A. O. Scott's Catechism for Infinite Jest

Infinite Jest is among my favorite novels. I have read it at least four times and have no intention of stopping, despite the soul wilting and spirit crushing. I have written a number of short, self indulgent essays on it, and draw on it extensively in my aloof, pretension papers written for disillusioned high school teachers and excited, destitute college professors However, upon reading A.O Scott's 1999 article The Panic of Influence, which in reality is not directly concerned with Infinite Jest, my love for the book has only grown. I have struggled with Wallace's particular brand of irony and meta-fiction since I first encounter his work along with that of Barth, Pynchon, DeLillo, and Gaddis. However, Scott's article, published in the New York Review of Books when I was in kindergarten, illuminates the elegance of Wallace's subversion of the artifice of his literary predecessors, and reveals a poignant humanism in his work which, taken at face value, embraces the sneering cynicism of the R&D line. Through meta-irony, the hideous cyclical progression of meta-fiction as well as human life, Wallace established a post-ironic literary movement with none of the saccharin, cringing, indulgence of other literary figures in their attempts to escape from the toxicity of postmodernism. Rather than reject and move backwards, back to comfortable narrative, and naive illusion, Wallace reestablishes the notions set forth by Pynchon and Barth (my favorites) which in the sixties served as mordant social critique or even a revolutionary upheaval in the zeitgeist, a form so long lost to the ages, and brings it to bear at the very center of the self. Endlessly self-conscious  of his self-consciousness, Wallace establishes a new humanism, built around the problematic disillusionment of modernism and postmodernism, without ever once denying it or turning a blind eye. Link to Scott's Article.