Graphic Narrative ties together nicely the goals of postmodernist writing. In Marvin Carlson’s chapter on “Postmodernism,” he defines goals of modern literature. To quote Thomas Laebheart’s definition of postmodernism, has “multiplicity, eclecticism, non-linearity, and the juxtaposition of disparate elements to form a resonant whole.” (Carlson, Chap. 6) And so too does the Graphic Novel. In fact, this new media might present a more interesting way for the public to access information. While new media or new technology often has a limited shelf-life, the novelty of it all can be exploited to reach the public in new ways.
Exploitation might seem like a harsh term, but in a genre so controversial as the Graphic novel, I think it is appropriate. To get all Marxist, once something is deemed valuable it becomes commoditized. This may be why the Graphic Novel section at Barnes and Noble is now the fastest growing section. So yes, there are people exploiting the marketability of the Graphic Novel as new media capable of reaching that hard to address youth niche. However, the Graphic genre still has its high and low art. There are definitely some classics out there including works from Harvey Peckar, R. Crumb, and Art Speigelman, and then there are your low art works that are just trying to make a buck off of young people.
On the other hand, Graphic Narrative can truly access the youth in new ways. Perhaps reading a text book about the history of the Civil War, is less than appealing to most middle-schoolers. However the Graphic Novel has taken to writing history visually which can stimulate the mind in new and interesting ways. The youth can still learn about important historical data, except they are taking it in visually instead of textually. Many times, the information becomes more accessible this way.
Carlson argues that goal of good postmodern works should always be to show, “what-it-is-to-be-living” (Carlson, Chap. 6) The Graphic Novel, while it has its eye-sores and of course, its heroes, may represent new modern media, and perhaps should be embraced as a legitimized form of academia.
Carlson, Marvin. “Performance and Contemporary Theory: Postmodernism.” Performance: A Critical Introduction. 2nd ed. 1996: Routledge. 50-53.
On the positive end of the argument over Graphic Narrative, Mark Bernard and James Bucky Carter’s article called “Alan Moore and the Graphic Novel: Confronting the Fourth Dimension,” argues that “artistry does not make the comic book or graphic novel superior to all art, but unique in its absolute expression of ideals of modernist writers.” The unique quality that Graphic Narratives bring to modernist writing is the fact that by combining pictorial and verbal narrative into one work of art, visual narratives bridge the gap between “human experience and interaction” (Bernard, Carter. 1) What this statement means is that a Graphic Narrative is different from other contemporary genres like a short story, or a film in that “a special relationship with space and time [is created] wherein the two conflate such that infinite multiple dimensionalities become simultaneously present…The reader’s interaction, or his/her own space-time is accounted for.” (ibid. 1) Meaning, the Graphic Novel, in its use of visual and verbal narrative does not limit the interaction of the reader, like a film or short story would. Graphic Narratives invite the reader into what Bernard and Carter call the “Fourth Dimension,” where the narrative depends on the reader, and is made specifically in the readers own space-time. The reader is allowed a narrative space where they can receive the visual and verbal communication all at once, and are then left to interpret as they see fit.
The graphic essay, “New Pictorial Language” a sarcastic discourse with Steven Johnson’s argument in “The Sleeper Curve.” In many ways, I often link these two articles together in my mind, for one simple reason. While Steven Johnson argues that new media is making us smarter, verbally. “New Pictorial language” mixes narration, and graphics, to depict, first-hand the experience of something, visually. I say that “New Pictorial Language” is a sarcastic piece because the narration on the right of the document argues that the arena of comic strips, which have been regulated to napkins and the last pages of the newspapers, are created for dumb consumers. However, the article stresses the importance of this for new marketing strategies. It sarcastically argues that since the people are becoming dumber, and can no longer even, “string sentences together,” that visual language is going to become the new way of communication, and most importantly marketing. The verbal argument is largely contrasted by an extremely complex and confusing graphic to the left of the document. The juxtaposition of the argument for graphic communication, and the graphic piece that is complex and for most people hard to understand, displays the complex reality of graphic narratology in the modern age. This article suggests the dueling viewpoints on graphic narrative: ie. one it’s for children, or dumb people who can’t read, or two: it is too complex and subjective to display any real meaning. I think it is important to think about these two articles in sequence of one another, because they compliment and constrast each other in interesting ways. Both show the dynamic argument for and against comic art, and talk about whether modern society is ready to interpret a whole new kind of language. CSA: Comic Strip Apprehension could become increasingly relevant to this modern age, and I hope it does!
Although Johnson’s argument focuses specifically on TV and video-games the popular culture that he imagines includes in it the world of the graphic novel, or as biased viewers would deem them, comic books. TV, video games, and comic books dwell in the so-called realm of low art, simply because they are not taught alongside classic pieces of art like “Ulysses” or “Moby Dick.” However Johnson’s argument wishes to raise the standard that these new medias exact on those who view them. In the same way that a greatly written novel like “Ulysses” might challenge the intellectual capacity of mass culture, so too does TV, and graphic media. Johnson argues that this new media is becoming ever more complicated, and thus a greater intellectual discourse between the media and the viewer. It’s true things like TV, video games, and even comic books have yet to really make it in academia, it is becoming rather common to see their influences in the classroom. The real influence of these new medias comes not from their use in the classroom, but the revolutions they are making at home. This type of media can reach the individual in the personal atmosphere of their home, and therefore can permiate the way they interact from the very foundations of their learning environment. Johnson writes, “the story of how the kind of thinking that I was doing on my bedroom floor became an everyday component of mass entertainment. It’s the story of how systems analysis,..pattern recognition…and old-fashioned patience became indispensable tools for anyone trying to make sense of modern pop culture” (part 3). So what Johnson is saying is that while new media may not have made it to the high end academic field, it has changed and advanced our cognitive thinking skills to allow more room for more complicated narrative interpretations. This argument perfectly sets up the academic debate about comic books, or graphic novels in the classroom. Comic books have always been a low pop culture item, and have been left to young children hiding in the corner of their “bedroom floors.” However, the more challenging and complicated these new narratives get, the more academic acclaim they receive, and the more fundamental they become in understanding our new modern culture, and modern narrative.
Johnson, Steven. “The Sleeper Curve.” Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter. Print.
I was poking around Infinite Summer and this forum topic proved of particular interest to me, especially the first post which saught to explain the strange love affair between John Wayne and Avril. On top of being the realized fantasy of Joelle and Orin’s relationship as cheerleader/footplayer, which hadn’t occured to me until last class, this affair has many political implications as well, and could help to explain some of the conflict between the AFR and ONAN.
“Himself, while in dsguise as the Conversation Therapist in The Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad, says the following about Avril: “Do you for one moment think that a professional plier of the trade of conversation would fail to probe beak-deep into your family’s sorid liaison with the pan-Canadian Resistance’s notorious M. DuPlessis and his malevolent but allegedly irresistible amanuensiscum-operative, Luria P – ?” (30),” says the Infinite Summer Blogger.
In an earlier post of mine I explained that Himself had caught Avril having an affair the day he set off to film the Entertainment. I noted that he saw footprints on the dashboard of the car, and a name appeared in the fog of the window. Although the name is never revealed, it could have been M. DuPlessis. This affair is also why Orin blames Avril for Himself’s suicide.
What this Infinite Summer Blogger also points out is something extraordinary, that had never occurred to me before, that because of Orin’s disdain for his mother, and seemingly the rest of his family, he may be to blame for the cartidges leek into the public arena. The blogger writes, “It is extremely possible that Avril is the one who alerted the A.F.R. to begin monitoring Orin (as it seems to me that Orin is the most likely canidate for sending the medical attache the Entertainment as 1) it was sent from Phoniex, Arizona where Orin both lives and works and 2) as Himself states it seems to be well known in the family that “…your own dear grammatical mother’s covortings with not one not two but over thirty Near Eastern medical attaches…” [30] and Orin seems to be the one most upset with his mother about this).” If Orin was angry enough about the affair that he claims killed James, then he might seek revenge on all the men Avril had liasons with, including the medical attache. The forum goes on to debate who Orin was talking about as Luria P. looks over his torturous predicament in the jar full of roaches, as he yells, “Do it to her.” Whom is he talking about, Joelle, Avril, Steeply, Luria??? who knows, but the only conclusion I can make is that Orin tends to blame the female, and not himself, and so projects his emotions onto those outside of himself, which also explains his distorted attitude toward becoming “the One” for his subjects.
Yep, all FOOD FOR THOUGHT…that’s all i’ve got for now.
A scene I felt shed a lot of light on the novel was the exchange between Remy Marathe and Kate Gompert. From the description of how Remy Marathe met his wife, and the story that actually cheers the anhedonic Kate Gompert up I am thinking that Canada has found a much more important and respected role for woman than Americans.
American Ideology
“Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human…One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia” (695).
Remy Marathe describes similar internal pain to Kate Gompert; “The more pain in my self, the more I am inside the self, cannot will my death, I think. I feel I am chained in a cage of the self, from the pain. Unable to care or choose anything outside it. Unable to see anything or feel anything outside my pain” (777). In response, Kate says, “I am so totally Identifying it’s not even funny,” (777) and why shouldn’t she, she is American, and a woman, and she suffers from the same delusions of the ratio of pleasure to pain that Hal does, because she has grown up in the patriarchal American setting of Infinite Jest.
Canadian Ideology?
It is very interesting to me then, how Remy gets himself out of this anhedonic funk in that it is the same way he meets his wife/love of his life/woman worthy of betraying Canada. Remy preeches the love of the nation above the love of the self to Steeply, however, Remy was lifted from his anhedonia by the love of a woman. “She [was] standing transfixed with horror…-identically as I had been motionless and tranfixed by horror inside me, unable to move…I [did] not know this woman or love her, but without thinking I released my brake…she with one blow broke the chains of the cage of pain at my half a body and nation” (778). Remy explains that it was not his love for the woman, for she was without a skull, but the choice that saved his life. “Without her to choose over myself, there was only pain and not choosing, rolling drunkenly and making fantasies of death” (780). So then, Remy’s loyalty to his nation comes from his loyalty to choice. Because of the encounter with his wife, Remy has realized the importance of choosing your own temple of worship, your own pleasure over seething pain. Unlike the Americans depicted in the novel, who are stuck in an inner stasis because of their inability to make choices, Remy has found a loophole in the design of nationalism.
Again, I go back to my theory that America is going to be stuck in a closed circuit of anhedonia, because of the lack of choice. The perspective that the people in power employ is a patriarchal one definitely, and also functions by way of eliminating choice, therefore it becomes a vicious unstoppable cycle. One of things that sets America apart from Canada, at least in terms of Remy’s metaphor for relief from anhedonic pain is America’s blaming of the woman as a figure of death. Molly Notkin finally describes what is on the ill-fated cartridge to her AFR captures. We learn that the deadly cartridge shows a naked Joelle as “some kind of maternal instantiation of the archetypal figure Death…goregous…hugely pregnant, her hideously deformed face..veiled…explaining in very simple childlike language…that. Death is always female, and that the female is always maternal…The woman who kills you is always your next life’s mother” (my emphasis, 788). So, need I explain that if one of the most intellectual American men created a deadly cartridge that is so pleasuring the viewer goes comatose, than the problem with American Ideology is clear. American Ideology remains cyclical, trapping its inhabitants in this anhedonic stasis, to which there is no escape but to addiction, depression, etc.
Many of the young characters of the novel play with this power, or control over American’s emotions. The boys at ETA play Eschaton, playing both God and political leader of their own imagined world. Surprisingly Orin, a notorious womanizer, almost gets it right. He seems like he’s on the track to understanding Remy’s epiphany, however Remy’s ephiphany came from love, and love comes with choice. Orin’s understanding comes from hope, “an immense, wide-as-the-sky hope of finding a something in each Subject’s fluttering face…the need to be assured that for a moment he has her, now has won her…something other than he…for that one second she loves him too much to stand it…that all else is gone; that her sense of humor is gone, her petty griefs, trumphs, memories, hands, career, betrayals, the deaths of pets—that there is now inside her a vividness vacuumed of all but his name: O., O” (566). Need I even say that Orin’s view of women too propogates the ideal of patriarchy. Orin wishes to annihilate the woman in order to achieve happiness. He wishes to replace her identity with his, in order to satisfy his own sick need for internal peace. Orin wants to experience the same ephiphanic moment of choice that Remy did, however his perspective is all wrong. Again I ask, Is Orin the cause of his troubles or yet another sick symptom of the American Ideology that he is surrounded by?
So my best friend went to John Krasinski’s reading of “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” in Brookline on November 8th. Apparently, DFW is John’s favorite author, and this is his debute as a film director. The film has already reached Sundance Film Festival acclaim, and has only reached LA theaters as of yet….but hopefully if we all cross our fingers it will come our way.!!!
Here’s John reading Wallace at the Brookline Booksmith Independent Bookstore
Modernism to Postmodernism: First and Second Wave Generation
Fitzpatrick considers first wave postmodern writers to be Pynchon and DeLillo, and second wave includes our very own David Foster Wallace.
However, in the section called The Anxiety of Obsolescence, Reconsidered, Fitzpatrick asks the question: Is the novelist’s anxiety about television a historically or socially specific phenomenon?
“The modernist movement was characterized in part by perceived need on the part of its ‘high’ artists to separate themselves and their work from the products of mass culture, word produced by and for the popular” (204). The anxiety created in modernism was the “anxiety of contamination, a need to fend off an increasingly consuming mass culture. Mass culture [did not] threaten modernism with marginalization but…popularization, with an audience composed no longer of the elite few but of the heterogeneous many” (204).
Fitzpatrick distinguishes the anxieties of modernism from the anxieties of postmodernism by exploring the rise in new media. Young writers of the postmodern generation “reveal through their representations of the media a cluster of anxieties about being displaced from the possibly imagined position of centrality in contemporary culture.” (201)
In Fitzpatrick’s discussion of Wallace’s own article “E Unibus Pluram,” Fitzpatrick seems to agree with Wallace that the second wave generation of postmodern writers were practically nursed on Television. Wallace seems to answer Fitzpatrick’s question further saying that the second generation writers “literally cannot imagine life without it (TV)” (Pluram, 43).
Fitzpatrick also seems to want to correlate the rise in new media and the “waning social influence of humanism.” (202). Fitzpatrick regards “humanism” as the “misused support [for] universal ideals that function to reinforce the hierarchies of racism, sexism, heteronormativity, ethnocentricity, nationalism, and individualism” (202).
So, Fitzpatrick regards the novelist’s anxieties as less about the “threat to the dominance of the novel, and more unspeakably about the threat to the hegemony of whiteness and maleness.” (202)
Oprah vs. Franzen
Brian: East of Eden? So, you pretty much read whatever Oprah tells you to, huh?
Stewie: Hey, this book has been around for fifty years. It’s a classic.
Brian: But you just bought it last week. And there’s an Oprah sticker on it!
Stewie: Oh, is that what that is? I’ll just peel that right off.
Brian: So, what are you gonna read next?
Stewie: Well, she hasn’t told us yet… Damn!
Franzen declined having his novel appear in the Oprah Book Club and also refused an interview. Fitzpatrick uses this example to illuminate the conflict between new media and literature by exploring the dynamics of Franzen’s unacceptance of the Oprah show as a high art, or as a tool of culturally promoting literature. Fitzpatrick appropriately calls the conflict “snooty writer vs. purveyor of daytime fluff” (203).
Fitzpatrick argues that “Oprah’s powerful branding…terrorizes authors, editors and retailers alike…with her seal of approval; threatening withdrawal from stardom is one fails to pay the proper obeisance” (203).
Fitzpatrick explains two ways of seeing the conflict. One way, “To his eternal credit”, Franzen “demonstrates his integrity in deciding to withdraw from the corporate scheme, or at least his discomfort with profiting from it” (203).
The second way of reading the conflict here is the fact that Oprah audiences are not dumbed-down drovel, but in fact sensitive and aware of when they are being condescended by elitist writers who think their literature is too superior to be viewed on daytime talk shows. “Franzen resists Oprah because of the threat that her viewership poses to the seriousness of his position as cultural producer” (204).
Finally Fitzpatrick pulls out the big guns and mentions something I have been waiting to hear the entire argument. The Franzen v. Oprah debate represents the conflict between a “white male humanist and a black female producer of mass media, each vying for control of the cultural arena.” Moreover, Fitzpatrick points out that Oprah’s audience is “overwhelmingly female, and more diverse in terms of race, class, and educational background than Franzen” (204).
The real danger then for Franzen is the threat to the “unmarked universal (white, male, middle-class, educated). What remains true throughout modernism and postmodernism is that “mass culture is somehow associated with woman while real, authentic culture remains the prerogative of men” (205) The threat “television poses to the novel and thus the threat that Oprah posses to Franzen, is not its dehumanizing mechanicity, or depthless spectacularization, or corrupting commercialism, but democratization. Instead of creating and supporting universalized hierarchies, TV and new media balances the playing ground. It “levels disparities in access to cultural knowledge” and might then expose Franzen as an individual of privilege rather than talent.
The New White Guys
The New White Guys is a term wrongly-attributed to Wallace as describing the second wave generation of postmodern writers. Fitzpatrick acknowledges that Wallace “has commented in several places on the whiteness and guyness of these particular writers, but less as a means of declaring them a group than pointing out the superficiality of the criteria by which they might be considered a group” (207). I.E. Wallace criticizes the criteria for being a member of this group (gender, and race, or which they have no control) and neither of which have anything to do with writing or talent. However, in sexing the group and giving them a universalized race, the canonization of “New White Guys” removes them from the center of power making them more like a “marginalized special-interest group” (208). “In finding themselves the New White Guys, these writers feel themselves excluded from a culture of exclusion, marginalized by a culture that is finally paying attention to the voices originating on the margins” (209)
In this section Fitzpatrick raises the idea of the predicament that young white male postmodernists writers have found themselves in because of the rise in new media. Race, gender, and generation are not something that can be controlled by the writer. So, one has to look at the Franzen vs. Oprah conflict closer to examine whether Franzen can be blamed for his position in the center of power. If Franzen is being ghettoized by being shoved into a cannon based on his race and gender, then he too becomes a marginalized voice.
This conflict begs Fitzpatrick’s own question, “Is a postmodern novelist necessarily pro-postmodernism, or rather a critical chronicler of the postmodern condition?” (206) The situation becomes extremely precarious then if new media threatens a position that is already untethered to begin with. TV’s threat to the novelist then, as Wallace sees it comes mainly from the new media’s misuse of Irony. This misuse is “especially terrible for young novelists who must escape stasis in order to challenge the culture within which they write” (Pluram, 49).
Fitzpatrick brings up E Unibus Pluram, and Wallace’s wish to deeactive irony because it has lost its political edge and instead becomes a means of avoiding change and seriousness, its seeks to maintain the status quo.
“The danger for these young writers is not that television will make their work obsolete, not that television will dehumanize or distract or deindividualize the potential audience for the novel,…but rather that proximity to the medium will dehumanize the writer himself” (211).
The Dangers of Television: Television and New Media as a Symptom rather than a Cause
“Though I’m convinced television lies…with a potency…the root of television’s danger, thus the crisis that television presents, is created not by the medium itself but by failures in the larger culture, failures that encourage viewers to seek solutions to basic human anguish in representations rather than realities, in things rather than people” (Wallace, E Unibus Pluram, 36).
Writing from the Margins
Fitzpatrick contends that “writing that takes human problems seriously” (sans the postmodernist sneer) has been produced all along by de-centered groups (African Americans, Asian Americans, gays and lesbians, among others), but that the “New White Guys” reasserted themselves just as the marginalized writers were finding their voices. She credits Jane Elliott for exposing the double-edged sword that white male writes used in appropriating personal/emotional material while simultaneously debasing these texts as “chick lit” (217).
Key Quote: “The implication that postmodern irony has functioned over the last decades to preserve the relevance of white masculinity in a political and literary environment focused on otherness—and, in fact, to shut down the concerns of marginalized writers through an inability or refusal to take such problems seriously—suggests that postmodernism, for all its putative rebellion against the various oppressions of the modern, including mimesis, rationality, teleology and hierarchy, is in part that political oxymoron, the conservative revolution” (218).
Fitzpatrick questions the historical practice of postmodern fiction to overlook the social uses and misuses of power (with regard to human differences) in an attempt to universalize cultural problems in the context of “whiteness, maleness, Americanness” (218). She views Neil Postman’s assertion that a TV audience in New Bedford couldn’t differentiate between a rape trial and a soap opera as “in keeping with modernist anxieties about mass culture” (219) as well as de-valuing the feminine.
Fitpatrick suggests the very act of distinguishing between “high” and “low” art is a politically charged act of gendering. She wonders: if it is possible for Franzen et al to appropriate the forms of culture that are relegated to “low” culture, can the masses (TV watchers, “chick-lit reders”) partake in “high” art? It seems that Franzen et al are fearful of an “anxiety of contamination” (219).
Fitzpatrick introduces the Oedipal model –the poet battling his father for the Muse—as an earlier paradigm. She states “…it is precisely this masculinism that most closely binds the anxiety of influence to the anxiety of obsolescence” (220). In the novel of obsolescence, the NWG fear the dynamics of the TV culture, the machinery, spectacle, and networks which all serve to make the novel seem like an old relic.
She points out that only the culture that has experienced a form of dominance feels the danger of becoming obsolete.
Toni Morrison
Morrison, according to Fitzpatrick, believes TV “supports a racist, patriarchal status quo” (221) and that the Clarence Thomas and O.J. Simpson trials served to elicit and underscore long-standing beliefs of its viewers. Morrison doesn’t see TV as the cause of U.S. cultural decline, but rather “one of the sites at which damage wrought by racism can be found” (223). Yet, she believes TV has the power to counteract the hegemonic ideas and influences.
Unlike Franzen, who dissed Oprah’s show for fear that it would dumb down his contributions, Morrison is “most impressed by Oprah’s transformation of a downmarket show into America’s most powerful bookselling tool” (223). In spite of being an Ivy League professor, Morrison does not fear that her work will be corrupted by mass consumption. For her, it’s about having one’s voice heard.
Morrison asserts that if literature is, in fact, endangered, then it is the writer’s themselves who bear the responsibility of its deterioration/demise. She equates language with agency: words have consequences, and storytelling can lead to empowerment. Morrison does not fear the media’s effects on the marginalized characters that people her novels because the medium does not belong to the African American community. She maintains that the African American culture is one of oral story-telling , and that is this very act of story-telling that transmits the lessons of history and builds community. Subsequently, television is largely absent from Morrison’s novels.
Fitzpatrick contends that racism is ingrained in 20th century media and cites the “forms of communication and entertainment created, distributed and imposed by the white in a top-down model of ‘mass’ culture” (228). She traces this thread in Morrison’s Jazz and how it was initially “reviled by the arbiters of high culture” (228). She suggests the effects of this movement threatened the chaste values of white Christian women and forced the dominant white culture to consider the “other.” Thus, the writers who perceive a threat from television are the people for whom the mass media has always spoken.
Melodramas of Beset (White) Manhood
Those who fear obsolescence bemoan the future of the novel by invoking the corruptible influences of the media, and in doing so, elevate the novelist’s privileged position in culture. In staking his claim against the media, the NWG “reveals another locus of anxiety—not the television itself but the audience” (230). Concerns about race and gender and otherness threaten to displace the novelist from centrality. Television provides an easy scapegoat in that so many conversations about its damaging effects are already taking place. Through an act of co-optation, the white male “somehow becomes the ‘other’ to the mainstream now composed of women and ‘minorities,’ and the novel becomes the ‘other’ in a culture ruled by so pervasively by television” (232). Marginality thus becomes a means by which white manhood can reclaim its dominance.
Conclusion
So what we keep seeing then is that the challenge of new media is not on the dehumanizing of the audience, but the direct implications and challenges it posses to the writer. The writer’s race and gender will directly impact the way his/her writing is received by the pubic based on their sensitivity to race and gender issues as represented by the “idiot box.”
Connection to Infinite Jest
“The punter never made her feel quote so taken care of, never made her feel about to be entered by something that didn’t know she was there and yet was all about making her feel good anyway, coming in. Entertainment is blind.” (237)
Wallace’s novel does not portray Television as the problem. After all Entertainment is blind. It cannot have bad intentions itself, however I think this passage wishes to portray the fact that people go into looking for things that are not going to be there. There is a false unfulfilled happiness that the public looks for in TV that they do not get from participating in the culture. Joelle as a person is debatable at best with her attitudes toward entertainment, turning her suicide into more of a spectacle than a cry for help.
Fitzpatrick points out that Infinite Jest again emphasizes the public’s pursuit of happiness through new media in discussing the “desperation of the U.S. public conditioned to believe that entertainment is the highest level of happiness that it can achieve, and the desperation of a doubly oppressed minority (the separatist Quebecois, marginalized in the novel by the Anglo-Canadian majority and by the dominance of the former United States in the O.N.A.N) that seeks to exploit the U.S. desperation in order to alleviate their own” (215).
Fitzpatrick states then, “The novel thus draws an analogy between television and drugs, two modes of escape from human pain that seem to result not in the promised amelioration of that pain but in its exacerbation, leading to addictions for which the sufferers cannot be wholly held responsible” (215). So again are we hearing the argument that Television is a symptom of the problems America faces and not one of the causes. The real worry is not that people are turning to Television for happiness, but that they are turning to something other than the culture or each other.
Okay, so I would feel like I had a much better grasp on the idea of femininity in the novel if I had any clue what the CAGE symbolized. My only assumption is that the CAGE is a metaphor for addiction. That the cage is whatever problem lead the individual toward feeding their needs and desires with addiction in the first place. It seems to me then, the CAGE is a commentary on a culture that is flawed and immoral, feeding the public on the pursuits of happiness that can only be achieved through addictive behaviors like eating, media, drugs, sex…..etc. (Wallace lists some of these things on page 202).
In describing the means to her suicide, Joelle talks about her vision of the CAGE. Joelle’s particular CAGE, which I will assume is cocaine, is a cage where “The entrance says EXIT. There isn’t any exit. The ultimate annular fusion: that of exhibit and its cage. It no longer delimits and fills the hole. It no longer delimits the hole” (222). Joelle finds herself in a vicious cycle that she cannot find a way out of. In order to understand the severity of this concept I think of it as not a just an inescapable circle or cycle, rather Wallace’s definition of the term annular fusion, indicates a more inevitably closed circuit that feeds and destroys Joelle, and many other characters in the novel. Joelle says “the difference between suicide and homicide, …[is] where you think you discern the cage’s door: Would she kill somebody else to get out of the cage?” (230) In the same thought she thinks, “Was the allegedly fatally entertaining and scopophiliac thing Jim alleges he made out of her unveiled face…a cage or really a door?” (230). However, what I don’t understand about Joelle’s own musings is that she has already described the cage, and the door or what would normally be deemed the EXIT doesn’t exist, or is in fact the entrance. Anyone else confused? The only conclusion I can make in regards to the concept of the CAGE is that suicide seems like a viable option. In fact, it seems like the only option. Suddenly I am understanding more a character like Kate Gompert, who describes her suicidal thoughts as not a means of hurting herself, but simply an escape from it all. Joelle’s temple of God or so it seems in the religious imagery she uses to describe her experience of doing cocaine is her body. The only way to be ride of the cage is to “eliminate her own map with the afflatus of the blind god of all doorless cages,” (231) or rather OD on cocaine, one of the addictions that causes her so much pain in the first place. Cocaine, Joelle describes is her “encaging god” and also “her lover, too, fiendish, angelic, of rock” (235). I think this is interesting considering the debate that Steeply and Marathe are having about the temple that Americans choose to show their allegiance and loyalty too. Apparently Joelle has chosen the temple of Self, like Steeply criticizes. Joelle’s body is her temple, but not in the abstinant and virginal way that one would think. In fact, when Joelle uses she imagines the religious painting “The Ecstasy of St. Teresa.” and perhaps for the only time at least in the context of the novel is her true femininity seen. She feels “attractive, deveiled and loved, observed and alone and sufficient and female, full, as if watched for an instant by God” (235). So how sad is that that only in the instant of her indulgent suicide does Joelle feel legitimated as a female. Only then does she feel sufficient as a human being.
Interestingly enough, I was surprised to see this religious piece of art appear again in another completely different section of the novel. At one of the AA meetings that both Joelle and Gately attend a member describes the horrific scene with the invertibrate and the Raquel Welch mask. As Wallace describes, the unknowing and “dysfunctional foster mother” (373) stares at a photo on her mantle which shows “a statue of a woman whose stone robes were half hiked up and wrinkled in the most godawfully sensually prurient way, the woman reclined against uncut rock, her robes hiked and one stone foot hanging off the rock as her legs hung parted, with a grinning totally psychotic-looking cherub-type angel standing on the lady’s open thighs and pointing a bare arrow at where the stone robe hid her cold tit, the woman’s face upturned and cocked and pinched into the exact same shuddering protozoan look beyond pleasure and pain” (373). This description of the same image Joelle sees when she is committing suicide is considerably more sexual and explicit. While Joelle experiences a proximity to God in her vision, this “wacko mother” sees corruption and sin. The AA member giving this speech explains that she was required to devote prayer to this photograph by her mother, and began seeing the same mixture of pleasure and pain the photograph depicts in the face of her catatonic sister who had just been “diddled.”
Anywho, these were my random yet detailed observations on femininity thus far. Some other important facts that I noticed is the fact that both Joelle and Avril blame themselves for James Incandenza’s suicide. Joelle blames the fact that she unveiled herself to Jim, for the whole mother-death-cosmology apology scene that went on during the creation of the Entertainment. However, we also learn in footnote 80, that just as Jim was on his way to film the infamous cartridge he had discovered nude footprints and a name of a lover in the steam of his car, meaning that Avril was having an affair. Both Avril and Orin believe that this was the real cause of his suicide. I have yet to decide who’s side I am on, or if the females are really to blame? All I can say is that females are definitely still getting a bad rap 500 pages into the novel and I don’t see it going uphill from here. I have found the imagery surrounding these different female perspectives very compelling, absurd, disturbing, yet interesting enough to keep me willing to track this concept until the books conclusion.
