The Legacy of David Foster Wallace

Foreword to Tenth Anniversary Edition of Infinite Jest

 143 Dave Eggers For ewor d to Tenth Anniversary Edition of Infinite Jest In recent years, there have been a few literary dustups­ ­­­ [To view this essay, refer to the print version of this title.] 144 A esthetics [To view this essay, refer to the print version of this title.] 145 For ewor d to 10th A n ni versary | Dave Eggers it never wants to punish you for some knowledge you lack, nor does it want to send you to the dictionary every few pages. And yet, while it uses a familiar enough vocabulary, make no mistake that Infinite Jest is something other. That is, it bears little resemblance to anything before it, and comparisons to anything since are desperate and hollow. It appeared in 1996, sui generis, very different from virtually anything before it. It defied categorization and thwarted efforts to take it apart and explain it. It’s possible, with most contemporary novels, for astute readers, if they are wont, to break it down into its parts, to take it apart as one would a car or Ikea shelving unit. That is, let’s say a reader is a sort of mechanic . And let’s say this particular reader-­mechanic has worked on lots of books, and after a few hundred contemporary novels, the mechanic feels like he can take apart just about any book and put it back together again. That is, the mechanic recognizes the components of modern fiction and can say, for example, I’ve seen this part before, so I know why it’s there and what it does. And this one, too—I recognize it. This part connects to this and performs this function. This one usually goes here, and does that. All of this is familiar enough. That’s no knock on the contemporary fiction that is recognizable and breakdownable. This includes about ninety-­eight percent of the fiction we know and love. But this is not possible with Infinite Jest. This book is like a spaceship with no recognizable components, no rivets or bolts, no entry points, no way to take it apart. It is very shiny, and it has no discernible flaws. If you could somehow smash it into smaller pieces, there would certainly be no way to put it back together again. It simply is. Page by page, line by line, it is probably the strangest, most distinctive, and most involved work of fiction by an American in the last twenty years. At no time while reading Infinite Jest are you unaware that this is a work of complete obsession , of a stretching of the mind of a young writer to the point of, we assume, near madness. Which isn’t to say it’s madness in the way that Burroughs or even Fred Exley used a type of madness with which to create. Exley, like many writers of his generation and the few before it, drank to excess, and Burroughs ingested every controlled substance he could buy or [To view this essay, refer to the print version of this title.] 146 A esthetics [To view this essay, refer to the print version of this title.] 147 For ewor d to 10th A n ni versary | Dave Eggers your heart is sturdier, for there has scarcely been written a more moving account of desperation, depression, addiction, generational stasis and yearning, or the obsession with human expectations, with artistic and athletic and intellectual possibility. The themes here are big, and the emotions (guarded as they are) are very real, and the cumulative effect of the book is, you could say, seismic. It would be very unlikely that you would find a reader who, after finishing the book, would shrug and say, “Eh.” Here’s a question once posed to me, by a large, baseball cap-­ wearing English major at a medium-­ size western college: Is it our duty to read Infinite Jest? This is a good question, and one that many people, particularly literary-­minded people, ask themselves. The answer is: Maybe. Sort of. Probably, in some way. If we think it’s our duty to read this book, it’s becausewe’reinterestedingenius.We’reinterestedinepicwriterlyambition . We’re fascinated with what can be made by a person with enough time and focus and caffeine and, in Wallace’s case, chewing tobacco. If we are drawn to...