INTRODUCTION. A LIVING TRANSACTION: VALUE, GROUND, AND BALANCING BOOKS
1. Mary Poovey demonstrates the importance of the balance book to modern epistemology, locating in double-entry bookkeeping “a prototype of the modern fact.”
History of the Modern Fact (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 11. Wallace’s resurrection of the image is one example of his break with certain postmodern methodologies—this introduction notes several other examples.
2. Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations: The English Text of the Third Edition, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1958), §107.
3. Pankaj Mishra, “The Postmodern Moralist,” review of
Consider the Lobster, by David Foster Wallace,
New York Times, March 12, 2006.
5. Adam Kelly, “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction,” in
Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays, ed. David Hering (Los Angeles: Sideshow Media Group, 2010), 133.
6.
Stephen J. Burn, “‘Webs of Nerves Pulsing and Firing’:
Infinite Jest and the Science of Mind,” in
A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, ed. Marshall Boswell and Stephen J. Burn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 71; Stephen J. Burn, “Toward a General Theory of Vision in Wallace’s Fiction,”
English Studies 95, no. 1 (2014): 88.
7. These ambitious efforts at defining a new cultural phase, led by Wallace’s break with Barth, Pynchon, and others, bear similarity to a few more focused claims: Marshall Boswell on Wallace’s relentless efforts to reach out to readers and, bucking poststructuralist theories of all-encompassing textuality, “create a space outside his work where direct, ‘single-entendre’ principles can breathe and live” (
Understanding David Foster Wallace [2003; repr., Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009], 207); and Allard den Dulk’s reading of Wallace’s anti-irony through the lens of Kierkegaard (“Boredom, Irony, and Anxiety: Wallace and the Kierkegaardian View of the Self,” in
David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing”: New Essays on the Novels, ed. Marshall Boswell [New York: Bloomsbury, 2014], 43–60). Lee Konstantinou has expanded his postirony argument in
Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016), which appeared while this book was in press.
8. D. T. Max,
Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (New York: Viking, 2012), 255.
9. Mary K. Holland, explaining the phase after postmodernism as a reinvigoration of humanism, swims against the anti-irony tide, arguing that
Infinite Jest is unable “to overcome the irony of which it is conscious” because of its “failure to recognize and address the cultural drive toward narcissism that fuels and is fueled by that irony.”
Succeeding Postmodernism: Language and Humanism in Contemporary American Literature (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 57. David P. Rando argues for “collaps[ing]…the sentiment-irony opposition” too many Wallace critics have accepted. “David Foster Wallace and Lovelessness,”
Twentieth Century Literature 59, no. 4 (2013): 576.
10. Bruce Weber, “Wallace, Influential Writer, Dies at 46,”
New York Times, September 14, 2008.
11. Stephen J. Burn, review of
Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays, by David Hering,
Modernism/modernity 18, no. 2 (2011): 467.
12. Lucas Thompson, “Programming Literary Influence: David Foster Wallace’s ‘B.I. #59,’”
Texas Studies in Literature and Language 56, no. 2 (2014): 116.
13. Tore Rye Andersen, “Pay Attention! David Foster Wallace and His Real Enemies,”
English Studies 95, no. 1 (2014): 8.
14. Richard Godden and Michael Szalay, “The Bodies in the Bubble: David Foster Wallace’s
The Pale King,”
Textual Practice 28, no. 7 (2014): 1311.
15.
Stephen Shapiro, “From Capitalist to Communist Abstraction:
The Pale King’s Cultural Fix,”
Textual Practice 28, no. 7 (2014): 1258. A scholar of the fictions undergirding finance, Leigh Claire La Berge concludes her 2014 study of 1980s U.S. banking narratives by suggesting that it could be extended to “our own present” through
The Pale King’s evocation of “the relationship between financial and literary form.”
Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 193. Two books with contributions to the discussion of Wallace and neoliberalism were published while this book was in press: Clare Hayes-Brady,
The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace: Language, Identity, and Resistance (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016); and Mitchum Huehls,
After Critique: Twenty-First-Century Fiction in a Neoliberal Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
17. Wallace took a film seminar with Cavell while enrolled in Harvard’s philosophy Ph.D. program in 1989. David Lipsky and David Foster Wallace,
Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace (New York: Broadway Books, 2010), 236. Wallace did not finish that fall semester, checking himself into McLean Hospital over suicidal thoughts. Max,
Every Love Story, 143.
18. Stanley Cavell,
Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (1987; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 187.
19. While he limits his readings of it to
The Broom of the System, Boswell (
Understanding, 50, 54) was first to note Wallace’s yin-yang symbolism.
21. Brian McHale,
Postmodernist Fiction (1987; repr., New York: Routledge, 2003), 3–25.
22.
The idea that literature ideally communicated a culture’s values arises early in his archive: in a paper from his first year at Amherst on the French medieval
Tristan and Iseult (a legend that stayed with him: see its use in
Infinite Jest [105] and “Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar Ecko”), Wallace states that the narrative “was a product of the same age as
The Song of Roland…and thus should reflect…Romanesque ‘values.’” Wallace discusses “the value of honor” and the differences between “internalizing” plots and an “‘externalizing’ story in which values and priorities came out in actions and deeds.” His
Song of Roland paper calls the poem a “tapestry, in which different values and priorities and personalities blend and clash as the characters…conflict,” “reveal[ing] a lot about what the society depicted in the [
Song]
really values.” This sounds like the tapestry a big novel weaves as well. For a writer who would incorporate mock student essays into his work, a literary ethic of “very old traditional human verities” seems to be brewing here, tellingly not in contemporary writing but in centuries-old narratives. Other freshman-year writing stayed with him, too: another paper in the archive is on Prince Hal in
Henry IV, Part One. See David Foster Wallace, “Amherst College: essays and exams, 1980–1981, undated,” box 31, folder 6, David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, Austin.
24. Paul Giles, “All Swallowed Up: David Foster Wallace and American Literature,” in
The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, ed. Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012), 4.
25. Conley Wouters, “‘What Am I, a Machine?’: Humans and Information in
The Pale King,” in
David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing”: New Essays on the Novels, ed. Marshall Boswell (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 175.
26. Nathan Ballantyne and Justin Tosi, “David Foster Wallace and the Good Life,” in
Freedom and the Self: Essays on the Philosophy of David Foster Wallace, ed. Steven M. Cahn and Maureen Eckert (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 138.
27. Jean-François Lyotard,
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 30.
28. John Barth,
The Floating Opera and The End of the Road (1967; repr., New York: Anchor, 1988), 295.
29. Michael LeMahieu,
Fictions of Fact and Value: The Erasure of Logical Positivism in American Literature, 1940–1975 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 5.
30. Charles B. Harris, “David Foster Wallace: ‘That Distinctive Singular Stamp of Himself,’”
Critique 51, no. 2 (2010): 174.
31. Robert C. Jones, “The Lobster Considered,” in
Gesturing Toward Reality: David Foster Wallace and Philosophy, ed. Robert K. Bolger and Scott Korb (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 183. For Wallace’s opposition to Benthamite “
value hedonism,” see Ballantyne and Tosi, “David Foster Wallace and the Good Life,” 141.
32. John D. Caputo,
The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 1986), 53.
33.
Wallace underlines his effort to reach back deeper into philosophical tradition than many postmodern novelists and critics had done when he complains to his former teacher about students who “pretend to ‘understand’ Derrida without having read Heidegger and Husserl” (unpublished letter, quoted in Boswell and Burn, preface to
A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, ed. Boswell and Burn, ix). For other Wallace references to Heidegger, see “Greatly Exaggerated” (
SFT 140–141), the McCaffery interview (
CW 45), “The Empty Plenum” (
BF 63, 66), and the use of “dasein” to refer to the infantile self in the cruise-ship essay (
SFT 317).
34. “All That” was left at Wallace’s death as a possible part of the
Pale King manuscript, but the editor Michael Pietsch opted to publish the story separately. “Everything and More:
The Pale King by David Foster Wallace,” panel discussion with Laura Miller, Michael Pietsch, Rick Moody, and Sandro Veronesi, PEN World Voices Festival video, April 26, 2011,
http://www.pen.org/video/everything-and-more-pale-king-david-foster-wallace.
35. “The world is all that is the case” is the common translation of Wittgenstein’s “Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.” Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness, rev. ed. (New York: Routledge, 1974), §1.
36. Paul Giles, “Sentimental Posthumanism: David Foster Wallace,”
Twentieth Century Literature 53, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 327–344.
37. Mary K. Holland, “Mediated Immediacy in
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,” in
A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, ed. Boswell and Burn, 111.
38. Jean-Joseph Goux,
Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 4.
39. Marc Shell,
Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophical Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 4.
40. “David Foster Wallace (
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men),” interview by Michael Silverblatt,
Bookworm, KCRW radio broadcast, August 3, 2000.
41. John Keats,
The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard, 3rd ed. (New York: Penguin, 1988), 459.
42. Katherine Rowe,
Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 122.
43. David Graeber,
Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Melville House, 2011), 27.
44. Tom LeClair placed Wallace in the systems tradition, along with Richard Powers and William Vollmann, in one of the earliest articles on
Infinite Jest. “The Prodigious Fiction of Richard Powers, William Vollmann, and David Foster Wallace,”
Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 38, no. 1 (1996): 12–37. Wallace studied intently LeClair’s book
In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), underlining numerous passages, including LeClair’s summarizing assertion, “The pretense and power of large closed systems, their fake and therefore punishing ‘certitudes,’ are the constant foci of [DeLillo’s] satire” (27). This line seems to me a solid assessment of the ambition of Wallace’s own systems novels. The Ransom Center call number for Wallace’s copy of
In the Loop is PS3554.E4425 Z75 1987 DFW.
45.
Thomas Tracey, elucidating David’s relationship to the work of his father, the moral philosopher James D. Wallace, makes a similar point in citing the father’s “Aristotelian view that ethics, the study of the good life, is a practical subject.” “The Formative Years: David Foster Wallace’s Philosophical Influences and
The Broom of the System,” in
Gesturing Toward Reality, ed. Bolger and Korb, 163. Stephen J. Burn also links Wallace’s moral project to his father’s work.
David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest
: A Reader’s Guide, 2nd ed. (New York: Continuum, 2012), 5–6.
46. Alissa G. Karl, “Things Break Apart: James Kelman, Ali Smith, and the Neoliberal Novel,” in
Reading Capitalist Realism, ed. Alison Shonkwiler and Leigh Claire La Berge (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014), 65–66.
47. Adam Kirsch, “The Importance of Being Earnest,”
New Republic (July 28, 2011).
48. Andrew Hoberek, “Adultery, Crisis, Contract,” in
Reading Capitalist Realism, ed. Shonkwiler and La Berge, 55, 42.
49. Mark McGurl, “The Institution of Nothing: David Foster Wallace in the Program,”
boundary 2 41, no. 3 (2014): 50.
50. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,
Commonwealth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), ix.
51. Lee Konstantinou, “No Bull: David Foster Wallace and Postironic Belief,” in
The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, ed. Cohen and Konstantinou, 105. In analysis drawing too sharp a divide between the political and ethical, McGurl is more harsh (and implicitly Foucauldian): in Wallace’s work, “political questions” and “motives for political contestation” are “obediently dissolved into a series of ethical choices” (“The Institution of Nothing,” 36).
52. Frederic Jameson,
Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), 49.
53. Shonkwiler and La Berge, “Introduction: A Theory of Capitalist Realism,” in
Reading Capitalist Realism, ed. Shonkwiler and La Berge, 3. For readings of Wallace making shrewd use of Jameson, see Connie Luther, “David Foster Wallace: Westward with Fredric Jameson,” in
Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays, ed. Hering, 49–61; and, especially, Paul Quinn, “‘Location’s Location’: Placing David Foster Wallace,” in
A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, ed. Boswell and Burn, 87–106.
54. Giles, “All Swallowed Up”; Josh Roiland, “Getting Away from It All: The Literary Journalism of David Foster Wallace and Nietzsche’s Concept of Oblivion,” in
The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, ed. Cohen and Konstantinou, 25–52.
55. Andrew Hoberek, “The Novel After David Foster Wallace,” in
A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, ed. Boswell and Burn, 222; Burn,
David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, 5; Kelly, “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction,” 145.
56.
Chuck Klosterman, “The Jonathan Franzen Award for Jaw-Dropping Literary Genius Goes to…Jonathan Franzen,”
GQ (December 2010).
The Corrections (2001) was, according to Chad Harbach, “David Foster Wallace!” review of
Oblivion, by David Foster Wallace,
n +
1 (Summer 2004), so influenced by
Infinite Jest as to qualify as Wallace’s own “next big novel.”
57. Burn,
David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, 4; and Toon Staes, “Rewriting the Author: A Narrative Approach to Empathy in
Infinite Jest and
The Pale King,”
Studies in the Novel 44, no. 4 (2012): 410, also connect Leonard to Wallace.
58. James Wood,
The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel (New York: Picador, 2005), 178.
59. Harbach, “David Foster Wallace!,” calls
Infinite Jest “the central American novel of the past thirty years.”
1. COME TO WORK: CAPITALIST FANTASIES AND THE QUEST FOR BALANCE IN THE BROOM OF THE SYSTEM
1. D. T. Max,
Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (New York: Viking, 2012), 187. Max’s biography reports on Wallace’s teenage job as a tennis instructor (9) and brief stints as a bus driver (while on leave from Amherst [23]), baker (in Tucson [112]), and health-club attendant (138), as well as long periods of poverty in which he scrambled for rent. But given his deep interest in work (particularly the humiliating kind) as philosophical subject, outside of teaching Wallace had little personal experience with bill-paying pursuits with which to compare writing—perhaps another reason for his distance from Marx and Marxism.
3. Ronald K. Shelp, “Business Forum: Can Services Survive Without Manufacturing?; Giving the Service Economy a Bum Rap,”
New York Times, May 17, 1987.
4. Thomas Tracey regards both Wallace’s Amherst philosophical training and his father’s moral philosophy as the key substrates for the Deweyan pragmatism of
Broom. “The Formative Years: David Foster Wallace’s Philosophical Influences and
The Broom of the System,” in
Gesturing Toward Reality: David Foster Wallace and Philosophy, ed. Robert K. Bolger and Scott Korb (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 157–176.
5.
Shonkwiler and La Berge relate Harvey’s claim in
The Postmodern Condition to Giovanni Arrighi’s similar sense (which I turn to in chapter 4) that accumulation changed fundamentally with financialization in the 1970s. In an elaboration of Hardt and Negri, Shonkwiler and La Berge also argue that capital “deepen[s]and intensif[ies] already existing sites of capitalist valorization instead of expanding imperially through cartographic space.” Alison Shonkwiler and Leigh Claire La Berge, “Introduction: A Theory of Capitalist Realism,” in
Reading Capitalist Realism, ed. Alison Shonkwiler and Leigh Claire La Berge (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014), 4.
6. Ronald Reagan, “Inaugural Address: January 20, 1981,” in
Actor, Ideologue, Politician: The Public Speeches of Ronald Reagan, ed. Davis W. Houck and Amos Kiewe (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1993), 177.
7. D. T. Max, “In the D. F. W. Archives: An Unfinished Story About the Internet,”
New Yorker (October 11, 2012); Max,
Every Love Story, 259.
8. Fredric Jameson,
Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), 314.
9. Patrick O’Donnell, “Almost a Novel:
The Broom of the System,” in
A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, ed. Marshall Boswell and Stephen J. Burn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 12.
10. Max Weber,
The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism and Other Writings (New York: Penguin, 2002), 77–78.
11. Thomas Pynchon,
Gravity’s Rainbow (1973; repr., New York: Penguin, 2000), 565; of the considerable scholarship on Pynchon’s critique of the Puritan legacy, see the benchmarks of John M. Krafft (“‘And How Far-Fallen’: Puritan Themes in
Gravity’s Rainbow,”
Critique 18, no. 3 [1977]: 55–73) and Christopher Leise (“‘Presto Change-o! Tyrone Slothrop’s English Again!’ Puritan Conversion, Imperfect Assurance, and the Salvific Sloth in
Gravity’s Rainbow,”
Pynchon Notes 56–57 [2009]: 127–143).
12. McHale calls
Broom “abjectly imitative” of
The Crying of Lot 49, though he gives Wallace “the benefit of the doubt” on his “implausible” claim not to have read
Lot 49 before writing
Broom (“
The Pale King, Or, The White Visitation,” in
A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, ed. Boswell and Burn, 194). But D. T. Max recounts a scene of Wallace first encountering
Lot 49 his junior year at Amherst (“The Unfinished: David Foster Wallace’s Struggle to Surpass
Infinite Jest,”
New Yorker, March 9, 2009).
13. Thomas Pynchon,
V. (1963; repr., New York: Harper Perennial, 2005), 506.
14.
Oxford English Dictionary Online, “cattle.”
15. John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity,” in
The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630–1649, ed. James Savage, Richard S. Dunn, and Laetitia Yaendle (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 10.
16. Reagan, “Farewell Address to the Nation: January 11, 1989,” in
Actor, Ideologue, Politician, ed. Houck and Kiewe, 327.
17.
Don DeLillo,
White Noise (New York: Penguin, 1985), 4.
18. In his paperback copy (from 1984) of
The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (Hyde’s original title), Wallace marked the copyright-page explanation of the cover image, the anonymous mid-nineteenth-century painting
Basket of Apples, product of “the Shaker Community in Hancock, Massachusetts.” That explanation continues, “The Shakers believed that they received their arts as gifts from the spiritual world. Persons who strove to become receptive of songs, dances, paintings, and so forth were said to be ‘laboring for a gift,’ and the works that they created circulated as gifts within the community” (and without an artist’s name attached). While we cannot know when Wallace first read
The Gift or marked that page, it is possible he did so before finishing
Broom. The Ransom Center call number for Wallace’s copy of
The Gift is GN449.6.H93 1983b DFW.
19. John D. Caputo,
Demythologizing Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 61.
20. Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations: The English Text of the Third Edition, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1958), §241.
21. For readings of immanence in
Broom,
Infinite Jest, and “The Suffering Channel,” by way of a comparison of Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of Kafka with Wallace’s, see my “‘We’ve Been Inside What We Wanted All Along’: David Foster Wallace’s Immanent Structures,” forthcoming in
Literature and the Encounter with Immanence, ed. Brynnar Swenson (Amsterdam: Brill, 2016).
22. Marshall Boswell,
Understanding David Foster Wallace (2003; repr., Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), 50. The tremendous meaning I show Wallace packing into initials throughout may derive from his love of
The Names, the novel about an initials-driven cult that Wallace told DeLillo was both his introduction to the oeuvre and still among his three “favorites.” Wallace to DeLillo, June 11, 1992, David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, Austin.
23.
Broom, a novel of “
almosts,” is rife with intentional formal gaps and incompletenesses, as Patrick O’Donnell argues (“Almost a Novel,” 9–10), and there is meaning in the ways it stops short of symmetry. The book pays much attention to the sun and sundial images, and its plot, seemingly set up to extend much further in time, stops, amid apocalyptic events, on September 11. That date must have looked far different to Wallace in retrospect, but in context it is notably about twelve days shy of the traditional beginning of Libra’s reign in the skies, September 23. As written,
Broom’s 1990 plot runs eighteen days, from August 25, Rick’s first journal date (
B 32), to the night of September 11 (
B 458). See chapters 3 and 6 for more on the importance of the dates Wallace’s novels
fail to reach.
24.
This quotation is from Stanley Cavell,
This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures After Emerson After Wittgenstein (1989; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 34.
25. Daniel 2:40–43 (New International Version).
26. Lance Olsen, “Termite Art, or Wallace’s Wittgenstein,”
Review of Contemporary Fiction 13, no. 2 (1993): 201.
27. Wallace is also fond of neurological allegories, as Steven J. Burn notes of the Incandenza brothers (“‘Webs of Nerves Pulsing and Firing’:
Infinite Jest and the Science of Mind,” in
A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, ed. Boswell and Burn, 68–69), and
Broom suggests that the two sides of the brain need to be connected and brought into balance: Lenore’s initial L makes her the left brain, commonly associated with rationality, while Rick (R) is the emotion-driven right brain.
28. David Lipsky and David Foster Wallace,
Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace (New York: Broadway Books, 2010), 35.
29. O’Donnell (“Almost a Novel,” 8) also places
Broom in this genre. For a differing reading of
Broom’s Wittgenstein/Derrida “conversation,” claiming that
Broom “asks what it means to write a novel in the wake of poststructuralism” and identifying Lenore and Bombardini with opposed forms of eschatology, see Bradley J. Fest, “‘Then Out of the Rubble’: David Foster Wallace’s Early Fiction,” in
David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing”: New Essays on the Novels, ed. Marshall Boswell (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 87.
30. Giving a sense of how prominent Derrida was in Wallace’s education, Max notes that at Amherst he “reveled in…‘The Double Session’ and ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’” (
Every Love Story, 38) and took a class focused on
Of Grammatology at Arizona (56).
31. Sean Sayers, “Creative Activity and Alienation in Hegel and Marx,”
Historical Materialism 11, no. 1 (2003): 110.
32. This is the rendering of the first heading under “Observing Reason” by A. V. Miller in his highly regarded and much-used translation of Hegel’s
Phenomenology, first published in 1976.
33. Karl Marx,
Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1977), 1:163.
34.
This reference to medieval Scotland may be autobiographical for Wallace, who, according to Lipsky’s interview, had a poster from the movie
Braveheart (1995), an epic account of William Wallace, in his house. “That’s my fucking
ancestor,” he says. “I think I saw that four times. Just to hear guys in kilts going, ‘Wal-lace, Wal-lace!’…I
wept, as he cried ‘Freedom’” (
Although of Course, 168). William Wallace was “never cowardly…I couldn’t
recognize myself in him at all, you know?” (169). In
Broom, such emotional attachment to ancestral example registers as an implicit yearning for a different economic order.
35. Dale Jacquette,
Wittgenstein’s Thought in Transition (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1998), 259.
36. Dale Peterson, an Amherst professor and Wallace’s thesis advisor on
Broom, notes in “The Start of Everything” that Wallace, in a 1983–1984 modern American literature course, submitted a “brilliant, spirited literary defense of [Frank] Norris’ odd coupling of bizarre incident and semi-serious philosophizing” (a good description of
Broom’s own mode!) when Peterson, after assigning it, disparaged
McTeague in class. Rick refracts the murderous ending of
McTeague when (having told his fable of a theoretical dentist) he handcuffs himself to Lenore in the G.O.D. In Norris, McTeague kills Trina, takes her lottery winnings, and escapes to Death Valley, where he is hunted by a vengeful Marcus, who handcuff’s himself to McTeague before being killed by him. Rick—trying mimetically to make himself a literary character in a way opposed to the Lenorean peripheralization described earlier—sees himself as the ineffectual Marcus, rival to the masculine McTeague (i.e., Lang). Reading
Broom in dialogue with literary naturalism underscores just how much brute male sexuality and possessiveness appear in the novel (and remain operative for Wallace up through
The Pale King’s horrifying portrayal, in language indebted to the contemporary American naturalist Cormac McCarthy, of the multiple rape victim Toni Ware).
2. NEW DEALS: (THE) DEPRESSION AND DEVALUATION IN THE EARLY STORIES
1. Eric Gelman, “Does 1987 Equal 1929?”
New York Times, October 20, 1987.
2. Paul Crosthwaite, “The Accident of Finance,” in
Virilio Now: Current Perspectives in Virilio Studies, ed. John Armitage (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), 178.
3. D. T. Max,
Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (New York: Viking, 2012), 25; Max noted Wallace’s childhood ambition to be a congressman in a presentation I attended at the David Foster Wallace Conference, Illinois State University, May 23, 2014.
4.
In the preface to
Signifying Rappers (1990; repr., New York: Back Bay, 2013), Mark Costello describes their co-composition of the book after Wallace became stalled: Costello wrote out replies to their conversations and “left [them] on his desk. It was Dave’s idea to incorporate my responses and turn the essay into a coauthored book” (xvi). The pair also cowrote a humor magazine at Amherst (Max,
Every Love Story, 26). Costello describes Wallace as “intensely competitive everywhere” (
Signifying Rappers, xiv)—why not in inventive analysis of New Deal economics as well?
5. Marshall Boswell,
Understanding David Foster Wallace (2003; repr., Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), 65; Kasia Boddy, “A Fiction of Response:
Girl with Curious Hair in Context,” in
A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, ed. Marshall Boswell and Stephen J. Burn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 23–24.
6. Jason Puskar,
Accident Society: Fiction, Collectivity, and the Production of Chance (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012), 14, 3.
7. Michael Szalay,
New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), 3.
8. David Foster Wallace, “Crash of ’69,”
Between C & D (Winter 1989): 3. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
9. In correspondence in his archive Wallace continues to refer to the story with the original title even after its publication in 1989, in the small journal
Between C & D (which produced stories on a dot-matrix printer and placed them in plastic bags). The story was never collected, but Wallace did include it in original plans for both
Girl with Curious Hair and
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, his correspondence with Nadell shows. Wallace to Nadell, September 20, 1987, and August 29, 1996, Bonnie Nadell Collection of David Foster Wallace, Harry Ransom Center, Austin.
10. The reference is to the famous aphorism (§125) of Nietzsche’s
The Gay Science: “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”
11. “It is no exaggeration to insist that going off the gold standard was the economic equivalent of the death of God,” Mark C. Taylor argues in
Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). “God functions in religious systems like gold functions in economic systems: God and gold are believed to be the firm foundations that provide a secure anchor for religious, moral, and economic values. When this foundation disappears, meaning and value become unmoored” (6).
12. Many became suspicious of Reagan’s mental failures as early as his noticeable faltering in a 1984 debate. Wallace also took Reagan’s mental health as a subject in the unfinished story “Wickedness,” “from around 2000,” which Max discovered among the
Pale King materials: in it a tabloid reporter tries to “shoot pictures of Ronald Reagan [at a nursing home] beset by Alzheimer’s.” D. T. Max, “In the D.F.W. Archives: An Unfinished Story About the Internet,”
New Yorker, October 11, 2012.
13.
The historical vertigo, proleptic of the confusions caused by Subsidized Time, also makes “Crash” a small-scale prototype for
Infinite Jest.
14. David Foster Wallace, interview by Charlie Rose, televised on PBS, March 27, 1997.
15. One of the typescript drafts of “Crash” has Wallace’s address on the title page as the University of Arizona English department. Wallace, “‘Crash of ’62,’ typescripts, undated,” box 27, folder 2, David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, Austin.
16. Examples of such conventional notation can be found in Wallace’s essay on fatalism: see page 191, for instance, in which he presents a series of rules that all use “= 1” to signify “is true.” David Foster Wallace,
Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will, ed. Steven M. Cahn and Maureen Eckert (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 191. For technical explications of Wallace’s attempted refutation of Richard Taylor’s fatalism, see Steven M. Cahn and Maureen Eckert, eds.,
Freedom and the Self: Essays on the Philosophy of David Foster Wallace (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), esp. William Hasker’s chapter, “David Foster Wallace and the Fallacies of ‘Fatalism,’” 16–25.
17. Wallace, interview by Charlie Rose.
18. Gen. 1:10 (New International Version).
19. Max (
Every Love Story, 74) sees an homage to William Gass, Boddy (“A Fiction of Response,” 25) makes connections to Cormac McCarthy, and Boswell (
Understanding, 85–86) hears echoes of Faulkner and Joyce. But “John Billy” is also born of Steinbeck’s great Dust Bowl novel,
The Grapes of Wrath. Another source is DeLillo’s
The Names and Owen Brademas’s memories of his Depression-era Pentecostal congregation praying for rain and speaking in tongues, a scene played on in Tap’s ending novel.
20. Martin Heidegger,
Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010), 131–132.
21. In explaining “Westward” Wallace mentions his interest in “mediated myths” (
CW 41). His understanding of myth in general is deeply indebted to Joseph Campbell, whose
Myths to Live By he annotated. On the page of promotional material at the front of Wallace’s edition is this sentence: “‘The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and The Beast, stands this afternoon on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.’—Joseph Campbell.” “This is my pt,” Wallace writes in the margin. The Ransom Center call number for Wallace’s copy of
Myths to Live By is BL315.C27 1984 DFW.
22. Saul Bellow,
Herzog (1964; repr., New York: Penguin, 2003), 75. Wallace says in a 1993 interview, “I like Bellow” (
CW 20) and notably leaves him off a satiric list of U.S. fiction’s “Great Male Narcissists” (
CL 51).
23. J.D.’s
perspective is connected to Stanley Cavell’s “Being Odd, Getting Even (Descartes, Emerson, Poe)” in
In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), which seems to contain a seed of Wallace’s critique of skepticism: in 1988, making notes for “The Empty Plenum,” he underlines Cavell’s remark, “I take skepticism not as the moral of a cautious science laboring to bring light into a superstitious, fanatical world, but as the recoil of a demonic reason, irrationally thinking to dominate the earth” (138). The Ransom Center call number for Wallace’s copy of
In Quest of the Ordinary is PS217.P45 C38 1988 DFW.
24. In less heightened terms, this “Reunion” reimagines the wildly successful Coca-Cola 1971 “Hilltop” commercial, featuring a multicultural cast holding Coke bottles and singing “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke.” Wallace refers to the iconic final crane shot when J.D. notes, regarding the LordAloft helicopter’s arrival, “The camera’s shots will be panoramic” (
GCH 309).
25. For attention to Wallace and gender, see Clare Hayes-Brady, “‘…’: Language, Gender, and Modes of Power in the Work of David Foster Wallace,” in
A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, ed. Boswell and Burn, 131–150; and Kathleen Fitzpatrick,
The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006), 201–234. A notable exception to the general neglect of race in Wallace is Tara Morrisey and Lucas Thompson’s interpretation of
Signifying Rappers (“‘The Rare White at the Window’: A Reappraisal of Mark Costello and David Foster Wallace’s
Signifying Rappers,”
Journal of American Studies 49, no. 1 [2015]: 77–97) in relation to whiteness studies and Wallace’s “commit[ment]to recording both subtle and unsubtle forms of racism” in
Infinite Jest and other fiction (95). But this essay does not examine “Lyndon.”
26. “Lyndon” refers subliminally to Coover when, just before the climactic homoerotic scene, a stirring passage about geography and nationhood asks the reader to “go as far west as the limit of the country lets you—Bodega Bay, not Whittier, California” (
GCH 117), a town best known for being Nixon’s birthplace and frequently mentioned in Coover’s book. By contrast, Boswell (
Understanding, 82) sees Wallace building on Coover’s “curiously sympathetic portrayal” of Nixon by remaking Johnson.
27. Michael LeMahieu,
Fictions of Fact and Value: The Erasure of Logical Positivism in American Literature, 1940–1975 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 12.
28. Mark McGurl,
The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 417n76.
29.
But Mark McGurl has, in a more recent article (“The Institution of Nothing: David Foster Wallace in the Program,”
boundary 2 41, no. 3 [2014]: 27–54), argued that Wallace is “a Program Man if ever there was one” (32), a writer whose work “marks a further step toward the thorough
normalization of the emergent conditions of institutionalization” (31).
30. Boddy, though, employing some of
The Program Era’s terms, claims that “Westward” shows “the creative writing class” to be “not a refuge from, but rather an example of, corporate capitalism” (“A Fiction of Response,” 29).
31. Lewis Hyde,
The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, 25th anniversary ed. (New York: Vintage, 2007), 4, 9, 12.
32. The impact of rising consumer debt among young American adults in the 1980s is another dimension of Wallace’s economic allegory—and another sign of his prescience for the long-term effects of neoliberal principles.
33. David Graeber,
Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Melville House, 2011), 172.
34. I refer here again to A. V. Miller’s well-known translation of Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), which renders “
Herrschaft und Knechtschaft” in chapter 3 as “Lordship and Bondage.”
3. DEI GRATIA: WORK ETHIC, GRACE, AND GIVING IN INFINITE JEST
1. Unpublished letter, quoted in Marshall Boswell, preface to
David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing”: New Essays on the Novels, ed. Marshall Boswell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), vii.
2. D. T. Max,
Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (New York: Viking, 2012), 141.
3. Elizabeth Freudenthal, “Anti-Interiority: Compulsiveness, Objectification, and Identity in
Infinite Jest,”
New Literary History 41, no. 1 (Winter 2010): 191.
4. Stephen J. Burn,
David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest
: A Reader’s Guide, 2nd ed. (New York: Continuum, 2012), 61–62.
5. Lawrence Buell,
The Dream of the Great American Novel (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014).
6. “David Foster Wallace (
Infinite Jest),” interview by Michael Silverblatt,
Bookworm, KCRW radio broadcast, April 11, 1996.
7. Joseph Conte,
Design and Debris: A Chaotics of Postmodern American Fiction (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002), 29.
8.
Thomas Pynchon, “Nearer, My Couch, to Thee,”
New York Times Book Review, June 6, 1993.
9. Luc Herman and Steven C. Weisenburger, Gravity’s Rainbow
, Domination, and Freedom (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013), 112.
10. Thomas Pynchon,
Gravity’s Rainbow (1973; repr., New York: Penguin, 2000), 179–180.
11. John Lingan, “William Gaddis, the Last Protestant,”
Quarterly Conversation 14 (2009).
12. William Gaddis,
The Rush for Second Place: Essays and Occasional Writings (New York: Penguin, 2002), 46. Gaddis quotes from Ernst Troeltsch’s
The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, trans. Olive Wyon (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 1992), 2:645.
13. William Gaddis,
J R (1975; repr., New York: Penguin, 1993), 477.
14. For analysis of
J R and other Gaddis works on the subject of Puritanism and the Protestant ethic, see Steven Moore,
William Gaddis (New York: Twayne, 1989), 70–73. Brian McHale (“
The Pale King, Or, The White Visitation,” in
Companion, ed. Boswell and Burn, 209n9) notes that in unpublished letters Wallace reveals he did not “read Gaddis until relatively late” in his career (McHale’s source is Burn, who is preparing the letters for publication). But I use Gaddis as a guide to
Infinite Jest in part because of Moore’s description of an early typescript Wallace (his colleague at Illinois State) shared with him in 1993. Moore spots a few Gaddis allusions, mentions their “similar tastes in fiction (we both revere William Gaddis, for example),” and notes that Wallace taught
J R “at ISU during this time” (“The First Draft Version of
Infinite Jest,”
The Howling Fantods, September 20, 2008). On Wallace’s reading of Gaddis’s
A Frolic of His Own, see chapter 5.
15. Along these same lines, A.F.R. members’ paraplegic states, as caused by “
Le Jeu du Prochain Train,” are Wallace’s attempts to vivify the process by which sadists are made (
IJ 1058n304). For a treatment of the A.F.R. and other bodies in the more realistic terms of disability law, see Emily Russell,
Reading Embodied Citizenship: Disability, Narrative, and the Body Politic (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 170–197.
16. Conley Wouters also recognizes that
Infinite Jest’s characters “constantly and necessarily struggle to identify the most fundamental signs of their own interior selfhood, of proof that they exist.” “‘What Am I, a Machine?’: Humans and Information in
The Pale King,” in
David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing”: New Essays on the Novels, ed. Marshall Boswell (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 169.
17. David Lipsky and David Foster Wallace,
Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace (New York: Broadway Books, 2010), 68.
18.
Timothy Richard Aubry,
Reading as Therapy: What Contemporary Fiction Does for Middle-Class Americans (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011), 104.
19. Mary K. Holland, “‘The Art’s Heart’s Purpose’: Braving the Narcissistic Loop of David Foster Wallace’s
Infinite Jest,”
Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 47, no. 3 (2006): 221–223.
20. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,
Commonwealth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 30.
21. Mark Bresnan, “The Work of Play in David Foster Wallace’s
Infinite Jest,”
Critique 50, no. 1 (2008): 53, 58, 61.
22. Wallace is again exploring Depression-era lives: his (paternal) grandfather was a dentist, and, he says, “there was a lot more dental trivia in the first draft of the book.” “The Jester Holds Court: An Interview with David Foster Wallace,” by Valerie Stivers,
stim.com 1, no. 1 (May 15, 1996),
http://www.stim.com/Stim-x/0596May/Verbal/dfwmain.html.
23. Paul Quinn, “‘Location’s Location’: Placing David Foster Wallace,” in
Companion, ed. Boswell and Burn, 91; Heather Houser, “
Infinite Jest’s Environmental Case for Disgust,” in
The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, ed. Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012), 139.
24. Bradley J. Fest, “The Inverted Nuke in the Garden: Anti-Eschatology and Archival Emergence in David Foster Wallace’s
Infinite Jest,”
boundary 2 39, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 125–149; Daniel Grausam, “‘It Is Only a Statement of the Power of What Comes After’: Atomic Nostalgia and the Ends of Postmodernism,”
American Literary History 24, no. 2 (2012): 308–336.
26. James McCarthy, “Privatizing Conditions of Production: Trade Agreements as Neoliberal Environmental Governance,” in
Neoliberal Environments: False Promises and Unnatural Consequences, ed. Nik Heynen et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 40.
27. In notes in his copy of DeLillo’s
Ratner’s Star at the Ransom Center (its call number is PS3554.E4425 R386 1980 DFW), Wallace seems to be working out Steeply’s name: at the top of the title page is a list in block capitals: “INGE / SLOTT / STEEPLY.” Slott might have formed an internovel dialogue with the coin and sexual associations (females as slots) of
Broom’s Evelyn Slotnik, whom Fieldbinder in “Love” uses for adulterous sex. In the Fieldbinder story there is thus a tension between a used Slotnik and Mr. Costigan (“cost,” or even “cost, again”?), whose indeed costly urges toward Scott Slotnik foreshadow a Wallace theme in
Brief Interviews—see chapter 4.
28.
These qualities, as well as Marathe’s agile manipulation of ideas, recall LaVache, whose name’s resemblance to Marathe’s (-a-a-he) is no coincidence. Adam Kelly (“David Foster Wallace and the Novel of Ideas,” in
Long Thing, ed. Boswell) ties together all three novels through the symmetries of the dialogue between LaVache and Lenore, that between Marathe and Steeply, and §19 of
The Pale King.
30.
David Foster Wallace, “
Infinite Jest: first two sections, typescript drafts and photocopy, undated,” box 16, folder 3, David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, Austin.
31.
Oxford English Dictionary Online, 2nd ed., s.v. “addict.”
32. Saidiya V. Hartman,
Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 109.
33. Gompert, in her ungratified desire for more “shock” (
IJ 72), is Wallace’s rewriting of
The Bell Jar by fellow McLean Hospital patient Sylvia Plath, a narrative culminating in electroshock therapy that Gompert reads (the unread Gately calls its author “Sylvia Plate” [
IJ 591]). Himself’s suicide clearly revisits Plath’s as well. The note Gompert’s doctor writes regarding her appeal for shock—“
Then what?”—suggests that this therapeutic solution is, in contrast to AA’s voluminous storytelling, an antinarrative choice (
IJ 78). On Wallace’s own fears about the courses of electroshock therapy he received, see Max (
Every Love Story, 300).
34. For Wallace’s anxieties about the United States “
really setting [itself] up for repression and fascism,” see Lipsky and Wallace (
Although of Course, 158). In 2006 Wallace warns of U.S. fascism again, worried over corporate power in politics (“‘A Frightening Time in America’: An Interview with David Foster Wallace,” by Ostap Karmodi,
NYR Blog [June 13, 2011]). On
Infinite Jest’s critique of the liberal subject’s autonomy, see N. Katherine Hayles, “The Illusion of Autonomy and the Fact of Recursivity: Virtual Ecologies, Entertainment, and
Infinite Jest,”
New Literary History 30, no. 3 (1999): 675–697.
35. Karmodi, “‘A Frightening Time in America.’”
36. David Foster Wallace, “
Infinite Jest: handwritten drafts, undated,” box 15, folder 6, David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, Austin. Alongside this pennies passage, run together on the same handwritten pages, are prototypes of passages in the eventual novel, including the first description of Lyle (127–128 in the novel) and Hal’s “We are all dying to give our lives away” monologue (900 in the novel). Wallace typed up a revised version of the pennies passage, calling it an essay by Hal for his mother’s “Expository But Errorless Composition” class, but did not include it in the published novel. David Foster Wallace, “
Infinite Jest: typescript draft fragments, undated,” box 16, folder 7, David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, Austin.
37. Critics who quote from these sections include Iannis Goerlandt, “‘Put the Book Down and Slowly Walk Away’: Irony and David Foster Wallace’s
Infinite Jest,”
Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 47, no. 3 (2006): 310–311; Holland, “‘Art’s Heart’s Purpose,’” 223; and Bresnan, “Work of Play,” 64–66.
38. Sigmund Freud,
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth, 1953–1974), 12:187.
39. On Wallace’s interest in Buddhism and other “Eastern religious practices,” including sitting meditation, see Max (
Every Love Story, 257). Max dates the origin of this interest to a woman Wallace met in Syracuse, where in 1992 he worked intensively on
Infinite Jest (181).
40. For a Lacanian reading of the whole novel, see Marshall Boswell,
Understanding David Foster Wallace (2003; repr., Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), 128–133.
41. Lee Konstantinou, “No Bull: David Foster Wallace and Postironic Belief,” in
Legacy, ed. Cohen and Konstantinou, 86.
42. David H. Evans, “‘The Chains of Not Choosing’: Free Will and Faith in William James and David Foster Wallace,” in
Companion, ed. Boswell and Burn, 185.
43. David Foster Wallace, “Quo Vadis–Introduction,”
Review of Contemporary Fiction 16, no. 1 (1996): 7–8.
44. Max Weber,
The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism and Other Writings (New York: Penguin, 2002), 38.
45. For arguments relating Wallace to pragmatism, see Thomas Tracey, “The Formative Years: David Foster Wallace’s Philosophical Influences and
The Broom of the System,” in
Gesturing Toward Reality: David Foster Wallace and Philosophy, ed. Robert K. Bolger and Scott Korb (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014); Clare Hayes-Brady, “The Book, the Broom and the Ladder: Philosophical Groundings in the Work of David Foster Wallace,” in
Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays, ed. David Hering (Los Angeles: Sideshow Media Group, 2010), 31–33; and Evans, “‘The Chains of Not Choosing.’”
46. For several other punning dimensions of the morpheme “Ennet,” including those suggesting entrapment and immanence, see my “‘We’ve Been Inside What We Wanted All Along’: David Foster Wallace’s Immanent Structures,” forthcoming in
Literature and the Encounter with Immanence, ed. Brynnar Swenson (Amsterdam: Brill, 2016).
47. Michael North,
Machine-Age Comedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 168.
48.
Jackson Lears,
Something for Nothing: Luck in America (New York: Penguin, 2004), 2. Randy Ramal suggests that Wallace “would have liked” Roquentin, the hero of
Nausea, and his view of a life that “does not carry a preconceived essential meaning to be appropriated and followed” (“Beyond Philosophy: David Foster Wallace on Literature, Wittgenstein, and the Dangers of Theorizing,” in
Gesturing Toward Reality, ed. Bolger and Korb, 180), while Allard den Dulk finds “Sartrean virtues” throughout
Infinite Jest (“Boredom, Irony, and Anxiety: Wallace and the Kierkegaardian View of the Self,” in
Long Thing, ed. Boswell). Wallace calls
Nausea a “work[]of genius” in “The Empty Plenum” (
BF 75). Much work remains to be done on Wallace’s rich relationship to existentialist novelists, including Camus in
The Pale King.
49. Max writes of Gately’s real-life model having “a Dostoevskian gloss to him, the redeemed criminal” (
Every Love Story, 141). Raskolnikov in
Crime and Punishment is one model: the associations include an unplanned killing (DuPlessis), a hallucinatory stint in a hospital, Joelle’s parallels with Sonya, and the Revere ADA’s with Porfiry. For a comparison of
Infinite Jest to
The Brothers Karamazov, see Timothy Jacobs, “The Brothers Incandenza: Translating Ideology in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s
The Brothers Karamazov and David Foster Wallace’s
Infinite Jest,”
Texas Studies in Literature and Language 49, no. 3 (2007): 265–292.
50. Jacques Derrida,
Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 26–27.
51. Adam Kelly, “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction,” in
Consider, ed. Hering, 139, 138.
52. Charles B. Harris, “David Foster Wallace: ‘That Distinctive Singular Stamp of Himself,’”
Critique 51, no. 2 (2010): 172.
53. Lewis Hyde,
The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (1984), 50. See chapter 1, n. 18.
54. Wallace’s notes come in Hyde’s final chapter, on Ezra Pound, and mention Marathe, Steeply, Hal, and Pemulis (Hyde [1984], 243, 247, 249).
56. Jonathan Lethem,
The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc. (New York: Vintage, 2011), 115, 117.
57. Paul Giles, “All Swallowed Up: David Foster Wallace and American Literature,” in
Legacy, ed. Cohen and Konstantinou, 7–9.
58. Jonathan Lethem,
Chronic City (2009; repr., New York: Vintage, 2010), 12.
59.
Jamie Clarke, ed.,
Conversations with Jonathan Lethem (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), 173, 174. That this January 2010 interview occurred four months before Lethem was officially announced as Wallace’s successor as Disney Professor of Creative Writing at Pomona may also influence these no-disrespect-intended caveats.
60. The fact that Roy Tony, abuser of Wardine,
does get the help of AA (he enforces hugging [
IJ 505–507]) but his nominal kin Poor Tony does not is another example of a karmic injustice. Class is a largely untouched topic in Wallace criticism, but Buell does identify in the “ethnographies” of E.T.A. and Ennet House “contrast[s] between privileged and downscale, elect and preterite” (
Dream of the Great American Novel, 455).
61. John Barth, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” in
The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 64.
62. Wallace Stevens,
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Vintage, 1990), 503.
63. Making his case for prescriptive grammar, Wallace in “Authority and American Usage” lightly objects to implications of another aspect of Chomsky’s argument, the idea “that there exists a Universal Grammar beneath and common to all languages” and “imprinted” on the human brain (
CL 92). On Wallace’s extensive reading in cognitive science, see Stephen J. Burn, “‘Webs of Nerves Pulsing and Firing’:
Infinite Jest and the Science of Mind,” in
Companion, ed. Boswell and Burn.
64. Boswell,
Understanding, 112.
65. David Foster Wallace, “
Infinite Jest: handwritten drafts, undated,” box 15, folder 5, David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, Austin.
4. OTHER MATH: HUMAN COSTS, FRACTIONAL SELVES, AND NEOLIBERAL CRISIS IN BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN
1. “Other Math” appeared in the
Western Humanities Review (Summer 1987). In a letter of August 29, 1996, to Nadell (Bonnie Nadell Collection of David Foster Wallace, Harry Ransom Center, Austin), Wallace includes “Other Math” among stories for a possible collection:
much changed over the next few years, this is the book that would become
Brief Interviews.
2. Tom LeClair, “The Non-Silence of the Un-Lamblike,” review of
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, by David Foster Wallace,
The Nation, July 19, 1999.
3. Giovanni Arrighi,
The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (New York: Verso, 1994), 217.
4. David Harvey,
A Brief History of Neoliberalism (London: Oxford University Press, 2005), 33.
5.
Patrick O’Donnell, “Almost a Novel:
The Broom of the System,” in
A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, ed. Marshall Boswell and Stephen J. Burn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 4.
6. D. T. Max,
Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (New York: Viking, 2012), 248; ellipses in the original.
7. Holland also sees the collection “assert[ing] a kind of integrity” but finds the linchpin to be a “consistent structural monovocality” (“Mediated Immediacy in
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,” in
Companion, ed. Boswell and Burn, 109). In his chapter on the collection, Marshall Boswell calls
Brief Interviews a “carefully constructed…story cycle” and sees its binding theme as “the ‘interview’ and…interrogation in general.”
Understanding David Foster Wallace (2003; repr., Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), 182.
8. Gérard Genette,
Paratexts, Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 16–17.
9. Howard Brick,
Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000), 54.
10. Zadie Smith,
Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (New York: Penguin, 2009), 288.
11. Wallace confirms his attention to such meanings when, after noting that “observing a quantum phenomenon’s been proven to alter the phenomenon,” he tells Mc-Caffery that understanding of fiction must catch up to physics: “We’re not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader” (
CW 40).
12. Wendy Brown,
Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 40.
13. Michael Taussig,
The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (1980; repr., Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 11.
14. The man’s race grants further power to the son’s assertion (about his father’s uniform), “I wear nothing white. Not one white thing” (
BI 90).
15. Don DeLillo,
End Zone (1972; repr., New York: Penguin, 1986), 88.
16. Søren Kierkegaard,
A Kierkegaard Anthology, ed. Robert Bretall (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), 103. On Wallace being inspired by Kierkegaard, see Allard den Dulk, who quotes unpublished personal correspondence in which Wallace states, “I too believe that most of the problems of what might be called ‘the tyranny of irony’ in today’s West can be explained almost perfectly in terms of Kierkegaard’s distinction between the aesthetic and the ethical life” (“Boredom, Irony, and Anxiety: Wallace and the Kierkegaardian View of the Self,” in
David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing”: New Essays on the Novels, ed. Marshall Boswell [New York: Bloomsbury, 2014], 59). See also Boswell,
Understanding, 137–145.
17.
For just three examples of synthetic readings of Wallace that make significant use of “Octet,” see Lee Konstantinou, “No Bull: David Foster Wallace and Postironic Belief,” in
The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, ed. Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012); Adam Kelly, “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction,” in
Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays, ed. David Hering (Los Angeles: Sideshow Media Group, 2010); and Timothy Richard Aubry,
Reading as Therapy: What Contemporary Fiction Does for Middle-Class Americans (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011).
18. Boswell,
Understanding, 180.
20. J. Peder Zane,
The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books (New York: Norton, 2007), 128.
21. Tom McCarthy,
Remainder (New York: Vintage, 2007), 64.
23. Plato,
The Symposium, trans. Christopher Gill (London: Penguin, 1999), 24.
24. Stephen J. Burn, “‘Webs of Nerves Pulsing and Firing’:
Infinite Jest and the Science of Mind,” in
Companion, ed. Boswell and Burn, 71.
25. Naomi Klein,
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Random House, 2007), 318.
26. My account of the stochastic is generally indebted to James Owen Weatherall,
The Physics of Wall Street: A Brief History of Predicting the Unpredictable (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2013), 1–48.
27. “David Foster Wallace (
Infinite Jest),” interview by Michael Silverblatt,
Bookworm, KCRW radio broadcast, April 11, 1996.
28. Wallace shows in his philosophy thesis that Richard Taylor makes a “category mistake,” writes Leland de la Durantaye: Taylor uses semantic arguments to reach a metaphysical conclusion endorsing fatalism and calling free will an illusion. This “counterintuitive” argument, de la Durantaye claims, “was focused more on saving logic than saving the phenomena” (“The Subsurface Unity of All Things, or David Foster Wallace’s Free Will,” in
Gesturing Toward Reality: David Foster Wallace and Philosophy, ed. Robert K. Bolger and Scott Korb [New York: Bloomsbury, 2014], 22). Wallace’s fiction, particularly in its intuitive “innit” dimensions, often moves characters from maintaining logical structures such as graphed points to saving the phenomena.
29.
Surprisingly, in 2004, Wallace called “Little Expressionless Animals” the “single thing I like best” among his writings; perhaps he was compelled to return to its form in later works. “David Foster Wallace: In Conversation with David Kipen,”
City Arts & Lectures (2004),
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfjjSj9coA0.
30. In both the essay I quote (“Fictional Futures”) and “Little Expressionless Animals,” Wallace may refer obliquely to John Barth’s inclusion of a graphic version of Freitag’s Triangle in
Lost in the Funhouse (1968; repr., New York: Anchor, 2014), 95.
31. Thomas Pynchon,
The Crying of Lot 49 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006), 181.
32. E.g., Iannis Goerlandt, “‘Put the Book Down and Slowly Walk Away’: Irony and David Foster Wallace’s
Infinite Jest,”
Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 47, no. 3 (2006): 321.
33. Teddy Wayne,
Kapitoil: A Novel (New York: Harper Perennial, 2010), 87.
34. In a column on language shortening, Wayne writes of “‘I can’t with’ (the short form of ‘I can’t deal with’), which has been around for at least a few decades, including in a 1987 David Foster Wallace short story.” “On Internet Slang, IMHO,”
New York Times, March 28, 2014. Wayne leaves it unnamed, but he means “Here and There.”
35. With the window image Wayne is likely referring specifically to not just Gramma Beadsman’s broom but Wallace’s claim that
Infinite Jest is structured like a “pretty pane of glass that has been dropped off the twentieth story of a building” (
CW 57).
37. Zadie Smith,
NW (2012; repr., New York: Penguin, 2013), 135, 198.
38. Along with Dave Eggers’s
The Circle (see chapter 6),
NW is also the first major
Pale King–influenced work. A hideous man at a college party who makes short films “about boredom” (and misunderstands Wallace’s subject) badgers a woman: “It’s the only subject left. We’re all bored. Aren’t you bored?” (
NW, 237). The critic Helen Small evokes
NW’s commonality with
The Pale King when she claims regarding Leah’s lottery work that Smith’s novel undoes the traditional “opposition between proceduralism and imaginative exploration, economic accounting and novelistic recounting” (“Fully Accountable,”
New Literary History 44, no. 4 [2013]: 554).
5. HIS CAPITAL FLUSH: DESPAIRING OVER WORK AND VALUE IN OBLIVION
1. Philip Mirowski,
Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (London: Verso, 2013), 59.
2.
Dave Eggers explains that Wallace asked to have “Mister Squishy” published in
McSweeney’s under the pen name, “for the life of me I now can’t remember why”—but the move fits for an author contemplating modes of self-erasure (“Memories of David Foster Wallace,”
McSweeney’s Internet Tendency).
3. Wallace here distorts the lawsuit he faced over naming Kate Gompert after a fellow junior tennis player, satirized in the attempts to not name “R - - d ©” (obviously, Raid) as the product responsible for Mother’s disfiguring (
O 185). Also germane are the legal delays of
Girl over the naming of celebrities and corporations. For analysis of these legal problems, see chapter 6.
4. The “Oblivion” typescript draft with the Justice epigraph is in box 24, folder 8, David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, Austin. A photocopy of Justice’s essay is also among Wallace’s creative-nonfiction teaching materials; Wallace stars the passage I have as my epigraph and places quote marks around the “What glories…” sentence, presumably planning to use it as an epigraph. See “Taught essays and writing topics,” box 32, folder 8, David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, Austin.
5. Walter Kirn, “Staring Either Absently or Intently,” review of
Oblivion, by David Foster Wallace,
New York Times, June 27, 2004.
6. Wallace to DeLillo, May 20, 1997, David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, Austin.
7. Brian McHale, “
The Pale King, Or, The White Visitation,” in
A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, ed. Marshall Boswell and Stephen J. Burn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 204.
8. Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “The Decider,”
New York Times, December 24, 2006.
9. Tor Nørretranders,
The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size, trans. Jonathan Sydenham (New York: Viking, 1998), 125. Wallace’s copy of
The User Illusion is, as noted on the Ransom Center’s bibliographic entry (the call number is BF311.N675 1998p DFW), the “Advanced Uncorrected Proofs” of the first English translation, from 1998. Stephen J. Burn (“‘A Paradigm for the Life of Consciousness’:
The Pale King,” in
David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing”: New Essays on the Novels, ed. Marshall Boswell [New York: Bloomsbury, 2014], 164) cites the book as an influence on
The Pale King. For an account of Wallace’s allusions to
The User Illusion, see my “Cutting Consciousness Down to Size: David Foster Wallace, Exformation, and the Scale of Encyclopedic Fiction,” forthcoming in
Size and Scale in Literature and Culture, ed. David Wittenberg and Michael Tavel Clarke.
10. Marshall Boswell, “‘The Constant Monologue Inside Your Head’:
Oblivion and the Nightmare of Consciousness,” in
A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, ed. Marshall Boswell and Stephen J. Burn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 166.
11. David Letzler, “Encyclopedic Novels and the Cruft of Fiction:
Infinite Jest’s Endnotes,” in
Long Thing, ed. Boswell.
12. Marc Shell,
Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophical Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 14.
13.
Oxford English Dictionary Online, 3rd ed., s.v. “coin.”
14. Stephen J. Burn, “‘Webs of Nerves Pulsing and Firing’:
Infinite Jest and the Science of Mind,” in
Companion, ed. Boswell and Burn, 65.
15. David Foster Wallace, “Order and Flux in Northampton,”
Conjunctions 17 (Fall 1991): 106.
16. Wallace makes one explicit State Farm reference in his fiction: the claims adjuster who laughs over Glynn’s bricklaying fiasco in
Infinite Jest is a State Farm employee from Bloomington (
IJ 138–140), and as Pat Montesian later cuts through “the red tape at Health” to gain hospital admission for Glynn despite “insurance fraud on his yellow sheet,” the gift-driven AA network becomes an alternative form of insurance in the novel (
IJ 824).
17. Ursula K. Heise,
Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 160–177.
18. Mirowski (
Serious Crisis, 120), writing of the broader economy and undermining neoliberalism’s adoration of capitalist “risk-takers,” identifies risk as “entirely a cultural construct” that, especially in finance, is manipulated to justify disaster-prone systems as the natural cost of entrepreneurial freedom.
19. Sweaty David Cusk will also repeat Roosevelt’s famous line to himself in assessing his nervousness in
The Pale King (95–96).
21. Burn, “‘A Paradigm for the Life of Consciousness,’” 151, 166n5.
22. David Harvey,
A Brief History of Neoliberalism (London: Oxford University Press, 2005), 79–80.
23. Paul Giles, “Sentimental Posthumanism: David Foster Wallace,”
Twentieth Century Literature 53, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 339.
24. Wallace, “‘Oblivion’: handwritten draft, undated,” box 24, folder 7, David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, Austin.
25. Kurt Eichenwald,
Serpent on the Rock (1995; repr., New York: Broadway Books, 2007), 94.
26. A copy of
Serpent on the Rock is unfortunately not among the Wallace books preserved at the Ransom Center.
27.
Given his attention to the 1930s, Wallace may reply here to the Clinton-approved repeal in 1999 of the Glass-Steagall Act, which in 1933 placed safeguard limits on combinations of securities firms and commercial banks. Widely regarded as a contributing cause of the 2008 financial crisis, repealing Glass-Steagall was another neoliberal victory of flexible capital.
28. D. T. Max,
Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (New York: Viking, 2012), 215.
29. Laurel’s thoughts track closely with a Gordon W. Allport quotation, circled by Wallace in his copy of William Ian Miller’s
The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997): “Think first of swallowing the saliva in your mouth, or do so,” Miller quotes from Allport. “Then imagine expectorating it into a tumbler and drinking it! What seemed natural and ‘mine’ suddenly becomes disgusting and alien” (97). The Ransom Center call number for Wallace’s copy of Miller is BF575.A886 M55 1997 DFW. Miller’s source is Gordon W. Allport,
Becoming: Basic Considerations for a Psychology of Personality (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1955), 43.
30. Elizabeth Anker (“Allegories of Falling and the 9/11 Novel,”
American Literary History 23, no. 3 [2011]: 471) also sees an oblique reference to 9/11 in the man climbing the Chicago office tower in “Mister Squishy.” “The Suffering Channel” has led to several critical essays on its relationship to 9/11, the best of which is by Annie McClanahan (“Future’s Shock: Plausibility, Preemption, and the Fiction of 9/11,”
symploke 17, no. 1–2 [2009]: 41–62).
31. Marshall Boswell,
Understanding David Foster Wallace (2003; repr., Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), 5.
32. Immanuel Kant,
Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith, ed. Nicholas Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), §45.
33. Kai Hammermeister,
The German Aesthetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 35.
34. Lewis Hyde,
The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (1984), 229. See chapter 1, n. 18.
35. Toon Staes, “‘Only Artists Can Transfigure’: Kafka’s Artists and the Possibility of Redemption in the Novellas of David Foster Wallace,”
Orbis Litterarum: International Review of Literary Studies 65, no. 6 (2010): 473–478.
6. E PLURIBUS UNUM: RITUAL, CURRENCY, AND THE EMBODIED VALUES OF THE PALE KING
1. D. T. Max notes chiropractor visits by Wallace; the spine imagery throughout his corpus seems partly based in a chronic issue for him (
Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace [New York: Viking, 2012], 301).
2. Examining §19 (but not Nichols’
s ideas in particular), Emily J. Hogg explores the “subjective” nature of politics for Wallace, claiming
The Pale King probes “the troubled intersection of the inner world and politics” (“Subjective Politics in
The Pale King,”
English Studies 95, no. 1 [2014]: 60).
3. Ralph Clare, “The Politics of Boredom and the Boredom of Politics in
The Pale King,” in
David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing”: New Essays on the Novels, ed. Marshall Boswell (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 199.
4. Richard Godden and Michael Szalay, “The Bodies in the Bubble: David Foster Wallace’s
The Pale King,”
Textual Practice 28, no. 7 (2014): 1274.
5. Marshall Boswell, “Trickle-Down Citizenship: Taxes and Civic Responsibility in
The Pale King,” in
Long Thing, ed. Boswell, 217.
6. Adam Kelly, “David Foster Wallace and the Novel of Ideas,” in
Long Thing, ed. Boswell, 15.
7. Stephen J. Burn, “‘A Paradigm for the Life of Consciousness’:
The Pale King,” in
Long Thing, ed. Boswell, 162–163.
8. Jacques Derrida,
Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 37.
9. David Lipsky and David Foster Wallace,
Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace (New York: Broadway Books, 2010), 258.
10. In an e-mail reply to my query, Amherst College archivist Christina E. Barber con firms that classes ended on May 10 and Wallace’s graduation occurred on May 17, 1985. Wallace’s thesis panel graded
Broom in “late spring of 1985” (Max,
Every Love Story, 48).
11. The fantastical structure of
The Pale King—in which ghosts play a role and trauma produces odd powers—might be indebted to the kinds of books Wallace found immersive in his youth, particularly
Lord of the Rings, which he read five times as a teen (Lipsky and Wallace,
Although of Course, 221) and calls a “bitchingly good read” (
LI 46).
12. Unpublished letter, quoted in D. T. Max, “In the D.F.W. Archives: An Unfinished Story About the Internet,”
New Yorker (October 11, 2012).
13. Greg Carlisle,
Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (Los Angeles: Sideshow Media Group, 2007), 54.
14. Zadie Smith,
Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (New York: Penguin, 2009), 297.
15. George Saunders, “Informal Remarks from the David Foster Wallace Memorial Service in New York on October 23, 2008,” in
The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, ed. Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012), 53.
16.
Don DeLillo,
End Zone (1972; repr., New York: Penguin, 1986), 42.
17. Amy Hungerford,
Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion Since 1960 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), xiv.
18. Paul Giles, “All Swallowed Up: David Foster Wallace and American Literature,” in
The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, ed. Cohen and Konstantinou, 11.
19. This poor Toni has the same name as her birthplace, Anthony, Illinois (
PK 59, 62). Max notes that one of the novel’s several working titles was
What Is Peoria For? (
Every Love Story, 323n17), a question that might have given this novel even more connections to Heideggerian criticisms of technology. Toni’s witchlike powers are predicted by one more pun: were-as in werewolf.
20. The bracketed insertion and ellipsis here are Wallace’s; the quotation (
BF 234–235n30) is from Joseph Campbell,
The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 3rd ed. (Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 2008), 10–11.
21. Søren Kierkegaard,
A Kierkegaard Anthology, ed. Robert Bretall (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), 119–20.
22. See chapter 4, n. 16.
23. Matt. 21:31 (New International Version).
24. Falling forty days after Easter, Pentecost does at times occur much closer to May 15. Smith’s notes on “Church Not Made with Hands” (
Changing My Mind, 297) show that Wallace mined that title from Acts of the Apostles, which also contains the description of the first Pentecost (see Acts 2:1–13). The suspended revelation at the end of Pynchon’s
Lot 49 is another possible inspiration. Sylvan-shine comes to Peoria having “forgotten to wash the shampoo from his hair,” giving “him the flame-shaped coiffure” (
PK 338). Might Wallace be, in his cheeky way, evoking Acts 2:3? “They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them.”
26. Such textual effects could be put into dialogue with the digital networks of “Infinite Summer” that Fitzpatrick examines (“Infinite Summer: Reading, Empathy, and the Social Network,” in
The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, ed. Cohen and Konstantinou, 182–207). Godden and Szalay read this scene pessimistically, as an illustration of the examiners becoming machine-like (“The Bodies in the Bubble,” 1297–1298).
27.
Oxford English Dictionary Online, 2nd ed., s.v. “fogle.”
28. Jimmy Carter, “
Report to the American People: Remarks from the White House Library. February 2, 1977,”
Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Jimmy Carter, 1977–1981 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office), 69–71.
29. “Everything and More” panel discussion.
30. “Welt” pays tribute to Wallace’s own father-in-fiction, DeLillo: in his glowing letter after reading the
Underworld typescript, Wallace praises the “line where Nick tosses off ‘welt of his shoe’ so many years after his shoe-lesson from Paulus (there was something about that that just tore my liver out).” David Foster Wallace to DeLillo, January 19, 1997, David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, Austin. Father Paulus’s shoe talk is also a prime intertext for Wallace’s tax teacher’s speech, and both Wallace and DeLillo clearly draw on Joyce’s
Portrait of the Artist.
31. This moment may encapsulate Wallace’s two attempts to join the Catholic Church: “I always flunk the period of inquiry,” he said in 1999. “They don’t really want inquiries. They really just want you to learn responses” (
CW 99).
32. David Foster Wallace, “Amherst College: essays and exams, 1980–1981, undated,” box 31, folder 6, David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, Austin. Stephen Shapiro sees other, more abstract “parallels to
Moby Dick” and, in the examiners’ drudgery, to “Bartleby the Scrivener” (“From Capitalist to Communist Abstraction:
The Pale King’s Cultural Fix,”
Textual Practice 28, no. 7 [2014]: 1267–1268).
33. Lee Konstantinou, “No Bull: David Foster Wallace and Postironic Belief,” in
The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, ed. Cohen and Konstantinou, 104.
34. Dave Eggers,
The Circle (2013; repr., New York: Vintage, 2014), 198.
35.
Brian McHale says Wallace’s title refers to Nabokov, “though exactly how
The Pale King might be related to
Pale Fire is harder to say” (“
The Pale King, Or, The White Visitation,” in
A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, ed. Marshall Boswell and Stephen J. Burn [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013], 193). But might tensions between David Wallace and Fogle have proven, in a finished novel, to be akin to those between poet John Shade and critic Charles Kinbote, whose “Foreword” and “Commentary” seem a model for §9? Wallace may have even been trying to recreate
Pale Fire’s ambiguity (covered in a vast critical literature) over who exactly writes the novel’s various parts and who is concealing his identity. As I suggest later, the Author sections have an intentional awkwardness that introduces doubt about their provenance. Wallace has played with
Pale Fire before: the name of Molly Notkin, who tells tales about a dead artist’s intentions, echoes the problem of distinguishing Kinbote and Botkin that Nabokov critics face, and, like
Pale Fire,
Infinite Jest shares its name with a controversial, posthumous work within the novel. On other Wallace engagements with Nabokov, see Marshall Boswell,
Understanding David Foster Wallace (2003; repr., Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009).
36. Marshall Boswell, “Author Here: The Legal Fiction of David Foster Wallace’s
The Pale King,”
English Studies 95, no. 1 (2014): 37n46.
37. When the lawyer for Time Warner claimed
Infinite Jest was protected by its futuristic setting and the usual disclaimers, Gompert’s lawyer shot back that the phrase “your own troubled imagination” was “anything but boilerplate” and clearly “a ‘taunt’ of his client” (“Fact Meets Fiction in Truly Novel Dispute,”
The Recorder [September 8, 1998]).
38. Wallace to DeLillo, November 25, 1998, David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, Austin.
39. Jonathan Franzen, “Mr. Difficult,” in
How to Be Alone: Essays (2002; repr., New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2003), 240.
40. William Gaddis,
J R (1975; repr., New York: Penguin, 1993), 393.
41. Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations: The English Text of the Third Edition, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1958), §241. By contrast, Andrew Warren, examining narratological modes, sees a community-building force in what he terms Wallace’s “Contracted Realism,” which “aims to render reality’s fine print legible” (“Modeling Community and Narrative in
Infinite Jest and
The Pale King,” in
Long Thing, ed. Boswell, 63).
42. Don DeLillo,
Libra (1988; repr., New York: Penguin, 1991), 181. Wallace says in his first letter to DeLillo (June 11, 1992, David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, Austin), “I have little doubt that your best and most comprehensive novel is
Libra, but I read it in galleys when I was trying to do some fiction-work of my own in the transfiguration of real U.S. fact and myth, and jealousy kept me from being able to love
Libra, and I’ve been afraid to reread it.” What specific “fiction-work” Wallace means here remains a mystery, but I suspect
The Pale King was his effort finally to engage with DeLillo’s analysis of government agents (and agency), massive archives of “fact,” and American myths.
43. Eliot Caroom, “fact-checking” Wallace, confirms that the IRS “doesn’t have an official motto. What it does have on the face of its building in Washington, is a quote from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: ‘Taxes are what we pay for a civilized society’” (“‘The Pale King’s’ Depiction of IRS Gets Fact Checked,”
The Daily Beast [April 17, 2012]).
44. Sigmund Freud,
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth, 1953–1974), 9:174.
45. Conley Wouters, “‘What Am I, a Machine?’: Humans and Information in
The Pale King,” in
Long Thing, ed. Boswell, 182.
46. §1
appeared under the title “Peoria (4)” in
TriQuarterly in 2002.
47. Marc Shell,
Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophical Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 40–41.
48. Marc Shell,
Art and Money (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 16.
49. For accounts of the interdependence of debt repayment and the neoliberal status quo, see David Graeber,
Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Melville House, 2011); and Maurizio Lazzarato,
The Making of the Indebted Man: Essays on the Neoliberal Condition, trans. Joshua David Jordan (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012). For a reading relating Wallace’s vision to these two theorists, see Mark McGurl, “The Institution of Nothing: David Foster Wallace in the Program,”
boundary 2 41, no. 3 (2014): 54. Godden and Szalay dazzlingly situate Bondurant’s story of Fat Marcus and service in Vietnam in the context of Nixon’s 1971 decision to remove the U.S. dollar from the gold standard, avoiding bankruptcy and enabling continued funding for Vietnam (and future wars) (“The Bodies in the Bubble,” 1292–1293). In Godden and Szalay’s hands,
The Pale King seems like an expanded version of “Crash of ’69,” whose evocations of Nixon in 1971 I analyzed in chapter 2.
50. Emily J. Hogg also sees a link to Ayn Rand (“Subjective Politics in
The Pale King,”
English Studies 95, no. 1 [2014]: 62).
51. Glendenning is called “a man of style” for his dress (
PK 436), but that word, always metafictional for Wallace, suggests that encyclopedic novel writing and organizational administration are similar tasks: note that
De
Witt
Glendenning shares three capital letters with “D.W. Gately” (
IJ 57), who grows through his administration of Ennet House (§48 of
The Pale King also shows Glendenning hospitalized, another leader felled in a work-related attack). These similar characters are images of their many-character-administering creator, who shares the first two initials.
52. On another possible source for Fogle’s nickname, see my “David Foster Wallace, James Wood, and a Source for ‘Irrelevant’ Chris Fogle,”
The Explicator 73, no. 2 (2015): 129–132. For an extensive reading of Wallace’s relationship to Borges, see Lucas Thompson, “Programming Literary Influence: David Foster Wallace’s ‘B.I. #59,’”
Texas Studies in Literature and Language 56, no. 2 (2014): 113–134.
53. Granada House has now done so: in 2013 Madras Press published §22 as
The Awakening of My Interest in Advanced Tax (echoing the title of James Incandenza’s memoir), with proceeds benefiting Granada House.
54. Tor Nørretranders,
The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size, trans. Jonathan Sydenham (New York: Viking, 1998), 30–31. Wallace’s copy of
The User Illusion is, as noted on the Ransom Center’s bibliographic entry (the call number is BF311.N675 1998p DFW), the “Advanced Uncorrected Proofs” of the first English translation, from 1998.
CONCLUSION: IN LINE FOR THE CASH REGISTER WITH WALLACE
1. Don DeLillo,
White Noise (New York: Penguin, 1985), 326.
2. Wallace, “
Infinite Jest: handwritten drafts, undated,” box 15, folder 6, David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, Austin.
4. D. T. Max,
Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (New York: Viking, 2012), 54.
5. Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly,
All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age (New York: Free Press, 2011), 47.
6. Jonathan Franzen, “Informal Remarks from the David Foster Wallace Memorial Service in New York on October 23, 2008,” in
The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, ed. Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012), 177.
7. For a nuanced take on the idea of “reading” Wallace’s suicide alongside his texts, see Lee Konstantinou, “No Bull: David Foster Wallace and Postironic Belief,” in
The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, ed. Cohen and Konstantinou, 104.
8. Lee Konstantinou, “The World of David Foster Wallace,”
boundary 2 40, no. 3 (2013): 68.