On Endings by Grausam Daniel;

Author:Grausam, Daniel;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 2011-04-14T04:00:00+00:00

Half Life

Jumping ahead some thirty years to David Foster Wallace’s homage to, and critique of, self-consciousness, the enduring links between metafiction and nuclear culture seem clear enough; so clear, in fact, that Wallace could reverse the comparison, and in doing so reveal in new ways the poverty of the strategic culture I’ve been discussing. A comprehensive reading of Wallace’s 1,079-page Infinite Jest (1996) is obviously beyond the scope of this chapter, but I do want to note that Infinite Jest, like a host of its mid-1990s contemporaries, records the enduring legacy of the Cold War even though the conflict had supposedly ended. And so the novel’s representations of global politics are indebted to Cold War nuclear brinksmanship; its principal father-figure began his working life as a weapons scientist, and in a novel obsessed by drugs and drug culture, the “ultimate” drug (imagine, as one character puts it, “acid that has itself dropped acid”) is called DMZ (the one place where the Cold War survives its supposed end is the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea).

But Wallace’s novel is also a loving if critical look back on a prior generation of postmodern writers. The missing father at the heart of the novel is not only a former weapons scientist, but also a highly self-conscious filmmaker whose work displays all the hallmarks of metafictional self-consciousness.60 And so one of the tasks of the novel is to move past the attachment to a father who has never been properly buried, and working through that is also an attempt to move past the Cold War.

Set in, among other places, an elite tennis academy in New England, Wallace helps us to reimagine the pressures of simulation in the 1960s by satirically hypothesizing that nuclear war-gaming could, in an imagined twenty-first century, become the psychic antidote to the pressures of sport; the analogy between the two disciplines is so ridiculous, in other words, that it can be reversed, and in his critique of the possibility of maps ever adequately representing territories, Wallace links postmodern aesthetics and nuclear strategy in particularly brilliant ways. The students at Enfield Tennis Academy are under immense pressure to perform, and part of their training involves a radical rethinking of the game they are trying to master. Coach Schtitt argues that to become a tennis star, the players must learn to regard the court as a world in itself. There is always an excuse for not winning: “Cold. Hot. Wet and dry. Very bright sun and you see the purple dots. Very bright hot and you have no salt. Outside is wind, the insects which like the sweat. Inside is smell of heaters, echo, being jammed in together, tarp is overclose to baseline, not enough of room, bells inside clubs which ring the hour loudly to distract, clunk of machines vomiting sweet cola for coins. Inside roof too low for lob. Bad lighting, so. Or outside: the bad surface. Oh no look no: crabgrass in cracks along baseline” (458–59). The solution

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