HEATHER HOUSER ! I n f i n i t e J e s t ’s E n v i ron m e n ta l C a s e f or Di s gus t “The contemporary condition is hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally retarded, sadomasochistic and stupid” (McCaffery 131). In stark terms, David Foster Wallace assesses the bleak condition that he is handed and determines that, in the face of it, the contemporary novelist must cultivate readers’ “capacity for joy, charity, genuine connections” (132) by “author[ing] things that both restructure worlds and make living people feel stuff” (quoted in Max 48). The novel, then, is not only an imaginary world; it can reconfigure the world beyond its pages by modeling and generating feeling. The outsize scope of Infinite Jest (1996) reflects its author’s grand hopes for fiction. Read in light of his pronouncements, Wallace’s novel raises the question of how aesthetic forms produce feelings that enhance an audience’s awareness of “hopelessly shitty” social and material conditions. This query motivates this essay, which contends that, in order to understand Infinite Jest’s affective project, we must include the novel’s underexamined environmental relations in our interpretive purview. Like time, space has been radically reconfigured under the political scheme that Infinite Jest envisions. The United States, Mexico, and Canada have merged to form the Organization of North American Nations, or O.N.A.N. Because the U.S. is choking on the effluvia of its hyperconsuming society, it annexes additional territory from its impotent northern neighbors to use as a massive dump for discarded waste. From the reshaping of the continent, Infinite Jest zooms in on the 118 Cohen_1PP.indb 118 12/14/11 10:57 AM E n v i r o n m e n ta l C a s e | H e a t h e r Hou s e r reshaping of more circumscribed spaces where its dominant plots take place: the Boston conurbation, Phoenix, and the Tortolita foothills in Arizona. In the fictional Enfield neighborhood of Boston, the narration moves between two institutions whose respective locations symbolize their missions. The Enfield Tennis Academy (E.T.A.) occupies a geoengineered site designed by the school’s founder, Jim Incandenza, to attract “boys [who] like great perspectival heights and spectacular views encompassing huge swaths of territory” (666). By “balding and shaving flat the top of [a] big abrupt hill,” Jim created a setting that offers vistas of Boston’s diverse topography: from “the spiky elegance of B[oston] C[ollege],” to the “high-voltage grids and coaxial chokers” of a power plant (241-2). Literally above it all, E.T.A. is a site for lofty ratiocination and abstraction. By contrast, Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House sits in the shadow of Incandenza’s hill and is a refuge for those who have hit a figurative Bottom. The halfway house is home to illogic: residents are urged to remain grounded by casting off thought because “most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking” (203). The dilapidated house’s open plan discourages the secrecy associated with drug use and facilitates interaction; the doors have no locks, and people and feeling flow unimpeded. These and other spatial arrangements express and enforce many of the ethical and social concerns that give Infinite Jest its thematic heft.1 If novels are the empathy engines that Wallace wishes for them to be — if they provide “imaginative access to other selves” (McCaffery 127) — their environments are crucial components. Infinite Jest makes this argument as it spotlights the environmental injustices that affective and spatial detachment under O.N.A.N. promote. By delineating how social and grammatical detachment motivate the novel’s main plots, distinguish its style, and attract Wallace’s satirical eye, I will establish that detachment is not only a psychological and ethical problem in Infinite Jest but, crucially, also a spatial one. Katherine Hayles first directed needed critical attention to the novel’s environmental consciousness by analyzing the text’s “recognition that market and individual, civilization and wilderness, coproduce each other” (676). Ultimately, she contends, Infinite Jest adopts an ecological perspective that tasks read119 Cohen_1PP.indb 119 12/14/11 10:57 AM A e s t h e t ic s ers with “discover[ing] the text’s recursive patterns so we can see it, as well as the world it describes, as a complex system that binds us into its interconnections, thus puncturing the illusion of autonomous selfhood” (695). Hayles recognizes the overlapping spheres of awareness that Infinite Jest details, and she helps us begin reading the novel outside of personal trauma. However, she does not adequately elucidate how “real ecologies” crucially figure in the novel’s scheme of cultivating connection against detachment. Pursuing this project, this essay argues that Wallace’s fiction of social, ecological, and somatic poisoning molds a medicalized environmental consciousness with disgust as its emotional core. Activated by the imbrication of body and environment, disgust is a conduit to engaging with human and nonhuman others as it counteracts forms of detachment that block environmental and social investment. Ultimately, it is through its sick aesthetic that Infinite Jest sees a way out of the sicknesses endemic to postmodernity. Uncritical Distance The complaint that houses all of the problems that plague the contemporary U.S. in Wallace’s fiction is that people and the cultural artifacts that they produce are too self-referential. Solipsism, self-involvement, self-indulgence: conditions in which the individual measures all, these states are psychological analogs to the self-reflexive style of postmodern cultural forms. What troubles Wallace is that, in only looking into the self — or a medium — the person distances, even detaches, herself from the outside world. A psychological disposition with spatial and political dimensions, detachment is the prime mover of Infinite Jest’s plots about a failed entertainment and insurgency against U.S. cultural and geopolitical dominance. The novel condemns detachment as a limit on intersubjective relations using distancing grammatical forms — notably, passive voice and prepositional chains — and a logic of emotions that alienates the feeler from the emotions felt. Read together, the thematic, grammatical, and emotional expressions of distancing conduct readers from the personal to the political ramifications of a crippling disposition. Hal Incandenza is the characterological center for Wallace’s critique 120 Cohen_1PP.indb 120 12/14/11 10:57 AM E n v i r o n m e n ta l C a s e | H e a t h e r Hou s e r of detachment. Intellectually and athletically gifted, Hal is impassive to a fault, and he nurses an addiction not so much to marijuana as to the rituals that surround his indulgence in it. Hiding his drug use feeds Hal’s habit of emotionally detaching from others but guarantees that he can still excel at E.T.A. To combat the teen’s retreat into himself, his father Jim Incandenza resorts to entertainment. Before he commits suicide during alcohol withdrawal, Jim conceives and produces the “Infinite Jest” film as an admittedly oblique countermeasure to Hal’s transformation into “a steadily more and more hidden boy” (838, original italics). He determines to “make something so bloody compelling it would reverse thrust on a young self’s fall into the womb of solipsism, anhedonia, death in life. . . . To bring him ‘out of himself,’ as they say. . . . A way to say I AM SO VERY, VERY SORRY and have it heard” (838–9, original italics). Jim’s objective, though targeted at only one person, echoes Wallace’s program for a new fiction. Rather than get lost in the funhouse of self-reference and metafiction, the responsible novelist should ventriloquize others’ voices to “have [them] heard.” Wallace explains with pathos that “true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with characters’ pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside” (McCaffery 127). Wallace’s comments to McCaffery for the Review of Contemporary Fiction preceded the novelist’s essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” which despairingly critiques two dominant cultural forms, television and advertising, for embracing irony but distorting its ends. In the early postmodern period, Thomas Pynchon and Ken Kesey, among others, employed irony with idealistic intentions, assuming “that etiology and diagnosis pointed toward cure, that a revelation of imprisonment led to freedom” from Americans’ image obsession and corporate subservience (Supposedly 667). Wallace’s peer writers must rethink, not recirculate, the stultifying irony that surrounds them amniotically because late twentieth-century irony is the aesthetic corollary to solipsism and cynicism (Supposedly 52). The medical diction —“etiology and diagnosis,” “cure”— that permeates “E Unibus Pluram” precisely hones the novelist’s job description: she can, indeed must, be a healer. 121 Cohen_1PP.indb 121 12/14/11 10:57 AM A e s t h e t ic s In this regard, Jim’s efforts fail. The film never reaches Hal to halt his slip into “death in life” and instead misfires, proliferating addicts who, enthralled by the work’s pleasures, end up “in exile from reality” (Infinite Jest 20). Analogously, Wallace’s novel does not escape from that which it critiques. Even as Infinite Jest directs its eagle-eyed satire at the social distancing that contemporary culture promotes, its grammatical form and emotional logic inscribe detachment into the narrative. Passive voice, which abounds in Wallace’s signature involuted, marathon sentences, speaks volumes in the novel. The description of Joelle van Dyne’s overdose provides one example of how passive constructions detach an action from the actor performing it. In a 37–line sentence, Joelle reaches a point where her cocaine high is “so good she can’t stand it;” a sign of her ecstasy: “Joelle’s limbs have been removed to a distance where their acknowledgement of her commands seems like magic” (240). The cocaine has not only figuratively amputated her limbs, it has severed her agency as well. Her arms move from off stage, as if by “magic.” Drug use exemplifies a late modern detached position, and the passive voice here instantiates the limits of this condition: a person’s behavior detaches her from her very body. Infinite Jest’s psychologically embattled characters also experience feeling as if from afar, insofar as processing “metaresponses”— or emotions about emotions — supplants primary experience. Metaresponses are reactions not to immediate “eliciting conditions” (Oatley 56) — for example, feeling envious of a neighbor’s success — but denote “how one feels about and what one thinks about one’s responding (directly) in the way one does” (Feagin 97) — feeling ashamed of that envy. Across the spectrum of affective content — from the pleasures of smoking a joint to the agonies of wrenching depression — Infinite Jest theorizes emotional being as detached in this experiential sense. Ennet House resident Geoffrey Day instances this logic in the text. “[Depression] was a bit like a sail, or a small part of the wing of something far too large to be seen in totality,” he describes. “It was total psychic horror: death, decay, dissolution, cold empty black malevolent lonely voided space . . . I understood what people meant by hell. They did not mean the black sail. They meant the associated feelings” (650–1, original italics). An expanse opens up between the character and the pri122 Cohen_1PP.indb 122 12/14/11 10:57 AM E n v i r o n m e n ta l C a s e | H e a t h e r Hou s e r mary event, and second-order “associated feelings” rush in. To cement this logic, the grammar of these sentences carries detachment into the reading experience. The string of possessive prepositional phrases —“a small part of the wing of something far too large”— directs the reader’s attention from the “thing” to a synecdoche for it.2 Grammatical and emotional strategies of detachment thread this disposition into the stylistic and experiential fabric of Infinite Jest and amplify the novel’s sweeping critique of detachment at the levels of plot and character. Crucial to my analysis of how affective relations might counterpoise environmental and medical injustices, these techniques draw our attention to detachment through the act of reading and attune readers to the literal and figurative spaces that must be traversed in order to escape from disconnection. As I elaborate below, detachment is a psychological disposition that manifests in material policies of environmental reconfiguration and thus conducts readers’ awareness from the individual to the geopolitical. Body Building Wallace’s United States is the apotheosis of the “Cornucopia City” that Vance Packard invented in his iconic The Waste Makers (1960). As in Packard’s allegory, O.N.A.N.’s “hyperthyroid economy” stimulates excessive consumption that “ ‘deadens sensitivity to other human beings” (6, 238). Unbridled consumption spurs the U.S. government to establish a putatively collaborative alliance with its neighbors, yet this political relationship is just as self-serving as the personal ones that distress Wallace. Under “Interdependence”—“merely rampant nationalism under another guise,” as Katherine Hayles aptly notes (685) — the U.S. strong-arms Canada into giving up a portion of its territory for a vast toxic waste dump and energy production site. America is suffocating on “the unpleasant debris of a throw-away past” and must expand its passageways to breathe afresh (Infinite Jest 383). It thus enters the business of exporting waste, of “sending from yourself what you hope will not return” (1031n168), by manipulating O.N.A.N. relations. The need to put distance between itself and waste, a source of opprobrium and fear, inspires the U.S.’s reworking of international relations and of space 123 Cohen_1PP.indb 123 12/14/11 10:57 AM A e s t h e t ic s itself. Under the organizing concept of detachment, then, Infinite Jest’s psychological climate hooks up with its ecopolitical arrangements. The U.S. adopts its policy of detachment at a point when “all landfills got full and all grapes were raisins and sometimes in some places the falling rain clunked instead of splatted” (382). With the obsessive compulsive Johnny Gentle at its head, the Clean U.S. Party (C.U.S.P.) capitalizes on environmental decline and rises to power under the motto, “Let’s Shoot Our Wastes into Space” for a “Tighter, Tidier Nation” (382). Closer than outer space and politically impotent, Canada presents itself as the ideal site for the nation’s waste exports. With this scheme, C.U.S.P. inaugurates a new geopolitical and economic regime: rather than pillage other nations’ resources to meet its own industrial demands, as in imperialism, the U.S. sends away the byproducts of capitalism under experialism. In order for this waste export plan to succeed, the American government rigs space and intracontinental relations through a program of spatial reconfiguration and semantic obfuscation. Appealing to Canada’s cooperative spirit, Gentle’s cabinet relocates residents of the northeastern U.S. and southeastern Canada — the area now known as “the Great Concavity” (or “Convexity” from across the border) — so that it can catapult its unwanted refuse into the nearly vacated territory. Readers learn the history of O.N.A.N.’s creation and the environmental injustices on which it depends through a puppet show created by the second Incandenza son, Mario. Every Interdependence Day (November 8), Mario’s characters reenact the cabinet meetings during which the U.S. government reshaped the continent: Tine [future head of intelligence services] places two large maps . . . on Govt.-issue easels. They look both to be of the good old U.S.A. . . . The second North American map looks neither old nor all that good, traditionally speaking. It has a concavity. It looks sort of like some person or persons have taken a deep wicked canine-intensive bite out of its upper right bit, in which an ascending and then descending line has its near-right-angle at what looks to be the historic and now hideously befouled Ticonderoga NY . . . 124 Cohen_1PP.indb 124 12/14/11 10:57 AM E n v i r o n m e n ta l C a s e | H e a t h e r Hou s e r Sec. State: A kind of ecological gerrymandering? Tine: The president invites you gentlemen to conceive these two visuals as a sort of before-and-after representation of “projected intra-O.N.A.N. territorial reallocations,” or some public term like that. (403) Through “ecological gerrymandering,” C.U.S.P.’s antiwaste platform becomes foreign policy. On the map that engenders this policy, the Concavity is symbolically detached from its home nations: it has been bitten off. By quarantining contamination, by giving it a designated place, the U.S. neutralizes “the Menace” of waste and distances itself from the ugly, globalized consequences of unfettered consumption and pollution (382). This scheme is also designed to obscure the fact that displacing waste requires displacing people. Infinite Jest thus explores how ecological gerrymandering is an environmental expression of the distancing and detachment that corrupts social relations. Johnny Gentle, “a world-class retentive, the late-Howard-Hughes kind, . . . the kind with the paralyzing fear of free-floating contamination” (381), successfully transmits his compulsive aversion to waste to the nation he rules. Under Gentle, aestheticism rather than asceticism becomes the point of advocacy for a green-washed political movement in the twenty-first century. With C.U.S.P., Wallace satirizes the Keep America Beautiful organization, which formed in 1953 with the mission of “bringing the public and private sectors together to develop and promote a national cleanliness ethic” (Keep America Beautiful). Speculating that Keep America Beautiful could become a full-blown political party, Infinite Jest imagines an aesthetic stance generating a perverse environmental politics, one that depends on the same detachment that compromises social relations and ethical engagement. The nation’s “deaden[ed] sensitivity to other human beings,” as expressed through its territorial and environmental policies, thus results from an individual pathology but in the end affects entire ecosystems. However, as Infinite Jest makes clear about this environmental policy, environmental despoliation isn’t simply an aesthetic affair: it has bodily effects and raises questions about somatic and environmental justice. In fact, Wallace’s 125 Cohen_1PP.indb 125 12/14/11 10:57 AM A e s t h e t ic s fiction establishes that, now more than ever before, the human body is inextricable from the spaces it inhabits, in literature as in life. Ecological gerrymandering is thus one facet of the medicalized environmental consciousness that Wallace’s novel promotes. A medical disorder — obsessive compulsion — leads to a disturbed, detached relation to the environment itself that allows for the restructuring of space, of political relations, and, as I establish here, of individual bodies. In Infinite Jest, the human body is the point of application for the unbridled toxification of the landscape that results from overconsumption and ecological detachment. The novel distinguishes two environments: the Great Concavity and everything south of it. Conceiving the former, Wallace flourishes his talent for bleak humor. Because the Concavity is off-limits to civilians, a spirited mythology builds up around it. As E.T.A. students roam the campus’s tunnels, they terrorize each other with tales of how the Concavity’s mutant rodents have migrated to the campus’s trash-strewn underground. The narrator checks the students’ wild ideas, assuring readers that “feral hamsters . . . are rarely sighted south of the Lucite walls and ATHSCME’d checkpoints that delimit the Great Concavity” (Infinite Jest 670).3 No one doubts that these creatures, though rare in Enfield, populate Canada, and their terrifying aspect takes hold of the public imagination: “bogey-wise [they are] right up there with mile-high toddlers, skull-deprived wraiths, carnivorous flora, and marsh-gas that melts your face off and leaves you with exposed gray-and-red facial musculature for the rest of your ghoulish-pariah life” (670). Hal rehearses the most common “late-night hair-raising Concavity narrative” about the region’s mutant features when he expounds why Québec is a hotbed for extremism: It’s Québecers with cloracne [sic] and tremors and olfactory hallucinations and infants born with just one eye in the middle of their forehead. It’s eastern Québec that gets green sunsets and indigo rivers and grotesquely asymmetrical snow-crystals and front lawns they have to beat back with a machete to get to their driveways. They get the feral-hamster incursions and the Infant-depredations 126 Cohen_1PP.indb 126 12/14/11 10:57 AM E n v i r o n m e n ta l C a s e | H e a t h e r Hou s e r and the corrosive fogs. . . . Proportionally speaking it’s Québec that’s borne the brunt of what Canada had to take. (1017n110) The tone here is playful, yet the allusion to chloracne — which is a breakout of cysts caused by dioxin exposure — undercuts the humor of this fantasy. As this passage already hints with mention of one-eyed infants, diminished function balances out abundance in the toxic equation that drives U.S. environmental and energy policy.4 As Québec vacillates between a barren wasteland and an “environment so fertilely lush it’s practically unlivable,” “Québecers” mutate into disfigured giants (573). As the novel spins out the somatic consequences of O.N.A.N.’s environmental policies, the full import of experialism materializes. Elsewhere in the text, Rémy Marathe, the paraplegic leader of the Québecois separatists Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents, further grounds the reality of toxic exposure. Marathe inventories his wife’s contaminated body as a way to convince his collaborator in U.S. intelligence of the health injustices of O.N.A.N. policy. In English marked with French grammatical tics, he catalogs his wife’s deformities: She had no skull, this woman. Later I am learning she had been among the first Swiss children of southwestern Switzerland to become born without a skull, from the toxicities in association of our enemy’s invasion. . . . Without the confinement of the metal hat, the head hung from the shoulders like the half-filled balloon or empty bag . . . Her head it had also neither muscles nor nerves. . . . There was the trouble of the digestive tracking. There were seizures also. There were progressive decays of circulation and vessel, which calls itself restenosis. (779) The medical blazon spans several more pages. Note that Wallace’s proliferative style does not let up in descriptions of lack and deficiency, signaled by “half-filled,” “empty,” and “restenosis” (the narrowing of blood vessels). As Americans distance themselves from the filthy detritus of consumption, they also jettison the ethical implications of experialism and ecological gerrymandering. Like the waste that’s fated to return, American policies come back to haunt it. Marathe’s wife’s health defects 127 Cohen_1PP.indb 127 12/14/11 10:57 AM A e s t h e t ic s fuel his anger and his rebellion against O.N.A.N. The entanglement of environmental change and somatic sickness therefore partly generates the separatist plot in Infinite Jest. The novel’s almost Rabelaisian descriptions of poisoned bodies thus highlights not only that the toxification of space expresses itself through bodies but also that the body is the way that we come to understand toxification as a sick practice. The damages of detachment ramify beyond interpersonal relations. Endemic and systemic, detachment undergirds intracontinental and environmental politics as well. The text makes this toxic state of affairs visible and palpable through human bodies that are inextricably woven into their environments. We can therefore understand Wallace’s novel as adding a new dimension to the cultural form of “toxic discourse” that Lawrence Buell delineates. Buell defines this mode as “expressed anxiety arising from perceived threat of environmental hazard due to chemical modification by human agency” (Writing 31). He historicizes toxic discourse, continuing, “As such, it is by no means unique to the present day, but never before the late twentieth century has it been so vocal, so intense, so pandemic, and so evidentially grounded” (31). While Buell’s account of the cultural forms of toxicity is masterfully wide-ranging, he overlooks one of the representational outcomes of pervasive toxicity: this ubiquitous “irritant” (53) — and the sickness that results from it — shapes a literature in which the medicalized body seeps into environmental consciousness, much like industrial poisons seep into the permeable skin. Buell contends that late twentieth-century environmental culture cannot help but account for toxicity; I add that the writers of toxic discourse cannot help but imbricate the mutable human body in its imperiled surroundings, through formal techniques and their correlated effects. In Infinite Jest, environmental manipulation and contamination disrupt ecologies and produce sick bodies through which readers become conscious of the injustices of experialism. This causal relay between body and environment — a degraded form of the latter yields a disfigured form of the former — yields an ecological awareness that the narrative enhances through a conceptual relay between body and 128 Cohen_1PP.indb 128 12/14/11 10:57 AM E n v i r o n m e n ta l C a s e | H e a t h e r Hou s e r environment. That is, Infinite Jest expounds its claims for somatic/ ecological interdependence by conceiving of urban space in terms of the medicalized human body. Infinite Jest animates its setting through human forms such that contemporary space and the body are “cobuilt,” to borrow from Elizabeth Grosz. Grosz posits that “the body and its environment . . . produce each other as forms . . . which have overtaken and transformed whatever reality each may have had into the image of the other: the city is made and made over into the simulacrum of the body, and the body, in its turn, is transformed” (43). Just as social norms, values, and symbols sediment in built spaces and are taken up by the bodies that move through them, cities take on the evolving forms and norms of the human body. Fredric Jameson also insists that the condition of postmodernity compels us to examine how space and body are coconstitutive. In “Postmodernism,” he diagnoses a “mutation in built space itself,” one that has outpaced our ability to adapt to it. These new spaces “stan[d] as something like an imperative to grow new organs, to expand our sensorium and our body to some new, yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately impossible, dimensions” (39). In Infinite Jest, the imperative to adapt physiologically to such “mutation[s] in . . . space” attains monstrous proportions, as the lurid descriptions of toxic mutants and disfigured bodies attest. As the visible effects of environmental toxicity evince, bodies metamorphose in response to mutations in space, but, crucial to my argument here, space also mutates into the human body. That is, Wallace grows buildings and landforms as “new organs,” in the mold of human anatomy. Enfield Tennis Academy sits on the “cyst” of “the whole flexed Enfield limb [which is] sleeved in a perimeter layer of light residential and mercantile properties” (Infinite Jest 241). Protruding from Enfield’s growth, E.T.A. is “laid out as a cardioid, with the four main inward-facing bldgs. convexly rounded at the back and sides to yield a cardioid’s curve, with the tennis courts and pavilions at the center and the staff and students’ parking lots . . . forming the little bashed-in dent that from the air gives the whole facility the Valentine-heart aspect” (983n3). The branching tunnels that snake under E.T.A. form this heart-shaped institution’s 129 Cohen_1PP.indb 129 12/14/11 10:57 AM A e s t h e t ic s veins and arteries, which supply the school’s Pump Room and “Lung,” a polyurethane dome that shelters the tennis courts from winter frost. If E.T.A. is part of Boston’s circulatory system, M.I.T.’s Student Union constitutes its nervous system.5 The Student Union is “one enormous cerebral cortex of reinforced concrete and polymer compounds” (184). A lexical shift occurs in this and subsequent passages describing M.I.T.: the use of medical jargon kicks into high gear as snippets of Madame Psychosis’s broadcast, a list of medical disorders (enuresis, hyperkeratosis, hydrocephalus), interrupt the neurologic depiction of the Student Union. This building takes shape as the narrator tracks the sound engineer’s movements through its halls. He “comes in through the south side’s acoustic meatus and gets a Millennial Fizzy® out of the vending machine in the sephenoid sinus, then descends creaky back wooden stairs from the Massa Intermedia’s Reading Room down to about the Infundibular Recess” (182). This is just one slice of an extensive passage in which human brain anatomy —“sephenoid sinus,” “Massa Intermedia,” “Infundibular Recess”— provides a heuristic for apprehending the urban environment. The narration carefully avoids the language of metaphor or simile here: the Student Union is not like a cerebral cortex, it is one. The body is the vehicle for a conceit that generates a medicalized symbolic landscape filled with “abundant sulcusfissures and gyrus-bulges,” a balcony “which curves around the midbrain from the inferior frontal sulcus to the parietooccipital sulcus,” and a “venous-blue emergency ladder,” among other features (186). Read in light of my analysis of poisoning under experialism, the medicalized depictions of space not only suggest the degree to which sickness suffuses contemporary experience but also make the case that, in the twenty-first century, it is impossible to conceive of either body or environment without the other. On the one hand, Infinite Jest’s corporeal imagination — adduced through Marathe’s wife, the Québecer infants, and even, we might argue, Mario’s and Marathe’s bodies as well — arises from its environmental imagination of toxification. On the other hand, the narrative’s spaces would not have their contours without the biomedical body. Environmental critics such as Louise Westling and Stacy Alaimo have argued that the gendered body crucially codes figurations 130 Cohen_1PP.indb 130 12/14/11 10:57 AM E n v i r o n m e n ta l C a s e | H e a t h e r Hou s e r of American landscapes in the twentieth century. Gender, they claim, structures an individual’s “environmentality,” her way of “thinking environmental belonging and citizenship” (Buell, “Ecoglobalist” 227). Infinite Jest introduces a new cultural habit: it establishes that a biomedical conception of the body now performs this structuring function in contemporary narrative. Entangling body and environment conceptually and through causal dependencies, the narrative thus reaches toward an environmental consciousness keyed to the vulnerable, malleable body. Thinking outside of a contemporary politics and culture of detachment and injustice requires this vision. The text not only makes the case that we cannot detach the somatic from the ecological but also vice versa. As the rest of this essay argues, Infinite Jest also imbricates the body in its environments to produce a toxic discourse that generates disgust, an affective relation that is an unexpected counterfoil to detachment. How to Do Things with Disgust Assigning disgust as the affective correlate to a medicalized environmental consciousness, Infinite Jest promotes an unlikely emotion as a conduit to involvement in the world beyond the self. Proffering disgust as an effective means of social and environmental engagement, the novel thus revalues an affect that is often maligned — if addressed at all — in aesthetic thought. Concentrating on Infinite Jest’s style and the mechanics of disgust, I will establish that Wallace ultimately approaches a sick world that is out of joint through disgust, which I theorize as a force that balances detachment and excessive attachment to aids to solipsism. “Balanced” is not an adjective that one customarily assigns to Wallace’s fiction. Indeed, excess appears to be the impetus for Infinite Jest, and Wallace seems to heed his young character Jim Troeltsch’s call for “an inflation-generative grammar” (Infinite Jest 100). The novel’s heft and proliferative aesthetic suggest that Wallace inflated the novel form to match the content of his story. Reviewing Infinite Jest, Michiko Kakutani castigates the author for his overabundant style. The novel is, in her words, “a big psychedelic jumble of characters, anecdotes, jokes, soliloquies, reminiscences and footnotes, uproarious and mind-boggling, but also arbitrary and self-indulgent” (Kakutani). Kakutani slams Wal131 Cohen_1PP.indb 131 12/14/11 10:57 AM A e s t h e t ic s lace for his evident lack of control; the laudable novelist, she intimates, must make measured choices. An ounce of control must counterweigh excess. Questions of style preoccupied — better, obsessed — Wallace. According to D. T. Max’s narrative of Wallace’s last years, the writer’s struggle to produce a formally distinct follow-up to Infinite Jest intensified his severe depression and led him to hang himself on 12 September 2008. Max quotes a letter to Jonathan Franzen in which Wallace identifies himself with his style and confesses his impatience with both: “I am tired of myself, it seems: tired of my thoughts, associations, syntax, various verbal habits that have gone from discovery to technique to tic” (Max 60). Wallace has lost control of a style that is ultimately coextensive with his self. Through the optic of disgust, I contest Wallace’s self-assessment and Kakutani’s criticisms. Infinite Jest’s idiom of disgust, one of the novel’s “inflation-generative” features, raises this question: Might excess be a peculiar form of control? Ennet House resident Ken Erdedy suggests as much. He trusts that by hitting Bottom he can extricate himself from his addiction. To do this, he travels through the gateway of excess and induces self-disgust. The narrator describes Erdedy’s mission: He’d smoke his way through thirty high-grade grams [of marijuana] a day . . . an insane and deliberately unpleasant amount . . . He would smoke it all even if he didn’t want it. . . . He would use discipline, persistence and will and make the whole experience so unpleasant, so debased and debauched and unpleasant, that his behavior would be henceforward modified . . . He’d cure himself by excess. (22) Erdedy’s practice accords with the principle of Alcoholics Anonymous that the addict must reach a personal Bottom before he can rehabilitate himself and climb out of his addiction. The final sentence above —“He’d cure himself by excess”— raises a question germane to my analysis: can affective excesses — in particular, the disgusting — effectively reform an individual life as well as reposition us with respect to the systemic afflictions of detachment endemic in Wallace’s story world? Infinite Jest concentrates disgust in descriptions of the somatic ef132 Cohen_1PP.indb 132 12/14/11 10:57 AM E n v i r o n m e n ta l C a s e | H e a t h e r Hou s e r fects of environmental reconfiguration and of the drug poisoned body. In both instances, the text makes damaging ethical and environmental policies visible in human bodies that are entwined with their environments. Only through reading the great number of repulsive vignettes in Infinite Jest can the reader fully experience how disgust works. Here, a couple passages must stand in for total immersion. I begin by returning to and expanding on a passage that I examined above. As Marathe continues to enumerate his wife’s medical abnormalities, her body exceeds its bounds and the reader’s revulsion intensifies: She had no skull, this woman. . . . Without the confinement of the metal hat, the head hung from the shoulders like the half-filled balloon or empty bag, the eyes and oral cavity greatly distended from this hanging . . . Her head it had also neither muscles nor nerves. . . . There was the trouble of the digestive tracking. There were seizures also. There were progressive decays of circulation and vessel, which calls itself restenosis. There were the more than accepted amounts of eyes and cavities in many different stages of development upon different parts of the body. There were the fugue states and rages and frequency of coma . . . Worst for choosing to love was the cerebro-and-spinal fluids which dribbled at all times from her distending oral cavity. (779) Leaking fluids carry us to another passage with similar designs. In this scene, addict Tony Krause’s degrading withdrawal from opiates forces him to set up residence first in a new Empire Displacement Co. dumpster and then in the Armenian Foundation Library’s bathroom: His nose ran like twin spigots and the output had a yellow-green tinge he didn’t think looked promising at all. There was an uncomely dry-rot smell about him that even he could smell . . . Fluids of varying consistency began to pour w/o advance notice from several openings. Then of course they stayed there, the fluids, on the summer dumpster’s iron floor. . . . Poor Tony Krause sat on the insulated toilet in the domesticated stall all day and night, alternately swilling and gushing. (301–3, original italics) 133 Cohen_1PP.indb 133 12/14/11 10:57 AM A e s t h e t ic s As this mortifying experience dilates, the reader seeks escape from Krause’s private hell. Through these scenes and others like them, characters’ bodies serve as vehicles for readers’ disgust. Images of flowing and overflowing — Marathe’s wife’s shapeless head and features hang loose and are indistinct; Tony’s bodily fluids run over — materialize the many ways in which we are living in “chemically troubled times” (151). Through these passages, Infinite Jest attests that depicting the body in contemporary culture almost demands the aesthetic relation of disgust.6 Disgust is a primary means of making bodies physical and, moreover, of envisioning how social and environmental conditions produce bodies expressing a full complement of symptoms. Marathe’s wife and Erdedy present cases where poisoning — whether from environmental toxins or drugs — renders the body radically unfamiliar. By making the body strange, Wallace reaches toward one of the goals that he assigns to contemporary fiction. In “E Unibus Pluram” he argues that “today’s most ambitious Realist fiction is going about trying to make the familiar strange” at a moment when “we can eat Tex-Mex with chopsticks while listening to reggae and watching a Soviet-satellite newscast of the Berlin Wall’s fall — i.e., when damn near everything presents itself as familiar” (Supposedly 52, original italics). The novelist must reverse the trend of excessive familiarization, and render the ordinary strange. Many critics point out Infinite Jest’s defamiliarizing techniques, but they largely focus on recognizably postmodern formal strategies of metafiction and multiperspectival narration.7 While I concur that these narrative techniques challenge readers intellectually, I maintain that Wallace most fully succeeds in his project by deploying disgust, a bodily affect that shatters familiarity. In a sense, sickness practices itself in the novel through Wallace’s sick aesthetic of disgust, but this aesthetic is also an approach to remediating detachment. Rather than distance the reader from the outside world, as we might expect, the defamiliarizing affect of disgust reattaches her to it. Examining salient points from theories of disgust will ground my approach to the question of whether a negative emotion like disgust can promote the kind of involvement toward which Infinite Jest sincerely aims. 134 Cohen_1PP.indb 134 12/14/11 10:57 AM E n v i r o n m e n ta l C a s e | H e a t h e r Hou s e r One premise of Erdedy’s project to cure his addiction through extreme unpleasantness is that disgust is compelling because it is such a visceral emotion. Directing enough disgust at himself, he cannot help but eradicate that disgust’s cause. Legal scholar William Ian Miller backs up this conviction when he argues that the disgust response is unambiguous and undeniable because it is “so much in the gut.” Disgust “signals seriousness, commitment, indisputability, presentness and reality. . . . We are surer of our judgments when recognizing the bad and the ugly than the good and the beautiful. And that’s at least partly because disgust (which is the means by which we commonly feel the bad and the ugly) has the look of veracity about it. . . . The disgust idiom puts our body behind our words” (180–1). Disgust has a gravity that feelings of attraction lack. Though Miller contrasts it to the beautiful, disgust, like Kant’s beautiful, also demands universal assent, but for different reasons. Our reaction is so much in the body that we believe, perhaps naïvely, that prejudice or social norms have not contaminated it, and yet disgust also “seeks to include or draw others into its exclusion of its object, enabling a strange kind of sociability” (Ngai 336, original italics). It is for these reasons that Sianne Ngai puts disgust at a threshold point in her account of “ugly feelings.” While emotions such as anxiety are anticipatory and suspend agency, disgust’s immediacy, intensity, and certainty locate us at the borderline of “more instrumental or politically efficacious emotions” (354). Disgust is politically powerful by Ngai’s reckoning because it is unignorable. We must ask, though: Is this always the case? What if we cannot stand to examine the offending source? We may be certain about how we feel and still not want to dwell in that certainty. Architectural critic Mark Cousins’s treatise on ugliness introduces this possibility. The disgusting object comes at us as a threat; on this, philosophers from Kant to Derrida agree. Cousins explains that we have two choices in the face of this threat: “to destroy the object, or to abandon the position of the subject. Since the former is rarely within our power, the latter becomes a habit. The confrontation with the ugly object involves a whole scheme of turning away” (64, original italics). For that reason, even though the disgust response may 135 Cohen_1PP.indb 135 12/14/11 10:57 AM A e s t h e t ic s be unequivocal, the object also produces the desire to avert our eyes, to put space between ourselves and disgust’s threatening object. Given this, disgust would appear to be an emotion of disattention, one that we express through that socially and environmentally corrupting distancing that animates Infinite Jest. Our own experience of disgust might substantiate Cousins’s observation that we want to turn away from (and in) disgust, but we have also surely experienced the opposite: even after looking away in aversion, we turn back for another look at the offending source, peeking between the fingers shielding our eyes. We waver between repulsion and attraction. Conflicting drives to attend to and turn away from the repulsive constitute the emotion of disgust. The tension between these responses is particularly important with respect to environmental debates because calls to environmental engagement are so often predicated upon calls to attention. Surveying environmental thought, we find numerous pronouncements of the causal relationship between attention and investment. As one example, environmental educator Mitchell Thomashow advocates a pedagogy of “perceptual ecology,” a practice of attending to the details of local ecosystems as a way to grasp global environmental change. A host of environmental thinkers — including Edward Abbey, Rachel Carson, Scott Slovic, and Arnold Berleant — similarly stake their projects in the bedrock of ecological awareness. The alternative of disattending is anathema to environmental ethics, as it arguably is to ethics more generally. Infinite Jest voices varied objections to “turning away”: Erdedy’s trip to the Bottom is also a trip away from the world, while experialism and “ecological gerrymandering” pivot on distancing and detachment. Wallace certainly writes from an antidistance platform as he delineates the material, psychological, and social valences of detachment in his fiction and nonfiction. The issue here is that Infinite Jest’s prevalent use of the disgusting might be at cross purposes with its condemnation of breaking off and turning away. How can a text that proliferates disgust then ensure that readers do not disengage? Wallace skirts the danger of inattention by staging the interplay between mimesis — by which I mean commitment to the order of re136 Cohen_1PP.indb 136 12/14/11 10:57 AM E n v i r o n m e n ta l C a s e | H e a t h e r Hou s e r lations outside the text — and hyperbole. Along with its nonlinear narrative, tortuous syntax, and endnotes, the novel revises our reading strategies through this dynamic. In the selections from Infinite Jest that I have analyzed thus far, the ugly scenes are based on observable biological phenomena and punctuated with medically, anatomically detailed diction. Grounded in detailed mimesis, these scenes demand readers’ attention. They call up our knowledge that something akin to what we are reading could and indeed does occur to our bodies. Marathe’s dialogue paints the wide-ranging effects of poisoning from environmental toxins, and Krause’s thoughts simulate the phases of heroin withdrawal. That said, Infinite Jest is not strictly faithful to evidence from lived experience of these disorders. The narrative hyperbolizes in laying out scenarios of environmental and physiological reconfiguration, and thereby defamiliarizes both bodies and the spaces they inhabit. An excessive number of ailments afflicts Marathe’s wife, so many that she obviously could not survive them all. Additionally, the Concavity’s vacillations between the extremes of desert and rainforest violate mimetic expectations. Through disgust, Infinite Jest toys with degrees of closeness to and distance from threats to bodily integrity that are the emotion’s source. The conditions the novel relates are plausible enough that they capture the reader’s attention, while the hyperbolized details of these conditions elicit aversion and dare readers to look away. We thus find in Infinite Jest a case of what Buell calls the “dislocation of ordinary perception” (Imagination 104). He claims for novels the capacity to make worlds, and remarks that some texts also “make the shadow of the actual haunt the reinvention, as a brake on imagined liberties taken, indeed even as a conscience” (Future 60). If we take Buell at his word, exercising writerly control is a kind of ethical practice. The author may “dislocate” readers with his imaginings, but the real must leak in to temper the excessive shock. Measuring mimesis and hyperbolic invention performs another balancing act: between overstimulation and being “divorced from all stimulus” (Infinite Jest 142). At either of these two poles, we risk becoming numb to the world outside of the self. Overstimulated, we attend 137 Cohen_1PP.indb 137 12/14/11 10:57 AM A e s t h e t ic s with fixation, often on a damaging object. Within the text, this habit manifests in O.N.A.N. society’s absorption in drugs and entertainment as well as in characters’ detached solipsism. Understimulated, we are apathetic, and affectless, and we cannot invest socially, politically, or environmentally. (Within Infinite Jest, overattending to the Entertainment and drugs eventually shades into this second state.) Through a medicalized form of disgust, the novel successfully modulates the actual and the invented as a way to balance these positions. Disgust — with its dual aspect of drawing us in and pushing us away — satisfies the demand for an even attention that can negotiate self-awareness and involvement in the human and nonhuman world. In the final analysis, readers are impelled to reflect on their disgust and its implications. Moreover, the novel genre is the safest home for the play of disgust because this play and the reflection it stimulates require the slow unfolding and recursivity of narrative. That is, all novels to some extent afford readers the time and space to look close, pull back, and then return for another glimpse. A markedly recursive novel such as Infinite Jest further advocates this behavior through the nonlinear diegesis, multivocal narration, and endnotes that demand that one read forward and backward at once.8 Through a kind of reflective reading, the disgusting has the potential to move us from observation to involved response. If the contemporary ethos is to “send from yourself what you hope will not return” (1031n168), temporarily but faithfully tramping through the disgusting offers an alternative in which you release such domination and allow the outside to come streaming in. Wallace thus positions disgust against self-absorption and environmental, psychic, and social detachment as a means of organizing interaction between the self and the world. As Infinite Jest gives disgust a place in social, environmental, and aesthetic thought, the novel challenges readers to remain receptive to the curative invasion that characterizes disgust. This is a challenge to open attention, a disposition that Wallace valorizes in comments he made while composing his unfinished last novel, The Pale King. On the occasion of Kenyon College’s 2005 commencement, he revises his 138 Cohen_1PP.indb 138 12/14/11 10:57 AM E n v i r o n m e n ta l C a s e | H e a t h e r Hou s e r young listeners’ understanding of freedom. “The really important kind of freedom,” he teaches them, “involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people” (This Is Water 120). Infinite Jest’s idiom of disgust offers ways of cultivating these values: it instills that “the really important kind of freedom” is not detachment from but attachment to other people and our surroundings. As it denigrates the material and interpersonal forms of distancing that manifest in the late twentieth-century U.S., the novel aims to provide the stimuli that prevent you “from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out” (This Is Water 60). A chorus of thinkers about postmodernity has made similar claims about the solipsism and apathy of contemporary existence. Wallace’s unique contribution to this conversation is to elaborate a medicalized environmental consciousness that mobilizes disgust as a way to set our ethical bearing, as solder for social and environmental bonds. Notes 1. In my analysis, I alternate between the terms space and environment to collocate two ideas. First is the idea, derived from David Harvey, that environment refers to whatever surrounds us but also to “whatever exists in the surroundings of some being that is relevant to the state of that being at a particular place and time” (118, original italics), including the emotions that that environment generates. Second, with space, I simultaneously evoke the notion that human intervention in the environment results from social relations and historical processes. 2. See also “The Depressed Person” in Wallace’s story collection, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. 3. The ATHSCME company produces fans for blowing waste over the U.S.–Canada border. 4. I do not have space here to elaborate on “annular fusion,” the energy generation process that Wallace invents to complement ecological gerrymandering. See Hayles’s tight summary of this terribly complex reaction (688–9). With annular fusion, Wallace figures a predicament that is acutely familiar to 139 Cohen_1PP.indb 139 12/14/11 10:57 AM A e s t h e t ic s twenty-first-century Americans: hyperconsumption fuels the need for energy, the production of which alters the environment irremediably. 5. The Student Union figures in the narrative because it houses WYYY, the studio where Joelle van Dyne records her radio program, the Madame Psychosis Hour. 6. Wallace’s exhaustively titled short story, “On His Deathbed, Holding Your Hand, the Acclaimed New Young Off-Broadway Playwright’s Father Begs a Boon,” lends support to this claim (Brief 259). 7. See especially Cioffi, LeClair, and Nichols. 8. With respect to this formal requirement, the coexistence of humor and disgust in Infinite Jest merits comment. I contend that the humor of the text dissipates over time under pressure of its content. That is, the humor becomes less salient as scenes of pain and anguish aggregate. Flooded by tortuous textual moments, engaged readers reflect on how horrific content had previously seemed so funny and potentially reorient their responses. Works Cited Abbey, Edward. Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness. 1968. New York: Random House, 1971. Print. Alaimo, Stacy. Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000. Print. Berleant, Arnold. The Aesthetics of Environment. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. Print. Buell, Lawrence. “Ecoglobalist Affects: The Emergence of U.S. Environmental Imagination of a Planetary Scale.” In Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature. Eds. Wai-chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. 227–48. Print. ———. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Print. ———. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. Print. ———. Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001. Print. Carson, Rachel. The Sense of Wonder. New York: Harper & Row, 1965. Print. Cioffi, Frank Louis. “ ‘An Anguish Become Thing’: Narrative as Performance in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.” Narrative 8.2 (2000): 161–81. Print. 140 Cohen_1PP.indb 140 12/14/11 10:57 AM E n v i r o n m e n ta l C a s e | H e a t h e r Hou s e r Cousins, Mark. “The Ugly (Part 1).” AA Files 28 (1994): 61–4. Print. Feagin, Susan. “The Pleasure of Tragedy.” American Philosophical Quarterly 20.1 (1983): 95–104. Print. Grosz, Elizabeth. “Bodies-Cities.” In Places through the Body. Eds. Heidi J. Nast and Steve Pile. New York: Routledge, 1998. 42–51. Print. Harvey, David. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996. Print. Hayles, N. Katherine. “The Illusion of Autonomy and the Fact of Recursivity: Virtual Ecologies, Entertainment, and Infinite Jest” New Literary History 30.3 (1999): 675–97. Print. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Print. Kakutani, Michiko. “A Country Dying of Laughter. In 1,079 Pages.” Review of Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace. New York Times 13 February 1996. Web. Keep America Beautiful. “A Beautiful History.” N.p. 2006. LeClair, Tom. “The Prodigious Fiction of Richard Powers, William Vollmann and David Foster Wallace.” Critique 38.1 (1996): 12–37. Print. Max, D. T. “The Unfinished.” New Yorker 9 March 2009: 48–61. Print. McCaffery, Larry. “An Interview with David Foster Wallace.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 13.2 (Summer 1993): 127–50. Print. Miller, William Ian. The Anatomy of Disgust. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Print. Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Print. Nichols, Catherine. “Dialogizing Postmodern Carnival: David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.” Critique 43.1 (2001): 3–16. Print. Oatley, Keith. Best Laid Schemes: The Psychology of the Emotions. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Print. Packard, Vance. The Waste Makers. New York: David McKay, 1960. Print. Slovic, Scott. Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing: Henry Thoreau, Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992. Print. Thomashow, Mitchell. Bringing the Biosphere Home: Learning to Perceive Global Environmental Change. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Print. Wallace, David Foster. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. 1999. New York: Little, Brown, 2007. Print. ———. Infinite Jest. Boston: Little, Brown, 1996. Print. ———. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments. New York: Back Bay Books, 1998. Print. 141 Cohen_1PP.indb 141 12/14/11 10:57 AM A e s t h e t ic s ———. This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009. Print. Westling, Louise Hutchings. The Green Breast of the New World: Landscape, Gender, and American Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Print. 142 Cohen_1PP.indb 142 12/14/11 10:57 AM