We See History Through a Glass, Abjectly, in Infinite Jest

David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel Infinite Jest presents a version of postmodern myth that is mediated through film, television, and other commercial entertainments. This media landscape is hostile, grotesque, and self-referencing. Its recursivity corrupts the chain of narrativization that transforms reality into history into myth. In the novel, the newly formed Organization of North American Nations coopts the preexisting culture industry in order to create a new, updated mythos and identity in service of its nationhood. The myths that it manages to produce are bizarre, non-linear, and illegible. This myth-making machine, using (fictional) history as its source material, seems unable to make meaningful or unifying narratives about the North American people of Infinite Jest. This is because the nascent government coopts the culture industry as the medium for myth, which leads the North American people to understand the culture industry itself to be their new mythic inheritance. This situation resembles Francis Fukuyama’s proposed End of History. An important characteristic of post-History is the loss of art. Individuals in this post-Historical position are at risk of losing the ability to describe their historical context or understand their identity as one among a collective of people. I argue that this landscape can be described through abjection, as defined by Julia Kristeva and elaborated by N. Katherine Hayles. I additionally use Roland Barthes’ definition of myth, Marshall McLuhan’s definition of media, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s critique of the culture industry, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s formalist method to aid my analysis of mythic entertainments that appear in the novel, which I term intratexts.