718 The American Century: Literature since 1945By contrast, Wallace only completed two novels during his brief lifetime. His
major work, however, Infinite Jest (1996), is over a thousand pages long. Wallace
believed that the mass media exerted a determining, ironic influence on fiction; and
his own work is steeped in irony, a blithe refusal to be confined to any particular
voice or vision. Infinite Jest is set in a future world in which the United States, Canada,
and Mexico form one unified state, and corporations buy naming rights to each
calendar year. There is a vast range of bizarre characters, and such plot as the book
possesses revolves around a search for the missing master copy of a film cartridge
called “Infinite Jest” and referred to as “The Entertainment” – a work so entertaining
to its viewers that they become lifeless, losing interest in anything other than the
film. But Infinite Jest is less a novel with a plot than a labyrinth of language, a web of
words that weaves together such diverse topics as substance abuse and recovery
programs, tennis, film theory, child abuse and family relationships, and the relentless
search of the corporate world for new products and markets. What compounds the
intricacy of this web is the radical discontinuity of idiom. The language careers
between the vernacular and the esoteric; there are wild neologisms, self-generated
abbreviations and acronyms packed into elaborate, multi-clause sentences. There
are nearly a hundred pages of footnotes designed, Wallace explained, to jumble our
perception of reality while persuading us to read on. Infinite Jest the novel is like
“Infinite Jest” the film referred to in its pages, a seductive maze capturing the reader
within its world of funhouse mirrors. Like so many major postmodernist works, it
resists meaning but, while doing so, generates strange feelings of loss and longing. Its
characters, and perhaps its readers, are invited to yearn for innocent, unselfconscious
experience while drowning in insignificance, captivated by artifice.
John Barth once suggested that the way postmodernism showed its distinctly
American face was through its “cheerful nihilism,” its comic and parodic texture.
That is, of course, too sweeping. But across from radical experimentalists like
McElroy and Coover, there are those many postmodern writers who have chosen to
pursue an absurd humor, a dark comedy that deconstructs and demystifies all it
surveys. Apart from those already mentioned, such writers include J. P. Donleavy
(1926–) (The Ginger Man (1955), The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B (1968)) and
Terry Southern (1926–2000) (Candy (1958), The Magic Christian (1959), Blue Movie
(1970)), whose predilection for protean, amoral characters has got them into trou-
ble with the censorship laws. Notably, there is also John Kennedy Toole (1937–1969)
who, in his posthumously published novel A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), mocked
everything to do with his region, the South and his hometown of New Orleans,
making his hero, Ignatius Reilly, sound sometimes like a Southern traditionalist on
speed. And there is Stanley Elkin (1930–1995), a novelist and storyteller who, during
the course of a long career, produced satirical, surreal versions of the success story
(A Bad Man (1967), The Franchiser (1976)), a picaresque tale about adventures in
the media trade (The Dick Gibson Show (1971)), and comic fantasies about death
(The Living End (1979)) and reincarnation (George Mills (1982)).
Postmodernism as black humor or brave fantasy tends to merge here with
contemporary confessional forms of male liberationists like John Irving (1942–)GGray_c05.indd 718ray_c 05 .indd 718 8 8/1/2011 7:31:41 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 41 PM