MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

This paper is the beginning of a much larger project on the notion of ‘limits’ and the nature of the ‘boundless’ in Wallace’s work. From the beginning of his career, Wallace is preoccupied with the problem of solipsism, the worry that each of us is an island unto ourselves, separated from each other by an insuperable abyss – that ‘We’re each deeply alone here’ (IJ, 112). As such, Wallace’s work can be characterized as a meditation on the possibility of self-transcendence, the escape from oneself or the exceeding of one’s limits. This desire for self-transcendence is what ties together his concerns with narcotics and his interest in religious questions. Nowhere is this clearer than in Infinite Jest. Joelle van Dyne’s reading of Incandenza’s Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell posits an ‘almost moral thesis’ of ‘self-forgetting as the Grail,’ distinguishing between the inferior ‘self-forgetting of alcohol’ and the higher self-forgetting of religion and art. This self-forgetting is elsewhere compared to the feeling of Nothing. In the train episode of Poor Tony Krause’s seizure, his breakdown is preceded by a feeling of ‘nothing, or rather Nothing, a pre-tornadic stillness of zero sensation’, to be contrasted with the more religiously tinged Nothing as characterized by Don Gately: ‘…not nothing but Nothing, an edgeless blankness….’ Gately imagines his prayers as ‘going out and out, with nothing to stop them, going, going, radiating out into like space and outliving him and still going and never hitting Anything out there…’ (IJ, 443-4). Gately’s notion of the divine is an encounter with the ‘boundless’ that draws the self beyond the self. The superiority of this mode of self-forgetting is that it is real, whereas the narcotic mode of self-forgetting is temporary, solidifying a more static notion of selfhood and isolation the moment the anesthesia wears off.