Finite Jest: Irony and Healing in There There

Abstract

Abstract: Critical responses to Tommy Orange's There There have largely focused on its relationship to other Native American works published over the last few decades. However, a juxtaposition of the novel with an Anglo-American counterpart, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest , can prove particularly illuminating for exploring Orange's distinctiveness, along with the contemporary status of two fundamental concepts—irony and healing—in the broader Native American literary canon. For Orange, the wellspring of restorative belief can be found in an attenuated but still potent and promising form of a traditional Indigenous worldview—namely, an ideal of personal autonomy framed by the divine and emphasizing the self's subordination to and emancipation within a vivifying network of interdependent presences, both human and nonhuman. There There diagnoses pathologies afflicting contemporary Native communities with a keenly ironic eye, but it preserves, against corrosive skepticism, a robust confidence in possibilities for personal and collective recovery. What we ultimately discover in juxtaposing this work with Infinite Jest is a dramatic contrast between one tradition's lingering morbidity in the contemporary moment, and another's enduring vitality.