n+DYHD)DWKHU:KRVH2ZQ)DWKHU/RVW:KDW:DV7KHUH|)LOLDO'HEWLQ,QILQLWH-HVW

+$<$6+,+LNDULʨΫʖϭʖχ .H\ZRUGʩ

'DYLG)RVWHU:DOODFH,QILQLWH-HVW)DWKHU6RQ5HODWLRQVKLS3RVWPRGHUQLVPʨॶ   ଒ ,QVWLWXWLRQʩ‫ز‬෠୉ָ‫گ‬үָ෨ʤ)DFXOW\RI(GXFDWLRQ*LIX8QLYHUVLW\ʥʨགྷ  ࢭ $EVWUDFWʩ 7KLVHVVD\REVHUYHVWKHIDWKHUVRQUHODWLRQVKLSVLQ'DYLG)RVWHU:DOODFHbVPDVWHUSLHFH ,QILQLWH-HVW7KHSDSHUH[SORUHVLQWHUJHQHUDWLRQDOYRLFHVZLWKLQ:DOODFHbVQDUUDWLYHVSUR[\LQJKLVRZQYRLFHDVDQRYHOLVWLQWKHJHQHUDWLRQRInSRVWSRVWPRGHUQLVP|,QWKHQRYHOWKH
PDLQFKDUDFWHU-LP,QFDQGHQ]DbVKLJKO\SRVWPRGHUQILOPVLOOXVWUDWHUHIOHFWLYHHQGOHVVQHVVDQGWKH
DEXVLYHDQGQHJOHFWLYHIDWKHUILJXUHWKDWLVUHSHDWHGWKURXJKDILOLDOUHODWLRQVKLSEHWZHHQKLPDQG
KLVWKUHHVRQVIRFXVLQJRQWKHPXWHQHVVRIKLV\RXQJHVWVRQ+DO+DODQG-LPbVLQFRPPXQLFDELOLW\ZLWKHDFKRWKHUPLUURUVWKHGLVFRQQHFWLQFRPPXQLFDWLRQDQGXQGHUVWDQGLQJEHWZHHQWKHPRGHUQSRVWPRGHUQDQGSRVWSRVWPRGHUQJHQHUDWLRQV$VSRVWSRVWPRGHUQZULWHUVGRQRWFDQQRWRUPXVWQRWGHQ\WKHLUILOLDOGHEWIURPSRVWPRGHUQIDWKHUVWKHVDPHDSSOLHVWRIDWKHUVDQGVRQV,QWURGXFWLRQ David Foster Wallace’s textual exploration has been analyzed by critics and by the writer himself regarding his
problematic relationship with other postmodern writers. Marshall Boswell observes that Wallace self-consciously
deplores “a generational clash” (92), where he situates himself among the young resistance: “The word ‘generation’appears twenty-six times in ‘Fictional Futures [and the Conspicuously Young]’ and seventeen times in ‘E Unibus Pluram.’
In every case, Wallace is at pains to explain how his generation is uniquely different from that of his immediate
predecessors” (92). The “predecessors” here are postmodern, highly experimental novelists: John Barth, Donald
Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, and others. The influences from these elder postmodern writers are mentioned in earlystudies of Wallace by Tom LeClair, including other writers of the “generation”: “[Richard] Powers, William Vollmann,and David Foster Wallace all admit within their novels their filial debt to ‘Pop’ Pynchon” (12).
Supporting this evaluation, Wallace’s description of his attitude to postmodernism is complexed as follow: “For me,
the last few years of the postmodern era have seemed a bit like the way you feel when you’re in high school and yourparents go on a trip, and you throw a party” (“An Interview” 150). With the simile of a party, he focuses rather on its
remnant:

But then, time passes, and the party gets louder and louder, and you run out of drugs, and nobody’s got any money
for more drugs, and things get broken and spilled, and there’s a cigarette burn on the couch, and you’re the host andit’s your house too, and you gradually start wishing your parents would come back and restore some fucking orderin your house. (150)

Here Wallace hopes for come-back of some “order,” something that postmodernists destroyed. The association follows abroken father-son relationship: “The postmodern founders’ patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and[. . .] writers [of] my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years” (150). His use of the word “patricidal”
connotes a kind of Oedipus complex where one desires to get over one’s father’s influence by killing him; but what is
peculiar is that he, calling himself an “orphan,” admits to the “uneasiness” of his need for his father’s return (“of course
we’re uneasy about that we wish they’d come back” [150]). This suggests that there may be a more complicated father-son issue embedded in Wallace’s comment, and also that this filial debt would be a key to read his texts. Obviously, one
can notice that there is a certain obsession with father-son relationships observed in his magnum opus Infinite Jest: thecentral family, the Incandenzas, includes a mysterious father figure, Jim, and his three sons—Orin, Mario, and Hal. Whenthese fictitious father-son relationships are compared with the author’s parable-like explanation above, an observation ofwhat it means to be a writer in succession after the postmodern fathers could be deduced. In other words, it illuminates
the question of how the writer could, or could not, produce the generational difference that he was striving to achieve.
 For the postmodern writers like Donald Barthelme, the father figure is symbolically dead. His novel, Dead Father(1975), announces in the first sentence that: “Dead, but still with us, still with us, but dead” (8). In Reiichi Miura’sinterpretation, this novel ironically expresses a parody (or joke) of the Oedipus complex—it no longer has any validity(225). According to Miura, Barthelme, after James Joyce’s and Samuel Beckett’s radically experimental works, has
nothing other than reminding us of the fictionality of what was founded, i.e., what was supposed to have authenticity, likea father (276).
On the other hand, Wallace’s father-and-son relationship rather takes the Oedipus complex more seriously (andsometimes overly). The sincerity in his writing is considered as the marking spot of the aforementioned generational
difference between him and postmodern 1960-70s. In this line of thought, Adam Kelly’s study (especially his article,“David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction”) generated a certain trend that situates Wallace in thecontext of New Sincerity, succeeding the irony-oriented postmodernism. Other scholars, such as Mark Sheridan and Mary
K. Holland, support that Wallace seeks to differentiate himself from the old generation of writers (even if in vain). Thesearguments tend to emphasize the gap between the older and younger literary generations, and Wallace himself is not an
exception in the statement above. However, such a claim invites a misunderstanding that the newer writers are completely
separated from the elders. It is neither a correct nor an effective way to pursue the notion. Postmodernism, as a literary
and philosophical movement, is not so simple to be denied indiscriminately. Even though there are several terms to denotethe divergence of the literary generation after postmodernism—digimodernism, renewalism, to name a few,1 none ofthose terms succeed in illustrating an entire idea of what comes after postmodernism. They only shed light on the facetsof an abstruse entity. Rather, as Lee Konstantinou notes, studies about what succeeds postmodernism should focus on theuneasiness with the postmodern “inheritance” (3). Therefore, what is suggested is an approach that seeks continuity rather
than discontinuity, or, in other words, the complicated “father-son” relationship between postmodernism and postpostmodernism.
Among those new terms signifying the cultural movement after postmodernism, “post-postmodernism” would be
sufficient to encompass the generational continuity and differences. The rather tricky term “post-postmodernism”
signifies an awkwardness that came with the wave. According to Jefferey T. Nealon, “the least mellifluous part of theword (the stammering ‘post-post’) is the thing that most strongly recommends it, insofar as the conception of postpostmodernism [. . .] is hardly an outright overcoming of postmodernism” because “post-postmodernism marks anintensification and mutation within postmodernism (which in its turn was of course a historical mutation andintensification of certain tendencies within modernism)” (ix: my italics). This implies that post-postmodernism is not a
total thrashing of postmodernism but a variation of it. A certain continuity, rather than a severance, is highlighted.
With this background, this study focuses on the treatment of the “filial debt” in Wallace’s writing, incorporating thedescription of the father and son characters in Infinite Jest, to propose a reading of persisting relationship between
postmodernism and after. Regarding the father-son relationship in Infinite Jest, so far Robert Bell and William Dowlinghas mentioned the hauntedness of the father figure (Bell and Dowling 118) and Nicoline Timmer has argued thedysfunctional father at some length in her book (133-42). However, there has been no discussion of the connection
between the father-son problems in Infinite Jest and Wallace’s “debt” for the postmodern fathers. The allegorical readingof Wallace in terms of father and son seems effective to consider the interrelationship among the different generations in1David Rudrum and Nicholas Stavris’s Supplanting the Postmodern organizes the putative terms after postmodernism.

American literary history. Why and how do sons hold continuity from their fathers? To answer this question, this study
highlights the importance of the textual remains of fathers and sons in Infinite Jest, including film works written on thenovel’s text.

-LPWKH)DWKHU Jim’s filmography is listed in “Note 24” at the end of the novel. It is an excerpt from an academic review that very
meticulously frames it as if the films are reality. With specific information about the film and the camera, every entry
describes the pragmatic details of Jim’s works. For instance, The Joke, which was a projection of the figure of the audience
onto the screen, is quite literally a joke that mocks the audience who expects cinematic beauty, revealing the silly
stereotype of “Art” and the “Artistic-minded” bourgeois. This film bears a certain resemblance to postmodern metafiction,
especially the artist’s attitude of making a “joke” to the reader/viewer who believes in so-called novels. Such an attitude
provokes a “sheer annoyance” (989) as the fictitious critics say in “Note 24,” and this work is “the most hated” one of
Jim’s career as his son Hal reminisces later in the novel (397).
Another work of his reflects a more barren idea of the result of “meta” confrontation, involving the audience in it. The
Medusa v. The Odalisque features two mythic figures, both of whom have the power to turn people who directly see theirfaces into stone or jewels. The film captures the audience watching their battle on stage, using a mirror and a shield, as alive drama. The live audience in the film indirectly watches their fatal eyes and faces reflected on the mirror or shield,
and, thus, they turn to stones and jewels and fall from their seats one by one. On the other hand, the audience who watches
these filmed sequences “never does get much of a decent full-frontal look at what it is about the combatants that
supposedly has such a melodramatic effect on the rumble’s live audience, and so the film’s audience ends up feelingteased and vaguely cheated” (397). As noted here, the highly experimental “meta” story gives rise to discontent in theviewer’s mind. What he/she finds at the end of the film is only apocalyptic barrenness after the extraordinary battle, filledwith stoned bodies of people. In this way, Jim’s work, like postmodern metafictions, turns the viewer into inept, inorganic
matter, it seems to say.2
A few of his films’ audiences, however, find a slight hint of human sensitivity in the cold-looking fronts. Joelle vanDyne, a student studying film theory, an actress in the film “Infinite Jest,” as well as the ex-girlfriend of Orin (Jim’s firstson), observes “flashes of something” in what looks so inept that any human sensitivity could not exist in it: “The M v.
O’s three quick cuts to the sides of the gorgeous combatants’ faces, twisted past recognition with some kind of torment.
[. . .] Three split-seconds, no more, of glimpses of facial pain” (741). The mythic figures’ (Medusa and Odalisque’s)
humanly aching faces that Joelle catches are for a moment, so brief that she gets “the creepy feeling the man [Jim] had
upped the film-speed in these few-frame human flashes, to thwart just such study. It was like he couldn’t help putting
human flashes in, but he wanted to get them in as quickly and unstudyably as possible, as if they compromised him
somehow” (741). Here, Joelle rightly senses Jim’s elusive emotion that is extremely limited to the smallest moment
behind the ironic story and construction of this work. Like The Joke, this work on Medusa and Odalisque signifies thedilemma of postmodernism, which is sometimes accused of its cold perspective of mocking naïve people while holding
a human aspect within itself. Joelle (and later Hal) narrowly perceives the resisting sensitivity within the cool experimental
work itself, and yet that it is too fugitive to catch face-to-face. This impossibility to match up to another’s face, like seeing
into the mirror, is what Jim’s postmodern works betray paradoxically: to confront one’s face is sometimes full of pain, sothat it is reduced to the least.
Commenting upon the literature of the postmodern era, John Barth once related in “Literature of Exhaustion” that thenovels after modernist experiments had been left in a “labyrinth,” where all the possibilities must be exhausted (75). With
this sense of exhaustion, the barren battlefield with petrified humans is certainly one of its goals, resulting from the2

Metafictional composition of Jim’s works is related to Infinite Jest’s metafictionality itself—it is a fiction about making
fiction, or rather, a son and his fiction-making father.

eccentric use of mirrors and reflections; for the latecomers (the viewer who watches his works after his death, like Joelleand Hal), the afterimage of literature of exhaustion haunts strongly even after the auteur died. Even though it is possible
to see emotional motivation in postmodern works, it is too brief to be fully understood. With such a communicational
discrepancy, Jim’s postmodern works are so exhausted that the next generation gets annoyed, confused, or lost in its
unfathomable quality. It is indeed a heavy debt—not a positive influence or parodiable mastery—because the latter
generation can neither enjoy nor healthily digest it. For his sons, this atmospheric indebtedness permeated into their living
experiences.

-LPbV6RQV Jim is the father of three sons—Orin, Mario, and Hal3; though, as Nicoline Timmer points out, he is an “absent father”(136). She relates this to Christopher Lasch’s argument in The Culture of Narcissism, which suggests that “the absenceof the American father has become [. . .] a crucial feature of the American family” (Timmer 138; Lasch 208). Jim’s
disfunction as a father is, for instance, described by Orin as follows:

Jim’s internal life was to Orin a black hole, Orin said, his father’s face any room’s fifth wall. [. . .] Orin had no idea
what his father thought or felt about anything. He thought Jim wore the opaque blank facial expression his motherin French sometimes jokingly called Le Masque. The man was so blankly and irretrievably hidden that Orin said
he’d come to see him as like autistic, almost catatonic. [. . .] Orin’s basic childhood memory of Jim had been of an
expressionless stare from a great height. (737)

Jim’s existence, especially his face, resembles his films, from his son’s eyes: cold, inhuman, stony, and turning others
into stone. The repeated mention of “face” and “facial expression” highlights the impossibility to read his inner feelings
from this apparent feature. Jim’s face, like Jim’s works, is an unfathomable “mask” hiding any traces of emotion, thus
seeming uncommunicable.
This communicational impossibility stands out, especially for his youngest son, Hal. Hal says, “Himself [=Jim], for
two years before his death, had had this delusion of silence when I spoke: I believe I was speaking and he believed I was
not speaking” (899). The words that Hal manifests do not reach Jim. The communication here was blocked. However,there is ambiguity as to whether it is Jim’s deficiency to grasp or his son’s to recount. Earlier in the novel, a conversation
between Jim and young Hal—Jim disguises himself into a “professional conversationalist,” consulting the boy—isdepicted with a characteristic “. . .” that marks (or masks?) the son’s words. Hal says to his father:‘I can’t just sit here watching you think I’m mute while your fake nose points at the floor. And are you hearing me,
Dad? It speaks. It accepts soda and defines implore and converse with you.’‘Praying for just one conversation, amateur or no, that does not end in terror? That does not end like all theothers: you staring, me swallowing?’‘. . .’‘Son?’‘. . .’‘Son?’ (31)

The father cannot grasp his son’s words, and they cannot “converse” even if they hope to. However, the reader cannot
know whether the father is at fault (due to his alcoholic delusion) or if it is Hal’s problem, whether the “. . .” shows Hal’s3

In the novel, it is suggested that Mario might not be a biological son of Jim, rather Avril and Charles Tavis’s (though it isnever distinctly identified). However, the fact that all of the three sons believe that Jim is their father is more important for theirgenerational complex. Thus, this paper calls three of them as Jim’s sons.

practical silence or Jim’s delusion. The ellipsis “. . .” is used in Wallace’s work effectively, as the critics notify.4 Here,the text focuses only on the dialog, not including a narrator to mediate them, and the “. . .” represents the unrepresentableutterance on Hal’s part. Furthermore, in this scene, Jim is in disguise, putting on the face “le masque” of a professional
conversationist, as it were. The interpretation of Jim’s real feelings from his face becomes more difficult due to its
combination with the dialogical discrepancy. Jim’s panicky reaction to Hal’s “. . .” betrays that there is an irretrievable
gap in the communication between the father and his sons.
Such incommunicability—even when the words and facial expressions are presented—is what motivates Jim to makethe film “Infinite Jest,” which eventually has the power to kill its viewer with its excessive attractiveness. Later in thenovel, when Jim appears as a wraith to Don Gately—not to any of his sons—he tells Gately that he really wanted to create“a medium via which he and the muted son could simply converse” (838) because, from Jim’s perspective, “[n]o horror
on earth or elsewhere could equal watching your own offspring open his mouth and have nothing come out” (837). Jim’s
work is indeed an attempt to communicate with his son, although it is fated to fail. Jim the wraith elaborates further thathe tried to[m]ake something so bloody compelling it would reverse thrust on a young self’s fall into the womb of solipsism,
anhedonia, death in life. A magically entertaining toy to dangle at the infant still somewhere alive in the boy, to makeits eyes light and toothless mouth open unconsciously, to laugh. To bring him ‘out of himself,’ as they say. The
womb could be used both ways. A way to say I AM SO VERY, VERY SORRY and have it heard. A life-long dream.
(839)

This emotional, but insensible, motivation of the father/filmmaker is directly represented in the film itself, where a mothercharacter says sorry to the camera’s wobbling lens that imitates the view of an infant. Mary K. Holland gives an acuteinterpretation of this malfunctioning work regarding adults and infants: “the film does not function simply as arepresentation of the experience of infantile narcissism [. . .]: it offers, rather, the experience of being a knowing adult,
already separated from the mother and suffering from that separation of longing and loss of self [. . .], and receiving the
apology that could ease that suffering” (81). Jim, as an adult, attempts to stand in an infantile memory for Hal, who is
now becoming an inept, solipsistic, and incomprehensive adult himself. Such an adult is exactly the one that his sonsimagine in the figure of their father, Jim.
Jim and his son, Hal, are thus very similar to each other, especially in the characteristic of incommunicability evenwhen they want to communicate: their conversational words or their exchange of facial expressions never reach eachother. Only the filmography of the father remains for the sons to interpret (yet it is not sufficient).
As Jim finds himself in Hal, though incognito, the repeating characteristics over generations—father to son—demanda glance of the other “father” figures in Infinite Jest, especially Jim’s own father.

-LPbV)DWKHU Infinite Jest offers a catalog of abusive fathers: the episode of the smiling father who violates his daughter wearing an
actress’s mask (371-74) is striking; Matt Pemulis’s father comes to his bed at night; Don Gately’s “organic father” broke
his mother’s jaw before he was born, and then her subsequently-involved live-in lover, a former M.P., hits her regularly
when he is drunk; Joelle van Dyne has also a father (“the low-pH Daddy”) who confesses that he is in love with hisdaughter and that confession destroys her life, etc. Those fathers often make their children addicts: it is said to be a “fact,”in the novel, that “over 60% of all persons arrested for drug- and alcohol-related offenses report being sexually abused as
children” (201). From the repeated description of these abusive fathers, the reader receives an image of the harmful father
4Stephen J. Burn illustrates the importance of the ellipsis in Wallace’s writing, comparing it with William Gaddis’s
employment of the same technique (David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, 30-31). On the silenced female characters’ words(such as “Q.” in the series of “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men”), see by Clare Hayes-Brady’s argument (172-77).

and the irretrievable infection to his children. Among these examples of harmful inheritances, it dawns on the reader that
Jim, so far discussed as Hal’s father, also has a problematic father who influences young Jim. Focusing on Jim’s father,
this section will consider the father-son relationship from a wider perspective: it is not a problem only for Jim and Hal, apostmodern author and the following generation, but also for the generation before Jim, way before postmodernism.
Jim’s father is the one who taught Jim tennis (as the sport is inherited by Jim’s sons, Orin and Hal), and his teachingcontains more profound ideas on life, mediated by talks about playing tennis. He tells Jim, “[y]ou are going to be a great
tennis player. I was near-great. You will be truly great” (158) in one chapter, where only his first-person narration (to hisson, Jim) is written. His expectation seems stifling for the son, but Jim’s reaction is not manifested. Then, his lesson
gradually slides into mental issues as to how to think oneself: “Son, you’re a body, son. [. . .] son, it’s just neural spasms,
those thoughts in your mind are just the sound of your head revving, and head is still just body, Jim. Commit this tomemory. Head is body. Jim, brace yourself against my shoulders here for this hard news, at ten: you’re a machine a body
an object” (159). Jim’s father’s severe materialistic admonition seems to deny his son’s inner thoughts, calling him “amachine a body an object.” It suggests that growing up with such a mantra, Jim turns out to be a “cold person” (from hissons’ perspective) who would never outwardly manifest his inner thoughts and feelings. The section of Jim’s father’s
one-sided talking suggests its influence on the formation of Jim’s personality.
However, Jim’s father’s materialistic warning betrays the opposite sentimentality of emotional nostalgia, when he
explicates that Jim is in a different generation from his own and his father’s. His father (thus Jim’s grandfather) has neveracknowledged Jim’s father’s talent of playing tennis (and thus “never acknowledged I even existed as I was” [163]) andJim’s father having remembered that his father had “no face” (165). The “non-existent” self of Jim’s father from his own
father’s eyes now turns to the relationships with his own son, that is, Jim and his generation:

You see parents as kind or unkind or happy or miserable or drunk or sober or great or near-great or failed the way
you see a table square or a Montclair lip-red. Kids today . . . you kids today somehow don’t know how to feel, muchless love, to say nothing of respect. We’re just bodies to you. We’re just bodies and shoulders and scarred knees andbig bellies and empty wallets and flasks to you. I’m not saying something cliché like you take us for granted so muchas I’m saying you cannot . . . imagine our absence. We’re so present it’s ceased to mean. We’re environmental.
Furniture of the world. [. . .] God I’m I’m so sorry. Jim. You don’t deserve to see me like this. I’m so scared, Jim.
I’m so scared of dying without ever being really seen. Can you understand? Are you enough of a big thin prematurely
stooped young bespectacled man, even with your whole life still ahead of you, to understand? Can you see I was
giving it all I had? That I was in there, out there in the head, listening, webbed with nerves? A self that touches alledges, I remember she said. I felt it in a way I fear you and your generation never could, son. (167-68)

While Jim’s father says everything should be thought of as a body, material, or object, he also expresses the fear of being
thought coldly as a mere body by his son’s generation. There is a contradiction in his mind, and it makes him emotional
to the extent that he apologizes. Peculiarly, this apology from the father is repeated in Jim’s film “Infinite Jest” (as in thequotation from page 839), and the desire to be seen by his son, to be recognized that he “was in there,” is similar to Jim’s
wish to be “heard” in the quotation from page 839. From these two examples, one can observe that this father figure
desperately wants to “communicate” to bridge the gap between generations. Also, this complex desire to have one’s
existence acknowledged to be seen or heard, is inherited from grandfather to father to son, although this is never satisfied
in any generation.
Moreover, this fatal separation between them can be compared to the gap between each representational “ism”s—modernism, postmodernism, and post-postmodernism. Jim, representative of postmodernism, would never be free fromhis father’s, that is, modernism’s influence, and his sons in the post-postmodern generation can never be disentangledfrom their father. This repeated problem between father and son foretells that Jim’s sons, especially Hal, would repeat
Jim’s and his father’s remoteness, becoming an uncomprehensive person who shuts down his communication. The sign

of such a shut-down is what the reader faces at the beginning of the novel, although the scene is chronologically the last—
the scene where Hal becomes totally uncommunicable (3-17).
Then, for the remainder of the story, can the reader only face the last generation’s deteriorating process? Or, as Jim
created his own film works, can the sons represent their own existence apart from the father’s? In other words, is Infinite
Jest merely a repetition that Wallace created of senior postmodern writers’ suicidal attempts? To answer these questions,this paper turns to Hal’s and Mario’s juvenile works that are passingly described in the novel, and often missed by critics.
The next chapter will illustrate how the sons’ works manage their indebtedness to the older generation, even if it seems
too late or too retrospective.

-LPbV6RQbV:RUNV The reader finds that some specimens of the sons’ work—Hal’s term papers, Mario’s films—inserted as chapters or
sections in the novel. However brief their works are, Wallace’s Infinite Jest incorporates them as a script-text, as opposed
to Jim’s “Infinite Jest” that never surfaces on the page (because it kills the viewer and no one can describe the contents).
Although the sons’ works sometimes help the reader to capture the historical or political context of the story, it is rare toargue that these works are written, transcribed, and created after the father’s death (and before the narrative present).
First, Hal’s academic papers are noteworthy. In the beginning, the reader learns that his application essay to the
University of Arizona includes the following titles: “Neoclassical Assumptions in Contemporary Prescriptive Grammar,”“The Implications of Post-Fourier Transformations for a Holographically Mimetic Cinema,” “The Emergence of Heroic
Stasis in Broadcast Entertainment,” and “Montague Grammar and the Semantics of Physical Modality,” etc. That he ishighly efficient at treating words is evident by the several mentions that he memorizes the entire Oxford English
Dictionary from A to Z. The range of his topics suggests the influence of his parents’ interests—his mother is a linguist
and his father is a filmmaker.
One of Hal’s term papers consists of a section in the novel (140-42), with the main topic summarized as: “how ourNorth American idea of the hero changed from the B.S. 1970s era of ‘Hawaii Five-0’ to the B.S. 1980s era of ‘Hill Street
Blues,’” mentioning two famous American TV-series. Hal compares the hero characters in these programs (Chief Steve
McGarrett of ‘Hawaii Five-0’ and Captain Frank Furillo of ‘Hill Street Blues’). It is explained by Hal that Steve McGarrett,on the one hand, is a character of “modern heroism,” and that, on the other, Frank Furillo is a “‘post’-modern hero” [sic.](141). Hal’s definition of “postmodern hero” is “a hero whose virtues are suited to a more complex and corporate
American era. I.e., a hero of reaction” (141). The description of the “postmodern hero” reminds the reader of his
dispassionate father, Jim. Hal elaborates further: “Frank Furillo retains his sanity, composure, and superior grooming in
the face of a barrage of distracting, unheroic demands that would have left Chief Steve McGarrett slumped, unkempt, andchewing his knuckle in administrative confusion” (141). This paper is annotated to be written four years after Jim died,and here Hal searches for his father in the description of generational differences in pop culture. However, what attracts
our eyes more is the part where Hal guesses “what comes next” for that postmodern hero: “What North American hero
can hope to succeed the placid Frank? We await, I predict, the hero of non-action, the catatonic hero, the one beyond
calm, divorced from all stimulus, carried here and there across sets by burly extras whose blood signs with retrograde
amines” (142). Hal expects the future of the American hero as a non-active and catatonic hero who is gradually embedded
in other people’s lives. Given that “placid Frank” is the postmodern hero portrayed as close to Jim, this catatonic young
hero should be compared with Hal. The first scene of this novel, where Hal cannot control his body and Jim’s delusionthat Hal is disappearing into the peripheral space of the frame supports the interpretation that the “post-post-modern hero”
is Hal. In this way, his paper illustrates how he posits himself in relation to his father over the generational transition
around postmodernism. Although he foretells his future to be stupefied, Hal does nothing to stop the advance. It seems
that the debt to the father is too much to expect any power to thwart the influence. That the son posits himself among such
resignations is significant: his purpose is not to deny or resist the indebtedness; rather, by subordinating themselves to theolder generation, it passively shows the difference. It might seem contradictory, but such complicated self-reflexivity isnuanced most in the word “post-postmodern.”
Another son’s work shows a peculiar commitment toward Jim’s work: Mario adapts Jim’s The ONANtiad into a puppetshow film. Jim’s original work is “a four-hour piece of tendentiously anticonfluential political parody long since dismissed
as minor Incandenza by his late father’s archives” (380-81). Although “minor” for Jim’s oeuvre, Mario’s puppet-show
version is a major source in the novel to learn how O.N.A.N. (Organization of North American Nations) has created,
depicted by several sequences (380-86, 391-94, 398-407, 438-42), with detailed scripts and subtitles. These scenes alsocomment that watching this film becomes a popular annual event at the Enfield Tennis Academy, even though the originalis “minor” and less liked, for the younger students to learn the history of their own country. Mario’s trick is to replace
every political figure into a puppet, “all made by E.T.A.’s fourth- and fifth-grade crafts class, [. . .] of matchsticks andPopsicle-stick shards and pool-table felt with sequins for eyes and painted fingernail-parings for smiles/frowns, under
their masks” (384). Remaking the father’s work, Mario makes the film’s plot accessible in a way Jim’s work could not.
Although it is only the son’s imitation of (or a homage to) the father’s work, its dependence and submission make theoriginal complicated works accessible to contemporary peers. Mario worked on this film after Jim’s death, so it cannot
be an answer or a real conversation with the father. However, it does affect students in E.T.A., the audience who lives inthe same era. Mario’s adaptation does not change anything in the plot but changes the direction that the work addresses.
Mario inherits the filming technique and interests from Jim, and Hal (and the eldest son Orin) the talent for tennis.
There is a collaborative work of the brothers called Tennis and Feral Prodigy, written and filmed by Mario, and narrated
by Hal, almost three years after their father died. The sons’ work is rarely featured in other critics’ readings, but it isimportant when we consider the indebtedness of the sons to their father because it is a putative answer that was possible
only momentarily. The contents of the work are described as a narrated script—voiced by Hal, written by Mario—frompages 172 to 176. It begins with some introductive statements about life in the Tennis Academy and descriptions about
being a tennis prodigy who aspires to be a professional player. The script consists of a list of directions, seemingly givenby the senior students of E.T.A. to the newcomer, for instance:

This is how to hold the stick.
Learn to call the racket a stick. Everyone does, here. It’s a tradition: The Stick. Something so much an extensionof you deserves a sobriquet.
Please look. You’ll be shown exactly once how to hold it. This is how to hold it. Just like this. Forget all thenear-Eastern-slice-backhand-grip bafflegab. Just say Hello is all. Just shake hands with the calfskin grip of the stick.
This is how to hold it. The stick is your friend. You will become very close. (172-73)

The technical advice on holding a racket (“stick”) slides into a moral lesson on how to approach a thing. The narrator
recommends seeing it as a friend, an intimate personage that needs even a nickname. This seems to be common with
Jim’s father’s coaching, but the direction is rather reverse; while Jim’s father calls one’s body material, here Hal andMario consider a tennis racket as an extension of the player, as a human friend. In Tennis and the Feral Prodigy, there
are more sentences about human figures on the tennis court, the player him/herself, and their opponents.:

Try to learn from everybody, especially those who fail. This is hard. Peers who fizzle or blow up or fall down, run
away, disappear from the monthly rankings, drop off the circuit. [. . .] Nets and fences can be mirrors. And between
the nets and fences, opponents are also mirrors. This is why the whole thing is scary. This is why all opponents arescary and weaker opponents are especially scary.
See yourself in your opponents. They will bring you to understand the Game. To accept the fact that the Gameis about managed fear. That its object is to send from yourself what you hope will not return.
This is your body. They want you to know. You will have it with you always. (176)The opponent player is also the extension (“mirror”) of the player him/herself, and his/her body is always here tocoordinate with themselves. Compared with Jim’s father’s words, “you are a body,” a cruel announcement that what washuman now is only a material object, Hal and Mario’s “This is your body” takes back what was once abject into their own
personal selves. The younger generation’s advice is more humanly, emotional, and friendship-oriented.
Moreover, the comparison between the sons’ words and Jim’s father’s words illuminates the absence of Jim’s teaching.
The literal lack of Jim’s advice to his sons in the novel strengthens the image of the deficiency of intergenerational
communication. The silence of the father is yet influential to the sons, though:Have a father whose own father lost what was there. Have a father who lived up to his own promise and then foundthing after thing to meet and surpass the expectations of his promise in, and didn’t seem just a whole hell of a lot
happier or tighter wrapped than his own failed father, leaving you yourself in a kind of feral and flux-ridden statewith respect to talent. (173)The impact of Jim (who faces the impact of his own father) causes a certain uneasiness within the sons’ minds: there arecontradictory sentiments—whether they should cry for paternal love out loud or stay quiet and practice hard, whether
they should resent and reject the inherited talent for tennis or enjoy it. This ambivalent attitude toward their father is theputative answer to their filial debt, which they could face only by absorbing the uncertain attention from the father. What
Hal and Mario do is not deny or overthrow the influence but undertake the unsolved enigma of their father, the postmodern,which was inherited from his own father, the modern.
One more thing to say is that this collaborative work is not promised to be effective; it is merely an essay about a shortfilm that Hal and Mario created almost two years ago from the narrative present. In the crucial “Year of Depend Adult
Undergarment,” the sons are not able to communicate from their hearts even between themselves, mainly because ofHal’s addiction and withdrawal. As the novel proceeds, it becomes certain that Hal would be going the same way as Jim,and the worst moment is foreshadowed in the first scene. The entire novel thus prepares the contradictive recognition thatthe post-postmodern sons are different from, and same as, the postmodern fathers simultaneously. That is what the “filialdebt” really means and such indebtedness is necessary for the wake of postmodernism because this debt is the only way
to maintain the connection with the father, who has been long out of reach, the only way for the sons to survive.

&RQFOXVLRQ This paper observes the manifestation of indebtedness in the father-son relationship that Wallace explores in Infinite
Jest as a proxy of himself as a novelist in the generation after postmodernism. As Jim’s highly postmodern films illustratereflective endlessness, the abusive and negligent father figure is repeated through their filial relationship. Although theyshare similar personal characteristics, the son and his father never fully communicate with each other. This
incommunicability is also inherited from fathers to sons, especially for Hal’s genealogy. Hal and Mario’s written
specimens reveal the contradictory feelings toward their debt to the father: even though they desperately realize that theycannot kill their fathers properly, to have an irreducible influence of the self-killing father within them makes a subtle
difference. Only a subtle one, through adapting and adopting one’s own father, is a big difference from what their father
did to his own father (i.e., their grandfather). Post-postmodern writer Wallace does not, cannot, or must not, deny theirfilial debt to postmodern fathers. The attitude to embrace the unresolvable incongruity is what makes the sons “postpostmodernists”: it is not a complete independence from the earlier generation’s suicidal desire, but a symptomatic
retention of what seems harmful to themselves.
$FNQRZOHGJPHQW
This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 22K13070.

:RUNV&LWHG
Barth, John. “The Literature of Exhaustion.” The Friday Book: Essays and Other Non-Fiction. Johns Hopkins UP, 1984,
pp. 62-76.
Barthelme, Donald. The Dead Father. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975.
Bell, Robert, and William Dowling. A Reader’s Companion to Infinite Jest. Xlibris, 2005.
Boswell, Marshall. Understanding David Foster Wallace. U of South Carolina P, 2003.
---. The Wallace Effect: David Foster Wallace and the Contemporary Literary Imagination. Bloomsbury, 2019.
Burn, Stephen J. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: A Reader’s Guide. Continuum, 2012.
Hayes-Brady, Clare. The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace: Language, Identity, and Resistance.
Bloomsbury, 2016.
Holland, Mary K. Succeeding Postmodernism: Language & Humanism in Contemporary American Literature.
Bloomsbury, 2013.
Kelly, Adam. “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction.” Consider David Foster Wallace:
Critical Essays, edited by David Hering, Sideshow Media Group Press, 2010, pp. 131-46.
Konstantinou, Lee. Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction. Harvard UP, 2016.
Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. 1979. Norton,
2018.
LeClair, Tom. “The Prodigious Fiction of Richard Powers, William Vollmann, and David Foster Wallace.” Critique, vol.
38, no. 1, fall 1996, pp. 12-37.
Miura, Reiichi. Postmodern Barthelme: Donald Barthelme and the Magic of Fiction Writing. [Posutomodan Barthelme:
shousetsu toiu mono no mahou ni tsuite], Sairyu-sha, 2005.
Nealon, Jeffery T. Post-Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Just-In-Time Capitalism. Stanford UP, 2012.
Rudrum, David, and Nicholas Stavris eds. Supplanting the Postmodern: An Anthology of Writings on the Arts and Cultureof the Early 21st Century. Bloomsbury, 2015.
Sheridan, Mark. “Interpret you, INTERPRET-ME? Or, Fictional Pasts and Fictional Futures: The Predecessors andContemporaries of David Foster Wallace.” Critical Insights: David Foster Wallace, edited by Philip Coleman,
Salem Press, 2015, pp. 78-93.
Timmer, Nicoline. Do You Feel It Too?: The Post-Postmodern Syndrome in American Fiction at the Turn of theMillennium. Rodopi, 2010.
Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest. Back Bay 10th anniversary paperback ed., Little, Brown, 2006.
---. “An Interview with David Foster Wallace.” Interview by Larry McCaffery. Review of Contemporary Fiction, 1993,
vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 127-50.
