The semiotics of emoji: Infinite Jest and the yellow smiley face

Journal article

“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.

Authors: Violaris, E

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Journal: Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction
• Volume: 61
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 193-205
• Publication date: 2019-12-17
• Acceptance date: 2019-12-05
• DOI: 10.1080/00111619.2019.1703634
• EISSN: 1939-9138
• ISSN: 0011-1619
• Language: English