The Semiotics of Emoji: Infinite Jest and the Yellow Smiley Face

ABSTRACT

“Infinite Jest” is an appropriate caption to the yellow smiley face: fixed, static, and permanently happy, it is a jest that never ends. The cultural history of the yellow smiley face indicates a semantic shift since its invention in 1963, from sincere positivity to an ironic association with false pleasure and consumerism. David Foster Wallace takes the latter as his starting point, making the face a sign of the counter-cultural terrorist organization A.F.R.. Yet the role of the smiley face in Infinite Jest is not only semantic but structural; its appearance in unrelated points of the narrative reveals the extradiegetic force plotting the patterns of the text, connecting together various parts of the novel. The privileging of form of over meaning is associated with Avril Incandenza, who embodies the smiley face in this capacity: she connects rather than refers, facilitates rather than means. Like contemporary emoji, Avril’s smiley face performs a linguistically “phatic” function, based on facilitation rather than semantics. Nevertheless, the yellow smiley face taps into Wallace’s wider project of writing sincere fiction, and the solution to the formalistic smiley face of Avril is the sincere smiley face of Mario: a sign which means what it proposes to mean.

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Notes

1. For a discussion of emoji in the context of writing systems, see Marcel Danesi, The Semiotics of Emoji, pp. 1-16.

2. For instance, Ferdinand de Saussure, widely regarded as one of the founders of modern semiotics, remarks that the “main concern” of semiology will be the “whole group of systems grounded on the arbitrariness of the sign”, rather than natural signs. See Course in General Linguistics, p. 68. Eco wishes to take into account a “broader range of sign phenomena”, including symptoms (16).

3. In an interview with David Foster Wallace, Michael Silverblatt identified the structure of Infinite Jest as “fractal”, a shape where the same pattern is replicated on every scale, making the microcosm identical to the macrocosm. This was confirmed by Wallace, who commented that he structured Infinite Jest according to the Sierpinski gasket which is composed of triangles within triangles to infinite regress. See Silverblatt, “Interview with David Foster Wallace”.

4. Marshall Boswell argues that Wallace combines “cynicism and naïveté”, “irony and sentimentality”, in a way which both continues the postmodern trajectory and takes it in a new direction toward sincerity. See Understanding David Foster Wallace, pp. 18-19. See also Kirsch, “The Importance of Being Earnest”.

5. Mary K. Holland observes that Wallace’s “E Unibus Pluram” essay, often read as the manifesto for advancing beyond the dead end of irony, ends on an ironic note. She remarks: “How can a writer, however well-intentioned, survive his own unconscious addiction to irony?” (Holland 220).

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Elena Violaris

Elena Violaris is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, currently writing a thesis on levels, games and “architectures of play” in postmodern and contemporary literature.