viz.

"Tropium" — Image Credit: WebMD 

Infinite Jest (IJ) is more than a novel, as anyone who has carried a copy around for awhile will attest.[1] Elsewhere I have argued that IJ is a performative utterance, following J.L. Austin, that IJ turns readers into addicts on the one hand and then thwarts the jones for textual mastery on the other. Here I wish simply to invite you into the tropium den[2] so you can see what it's like to cook up some of the visual texts that having been using Infinite Jest. I begin with the work of designer Chris Ayers, who created a tumblr called "Poor Yorick Entertainment" with the aim of "bring[ing] some kind of visual life" to the world of Infinite Jest (according to the site's "About" page). Many of the visual artifacts featured on Ayers's blog are also available for incarnation into the physical world through purchase.

"A Sampler of PYE movie posters: Blood Sister, Valuable Coupon, Medusa, Fun with Teeth" — Image Credit: Chris Ayers 

Ayers lives and works in an old haunt of mine:[3] Phoenix, AZ, whose metro areas including Scottsdale and Tempe make their own appearances in the mainly Boston, MA- (and Tucson, AZ[4]-) centric world of IJ. But thanks to Ayers, the world of IJ makes its appearance in our own. The fascinating movie posters are not the only way James Incandenza's filmography has actualized—a 2010 Columbia University art school exhibition ran work in several media including film that was based on the filmography.

Image Credit: "Various Small Flames," adapted by William Santen 2010

And then but Incandenza's filmography is only eight and a half pages of endnote out of a 1079 page book, so Ayers and other artists have plenty of fictional world to select from and actualize. Ayers's site has featured posters for IJ's germophobe President's election campaign, its Southwest junior invitational tennis competition,[5] and even Michael Pemulis's dorm room décor.

"A Sampler of PYE posters: Johnny Gentle, Whataburger Invitational, Paranoid King" — Image Credit: Chris Ayers 

What all these visualizations have in common is a rhetorical force of inventiveness. It may be highly specific, but each of these images extend the world of the fiction into our non-fictional world. I consider this one in a portfolio of ways that IJ complicates the logic that separates fiction from non-fiction:[6] by "multiplying its figures, in complicating, thickening, delinearizing, folding, and dividing the line precisely by making it increase and multiply."[7] Digital images become material objects: in addition to a huge print of Ayers's "Visit Tucson" poster, I'm also the proud owner of an Enfield Tennis Academy t-shirt, emblazoned with last name of SOVWAR Air Marshal[8] Ann KITTENPLAN, the only actual character in the entire novel to whom the adjective "butch" gets attributed (p. 330) and so the only character I actually feel to be my own kith and kin.[9]

"Kittenplan" — Image Credit: Kendall Gerdes

The digital images become material objects, and the material objects exert their own kind of force on the world, in the way we move through it, and the way we think about ourselves moving through it. They change our relations to the text, and they generate new relations to one another. I entitled this post "The visual (after)life of Infinite Jest" in part in a nod to IJ's own haunting: the wraith, whose possible measure of very slow wraith-time agency could be responsible for the odd behavior of objects around ETA. But I leave you with Lyle's exhortation for Ortho Stice, the tennis cadet most moved (and disturbed) by the odd behavior of ETA's objects: "Do not underestimate objects, he advises Stice. Do not leave objects out of account. The world, after all, which is radically old, is made up mostly of objects" (p. 395).