertaining President at its helm, he also predicted the rise of Americans’ growing appetite for constant entertainment. He predicted that after the growth of spontaneous dissemination technology, there would be a consolidation among the big cable companies that would result in a monopoly on the dissemination of entertainment (see Netflix’s recent bid for HBO and the conglomeration of the once-numerous streaming services). Part of the appeal of spontaneous dissemination is this: “What if a viewer could more or less 100% choose what’s on at any given time… What if the viewer could become her/his own programming director; what if s/he could define the very entertainment-happiness it was her/his right to pursue?”

Wallace predicted in 1996 what would happen in the late 2000’s, when the rise of streaming technologies intersected with Americans’ longstanding desire for freedom of choice and increasing appetite for personalized entertainment. People could now choose what to watch at any given moment. Even cable’s hundred-plus channels were reduced in degree of freedom by their preset programming, but with this technology he predicted, “American mass-entertainment became inherently pro-active, consumer-driven.” In 1996, this was a radical concept, but by the early 2010’s, not only did this prediction come to life, it became far more prevalent and widely available than even Wallace thought parodically possible.

Wallace also came up with the device that would inevitably replace televisions. The term for his fictional version is a teleputer or TP, a word which sounds a lot like a mix between a telephone and computer, something that would show up in our modern world in June 2007, with the release of the iPhone (although Wallace’s version is more analog and less portable than today’s fully digital, handheld tech).

Wallace’s book portends the growing presence of the internet and the ways in which the modern USA, with all its freedom of choice and encouraged seeking of maximal individual pleasure, is doomed to succumb to The Entertainment. We live in a nation growing more and more divided and isolated and lonely, in a time where our society is fractured and modern life has become divorced from meaning while there’s a parallel (and perhaps consequent) increase in popularity and availability of mind-numbing and increasingly potent drugs like marijuana, and we spend an ever-increasing amount of our lives devoted to the consumption of mindless entertainment.

Think about what The Entertainment really is—a device of limitless pleasure, a black hole of entertainment that enfeebles our minds, one to which we willingly hand over every available second of our attention. In a country where our political leaders have become entertainers and ignore major problems they caused while obfuscating those problems behind strawmen common enemies, where a huge portion of our world is drowning in litter and waste and we do nothing to address it but everything to ignore it. Where young people find themselves increasingly hopeless and turn to drugs and alcohol and distraction to cope with the world around them. This is the world of Infinite Jest, but it’s eerily similar to the world of today.

So, what to do? In our own modern USA, where constant entertainment and pleasure is not only readily available, but normalized and ubiquitous, how can we overcome it? Shall we resign to our fate as no better than the pleasure-hungry rats of Steeply’s story, thumbing our personal stimulation levers over and over? Well, no; there’s still hope. Steeply mentions rumors of an “Anti-Entertainment,” one that can act as a sort of antidote to the effects of The Entertainment. However, it’s never found, nor brought up again in the novel as the AFR gets steadily closer to finding a Master Copy. So, does it exist? Would Wallace really write this novel about the perils of entertainment and dangle the possibility of an antidote in front of us if he was never going to provide one?

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THE ANTI-ENTERTAINMENT

The arguably most impressive thing James O. Incandenza ever did was build Enfield Tennis Academy (ETA). He created the design, the cardioid architecture, the initial curricula, and recruited the instructors and coaches; however, he didn’t build ETA just to teach kids how to play tennis.

Gerhard Schtitt, the fascist head coach of ETA, drills the students there relentlessly (450-461, for example). They wake at dawn for practice and conditioning drills, and while it does build their athleticism, Schtitt is really there to teach the kids how to fortify their minds. JOI hired Schtitt because they both knew that tennis is not a game of athleticism and statistics, it is a game limited only by the boundaries of the self (82). He’s there to instill in the kids a certain mental fortitude and a set of guiding principles on discipline to serve as the philosophical anchor around which they will base their lives. Schtitt laments that his training is up against a national philosophy antithetical to what he’s there to teach:

“…but who can imagine this training serving its purpose in an experialist and waste-exporting nation that’s forgotten privation and hardship and the discipline which hardship teaches by requiring? A U.S. of modern A. where the State is not a team or a code, but a sort of sloppy intersection of desires and fears, where the only public consensus a boy must surrender to is the acknowledged primacy of straight-line pursuing this flat and short-sighted idea of personal happiness” (83).

O.N.A.N. is a nation of maximizing personal happiness and avoiding hardship at all costs, where they’ve lost any sense of central guiding principles. Again—it’s not about tennis—it’s about what one can learn of themselves through the game of tennis. It’s about pushing the individual to transcend the limited self and the modern myopic ideals of maximizing short-term pleasure in favor of true growth and self-realization.

It’s worth noting that alongside rigorous tennis lessons, DFW’s JOI’s tennis academy has a two term minimum required class “Introduction to Entertainment Studies,” (140), alongside classes on double binds, advanced calculus, and annular fusion. The academy’s purpose is to strengthen its students, physically, mentally, and psychologically, and prepare them to resist life in the modern O.N.A.N.ite world.

Just as JOI created his tennis academy to strengthen the minds and bodies of young pupils, so has DFW created a “tennis academy” of his own with Infinite Jest.

In many ways, James O. Incandenza is a stand-in for Wallace himself. He’s a technically brilliant and frequently misunderstood man with a previous career in junior tennis and an interest in the avant-garde. Although he commits suicide before the events of the book begin, his ghost looms over the story. He’s partly responsible for annular fusion, which created the Great Concavity, he’s the father of the book’s protagonist Hal, and he’s often called “The Auteur,” as the creator of titular Entertainment, or “Himself,” by his family. The majority of JOI’s presence in the book is told through other characters, but toward the end of the book, he manifests as a wraith and communicates directly with the book’s deuteragonist, Don Gately.

At the end of the book, Gately is taken to the hospital after a violent encounter with a group of Canadian separatists. As he lies in bed fluttering in and out of consciousness, he’s visited by the ghost of JOI. It’s already well-established that JOI’s body of creative work was considered by critics to be technically impressive, but lacking in true entertainment value. With Infinite Jest (the film version, a.k.a. The Entertainment), JOI has created his entertainment magnum opus, a film terminally entertaining. In wraith form, JOI explains that his strongest desire with filmmaking was to entertain, and his ultimate goal of Infinite Jest (the film) was to make a piece of media so compelling it would shake his youngest son, Hal, out of his “anhedonia,” or growing apathy.

There’s a parallel here. The Auteur (both JOI and DFW) created Infinite Jest (JOI’s film and DFW’s book) at the intersection of entertainment and technical mastery, with the ultimate goal of freeing the younger generation from growing apathy.

In a 1996 interview on Bookworm, Wallace said of Infinite Jest, “It’s designed to be a book to be read more than once… The really hard and really scary thing was trying to make it fun enough so somebody would want to. And how to have it be fun without it being reductive or pandering or get co-opted by the very principles of commercialism that the book is partly about.” In other words, Wallace wanted the book to be entertaining, but struggled with the limit of how entertaining a piece of media should be, an idea central to JOI’s storyline and to the book itself.

Also in a parallel to the book, the wraith form of JOI injects abtruse words and phrases directly into Gately’s brain, which he feels is, “a sort of lexical rape” (832). These words have previously shown up themselves in Infinite Jest, words like BRICOLAGE or PROPRIOCEPTION or SCOPOPHILIA. For the average person reading the book, these words aren’t common to their vocabularies and will require them to consult the dictionary or surmise with root words and context clues. They are words that JOI has injected into Gately’s brain, but also words that, by simply writing them, DFW has injected into the readers’ brains.

As we read and encounter words like bradykinetic, phalloneurotic, arachnodactylic or suprasubliminal, it’s not unlike how Gately described learning these words above. They will often make the reader pause, get their internal vocabulary gears churning, and actively engage with each sentence just to figure out what Wallace is trying to say. Although this might seem to some readers to be overly-demanding (why say “arachnodactylic” when “spider-like fingers” works just as well and is far more accessible), it is not without purpose.

In a radio interview with Leonard Lepote in 1996, Wallace said of Infinite Jest, “I’m fairly conscious of the fact that the demands you make on a reader are not in of themselves valuable. The demands of the reader need to serve a discernable function, and there needs to be some sort of payoff.”

So what’s the payoff of a book as demanding as this? Once you’ve sorted through the jumbled chapters and mentally detangled the over 100 characters and their intertwined plot lines, once you’ve crinkled enough pages in the dictionary looking up the more esoteric words, what’s your reward?

The reward of reading Infinite Jest is the same JOI hoped would come from building his tennis academy. He’s asking you to do something mentally taxing. It’s the reading equivalent of getting up early for dawn drills, then going to morning classes, then hitting the weight room, and starting it all over again in the morning; it’s conditioning for your brain.

The form and structure of the book also serve a secondary function: to teach you how to read. That’s not to say literal instructions, but teaching you not to be afraid of daunting books with accompanying appendices, to show you it’s possible to build out a mental map of so many characters and places, and to teach you that words on subjects ranging from dentistry to philosophy to street argot—no matter how obscure—are within your realm of understanding. It’s jam-packed with uncommon references. In order to understand the book fully, you need to incorporate external sources into your reading. The writing sends you outwards, to the dictionary, to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, to AA’s website, to beginner calculus and the poetry of Emily Dickinson, to the films of Fellini and Sidney Peterson and the philosophy of Kant and Hegel. To fully understand the references and jokes, you have to include other books in your reading of Infinite Jest, and that’s partially the point; Wallace is sending you to the literature and ideas that he feels are integral to understanding this modern (or, post-modern) world.

The book is not just a syllabus in content, it’s also a training guide on how to actively engage with entertainment, reinforced by the structure of the book itself. In a single reading, you have to flip to the appendix and back nearly 300 times. It’s a repetitive motion, trained into you again and again until it becomes second nature, like a tennis serve. Enough repetitions and the motion becomes ingrained, automatic. It’s frustrating but absorbing. It pushes you past your understanding of what literature can be, all while constantly reminding you that what you’re holding is just a book: the sheer physicality of it, the tiny text stuffed wall to wall on the thin pages, the oversized appendix, and the fact that you need two separate bookmarks to read it properly. Once you’ve finished the book for the first time, the narrative feels unresolved, which is deliberate on Wallace’s part. He structured the story so that the book would have to be read twice, even three times, to be fully understood.

By the third read through, those sprawling compound sentences will seem lyrical instead of intimidating. Those perplexing words aren’t strangers anymore, and their definitions will come to you without the need of a dictionary. The once inscrutable story begins to unfold fully and take on new dimensions. The appendix becomes optional if your recall is good enough, but it’s still fun to bounce back and forth between it, like you’re playing a game of tennis within the book itself.

At no point can the book be read passively. Flip open to a random page and you’ll find it loaded with shorthand and acronyms and self-references that get the cogs of your brain turning just to parse it all out. The times are all military, the weights are all metric, and the years are all subsidized—for the average imperial-taught American, this adds additional conversions and calculations on top of the already difficult vocabulary and character web that the book requires of you to understand. It is challenging and sometimes tedious, but the rewards are far greater than what you’d get from passive entertainment like a television show or mass-market film. Although it’s incredibly entertaining, it’s the opposite of entertainment; it is the Anti-Entertainment.

The Anti-Entertainment Steeply mentions in the book doesn’t exist within the narrative of Infinite Jest; the Anti-Entertainment is Infinite Jest. Infinite Jest is both the titular diegetic film of the novel and the novel itself. It is, in the narrative world, “The Entertainment,” and in the real world, “The Anti-Entertainment.”

Positioning Infinite Jest as the Anti-Entertainment logically pits itself against the many-headed beast of modern entertainment. Whether it’s scrolling TikTok or Instagram, Facebook or Reddit, whether it’s watching the new forgettable show-of-the-week on Amazon Prime or not being able to eat lunch without a YouTube video on, or the inability to drive even ten minutes without some form of music or podcast queued up, our desire to be entertained is ever-present. And even if none of these entertainments are as directly engrossing as the fictional Entertainment, the choice remains the same: to engage actively with the world around you, or to sit there, rapt, like a giant, brain-off infant, to be nothing more than a passive consumer of entertainment.

Wallace’s dystopian vision of an America consumed by addictive entertainment isn’t as far-fetched as one might think. Political analogues aside, it’s a prophecy for a nation devoted to maximizing individual self-pleasure and minimizing pain. The image of us trapped in our homes, thumbing our pleasure terminals over and over is eerily similar to the dopamine drip of the endless scroll that social media has become. One more Instagram Reel or Tiktok can become an hour, can become two or three, and soon your brain is turned off as you consume mindless, algorithm-driven entertainment bites personally tailored to your interests, designed to keep you engaged as long as possible. This algorithm-backed entertainment delivery system has become a vehicle of maximal individual self-pleasure, and the consequences of such are far greater than we yet understand. There’s no difficulty in being passively entertained; there’s no growth or challenge.

Wallace saw this problem in the 90’s with the rise of television, and knew that as technology and the internet advanced, this problem would only worsen and become a greater threat to the minds of young Americans.

In Infinite Jest, Wallace knew it was already too late to stop the nation from succumbing to the omnipresent Entertainment, but thankfully, he has provided us with a cure in the form of a challenging yet engrossing anti-entertainment—all 1079 pages of it.