ABSTRACT

Wallace draws throughout his work on a specific model of the embodied mind, but his work is also emphatically dualistic, driven throughout by the tension between that materialist model and more traditional accounts of selfhood. To write about the soul and body in this way raises the problems that philosophers have tackled for centuries: to what extent do human beings have free will? Is the essential soul or the deterministic body in charge? What does Wallace mean, ultimately, by the self? Setting Wallace’s work against a range of postmodern fiction, in particular by Joseph Heller and Don DeLillo, we will see that the body is not a boundless, malleable text in Wallace’s fiction but a stubbornly material, deterministic entity, in which the interior self is contained. In this chapter I will also unpack the central water metaphor that Wallace uses to describe addiction and its effects on people. Tracing this metaphor through Infinite Jest forces us to reconsider the extent to which Wallace actually champions free will and the power of paying attention in his work.