Post on 16-Feb-2017
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The Ecstasy of St. Wallace: The Influence of the Visual arts on the Works of David Foster Wallace
In the nine years since the publication of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, a huge base of
critical scholarship has emerged surrounding the novel. It often seems that Wallace critics are
attempting to ‘catch up’ with those of Shakespeare and Joyce in examining the novel from
every possible angle. However, this large (and rapidly expanding) field of study still retains
something of a lacuna; there has been no major critical examination of Wallace’s treatment of
visual art, and its influence on the novels and short stories. This essay will make some
attempt to plug that gap, with particular reference to Wallace’s use of ekphrasis. For the
purposes of this essay, the definition of ekphrasis used will be that of James Heffernan, i.e.
“Verbal representation of visual representation”.1 Also discussed will be the specific works of
art which are mentioned in Wallace’s works, and the complicated ways in which they inter-
relate both with the characters in the texts, and with Wallace’s wider aesthetic project.
Wallace’s work carries with it something of Orhan Pamuk’s assertion that “novels are
essentially visual literary fictions”. This essay will attempt to show how Wallace accepts and
overcomes Pamuk’s challenge to evoke “a very clear and distinct image in the mind of the
reader” through “painting with words”.2
To begin, it is best to look at the concrete examples of ekphrastic writing in Infinite
Jest. There are numerous smaller nods to various artists or movements, including Cubism,
Picasso, and the evocative idea of the “Escherian signs”3 of Storrow Drive, Boston. The most
obvious reference that Wallace makes to an extant work of art, however, is in the section
detailing Joelle’s overdose and suicide attempt. Here we see Joelle specifically verbally
identified with Bernini’s The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, a Baroque sculpture completed in
1652, and pictured below.
1 Phillip Sayers, “Representing Entertainment in Infinite Jest” in David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing”: New Essays on the Novels, ed. Marshall Boswell (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014), 1132 Stephen J. Burn, “Towards a General Theory of Vision in Wallace’s Fiction” in English Studies 95 (2013), 873 David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, (New York: Abacus, 1997), 1034
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Detail from Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Teresa, 1652. Image sourced from www.wikipedia.com
The reference to Bernini comes at an important point in the episode, when Joelle is trying to
articulate just what the feeling of freebasing means to her. Interestingly, she can only manage
such articulation by using the statue, a visual as well as a solid object, as a metaphor. This
“afflated orgasm of the heart that makes her feel, truly, attractive, sheltered by limits,
deveiled and loved, observed and alone and sufficient and female, full, as if watched for an
instant by God”4 is irreversibly connected to the memory of the statue. It is the sculpture’s
expression of “the perfect vice of barb-headed love” that Joelle imagines at the zenith of her
high. To fully understand the implications of this, we must first understand something of the
sculpture’s history and it’s the motivations behind its creation. The sculpture features St.
4 Wallace, Infinite Jest, 235
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Teresa of Ávila, a Spanish nun born in 1515 who was herself an influential writer in the
Spanish Renaissance tradition. Teresa in her autobiography described the incident which the
sculpture depicts thusly:
I saw an angel close by me, on my left side, in bodily form…He was not large, but small of stature, and most beautiful… I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron’s point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce to my very entrails…The pain was so great that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God.5
The idea of being ‘observed’ is important to Joelle, but so too is being ‘alone’ and ‘female’.
St Teresa, and in particular the beautified, angelic version that Bernini depicts, is to Joelle a
visual representation of the feeling of ultimate solitude and completeness that she feels when
high. Of course, this idea of oneness with oneself is problematized by Wallace in his
acknowledgement that the ‘God’ figure in this equation is something which causes great
emotional pain and dependence. This is, of course, visually represented in the sculpture as the
angel’s stabbing of Teresa.
Wallace’s work is often seen as having a moral imperative behind it, something
attributed to his associations with the New Sincerity movement and the almost overwhelming
desire to facilitate some sort of deeper communication between character and reader. Bernini
seems to have had a similar outlook on his art, although, in the case of the Baroque sculptor,
this moral obligation assumes a more traditional Christian form. As Robert Wallace writes
“Bernini in many ways was as close to being a Jesuit as a layman can be, and in a sense he
took in his art the role of the instructor in the Exercises. His creation of striking, colourful
work was not merely his inclination but, he believed, his sacred obligation: it helped others,
less gifted with imagination than he, to visualize and participate in the miracles of the Saviour
and the saints”.6 This desire to see the world through other people’s eyes (and the ultimate
impossibility of doing so) is something which crops up again and again in Wallace’s work. 5 Robert Wallace, The World of Bernini (New York: Time Life Library of Art, 1973), 1446 R. Wallace, World of Bernini,138
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While their underlying ideologies are very different, these two artists seem to have similar
motivations for creating their art. Art, for them, functions as an aid to communication, be it
interpersonal or spiritual, with other people or with a higher power. The visceral or sexual
nature of a Wallace or Bernini artwork is ultimately sublimated to this cause. Robert
Wallace’s statement that, for Bernini “Spectacle for its own sake was unimportant; what
counted was spectacle with a purpose, spectacle that reached out and laid hold of the viewer”7
could just as easily have been written about our own Wallace. Both men share the underlying
moral imperative to help their readers/viewers to fully participate in life, however that life
may ultimately manifest itself.
This idea of communication is of particular interest when we remember that the
sculpture is also a major set-piece in the James O. Incandenza film The Pre-Nuptial
Agreement of Heaven and Hell, and that this is likely where Joelle first encountered it. The
sculpture is shown for “four narrative minutes”. It entirely fills the screen for the duration of
this time, pressing “against all four edges”. The sculpture serves as a sort of visual and
symbolic communicative shorthand between Incandenza the film-maker and his audience, in
much the same way as it serves Wallace the writer. It also offers a point of otherwise
impossible emotional contact between James O. and Joelle. While we have no evidence that
Incandenza saw the same parallel between the religious, pseudo-sexual imagery of the
sculpture and the ‘God’ of addiction that Joelle saw, the sculpture was obviously of similar
symbolic importance to him. This shared emotional connection with a piece of visual art goes
a long way towards forging and nurturing their friendship. Visual art, for Wallace, is an
avenue through which communication can be facilitated while recognising the impossibility
of ever truly entering somebody else’s mind.
7 R. Wallace, World of Bernini, 140
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It is also worth noting the numerous layers of ekphrasis employed here: Wallace is
writing a novel which features a fictional film which features a real statue, which is depicting
a fictionalised account of a real or imagined event in a real person’s life. This serves well as a
microcosm of the whole project of Infinite Jest, in which the story is created and the
characters all linked by the fictional work of art that is The Entertainment, and many layers of
meaning built up on top of this central premise. As Philip Sayers says in his essay on Wallace
and entertainment “Wallace’s use of ekphrasis (the verbal description of the visual) and
filmic language makes Infinite Jest a semiotically hybrid project, in which novel and film are
shown to be fundamentally intertwined”.8 This statement, while apposite, arguably does not
go far enough in its examination of hybridity in the novel: Wallace’s use of ekphrasis does
not only show the intertwining of novel and film, but his belief in the interconnectedness of
all forms of art and expression. He seems to subscribe largely to W. T. Mitchell’s idea of
ekphrastic hope. As Mitchell writes “The central goal of ekphrastic hope might be called "the
overcoming of otherness."9 Ekphrastic poetry is the genre in which texts encounter their own
semiotic "others," those rival, alien modes of representation called the visual, graphic, plastic,
or "spatial" arts”.10 Just as the Bernini sculpture is able to facilitate stronger communication
between Joelle and James O., so the ekphrastic project of Infinite Jest is able to overcome the
essential otherness that exists between different forms of art. This attempt to overcome the
barriers between the literary and visual arts through multiple layers of ekphrasis is also to be
found in the early short story “Little Expressionless Animals”, in which Wallace uses the
John Ashbery ekphrastic poem Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, itself based on the
8 Sayers, Representing Entertainment, 1079 W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 15610 Mitchell, Picture Theory, 156
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Parmigianino poem of the same name, which Marshall Boswell has described as “a mirrored
reflection of a mirrored reflection”.11
Another important way in which ekphrasis inflects Wallace’s works is through the
paintings and films that he himself creates in the novels. The aspect of film is one which has
been explored in detail by Sayers, and as such we shall focus here on the paintings Wallace
invents. The most striking example of this invention is in the “huge touring exhibition of
paintings by artists with crippling facial pain about crippling facial pain”.12 These paintings
are commercial art pieces created to advertise a product called Nunhagen aspirin, and as such
are televised in major advertising slots on network television. The paintings are described in a
revolting, if detached manner, featuring such horrors as “a woman with every carpenter’s tool
know to God exiting her face”, and “a woman with her crown between the incisors of some
sort of shark so huge it passes from view past the frame”.13 These paintings inspire in viewers
an incredible revulsion, which results in high sales for their product and abysmal ratings for
the advertisements as people jump for their remote controls. These adverts are shown to have
enormously negative and lasting effects on their viewers, with Hal’s ears ringing for almost a
week following a compulsive Nunhagen binge in the wake of the advertisements. This is
perhaps another example of Wallace’s insistent moral imperative coming to the fore. The
neuroses caused by these paintings surely represent a negative consequence of the use of art
for cynical and profiteering reasons. These paintings, reminiscent as they may be of the
works of Bacon or Munch, have no real artistic soul and are thus only able to create a
visceral, physical response. The effectiveness of these paintings clearly shows how much of
an impact Wallace believes visual art can have, but unlike Joelle’s response to the Ecstasy of
11 Marshall Boswell, Understanding David Foster Wallace (Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 7312 Wallace, Infinite Jest, 41213 Wallace, Infinite Jest, 1030
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St Teresa, they illicit a response which has no nuance and serves only to wound their viewers,
offering Nunhagen Aspirin as a salve.
Some work has been produced on Wallace’s profoundly visual nature as a writer,
most notably Stephen Burn’s essay on Wallace and Vision, in which Burn categorically states
that “Although Wallace clearly built his sentences in sonic clusters (emphasizing alliteration,
assonance and rhythm), his fiction—indeed his very theory of fiction—is profoundly
visual”.14 However, Burn does not tie this tendency towards forensic visual description in
with Wallace’s treatment of the visual arts in general, instead choosing to focus on Wallace’s
fascination with ocular science and the more physical nature of seeing. It is possible to
expand Burn’s analysis, and to attempt to explain this visual impulse as a further
manifestation of Wallace’s ekphrasis.
One hugely important aspect of this visual tendency is Wallace’s seeming obsession
with the description of light. In almost every scene, we get a description of the light that
backgrounds it. In this regard, Wallace’s method of creating a scene could be favourably
compared to that of the Impressionist movement in France in the late nineteenth-century. One
of the major concerns of this group of painters was the depiction of the transitory, and the
effects of light on solid objects in particular. As Phoebe Pool puts it, they considered “light
and the exchange of coloured reflections as the unifying elements of a picture”.15 Often, they
would examine the same scene many times in the same series of paintings (see Claude
Monet’s Haystacks (pictured below) in order to show how different lights made the scenes
look almost totally altered.16
14 Burn, Wallace and Vision, 215 Phoebe Pool, Impressionism (London: Thames and Hudson, 1967), 716 It is important to note here that this artistic use of light is not incongruent to Burn’s idea of Wallace’s scientific use of optics - As Phoebe Pool points out, the Impressionists themselves were greatly influenced by advances in the field of optical science “especially in the constitution of colours and the structure of light”, Pool, 12
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Claude Monet: Haystack, Morning Snow Effect, 1891. Image sourced from allart.biz
Claude Monet: Wheatstacks (End of Summer), 1890-91. Image sourced from www.wikipedia.com
Wallace’s pre-occupation with light in the novel begins on the very first page, with “a
polished pine conference table shiny with the spidered light of an Arizona noon”.17 Wallace’s
attention to these visual details speaks of a finely-attuned artistic sensibility. The descriptor
‘spidered’ conjures for the reader the exact quality of the light; white, spindled and glaring.
The Impressionistic connection is underlined through the mention of the time of day. The
acknowledgement of the fact that light changes throughout the day, and the desire to
document this, was one of the primary motivations behind Monet’s series paintings. The fact
17 Wallace, Infinite Jest, 3
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that it is the idea of repeating “the same processes, day after day, in all kinds of light” that
ultimately precipitates Hal’s breakdown at the end of the novel also underlines the
importance of this connection. Hal is exhausted by an insurmountable number of possibilities,
and the impossibility of categorising his impressions of all of them.
Nowhere does this idea of an Impressionistic series of images of light come more to
the fore than in the conversation between Marathe and Steeply. The fact that their meeting
takes place over a single evening means that the light is an important tool for Wallace to
show the passage of time as the two men talk. The night begins with Marathe “alone above
the desert, redly backlit and framed in shale”.18 This description of the colour of the light has
further Impressionistic implications. One of the fundamental shifts forward in optical science
at this time was the discovery of the prismatic quality of light. The Impressionists realised
that “the brilliance of light could be rendered be allowing the spectator’s eye to reconstruct it
from the prismatic colours of which it was composed”.19 In one description, the light is even
depicted as running “over everything in a sickening yellow way like gravy”.20 This physical,
tactile aspect of Wallace’s description of light seem to give it its own metaphorical character.
The idea of a liquid light here is certainly not a million miles away from the paints of the
Impressionists. Even the consistency is the same.
The connections with painting that Wallace’s writing exhibits are not limited to
Impressionism, however. The extreme focus on angle and composition that Wallace employs
seem to have more in common with the post-impressionists and the Cubists. In fact, Wallace
makes explicit this connection when he describes Gately’s fever dreams as having a
“dismantled cubist aspect”.21 In painting his scenes, Wallace makes great efforts to sharply
define the locations of every object or body present, and gives precise details about their
18 Wallace, Infinite Jest, 8719 Pool, Impressionism, 1520 Wallace, Infinite Jest, 64621 Wallace, Infinite Jest, 934
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spatial relations to each other. Gately in hospital is disconcerted by the idea that when
Joelle’s “head was down the veil hung loose at the same vertical angle as when her head was
up, only now it was perfectly smooth and un-textured”.22 We also see this tendency towards
angularity carried over into the later work, The Pale King. The opening section of this
unfinished novel,23 itself an enormously visually detailed frontispiece in some ways
reminiscent of the work of Van Gogh (particularly in the idea of “ale-coloured sunshine”),
features prominently a “pasture’s crows standing at angles”.24 As Burn says “The acute
attention to visual detail that distinguishes Wallace’s novelistic prose—perhaps most
obviously in the visual onslaught that opens The Pale King—relies on an attempt to craft a
narratorial viewpoint with all the observational power of what he called (with reference to his
non-fiction) an “enormous eyeball””.25
This intense precision is of particular relevance to the sections of Infinite Jest which
feature Hal as their main focus. He describes his childhood memories as “tableaux”, exact but
frozen snapshots in time. It is also the “intense horizonality” of the Viewing Room which
eventually forces his breakdown. This idea of precise depiction, but also of being “awakened
to a basic dimension I’d neglected during years of upright movement”26 is of huge relevance
to the cubist ideals of de-familiarising everyday objects through looking at them through
numerous perspectives at once. Wallace’s characters become overwhelmed when they are
forced to examine other perspectives that they had not previously considered. This process of
dismantlement, however, is as important to Wallace as it is to the Cubists. The overall vision
of Infinite Jest is to present a multiplicity of disparate but linked perspectives in order to
create a single, overarching perspective. In this way, it could be said to be a largely Cubist
22 Wallace, Infinite Jest, 85723 Of course, this argument is dependent on our willingness to accept that the section at the top of the pile atop Wallace’s desk upon his death was indeed intended as the opening section.24 David Foster Wallace, The David Foster Wallace Reader (London: Penguin Books, 2014), 53425 Burn, Wallace and Vision, 226 Wallace, Infinite Jest, 902
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project, allowing the reader a new sense of understanding of a situation through showing it
from many different angles at once. Also relevant is the way in which Wallace uses hugely
different styles to represent the thoughts of different characters. As Picasso said of his Cubist
period “If the subjects I have wanted to express have suggested different ways of expression,
I have never hesitated to adopt them. I have never made trials nor experiments. Whenever I
had something to say I have said it in the manner in which I have felt it ought to be said.
Different motives inevitably require different methods of expression”.27
Picasso’s Portrait of William Uhde, 1910. Sourced from www.artarchive.com
It is telling also that in the list of words that the wraith puts in to Gately’s head, the
word “chiaroscuro” makes a prominent appearance. This word originates in the tradition of
oil painting and roughly translates to ‘light and shade’. The fact that the wraith considers this
concept to be of vital enough importance to communicate it to Gately raises a flag for the
reader that we should also consider it significant. Wallace uses the wraith in this section to
draw our attention to several major thematic implications of the novel, among them the idea
of seeing and being seen (“SCOPHILIA”), the focus on human beings as bodies and their 27 Herschel Browning Clipp, Peter Howard Setlz and Joshua Charles Taylor, Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (California: University of California Press, 1968), 265
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physical inter-relation with the world (“PROPRIOCEPTION”), and of course the undeniable
Hamlet parallels we come across so often (“LAERTES”).28 Surely, to include a reference to
visual art in such a list can only cement the conviction that Wallace considers this visual,
painterly quality an integral part of the novel, both stylistically and thematically.
Even the act of writing in Wallace often takes on an artistic dimension. To fully
understand the extent to which this is the case, we must return to the opening section of The
Pale King, and the crows in their pasture. The crows are feeding, turning over cow pats to get
at the worms underneath, with “the shapes of the worms incised into the overturned dung and
baked by the sun until hardened”.29 These forms represent to Wallace a complex system of
hieroglyphics which he compares to a system of writing. His heartfelt imploring to “read
these”, while it could apply to the subsequent sections of the novel, would also seem to point
to the idea that the visual world and the shapes it creates is as worthy of the reader’s notice as
the words that Wallace is presenting. The barriers between image and language are also
explored in the ‘fever dreams’ sections of Infinite Jest, in which Don Gately is in deep shock
following a gunshot wound in hospital. The most frustrating part of the hospital experience
for Gately is his inability to speak due to a tube inserted in his mouth. In one of his dreams,
Joelle gives him a notepad and pen, and he attempts to write out what he wishes to
communicate. This however, comes out “more like drawing than writing”30, leaving Gately
even more isolated than before. This, on the face of it, would seem to be Wallace doubting
his own vision of the interconnectedness of artistic form – the visual art of drawing is here
presented as unable to communicate to the same level as the literary system of writing.
However, what we do see here is Wallace literally illustrating the way Gately has written
“Yo”.31 The novel here becomes itself a piece of visual art. Words and illustrations are
28 Wallace, Infinite Jest, 83229 Wallace, Wallace Reader, 53430 Wallace, Infinite Jest, 88431 Wallace, Infinite Jest, 884
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melded seamlessly in a way which, while it may cut Gately off in his own head, facilitates
more nuanced communication between author and reader. Fundamentally, hybridity of
expression between the verbal and visual arts seems to be what Wallace is striving for. Sayers
calls attention to this idea of writing as a visual art when he points out that “The novel’s
already-undermined aesthetic purity is further disrupted by the fact that, as well as using
occasional illustrations, diagrams and graphic signifiers (502, 884, 892, 1024), Wallace has a
tendency to use letters and punctuation to convey meaning not only through their arbitrary,
linguistic meanings, but also through their iconic meanings-that is, their pictorial
resemblances”.32 In the publication of the eBook edition of Consider the Lobster, this
pictographic tendency to the writing, rather ironically, prevented the inclusion of “Host” “an
extraordinarily visual essay about radio; it is filled with intricately boxed footnotes,
connected to their referents with a frequently chaotic number of arrows, which occupy so
much marginal space (top, bottom and side) that page numbers are frequently elided”,
because the visual aspects were incompatible with electronic publishing methods.33
In conclusion, it is apparent that the visual art world has had an enormous impact on
Wallace, and upon Infinite Jest in particular, both formally and thematically. The ekphrastic
use of real works of art to expand upon the theme of communication is of great import, but
the influence of visual art, I hope to have shown, goes considerably deeper than merely
name-dropping a few artists. The visual impulse has inflected his entire body of work,
through descriptions of light, shade, angle, and composition. Wallace is a profoundly visual
writer who clearly places great importance on the visual as a way to explore his fundamental
message about the necessity of interpersonal communication. This acknowledgement of the
visual art world has also helped Wallace to craft a more holistic approach to novel-writing
than some of his contemporaries. There is no word/picture barrier for Wallace, and as a result
32 Sayers, Representing Entertainment,12233 Sayers, Representing Entertainment, 122
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he can use all the many wonderful techniques of the painter to create work that is at once
specific and expansive; a series of wonderfully detailed scenes which together form into a
series which is as messy as it is glorious.