Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

‘Thus the Flood’s real consequence is revealed to be desiccation, generations of hydrophobia on a pandemic scale,’ the protagonist was reading aloud. Peterson’s The Cage was running on a large screen behind the lectern. A number of shots of undergraduates with their heads on their desks, reading their mail, making origami animals, picking at their faces with blank intensity, established that the climactic lecture wasn’t coming off as all that climactic to the audience within the film. ‘We thus become, in the absence of death as teleologic end, ourselves desiccated, deprived of some essential fluid, aridly cerebral, abstract, conceptual, little more than hallucinations of God,’ the academic read in a deadly drone, his eyes never leaving his lectern’s text. The art-cartridge critics and scholars who point to the frequent presence of audiences inside Himself’s films, and argue that the fact that the audiences are always either dumb and unappreciative or the victims of some grisly entertainment-mishap betrays more than a little hostility on the part of an ‘auteur’ pegged as technically gifted but narratively dull and plotless and static and not entertaining enough—these academics’ arguments seem sound as far as they go, but they do not explain the incredible pathos of Paul Anthony Heaven reading his lecture to a crowd of dead-eyed kids picking at themselves and drawing vacant airplane- and genitaliadoodles on their college-rule note-pads, reading stupefyingly turgid-sounding s...