| In the final years of the twentieth century, digital data and information ruled the day. In the early part of the twenty-first century, data and information not only rule but dominate society with a grip most firm. But in this repetition of codes, both binary and linguistic, lay a core of comedic hope. Virtualist Comedies are comedic in the tradition begun by the Greeks and Romans---they contain the traditional forms of farce, satire, slapstick, and a kind of marriage plot---but they also add a repetitive, mechanistic form of human comedy that is essential in an absurd Virtualist world. These narratives, exemplified here by Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist (1999), Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (199o), and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (1995), examine the dominance of data, machines, and their comedic qualities in terms of the postmodern Virtualist world. The comedy closely resembles the comedy of the absurd popularized by the English playwright Samuel Beckett and others, but as a whole, these narratives mark the humorous stance that must be adopted in order to navigate the maze of postmodernity. |
