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  • Some Assembly Required:The Embodied Politics of Infinite Jest
  • Emily Russell (bio)

Weighing in at over two pounds, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest cautions by its sheer heft that reading the novel will be an embodied experience. In finding a place to balance its weight or endlessly flipping back to the endnotes, reading this book becomes a curiously physical task. These excessive qualities call attention to the body consuming the text, but the novel also announces the extraordinary bodies between its covers. At a distended 1,079 pages, the most obvious anomalous body is perhaps the text itself. Wallace constructs this unconventional textual body from a series of nonlinear episodes, shifting points of view, and nearly one hundred pages of explanatory endnotes. His experimentation with freakish textual forms finds expression in the bodies of the characters as well. Wallace populates his novel with wheelchair assassins, gargantuan infants, the "Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed," and a host of characters with congenital malformations. Rather than read these extraordinary elements as merely the offshoot of creative innovation, I argue that unusual physical bodies provide a model for reading the textual body and vice versa.

This homology of physical and textual forms finds its crystallizing expression in Wallace's image of the characteristic asymmetry of athletic bodies. Slipping into the boy's locker room at the Enfield Tennis Academy, Wallace describes how these teens have "the classic look of bodies hastily assembled from other bodies' parts, especially when you throw in the heavily muscled legs and usually shallow chests and the two arms of different sizes" (100). In imagining the body as a lopsided collection of parts, this scene offers the physical analog to Wallace's irregular, [End Page 147] episodic narrative. The phrase "hastily assembled" evokes the sense of construction, representing both writing and embodiment as processes. In contrast to dominant conceptions of the body as natural and ahistorical, this image of corporeal assembly insists upon heterogeneity and social formation. Bodily assemblage runs counter to the cultural fantasy of the "able-bodied" as complete. In the proliferation of discourse that seeks to make sense of the in-coherent body, even exceptional athletes, who seem antithetical to traditional notions of disability, can fall under the more capacious reaches of disability as freakish anomaly.

The students at the Tennis Academy testify to embodiment as a matter of process and training. Although they are superabled in athletic ability, the players' relentless conditioning results in hypertrophy, joint disorders, exaggerated appetites, and exhaustion. They blur the line between abled, disabled, and superabled, reminding us that these divisions are flexible and not naturally determined. Typically, however, physical excellence collapses into the invisible position of norm. Disability, by contrast, carries the ideological burden of the extraordinary to stand constantly in opposition to (literally) unremarkable models. As an embodied challenge to idealized norms, like health, beauty, and a natural body, disability both calls for a revision of conventional narratives and finds a new conceptual model in its own form. Even as "assembly" refers to the literal figure of disability and its visual suggestion of collected parts, it also contains a theoretical intervention in the rejection of unified ideals.

Wallace's description of the athletic body as an assemblage of visually discrete parts recalls centuries-old visions of the state as a somatic collection of citizens: the literal form of the body politic.1 The second sense of the term "assembly" as a gathering or meeting draws the social body into necessary conversation with physical and textual bodies. Appropriately, the social bodies in Infinite Jest are no less extraordinary than the characters or the form of the novel itself. The Enfield Tennis Academy, the Boston chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous, and the hemispheric interactions of Canada, Mexico, and the US all demonstrate the effects of communities built explicitly on the principle of collectivity. In place of the reigning cult of American individualism, disability proposes a model of ethical assemblage, a set of practices that acknowledges the interdependent nature of the body politic. I argue that assemblage highlights both construction and a sense of deferred [End Page 148] whole, challenging portraits of the body as natural or political ideology as inevitable...

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