Anti-Interiority: Compulsiveness, Objectification, and Identity in Infinite Jest

In david foster wallace's 1996 behemoth Infinite Jest, everyone is an addict. More precisely, everyone is a compulsive user: of crack, Demerol, booze, elite competitive tennis, M*A*S*H, household bleach. Recovering drug addict Don Gately emerges as one of the sprawling novel's heroes, in part because of his success in recovery. Readers want to let Wallace off the hook for the clichéd contradictions of working-class identity defining Gately—his sweet naïveté and brute, bearlike strength, his wide-ranging, deep insight and lack of formal education, his ability to get the uptown girl despite his downtown background—because he's so dang likeable. Gately's struggle to "work the program," to apply the rules of Alcoholics Anonymous to his own life meaningfully and effectively, drive much of the novel's emotional power. And despite the problems one may have with AA as a vehicle for healthy living, Gately's mode of fighting addiction is the only one in the novel that actually works. In Wallace's obsessive-compulsive, entertainment-addled, apocalyptically consumption-based society, everyone would do well to act like Don Gately.

In one example of Gately's recovery process, he follows AA's dictum to pray to a "higher power," even though he has no idea who, what, where, why, or how such a power might exist. Gately "simultaneously confesses and complains" to an AA meeting that he

takes one of AA's very rare specific suggestions and hits the knees in the A.M. and asks for Help and then hits the knees again at bedtime and says Thank You, whether he believes he's talking to Anything/-body or not, and he somehow gets through the day clean. This, after ten months of ear-smoking concentration and reflection, is still all he feels like he "understands" about the "God angle." . . . He feels about the ritualistic daily Please and Thank You prayers rather like a hitter that's on a hitting streak and doesn't change his jock or socks or pre-game routine for as long as he's on the streak. W/sobriety being the hitting streak and whatnot, he explains.¹

Gately fights addiction by replacing his compulsive drug use with this kind of repetitive, performative, bodily ritual. He doesn't use talk therapy, he doesn't articulate how he feels, he cannot intellectualize how or why it works. In fact, when he tries to speculate what his higher power might be, he feels a "Nothing" so profoundly terrifying that it makes him want to puke (IJ 444). Though the narrative nods to childhood trauma, memories that his addictions buried and that he revisits in recovery, Gately's recovery is largely depicted as a compulsive, ritual, and physical investment in an entity outside of himself that may or may not exist. Despite his ambivalence about the nature of the powers controlling him, he creates a functional but empty signifier for them, using his own body as a similarly functional instrument of free-floating, originless well-being.

I call Gately's ritual "anti-interiority," and I find it in a number of major contemporary novels where biomedicine, individual power, and destructive social orders collide. Anti-interiority is a mode of identity founded in the material world of both objects and biological bodies and divested from an essentialist notion of inner emotional, psychological, and spiritual life. Anti-interiority is a subjectivity generated by the material world and yet works against oppressive political, economic, and social forces in that same world, not in the ideal realm of interiority, with its normative modes of agency and its metaphysical connotations. In fact, it replaces the referents associated with "interior" and "exterior" with a dynamic, generative materiality, itself composed of both object worlds and biomedical realities. In several cultural productions, of which Infinite Jest is a compelling example, I find anti-interiority in representations of obsessive-compulsive disorder, Tourette's syndrome, and compulsive consumption behaviors, along with other biomedically defined mental illnesses of bodily repetition and iteration, such as amnesia and dementia. This essay focuses on Infinite Jest to...