The Perils of Self-Consciousness : Heinrich von Kleist's "Über das Marionettentheater" in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest

Abstract

Heinrich von Kleist’s “Über das Marionettentheater” is a yet overlooked intertext in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. A comparison of the two texts shows direct textual echoes of the 1810 German essay in Infinite Jest. Infinite Jest transposes Kleist’s theme of the loss of grace through self-consciousness to its criticism of postmodern irony. Fulfilling the solution proposed in Kleist’s essay, Infinite Jest uses its structural features to create an infinite loop that, like the history of graceless man in Kleist’s essay, can be ended only by a fundamental readjustment of projections. In changing their perspective from a Euclidean, postmodern point of view to a non-Euclidean, hopeful perspective, readers can redeem themselves from the self-conscious cycles of irony. Thus IJ’s structure creates a text that is longer than its page numbers, oscillating between, and thus including, the postmodern and the sincere.