Chapter 26 - Infinite Jest as Opiate Fiction

Summary

In 1996, the year Infinite Jest was published, the Federal Drug Administration approved Oxycontin as a prescription drug, a move that would have dire repercussions for Americans’ relationship to opiates. Indeed, Wallace’s novel appeared at a pivotal moment in what is now considered the opiate crisis. Drug use, of course, appears throughout Wallace’s fiction, including the pot-smoking LaVache of The Broom of the System, the numerous addicts in Infinite Jest, and the amphetamine-popping Chris Fogle in The Pale King. Wallace’s work fits into a long tradition of drug use and recovery in fiction, a genre that reaches back to Homer, Thomas De Quincey, William Burroughs and many more. This chapter will argue that Wallace’s fiction marks a sociopolitical shift in this genre: the commercialization of addiction under late capitalism. This approach to Wallace’s work will, like the recent Cambridge Companion and Marshall Boswell’s latest monograph, further thicken our understanding of Wallace’s literary and sociocultural context.