Chapter 29 - Very Old Land

Summary

Hal Incandenza, early in Infinite Jest, has a dream of a tennis court that is dauntingly “complex,” with “lines going every which way, and they run oblique or meet and form relationships and boxes and rivers and tributaries and systems inside systems.” Among other meanings, this court is an image of Wallace’s complex narratives themselves, landscapes that juxtapose the regulating and other effects of systems of information, computing, government, ecology and more. This essay attempts to ground Wallace’s corpus in the systems novel, a category applied by critic Tom LeClair to the postmodern novelists that most inspired him, including Thomas Pynchon, Joseph McElroy and William Gaddis. The essay will focus its readings on Wallace’s last two novels, Infinite Jest and The Pale King, and draw briefly on archival evidence at the Ransom Center that Wallace learned much about the systems novel’s grand ambitions from not just Don DeLillo’s works but the discussion of Gregory Bateson and other systems theorists in LeClair’s In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel.