"Optical Politics": Film and Spectatorship in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest

As a writer who was equally as well known for being an avid reader, David Foster Wallace was a consumer of all kinds of texts. Wallace’s annotations in his personal library – which is preserved alongside his papers at the... [ view full abstract ]

As a writer who was equally as well known for being an avid reader, David Foster Wallace was a consumer of all kinds of texts. Wallace’s annotations in his personal library – which is preserved alongside his papers at the University of Texas at Austin – reveal he was not an idle consumer of fiction, but rather a reader who was acutely aware of the limitations of the narrative form. Interestingly, of the many annotations Wallace made while researching his novel, Infinite Jest, a sizable number are concerned with the complex dynamics that regulate the ways in which we are allowed – or not allowed – to engage with mass media. This commentary is especially illuminating, as Infinite Jest is just as much a meditation on the consumption of media as it is a form of media itself. As a novel that is saturated with television screens and set in a technologically oriented world that feels eerily proleptic of our own, Infinite Jest questions whether books and movies bring us closer to reality, or leave us perpetually trapped in the purgatorial space between the real and the virtual. Wallace’s marginalia reveals that this ambivalence as to whether the vicariously enjoyed fictional enterprise can bring long lasting unity did not appear for the first time in Infinite Jest, but rather nestled tightly in the margins of the author’s own library.