Memories of the Limbaugh Administration 1990s Politics, Conservative Media, and Infinite Jest as a Novel of Radio

Abstract

This essay addresses the questions of why conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh appears in the background of Infinite Jest as pre-Subsidized Time president and what this small, unexplained detail opens up about the relationship of the novel and some of Wallace’s nonfiction writing to conservative media, the later rise of Donald Trump, and the role of radio in particular in Wallace’s imagination of narrative voice. While there are some things to say about Trump and about Infinite Jest’s seeming prediction of his presidency, in the figure of entertainer-turned-politician Johnny Gentle, this essay focuses instead on Wallace’s concrete (if fleeting) prediction of President Limbaugh, as well as the larger role Limbaugh’s strident, cruel, demagogic voice played in the way Wallace (a heavy listener to all sorts of radio) imagined political, media, and even fiction-writing possibilities. The essay examines how Limbaugh as major conservative media figure lies not just in the background of Infinite Jest but is threaded through Wallace’s analysis of U.S. politics and potential fascism, from the early 1990s in which Infinite Jest was largely composed through to one of Wallace’s final major essays, the 2005 account of conservative talk radio titled “Host” are analysed. In close-readings of Infinite Jest, sonic elements of Infinite Jest and certain subliminal anti-Limbaugh and anti-Gentle agendas in the radio host the novel does describe at length, Joelle van Dyne, a.k.a. Madame Psychosis, adding much-needed nuance to analyses of Wallace that focus exclusively on visual media as dominant forces in U.S. culture.