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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.