Table of contents Introduction 3 Mission 4 Method 4 Theory 5
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Revolt against the SystemThe main problem, which American writers encounter today, is how the mainstream culture increasingly invade their territory thereby rendering them harmless. The main goal it to stay out of the commercial circle in order to maintain a marginal position in the society they criticize; because staying on the edge of the System makes it possible to incorporate critical attacks against the System, and not become a part of it. Andersen uses the American author Don DeLillo as an example of this, who has always tried to stay out of the commercial market. But with his bestseller novel White Noise from 1985, it was no longer possible for DeLillo to maintain his role as a marginal writer. According to Andersen, this is the same problem Wallace is faced with, because as he puts it, the great challenge for Wallace and others of his generation is the creation of an updated, effective counter-language that does not fall into the trap of what art critic Thierry de Duve calls avant-gardism, which is according to him an ineffectual reproduction of a previous avant-garde; a reproduction that has no relevance for and no effect upon its own immediate context.31 Andersen views it difficult for these young writers to negate the ironical negativity aesthetics of the literature of the sixties, without employing its own artistic effects and thus be caught up in the very tradition they are trying to escape. As he puts it, “how can they criticize society and their literary predecessors without automatically being accepted by mainstream culture whose principal language is the postmodern counter-language?”32 By Andersen’s account Wallace does seem to have an answer to this in one of his most well known novels, and this will be elaborated in the following section. Understanding the PostironicalAs mentioned earlier Andersen uses American writer David Foster Wallace as the leading figure on the issue of ironical literature. In his essay he argues that Wallace’s strength is first and foremost etiological because he convincingly comments on what is wrong and why it is a problem, but he fails to pose a clear, constructive alternative. However, Andersen argues that Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest is an exception of that. I will not go into detail with this novel but only briefly include some of its aspects. The reason for this is due to Andersen’s perception of the novel as a foundational monument of what he describes as a postironical movement in modern American literature. The story of the 1996 novel Infinite Jest is set in the USA in the near future and deals with addiction as the main theme. The characters are addicted to everything from substance abuse to the TV-show M*A*S*H. According to Andersen, the novel then becomes a corrective to the sixties’ glorification and mythologization of drugs, where Wallace concentrates on the humiliating debasement involved in the desperate struggle for one more fix. This theme of addiction also becomes a corrective to the American “pursuit of happiness” which is written in the Declaration of Independence as a self-evident truth. According to Andersen, the freedom to choose and the fear of letting your life be controlled from above have always been important themes in American literature. Furthermore, one could argue that this is the collective opinion of Western society, however critical views on the subject of personal freedom are something rarely, if not never, argued. This is also the case with Wallace who sees that there is nothing inherently wrong with the personal freedom to choose, but he does argue that this freedom does not necessarily lead to our common good. This is argued in the novel by the American government agent who states that each American seeking to pursue his maximum good results together in maximizing everyone’s good. However, later on the novel argues that Americans manage their free choice at best dubiously because rather than preserve a genuine freedom; they choose to submit to some higher purpose such as religion. So the valued independence often leads to a form of dependence and the American citizen turns into “the slave who believes he is free”. The aspect mentioned above also substantiates Andersen’s claim of one of the characteristics of the Postironical, namely that of political awareness. The example used here is an element often seen in postmodernism; that we are represented as products and slaves of the System. But this aspect becomes postironical due to Wallace’s notion that we in fact constitute the System and that our role as helpless victims is caused by our own free choices. The central metaphor of the novel is the movie created by the character James Incandenza that like the title of the novel is called “Infinite Jest”. This is rather satirical described as lethal movie which is so enjoyable to watch that you lose your desire to do anything but watch it repeatedly in an infinite loop guaranteeing ‘infinite jest’. This aspect brings a comparison between the movie and the novel itself, because according to Andersen Wallace’s novel is also a very pleasurable read. However, But where the movie “Infinite Jest” encourages passive consumption and surrender, the novel Infinite Jest demands that the reader take active part in integrating the fragments of the novel into more or less coherent vision.33 This is demonstrated by the possibly intentional lack of narrative convergence which is an essential trait in the novel. Furthermore, this feature has much in common with Umberto Eco’s theory on the open work that notes a new ambiguous depiction of the world where the emphasis in the interpretational work has shifted from a sender-oriented to a receiver-oriented understanding. This creates according to Andersen a kind of organized disorder in order to increase the number of potential meanings and undermine the dominant cultural codes – rather than being genuinely formless it creates the perfect illusion of formlessness. This also supports the notion of Andersen’s idea of the postironical or at least one aspect of it. The constructed chaos of ‘art’ is a part of the attempt to avoid reproduction of the system against which art is in opposition. Here, again the revolt against the System seems to surface. Moreover, it is argued by Tony Bennett that we should not discuss the interpretation of a text but rather the reader’s ‘productive activation, of the potential discursive formations of the text. The result of this notes that each reading of an open work differs according to the perspective of the receiver, which means that the reader of Infinite Jest has the freedom to choose which patterns to construct. Additionally, this aspect of freedom to choose compares with earlier mentioned cultural theme of the novel namely the American “Pursuit of Happiness”. The result of the open work in Infinite Jest means that the novel theoretically has an infinite potential of meanings, but according to Andersen, the interpretations of open works like Wallace’s novel have a tendency to converge towards some kind of common denominator to coagulate in a broad consensus: Wallace is fully aware that the originally wildly divergent interpretations of his novel will gradually be caught up in a curve bell – the curve of a normal distribution – but in order to counter the effectively as possible he has sprinkled his novel with a number of unbridgeable inconsistencies and narrative canyons which are so deep that they will hopefully ensure continued disagreements among the literary critics and sustain the manifold potential of the work.34 In his essay, Andersen claims that with Infinite Jest Wallace attempts to create an updated complex realism and, hence, he sees how the novel combines Raymond Carver’s realist fiction with the formal complexity of postmodernism, and it is an ambitious attempt at creating a constructive alternative to the ironical postmodernism. |