Infinite Jest

Tiny sees mice all over his room and reasonably asks the rehab facility to fumigate so that he does not have to share his room with invasive rodents. The nurse compares fumigation for pest control to the sedation of a patient. Her comment is cruel and emphasizes the way in which institutions like this one can be more interested in a patient's compliance and performance of tranquility than in their actual well-being. Librium is not an uncommon treatment for withdrawal, but it carries its own risks as a benzodiazepine. It should be administered carefully, not simply to stop a patient from annoying a nurse. Still, there is evidence to suggest that the rodent problem really is in Tiny's head, not in his room. Mice are small, but they are probably too large to "ooze through the room's electrical outlets." Perhaps Tiny really will feel better with a sedative.

The metaphor of sedation-as-fumigation emphasizes the way society often treats people with addictions or mental health issues as though their mind is "infested" with delusions and harmful thoughts. All of the characters in Infinite Jest have their own distorted version of reality, and many of them have major mental health challenges. However, many of them also live in spaces where real pest infestations have begun to creep in. Orin, for instance, is so disturbed by cockroaches that he moves out of New Orleans. Ken Erdedy watches a bug in his apartment for hours while he waits for a fix. Even the E.T.A. students sometimes find pests in the tunnels under the school. The world of the novel is at least as infested as Tiny's mind.

The fact that pests are so common suggests that people's minds are "infested" by the real world problems they cannot ignore. Rich institutions like E.T.A. try to hide their pest problems to keep up a respectable façade. This performance of cleanliness is part of the broader social trend of hiding waste and other unsavory parts reality: O.N.A.N. goes so far as to catapult all waste into the Great Concavity so no one has to deal with it underfoot, and addicts are rounded up and institutionalized so that they do not cause trouble on the street. The characters with the most mental health issues are often the ones who can't ignore all of the pain and ugliness society is trying to sweep under the rug.

Pemulis is in a good mood both because he is high, and also because he has bought some drugs to bring back to campus. It is not enough for Pemulis to think that he feels "good." He imagines more specifically that he is the 17th-18th century colonist William Penn, bartering with American Indian people and ultimately ripping them off with a trade that is (for him) too good to be true. One of the most famous likenesses of William Penn stands atop Philadelphia City Hall. There are also plenty of other famous depictions of him, including a revered oil painting called "Penn's Treaty with the Indians." The William Penn Pemulis imagines is not from any of these cultural artifacts. He thinks instead of the smiling likeness of Penn on the Quaker Oats box. Corporate branding is so thoroughly embedded in Pemulis's experience of the world that he uses logos to describe his emotions. He even conflates a corporate logo with a real historical person, which seems to give him a sanitized, jovial understanding of a person whose real legacy is very complicated. His understanding of reality has been indelibly shaped by the presence of corporate advertising all around him.

It is worth noting, too, that Pemulis is taking a name-brand drug. Wallace often includes the brand name, generic name, and slang terms for drugs, emphasizing drugs as products marketed by corporations and on the street. Virtually everything in the novel is branded as some sort of marketable product, even including the E.T.A. students, who compete wearing the logos of their corporate sponsors. The way Wallace explicitly names the brands, filling the novel's pages with references to familiar companies—Quaker, Whataburger, even semi-local Boston chains like Star Market—invites readers to reflect on just how much of their own mind is taken up by brand names and images.

Love Canal was a real neighborhood in upstate New York. In the 1970s, the deaths and health issues of hundreds of people were linked to a landfill there, where toxic chemicals had accumulated to the point of hazard. A federal environmental remediation program called Superfund cleaned up the site over the course of two decades, and Love Canal became a symbol of man-made environmental disasters that need organized efforts to restore.

The absurdity of this clipping may or may not suggest that Mario made it up. This is part of the point: in the world of the novel, the government is so corrupt that it is difficult for the reader or the characters to tell when the corruption is being exaggerated for effect. The clipping describes O.N.A.N. government officials as caricatures of themselves. They drive trucks bearing a laughable crest composed of a "sombreroed eagle" (symbolizing Mexico and the United States) holding a maple leaf (symbolizing Canada) in its mouth. A generous interpretation is that the eagle is holding the maple leaf for show, like the eagle on the current U.S. seal holds a banner with the national motto. However, it also seems like the eagle might be chewing Canada up and spitting it out. Either these O.N.A.N. officials or New Hampshire state officials placed "vast collections of drums leaking" dangerous chemicals in a field where the Environmental Protection Agency goes to play softball. No matter who put the barrels there, the federal regulatory agency looks completely toothless. State and O.N.A.N. officials can simply dump their industrial runoff in whatever park they want and point the finger at someone else. Superfund has been left by the wayside, and environmental regulation appears to be mostly dead.

Considering the many references throughout the book to the way environmental blight impacts characters' health, it is concerning that the government does not try to make things better. Marathe's wife, for instance, owes her extreme disabilities to environmental toxicity. Nominally, Johnny Gentle's administration intervenes. However, instead of developing more sustainable industrial practices, they have evicted everyone from the Great Concavity and transformed the entire swathe of land into a huge landfill into which everyone catapults their hazardous waste. There is some indication that once it is full, Alaska will be targeted next. This plan begs the question of what will happen when there is nowhere left to dump all the trash.

The novel's exaggerated descriptions of bodies are worth critiquing for the way they intersect with transphobia and ableism. For another example, Steeply's "unconvincing" performance of femininity is a running joke at trans women's expense. At the same time, there is a sense in which the novel normalizes "abnormal" bodies. Some characters are born disabled due to hereditary conditions or environmental factors, but practically everyone else deals with some form of disability, chronic pain, or other body horror at some point in their life. E.T.A. students all develop lopsided bodies due to overuse of their racket arm. Orin further develops a lopsided football kicking leg. Joelle's beautiful face is burned with acid. Gately works out compulsively because he is afraid of becoming fat or disabled; for all that he tries to avoid it, he ends up at least temporarily disabled from a gunshot anyway.

In a world where bodies are so vulnerable, it is often the characters with the most exaggerated disabilities who carry themselves with the greatest dignity. Characters like Mario or the members of the A.F.R. accept their bodies and adapt to them in ways that other characters seem to find difficult. Hal, for example, gets high to avoid dealing with anxiety over his ankle injury and what it might mean for his future. In scenes between Marathe and Steeply, Wallace contrasts Marathe's amazing feat of climbing a mountain in a wheelchair against Steeply's foolish difficulty keeping his prosthetic chest in place. These scenes can be read as transphobic, but they may also suggest that Steeply simply needs more practice adapting to a different kind of body, one with prosthetic parts.

In fact, the novel is almost as fascinated with prosthetics technology as it is with human bodies themselves. Mario, Marathe, "Lateral" Alice Moore, and others make deft use of all kinds of prosthetics to turn their disabled bodies into cyborgs, or human-machine hybrids. In Chapter 69, Marathe imagines incredible cyborg technology to keep his wife alive:

The A.F.R.’s triumph of dissemination of the lethal Entertainment would ensure Marathe’s valuable welcome by Gentle and his wife’s beloved treatments for the ventricle and lack of skull. Marathe pictured Gertraude with a helmet and hook of gold, breathing easily through expensive tubes.

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Marathe wants to get his wife a prosthetic skull and breathing contraption, replacing some of her most vital biological systems with machines. The novel seems ambivalent about whether or not such profound medical interventions are good. Still, it hints that they may become more necessary than ever as environmental catastrophes become more commonplace, and as politicians increasingly disregard the value of human lives.

According to Molly, Joelle's father has been sexually attracted to her since she hit puberty. In an effort to curb his desire, he has tried his best to keep treating her like a little girl. Seeing her with Orin shatters this illusion for him, and he explodes with jealous rage and shame. This evening ends with Joelle's mother throwing acid at him and accidentally hitting her daughter.

If true, this story is deeply unsettling. However, Wallace casts doubt on it by making it so sensational and also by telling it in the voice of someone who only heard about it after the fact. Molly may be embellishing the story for the benefit of her interviewers (she is, after all, a film studies scholar and knows how to put together a compelling story). For that matter, Joelle has her own flair for drama and self-invention. It is just as possible that she embellished the story or made it up wholesale when she told it to Molly.

Joelle is far from the only one with a story like this that Wallace invites readers to question. Orin has a possible history of sexual abuse by his own mother. This allegation, too, is indirect and never comes from Orin himself; it is possible that other characters are drawing conclusions based on what will make the most compelling story. At first, it looks as though Mario's disabilities may be due to the fact that his biological parents are siblings. However, it is eventually clear that this is not the case at all. Avril and Charles Tavis seem to have an equitable relationship that skirts the line of incest but never crosses it, at least biologically. Mario's disabilities have shown up in multiple generations on Charles Tavis's side of the family, demonstrating that readers and other characters in the novel have been too eager to stereotype Mario as the "cursed" product of a taboo relationship.

Wallace himself engaged in stalking and other abusive behavior, so it is especially important to notice moments when his writing tends to normalize abuse as part of the normal spectrum of human sexuality. It is also important to interrogate the ways in which he casts doubt on survivors' stories. All this notwithstanding, the book also makes the important point that society is often too eager to sensationalize abuse stories for entertainment.