Holl The Narrative Game: The Reading of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest as Play

1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-3-95489-557-1
Verlag: Anchor Academic Publishing
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 47 Seiten

In 1996, David Foster Wallace published his second major novel 'Infinite Jest' that changed not only our understanding of what literature can do but, also the way we read literature. Despite its age, the book has not lost a single bit of its fascination, its actuality, and its academic appeal. With its hundreds of characters, thousands of pages, hundreds of endnotes and myriads of different perspectives, sub-plots, and narrative digressions, 'Infinite Jest' was, and still is, an extraordinary challenge for its readers as well as literary critics. One interesting question related to Wallace's work is to what extent readers are able to establish, and defend their own way of approaching literature, their natural reading habits, their personal boundaries, and their 'readerly authority' that are challenged by their discourse with the book. The author shows in how far the reader of 'Infinite Jest' has to get involved in this work of play, how it affects the way they read the book, and how the idiosyncratic reading experience finally becomes an integral part of the whole book itself.

Rainer Holl was born in Neuwied in 1983. He studied American studies, information science, and applied literary, and cultural studies at the TU Dortmund. In 2012, he finished his master thesis that was also based on David Foster Wallace. Currently, he is

Autoren/Hrsg.

Holl, Rainer

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1;The Narrative Game;1
1.1;Table of Contents;3
1.2;The Reading of David Fosters Wallaces "Infinite Jest" as Play;4
1.3;Bibliography;46

Leseproben

Text Sample: Hal's disruptive drug-play that flaws the official rules of E.T.A. actually enables him to get lost in a world that is so simplified and regulated that he has to do nothing but play according to these simple regulations. He is still not free in that system, but at least it is so simple and uncomplicated enough that he is able to occur and start playing. Hal's loss in that system takes away his fear that the game becomes hypothetical. Theory turns into practice and transforms Hal into the second best player of the Enfield Tennis Academy. Is Hal's strategy now good advice for the reader? For some readers the reading experience might become even more thrilling after the consumption of certain mind-expanding substances. For others the book is already addictive and thrilling enough to realize that it actually might be bigger than the reader herself. By simply considering the fact that the reader is confronted with a massive amount of characters throughout the book that counts into the hundreds, it becomes obvious that this reading game deserves some special strategies. One of those strategies could in fact be to do the same as Hal and leave the self behind. Thus, the reader is actually able to slip into the numerous characters whose destiny is presented to her through the voice of several narrators. Instead of being overwhelmed by the book's complexity the reader can just focus on the most basic regulations of this game; namely that there is a book and there is a reader, only the two of them inside a play-ground which is reason enough to keep this play-ground alive. This play-ground is the book itself and reading it becomes its own purpose. Here we can apply another etymological meaning of 'jest' which is also derived from the stem 'gerere' and which means 'being carried'. The game is established through the book and the reader which carry each other in an infinite circle. The book is being carried by the reader who is being carried the book, etc. This fragile building is another play between infinity and jest that, on the one hand, carries the reader through the book and on the other hand carries Hal to the court day after day, enabling him to occur in the game. This changes when every E.T.A. player is forced to give a urine sample, which coerces Hal to stop taking drugs. Before that point Hal was not just a very talented tennis player but also an academic prodigy. At a very young age he had started to learn dictionaries by heart, meaning he could probably also have given detailed etymological definitions of the word 'jest'. Furthermore, he did not just read but even 'digested' whole libraries of books, which enabled him to write essays like 'The Implications of Post-Fourier Transformations for a Holographically Mimetic Cinema.' (p.7). Hal is playing a game that can be described as an infinite jest in so far as he is constantly consuming and digesting knowledge just as if he were a wandering vacuum, sucking up everything around him just to fill up an inner gap. Hal's hunger for knowledge was only topped by his appetite for food that was exceptionally huge after he smoked dope. Immediately after Hal stops to secretly smoking marijuana he does not just suffer the loss of his tennis skills but also the disappearance of his appetite. This becomes clear when he almost loses a match against Ortho Stice, a younger but also talented player that everyone calls 'The Darkness'. Considering the etymology of the name Incandenza, which is 'glowing white light', their match can in fact be seen as light vs. darkness. Hal wins the match but he realizes that something went terribly wrong. This process is symbolized when Hal is sitting at the dinner table after the match, curiously not very hungry, and Stice steals a tomato from Hal's plate 'trying to respect this object with all his might.' (p.637) Stice does not know what happened during the match but he realizes that 'Hal had played with the wide-eyed but unfocused look of a tennis player right on the verge of falling apart out there.' (p.637) When Hal finally meets his coach to recapitulate the match he gets the sobering feedback that he 'just never quite occurred out there.' (p.686) This is a shock for Hal after which he starts having bad dreams again. His brother Mario wakes him up one night from a dream during which he was constantly saying 'Thank you Sir may I have another,' which stands for his high functionality and shows his infinite digestion of knowledge. But in the same dream Hal was losing his teeth, which made him incapable of consuming further and thus hindered him to deliver himself the goods that he was relying on. As a consequence, Hal is excluded from the game that makes it possible for him to exist because it carried him. In his real life, Hal is also carried by the game, with the tennis court symbolizing his sheltering refuge. His drug habit was the admission fee, which made it possible for him to enter this space in which he now cannot occur anymore. The abstinence creates a hole in Hal's life that threatens to suck him up. 'I feel a hole. It's going to be a huge hole, in a month. A way more than Halsized hole.' (p.785) Instead of being safe in the world of the game, Hal is caught 'inside his own hull,' (p.694) which hinders him from occurring outside and which surrenders him to a world that he is not able to cope with.