All to no a veil : crip humour and neurodiversity in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest

Critics have not failed to note that David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) is full of disabled bodies (Sloane 2019; Russell 2011). Yet, its thematic content may seem at the furthest remove from any serious type of disability studies concern. Its humour concerning bodily malfunctions seems widely off the mark, and its depiction of a tennis academy for geniuses may seem to brandish able-bodiedness. However, we argue that the novel operates via crip humour, which is a type of gallows humour which aims to shock the reader into a renewed awareness of harsh realities that might otherwise have become opaque and shrouded. Important discussions about disability rights and representation are often hijacked by nomenclature debates overshadowing the focus on actual needs. Growing increasingly relevant to disability studies and Crip Theory in recent years, concepts from the neurodiversity movement will be more central to our argument. This movement aims to reconceptualise neurodevelopmental disorders as cognitive differences. Over the past few years, literary studies have witnessed a shift from the language of mind and mentalising to the paradigm of embodied cognition, which has enabled a more sustained interaction with disability studies as well. Scholars like Karin Kukkonen and Paul Armstrong in particular have made a strong case for aligning the study of narrative with neuroscientifically informed approaches (Armstrong 2019; Kukkonen 2019). we will take a closer look at the novel’s stylistic strategies and how they may convey the experience of such neurodivergence: literary techniques that evoke distraction, hyperfocus, or hyperlexia are paramount to constituting the reading experience. As such, readers are forced to update normative understandings of what counts as communication and cognition. Wallace himself has objected to “a purely neural account” because it leaves out many other factors: “This within is what’s important here” (Wallace 2012, 21). We follow this line of argument and propose that the embodied approach allows us to revise the question of nature and/or nurture as one-sided and to broaden critical attention to encompass non-standard brains and "bad cognition" (Kukkonen).

Publication year:2024

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