preview

Allusion In Infinite Jest

Decent Essays
Open Document

In his celebrated 1,079 page novel set at a tennis academy and addiction recovery house, David Foster Wallace borrows a phrase from Shakespeare’s Hamlet for the title, Infinite Jest. The allusion is grounded in the vital plot device also named ‘Infinite Jest,’ a necromantic film that engrosses the viewer to the point of catatonia and eventually death. The filmmaker is the character James O. Incandenza, who sought to produce a film so radically entertaining that it would affectively tear his son Hal from anhedonia, a sarcastic and apathetic state of being that characterized, for Wallace, American culture at the time. As it becomes clear very early on in Infinite Jest, James is dead for the majority of the plot, appearing as a ghost late in the …show more content…

Catherine Nichols points this out, calling James the ‘infinite jester’ of the novel (11). In view of his connection to Yorick, the allusion to the graveyard scene in Hamlet is twice made explicit: once near the beginning and once toward the end of Infinite Jest; Hal shares a dream with the novel’s other protagonist, whereby the two dig up James’ head (16-17; 934). Of course, the graveyard dream recalls the grave scene from Hamlet, where the titular character discovers that the skull uncovered by the gravediggers is that of his childhood jester Yorick, whom he describes as “a fellow of infinite jest” (5.1.191-2). As Indira Ghose suggests, the ‘infinite’ in this line is enclosed within Hamlet’s recollection of the jester, so the infinity is reduced to the confines of a single character’s memory and is recalled only upon his chance encounter with the skull; the infinite is juxtaposed with the image of the empty skull he holds up to the audience, so the infinite as a concept is exposed as “a huge joke” (1015). Aside from James’ ‘The Joke,’ his film Infinite Jest itself functions as a jest: the overt impossibility of a film engaging a viewer to the point to death, the hyperbolic mother-son theme parodying psychoanalytic theory, and, perhaps most poignantly, the glaring absence of the infinite. In Hal’s dream, he digs up his father’s head in order to find, as it is elsewhere inferred, the master copy of the film. However, as the reader and Hal are aware, James’ head was destroyed, thus the film no longer exists. This absence recalls the gaping emptiness of the jester’s skull as Hamlet holds it up to the audience. In both cases, the infinite itself becomes the joke, in the sense that the yawning absence belies the immutable nature of infinity. Likewise, Wallace’s

Get Access
Related
Get Access