Dialogizing postmodern Carnival: David Foster Wallace's 'Infinite Jest'

In Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin applied the symbolic hierarchical inversions of medieval carnival to literature and galvanized intellectual interest in carnival as an analytic, literary, and political model for transgression. For Bakhtin and those influenced by his theory, carnival provided an ideal setting for what he termed the “dialogic imagination,” because it involved a temporary suspension of official order that allowed for a creative and therapeutic admixture of the symbolic forms of cultural life. As Wilson Yates succinctly explains in The Grotesque in Art and Literature, this heterogeneous festivity also served as a “revolutionary vision and understanding of a new world freed from both bourgeois and totalitarian cultures” (22). In the postmodern era, carnival’s liberatory vision has been used to counter hegemonic notions of stable identity, gender, language, and truth in the contemporary work of such authors as Ishmael Reed, Angela Carter, William Burroughs, and Thomas Pynchon. In the recent novel Infinite Jest, however, David Foster Wallace turns the carnivalesque against itself to reveal a literary vision that foregrounds the line between transgression for its own sake and the use of art for redemptive purposes. © 2001 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.