American Touchstone: The Idea of Order in Gerard Manley Hopkins and David Foster Wallace

We have retreated inward to our minds
Too much, have made rooms there with all doors closed,
All windows shuttered.
There we sit and mope
The myth away.

--Elizabeth Jennings,
"In This Time," Collected Poems: 1953-1985

Nothing is bad in itself except disorder.

--T.E. Hulme, "A Tory Philosophy,"
The Collected Writings of T.E. Hulme

In the first critical article on David Foster Wallace's second novel, Infinite Jest (1996), Tom Le Clair calls the work an "allegory of aesthetic orphanhood." ¹ Wallace's novel is at once a dense compendium of American neuroses and addictions, an astute examination of the insatiable American proclivity to the pursuit of happiness--"happification" ² --in an age of infinite stimulative choice, and a latent aesthetic allegory. For Wallace, the typically American rush toward attaining (and sustaining) pleasure is a self-destructive habit of mind that has its root in the arts, particularly the literary arts of millennial America. The postmodern bequest of heavily ironic and self-conscious fiction has corrupted literature, according to Wallace, diminishing it from its previous status as a "living transaction between humans," leaving literary orphans in its wake. ³ The consequence, for Wallace, is that current fiction regresses into a game that celebrates the author and privileges the artifact over the reader, terminating any potential transcendent communicative power. Wallace attributes the aporia between writer and reader to a state of aesthetic rulelessness in which writers are no longer "using formal innovation in the service of an original vision" (McCaffery 145). In Infinite Jest, Wallace revives the mimetic tradition of realism--"little-r" for Wallace as he negotiates "canonical distinctions" (140)--by defamiliarizing current literary perceptions and expectations within his artifact. Infinite Jest creates a new space for American fiction by recalling past practitioners of mimesis and through adherence to aesthetic rules that recall Gerard Manley Hopkins's own exacting yet prescient aesthetic. In doing so, Wallace establishes an aesthetic that combines order with originality, and one that conveys a singular message in an unself-conscious manner. The correspondence between these two artists surpasses artistic production; their art symbolically transforms the mythos of their literature into what Northrop Frye has called a "myth to live by," ⁴ in which literature bridges existential loneliness and American "lostness." ⁵

Wallace attributes current fiction's malaise to a culture of irony founded by American postmodernists like Nabokov, Pynchon, Coover, Barth, and other innovative writers who "weathered real shock" (McCaffery 135) and inventively exercised irony to destabilize their docile society. Their fictions defamiliarized the familiar by making standard things strange. In the aftermath there has followed a series of "crank turners" (135) weaned on the same ironic formulae, but operating when the strange is now normal, the defamiliar all-too familiar: "we need fiction writers to restore strange things' ineluctable strangeness" (140, interviewer's emphasis). Fiction's function is now "reversed" (140). Irony as a cultural currency has sent us retreating further into the mind; authorial posturing replaces conviction as "all US irony based on an implicit 'I don't really mean what I say'" premise that "serves an exclusively negative function." ⁶ Wallace contends that purposeless irony (for irony's sake) paralyzes when it "becomes in and of itself just a mode of social discourse. That is, it's not really about causing any sort of change anymore, it's just sort of a hip, cool way to do it--to speak and act, to sort of make fun of everything and yourself and being really afraid of being made fun of." ⁷ In her somewhat prophetic essay, "Spoofing and Schtik [sic]" (1965), Pauline Kael cautions that "unlike satire, spoofing has no serious objectives . . . it has no cleansing power. It's just a technique of ingratiation: the spoof apologizes for its existence, assures us that . . . it isn't aiming for beauty or expressiveness or meaning or relevance." ^8...