ONAN Revisited: Addiction, Waste, Depression, and US–Canadian “Interdependence” in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest

This article reconsiders David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) with a special focus on the fictional polity of ONAN (the Organization of North American Nations) in which its narrative is set, reading the novel’s increasingly salient satirical treatment of US–Canadian “Interdependence” as the basis for a multivalent allegory that weaves together themes of imperial expansion and decay, waste externalization, addiction, and depression. Drawing on concepts of “imperial metabolism,” “blowback,” and “codependency,” the author examines how Wallace maps geopolitical dynamics onto individual psychology via concentric “closed” loops of violence and despair. In this respect as in others, the novel’s much-celebrated prescience is apparent—as indeed are the limits of its vision, the particular contours of which bear the imprint of a socio-historical impasse that has since shaped our own. As the author argues, Wallace’s valorization of “sincerity” and his rejection of political engagement help account for Jest ’s doubly pessimistic depiction of therapeutic individualism (embodied by Kate Gompert) and sovereigntist militancy (embodied by Rémy Marathe) as symmetrically inadequate responses to late-capitalist crisis. This symmetry, in turn, reflects Jest ’s entrenchment in the very post-historical consciousness that it half-diagnoses, evincing a depressively “realist” foreclosure of popular sovereignty, even as imperial dysfunction becomes plain to see.