The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace: Language, Identity, and Resistance 9781501313523, 9781501313554, 9781501313547

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Preface
Abbreviations
1. Introduction
2. “I’m a Man of My—” Wallace and the Incomplete
3. “It’s Just the Texture of the World I Live in”: Wallace and the World
4. The Book, the Broom, and the Ladder: Grounding Philosophy
5. “Something to Do with Love”: Writing and the Process of Communication
6. Narcissism, Alienation, and Commun(al)ity
7. Vocal Instability and Narrative Structure
8. “Personally I’m Neutral on the Menstruation Point”: Gender, Difference, and the Body
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace

The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace Language, Identity, and Resistance Clare Hayes-Brady

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 Paperback edition first published 2017 © Clare Hayes-Brady, 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Cover image by Corrie Baldauf. Photograph by PD Rearick. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hayes-Brady, Clare. The unspeakable failures of David Foster Wallace: language, identity, and resistance / Clare Hayes-Brady. pages cm ISBN 978-1-5013-1352-3 (hardback) 1. Wallace, David Foster--Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PS3573.A425635Z69 2016 813’.54--dc23 2015022833 ISBN: HB: PB: ePub: ePDF:

978-1-5013-1352-3 978-1-5013-3584-6 978-1-5013-1353-0 978-1-5013-1354-7

Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.

for Nóirín, Mike, and Mazen

Contents Preface Abbreviations 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Introduction “I’m a Man of My—” Wallace and the Incomplete “It’s Just the Texture of the World I Live in”: Wallace and the World The Book, the Broom, and the Ladder: Grounding Philosophy “Something to Do with Love”: Writing and the Process of Communication Narcissism, Alienation, and Commun(al)ity Vocal Instability and Narrative Structure “Personally I’m Neutral on the Menstruation Point”: Gender, Difference, and the Body

viii x 1 21 41 65 93 111 137 167

Conclusion

193

Bibliography Index

205 219

Preface Coming to the work of David Foster Wallace as a callow undergraduate, I recall the feeling of having discovered something enormously unusual. The joy in language and the world that marks his writing captured my sense of what literature was, or should be, for. In trying to explain this to people, I gradually began to understand it myself, and have since had the privilege of pursuing that interest as a researcher and teacher. Since Wallace’s death in 2008, it has become something of a truism that he spoke for a disaffected generation, encoding a peculiarly contemporary narcissism in the dense, meandering, subordinate-clause-laden style for which he has been celebrated. The emergence of David Foster Wallace Studies as a distinct field of criticism has turned up a range of ideas that have become doctrinal, among them Wallace’s equivocal relationship with the discourses of postmodernism, his abiding concern with solipsism, and his constant return to the themes of connection and communication. It has certainly become an element of doctrine that Wallace captured all of these things very well indeed, and he has been widely hailed as a genius, a visionary, a clarion voice. Much of the dominant early discourse on Wallace has stemmed from the years between 1993 and 1996, a period that furnished three foundational pieces of work: an interview with Larry McCaffery in the journal Review of Contemporary Fiction, the long essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Culture,” collected in the book of essays A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, and Wallace’s very magnumest opus, 1996’s Infinite Jest. In various ways, these three texts have been taken as the cornerstones of Wallace’s artistic agenda, furnishing the framework within which his oeuvre has largely been interpreted. One of the things that all three texts have in common is a yearning for connection between selves, a goal that is frustrated by narcissism, entertainment, and the entanglements of language. The drive to connect shown in these works specifically, and across Wallace’s writing more generally, provides the animating impetus for his career from beginning to end; while by no means the only theme, it is the most consistent. This insistence on striving for connection, and his preoccupation with the choices that facilitate or hinder it, offers a guiding structure within which to read Wallace’s writing as a coherent, multifaceted whole, and furnishes the framework within which this book considers his contribution to contemporary literature and thought.

Preface

ix

The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace has developed in fits and starts over several years, with Wallace’s writing emerging as a serious research focus in early 2007. The timing of this work has been fortuitous, coming as it did in a period when attention to Wallace’s writing has exploded. I have had the immense pleasure of watching a whole field of study materialize over the last seven years. I can only express my admiration for the many excellent scholars, established and emerging, who make this such an exciting area in which to work, and my eager anticipation of the next phase of Wallace Studies. As Wallace Studies has grown, my interactions with other scholars of Wallace’s work have shaped and challenged my own readings, and I am fortunate to have had the opportunity for such discussions. Adam Kelly in particular has been a sounding board and a teacher, but the work of the whole community of Wallace scholars has contributed to this study. The beautiful cover image for this book comes from the visual work of Corrie Baldauf, one of many people whose discussions of Wallace have inspired and moved me. As for the process of writing this study, I am enormously indebted to the many people who acted as readers, advisers, and general cheerleaders. My particular thanks to Dara Downey, a tireless editor and friend, without whose advice and support this book would simply not have happened. The School of English at Trinity College Dublin smoothed the path of my research and facilitated my work in every way, making me feel valued and esteemed as a researcher. In particular, my supervisor, Philip Coleman, offered an eagle eye and constant encouragement from the beginning of this project to its present incarnation. Haaris Naqvi and the editorial team at Bloomsbury have made every stage of this process a pleasure, and I am especially grateful to the reviewers there for guiding my revisions so constructively. My family and friends have been unstintingly encouraging and have dutifully read, discussed, and comforted as appropriate. Their support and advice has meant the world. My sisters, Kate and Alison, have helped and cheered at every hand’s turn—a special nod to Kate for the title. My wonderful husband Mazen has seen this project through its most difficult and most exciting days, and has been a tower of strength without whom I would have fallen at a long-ago hurdle. Lastly, my parents, Mike and Nóirín, have made all of this possible, guiding my education and fostering my curiosity about literature, ideas, and the world all my life. They are my example and my inspiration, the stars by which I steer, and I dedicate this book to them.

Abbreviations BFN BI BS CL DSR

Both Flesh and Not. 2012. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2012. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. 1999. London: Abacus, 2005. The Broom of the System. 1987. London: Abacus, 2004. Consider the Lobster. 2006. New York: Back Bay Books, 2006. “Deciderization 2007—a Special Report.” Introduction to The Best American Essays 2007. Edited by David Foster Wallace. New York: Mariner-Houghton Mifflin, 2007. EM Everything and More. 2003. London: Orion Books, 2003. FTL Fate, Time, and Language. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. GCH Girl with Curious Hair. 1989. London: Abacus, 2009. IJ Infinite Jest. 1996. London: Abacus, 2007. OB Oblivion. 2004. London: Abacus, 2005. OFN “Order and Flux in Northampton.” Conjunctions 17 (Autumn 1991): 91–118. SFT A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. 1997. London: Abacus, 2004. SR Signifying Rappers. 1990. London: Penguin, 2013. SS “Solomon Silverfish.” Sonora Review 16 (Autumn 1987): 54–81. TIW This Is Water. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009. TPK The Pale King. London: Little, Brown and Company, 2011.

1

Introduction

In his 1990 review of David Markson’s novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress, considering a world in which the early philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein holds sway, David Foster Wallace suggests “rarely is our uncritical inheritance of early Wittgensteinian & Logical Positivist models so obvious as in our academic & aesthetic prejudice that successful fiction encloses rather than opens up, organizes facts rather than undermines them, diagnoses rather than genuflects” (BFN, 106, emphasis mine). This judgment reflects Wallace’s strong engagement with philosophy in his work, and the explicit connection between philosophical models and fictional achievement that this book explores. More importantly, it signals the central thread of Wallace’s project for literature: opening questions to consideration, dialogic rather than didactic, and strongly resisting the confinement of conventional structure.1 Although it has become commonplace to discuss Wallace as a complex bridging figure between postmodernism and what has emerged in its muchcontested aftermath, in this tendency toward opening up Wallace seems to me to maintain a stronger link with postmodernist discourses—notwithstanding his explicit ambivalence about its value—than is usually implied in what is called postpostmodernist work. The writing of such peers as Franzen, Smith, and Powers, for example, tends more to incorporate the strategies of classical realism, especially in their movement toward “smaller scales and increased closure,” as Stephen Burn has 1

Sue Vice, Introducing Bakhtin (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 45. The term “dialogic” here, and elsewhere in this study, is intentionally ambiguous. It refers both to Bakhtinian dialogism—that is, pertaining to double-voicedness, either narrative or linguistic—and to the state of being in dialogue. Bakhtinian dialogism is an integral characteristic of Wallace’s philosophy of communication, insofar as the writer and the reader(s) provide the voices or sense-making apparatus of each utterance, but it is also remarkable how many of Wallace’s narrative fragments are structured as dialogue, or even more strikingly, half-dialogue. This structural tendency highlights the Bakhtinian dialogism inherent in Wallace’s vision of the unfinished exchange at the heart of communication.

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The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace

argued.2 While I concur with the general determination that Wallace may indeed be termed a post-postmodernist writer, it is with the caveat that there is as much of the “postmodernist” as there is of the “post-”. Marshall Boswell suggests that Wallace may be seen as “a nervous member of some still-unnamed (and perhaps unnamable) third wave of modernism”;3 that nervousness, and his own persistent ambivalence about the “post” label in the singular (and presumably the plural), is significant to a consideration of his complex place in contemporary American literature and its legacy.4

Wallace and failure: A love story The philosopher Richard Rorty held that the purpose of philosophy is not to find answers, but to keep the conversation going. In Wallace’s writing, the same perspective is visible. His persistent invocation of plurality, or “Both/And” systems, along with his resistance to teleological structures, infuses his writing with a sense of the necessity of continuation, and provides the thematic and structural (though necessarily negative) center of his creative output. The purpose of writing—which, as he pointed out regarding Markson, can also function as a literalization of philosophical theories—is not to find closure, but to resist it, to frame the possibilities of meaning, not to achieve, and so to close them. Failure, then, read as the absence of closure, is the primary positivity of Wallace’s writing. The unending journey westward that closes Girl with Curious Hair physically enacts the Rortian continuity of dialogue that I argue animates the structures of Wallace’s writing; it’s worth noting too that Wallace’s first novel The Broom of the System not only ends in mid-sentence, but ends by cutting off the very word “word,” reflexively invoking the absence of linguistic closure that has been problematized throughout the narrative. It is perhaps somewhat disingenuous to call a book of this nature The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace. However, the term “failure” is carefully chosen, and refers to a range of attributes, including the many very real shortcomings in Wallace’s writing. Failure itself was a recurrent theme of the writing: Infinite Jest went under the working title of A Failed Entertainment 2

3

4

Stephen J. Burn, Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism (New York: Continuum Books, 2009), 127. Marshall Boswell, Understanding David Foster Wallace (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), 1. Charles Altieri’s Postmodernisms Now explores a number of the contradictions and problems of late postmodernism that concerned Wallace so much.

Introduction

3

because for Wallace “the book is structured as an entertainment that doesn’t work. Because what entertainment ultimately leads to, I think, is the movie Infinite Jest,” which implicitly positions entertainment (passive, unidirectional, fundamentally absent) in opposition to communication (active, transactional, grounded in but transcending absence).5 By this reckoning, then, failure marks the continuation of human thought, whereas success leads to atrophy of will and the inevitable choice of death by pleasure. By contrast, the central failure of the novel is ultimately a symbolically productive one: like the failure of communication I propose, the central absence of the novel becomes a repository of possibilities, not a univocal object but a play of potentialities. In this respect as well, Wallace seems to echo and extend Wittgenstein’s resistance to the idea of the perfect expression of anything, as explored in the question “what is a broom?,” evoked in the title of the first novel, as well as invoking later readings of Wittgenstein by Rorty and Cavell and picking up on the ideas of negative dialectics of Theodor Adorno. In this respect also, the silenced central figure of Q, in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, might similarly be reimagined as a locus of projection, rather than as a figure of proscription. Closure is repeatedly imagined as a kind of death, death as a kind of perfection—Hamlet’s “consummation,” perfect, static, and final. Karnicky argues that the film Infinite Jest, with its narcotic effect on the viewer, represents the “culmination of a movement towards stasis,” a stasis of pleasure that is literally deadly.6 Wallace’s foundational conception of communication as an unending process absolutely precludes its own success; success, after all, is an ending, closing off possibilities for further conversations. To close a story in the traditional sense is in some way to end a conversation, to offer the illusion of logic, linearity, and control, and to quit the grand project of keeping the conversation going, which offers a route out of the postmodernist trap of solipsism. Hence, Wallace’s resistance to endings becomes a central part of his creative process, in which the reader is and must continually be a coproducer of meaning. Wallace’s conception of a dynamic process of communication, which is explored more fully across several chapters of the book, incorporates the giving of the self to the process, the effortful involvement of the subject in the process of attempting to reach the other, to “leap over that wall” as he put it in an interview with Laura Miller.7 5

6

7

David Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (New York: Broadway Books, 2010), 80. Jeffrey Karnicky, Contemporary Fiction and the Ethics of Modern Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 101. Laura Miller, “The Salon Interview: David Foster Wallace,” in Conversations with David Foster Wallace, ed. Stephen J. Burn (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 62.

4

The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace

In this model of communication, the effort to reach the other must be sincere and full, but the process cannot be completed. It is not a process of incompletion, but rather an incomplete process, perhaps more connected with Aristotle’s idea of perfectibility than with any existing philosophy of communication as such. The sense of failure as a lack of, and resistance to, completion is central to this book’s reading of Wallace’s work as coherently plural, and is explored in each chapter as a generative force. The necessity of failure, the redemptive potential (never quite to be achieved) of love and free will, and the central importance of attention or engagement are thematically unpacked by attention to questions of gender and the body, vocal and structural instability, freedom, and philosophy. These investigations yield a vision of Wallace’s writing that approaches and retreats from the antiteleology that marks his work, gesturing toward the coherence of nonclosure. Wallace himself identified this inclination to circling around a present absence as “tornadic”;8 it is in that annular centrality of absence and chaos that this book finds a dynamic coherence, shifting and re-emerging, permanently impermanent, changing with each iteration, each time failing again, each time perhaps failing a little better. It is most useful to consider failure in Wallace’s work as occurring in three modes: abject, structural, and generative. Abject failure is the total failure of an attempt to communicate, as in the case of the “depressed person” from the short story of the same title, whose efforts to communicate with those around her are hampered by paralyzing self-absorption and inability to recognize other people as anything other than objects for her use. Structural failure is failure of the process of communication, usually caused by the absence of an element necessary to communication, such as the ability to speak. This kind of failure is characterized in Infinite Jest by Hal’s inability to form intelligible words. Similarly, Don Gately has spent the hundred or so pages leading to this point attempting to resist medication, but by the final passage he is unable to muster sufficient power of speech to say that he is an addict. “He kept trying to say addict [ . . . ] he gurgled and mooed, saying addict” (IJ, 973). Gately’s failure to communicate his status as addict, in fact, is integral to his survival on a conceptual level: the failure of communication here opens an interpretive gap. That failure is implicitly symbolized by the life-saving administration of pain medication (although it may result in a slide back into addiction). Gately’s survival, then, is associatively 8

Editor’s introduction to The Pale King (London: Little, Brown, 2011), viii.

Introduction

5

linked with the structural failure to communicate: his status as object of another subject’s will disrupts the solipsistic slide into the perfect closure of death. The third kind, most important to our work here, is generative failure, which refers to the necessarily unfinished nature of communicative acts, and at its most powerful entails the simultaneous narrowing and strengthening of the gap between self and other, the isolation of the subject. While this gap would seem to be precisely the cause of the much-vaunted solipsistic trap that concerned Wallace, the concept of generative failure challenges that idea. In our inevitable failure to communicate successfully, due to the fundamental absence inherent in textuality (that is, the absence of the writer at the time of reading and vice versa), the fundamental unbridgeability of the gap between self and other is reinforced. That gap entails alterity, the nexus of subjectivity in the object of communication that cannot be reached by communicative intent, thereby rejecting the projective total consciousness that lurks at the heart of solipsistic fear: the sense that one’s own consciousness is responsible for the whole universe. Narcissistic and solipsistic traps are averted or deferred by recognition of an alternative locus of subjectivity, enacted in the failure of communication, where the necessary gap in interpretation opens the possibility of plural and unpredictable communicative outcomes. The clearest implications of this concept are for Wallace’s ideation of solipsism and narcissism, but iterations of generative failure are everywhere manifested in his writing at both narrative and structural levels as the failure to cohere. Importantly, the structural, narrative, and formal manifestations of this form of failure depend on the sincere effort to overcome them, rather than existing as a commodification of the concept of failure as a new form of success; they do not achieve what they set out for, but their shortcomings offer generative possibilities that would be precluded by their success. For example, Lenore’s completion of her quest in Broom, although it would return her great-grandmother to her, would not allow her to inhabit her own subjectivity. Similarly, in “Order and Flux in Northampton,” Barry Dingle’s homunculus never achieves his telos, the love of Myrnaloy Trask, but his failure to do so allows Barry to convey the necessary separation of self and other. The myriad instances of failed communication—the depressed person, the couple in “Here and There,” the child in “Another Pioneer”—are tragic and frustrating, but invite the reader to consider why we fail to communicate, to get closer to clarity each time, knowing we will never quite reach it. This type of failure—choosing to fail again and better, choosing generative imperfection over encompassing perfection, breaking open rather than closing off—is the conceptual core of

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The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace

this book. While instances of both abject and structural failure are discussed as they arise, the recurrence of generative failure draws together the disparate elements of Wallace’s writing, offering a framework for the interpretation of his overarching creative project, which was to foster attention and engagement in his readers, or as he put it to “aggravate this sense of entrapment and loneliness and death in people.”9 In respect of these three modes of failure, and especially the concept of generative failure, the anti-idealism of Theodor Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, with its insistence on the primacy of the object rather than the subject, mirrors Wallace’s own troubled articulation of the relationship of self and other, and the potential subjection of that relationship to a solipsistic interrogation of the self. Rather than seeking to collapse that boundary, Wallace’s work depends on the persistence of alterity and the ongoing dynamic exchange between self and untouchable other for the relief of—but not solution to—postmodernist narcissism and the threat of solipsistic entrapment. In exploring Wallace’s encounters with questions of language and culture, and his later articulation of the pressing need to try to be an engaged citizen, it becomes clear that the process of communication is the central thread of Wallace’s work, a fundamentally political process, offering the potential liberation of the late-capitalist subject from the radical individualism that had overtaken the society within which Wallace found himself working, as dramatized throughout his work, from the corporatization of alienation in Broom to the exploitation of pain in “The Suffering Channel.” The process exculpates the reader from the search for certainty, and reinscribes the communicative process—always unfinished, always failing—within each reading, galvanizing readers to engage in this process as a way of challenging their own narcissism. Adorno’s thinking also offers a way in which to read this outcome; in the context of postmodernist recursivity it is absurd that artistic or creative output should persist, yet it manifestly does so. The teleological imperative of postmodernism is to will its own decline, to question itself into silence, which is Wallace’s central problem with it. Adorno posited that “there are no more ideologies in the authentic sense of false consciousness, only advertisements for the world through its duplication and the provocative lie which does not seek belief but commands silence.”10 Postmodernist discourse 9

10

Larry McCaffery, “An Interview with David Foster Wallace,” in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 13.2 (Summer 1993): 136. Theodor Adorno, Prisms, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen and Samuel Weber (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), 34.

Introduction

7

is not an authentic false-consciousness, by this view, but the provocative lie that commands silence. Adorno’s articulation of the impossibility of poetic endeavor is manifestly falsified by the persistence of writing and so “the ontological account of a loss of meaning becomes meaninglessly clichéd.”11 Works of art that persist in the aftermath of chaotic decentering such as that occasioned by the patricidal disfiguration of the early postmodernists—we might think of Vonnegut or Heller struggling to portray the lunacy of war, or Ellison’s polemic of postwar Black identity—are therefore catastrophic, because they subvert the sense of catastrophe as ending. Postmodernist cultural production, then, was an inherently catastrophic form of art, which in response to radical and traumatic shifts in consciousness “moves through the extremes and thus brings thought to turn in on itself in its most extreme consequence,” as Adorno had predicted.12 The state of coming after, then, the belatedness that Wallace felt himself part of, becomes a state of generative failure, the very absurdity of which renders it productive. Such a position entails the necessary failure of Wallace’s work, which is and must be unfinished. Failure is the only productive outcome, when it comes to the articulation of meaning, since the process must be reproduced each time it is undertaken. The desire for and expectation of completion, the dream of complete intimacy, of clear and unambiguous information transfer exists for Wallace as it did for Wittgenstein. That possibility, which animated both thinkers’ early work and faded in the late, continues to hang tantalizingly out of reach. The fact that the failure to achieve that completion is unavoidable does not constitute less of a failure, and the fact that it is investigated and turned to positive ends merely makes it a better failure than the one before. Failure, then, predates the generative outcomes that emerge from it, but this is not to say that it is not a failure. It is also worth noting that while the ends of generative failure may be positive, they are not always so; there are serious structural and political shortcomings in Wallace’s work that emerge from his failure to overcome the distance between selves, and his often-paralyzing consciousness thereof, which are discussed in later chapters.

11

12

Tania Roy, “History in the ‘Mise en Abyme of the Body’: Ranbir Kaleka and the ‘Art of Auschwitz’ after Virilio,” in Virilio and Visual Culture, ed. John Armitage and Ryan Bishop (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 112. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. Jephcott, E. (London: New Left Books, 1974), 86.

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The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace

I choose the term failure rather than the gentler or more positive incompleteness because failure takes account of the necessary effort involved in the process. This is a critical distinction: I do not mean to position failure as a derivative product of success, somehow also, reassuringly, an achievement; failure as it is seen here—failing to cohere, to communicate, to write the perfect, self-contained sentence—is painful and discouraging each time. It is not a thing to be desired but a thing that cannot be avoided. While not a form of success, it is nevertheless inevitable and necessary. For an origin of this kind of failure we might look to the poetic legacy within which Wallace operated, since “American literature achieves its vitality by a conscious labor to transform the mere state of failure into the artistic success of forms and pageants.”13 Alternatively, we might look to the deep failures of Samuel Beckett, to whom Wallace was consciously indebted, and whose sense of the impossibility of successful emergence from subjective hell elucidates the use here of the term: while to be incomplete is not necessarily to fail, to fail is necessarily to be incomplete. Wallace invokes Beckett in “The Empty Plenum” as a writer who has “captured the textual urge, the emotional urgency of text as both sign and thing” (BFN, 83n10). While he would later invoke, and perhaps subtly challenge, James Joyce with the title of the short story “The Soul is Not a Smithy,” Wallace’s invocation of Beckett so early in his career offers an interesting angle on his use of both silence and incompleteness; we might think in particular of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men in this respect, particularly that recurrent, precise figure of the ellipsis, which evokes Beckett’s exacting stage directions regarding the length of silences. Beckettian or otherwise, Wallace is certainly a writer for whom silence is productive, and for whom completion signifies a form of failure: the failure of perfection, which is commonly associated with death. This book explores and expands on some of the primary themes of Wallace Studies,14 drawing on and expanding existing critical work on themes of narcissism, communication, and philosophical engagement, with the goal of working toward a new reading of Wallace’s oeuvre that proposes a coherence and continuity across his work. Perhaps ironically, the central feature of this coherence is the failure to cohere, characterized by a persistent, multifaceted, and systemic resistance to conclusion. The key ideas I promulgate over the 13 14

Denis Donoghue, The Sovereign Ghost: Studies in Imagination (London: Faber and Faber), 104. See Adam Kelly’s excellent history of Wallace criticism, “Critical Writings about David Foster Wallace,” in Critical Insights: David Foster Wallace, ed. Philip Coleman (Ipswich: Salem Press, 2015), 46–63.

Introduction

9

course of the book, which are linked by this central resistance, might loosely be grouped as follows. First, I situate Wallace as a writer who balanced philosophy and literature in unusual and self-conscious ways, using both disciplines in concert to investigate the questions that preoccupied him. In situating Wallace thus, I advocate a reading that moves away from the inclination to sui generis reading and toward a sense of him as a writer deeply embedded in literary and cultural history. Second, I note a trajectory in Wallace’s writing that begins with a preoccupation with language and develops into a more explicit focus on cultural systems, with language as one part of the system, finally culminating in a detailed attention to questions of politics and citizenship, which are intimately and explicitly tied to both language and culture. This movement constitutes a movement-through, rather than a movement-from: these concerns are points along a single spectrum, progressive iterations of a concern with systems, focusing on the broad concept of commun(al)ity. This term as I use it here is intended to imply both the implicitly conscious connection of the term “community” and also the more nebulous connectedness of experience that is shared at a precognitive linguistic or cultural level (e.g., the identifier “mother,” which involves one in a commonality of experience without invoking a conscious community; those who identify or are identified as mothers exist in a network that does not presuppose acquaintance). Thirdly, I propose a model for Wallace’s understanding and representation of communication in which communication is represented as both challenging and strengthening the borders of the individual self in a partially shared world. This model is foundationally linked to both his literary and cultural embeddedness and the development of his work. It draws particularly on the philosophical groundings of Wallace’s work, but shifts the focus from theoretical alignment to the process itself, the delicate relationships among writer, text, and reader. Central to the model is Wallace’s repeated invocation of love as a kind of primary force, a catalyst in the transaction of communicative exchange. Central also is the unfinished nature of the process; the focus is not on outcomes—which are potentially infinite and infinitely recurrent—but on the dynamic of exchange itself, which is critically always in motion. I analyze the persistent structural and stylistic resistance to closure that marks Wallace’s work, concluding that both the model of communication and the resistance to closure stem from a dogged and sometimes uneasy pluralism. This pluralism, the “Both/And” propensity of his work, emerges as a fundamentally political invocation of free will. The argument highlights the identified trajectory of Wallace’s concerns,

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The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace

demonstrating that while there is clear development throughout his body of work, the central concerns and strategies are identifiable in different guises from the beginning of his career and in a variety of elements of his writing, structural, stylistic, and narrative. Lastly, I propose that those thematic concerns are linked by the necessity of failure; the fundamental impossibility of complete communication—that is to say, an act of communication that enacts perfect expression, perfect transmission, and perfect interpretation—which intuitively seems to reinforce the threat of solipsistic isolation, actually necessitates the recognition or acknowledgment of an unreachable subjective other. The existence of this untouchable subjectivity is necessitated by the interpretive gap, which exists only because of the inevitably incomplete nature of communication, and so, counter-intuitively, the necessary failure of communicative exchange functions as proof against solipsistic tragedy.

Communication, ethics, and will The process of and engagement in communicative exchange is central to Wallace’s writing, the basic principles of which were influenced by Wallace’s own early engagement with modal logic and governed by a desire for clarity, a search for an illusory perfection of communication he referred to in the famous 1993 interview with Larry McCaffery as a desire for “distinct problems and univocal solutions.”15 In brief, Wallace developed an idea of communication that necessitates that the physical conditions necessary for communication should be present (these include a speaker/writer, a hearer/reader, a means of transmission, and a text/speech act). Significant for our work here, though, is the additional element required for Wallace’s process: the act of will that Wallace himself referred to variously as “love,” “engagement,” and “immersion.” For the purposes of consistency, the term love (referring to an abstract sacrificial disposition, a giving of the self, radically desexualized and raised to a Platonic imperative, sharing much with the Derridean concept of love as surrender) is chiefly used in this book to describe this catalytic force in the process of communicative exchange. I will return to the development and iteration of this process over several chapters, and wish to note it here not for its specific ingredients but rather for its multiple, unfixed outcomes. 15

McCaffery, “Interview,” 136.

Introduction

11

What is important about this process, which is deeply encoded in Wallace’s work both structurally and narratively, is that it works to alleviate the symptoms of both narcissistic and solipsistic self-referentiality by simultaneously seeking to recognize the other and reinforcing the primacy of the individual, a dichotomy that will arise frequently throughout this study. Further, within the workings of this process, the balance of these elements is not fixed, giving rise to the possibility of multiple communication outcomes. The unfixed nature of the outcome is central, and no closure or definite end is sought: the emphasis is always on process, never on consensus. Evans observes in A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies that Wallace shared a commonality of affect with William James in his appraisal of free will, which is, perhaps, strengthened by reference to Wallace’s own early work on the philosophy of Richard Taylor, where he concludes that the actual fact—or otherwise—of free will is not important, but that the commitment to engaging with it is sufficient. The endurance of that preoccupation with the exercise of will and the centrality of choice to the human condition mirrors the endurance of Wallace’s central concerns alongside the movement of his focus from linguistic through cultural and later to political communities; connection between individuals remained central to his artistic and political project. For Wallace, though, the value is not in the product, but in the process of trying to communicate, trying to connect. The declaration in The Pale King that “true heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer” (TPK, 230) suggests a conception of heroism that is associated with a pragmatic commitment to free will, a concern that is evident in Wallace’s work from his undergraduate philosophy thesis through to The Pale King. The necessity of trying, failing, and trying again also mirror Richard Rorty’s pragmatic conception of positivism, which is interested not in solving, but rather in dissolving problems, by means of reformatting vocabularies and modes of exchange. While Rorty is explicitly invoked in the title of a later short story—“Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,” taken from Rorty’s 1979 book of the same name—Wallace also referred to Stanley Cavell at least once, and his influence on Wallace’s work has gained increasing attention in the recent past. Wallace owned and annotated a number of Cavell’s books, and his biographer D. T. Max notes that Wallace studied— briefly and somewhat unedifyingly—under Cavell at Harvard.16 Adam Kelly has noted the importance of Cavell’s ideas on language for Wallace’s exploration of 16

D. T. Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story (New York: Granta, 2012), 132.

12

The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace

sincerity in his work. Of particular relevance to our work here is Cavell’s invocation of the role of reader in the process of textual production, and his extrapolation from this question to ask “when is writing done?,” implicitly averring the constant reproduction by the reader of the process of interpretation. This question is central to Wallace’s idea of the process of communication, and his implicit belief (via Wittgenstein) that good fiction should open rather than close, undermine rather than order. Wallace’s conception of communication reflects a process that does not end, but replenishes itself indefinitely in different forms, with infinite possible outcomes. This movement toward unlimited multiplicity is reflected across Wallace’s work, fictional and nonfictional, resonating in his resistance to endings, his disruption of narrative structure and his interest in concepts and iterations of infinity (Infinite Jest, Everything & More, the many circular or quasi-circular apparatuses in his writing, and the idea of solipsism or the infinite self).

Boundaried selves: Reading resistance, resisting reading Before embarking on the exploration of these multifaceted failures, a word about the conceptual structure of this book; there were many possible ways of organizing the argument that follows: I have chosen to move from the general to the specific, beginning with the breadth of Wallace’s cultural and ideological engagement, rather than to begin, as might be expected, with Wittgenstein and language. By beginning instead with a broader view of Wallace’s chief influences, concerns and predecessors, a clearer picture of him as a writer of his time emerges, challenging the too-frequent tendency toward hagiographical, sui generis readings. In this vein, Chapter 2 undertakes an investigation of ideas of incompleteness in Wallace’s work generally, pointing to and exploring the consistent resistance to closure that marks the writing in structural, vocal and narrative ways, as well as offering some further consideration of Wallace as a philosopher in his own right. This discussion should remind readers that while Wallace engaged with a number of philosophical traditions and lenses, he worked within his own interpretations and concepts, as well as with those of others. For this reason, it is perhaps unwise to attempt to fix him as a Wittgensteinian, a Cavellian or a pragmatist above all else, and more useful to consider the ways in which he uses philosophy, rather than seeking to pinpoint his philosophy per se. One facet of this is the recurrence of literalized or embodied problems; for Wallace, literalization is part of a process of investigation: Wallace presents

Introduction

13

a hypothesis in narrative or structural form, testing the literalized hypothetical product to retrospectively postulate causality; Gramma’s disappearance in Broom, for example, literalizes the nominative duplication that challenges Wittgenstein’s meaning-as-use paradigm. Wallace referred to this tendency in the interview with McCaffery, saying: “Norman [Bombardini, a character in Broom who seeks to eat himself to infinite size]’s gag is that he literalizes the option.”17 This “gag” would become one of the trademarks of Wallace’s fiction, literalizing difficult questions and working them out in a living context. Having positioned Wallace as a thinker deeply embedded in the work of other thinkers, Chapter 3 reads him in relation to the literary and cultural context in which he emerged as a creative force. While his writing may well be, as it has been called, era-defining, it is also crucial to consider Wallace as a product of his time. The breadth of his references reflects both his education (Wallace embarked on but never completed graduate work in Philosophy at Harvard) and his absorption of contemporary literary and popular culture. Wallace himself referred to this absorption a number of times throughout his career, and it is a crucial facet of his writing, tying in with his own expressed belief that good fiction could simultaneously dramatize the worst of its own context while also reaching beyond it to highlight “the fact that we still are human beings, now. Or can be.”18 Chapter 3 offers a vision of Wallace as a writer intimately tied to his own—distinctively American—culture and period, as well as one who reached for something “timelessly vital and sacred.”19 In Chapter 4, a longer and more detailed exploration of Wallace’s specific grounding philosophy is undertaken, focusing particularly on the influences of Wittgenstein and Rorty. This chapter focuses on The Broom of the System to a greater extent than Wallace criticism has to date, exploring the early articulation of his most abiding concerns. Recent years have seen an increase in attention to the philosophical underpinnings of Wallace’s work. Scholars have drawn attention to his links with Leibniz and James, with Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, with Cantor and deMan, as well as with Cavell, with whose work Wallace seems to have engaged across his career.20 Wallace himself made extensive reference to such writers, exploring and appropriating their ideas in the same way as he did with

17 18 19 20

McCaffery, “Interview,” 143. Ibid., 131. Ibid., 148. See particularly the 2014 collection Gesturing Toward Reality, ed. Robert Bolger and Scott Korb (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014).

14

The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace

writers of literary fiction, critics and journalists. Interestingly, however, even as this scholarly attention has grown, and while Wallace engaged strongly and clearly with a variety of traditions, both literary and philosophical, it is difficult to pin him to a single trajectory, as he seems to feint away from each tradition at a certain point. Consequently, I do not attempt to align his work with a particular philosophical discipline or strain of thinking; rather, I propose to explore the structures of philosophy within his fiction and nonfiction, delineating the relationship between philosophy and creative literary output. Having said that, this chapter does explore in detail Wallace’s specific encounters with Ludwig Wittgenstein, and his direct engagement with the work of Richard Rorty, the American pragmatist who, like Wallace, explored the interface between literature and philosophy. Rorty’s pragmatic injunction to “keep the conversation going”21 seems in some ways to challenge Wittgenstein’s closing aphorism from the Tractatus that “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”22 Rorty takes up Wittgenstein’s language games and uses them to reframe or renegotiate problems, in a way echoed in Wallace’s exploitation of voice, in both fiction and nonfiction. Rorty’s Wittgensteinian heritage offers a lens through which to view Wallace’s engagement with the Viennese philosopher, whom he referred to as “a queer sort of ascetic” (BFN, 96). The almost playful way in which Rorty reframes Wittgenstein’s concerns about the “difficulty of reality,” a phrase philosopher Cora Diamond appropriated from Updike23 (whom Wallace wrote about) to talk about Cavell and the philosophy of Wittgenstein (whom Wallace also wrote about) is reflected, I suggest, in Wallace’s own use of narrative structure to engage with questions of representation. With respect to the influence of both Cavell and Rorty on Wallace’s philosophical thinking, while both thinkers furnish and enrich specific aspects of Wallace’s writing in their own right, both also point to Wallace’s invocation of what has been termed the “New Wittgenstein.” This term refers to a reading of the philosopher “suggesting that Wittgenstein’s primary aim in philosophy is—to, use a word he himself employs in characterizing his later philosophical procedures—a therapeutic one.”24 More pertinently for my work here, it offers a

21 22

23

24

Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), 367. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), §7.1. Cora Diamond, “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 1.2 (June 2003). In a footnote to this essay, she notes of the phrase “I believe I read it in a New Yorker essay of his in the 1980s, but cannot trace it.” Alice Crary, “Introduction,” The New Wittgenstein, ed. Alice Crary and Rupert Read (London: Routledge, 2000), 1.

Introduction

15

vision of Wittgenstein’s work, commonly divided into early and late, that suggests that “the Tractatus anticipates his later thought in more significant ways than is ordinarily assumed.”25 I wish to make a similar claim for Wallace; while it is early indeed to declare the era of a “New Wallace,” I suggest that we tend to perceive Wallace’s career in terms of a break, with Infinite Jest at the center and with Broom and the early work in general consigned to the sidelines (notwithstanding the emergence of one or two voices on the subject, notably in A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies). Lipsky identifies this break in Wallace’s writing after Jest, arguing that while Wallace’s fiction got progressively bleaker after the 1996 publication of the novel, “the non-fiction writer was an impervious sun.”26 This break is attributable, I think, to two things: first, the sheer scale of Infinite Jest makes it extremely interesting to critics, and as a consequence a good deal of the early criticism focused on it. Secondly, Wallace was dismissive of his early work, making it easy to be critically dismissive of it too. I argue, though, that while the tonality of the writing shifted and shifted again—The Pale King has generally been recognized as containing redemptive possibility, if not actual redemption—the idea that Jest should be the orbital focus of criticism of Wallace’s work glosses over the value of much of his early writing, especially as it bears on his later work. In fact, the concerns that dominated Wallace’s later writing—coherence of the self, duty to the other, civic responsibility, connection, and the importance of witnessing and paying attention—are all visible in embryonic form in his earliest work and developed throughout his career: this book draws attention to that development, seeking to elucidate a common thread of concern that unifies Wallace’s career, while taking account of his obvious development as an author. Chapter 5 details Wallace’s specific conception of the process of communication, exploring the sense of exchange and transaction—what he called “a living transaction between human beings”27—that characterizes communication within and beyond his work. Situating this process within the context of his philosophical engagements, the chapter outlines Wallace’s dynamic idea of communication. In particular, I attend to the conditions under which communication can flourish, and the dynamic Wallace identified as “a willingness to disclose yourself,”28 which he sought in both the writer and the

25 26

27 28

Ibid., 1. David Lipsky, “The Lost Years and Last Days of David Foster Wallace,” in Conversations with David Foster Wallace, ed. Stephen J. Burn (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 173. McCaffery, “Interview,” 142. Ibid., 148–9.

16

The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace

reader. I posit that this dynamic should be called “love,” partially influenced by Derrida’s definitions of the term, and emerging from Wallace’s own definition of love as a function of distance in “Lyndon” (GCH, 115). The chapter goes on to discuss the iterations of the process both within and outside the confines of his writing, exploring the many ways in which communication is attempted and the many ways in which it is not completed. Chapter 6 moves to a consideration of the place of narcissism in Wallace’s work, one of the most widely canvassed themes in Wallace scholarship to date. Over the course of this chapter, I link his preoccupation with narcissism and solipsism with the connected concerns I identified earlier of language, culture and politics. Specifically, the chapter explores solipsism as a linguistic problem, as well as ideas of community—both conscious and unconscious—as potential antagonists to solipsistic entrapment. Wallace’s early work is indeed particularly concerned with language, in a way that his later work is not—or at least not so openly—which accords with the heavy reliance on Wittgenstein in The Broom of the System. After this, the focus of the writing appears to shift from language to culture and finally to politics (perhaps most cleanly mapped by the novels that punctuated Wallace’s career, although the trajectory is also apparent in the short fiction and the essays). While this development may suggest that Wallace came to reject his early preoccupation with language, I suggest that it simply marks a series of iterations of the same questions. Language, culture and politics are three forms of community or connective networks—three systems. Moving through his career, Wallace telescoped outward from language, which at best connects those using it, to culture, which connects those living in it, and politics or civic involvement, which connects people in networks that work both actively and passively (the tax system in The Pale King is one such system, which links people despite being ostensibly an individual identifier). The present study offers an exploration of the different forms of connection Wallace investigates through his writing, presenting not an antidote to narcissism, but the possibility of such an antidote. Perhaps more controversially, I suggest that the form of this antidote is never presented, and never can be. By this reading, Wallace’s apparent redemptive project, identified by numerous critics including Holland, Boswell and Burn, is a failure, and its failure is a necessary part of the project. Chapter 6 also engages with the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, another presence in Wallace’s writing, whose work explores the border between self and other. The idea of the boundaried narrative self—the drive to simultaneously connect with and repudiate the other—is complemented by the play of narrative borders and

Introduction

17

anti-teleological impetus that I argue characterizes Wallace’s work as a whole. That same impetus is investigated in Chapter 7, which deals with the unique vocal structures Wallace deployed in his work, both fiction and nonfiction, which are dominated by multiplicity. In the nonfiction, Wallace repeatedly and explicitly undermines the idea of expertise, repudiating his own status as authority on any of the subjects he writes about and creating an illusory linguistic network between author and reader(s), further enacting the kind of unconscious community explored in Chapter 6. In the fiction, Wallace makes use of a skeletal narrative structure, in which narrative voice is undermined by elements encoded within its own vocabulary, most commonly by the partial uncovering of a deeper layer of narrative, revealed by jarring notes or cracks in the narrative voice. Again, the use of this structure ruptures the boundaries of narrative in a variety of ways that resist closure. This chapter also explores some of Wallace’s thorny engagements with political issues, encounters that are again tied up with forms of narrative, vocabulary and authority, particularly his complex engagement with ideas of belief and cynicism. Discussing John McCain, for example, Wallace talks about McCain’s campaign, reflecting that true authenticity is undermined by pervasive cynicism about political communication. Interestingly, as this chapter argues, Wallace appears to view the 1950s and 1960s with a kind of political nostalgia, hinting at a conservative outlook despite his persistent and ostentatious repudiation of political labels. Moving on from questions of voice, Chapter 8 interrogates Wallace’s encounters with otherness, focusing on race, gender and the body, questions upon which he has been rightly criticized. I argue here that rather than (or perhaps as well as) reflecting the kind of fear-based misogyny that Wallace himself identified in the characters of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, difference and the alien feminine in particular offered Wallace a shorthand for the exploration of concepts of alterity that occupied much of his writing. Allowing, then, that Wallace used fiction as a way of literalizing and investigating many of the philosophical questions that concerned him, I suggest that representations of gender offered scope for exploration of his fear of solipsism. In his encounters with the feminine subject, which he characterized as “historically passive, perand conceived as an object” (BFN, 99), I argue that Wallace finds the space to embody the inaccessible other whose existence offered a challenge to infantile narcissistic self-regard. I argue, too, that the silence and silencing of the female voice in his work investigates a form of resistance to power, encoding ideas of the cataclysmic power of the to-be-looked-at object, which is reflected in the

18

The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace

Entertainment at the heart of Infinite Jest, among other motifs, engaging strongly with the theories of Wittgenstein and Ricoeur on identity and communication. Developing this argument to touch on questions of mind/body dualism, I argue that Wallace uses the body—particularly but not exclusively the female body, often in pain—to dramatize coherent alterity. I finally argue that, by literalizing the recognition of the subject as simultaneously also always object, Wallace invites consideration of the inaccessible ipse of the other, using gender and the body to dramatize the unbreachable distance between individuals. Overall, the book posits that Wallace’s conception of communication, and his articulation of what it meant to be human and alive in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, were predicated on a vision of human interaction that simultaneously repudiated and reinforced the necessity of the boundaried self, at once loathing and depending on the separation of competing subjectivities. This dichotomy is particularly visible in the recurrent theme of the loss of self, which can be caused by the inability or refusal to communicate meaningfully (infantile narcissism), the propensity to rely too heavily on identification with others (subjective solipsism, the sense of the self as universal subject), or an overabundance of empathy (displaced solipsism, or the sense of the self as no more than object). Mary Holland notes that Wallace was among a cohort of writers who “explore[d] challenges to individual integrity and communication between individuals [ . . . ] often in the form of the narcissism and self-reflexive solipsism that seem equally to describe postmodern culture and language theory.”29 Holland’s reference to individuality and communication as simultaneously under attack from solipsism and infantile narcissism, which Wallace “recognizes as an inescapable element of contemporary culture,”30 speaks to the importance of the boundaried self, neither wholly isolated nor wholly subsumed in the other. The infantile narcissism of Wallace’s characters, connected with the failure to recognize the self as also object, is countered by the traumatic perception of self as object that characterizes much of Wallace’s engagement with the body, discussed in Chapter 8, which is crucially depicted as a moment of maturation in several cases; we might think of Cusk’s sweating, which occurs specifically as a self-conscious response to the gaze of an other. Similarly infantile is the inability of these characters to communicate meaningfully or effectively, a link heavily underscored by the recurrent images of infancy throughout Wallace’s 29

30

Mary K. Holland, Succeeding Postmodernism: Language and Humanism in Contemporary American Literature (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 7. Ibid., 75.

Introduction

19

work. The bizarre subplot of Vlad the Impaler in Broom highlights the comedy of ungoverned infant volubility, offering a comic literalization of the unthinking flow of information that so troubled Wallace. The literalizing tendency that pervades Wallace’s work was a feature that he would identify as Kafkaesque in the essay “Kafka’s Heroic Sanity,” but which also shares a good deal with Beckett: besides Norman Bombardini in Broom, we might think of the Entertainment in Infinite Jest or the office ghosts in The Pale King. Both narcissism and solipsism, which are often treated together, are worked against by the process of communication, and specifically displaced, counter-intuitively, by the failure of communicative action: the interpretative gap that inescapably opens in the communicative process confirms and depends on the existence of a radically other interpreting subject, which requires the recognition of the self as both subject and object. This surprising formulation, then, is the central weapon Wallace deploys to work against unbalanced subject/object outlooks. Over the course of this book, I advocate reading the disparate strands of Wallace’s work—the compulsive return to solipsistic ideas and contiguous obsession with connection; the sometimes disingenuous voice of the nonfiction; the apparent reluctance or inability to write strong female characters or loving relationships despite an almost pathologically repetitive invocation of both femininity and love; the constant resistance to the teleological imperative of storytelling; the political ambiguity; the ambivalence toward postmodernist discourses, and the slipping of narrative voice between different frames—through this central idea that commitment to the process of communication (rather than its outcome) is the driving force of his writing. I emphatically do not attempt in this book to present an exhaustive reading of Wallace’s oeuvre, but rather offer a framework within which his work can be read. The conceptual centrality of sincere communication to Wallace’s writing, both within and without the text, has never been in doubt, but considering process rather than outcome allows for a more coherent reading of Wallace’s work as a whole, one that links his body of work along thematic, formal and stylistic lines, persistently returning to the need to try. The remainder of this book outlines the thematic, structural and stylistic recurrences of that process—and its failures—throughout his writing.

2

“I’m a Man of My—” Wallace and the Incomplete

The legacy of ideas Since the 2011 publication of Wallace’s undergraduate thesis, Fate, Time, and Language—a rejection of Richard Taylor’s argument in favor of the doctrine of fatalism—it has become clear that Wallace should be considered a serious technical philosopher in his own right. James Ryerson’s introduction to Fate, Time, and Language articulates the groundings of Wallace’s writing in modal logic, a deeply technical branch of philosophy. Wallace’s consideration of Taylor prefigures much of his engagement with the ideas of free will and choice. As well as his early academic engagement with philosophy, readers of Wallace will be aware of the breadth and regularity of his encounters with a range of philosophers and the central questions of their—and his—work.1 For Wallace, philosophy and literature worked in tandem, with philosophy articulating questions, and fiction offering scope within which to dramatize, embody, or otherwise ventilate these issues. Early in his career, Wallace discussed philosophy as being “first and last about feeling” (BFN, 78), and this disposition is visible throughout his literary engagement with ideas. This chapter outlines some of that engagement, undertaking an investigation of ideas and modes of incompleteness in Wallace’s work generally, pointing to and exploring the consistent resistance to closure that marks the writing in structural, vocal, and narrative ways, establishing the persistence and centrality of the idea of incompleteness, which the later chapters explore in narrative, ideological, structural, and formal guises. In terms of the 1

Much work has recently been done on Wallace’s academic origins, and Thomas Tracey’s work on his early philosophical influences offers a persuasive delineation of his development.

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The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace

book’s terminology, while “resistance to closure” is the term most often used to describe the consistent lack of completion: this term is closely linked to the modes of failure I outlined in the previous chapter, and the third category of generative failure should be kept in mind as a conceptual backdrop to that resistance. This chapter is grounded in existing criticism of Wallace’s work, outlining what critics have seen as the central elements of his writing, including horror of solipsism, obsession with sincerity and a corresponding ambivalence regarding postmodern irony, and detailed attention to the contemporary (American) human condition. Overall, the chapter situates Wallace as a proponent of plurality, as someone who strongly resists ending, and for whom that antiteleology is integrally related to his broader project for literature, which he saw as “to combat loneliness.”2 Wallace’s work is most unified by its resistance to closure, which pervades the structural, narrative, and stylistic elements of his writing. This unifying feature involves both a strategic rejection of conventional narrative modes to highlight their shortcomings, and a creative frustration with those very conventions; in other words, the anti-teleological perspective evident in the resistance to closure marks a concession to the failure of traditional and contemporary narrative forms, and simultaneously a continued desire for their promised coherence. This chapter works to foreground the unifying antiteleology of Wallace’s writing, arguing that that position is a fundamentally political response to the cultural condition of neoliberal America. One of the purposes of this book is to explore how philosophical thinking, both his own and that of others, grounded Wallace’s broader growth as a writer, and developed into tools for writing as opposed to ends in themselves, intimately tied to his redemptive ambition for literature. Wallace himself ascribed his move from technical philosophy to writing to the fact that he felt more engaged by writing.3 Writing, then, offered a scope for experimentation with ideas that philosophy alone did not; namely, an arena in which to explore the applicability of theories in varied situational challenges as opposed to the narrow constructions of strict technical philosophy. Wallace referred to his own interest in “the consequences for persons of the practice of theory” (BFN, 78, emphasis original). Ryerson’s introduction to Fate, Time, and Language, titled “A Head That Throbs Heartlike,” was intended as an entry point into what Ryerson saw as “an overlooked aspect of his [Wallace’s] intellectual 2

3

David Lipsky, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (New York: Broadway Books, 2010), 22. David Lipsky, “Lost Years and Last Days of David Foster Wallace,” in Conversations with David Foster Wallace, ed. Stephen J. Burn (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 167.

Wallace and the Incomplete

23

life: a serious early engagement with philosophy that would play a lasting role in his work and thought, including his ideas about the purpose and possibilities of fiction” (FTL, 2). Since then, a number of scholars have begun to consider Wallace as a philosopher, with a book of essays on the subject, Gesturing Towards Reality published in 2014. Allard Den Dulk’s 2015 Existential Engagement in Wallace, Eggers and Foer engages with Wallace among other contemporary writers on a philosophical level, and in recent years more attention has been paid to the dominant philosophical tropes in his work. What is perhaps overlooked, though, in these engaging critiques of Wallace’s writing, is the often utilitarian approach he takes to the work of other philosophers, taking what is useful and discarding what is not. In this respect, several theories arise for consideration at various points throughout this study that invoke or embody contradictory philosophical standpoints. These readings often arise out of Wallace’s own direct reference to the ideas, and reflect his own contradictory use of various traditions of thought. What I outline in this book, then, is not so much Wallace’s adherence to any or all of these philosophers, but rather his encounters with them—probing, contradictory, and plural. Wallace was a writer deeply embedded in his own heritage, both cultural and academic. As such, I here explore Wallace’s various uses of academic philosophy in his writing, and his use of writing to clarify a philosophical position; to find, by way of his engagement with academic philosophy, the guiding principles embodied in his writing, and to explore and analyze the interaction of philosophical and literary tropes in Wallace’s work, rather than identifying the one in opposition to the other. Wallace’s fiction is more than the simple illustration of an idea; it is the wholesale fleshing out of a world-view, the process and the philosophy, with a focus more on the former than the latter. The title of Ryerson’s essay suggests one of the founding principles of Wallace’s writing project: that philosophy and literature are not distinct disciplines, but rather complementary modes of expression that overlap and mutually reinforce each other. I have consciously avoided tying Wallace to any tradition in particular, working instead from his own many and varied encounters with philosophy and philosophers to articulate the ways in which they affected his own work.

“This muddy Bothness”: Persistent plurality In an early essay on director David Lynch, Wallace discusses the discomfort of realizing that one of Lynch’s characters is both good and bad. The great challenge

24

The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace

of this representative perfectionism is also linked to the Both/And balance that characterizes both the style and the content of Wallace’s fiction and nonfiction. In “David Lynch Keeps His Head” Wallace confesses that “we hate this possibility in movies; we hate this ‘both’ shit” (SFT, 211). “Laura Palmer [ . . . ] is both ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ and yet also neither: she’s complex, contradictory, real” (211). The reason we hate this “muddy bothness” (211, emphasis original), he implies here, is because we recognize it in ourselves. In Wallace’s estimation, Lynch’s capacity to present this Both/And image is both the greatest thing about his work and its biggest failing. Lynch’s detachment allows him to make evil compelling and so investigate the complex relationship of his characters to their varying moralities. Lynch manages, without didacticism, to suggest “not just that evil is ‘implied by’ good, or Darkness by Light or whatever, but that the evil stuff is contained within the good stuff, encoded in it” (205). Lynch’s skill does not meet with unalloyed approval, as Wallace declares “I emphatically do not like to be made uncomfortable when I go to see a movie” (SFT, 207). Working through the questions of bothness, the crux of the Lynch essay is halfway through, in a section titled “9a the cinematic tradition it’s curious that nobody seems to have observed Lynch comes right out of,” in which Wallace recounts his first exposure to Blue Velvet as a graduate student. Wallace expands on the “epiphanic” effect the film had on his outlook: “the movie helped us to realize that first-rate experimentalism was a way not to ‘transcend’ or ‘rebel against’ the truth but actually to honor it” (201). He goes on to talk about the not fully conscious nature of “the very most important artistic communications” (201), whose most important feature was not what school they belonged to but “whether they felt true” (SFT, 201), in a striking echo of John Barth’s “The Literature of Exhaustion.” Wallace attributes the power of Lynch’s communication to the fact that he is “thoroughly, nakedly, unpretentiously, unsophisticatedly himself, a self that communicates primarily itself ” (201). The essence of Wallace’s plurality is one of effort and failure. Its conceptual centrality to his writing is difficult to overstate, and has its philosophical genesis in a range of overlapping paradigms, including the ontological hierarchy of multiple infinite sets, which Wallace wrote about in Everything and More, and in his engagement with the various linguistic and textual theories of the twentieth century, from Wittgenstein to Derrida and beyond. While Derrida and the strategies of deconstruction are relevant to a reading of Wallace’s work, though, the broader phenomenological mindset is of less relevance than Wittgenstein’s analytic philosophy, which dominated Wallace’s early work; Ricoeur’s theory of balanced narrative identity, the search for which pervades his characters, or Rorty’s

Wallace and the Incomplete

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perspectives on contingency, truth, and the self. While Derrida’s work crosses paths with Wittgenstein’s in places, his anti-metaphysics perversely privileges metaphysics by its focus, which Stanley Cavell opposes to Wittgenstein’s focused defense of “the ordinary against [ . . . ] philosophy’s metaphysical flight from the ordinary.”4 Like Wittgenstein, Wallace was tenacious in his focus on the mundane, working into the metaphysics of the tedious through much of his writing. In several important senses, Wallace is anti-deconstruction; while he resists the notion and structures of ending, there is meaning to be found in the process, and the focus of text is connective and transcendental rather than chaotic and isolating. The postmodern decentering of the self, for Wallace, ultimately proves to be potentially redemptive rather than cataclysmic, its disruption and alienation offering proof against rather than evidence for solipsistic entrapment. However, what Cavell calls the “procedures” of deconstruction, with their quasi-hegemonic domination of late twentieth century thought, echo throughout Wallace’s writing. Patricia Waugh’s characterization of deconstruction as “not so much a way of analyzing the world as a way of living in the world” is perhaps a useful distinction: deconstruction is not an abstract mode of thought, but the practical application of a set of phenomenological tools.5 It is in this regard, as a set of tools rather than a founding ideology, that we consider deconstruction here. In Of Grammatology, Derrida introduced his reading of the Heideggerian strategy of overwriting, which he called “sous-rature.” Derrida invoked Heidegger’s tactic in Zur Seinsfrage [The Question of Being] of writing the word Being only with a cross through it: Being.6 Derrida argues that “the presence of a transcendental signified is effaced while still remaining legible [ . . . ], is destroyed while making visible the very idea of the sign,”7 which was seen as “inadequate yet necessary.”8 This overwriting is not wholly negative: it is not an act of deletion, but of superscription. The common translation of sous-rature as “under erasure” usefully indicates the never-complete process of meaning. However, the implication of deletion (i.e., movement toward total absence) undermines the sense of absence-

4

5

6

7

8

Stanley Cavell, Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), 46. Patricia Waugh, Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 307. Martin Heidegger, The Question of Being, trans. Jean T. Wilde and William Kluback (New York: NCUP, 1956), 33. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 23. Madan Sarup, An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1988), 35.

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The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace

in-presence Derrida mentions, and which might be translated also as “crossed out” or “overwritten.” This second definitional element—what might be called a sense of “Both/And”—is significant to the possibility of multiplicity and interpretive synergy implicit in the idea of using destructive processes to construct anew, and should be borne in mind when considering Wallace’s exploitation of the processes of deconstruction to find new sources of meaning. The effect of sous-rature, then, is not deleterious but cumulative, allowing for the layering of plural and frequently contrary elements of meaning, rather a palimpsest than a supplantation like deconstruction in general, it is fundamentally resistant to closure. That resistance to closure mirrors and extends Wallace’s focus on communicative process rather than interpretation, which characterizes his conception of communication, with both elements working together to disrupt the isolation of the contemporary self. However, the failure of Wallace’s inscription of communicative exchange differs from the failure of Derrida’s in its generative outlook: the cataclysmic inwardness of poststructuralist textuality is superseded in Wallace’s work by the sincere interpretive work of the reader, the uncontrolled but engaged commitment to the process. The always-unfinished nature of sous-rature allows the continuation of a permanently renewing process, forestalling fixity and decay, continually deferring possible endings. It is interesting that deconstruction foretells its own great challenge: Derrida’s idea of sous-rature makes explicit the necessity of opposition for fullness. Indeed, the concept foretells its own demise: unopposed, univocal, the originally hegemony-challenging practice of deconstruction itself became hegemonic, and so homogenous. The very possibility of rebellion or challenge became bound up with the systems of production that generated them, derivative products of mainstream cultural capital whose very sharpness became a trading point. Wallace’s estimation of the progress of postmodernism explicitly references this process of neutralization by absorption: “prescient art suffers death-by-acceptance.”9 In the face of postmodernism’s endgame, with the uncertainty of deconstruction the only certainty, it is tempting to reduce the term “deconstruction” to “destruction,” as Bové has done in his work on Heidegger and poetics, robbing the term of the creativity implicit in the second syllable, “con.” Indeed, it is here that Wallace’s work diverges from mainstream postmodernist poetics, in its consideration of both the beginning and the end of deconstruction, both destruction and construction, and the vital movement between.

9

Larry McCaffery, “An Interview with David Foster Wallace,” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 13.2 (Summer 1993): 135.

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While his ambivalence toward postmodernist heritage, theoretical and artistic, persists most openly in Wallace’s nonfiction, it speaks to a deeper theoretical foundation in his writing more broadly. Arriving on the late-postmodern scene, Wallace represents one of the first writers of a generation that straddled postmodernism and what would succeed it. The term “late,” used here in reference to both capitalism and postmodernism, has the same meaning in both cases, and refers to the point in the development of a sociopolitical or artistic system at which it is hegemonic and tending toward decadence, but has not reached the point of breakdown. “Late capitalism” refers to Jameson’s conception of the phenomenon as increasingly bureaucratic and internationalist, with a slight emphasis on the resonances of limitedness and morbidity associated with the term “late.” In Postmodernism, Jameson referred to the sense of change associated with the term, the conviction that a decisive shift had taken place that made late capitalism both a continuation of and a break with the late capitalism understood by the Frankfurt School, characterized most strongly by the loss of national capitalisms, and thus, identities.10 Similarly, “late postmodernism” refers to the period in which the groundbreaking work of the postmodernist founders had become mainstream, suffering the death-by-acceptance Wallace noted, a point at which the system was beginning to stagnate in its own ubiquity, but at which no alternative was yet apparent. As with capitalism itself, the artistic modes of the preceding movement remained dominant, but subject to often-hostile questioning. The inculcation of high postmodernist values into the mainstream grew into a radical instability characterized by a failure of the sociolinguistic contract. In invoking parental duty and the necessity of limits,11 Wallace worked against that to foster the conditions in which the perpetual process of communicative exchange could take place. To refer to the work of William James again, it is the act of will that is important, that facilitates progress from that point.

“I can’t go on, I’ll go on”: Cynicism and the will to belief Wallace’s short fiction is the area in which he engaged most with theories of deconstruction, particularly with questions of fullness of expression.12 The success of a short story “often lies in conveying a sense of unwritten, or unwriteable 10 11 12

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1990). McCaffery, “Interview,” 151. Wallace also interrogated and made use of the strategies of postmodernist representation, linked with deconstructive practices, but in a more artistic than theoretical way. That engagement is addressed in the next chapter.

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The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace

things: the storyteller accepts the limitations of his art, and makes his freedom an aspect of those same restrictions. And if his story succeeds, that freedom is passed on to us.”13 In the lacuna between speech and interpretation lies the freedom to choose—or not choose—to take part in the process; it is in the spaces before completion that freedom will be exercised. There is a fixation in Wallace’s fiction with story-making and storytelling, from the relationship between Lenore Jr. and Rick Vigorous in The Broom of the System to the video in Infinite Jest that is so entertaining it leaves its viewers catatonic, through the stories within “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” in Girl with Curious Hair, right up to Wallace’s final published collection, Oblivion, in which Wallace investigates storytelling and self-narration in the early twenty-first century. This tendency to continually reframe narrative leads to the sense of permanently deferred narrative accountability, further enhancing the sense of decentered, unfixed narrative, and the disruption of closure. In Frames of War, Butler talks about the idea that we must disrupt our own narrative frames in order to apprehend the reality of another life, echoing Cavell’s idea of acknowledgment. She further notes that “to call the frame into question is to show that the frame never quite contained the scene it was meant to limn,”14 which evokes the tendency of these narratives to rupture their own borders, bleeding out of the voices that narrate them, sometimes sharing characters or titles across different stories, sometimes simply disrupting the narrative integrity of a single story or collection. Butler’s work offers a link between the eruptive tendencies of Wallace’s writing and his broader project of fostering recognition of the subjectivity of the other; by recognizing that narrative frames are insufficient we again recognize the external, unreachable reality of the narrative object. The middle-period story “Octet” embodies this struggle, providing the reader with a choice: to accept the possibility of collective progress beyond the point of simple recognition and engage in communicative exchange in the knowledge of its mediated nature, or to refuse to progress on the grounds that all language and all communication are inescapably mediated, itself a conviction mediated by language and Western cultural and philosophical constructs. In an interview with Bryan Garner, Quack This Way, Wallace spoke of a distinction between “expressive writing and communicative writing,” which he attributed to the fact that communicative writing occurs in a world where “the reader doesn’t care

13 14

Valerie Shaw, The Short Story: A Critical Introduction ( London: Longman, 1983), 264. Judith Butler, Frames of War (London: Verso, 2009), 9.

Wallace and the Incomplete

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about you” and where your writing is the tool by which you “make them care.”15 In “Octet,” Wallace demonstrates that the form of expression affects—and even effects—what is expressed: if we choose to participate, it is possible to see past the fact of mediation to a point at which mediated communication might again become meaningful. Holland persuasively argues that “the narrative uses selfconscious representation not only to return us to presence and the real [ . . . ] but also to remind us of the powerful ways in which acts of reading and writing impact the real world.”16 The story encodes a Lynchian recasting of characters in various kinds of extremity, closing with Pop Quiz 9, which enlists the reader as one of the characters, urging honesty and consideration and humanity, and then closes with the sentence “So decide.” In other words, even a story that restores our sense of balance between the real and the written rejects, and even ruptures, the possibility of narrative closure, turning the future of the text back over to the reader, ending with the opening, rather than the closing, of a transaction. Rather than freeing the reader from mediation, the narrative entangles her further, forcing a renegotiation of the relationship of self and language and blowing open the structural integrity of the story, disrupting what Butler conceived of as the illusory narrative frame. In its meta-metafictionality, “Octet” encodes its own endless idealistic recursivity, the ultimate postmodern idée fixe. Just as the short fiction plays with its own formal conventions, Wallace’s novels challenge the readers’ expectations. The novels are particularly characterized by a lack of strong connections between the characters, functioning rather as collections of loosely associated “short stories,” with different narrative styles and focuses, framed within the boundaries of a novel but always bursting out of them. The locus of Wallace’s novels tends not to be a main character or traceable thread of narrative, but a place or a period of time and a collection of individual stories that orbit that silent center, in keeping with the postmodernist idea of the decentered subject. In the introduction to The Pale King, Wallace’s longtime editor Michael Pietsch noted that Wallace had explicitly intended this novel to do just that. Wallace’s word was “tornadic,” according to Pietsch,17 a word used to describe the thought processes of one of the characters. This sense of tornadic exposition is one of the major links between substance and style in Wallace’s work: the structure of much of his work reflects the ideologies that make up the 15 16

17

Bryan A. Garner, Quack This Way (Dallas: Rosepen Books, 2013), 35. Mary K. Holland, Succeeding Postmodernism: language and humanism in contemporary American literature (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 7. Editor’s introduction to The Pale King (London: Little, Brown and Company, 2011), viii.

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The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace

narrative, blurring the boundary between narrative and subject and resisting any sense of enclosure. While Burn identifies in Wallace’s contemporaries “a gradual, qualified return to more conventional methods of closure,”18 Wallace continued to resist and radically disrupt framing narratives. In the context of generative failure, to reach a conclusion in any narrative is a priori to close off avenues of possible communication by collapsing the distance between subjects; to succeed, then—to write a successful ending, to perform successful connection on the page—is to fail, and vice versa. It is the commitment to take part that counts, the journey toward outcome, not the outcome itself. This essentially Aristotelian idea of perfectibility governs Wallace’s work in every part, drawing together the structure, content, and thematic concerns of his work. Baskin discusses perfectibility with regard to Wallace’s work in a Cavellian context; Cavell discussed Perfectionism as “philosophy less as a search for better facts than as a ‘journey of ascent’ towards a better self.”19 Whatever incarnation of the concept we trace through Wallace’s work, the term is useful, given its implications of both process and deferred closure; perfectibility precludes the achievement of perfection, focusing instead on constant improvement. Wallace’s Perfectionist resistance to ending, and the concomitant commitment to process are a fundamentally political series of actions, seeking to draw readers out of the search for finality, and toward a comfort with ambiguity that would allow for simultaneous conservative and liberal politics, a standpoint Wallace discusses in “Authority and American Usage,” embodying the “muddy bothness” Wallace identified in Lynch’s work. That “bothness” and its connection to Wallace’s resistance to ending are inextricable from Wallace’s conception of communication as a dynamic and always-incomplete process. Wallace’s attachment to plurality persists in other forms in the nonfiction; we might consider, for example, his digressive passage on reproductive rights in “Authority and American Usage.” There, Wallace deals with language and politics, offering an interesting, if slightly oblique, of cultural and strategic engagement with a contemporary political issue. Ostensibly, Wallace reviews A Dictionary of Modern American Usage; actually, he spends a little time praising the book and significantly more time exploring his own thoughts on Prescriptivism versus Descriptivism, two sides of the so-called Usage Wars. 18

19

Stephen J. Burn, Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism (New York: Continuum Books, 2009), 128. Jon Baskin, “Untrendy Problems: The Pale King’s Philosophical Inspirations,” in Gesturing Toward Reality, ed. Robert K. Bolger and Scott Korb (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 148.

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Descriptivists tend to be “hard-core academics” (CL, 81)—the implication being that Wallace is not a hardcore academic, and here Wallace, perhaps speciously, aligns himself with his readers—and “doctrinaire positivists” (81). He comments also on the influence of Descriptivists on contemporary American culture, an influence that does not fill him with unmixed delight. He particularly laments the influence on teaching: “everyone who started junior high after c. 1970 has been taught to write Descriptively [ . . . ] a view of writing as self-exploratory, and -expressive rather than as communicative” (81), which resonates with his expressed conception of writing as “an act of communication” (SFT, 144). The rhetorical position Wallace ultimately assumes—that usage dictionaries should tread a line between guidance of and response to the development of language—bespeaks the same Both/And pragmatism that was visible in its early stages in The Broom of the System. Alexis Burgess’s recent essay on this piece deals with the philosophical implications of Wallace’s argument; Burgess argues that Wallace’s position is inherently flawed, and that “Wallace tries to prove too much, [reaching] vainly for the extreme conclusion that a purely descriptive lexicography is impossible.”20 Burgess further points out that this overreaching involves “dubious identification” of one concept with another (in this case Positivism with the quest for objectivity),21 a fault visible in Everything and More and other texts as well, which is a recurrent problem in Wallace’s nonfiction in particular. However, as Burgess also notes, while Wallace “overreaches” in the philosophical side of his argument, he arrives at a position informed by a “Significant kernel of Truth,”22 which is that “given what we already care about, we should also care about how we express ourselves,”23 not because it is scientifically required or philosophically mandated, but because “how we use language directly affects our chances of gaining membership into various social and professional groups,”24 and by extension functions as a tool of the kind of social exclusion Wallace identified in This Is Water. Wallace talks about this problem specifically in Quack This Way, identifying a type of writing that “becomes as much or more about presenting one’s own qualifications from inclusion in [a] group than transmission of meaning [ . . . ] people feel that unless they can mimic the particular jargon and style of their peers, they won’t 20

21 22 23 24

Alexis Burgess, “How We Ought to Do Things with Words,” in Gesturing Toward Reality, ed. Robert K. Bolger and Scott Korb (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 9. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 17.

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The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace

be taken seriously.”25 This later question of exclusion versus inclusion, which is the real focus of “Authority and American Usage,” is wrapped up in that essay with questions of authority and expertise, areas about which Wallace was explicitly ambivalent.

Authority and authorship In the same essay, Wallace talked extensively about the author, Bryan Garner, a successful attorney in the United States who continues to write extensively about the use of language, particularly in the field of law, and with whom Wallace would subsequently strike up a friendship. In writing about Garner’s authorial approach, Wallace comments on the characterlessness of his prose: “it struck me that I had no idea whether Bryan A. Garner was black or white, gay or straight, Democratic or Dittohead” (CL, 119), and that, more importantly, it did not seem important. Garner’s skill was to make himself objective, “with a small o” (119). He does not appear to “have an axe to grind” (119), but rather seems to believe that “the purposes of the expert authority and the purposes of the lay reader are identical” (124). Wallace describes Garner’s generosity and authorial self-effacement as embodying a “Democratic Spirit” (so capitalized), explicitly linking linguistic expression with political engagement in a way that would persist and evolve into the direct concerns of The Pale King with citizenship, will, and politics.26 Wallace’s admiration of this position is tainted somewhat by his uncertainty over “the big question [of] whether such a spirit compromises Bryan A. Garner’s ability to present himself as a genuine ‘authority’ on issues of usage” (73). This discomfort is visibly turned on Wallace’s own writing at a number of points throughout his nonfiction—we might think of his distancing of the “swanky East-Coast magazine” people in his cruise ship essay; his persistent repudiation of any kind of expertise; his repudiation of politics and his self-conscious racial entanglements in Signifying Rappers—and embodies again a resistance to categorization, a problematic Democratic Spirit of his own. Korb generously suggests that this Democratic Spirit is the animating force of critical thinking in general, and 25 26

Garner, Quack This Way, 48. For an excellent discussion of the civic, ethical, and political themes of The Pale King, see Boswell’s “Trickle-Down Citizenship: Taxes and Civic Responsibility in The Pale King,” in David Foster Wallace and the Long Thing, ed. Marshall Boswell (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014).

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that there is “some transcendent value in bringing a Democratic Spirit to [the] consideration of Wallace’s work,”27 but while admirable, the Spirit in question is not without its pitfalls. His reliance on a “democratic” voice forces Wallace to simultaneously inhabit and repudiate specific roles, mainly roles associated with authority, which can result in an obviously disingenuous effort to align himself with the reader, or in a paralysis-by-self-consciousness, as in Signifying Rappers. It can also result in simple poor writing, as in Everything and More, where the effort to be all things results in slapdash writing that veers between high-concept and rudimentary, finally achieving mere chaos. Wallace’s own judgment of this problem is embodied in his worry over Garner’s ability to present himself as expert, and suggests an awareness that it is not possible to fully obliterate hierarchy. Indeed, the tension between democratic desire and hierarchical necessity is reiterated in the McCaffery interview in a structural light: first, there may well be “something about authority and limits we actually need,” and second, the authority figures against whom postmodernist thought rebelled, referred to as parents, “aren’t ever coming back—which means we’re going to have to be the parents.”28 In other words, there is a maturity to accepting authority that the early postmodernist thinkers did not reach, again reflecting Wallace’s thoughtful embeddedness in his own cultural milieu. In order for progress to be possible, the youthful zeal of rebellion must give way to a mode that recognizes authority without assuming that it is inherent in writing. Wallace’s sense of collective duty here—“we’re going to have to be the parents”—is bound up with the question of free will and choice, and with his belief in the redemptive power of literature in the face of solipsism; only by choosing to believe in systems of authority, in the rules of language games, can we find common ground. Indeed, it is interesting to note the language of parenthood that characterized much of Wallace’s engagement with his postmodern forbears, particularly in light of his Wittgensteinian proclivities with regard to language. The need for structure is predicated on the failure of the Both/And dynamic in Wallace’s own work—his inability to be both writer and reader, both expert and amateur. Wallace’s return to limits here speaks to his broader conception of freedom as positive: the freedom of play within structure, the freedom of the incomplete, but contrasts heavily with the idea of freedom as oblivion. 27

28

Scott Korb, “Love, and What You Will, Do: An Introduction,” in Gesturing Toward Reality, ed. Robert K. Bolger and Scott Korb (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 3. McCaffery, “Interview,” 150.

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The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace

Sincerity and art: The next rebellion The Both/And trope threads through Wallace’s work as a unifying conceit, ambivalent and contingent though it was. As Harbison put it elsewhere, “on the page, at least, an ideal marriage is arranged between enthusiasm and irony, cynicism and simplicity, however schizoid it seems as a literal recipe.”29 While the impulses may be contradictory, the marriage of opposites can also prove counterintuitively fruitful, proliferating into plural interpretive potential. That plurality extends, most importantly, to the consideration of communication as a phenomenon. As the traditional binaries of authority have been stripped away by the questioning of postmodernism and the explosion of available information, so has the privileging of language in communication, giving way to the realization that communication is and must be mediated. Wallace explored the conditions of communication under extreme duress, finally arriving at a multifaceted pluralist framework in which communication relies neither on the “kind of tragic fall Wittgenstein’s obsessed with”30—where language must be perfectly mimetic, reflecting the world as it is—nor yet on the hopeless nihilism attendant on Rorty’s truth-construction hypothesis, or worse, Baudrillard’s depthless surface, but on the individuals involved. The realization that language alone is not a sufficient condition for communication seems tantalizingly close but is never quite achieved in The Broom of the System, in which it becomes clear that the philosophy of language was insufficient to Wallace’s needs as a writer, and it is here that his nonfiction becomes integral to a reading of his fiction. The nonfiction reads as a progressively more earnest plea for his readers to be ready to fulfill the promise of his writing, to help him engage in communicative exchange with them. The claim that “writing is an act of communication” (SFT, 144) is not merely an artistic credo, but a moral one, a warning to the reader that they, too, must do an integral part of the work of his writing, that writing is never done, but always in progress, renewed, and multivalent with each reading. The idea of honoring the messy truth is present also in Wallace’s idea of “ImageFiction” (SFT, 50), which was how he defined his own writing and that of his peers. “Image Fiction,” according to Wallace’s definition of it, is “distinguishable not just by a certain neo-postmodern technique but by a genuine socio-artistic agenda” (51); in other words, Wallace sees the sociopolitical importance of writing as important as well as the artistic element, but the two are not separate 29

30

Robert Harbison, Pharaoh’s Dream: the Secret Lives of Stories (London: Secker and Warburg, 1988), 6. McCaffery, “Interview,” 143.

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as such. This essay suggests a sequel to the postmodern “used-upness” of art and the “weary cynicism” (68) of the televisual generation. “The next real literary ‘rebels’ in this country [America] might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction” (81). Holland comments on “[Wallace’s] belief in language’s ability to mean and forge relationships.”31 However, in keeping with his ambivalence toward postmodern toxicity, Wallace immediately undercuts the possibility of simple sincerity as a next step: “these anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started” (81). It has become a cliché among scholars that Wallace “affirmed and embodied sincerity” in his work.32 His “reconfiguration of the writer-reader relationship displaces metaphysics while retaining a love of truth, a truth now associated with the possibility of a reconceived, and renewed, sincerity.”33 Kelly draws a line from Lionel Trilling’s Sincerity and Authenticity to Wallace’s use of sincerity as a “complex and radical response to contemporary conditions.” Kelly traces the distinction between sincerity and authenticity: “whereas sincerity places emphasis on intersubjective truth and communication with others [ . . . ] authenticity conceives truth as something inward,” Kelly further argues that Wallace sees sincerity as stemming from intent (authentic) rather than motive (inauthentic). Taking this conception of authenticity as fundamentally interior, the self-referentiality of authenticity becomes problematically narcissistic, while Wallace’s persistent return to communication as a good places him in the realm of the sincere, rather than the authentic. Further, Kelly’s suggestion that “true sincerity [is] made possible by the impossibility of its certain identification,”34 a paradox that strikingly evokes the deferral of closure under discussion here: sincere communication is always necessarily open-ended, hopeful rather than entropic.35 Sincerity, always aware of the possibility of its own failure or rejection, 31 32

33 34 35

Holland, Succeeding, 62. Adam Kelly, “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction,” in Consider David Foster Wallace, ed. David Hering (Universal City, CA: SSMG Press, 2010), 131. Ibid., 146. Ibid., 140. There is, I think, an argument to be made that the “reconceived and renewed sincerity” that Kelly identifies in Wallace and other writers is used to entrench and defend the privileged position of white American masculinity Wallace so obstinately foregrounds, and it is certainly clear that Wallace manipulated the sincerity of his tone in ways that force a specious rapport with readers (see Chapter 7). However, the consistent yearning for sincerity is an indisputable and central motif throughout Wallace’s corpus, spoken both in his own voice and in those of his characters.

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The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace

allows for the subjective interpretation of the other, where authenticity refers only to its own judgment. Accepting postmodernism, with its anarchic, iconoclastic stance of challenge, as the antithesis to some prelapsarian sort of creative production that is unmediated and sincere, it is not enough to simply revert to the thesis; we cannot simply return to what went before. Rather, it is necessary to either reconcile or balance the two in a synthetic but incomplete gesture; that is to say, it is necessary to balance both the chaotic present and the nostalgic past. Wallace’s complex structural participation in postmodernism’s nostalgic imagining of a lost unity is complicated by his complicity with the pluralism and anti-hierarchicalism typical of postmodernism, which is itself further complicated by his desire to move beyond postmodernism toward a form of sincere exchange that takes account of cynicism. The features of postmodernism as discussed here function as varied sociocultural responses to the temporal condition of postmodernity; the two terms, while related, stand in a relation of productive challenge.36 In Hegelian terms, Wallace places the thesis of (nostalgic images of) unity and the antithesis of (cynical) plurality in mutual syllogistic refutation. This opposition in turn seeks the incomplete synthetic gesture of a paradoxically retrogressive vision of progress where postmodernist cynicism and naïve ideas of harmony mingle and give way to sophisticated exchange. Importantly, this synthesis is not hierarchical but pluralistic, allowing for a radicalization of Hegel’s dialectic of desire such as in the work of Baudrillard and Bataille, where “reciprocity is bound up with contestation.”37 The contestation, or interpretive gap, gives new life to a statement and keeps it moving; if we all understood each other instantly, once and for all, we’d never need to speak again. Wallace’s “representations of sentiment [ . . . ] are not merely backward looking or nostalgic; instead, he takes the psychological fragmentation endemic to posthumanist cultural landscapes as a fait accompli,”38 which makes his exhortation to “restore what’s taken for ‘real’ to three whole dimensions, to reconstruct a univocally round world out of disparate streams of flat sights” (SFT, 52) yet more challenging than it appears at first glance. Wallace’s hope for the fiction of his contemporaries and successors involves not just outgrowing irony and reflexivity, but also acknowledging how profoundly those things have influenced not only our art but our very society. Philosophically, “E 36 37

38

Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 2002), 23–8. Julian Pefanis, Heterology and the Postmodern: Bataille, Baudrillard and Lyotard (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 3. Paul Giles, “Sentimental Posthumanism,” Twentieth Century Literature, 53.3 (Autumn 2007): 337.

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Unibus Pluram” is not a rejection of the exhausted and exhausting reflexivity of the postmodern self, but an invitation to “search for fragments of authentic personality amidst the [ . . . ] jargon.”39 The temporal condition of Wallace’s belated postmodernity largely consists of mass-consumerism and profound psychosocial uncertainty, characterized by the globalized individual; markers of identity such as nationality, taste, and career have been subsumed into a heavily mediated system of global intrarelations. Importantly, for most of Wallace’s career, discussions over postmodernity “transpired almost exclusively in the west, notably in France and the United States”;40 this suggestion foregrounds again Wallace’s consciousness of his own milieu, but simultaneously underscores the paucity of his movement beyond that narrow perspective. The idea, in fact, “has been advanced largely by western, mostly academic intellectuals [and] needs to be registered as part of recent western history.”41 The late twentieth century stood in unprecedented confusion. Far from the bright future promised by technology, the reality of the time was, as Gunn put it “a world bereft of transcendent meaning or purpose and from which we are totally alienated.”42 Postmodernism functioned as a response to this epoch, a collection of aesthetic, cultural, and political reactions, almost on the scale of a social movement, that question, critique, and challenge in an effort to resituate the individual, either within or without the system. The decentering of the subject resulted from “the change of dominant”43 from modernist literature to postmodernist. There are several hierarchical shifts offered by a variety of different critical dispositions, but the central point is that the hierarchy of interpretive devices shifted between the two epochs. Taking up this theme, the change of dominant can be read as an “attack on the philosophy of Identity (‘Know Thyself ’) and its replacement with a philosophy of alterity (‘Acknowledge the Unknowability of the Other’).”44 Docherty identifies this alterity through the lenses of Bakhtin, as dialogical; Habermas, as intersubjective; and Lacan, as psychoanalysis’ projection of the I. In

39 40

41

42

43 44

Ibid., emphasis mine. Steven Seidman, ed. The Postmodern Turn: New Perspectives on Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 2. In view of this fact, it is interesting to recall that the only linguistic cultures besides forms of American English to appear in Wallace’s writing are Québécois French and Haitian Creole (also originating in French). Ibid., 2, emphasis mine. Wallace demonstrated a profound and often ambivalent awareness of his Americanness. Giles Gunn, The Culture of Criticism and the Criticism of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 118. Brian McHale, from the title of Chapter 1 of Postmodernist Fiction (London: Methuen, 1987). Thomas Docherty, Postmodernism: A Reader (London: Whitesheaf Harvester, 1993), 17.

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all cases, the locus of subjectivity is deferred, decentered. Thus, in order to locate a self, it is necessary to interact with an other. This hypothesis goes to the heart of Wallace’s writing in general, and is implicit in his project for art; that is, the simultaneous rupture and reinforcement of the boundaried self. This resituation was necessitated by the advent of postmodernity’s cataclysmic pluralism, which, in acknowledging the coexistence of many vantage points, decentered the idea of “I,” deferring closure and problematizing interpretive autonomy. The various elements of postmodernism are divided across many issues, but are united in their invocation of the past, either implicitly by overt rebellion and rupture, or explicitly by complicit critique and/or nostalgia. Given the period in which Wallace was writing, and the issues with which he engaged, Wallace’s ambivalence toward postmodernism is perhaps unsurprising, even natural. As Jeremy Green pointed out in Late Postmodernism, “the recent dissatisfaction with postmodernism [ . . . ] indicates that the great promises that came with the introduction of the concept—[ . . . ] announcements of the end of this or that, of ideology, metaphysics, the great divide between high and low culture, and the like—have ceased to be compelling.”45 Ideologically, Wallace reflects this dissatisfaction in his encounters with the theories of deconstruction, just as artistically he challenges the creative practices of postmodernism, most obviously metafiction and irony. A variety of Wallace’s fictional characters conform to the kind of “bothness” he identified in Lynch’s work, but perhaps the most radical incarnation of this trait is not in character development, but rather in story structure. Burn identifies in Wallace’s contemporaries a movement away from the “open-ended uncertainty” that characterized many of the “postmodern predecessors” of this generation.46 While Franzen, the writer most frequently associated with Wallace, and who in millennial parlance might be termed a “frenemy,” moved “consistently toward smaller scales and increased closure,”47 Wallace’s novels in particular have more in common with those predecessors; Broom, for example, mirrors Gravity’s Rainbow in its ostentatious mid-sentence truncation. Indeed, McHale argues—rather unfairly, I think—that The Broom of the System “seems abjectly imitative of The Crying of Lot 49, hardly more than a rewrite of it,”48 although he goes on to acknowledge that this may have been unconscious. Burn 45

46 47 48

Jeremy Green, Late Postmodernism: American Fiction at the Millennium (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 13. Burn, Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism, 127. Ibid., 126. 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), 194.

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notes the possibilities implicit in the wide-focus ending of Franzen’s The TwentySeventh City: the story is over and the characters can move on. Infinite Jest, by contrast, ends with a sense not of closure, but of inevitable continuation, since much of the novel’s action takes place temporally after its final pages and while it leaves large lacunae in the untold period, the bulk of the action is, as it were, predetermined: the story is not over. While The Pale King is of necessity radically unfinished, and in large part the work of Wallace’s long-time editor Michael Pietsch, the notes nevertheless strongly suggest that the novel was planned as a narrative with no climax: “Plot a series of set-ups for stuff to happen, but nothing actually happens” (TPK, 546). Indeed, as Boswell notes, while the manuscript’s development was certainly interrupted by its author’s death, Pietsch has said that the central story does not have a clear ending, but argues that “the notes and set pieces in and of themselves constitute ‘an astonishingly full novel,’” and that “although The Pale King never reaches a conclusion per se, it is clear that Wallace always intended to deny his readers any such satisfying sense of closure in any case.”49 In fact, this “intention to deny” is one that is visible throughout Wallace’s writing, and has perhaps been made clearer—if problematically so—in The Pale King, partly because its unfinished nature forces an encounter with our thwarted desire for closure. While that is not to say that we should consider its unfinished state as a full expression of its artistic intent, what we know of the plans clearly suggests that it would have followed its precursors into the category of the radically incomplete. Indeed, while the final novel must be treated carefully, the resistance to conventional narrative structure appears to be as present in The Pale King as it was in the earlier novels. Boswell argues that all of Wallace’s novels “fall firmly within” the category of encyclopedic novels, as laid out by Mendelson. Regarding the idea of the incomplete, I would further argue that the concept of the encyclopedic novel is particularly appropriate: the novels try—and inevitably fail—to encompass the full lived experience of their cultural context: Mendelson notes that encyclopedic novels “attempt to render the full range of knowledge and beliefs of a national culture” while also working within a context in which “the world’s knowledge is larger than any one person can encompass,” thus setting themselves up for inevitable failure; an encyclopedia is necessarily always incomplete.50 Wallace’s novels, which Boswell argues were written “with 49

50

Marshall Boswell, “Introduction: David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King,” Studies in the Novel, 44.4 (Winter 2012): 369. Edward Mendelson, “Encyclopedic Narrative: from Dante to Pynchon,” MLN, 91.6 (1976): 1269.

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The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace

Mendelson’s definition firmly in mind. As such, his novels not only epitomize the form, but also interrogate and parody it.”51 The encyclopedic scope of the novels, then, necessarily invokes a structure of incompleteness, playing with and investigating the impossibility of complete articulation. The radical antiteleology of the novels is further encoded in the short fiction; a short story, as a snapshot, resists ending in any case, implying as it does an unseen externality. In “Good Old Neon,” to take one example, the narrator’s death—a logical end—is not the final narrative point. Rather, the narrator closes by saying “Not another word.” The story is not over, but the speaker is finished speaking. This tendency simply to stop, rather than to achieve a clear ending, radically encodes the Both/And balance that dominates Wallace’s writing. The same anti-teleological instinct is mirrored in his tendency to distance narrative from narrative process, as in the story “Another Pioneer,” where the narrative action is situated at a distance of three vocal frames. The use of multiple or contradictory narrative voices marks the short fiction in general, and speaks to this strong resistance to conventional structure. The recurrence of the incomplete in various guises throughout Wallace’s work speaks both of his desire for completion and his awareness of its impossibility, his rejection of and nostalgia for his early belief in “univocal solutions.”52 The recurrent encounters with the incomplete throughout Wallace’s work unify his writing at structural, formal, and narrative levels. The conceptual backdrop of an artistic career marked by representations of failure and resistance to closure is firmly grounded in Wallace’s continuous ideological engagement with literary, philosophical, artistic, and political conceptions of the unfinished.

51

52

Marshall Boswell, “David Foster Wallace and ‘The Long Thing,’” Studies in the Novel, 44.3 (Fall 2012): 265. McCaffery, “Interview,” 136.

3

“It’s Just the Texture of the World I Live in”: Wallace and the World

Out of joint: Wallace and his time One of the most interesting aspects of Wallace’s artistic development is his seemingly indiscriminate absorption of texts in all their forms, from television and rap music to obscure and challenging branches of modal philosophy. An English graduate with a double-major in Philosophy, Wallace was well versed in canonical writings. Equally, in David Lipsky’s account of their road trip together, Wallace indicated that he watched a great deal of television, referring to it as the “primary addiction” of his life.1 In a 2000 interview with Mark Shechner, Wallace discussed his own readerly purview, from George Saunders and Dickens to Denis Johnson and Malamud. This chapter explores Wallace’s engagement with literary heritage, positioning him as a writer deeply embedded in other writings, a writer who was also a voracious textual consumer, not just of literary texts both contemporary and classic, but of the teeming cultural marketplace of the late twentieth century, and advocates a move away from the early critical tendency to atomize Wallace’s writing as (post-)postmodernist. Wallace’s absorption and reconfiguration of other texts position him as a writer whose work broke its own boundaries at a creative level as well as in narrative and structural contexts. I argue in this chapter that Wallace was a writer who was both deeply culturally embedded and profoundly aware of that embeddedness, who challenged tradition but nevertheless reused forms and textual fragments in new ways to meet the needs of a new generation. This appropriation and reconfiguration was multifaceted and not always successful, and contributed to the overall sense of his 1

David Lipsky, Although of Course (New York: Broadway Books, 2010), 144, emphasis original.

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The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace

resistance to closure: by invoking other texts, both accurately and inaccurately, Wallace used his cultural heritage to interrogate and disrupt convention. The uncompromising breadth of Wallace’s topic coverage can be disorienting. The combined range of his subjects and his cultural engagement may account for the tension between sui generis or isolationist readings and more populist critical perspectives; that is to say, the disconnect between Wallace-as-loneexemplar and Wallace-as-culturally-embedded-artist might be explained not by any absence or obscurity of identifiable influences, but rather by their plurality, and—more importantly—by their variety. The range and type of touchstones invoked throughout his work form a mesmerizing tapestry of derivation and disruption that frustrate any attempt to align Wallace with a specific viewpoint or tradition. Perhaps the single constant reference point is Wallace’s own status as White American Male. Even to this identity he stands in uncomfortably watchful relation: his own awareness of his cultural position formed an integral part of his artistic consciousness, to the point, sometimes, of handicapping his perspective, as he explicitly, anxiously, understood. The nonfiction offers a particularly fruitful ground for the study of this phenomenon, whereby Wallace’s engagement with his legacy and cultural perspective became so intense as to appear to restrict his descriptive powers, forcing him to qualify and requalify statements in a way that rather highlights than excuses his subjectivity; Wallace’s etiology of his own biased perspective is neither cure nor excuse for its intransitiveness. This selfconsciousness is particularly in evidence, to an almost crippling degree, in the early nonfiction piece Signifying Rappers, coauthored with Mark Costello, in which Wallace’s white maleness almost—and sometimes actually—overpowers the thrust of his argument. His explication of this self-consciousness has a paradoxical dual effect: on the one hand, it marks him out as what he believes himself to be, pinning him to the White American Male paradigm, while on the other hand it actively and repeatedly repudiates that label, invoking a kind of paralliptical self-negation. Such relentless self-examination bespeaks a mind keenly attuned to the multiplicity of perspectives that compete with his own, a postmodern, if not postmodernist, subject whose awareness extends to encompass its own decenteredness; in other words, a mind at odds with but embedded in its own time. In this respect, Wallace’s authorial perspective maps on to Kierkegaard’s description of the artist as ironist,2 a figure who cannot see

2

Søren Kierkegaard, The Essential Kierkegaard, ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 28.

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the future, but sees the present as past, looking back at his own generation while walking in step with them.

The appropriateness of misappropriation During a year away from his studies at Amherst, Wallace claims, he read “pretty much everything [he had ever] read,”3 self-consciously positioning this extraacademic period as the single expansion of his literary horizons. From his conversations about reading and the way he annotated and quoted books and writers, that seems improbable indeed; however, regardless of when this reading took place, Wallace was indeed very widely read, in fiction, both highbrow and mainstream, and in philosophy. His frames of reference zigzag wildly from bathos to profundity, indicating a prodigious appetite as much as a careful cultivation of mind, and the results of such broad self-directed learning are traceable throughout his writing. Wallace’s engagement with existing texts often serves as a kind of reinscription of narrative itself, using textual touchstones to orient a new or revisionist narrative, situating textual fragments such as scrapbook pictures in unexpected places, a characteristic he shared with Marianne Moore, whom he also mentioned as an influence. Evoking Hutcheon’s ideas about the disruptive nature of “ex-centric” narratives, Wallace’s reorientation of textual fragments problematizes the existing textual landscape, further destabilizing the borders of textual production and fostering debate on the nature and integrity of narrativity in ways strikingly resonant with the rupturing structural tendencies of his fiction. One way in which Wallace reappropriated textual fragments was by using them in titles, literally framing his own work by reference to other authors—Joyce, Shakespeare, Berkeley, Keats, Wittgenstein, Rorty, and so on. This mode of appropriation invites culturally embedded readings of the relevant texts, reinforcing Wallace’s referential authorship. Three examples that stretch across his career are “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,” “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” and The Pale King, the sources of which offer additional angles of interpretation on the texts in question. Wallace’s first short fiction collection is dominated by the novella “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way.” “Westward” is marked by the appropriation and reconfiguration of other texts, many of which themselves deal with themes of 3

David Lipsky, “Lost Years and Last Days of David Foster Wallace,” in Conversations with David Foster Wallace, ed. Stephen J. Burn (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 165.

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The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace

rewriting, from a wry invocation of Cynthia Ozick’s “Usurpation (Other People’s Stories),” itself a story about textual misappropriation, to the redeployment of John Barth’s Ambrose as a creative writing professor, and possibly to Jeffrey Farnol’s Jeste of Duke Jocelyn, a parodic epic poem about lies and deceit. A particularly interesting element of the relationship between “Westward” and “Lost in the Funhouse” is the way in which Wallace makes use of the source material: rather than appropriating the character of Ambrose directly, he refracts the character through an oblique lens. The Funhouse of Barth’s title is redeployed as a commercial wasteland, in such a way that it becomes a re-commodification of the very household gods of the postmodern masters. This strategy of misappropriating details of other texts is one that would persist throughout Wallace’s writing, from slightly mistranslated Québécois in Infinite Jest to misidentifying the author of Frankenstein in The Pale King, reconfiguring cultural reference points into strange new shapes. Wallace’s fictional relationship with history, particularly in his novels, is an interesting one; he approaches and feints away from dystopia, remaking the world enough to be uncomfortable and little enough to be familiar (consider among others the G.O.D. in Broom of the System, the Great Convexity/Concavity of Infinite Jest and, perhaps most subtly, the Dave Wallace working in the Peoria Internal Revenue Service [IRS] center in The Pale King). In this, as well as his detailed engagement with specific writers and texts, Wallace repeatedly enacts one of the major postmodernist strategies: the reappropriation of existing textual fragments, be they fictional, historical, or cartographical, and the incorporation of those fragments into a broader body of coherent work, where the appropriated fragments act as links between the work and the slightly reimagined world. Barth discusses the remaking of old art in reference to Borges, highlighting it as one of the central threads of postmodernist representation, and arguing that pastiche and homage result not in the deadening of literature, but in its reinvention. Barth’s appraisal of Borges’s use of error and misappropriation in his work is particularly notable with respect to Wallace’s tendency to pilfer and reconfigure textual fragments. Wallace also talked about the durability and adaptability of narrative art, arguing that while the late postmodernist era was—and is—an undoubtedly difficult time for writing, “good art can do things that nothing else in the solar system can do. And that the good stuff will survive, and get read” (SFT, 91). Like Barth, Wallace felt strongly that some technically experimental, avant-garde writing was animated by sufficient honesty to make it “represent on a page, what it feels like to be alive right now” (40) and show that “what’s always been important is still important,” but in a different context than that captured by the tools of classical realism. In other words, Wallace

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held animating ideas (one might even say intentions) to be paramount, again suggesting the centrality of a sincere willingness to engage that was necessary in both writer and reader. Like Barth, he believed that what was good and true and worthy would shine through the—admittedly legion—reams of poor art. The reappropriative experimentation that animated his work recurred in a variety of guises, from erroneous attribution and poor translation to slight renegotiation of history and geography. Wallace thus reconfigured the textual landscape within which his artifacts operate, destabilizing not only the idea of canonical texts or readings, but also the very coherence of the texts themselves. Ed Finn’s essay on the “afterlife of reception,” which explores cultural transmission and market forces within and around Wallace’s work, shows him in a variety of interesting ways to be connected both with his own time—the expected connections to Pynchon, Vollman, Franzen—and also to stranger texts such as Practical Magic, to James Ellroy, and Ben Jonson. While Wallace has been identified by a number of critics as post-postmodern, and explicitly struggled to disentangle himself from the postmodern heritage of recursive irony, Finn notes that the discussion surrounding Wallace, both critical and commercial, situate him “squarely in an intellectual tradition of Serious Young Men writing in the shadow of Serious Established Men”;4 in other words, as postmodern, rather than as a new breed. Identifying Wallace as a post-postmodernist writer tends to focus our attention on the desired return to sincerity and meaning. However, given his resistance fixity of any sort—expertise, structure, closure—it seems clear that Wallace moved less of a distance from the perpetually questioning dynamic of postmodernism than his early writing on the subject might suggest. Wallace’s dreamed-of successors, the next retro rebels, are tasked with reconciling the irreducibly contingent and chaotic reality with the human need for structure and belief, while simultaneously overcoming the pervasive cynicism regarding belief itself. This “peculiarly American ambivalence” is an example of the very pluralism that characterizes postmodernism, the “truce” of the “inclusive Both/And [that became] the beginning of the problems identity politics would have with the postmodern.”5 The enemy of post-postmodernist art is what Wallace called “anhedonia” in Infinite Jest. Anhedonia is the inability to feel pleasure, but Wallace adds depth in his definition: “a kind of radical abstracting [ . . . ] a hollowing out of stuff that used to have affective content” (IJ, 692). For

4

5

Ed Finn, “Becoming Yourself: The Afterlife of Reception,” in The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, ed. Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012), 163. Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 2002), 166.

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The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace

Wallace, anhedonia is not merely the inability to feel pleasure; it is that inability specifically associated with meaninglessness, a condition implied and caused by withering pluralist postmodern cynicism. The challenge for Wallace’s imagined Image-Fictionists is to restore meaning without submitting to mere nostalgia; to continue the cultural interrogation of postmodernism, but to embody sincere communication while so doing. This process of necessary balancing seems to defer its own success, again suggesting that it is not the outcome that is important, but the process, a Cavellian iteration of perfectibility by repetition, enacting an infinite process. Wallace, then, was moving both toward the new earnestness and empathy of the post-counterculture and away from the deadening spirals of his precursor, but remained intimately linked to that past. These links show clearly in his own complex engagement with his inheritance and in the reception of his work more broadly.

Self-reliance: Wallace, America, and the wider world Wallace was self-consciously American, and much of his work dealt explicitly with American-ness: Paul Giles argues that “Wallace’s invocation of digital America [ . . . ] gains in aesthetic power from its self-conscious negotiations with earlier American narratives.”6 Indeed, Giles is one of the relatively few critics who situate Wallace in a long-range critical context, both American and global. He draws comparisons between Wallace and Emerson and Thoreau in particular, citing the desire Wallace shared with Emerson to “metamorphose apparently ‘dull’ situations into landscapes of ‘wonder.’”7 Wallace emerges out of a proselytizing idiom, tied to the Puritanical origins of the nation and entwined with ideas of transcendentalism. Giles’s suggestions that Wallace seeks to locate meaning despite the profusion of simulated stimuli that characterized the world in which he found himself touches on one of the primary paradoxes of his work, the tension between a belief in meaningful narrative potential and a consciousness of the contingency of language and communication. A dominant theme throughout his career was Wallace’s preoccupation with the mediated nature of contemporary life, whether refracted through textual, televisual, or simply psychological lenses. A large part of the strife in which Wallace’s characters typically find themselves is linguistic or informational, an 6

7

Paul Giles, “All Swallowed Up,” in The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, ed. Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012), 6. Ibid., 7.

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“inability to get any lucid perspective or purchase on the information fields that encompass them.”8 This density of experience, indeed, extends beyond the merely informational, encompassing, and complicating every kind of human experience. Wallace’s “intense authorial focus on popular culture, mass media and everyday life”9 was an attempt to come to terms with this, to situate literature as a tool for dealing with this overwhelming tide. Wallace repeatedly talked about the inundation of information that confronts the average citizen, the challenge of being an engaged member of society, notably in his introduction to the Best American Essays 2007, in a brief essay called “Deciderization 2007,” in which he bemoaned the impossibility of feeling like an informed citizen. The problematic accrual of data, as portrayed in his short fiction in particular, is not specifically technological, but social, psychological, visual, and often physical, in the sense of addictive stimuli. While Wallace’s writing certainly engaged actively with the challenges of technology, it is perhaps more accurate to say that technology offers a perspective from which Wallace’s writing approached the shifting landscape of contemporary American life. Wallace was openly concerned with what it meant to be American in the late twentieth century, and while the case for his Emersonian heritage is compelling, it is equally important to acknowledge also the influence of more contemporary American proselytizers. Wallace drew on and battled with the legacies of the major American postmodernist fictionwriters both implicitly and explicitly, at once venerating and renouncing them. His use of names, particularly in the early work, both mirrors and mocks the zanily explicative nomenclature of both Pynchon and Vonnegut. He invoked Updike’s craftsmanship as the epitome of ars gratia artis, while also suggesting that Updike “had never had an unpublished thought.”10 This tension between veneration and excoriation, often expressed in the same breath, a kind of schizoaffective critical articulation, is a dominant motif in his engagement with recent cultural shifts. Significantly, the competing influences do not undermine or hinder each other, but rather accumulate to form a decisively pluralist response. A curiously parental language characterizes his extra-fictional encounters with these writers; references to childhood and specifically adolescence characterize his description of their place in his pantheon, in a way that is not mirrored in his invocation of older writers or writers whose primary field was not American 8 9 10

Ibid., 15. Finn, “Becoming Yourself,” 152. Lipsky, Although of Course, 92.

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The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace

literary fiction. This filial relationship is further strengthened by the clear ambivalence of Wallace’s engagement with them—simultaneously admiring and resentful, aspirational, and dismissive—which mirrors processes of adolescent self-definition, functioning as an anodyne of sorts to infantile narcissism, refusing to look beyond the borders of its own importance. While he tended to elide the “American” from his discussion of what it meant to be an American human being, Wallace was explicitly, exhaustingly conscious of writing from an American perspective, and repeatedly articulated his struggles with taking a perspective outside of his own. Lee Konstantinou comprehensively traces Wallace’s engagement with media stimulation and the performative cosmopolitanism of a type of educated American, suggesting that Wallace’s engagement with informational “discloses some of the most troubling aporia of [his] style. Wallace’s inability to represent a genuine cosmopolitanism in [‘The Suffering Channel’] is not simply an individual failure but is, for him, an indictment of the very ‘view’ that he understands himself to be inhabiting.”11 The paralyzing consciousness of mediated perspective, then, positions Wallace as an uncomfortably but inescapably American author. Konstantinou points out, indeed, that the critical tendency to read Wallace in light of his American-ness, even his most specifically local texts “[showcase] a longing for the international,” but notes that this longing is unmet in “The Suffering Channel,” trapped by its own self-focus.12 Konstantinou astutely notes that Wallace’s internationalism is different from the globalism of De Lillo or Pynchon, and emerges from a desire to disrupt the myopic ethnocentricity of late-century America. Much of his thinking engaged with writers from beyond the border of his own experience, including, among many others, Dickens, Sterne, Beckett, Shakespeare, Joyce, Borges, Cortázar, Keats, and Shelley, as well as folk stories and myth. Similarly, although he was and remains known mostly as a writer of stylized, challenging fiction, the range of his formal influences must not be understated, running the gamut from fiction through poetry and journalism, while also taking in dense and obscure philosophical writings. A glance at Wallace’s critical work, or the situations in which he discussed his own writing, shows clearly that he vacillated between a keen awareness of his own period and an acute consciousness of his literary heritage. Wallace belongs in the third category suggested by John Barth, of writers “whose artistic thinking may be as au courant as any [ . . . ] but who 11

12

Lee Konstantinou, “The World of David Foster Wallace,” in Boundary 2, 40.3 (September 2013): 77. Ibid., 67.

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manage nonetheless to speak eloquently and memorably to our human hearts and conditions, as great artists have always done,”13 an estimation echoed almost precisely, by Wallace: “a big part of real art-fiction’s job is to aggravate this sense of entrapment and loneliness and death in people.”14 The danger of reading Wallace independently of his peers, precursors, and ancestors is not merely to fall into the arrogance engaged in by every generation busy with the articulation and argumentation of its reinterpreted canon, but also, radically, to misread the nature of his artistic project, which was to explore and seek to ameliorate the condition of being a human being alive in the late twentieth century. While Wallace’s fiction tends to invite what might be termed Promethean criticism, this critical positioning necessarily impoverishes our reading. By contrast, the nonfiction engages explicitly with other writers and texts of every kind, from fiction to nonfiction, touching on writers from Dostoevsky to Updike. This strand of Wallace’s writing simply does not admit of the same atomistic reading as his fiction; indeed, in its more explicit engagement with outside texts, it very often reintegrates itself with the broader body of Wallace’s own work, directing—or attempting to direct—our reading of his fiction: a pattern emerges whereby what Wallace frequently holds up as admirable in the writing with which he engages as a critic mirrors features of his own writing. Apart from his broad range of literary engagement, Wallace also invoked nonliterary symbols of American identity throughout his work, from an investigation of the motto “E Pluribus Unum” through the peculiarly American phenomenon of the television gameshow. An awareness of this cultural embeddedness offers a framework within which to read Wallace’s work that greatly enriches the reading experience. Like Joyce, to whom Wallace has been compared, the cultural, linguistic, and literary resonances of the texts enliven the backdrop to an otherwise flat and solitary artistic endeavor. Wallace was acutely conscious of living and coming to artistic maturity in the time Updike referred to as the “twilight of the old morality,”15 speaking often of the challenge and injustice of such a creative mantle. Wallace’s relationship with postmodernist literature was as complex as his engagement with its theories: his relationship to it was not specifically hostile, nor did he fully disentangle himself from its reaches. In this, as in many things,

13

14

15

John Barth, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” in Metafiction, ed. Mark Currie (New York: Longman, 1995), 164. Larry McCaffery, “An Interview with David Foster Wallace,” The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 13.2 (Summer 1993): 136. Lipsky, Although of Course, 163.

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The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace

Wallace’s consistent plurality continued to define him, seeing in postmodernist writing and theory both inspiration and target. It is misleading to oppose Wallace to postmodernism completely, and it is simplistic to position him as a simple imitator. Rather, he was an inveterate interrogator of postmodernism, engaging and dismissing it in equal measure. One of the ways in which this ambivalence is clearly shown is in Wallace’s persistent nominative invocation of postmodernism, simultaneously invoking as family and reacting against his immediate postmodernist heritage—what Wallace termed “a patriarch for my patricide”16—and doing that most clearly in the early days. McHale notes that in Jest, Wallace would use the surname of one of Pynchon’s recurring characters— Bodine—as part of a pseudonym of Orin’s.17 Similarly, of course, in “Westward,” Professor Ambrose’s name is taken from Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, which is both explicitly invoked at the start of the story, and strongly present throughout. Both the movement of Ambrose’s name to a surname and the appropriation of that Pynchon surname bear particular relevance to the cultural practice of both patrilineal and patronymic surnames. Orin’s appropriation of Bodine is a “private joke” that playfully indicates the self-conscious debt to Pynchon, and is an adopted patrilineal surname. Orin’s choice of it thus indicates Wallace’s acknowledgment that he has indeed adopted Pynchonian practices in his work, but importantly also that they are temporary, because it is a pseudonym, not a given name. The idea of father–son creative heritage is even more clearly (and perhaps more seriously) invoked in “Westward,” where the appropriation of the name, its conversion to a patronymic surname and the paternal/authoritarian position of the so-named Professor Ambrose all serve to create a strong and unchanging filial honorific. Taken alongside Wallace’s direct own engagement with the idea of patricide, it seems clear that the appropriation and redeployment of these surnames signifies Wallace’s awareness of his own complex filial relationship with the preceding generation, and incorporates that relationship as an integral structural strategy, simultaneously acknowledging, celebrating, and resisting that inheritance. In “Westward,” too, there is a further layering of the problematic patronymic, when we add the protagonist, Mark, to the mix. Mark’s surname is Nechtr, which sonically evokes the word nectar, which is of course mythologically linked to Ambrose (or rather Ambrosia), placing Mark and Professor Ambrose in at least a nominative relationship, the narrative possibility of which is further hinted at in the text. 16 17

McCaffery, “Interview,” 146. Brian McHale, “The Pale King. Or, The White Visitation,” in A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, ed. Marshall Boswell and Stephen Burn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 194.

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Mark, the radiantly healthy young adult with secret ambitions to write something great, arguably functions to some extent as a Wallace-avatar in this story. Mark’s use of the names Dave (for his own avatar, the romantic innocent archer in the story he writes for the class) and Mark (for the counterfeiter, a significant choice of vice in a story about authenticity) further complicates the already convoluted nominative relationships, blurring the boundary between author and story, real world and fictional world, again evoking Barth’s story about Ambrose writing about Ambrose, which reading then places Wallace in a relationship of uneasy but decisive affiliation with Barth. Interestingly, Ambrose Mark’s teacher, says that “fictionists who tell the truth aren’t able to use real names” (GCH, 261), a maxim undermined by Wallace’s use of real names in his writing.

“Jesus, Sweets, Listen”: “Westward,” exhaustion, and intertextuality “Westward,” which has as its protagonists two graduate students of creative writing and an advertising executive, is almost wholly occupied with the telling of stories, and is thus itself an exercise, at least in part, in metafiction. Wallace would later say that he believed metafiction had become “a godawful trap” and that “Westward” was useful only in that it showed “the kind of pretentious loops you fall into now if you fuck around with recursion.”18 The “now” of that sentence, though, is important; implicitly, metafiction has not always been so perilous. It had outlived its usefulness by the time Wallace began to write, but was not necessarily inherently problematic; sufficient attention had been drawn to the artificiality of fiction by the 1980s. While Wallace made use of metafiction as one of the modal structures within which postmodernist literature operated, it was in the context of an overarching desire to rupture the inward-directed circularity of postmodernism in general and metafictionality in particular.19 In response to Wallace’s dismissal of late-century metafiction, McCaffery suggests that what Wallace is doing is in fact his “own meta-metafictional attempt to deal with [ . . . ] large areas that are not merely metafictional” (136).20 18 19

20

McCaffery, “Interview,” 142. Like many elements that could be termed essentially postmodernist, it is important to recall that while postmodernism may be partially characterized by metafiction, it does not follow that metafiction is a postmodern innovation. Rather, as Patricia Waugh suggests, there is a strong case to be made that “metafiction is a tendency or function inherent in all novels,” Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (London: Methuen, 1984), 4, emphasis original. McCaffery, “Interview,” 136.

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Wallace’s use of metafictional devices within the context of overtly parodic passages of text results in paralliptical metafictionality; that is to say, the invocation of a concept by way of its apparent rejection. In other words, Wallace explicitly repudiated metafiction while simultaneously engaging in it. My use of the term “metafiction” takes account of Wallace’s open suspicion of the mode, seen in fictional guise in “Westward” and referred to several times in the interview with McCaffery, while also acknowledging his persistent return to the mode throughout his career. Wallace engages in a complex way with irony as well as metafiction. Indeed, the two are closely related; it might be argued that his passages of explicitly metafictional text are always ironized, to the point of being “meta-metafictional,” as McCaffery suggested.21 Wallace’s use of irony tends to be revelatory rather than obfuscatory, aimed at investigating concepts of authenticity and sincerity by way of ironic conventions. By drawing metafictional attention to his metafictionality, he disrupts the reader’s encoded response to postmodernist metafiction by simultaneously exaggerating and repudiating the mode, creating an environment that “makes fun of itself as it goes along.”22 Gary Handwerk’s distinction between ironies offers some purchase on this complex layering of ironic modalities. He identifies the strands as ethical, romantic, normative, and epistemological, finally offering a vision of “an irony of consensus.”23 By this taxonomy, Wallace’s use of irony functions as a response to normative irony, with some gestures toward ethical irony. That is to say, there is a narrative layer of normative irony (irony as defined by Booth, where identification with the ironic tone creates a group or consensus).24 This familiar irony is subjected to a second layer of what might be termed ethical or self-questioning irony, concerned with identifying the ironic subject, which we might pinpoint as an organizing structure for Wallace’s engagement with irony. Wallace’s primary response to the exhaustion of recursive irony, then, was to overlay an existing, exhausted ironic mode with a second layer of ironic perspective, thus repolarizing the reader’s response to one familiar irony by imposing a second. Examples of this include the heavily ironized nostalgic voice of Sick Puppy in “Girl with Curious Hair,” overlaid on the existing irony of the reader’s projected non-response to his sexual depravity, 21 22 23

24

Ibid. Richard Poirier, “The Politics of Self-Parody,” The Partisan Review, 35.3: 339. Gary J. Handwerk, Irony and Ethics in Narrative from Schlegel to Lacan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 15. This form of irony is particularly resonant with Wallace’s disingenuous vocal construction in the nonfiction, where he creates a specious relationship with the reader by dint of a constructed irony of consensus through the linguistic creation of an outsider group.

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and the irony in Infinite Jest of Hal’s polished internal monologue as against his incapacity to speak, challenged by, among others, the minor character yrstruly, who displays a smoothly loquacious externalization of a chaotic internality. In this respect, Kierkegaard, who Den Dulk argues offers “perhaps the most illuminating perspective” on Wallace’s critique of irony,25 is a useful figure to keep in mind. As Den Dulk points out, neither Wallace nor Kierkegaard regards irony as a single, monolithic phenomenon that is to be rejected in all of its forms, as for instance Michael Little writes about Wallace (66). In their critique of irony, Kierkegaard and Wallace are not concerned with irony as just a verbal strategy, a figure of speech, an indirect or ambiguous form of language use, but with irony as an attitude towards existence.26

Irony, then, functions as a means by which to re-energize or renegotiate one’s relationship to and mediation of the world, a perspective also espoused by Richard Rorty, whose idea of liberal ironism animates The Broom of the System. Den Dulk defines Kierkegaard’s idea of Socratic irony as a kind of liberating perspective, or—perhaps more pertinently—process: “the negative freedom that it brings about is a necessary condition for the subsequent formulation of a positive freedom (a freedom-to), in which one gives actual content (‘positivity’) to one’s freedom and establishes one’s self-chosen life-view.”27 Simple Socratic or liberating irony, though, is problematic because by Wallace’s time, it had been exhausted as a linguistic device (rather than a world-view, the useful distinction Den Dulk offers). Also, freedom is not always simply positive, and the articulation of freedom is at its clearest in Jest: during the mountaintop encounter between Marathe and Steeply, while discussing the Entertainment, the Québécois Marathe posits that the Entertainment is symptomatic rather than (potentially) causative of the death of the United States. Jest’s persistent engagement with different iterations of freedom find the fullest expression of peril in the form of addiction, Marathe’s world in which it is possible to choose death by pleasure: (dis)embodied in the Entertainment itself is a conceptual challenge to negative liberty. If Marathe and Steeply, then, personify Berlin’s positive and negative liberty, it is perhaps interesting to note that the proponent of positive liberty is not American, but Canadian, and Québécois at that, as if Wallace could not imagine an American voice making the argument

25

26 27

Allard Den Dulk, “Beyond Endless ‘Aesthetic’ Irony: A Comparison of the Irony Critique of Søren Kierkegaard and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest,” in Studies in the Novel, 44.3 (Fall 2012): 325. Ibid., 326. Ibid., 329.

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for positive liberty, even as negative liberty is embodied in the dystopian O.N.A.N.’s slide into comfortable, chosen oblivion. The deadening force of consumption pervades “Westward,” which is also one of the most overtly and plurally intertextual of Wallace’s stories, a “nexus of intertextual routes [ . . . ] that reveal interesting possibilities for interpreting Wallace’s work.”28 The Funhouse at which the story’s central Reunion will (not) take place is an embodiment of postmodern recursivity, as well as a none-toosubtle reference to Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, which May includes in the canon of short fiction that “is less and less about objective reality and more and more about its own creative processes,”29 a quote that could be applied in some ways to “Westward,” which marked one of Wallace’s strongest fictional engagements with the artistic mindset of his age. Influence and its attendant anxieties are central to “Westward,” in both the textual world and the real. Wallace discussed his debt to Barth specifically in relation to “Westward,” which he claimed was intended “to sort of be a suicide note” to his career as a writer;30 he was simultaneously rejecting his writing career and entering into a dialogue with his predecessors. Kasia Boddy points this out in her essay “A Fiction of Response,” in which she argues compellingly that Wallace’s early work in particular forms a fraught dialogue with both identifiable influences such as Barth and the “writing program” generation of which he was a part,31 again highlighting his embeddedness in the culture of his time. Boddy points out that, for Wallace, the practice and theory of writing were both integral to its purpose, suggesting that he sought a middle course between the poles identified by Marjorie Perloff of the A team (the Creative Writing Workshop) and the B team (the Graduate Seminar in Theory). The ethical turn on the theory side, moving beyond the post-Enlightenment rejection of objective observation and utterance, was particularly significant here: Wallace became interested in the ethical intersection between theory and practice, gesturing to Harpham’s definition of ethics: “the arena in which the claims of otherness . . . are articulated and negotiated.”32 The articulation and negotiation of the boundaries between self and other was central 28

29 30 31

32

Philip Coleman, “Consider Berkeley and Co.: Reading ‘Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,’” in Consider David Foster Wallace in Consider David Foster Wallace, ed. David Hering (Universal City, CA: SSMG Press, 2010), 63. Charles E. May, The Reality of Artifice (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 83. Lipsky, Although of Course, 61. Kasia Boddy, “A Fiction of Response,” in A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, ed. Marshall Boswell and Stephen Burn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 24. Geoffrey Harpham, “Ethics,” in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 394.

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to Wallace’s writing, both as a narrative concern and as a formal ambition, since that negotiation would allow for a reprieve from the exhausted self-referentiality of contemporary subjectivity. The novella blurs the line between reality and fiction at several levels: most obviously, the title itself—“Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way”—is taken from the 1861 mural of the same title, which in turn took that title from the final lines of a poem by George Berkeley some centuries earlier. The story centrally recasts the existing Barth story “Lost in the Funhouse” as a work by a character in the story, the director of the writing program, Professor Ambrose, whose name, as we have seen, highlights both Wallace’s connection with Barth and Mark’s with Ambrose. The fictional part—Collision—of a real place— Illinois—gives a familiar but dystopic edge to the narrative. The decidedly real McDonald’s is given a fictional advertising director and clown (J. D. Steelritter and son), whose other client, actor Jack Lord,33 was also a real person and is associated in the story with a fictional business venture named LordAloft. This name may be taken from the 1919 prose/poem romance “The Geste of Duke Jocelyn,” itself full of metafictional passages that would later be echoed almost exactly by William Golding’s The Princess Bride, and which includes the lines, “My lord aloft doth hang full oft/Poor rogues the like of me/But all men know where e’er he go/A greater rogue is he.”34 “Westward” posits a recurrent link between fertility and creativity, first implied in the description of Drew-Lynn as “fiendishly, coldly fertile” (GCH, 234) is further strengthened by Wallace’s repeated references to the fertility of the ground around Collision. The corn, echoing Stephen King, a writer Wallace admired, grows “quickly and thickly and tall” (257), shading the highways, a “disorienting, wind-blown, verdant, tall, total, menacingly fertile” vista (275) that invades the dreams of Tom Sternberg’s mother even years after her son has moved on from his involvement with McDonalds (254). This terrible fertility (echoed again in D. L. in ways both physical and literal) has ties with Jameson’s vision of the deadening prolificacy of the postmodern era, the furious production of which he “considers [ . . . ] paradoxically sterile.”35 By way of her association with Collision and its terrible lushness, D. L. is linked to the earth,

33

34 35

Lord was famous for starring in Hawaii Five-O, episodes of which are playing on repeat in the Central Illinois airport in the story. Jeffrey Farnol, The Geste of Duke Jocelyn (London: Little Brown and Company, 1920), 8. Connie Luther, “David Foster Wallace: Westward with Frederic Jameson,” in Consider David Foster Wallace, ed. David Hering (Universal City, CA: SSMG Press, 2010), 32.

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a link apparently reinforced by her sudden, illusory pregnancy. By contrast, Mark, while less ostentatiously ethereal, is paradoxically less earthbound, both in his superhuman radiance of health and in his name—Nechtr—which, in its evocation of nectar, the mythical drink of the gods, connects him both to Ambrose and to a kind superhuman divinity or virtue. The positioning of Collision as a crisis-point echoes Wallace’s own assessment of postmodernism. Responses to postmodernity had become recursive and sterilely overproductive, as imagined in the threatening fields of corn. Simultaneously, what had become the artistic norms of postmodernism— metafiction, overt self-consciousness, irony—had grown directionless, characterized by movement for the mere sake of motion, symbolized in the novella by Illinois: it is not only west of the characters and so symbolic of the future, but it is also deeper into middle America, and so symbolic of introspection. The Funhouse itself, the “exit and egress and end in full view” (GCH, 332), symbolizes the endgame of postmodernism, where the only alternatives are escape (exit) or submission (end). Steelritter sees the Funhouse as a place of submission, where no one will ever leave, a haven of unthinking consumption, the prototypical Infinite Jest. If Collision as a place symbolizes the violent decentering of the subject at the heart of postmodernism, collision with a small c leads to stasis and death: literal stasis and death in the case of the woman in the car, figurative stasis and death in the case of the Funhouse, the stasis of fulfilled desire, the death of D. L.’s phantom child and of the wills of all present. The arrival of All Who Have Appeared at the Funhouse—the end of their journey—will mean that “advertising will finally have arrived at the death that’s been its object all along. And, in Death, it will of course become Life” (310). “Westward” is the earliest text in which Wallace equates completion or success with death, a hostile engagement with closure that further underscored his enduring anti-teleological urge. This association would persist throughout his writing. The closing pages of Jest, for example, consist of Gately’s loss of consciousness owing to pain and fever and the ensuing hallucination of his “Bottom,” or final trip. As he loses his grip on consciousness, his narrative perspective takes on the same detachment that characterized Hal’s narrative at the beginning. Gately “figured he might die [ . . . ] it was like trying to pull something heavier than you [ . . . ] it occurred to him that if he died everybody would still exist and go home and eat and X their wife and go to sleep” (IJ, 973). The juxtaposition here of sleep and death, as well as the hallucination that follows it, evokes Hamlet’s ambivalence regarding the desirability of death:

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“‘tis a consummation devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub; for in that sleep of death what dreams may come.”36 As with the mother in “Suicide as a Sort of Present,” death here is presented as a kind of perfection, a closure, a “consummation.” These references direct the reader’s attention again to the Hamlet references in the opening pages, bringing a further circularity—albeit, as ever, truncated—to the novel’s ending, in which the structural circularity mirrors or traces the narrative circularity. Significantly, Wallace chooses to end the novel within Gately’s recollection of the past (i.e., before the novel’s opening and while Gately is a drug addict), suggesting that the past is not easy to escape, which would support the reading that Gately is in fact given narcotics in the hospital. This ties in further with the circular motifs present in the novel as a whole, bolstered by the fact that the novel begins in a present that is then led up to by the remainder of the novel, which finally ends in a past-within-that-past, giving rise to a kind of temporal Möbius strip, where past, present, and future infinitely overlap without discernible edges. Rather than the circularity that would characterize much of Wallace’s later narrative structure, the primary recurring image in “Westward” is of movement, a specifically directed movement with a view to an end point, beginning with the title. Connie Luther explores the recurrence of directionality in this text as a reading of late capitalism, but these invocations of velocity also point to the formal structures of postmodernist writing and its apocalyptic trajectory. Motifs of direction include, most obviously, the staggering westward journey to the Funhouse; the backward spin of a wheel within a wheel that fascinates J. D. Steelritter; the trajectory of an arrow that occupies Mark’s mind; and, of course, the name of the place to which they are traveling, Collision, which necessarily implies conflicting directionality. Steelritter’s fascination with the spin inside a spin—staring into a spinning thing, “you can see something inside the spin sputter, catch, and seem to spin backwards inside the spin, against the spin” (GCH, 245)— has to do with desire, the engine of his business. The spin somehow symbolizes the catch of criticism, of healthy opposition, that marks a potentially successful ad campaign. In this sense it also resonates with Wallace’s own description of the “click” that, for him, marked out good fiction.37 Mark, a “fair competitive target archer” (GCH, 236) mentally connects writing with shooting: an arrow that is angled directly at the target will hit left of the bullseye, whereas “the straight-

36 37

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2003), 3.1.66. McCaffery, “Interview,” 138–9.

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aimed and so off-angled target arrow will stab the center, right in the heart, every time” (294). The explanation, such as it is, that is offered for this paradox is that the answer “lies in what happens [ . . . ] as it’s traveling to the waiting target” (294). In other words, it is not the original intent, but the process, the journey from launch to impact—or from writing to interpretation—that finally determines the stab of what is launched, a textual mirror of Wallace’s ideation of the relationship between writer and reader. The westward—future—direction of the journey, especially in connection with its multiple interruptions and uncertainties, as well as the place to which the group is traveling, with its evocation of directional conflict, is complicated by the past association of all the characters with the place. Their journey into the future, both literal (temporal) and figurative (the traditional associations of the west with the future, in which the title is complicit) becomes a confrontation, or small-c collision, with the past that conversely allows each character to change the direction of their future. Collision, both the place and the concept, although it begins in stasis and death, gives rise to growth and potential not once, but twice: the first growth of the town and the second, significant but metaphorical, collision at the end of the story that Magda’s predictions reveal will lead to the death of a sham marriage and the growth of a new family. By extension, the fatal end of postmodernism may allow for the growth of a new, healthier kind of creativity. These changes, while explicitly predicted, are deferred beyond the borders of the narrative, again rupturing the narrative integrity of the novella. “Westward” ends with a plea to relax and a change of address: Listen to the silence behind the engines’ noise. Jesus, Sweets, listen. Hear it? It’s a love song. For whom? You are loved. (373)

The change in narrative address, the introduction of You, disrupts the enclosed structure of what has come before, redirecting the focus outward. This ending functions as an early iteration of the implicit structural challenge to the recursiveness Wallace resented in metafictional experimentation, and the recursiveness implicit in the idea of being lost in the funhouse. By refusing to allow the end of the journey, Wallace ruptures the expected teleological progression, which in the novella is explicitly linked with death, symbolically breaking the patricidal cycle of death and reinvention that characterized postmodernism’s founding ideologies.

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What’s in a name? Hauntings, titles, and talking to texts We have already seen that “Westward” brings with it an explicitly literary heritage; so too does “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,” from Oblivion, originally published in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern in 1999 under the title “The Porousness of Certain Borders (VIII).” The earlier title links it with three other stories, published in Brief Interviews, each with the same title but a different number. The later title, by which the story is referred to here, “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,” explicitly invokes Rortian philosophy, taking its title from Rorty’s 1979 book of the same name. In the same collection, “The Soul is Not a Smithy,” in its invocation of Joyce’s artistic credo, seems also to resist ideas of the capacity of literature to formulate and maintain a coherent identity. The Broom of the System invokes Wittgenstein’s early theorizing on the subject of naming and the full expression of identity, which furnishes the central tension of the novel; Lenore’s confusion over her identity and its relationship to her name is an incarnation of Wittgenstein’s question of what the central or essential feature of a broom is. Infinite Jest, of course, invokes Hamlet, with its threads of fatherhood, communication and the paralysis of indecision. Moving to the final novel, The Pale King is perhaps the least obviously referential of the novels in its title, although several sources have been suggested. Wyatt Mason suggests Tennyson, More, and Lytton as three possible sources. Brian McHale argues that “we can extrapolate from Pynchon’s The White Visitation, of which the Exam Center appears to be in some sense a version.”38 McHale’s argument is compelling, and it seems clear that the book owes a good deal to Pynchon in general, not least the Reverend Paul de la Nuit, who “produces strings of numbers through automatic writing,”39 which is inverted in Wallace’s novel into a string of numbers that can produce intense concentration or immersion. While Pynchon is undoubtedly an influence, though, there is another more distant, founding creative spirit: John Keats, emblematic of British Romanticism more generally. There is a sense in which The Pale King speaks from the eye of the storm, the silent, even empty, center, around which the dramatic action of the world rages. It is this tornadic quality that most links the novel atmospherically with what I propose as the source for its peculiar title: the poem, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” 38 39

McHale, “The White Visitation,” 205. Ibid., 199.

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in which the action is recollected at a distance, if not wholly imagined. Textually speaking, there are also distinct points of contact. First, and most obviously, there is the phrase itself, a clear echo of stanza ten of the poem, which opens, “I saw pale kings and princes too.” Notwithstanding the quantitative difference— many pale kings becoming one pale king—the echoes are striking. However, what differentiates the Keats source from other possible sources are the more subtle references to it in the novel. Most readers of the novel will have picked up the references to British poetry in Irrelevant Chris Fogle’s monologue in §22, where he quotes his father quoting “Ozymandias” and then, rather ostentatiously failing to name the British poet in question—Percy Shelley—incorrectly credits him with writing “the original Frankenstein.” The plot thickens: Frankenstein was first published in 1818, “Ozymandias” appeared in 1819, the same year that Keats published two versions of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” and retired to Italy, along with the Shelleys, seeming to further evoke Keats as a spectral presence. The stillness of the novel’s opening image echoes the stillness of the opening stanzas of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” Human action is absent from both passages, save for the narrative voice and the plurality of human presence implied by the interrogative voice in the poem and the reference to “we” in the prose. By invoking Keats within the title, the novel necessarily invokes that poet—and by extension the British Romantic Period—as its founding consciousness. The confluence of these connections may be coincidental—as McHale says of the Pynchon connection, we may never know—but the significance of the British Romantics and the various echoes of Keats are too pronounced to ignore, particularly in light of the novel’s preoccupations with duty and heroism. While Wallace may also have been referring to Pynchon, to Tennyson, More, or Lytton, or indeed to all simultaneously,40 the echoes of Keats throughout the text strongly suggest “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” as a—if not the—title source for the novel. In essence, the novel’s title and heritage offers another example of the ways in which Wallace resists alignment with a single tradition, instead engaging in play with a multitude of texts at different levels. Indeed, at a more pervasive level, Wallace’s engagement with the nineteenth century generally—Dickens and Dostoevsky, Kafka, Keats, and Emerson as well as a range of nineteenth-century philosophical titans—tend to be overlooked in favor of the postmodernist aspects of his work, but it seems equally important to recognize Wallace as a long-range reader in creative dialogue with more than just his Oedipal partners. In fact, 40

Wyatt Mason, “Weekend Read: Three Kings,” Harper’s (March 6, 2009).

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observing the pertinence of British Romanticism in The Pale King and Wallace’s work more broadly offers a lens through which to tie his vision of patient heroism with the work’s animating resistance to closure. Christie suggests that “under the influence of Romantic notions of the creative imagination and of genius, the Romantic artist-as-hero was seen to undertake the psychic equivalent of the traditional heroic (or chivalric) pilgrimage.”41 Lenore, certainly, conforms to the mold; she undertakes a quest to find her great-grandmother, but the quest—as a Romantic one should, by Christie’s definition—becomes an explicitly psychic one. Lenore’s failure on her ostensible quest generates a new angle on the psychic or artistic quest, allowing her to exist in accordance with, rather than opposition to, her surroundings. Wallace himself referred to Broom as “my sensitive little selfobsessed bildungsroman” reinforcing the status of the novel as a quest narrative.42 “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” also invokes the symbolism of quest narrative: a journey westward with a goal that one character believes will change his life, but which ultimately also fails, and in the failure of which we see the possible futures of its protagonists. Their journeys are psychic as well as physical, into their own creativity. Speaking reductively, Jest is in part a quest narrative with the Entertainment as its always-deferred goal. The narrative of The Pale King is not sufficiently finished to discern what its central narratives might have been—as McHale points out, “anything one ventures to say about the lost whole that would have been The Pale King will inevitably be speculation”43— but even in its partial state, the novel does seem to revolve around the search for “immersives” such as Shane Drinion, who levitates when fully concentrating; by the definition of heroism as patience or attention, this would make it a novel whose quest is for heroes, which seems fitting given the political undertones. The notes refer, also, to the series of numbers that, it seems, will allow a subject to somehow become an immersive; perhaps this is the novel’s Grail. Similarly, many of the late short stories recount journeys of purpose, some physical but most psychic—we might think of the unexceptional protagonist of “Mister Squishy,” whose task in the Focus Group is secondary to his psychic unfolding of his relationship to language. Finally, the religious language of many of the titles in Brief Interviews in particular again highlights the sense of heroic purpose at their center. 41

42 43

William Christie, “Hero,” in Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, ed. Christopher John Murray (New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004), 497. McCaffery, “Interview,” 142. McHale, “The White Visitation,” 191.

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It is safe to say that Wallace’s cultural and strategic engagement with the major texts and ideas of his time and beyond informed his thematic concerns, which in turn fed into his overarching project of representing the experience of being human in the late twentieth century. As what we might call a postmodernist native—born into the glorious heyday of disruptive thinking—his ambivalent engagement with other texts and with textual appropriation is one of many ways in which Wallace made use of the strategies of postmodernism within his work. As well as exploring Wallace’s approach to the process of human communication, both within narrative confines and across the borders of text, this book examines his place at the forefront of a generation of writers born into a “postmodern” world. Despite his ambivalence toward postmodernist representation and its attendant mindset, Wallace maintained a constant optimism about the power of art, both in his critical writing and in his discussions of his own work. As a writer who believed that the purpose of fiction was to alleviate loneliness—who believed, indeed, that fiction had a purpose—engagement with the world as he experienced it was the only legitimate means of creative endeavor. Wallace believed that stories that, as he put it, “help me, the average citizen, deliberate” (DSR) about complicated political issues, “helped readers live the type of conscious life that he advocated in his Kenyon speech.”44 Konstantinou writes of Wallace’s “postironic belief ” and desire “perhaps impossibly, [ . . . ] to use literary form to construct ethical countertypes to the incredulous ironist [ . . . ] a kind of post-countercultural or newly earnest countercultural figure.”45 Konstantinou goes on to say that “Wallace does not give a positive content to this figure.”46 In fact, a positive content for such a character would cut off the very possibilities implicit in the cipher. Wallace’s own discussion of this type, the “anti-rebel,” is hazy and unfocused, and with good reason; to focus is to define, to cut out the potential for plurality and multiplicity, to limn and to limit. By not giving positive shape to the anti-rebel, the creative or communicative outcome is always deferred, always possible and perfectible and never achieved, reflecting the radical anti-teleology of the fiction and the constant qualifying 44

45

46

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. Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012), 27. 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), 85. Ibid.

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specificity of the nonfiction. Nevertheless, it is certainly clear that the perfectible figure Wallace seemed to yearn toward was a one always-already in the process of communication, ethical, earnest, and empathic. Partly because of the unbounded structure of the texts he produced, Wallace’s work drew criticism for being challenging to read, for the frequent use of pop-culture references in his work, and for his tendency to write stories that approached reality at an angle. Wallace defended himself more than once on this count, explaining that he was not an anti-realist, but that his realism, and the realism of any responsible writer of this period, had to take account of the noisy, linguistically debased milieu of the turn of the millennium, which he called “Total Noise” in “Deciderization 2007.” In conversation with Shechner, Wallace noted that “the conventions of what was called Realism don’t seem all that real anymore [and] some things in the writers you’ve mentioned [Barth, Pynchon, Barthelme, Burroughs] seem to me more ‘real’ than Dickens or Anne Tyler or pick your realist.”47 Despite his commitment to representationality, he was also careful to articulate the responsibility of the writer to transcend the debasement of contemporary life, invoking Bret Easton Ellis more than once. Wallace held the firm conviction that the writer’s duty was to simultaneously represent and transcend this bleakness. Communicative exchange with the reader is the cornerstone of Wallace’s artistic progression beyond the limits of postmodernism; while the representation of both the abject and the structural failure of acts of intratextual communication was a core thematic concern, it was only by means of committing to generative failure, to the inevitably, frustratingly unsuccessful process of communication with the reader, to get as close as possible to realizing the unrealizable ideal of intimacy, that his redemptive ambition for literature could begin to be realized.

47

Mark Shechner, “Behind the Watchful Eyes of Author David Foster Wallace,” in Conversations with David Foster Wallace, ed. Stephen J. Burn (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 108.

4

The Book, the Broom, and the Ladder: Grounding Philosophy

Climbing the ladder: The uses of philosophy The structural instability that generates productive rupture, the disintegration of voice that leaves room for interpretation, the self-replenishing proliferation of communication and the simultaneous conservation and rejection of the boundaried self—all elements of Wallace’s writing that speak to his desire to move away from closed systems—can be traced to the philosophy that occupied his early days. This chapter engages with the philosophical underpinnings of Wallace’s work, again demonstrating that the central ideas of his work were present from the beginning of his writing. Specifically, this chapter explores Wallace’s use of the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Richard Rorty, showing that while he explicitly invoked these and other thinkers, his persistent resistance to singularity makes it impossible to tie Wallace to a philosophical tradition, although it is important to note that his engagement with Wittgenstein informed his engagement with Cavell, Ricoeur, and Rorty, all of whom derived and developed ideas from Wittgenstein’s work. I undertake a close reading of The Broom of the System (1987), the quixotic first novel that has been to some extent overlooked and is ripe for reconsideration as the foundation—if not by any stretch the masterpiece—of Wallace’s career. While it was largely sidelined in early criticism, having only sundry reviews, Lance Olsen’s 1993 essay and a single chapter in Marshall Boswell’s Understanding David Foster Wallace (2003) in its early critical retinue, Broom has more recently begun to attract further attention to two articles in the essay collection Consider David Foster Wallace in its critical retinue, which is promising.

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Although less famous and in many ways less accomplished than Infinite Jest (1996), Broom is a crucially important text, as important as Infinite Jest to the general study of Wallace’s work, and more so to understanding the trajectory of his career and the development of his guiding principles. Its chief importance lies in its very clumsiness, in the visibility of its central concerns with connection, solipsism, and the interpretive gap, as well as many of the structural and stylistic features for which Wallace is most famous, which awkwardly and obviously permeate that first novel. Broom, imperfect as it is in places, perhaps not even a very good book (at least by comparison with Wallace’s later virtuosity), but a very important one, is key to any understanding of Wallace’s creative development. Building on the critical work that has been done in this area by Boswell, Olsen, and others, and focusing particularly on the issues of naming and identity, I outline and explore those elements of Wittgenstein’s writing that are necessary to any understanding of Wallace. Later, the chapter engages with the work of Richard Rorty, whom Wallace explicitly referenced several times throughout his career, exploring the elements of Rortian philosophy that are significant to Wallace’s work, notably the ideas of constructed truth and shifting vocabularies. Again, by using Broom as a touchstone text, the chapter demonstrates how Wallace laid the foundations of his later work at the beginning of his career.

“The piquant qualia of lived experience”: Wallace, Wittgenstein, and The Broom of the System The investigation of philosophical concepts and questions is one of the cornerstones of Wallace’s work; this much is obvious. Tellingly, though, in a late interview about the philosophical preoccupations of his work, Wallace responded: “if some people read my fiction and see it as fundamentally about philosophical ideas, what it probably means is that these are pieces where the characters are not as alive and interesting as I meant them to be,”1 echoing Wittgenstein, who argued that philosophy should involve more than abstract ephemera, asking: “what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday

1

Otstap Karmodi, “‘A Frightening Time in America’: An Interview with David Foster Wallace,” New York Review of Books, June 2011.

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life.”2 The study of philosophy should make the student “more conscientious than any [ . . . ] journalist in the use of the DANGEROUS phrases such people use for their own ends.”3 In other words, the end of philosophy, for Wittgenstein, is not simply the pursuit of academic study, but the better ability to live in and consider the world. Wittgenstein’s remark might be offered as a guiding principle for this book: the philosophical ideas introduced here and in earlier chapters inform and are informed by the literary context in which they occur. “[W]idely acknowledged as one of David Foster Wallace’s primary intellectual sources,”4 Wittgenstein’s influence has become almost too commonplace to investigate, partly due to Wallace’s own direct engagement with it in “The Empty Plenum.” We might trace the critical connection of Wallace and Wittgenstein as far back as the emergence of Wallace’s own critical perspective; Olsen’s essay “Termite Art” appeared in the same issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction as the famous McCaffery interview. Olsen’s early alignment of Wallace with Wittgenstein is interesting given the thrust of the present study; “doubt,” he claims, “is their cardinal virtue. Wittgenstein may have begun as a modernist searching through his picture theory for what can be said honestly about experience. He ended up, however, drifting in a post-Tractatus twilight zone wondering if he could even be relatively sure he possessed a hand,”5 a trajectory mirrored by Wallace’s self-professed journey away from univocal solutions. Olsen’s invocation of doubt as the central good here reinforces the anti-teleological standpoint of the rest of Wallace’s work, encoded in the principles of his earliest writing and demonstrating continuity of creative development, as opposed to a break between juvenilia and mature work. This chapter focuses on the appearances, implicit and explicit, of Wittgenstein and Rorty in Wallace’s work, exploring balance between “the concerns of Pragmatist ethics [and] Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language.”6 The Broom of the System laid out Wallace’s theoretical framework, and the attention to it in this chapter is intended to outline a sort of roadmap of Wallace’s main concerns. As

2

3 4

5

6

Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein, A Memoir, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 93. Ibid., 39. Patrick O’Donnell, “Almost a Novel,” in A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, ed. Marshall Boswell and Stephen Burn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 3. Lance Olsen, “Termite Art: or Wallace’s Wittgenstein,” in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 13.2 (Summer 1993): 202. Thomas N. Tracey, “The Formative Years: David Foster Wallace’s Philosophical Influences and The Broom of the System,” in Gesturing Toward Reality, ed. Robert K. Bolger and Scott Korb (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 157.

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Wallace put it, it is the story of “a character in a story who’s afraid she’s really nothing more than a character in a story.”7 Lenore exists in an almost-recognizable world (Ohio of 1990, future at the time of writing) where the search for integrated selfhood, for authenticity and demarcation of identity and for any kind of coherent meaning, is frustrated by a society that trades in aphorism, where contemplation and profound thought are encouraged by means of the “otherness, blastedness, [ . . . ] sinisterness” (BS, 55) provided by a man-made black-sand desert, called the Great Ohio Desert, or G.O.D., and where a city is designed in the shape of a film star, the neoliberal city made literal.8 Both the G.O.D and the city of Corinth itself prefigure Wallace’s later engagements with the corporatization of citizenship and the gleeful incorporation of capital into culture. Outside of the fiction, Wallace engages with Wittgenstein most directly in “The Empty Plenum,” which provides valuable insight into Wallace’s own ideas about philosophy generally, and Wittgenstein’s philosophy in particular. Perhaps most significantly, Wallace articulates his vision of what philosophy should be and do: make “what is designed to be a mechanism pulse, breathe, suffer, live, etc.” (BFN, 78). From Wallace’s engagement with the novel, it becomes abundantly clear that he sees philosophy not as “elaborate empty exercise” (78), but as an exercise in humanity. Besides explicitly displaying Wallace’s general vision of philosophy, the article shows Wallace’s deep interest in the work of Wittgenstein, both “one of the smartest & most important contributors to modern thought” and “a personally miserable son of a bitch” (79). He goes on to argue that the world depicted in Wittgenstein’s Mistress would initially be, for Wittgenstein, “logical heaven” (86), but that it would quickly become “a metaphysical hell” (86), a view echoed and expanded in his own engagement with solipsism and connection. Horn points out that Wallace ignored or misrepresented elements of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, especially his conception of solipsism. Horn’s challenge of Wallace’s reading of Wittgenstein is valid, and useful in considering the heritage of Wallace’s ideas, but my purpose here is to elucidate Wallace’s use of Wittgenstein’s ideas, rather than to tie him to a specifically Wittgensteinian mode. Wallace uses the review of Markson’s novel to explore some of the ideas that animated his own work—the picture theory of language, the disavowal of the Tractatus and Wittgenstein’s movement from monadic to pluralistic visions of 7

8

Larry McCaffery, “An Interview with David Foster Wallace,” The Review of Contemporary Fiction. 13.2 (Summer 1993): 142. See Graham Foster, “A Blasted Region: David Foster Wallace’s Man-made Landscapes,” in Consider David Foster Wallace, ed. David Hering, (Universal City, CA: SSMG Press, 2010), 37–48.

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communication structures. Early in the review Wallace discusses the writing instinct in light of the narrative structure of the novel, a sort of “objectless epistle” (88), admitting that he, like the protagonist, Kate, feels the need to inscribe, not with the hope that what he writes will be lucrative, but that it might be “simply received, read, seen” (81, emphasis original), highlighting the necessity of a witness (reader) to the dynamic process of communication. He follows this theme throughout the essay, suggesting that Kate’s obsessive connection of facts (such as the names Gaddis and Gaddi) is an attempt to linguistically replace the apocalyptic absence of any real connection: Kate writes because she is lonely—that word, again. Kate’s actions (or the way Wallace views them, at least) display the conditions under which communication fails, in this case for lack of a counterpart: Kate is physically capable of communication, and her epistle to no one is the embodiment of her sacrificial disposition, the act of love required to catalyze the reaction. The absence of an other to listen, or even to fail to listen, is a structural failure: that absence precludes even the hypothetical process of communicative exchange, and is the tragedy of the review, if not of the novel itself. With respect to the specific influence of Wittgenstein’s work on Wallace’s writing, three ideas have particular relevance: meaning-as-use, language games, and family resemblances. The concept of meaning-as-use arises from Plato’s Theaetetus dialogue. Socrates asks of Theaetetus, “what is knowledge?”9 Wittgenstein’s theory is founded on a persuasive, though implicit, defense of Theaetetus’s failure to answer. It is at the same time a rejection of Wittgenstein’s own earlier suggestion in the Tractatus that ostensive definition—that is, naming-based definition—is the root of language mastery.10 In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein points out that there exist any number of complex composite articles that would paradoxically be complicated by oversimplification, drawing on concrete examples including a chair, a chess-board and, most significantly, a broom. The problematic conception of the primacy of elemental 9

10

Plato, Theaetetus, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Levett. (Cambridge: M. J. Hackett, 1992), 143d– 145e. Ostensive definition comes close to the form of meaning-making Wittgenstein privileged in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, viewing language as essentially imagistic. Philosophical Investigations opens with a quote from St. Augustine’s recollection of his own language acquisition, suggesting that the names of things, and the act of naming, were the tools for building meaning. Augustine recalled imitating the adults in his vicinity, who pointed to an object and made a sound, which the boy Augustine gradually learned to associate with the object. Language, in Wittgenstein’s early work, the Tractatus, was described as a structure built on the awareness of these names and the manipulation of related information. The position would quickly become problematic for Wittgenstein, as he realized that the functions of language could not be limited to simple information transfer and moved from the theory of “meaning-as-use” to that of language games.

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or Adamic naming frustrates Wittgenstein into the passage at §139 of Philosophical Investigations, where he finally asks “isn’t the meaning of the word also determined by this use?”11 The exposition of this theory is echoed explicitly in The Broom of the System, and provides the title of the novel, which refers to §60 of Philosophical Investigations.12 Wittgenstein here makes the point that the essence of something depends on the purpose for which one intends to use it, meaning that language is necessarily fluid, depending on context to furnish meaning, and that the most “fully analyzed” (i.e., most explicit) way of describing that something is not necessarily any easier to understand than the customary expression, in this case “the broomstick and the brush which is fitted on to it” versus “the broom.”13 Both Boswell and Olsen make reference to some of the possible problems with the meaning-as-use theory, including the potential for nominative entanglement, literalized in the novel by Lenore Jr. and Lenore Sr., or “Gramma,” sharing the same name. The novel’s title highlights the importance of language games and word-play in the novel. Wittgenstein introduced the idea that we manipulate meaning by placing things in constantly shifting relation to other things, stipulating that rules for this manipulation exist at a social level (it is for this reason, he argues, that there can be no such thing as a “private language”: language is predicated on exchange), which he calls language games. He gives the example of a chessboard, with a player who is unfamiliar with the game. If this player is shown a piece and told “this is the king,” that statement, in order to be of any use at all, must presuppose a familiarity with the rules of the game, the context within which the “king” exists. Wittgenstein expands the game idea further to account for the different functions of language; just as there are countless different card games, ball games, drinking games, each quite unlike the others, yet all recognizable as games, so there are unnumbered permutations of language use. Wittgenstein gives a list of examples, and it leads to the question of what these “games” have in common. From here, Wittgenstein proposes the idea of family resemblances: there may not be one defining feature of language. Instead, language uses resemble each other in a wide variety of ways but with no central sine qua non feature. Wittgenstein also suggests that language itself—the whole panoply

11

12

13

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), 54. Interestingly, Wallace himself repudiated Wittgenstein as a title source, claiming that “the broom of the system” was a family saying. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §60.

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of language functions and aims and uses—be regarded as a language game in itself. Notably, however, Wittgenstein did not posit the existence of anything outside of language, any metastructure, going so far as to prefigure Derrida with the rejection of such an idea with the phrase “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”14 Far from permitting a privileged perspective, these concepts present a vision of language that is contingent, contextual, and defiant of any attempt at delineation. As Olsen points out, “in Wallace’s universe it’s not always clear who’s winning. Or who’s playing what. Or what, exactly, the rules of the game are supposed to be.”15 Recreation would be an abiding concern for Wallace across his career, coming to the fore particularly in Jest. Besides the instances of recreation immediate to the plot—in particular drug use and televisual entertainment (especially the Entertainment of the title)—Wallace interrogates the concept of games at a broad level, literalizing and challenging some of the central notions of games in general, again evoking his early engagement with Wittgenstein. Hal’s early reminiscences about his relationship with his father include references to what could be termed language games, and Avril’s involvement with the militant grammarian group gives rise to a number of incidences of language play throughout the novel, but Infinite Jest is remarkable for the variety of actual games that take place in its pages. Tennis, football, chess, and drinking games, and death-defying initiations are some of those that appear over the course of the novel, but it is Eschaton that most ties in with Wittgenstein’s philosophical use of games. Eschaton is basically a language game, in the sense that its meaning comes from the linguistic constructs that make up the rules of the game, literalizing ideas of performative language. The combination of verbal and physical negotiation of borders upon which the game depends, resonates with Borges’s map-territory relationship, and the idea of a map that is coterminous and coterritorial with its subject. With this map, Borges was invoking Lewis Carroll, the mathematician and writer, a significant figure for Wallace’s own interest in mathematics and space.16 Borges’s 1946 short story, “On Exactitude in Science,” builds on the idea in Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno Concluded—the second volume of his final 14

15 16

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), §5.62. Olsen, “Termite Art,” 209. Carroll, of course, engaged with many of the same lines of questioning in his mathematically inflected fantasies that Wallace does in his logic-dreams; a fruitful exploration of their points of contact has yet to be undertaken.

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novel—of a map that has a ratio of mile to mile. Occupants of the country in question “use the country itself as its own map.”17 Importantly though, Carroll’s map—the simulacrum—is never used, and the country—the original—is its own cartographic equivalent. Borges, on the other hand, builds a map that is realized to be useless, but which is laid out to the ravages of reality and ruined. While drawing on Carroll’s idea, Borges also presents an implicit challenge to Korzybski’s famous dictum that “the map is not the territory,” meaning that a representation of a thing cannot become the thing itself, which echoes Carroll’s movement away from the map and back to the original. By contrast, Borges’s imagined map is developed by Eschaton into a comment on simulacra and reality, wherein Borges’s map becomes Baudrillard’s simulacrum, covering and eventually supplanting the original. Furthermore, the name Eschaton refers to religious doctrines of the end-times or Armageddon, referring, perhaps, to Wallace’s early opinion that “metafiction’s real end has always been Armageddon.”18 Similarly, as I mentioned earlier, Wallace told Lipsky that he believed that “what entertainment ultimately leads to”—that is to say, the endtimes or eschaton of entertainment—“is the movie Infinite Jest.”19 Eschaton, then, marks the point at which the map in fact is the territory, the crisis point at which mask becomes identity. This connection is highlighted by the use of the colloquialism “map” in the novel to refer to one’s face, and rather more dramatically, by the phrase “to eliminate one’s map,” meaning to kill oneself. These phrases, which are used at various points in Jest, highlight the connection of mask, map or symbol, with self, identity, or thing, evoking both the narrative identity and masks of Broom and Wallace’s own early description of “text as both sign and thing” (BFN, 83n10). Wallace’s radical expansion of recreation in Jest sees the characters becoming obsessed with improving their particular form of recreation, be it tennis, drug-taking, or films. Each character becomes driven by the notion of perfection, the perfect serve, the perfect high, the perfect film. Applied to Wittgenstein’s theory of language games, speakers become obsessed with rules and with perfect communication, leading to stagnant dialogue and isolation; precisely what is visible in its early stages in Infinite Jest. Jest, then, dramatizes the static tyranny of perfection, the dying of creativity in its attainment of a teleological imperative. 17 18 19

Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (London: Forgotten Books, 2012), 163. McCaffery, “Interview,” 134. David Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (New York: Broadway Books, 2010), 79.

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The recurrence of identity games is most clearly underscored, again, by Wallace’s use of names. There are numerous occasions in the novel where Wallace plays with Wittgensteinian notions of naming, most commonly connected either with self-definition or with power. The nominative doubling of Lenore is the most obvious and most central example. Boswell says—and others, such as D. T. Max in an article in The New Yorker of March 2009, have repeated—that Lenore’s full name is Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman, but Stonecipher is the first name of the eldest boy in each generation (Lenore’s brother LaVache, father, and grandfather, specifically), not a middle name. Lenore, then—or rather, both Lenores—are not the only Beadsmans to be doubled: the male family members are also doubled by this shared name, Stonecipher. In the scene between Lenore and LaVache, he points out that “everybody in the family with male genitals is Stoney” (BS, 250). For Lenore Jr., her name is a matter of confusion; sharing a name with so domineering a lady as her great-grandmother has left Lenore with no real sense of her own identity, disengaged, and alienated from her self. Tracey argues that “multivalent function is intended to suggest alterity and individuation, rather than the banality of sameness”;20 while this is true, it is more complicated than that in Broom. Wittgenstein’s early ostensive approach to language stipulated that no two objects could have the same object-name, and that any two that shared a label would be differentiated by context. Here, the Lenore/Lenore relationship demonstrates just how closely two identical labels can be linked by circumstances as well as semantics. Wallace highlights Lenore’s shared name with a joke, when Lenore arrives at the Shaker Heights Nursing Home reception after her great-grandmother disappears. She tells the receptionist, whom she does not know, that she is Lenore Beadsman. The receptionist, who is aware that Lenore Sr. is missing, which at this time Lenore Jr. does not know, takes offence at what she perceives to be Lenore’s poorly chosen jest, and there is a moment of dark humor. More importantly, though, this doubling problematizes ostensive meaning, the idea that the basic components of language are names, which we combine to form propositions about the world. The question is complicated by the meaning-as-use paradigm: if we use a name to refer to one thing, the name becomes the name of the thing for which we use it. However, if the thing itself changes its function, does its name remain the same? Nomination, in an early-Wittgensteinian sense, entails enfranchisement, and a useless thing, by extension, has no need of a name. Wallace would comment on 20

Tracey, “The Formative Years,” 162.

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this in his review of Wittgenstein’s Mistress, referring to the protagonist’s “prolonged musings on the ontological status of named things” (BFN, 112), in particular the status of those names in the absence of the thing itself. The obvious application of such a nomination-as-enfranchisement/validation theory in Broom is to Lenore Sr.’s life of inactivity in the nursing home, highlighted by Lenore’s father (BS, 150). She is not useful, so she has no meaning; therefore she has, and needs, no name, which means that Lenore Jr. is the only Lenore, since purpose is “one of the three distinctively adult attributes.”21 Lenore Sr. never reappears in the novel; having been relegated to the position of signifier, with two names (Lenore and Gramma) and no function, she must become abstract. Her disappearance, which seems like the central problem of the narrative, can be read as a generous act; a name must cleave to something,22 so if the name Lenore no longer cleaves to her, as it cannot in her useless life and subsequent relegation to the abstract, it is left to Lenore Jr. to appropriate the name and mould it to her own identity, to as it were become Lenore, which is the real outcome of the novel. Lenore Sr.’s disappearance gives Lenore Jr. the space to recognize that “the meaning of her name does not depend on the existence of some stable outside referent—here, the great-grandmother—but rather on its own volition within a system of relations.”23 This appropriation and understanding of her name is impossible until Lenore has stabilized that set of features to which the name Lenore comes to refer, as she does in her search for the physically and semantically absent “outside referent,” Lenore Sr. “Gramma’s” nickname, which of course foregrounds her association with linguistic structures, also highlights another element of the meaning-as-use paradigm: if each object has a single, “fully analyzed” name, how can people have nicknames? This problem, particularly the fact that a person can have as many nicknames as acquaintances, and more, highlights the conclusion that Wittgenstein would approach in his later life; that names—and by extension the whole of language—are a function of their circumstances: contextual, contingent, and fluid. One character whose whole raison d’être seems to be his nickname, which highlights the delicate balance between high farce and high philosophy with regard to naming and reference, is “Biff ” Diggerence. Biff plays no more than a cameo role in the novel, appearing in the opening scene and mentioned in one much later scene, but he perfectly illustrates Boswell’s notion that Broom is 21 22 23

Patrick Swinden, Literature and the Philosophy of Intention (London: Macmillan Press, 1999), 1. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, §3.203. Marshall Boswell, Understanding David Foster Wallace (South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), 36.

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“in many ways a compendium of gags,”24 and Wallace himself commented in the McCaffery interview that he “love[d] gags.”25 Nicknames in Wallace’s writing often signify comfort and security: for example, Lenore’s eldest brother, Stonecipher III, has distanced himself from his family and name by not one, but two name changes (LaVache, his middle name, and “Antichrist,” his college moniker), with the expressed aim of establishing a new identity. “As the Antichrist,” he explains to Lenore, “[ . . . ] it’s gloriously clear where I leave off and others begin” (BS, 250), thus rejecting the tradition of “everyone with male genitals in the family [being] called Stonecipher” (250). Interestingly though, LaVache continues to define himself in opposition to his family. It is interesting, too, that LaVache says to Lenore “you are the family” (BS, 249) in the context of language games, implying that Lenore’s function, and so meaning, is inextricable from her family. LaVache says this in his capacity as the heir, the inheritor of the name Stonecipher, which he has decisively rejected. Interestingly, he follows this immediately with a suggestion that Lenore should substitute “Company” in place of “family.” LaVache, with his many names, is sufficiently comfortable in his existence to manipulate language to his own advantage. Lenore, on the other hand, spends too much time searching for immutable meaning and ends up mired in a swamp of possible interpretations. This issue of naming is most prevalent in regard to Lenore’s search for self-definition, but recurs in other areas of the plot throughout the novel. The association of naming with power and will would recur throughout Wallace’s work, becoming particularly significant in the consideration of the power dynamics between characters, a concern prefigured in Broom by the comparison of Lenore’s relationships with Rick and, later, Andrew Lang. It is perhaps interesting to note that Lenore’s name means “bright light,” one of an interesting recurrence of names associated with light including Hal O., and Orin, which means either light or pale, and the surname Incandenza, of course, and Claude Sylvanshine in The Pale King, whose surname refers to a dappling of sunlight through leaves in autumn. The absence of solidity in Lenore’s name contrasts sharply with the name Stonecipher, which has a significance of its own, in its paradoxical references to solidity and mutability. Particularly in the context of LaVache, the name Stonecipher fits neatly into the above reading of his character: he is stonily certain of his identity, which makes him uniquely able to manipulate signs (or ciphers) and meanings. This extends to the name of the 24 25

Ibid., 21. McCaffery, “Interview,” 142.

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company owned by Lenore’s family, Stonecipheco: the company, magnificent in its success and reach, no longer needs to announce or define itself, and trades in a wide variety of incarnations, quietly infiltrating every aspect of life. It is this twinning of certainty and flexibility that allows the stronger characters—Lang, LaVache, and the company, for example—to flourish in a world of interpretive entropy, and gives rise to the obsessive desire for stability that reduces Lenore and Rick to confused immobility, as the fear of instability becomes fear of any movement at all.26 Games of all kinds, especially language, are the preserve of the confident subject. While there are points of contact between Wittgenstein’s later philosophy and the methods of deconstruction, language games function as a challenge to deconstruction. Wittgenstein sees the problems of philosophy as arising “from the failure to recognize [the] multiplicity of language games. [ . . . ] If our ways of talking about the world are a matter of tacit convention, then skepticism is simply beside the point, a misplaced scruple of a false epistemology,”27 anticipating Rorty’s (neo)pragmatism in its dismissal of the self-sustaining questions of academic philosophy, or the perpetual, meaningless dialectic of deconstruction. In Wittgensteinian terms, by entering a system in which she stands as an independent entity in relation to another independent entity (Andrew Lang, with whom Lenore embarks on a relationship late in the novel), Lenore establishes herself as the mistress of a language game rather than its pawn, which sets her free. It is this independence that bothers Rick, who desires to possess, not to share: who, in other words, seeks an ostensive, or Adamic, use of language instead of a relative one in which communication, rather than ownership, is the goal. As well as names themselves, signatures, and initials play a crucial role in establishing possession and position, from the early scene in which Andrew and Biff insist that the girls sign them, to the very end, where Rick Vigorous is known simply as R. V. It is perhaps significant, as Boswell points out, that the first signatory of the Amherst boys in the novel’s first scene, Mindy, eventually becomes Lang’s (ultimately estranged) wife. Mindy is possessed by Lang, and eventually discarded by him, at which point she takes up with Rick, the obsessively word-oriented writer with palpable possession anxiety. Mindy,

26

27

This is a position assumed by Richard Rorty in the book Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989). In brief, recognizing the contingency of life can lead to what Sartre called “metastability,” of which the associated problem is immobility owing to an insubstantial sense of self. See Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (London: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (London: Methuen, 1991), 130.

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inscribed and so claimed by Lang, matches up with Rick, who is anxious to possess, to claim. In balance with this, Lenore, who dramatically, even violently, refuses to be signed, and has resisted Rick’s attempts to claim her, is drawn to Lang, who does not possess her, but more importantly has no desire to do so. This point is reinforced in Rick’s peculiar dream of the four of them, in which Lang signs his initials on a drawing of Lenore, bringing the two-dimensional Lenore to life. She then signs him, in an echo of the first scene. The voluntary nature of both signings constitutes the creation of a shared system within which they understand each other, as Dr. Jay explains to Rick in the “rap session” dealing with the dream (BS, 344). The pattern of inscriptions here might also be read as an oblique reference to Benjamin’s theories of inscription: Lang’s inscription of his initials on his drawing of Lenore in Rick’s dream is a literalization of de Man’s materiality of inscription.28 Rick’s dream of his scriptive displacement by Lang is prefigured by an actual event in the Flange bar at Amherst, which is where Rick and Lang originally meet. Rick goes, significantly, to the bathroom, in search of the initials he had carved on the door as an undergraduate, only to find that they have been obliterated by Lang’s powerfully carved initials. The function of signatures and initials as claiming what is signed, be it space, flesh or person, is made clear in advance of Rick’s possession-anxiety dream. The darkly comic dreamscape hearkens back unmistakably to Wittgenstein’s discussion of names and belonging in the Tractatus.29 The issue of initials recurs once more in the closing scene, where Rick, designated by his possessive initials, is embarking on a sexual relationship with Mindy Metalman, symbolically superseding Lang’s earlier signatory possession of her. This exchange looks ahead to “Brief Interview #20,” in which the narrator’s repetition of his lover’s name enacts or attempts a form of linguistic possession and mastery. While the instability of language and the arbitrary, contingent nature of language games are made clear by all the implications of names and naming, these features are further and more starkly highlighted by the intermittent appearance in the text of antinomies. An antinomy is a problem of language similar to a paradox: it is a contradiction, real or imagined, that arises out of the application of reason to a logical statement. Antinomies are also a feature of mathematics, specifically naïve set theory. The first antinomy is a comic strip depicting a barber, shaving clients, then shaving himself, and in the final picture having his head explode. It

28 29

Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 51. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, §3.3 and 4.21–4.243.

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appears early in the book, shortly after the news of Lenore Sr.’s disappearance, and is explained by Lenore Jr. The man in the picture, she says, is the barber who shaves all and only those who do not shave themselves. His head is exploding because if he shaves himself then he has taken himself out of the group of people who do not shave themselves, thereby breaking the rule of his work. Similarly, if he does not shave himself, he is breaking the rule. The resultant existential bewilderment causes his head to explode. The barber antinomy is known as Russell’s paradox, posed by Bertrand Russell, one of Wittgenstein’s mentors, who arrived at it by applying Georg Cantor’s work on naïve set theory and the idea of the infinite to the work of Gottlob Frege.30 “The classes that are not members of themselves [ . . . ] must form a class. I asked myself whether this class is a member of itself, or not. If it is a member of itself, it must possess the defining property of the class, which is to be not a member of itself. If it is not a member of itself, it must not possess the defining property, and therefore be a member of itself. Thus each alternative leads to its opposite and there is a contradiction.”31 Wallace mentions Frege in “The Empty Plenum,” and would later address this issue in Everything and More, making this an early explicit example of Wallace’s connection of mathematics with the philosophy of language. In fact, Russell’s explicit connection of his paradox with Cantor’s work reinforces the idea of a consistent philosophical paradigm across Wallace’s work. Broom’s second antinomy is a picture of a man with a stick, facing up a hill. The fact that the picture could logically represent either going up or coming down, or both, makes it a tautology, the Wittgensteinian counterpart of the antinomy form mentioned above. This image is actually directly referred to in Philosophical Investigations.32 Wallace, writing in the 1980s, challenges its validity by referring to advances in technology that render our understanding of seemingly simple problems different in unpredictable ways, in this case suggesting that the man on the hill may have been dropped from a helicopter, prefiguring the problematic appearance of Marathe in Infinite Jest on the Arizona outcropping; like Wittgenstein’s man, it is not clear how he got there. More importantly, it is not clear how he will get down. The rules are changed, the goals shifted and we must keep up with the frantic pace of progress: nothing about language is static, 30

31 32

Russell wrote to Frege regarding the paradox in 1902, challenging one of his founding principles and seeking clarification. Frege responded that the paradox stood and added an appendix to that effect to the second volume of Grundgesetze der Arithmetik. Letter to Gottlob Frege, Friday’s Hill, 16 June 1902, in The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell Volume 1: The Private Years, 1884–1914, ed. Nicholas Griffin (London: Allen Lane, 1992), 246. Bertrand Russell, My Philosophical Development (London: Unwin Books, 1959), 58. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §139[b].

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and problems will change as solutions arise. This position was one maintained by Richard Rorty in the vein of Wittgenstein, when he suggests that we do not solve philosophical problems, but rather change the questions. By posing these antinomies, which come from Lenore Sr. each time, who, “like her mentor [fictional, Wittgenstein], her creator [literal, Wallace] adored antinomies,”33 Wallace is drawing attention to issues of sense and nonsense, but also, importantly, illustrating the function of language games. For this reason the second antinomy is the more important: Lenore’s proposition of the Martian who does not understand the sign because it does not know about gravity underscores Wittgenstein’s point about the necessity of knowing the rules of a game before you can manipulate its pieces. The antinomies tend to appear as clues, although in the end they lead nowhere in Lenore’s search for the elderly fugitive. In this regard, the failure of Lenore’s ostensible quest is a literal embodiment of generative failure. Antinomies preface episodes in which such productive instability of meaning becomes important, and as such function as signposts, rather than clues. In an extensive conversation with LaVache on the subject—he has received a drawing of a man on a dune of black sand, which is taken to indicate the G.O.D—he asks Lenore “how would you like [the drawings] to function?” (BS, 245), hearkening clearly back to the meaning-as-use paradigm. It is also LaVache who explains this concept in the novel. LaVache has very little sympathy for Lenore Sr.’s games, and is impatient with the whole concept of life-as-speech-act. His attitude would seem to be tolerant of language games and layered meaning, but unwilling to allow the sequor ad absurdum approach espoused by Lenore Sr. Dismissing Lenore Sr. and her linguistic trickery, LaVache also demonstrates his understanding and mastery of language games, ironically casting him as the character who most closely resembles Lenore Sr., whom he calls a “ring-tailed bitch” (243) and professes to hate. The continued existence of antinomies, and their persistence at points of flux in the text (as well as their echoes in later texts—Marathe in Arizona, the death-in-life abjection of Toni Ware in The Pale King, wherein the chosen death is the ultimate declaration of agency) again underscores Wallace’s fundamental resistance to closure. The final word on antinomies and their function in the story may as well come from LaVache, who, having reached the conclusion that Lenore is self-alienating, as represented by the barber and the hiker, closes with the typically unanswerable “KA-BLAM [ . . . ] There go the old crania” (BS, 248). 33

Olsen, “Termite Art,” 213.

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Richard Rorty, collectivity, and the pragmatic tradition Richard Rorty, another proponent of plurality, distinguished between philosophy as a pursuit (of which he approved) and Philosophy (so capitalized) as an academic discipline (of which he was scathing), and followed a similar trajectory of thought to Wittgenstein’s (and Wallace’s), moving from the position that all philosophical problems are mere problems of language to a conviction that language is a system of contingencies. He, however, took this one step further, holding that the search for truth was the primary obstacle to philosophical equilibrium because it was a social construct. Truth, in a pragmatic paradigm, is “manifested and pluralized by processes of communication”;34 it is not something to be discovered, but something to be made.35 In his influential 1979 book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty argued that the difficulties of philosophy arise from the misguided conviction that language did, or aimed to, represent reality as a mirror—that, indeed, it should share with reality, as Wittgenstein maintained in the Tractatus, a common mode of expression.36 Rorty gestured in much of his foundational thinking toward the writing of Wittgenstein, but extended the social nature of language to interrogate ideas of truth and knowledge from a neopragmatic perspective. Tracey outlines “the native influence of American Pragmatism as Wallace exploits it in relation to the Wittgensteinian threads running through Broom,” exploring the idea that “knowledge is only ever paradigmatic and conditional.”37 Tracey further argues that Wallace’s invocation of Rorty, and the pragmatic reading of Wittgenstein, “takes an initially abstract philosophical construct and embodies it in human terms, to darkly humorous effect.”38 In Broom, it is Lenore’s desperation for immutable truth—that is to say, for closure—that frustrates her capacity to live contentedly. This is a crucial secondary

34

35

36 37 38

Lenore Langsdorf and Andrew R. Smith, Recovering Pragmatism’s Voice: the Classical Tradition, Rorty and the Philosophy of Communication, ed. Lenore Langsdorf and Andrew R. Smith (New York: SUNY Press, 1995), 10. Arguably, Rorty may be read as an heir to Wittgenstein’s idea of language as praxis as mediated by the work of Pierre Bourdieu, who Ivan Snook argues sought to de-intellectualize the study of language and recognize it as serving “essentially practical ends.” (See “Language, Truth and Power: Bourdieu’s Ministerium,” in An Introduction to the Work of Pierre Bourdieu: The Practice of Theory, ed. Richard Harker, Cheleen Mahar and Chris Wilkes (London: Macmillan Press, 1990), 160–79.) Bourdieu’s work on the practical philosophy of language mediates some of the continuities and oppositions between Rorty and Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, §2.12, 2.2. Tracey, “The Formative Years,” 160–1. Ibid., 169.

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function of the antinomies mentioned earlier in this chapter; by highlighting the instability of language—and, in Rortian terms, postulating some of the inevitable problems that arise within a specific vocabulary (the vocabulary in which Lenore is seeking self-validation)—the antinomies serve to hint to Lenore that the teleological imperative is a hollow goal. Lenore must instead learn to cope with the incomprehensible, and the merely bizarre. Rorty’s point about the creation of truth, as opposed to its discovery, is borne out by Lenore’s eventual adaptation to plurality and mutability. Rather than actually solving any of her problems in an objective sense, she reframes her vocabulary so that they become facts instead of problems, openings instead of obstacles, and so that she can manage the challenges to her personal stability. Rorty held that the traditional aims of philosophy—to determine the cosmic truth of questions of moral and material import and, in the case of epistemology, to legitimate mankind’s claims to uniqueness and to knowledge—were erroneous and self-defeating. Modern epistemology, in particular, was as much an effort to legitimate philosophical enquiry itself as to legitimate the claims arising from such investigation. Rorty also held that not only is there no discoverable (and the key is discovery, after all) Truth, but that the problems that Philosophy in its academic guise was trying to deal with were in fact illusory, or, more precisely, were direct consequences of the paradigms under which they were being investigated. In Rorty’s own words, as Philosophy evolved, “philosophical problems appeared, disappeared, or changed shape, as a result of new assumptions or vocabularies.”39 Since different vocabularies are incommensurable, Rorty uses the term “edification” to mean the project of finding new and better vocabularies, which “may consist in the hermeneutic activity of making connections between our own culture and some exotic culture or historical period [ . . . ] but may instead consist in the ‘poetic’ activity of thinking up such new aims.”40 The point of this project of edification, he goes on to suggest, is “to keep the conversation going, rather than to find objective truth.”41 We see this injunction at work in Wallace’s adherence to the process rather than the product of linguistic exchange, and more radically in his narrative and structural resistance of teleology, both paradigmatic for my reading of chaotic coherence in Wallace’s writing. One of the central elements of Rortian pragmatism is the notion of “antirepresentationalism,” which challenges one of the central tenets of realist 39 40 41

Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), xiii. Ibid., 360. Ibid., 367.

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philosophy: the idea that the mind is similar to a mirror, accurately reflecting the state of the world as it is in some extra-perceptual sense. In The Consequences of Pragmatism, Rorty explains how the rejection of the ocular metaphor in favor of the more pragmatic epistemological behaviorism maps on to his discussion of pragmatist versus realist. The pragmatist’s view is that the mind mediates the world, where the realist’s view is that the mind mirrors the world. Rorty contends that we have no way of knowing whether this is the case, but that the problem is irrelevant, because even if the mind were a mirror, “can one ever appeal to non-linguistic knowledge in philosophical argument?”42 In other words, the problems we see, whether or not we see them clearly, must be articulated by means of a vocabulary. Rorty’s question is markedly evocative of both Wittgenstein’s articulation of limits and Derrida’s infamous maxim “il n’y a pas de hors-texte,”43 but carries with it the pragmatic implication, also posed by Cavell, that the question of whether or not our knowledge of the world is objectively accurate is both unknowable and ultimately irrelevant, and that our focus should be on efficacy rather than accuracy. One vivid image of the communal construction of truth in The Broom of the System comes in the shape of the otherwise baffling Vlad the Impaler, Lenore’s peculiar pet bird, whose sudden acquisition of language is one of the central mysteries of the plot. It turns out that Stonecipheco, the Beadsman family business, is testing baby food with pineal-gland additives, which foster the rapid development of linguistic skills in young children. The problem with this, which Vlad embodies, is that the acquisition of a language without understanding of its function and context can lead to misuse of that language, with—in this case—comic results. Vlad imitates words and phrases he has heard spoken, but with no concept of their meaning or value; he is the incarnation of vocalizing infantile narcissism, imitative and pointlessly reflexive. Since his early experiences with language are a combination of Candy and Lenore’s loose banter, Candy’s frequent, formulaic breakups and their landlady’s religious outbursts, Vlad comes out with sentences that fit neatly into the evangelical vocabulary. The viewers of the Rev. Sykes Show take Vlad’s frequently obscure statements as evidence of divine inspiration. Vlad’s words have no intention behind them, but within the vocabulary of the television show, his words take on a significance peculiar to the circumstances. The Vlad scenario also highlights what Rorty would regard as the misguided tendency to seek extrinsic (in this case divine) meaning in things that manifestly lack intentional 42 43

Richard Rorty, The Consequences of Pragmatism (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1982), xxxvi. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 158–9.

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significance, such as a cockatiel whose language center has been stimulated into imitating words the rest of his brain does not comprehend. Interestingly, Rorty does not deal with the questions of deception or dissimulation in his rejection of the concept of objective Truth. Lying in literature “receives relatively little attention as a feature of linguistic interaction (other than as a moral aberration).”44 Wallace, on the other hand, frequently engaged with questions of falsehood and mendacity, most notably in Broom with LaVache, who renames his telephone a “lymph node,” refusing to participate in the collective vocabulary of his upbringing. If LaVache understands his father’s intention when he asks whether his son has a phone, and replies in the negative, which negative holds true in his private vocabulary, but not, as he is aware, in the social vocabulary his father is speaking, is he not intentionally deceiving his father? This is a problem thrown up by Rorty’s theory of vocabularies and never fully addressed by him but which Wallace highlighted in a number of ways. Rorty allowed for no hierarchy of vocabularies, and as such, instead of rendering communication clearer in its contingency, he complicates it further by allowing it to be wholly malleable. In this respect, among others, Wallace seems to accept Rorty’s philosophy only up to a point, making use of it as it suited his own thoughts and discarding it at the point at which it was no longer useful. It seems clear from Wallace’s treatment of the theme, here and elsewhere, that he believed, if not in total stability, then at least in the necessity for an accepted vocabulary. If we can reasonably assume that we share sufficient common ground with our interlocutors to foster meaningful communication, then the social construction of truth is feasible. However, if our vocabularies become so tractable that we can never know what is intended even on a concrete level, we can never hope to communicate meaningfully and so never construct any kind of truth.45 Consequently, we must return to Wittgenstein’s idea of language games and commit to the rules as well as accepting their inherent instability. 44

45

David Simpson, “Lying, Liars and Language,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 52.3 (September 1992): 623. This is an exaggerated representation of Rorty’s opposition to truth; he was not so much anarchically anti-truth as merely uninterested in truth because it is not conceptually efficacious. Norris points out that Rorty is less trenchant than Baudrillard, who maintained an “extreme oppositional stance toward every last truth claim” (Christopher Norris, What’s Wrong with Postmodernism: Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), 165). Norris argues that Rorty and Baudrillard do share an important anti-hierarchical aspect that fits with predominant postmodernist objections to orders of knowledge; however, where Baudrillard is deconstructive (i.e., interested in dismantling erroneous assumptions of metanarrative authority), Rorty is pragmatic (i.e., concerned with finding a practical alternative to the fallen enlightenment metanarratives). Thus, while their perspectives are similar in regard to hierarchy, their goals are quite different.

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In view of what Rorty sees as the incommensurability of different vocabularies, he is forced to view truth and knowledge as constructs of whatever vocabulary is seeking them (almost always collective rather than individual). A corollary of this view, however, is that each vocabulary phrases its own inescapable problems. This is a view Rorty clarifies in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, where he discusses the nature of truth as a property of statements, not of facts; for example, the color of an object is not true or false, but the statement that such an object is blue has the property of truth or falsehood. He argues further that language is made, not discovered, and as such, truth is a creation, not an extrinsic reality: “since truth is a property of sentences, since sentences are dependent for their existence on vocabularies and since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths.”46 Smith and Shyles address the idea of “this speaking one’s truth,”47 arguing not only for the philosophical weakness of extrinsic truth, but for its experientially problematic nature: speaking what one believes to be the truth can cause problems and even directly invite suffering. They also identify a significant corollary of contingent truth: it is not merely the case that “speaking one’s truth” can be difficult in one’s own time; there are also multiple instances in which “one person’s perception and expression of truth was ridiculed and invalidated by his or her contemporary community or inquirers—or inquisitionists—only to be validated and praised in the future by persons who investigated the same, or similar, issues” (evoking the changing interpretations of Wittgenstein’s man on the hill).48 The fact that it is a phone that Wallace uses to suggest the monumental instability of Rorty’s theory underscores the relevance of the passage to understanding communication; because LaVache refuses to call a phone a phone and so refuses to enter into the social vocabulary, his family is physically unable to communicate with him. The scene between Lenore and LaVache highlights this repeatedly in LaVache’s offhand treatment of language and meaning, even in his demurral on the nature of “work.” In response to Lenore’s question of whether her roommate “seduced” LaVache, he tells her “a really important part of being here is learning how to lie. ‘Strategic misrepresentation’, we call it” (BS, 237). Later in the same scene, LaVache responds to Lenore with the words “all sorts of different truths in that statement” (252) evoking Rorty’s conception of

46 47

48

Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (London: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 21. Andrew R. Smith and Leonard Shyles, “On Ethnocentric Truth and Pragmatic Justice,” in Recovering Pragmatism’s Voice, ed. Lenore Langsdorf and Andrew R. Smith (New York: SUNY Press, 1995), 71. Ibid.

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constructed and multifaceted truth. By means of this scene specifically, and the whole conceit of the book, Wallace both propounds and undermines the outcome of Rorty’s dogma of pragmatism. This pragmatism arose out of the tradition of classical pragmatism developed by Dewey and Peirce, among others.49 Classical pragmatism, as the name would suggest, is more phenomenological than epistemological or ontological; that is, it is concerned more with experience than with knowledge or truth. It is not, however, contiguous with the discipline of phenomenology: pragmatism is results-oriented, assessing theories by their consequences, and so motivated by observable outcomes rather than the “tyranny of method.”50 However, Rortian pragmatism diverges from its classical roots in several ways, particularly in its disdain for metaphysics and its replacement of the subject with an ethnocentric sensibility that was in keeping with Wallace’s paralyzing awareness of his ethnic and social status. Langsdorf suggests that the fundamental divergence in the conception of communication as on the one hand based in poiesis (classical) and on the other hand based in praxis (Rortian).51 The Rortian concept of different vocabularies owes much to Wittgenstein’s language games, but Rorty takes the idea further, maintaining that society itself consists of a vocabulary, and proposes a paradigm he calls “epistemological behaviorism,” which explains “rationality and epistemic authority by reference to what society lets us say, instead of the latter by reference to the former.”52 This paradigm results in a form of pragmatism that accepts the ambiguities and limitations of philosophical inquiry, but instead of giving the pursuit up as a bad job and turning to hedonism, which might seem like the obvious choice, Rorty turns the outcome on its head, proposing that consequent on this fact, knowledge becomes a process of social construction, a linguistic project of sorts, and as such is limited only by the vocabulary amid which the process takes place. For Rorty, the most important thing is to keep the conversation going. He assumed what his colleague E. D. Hirsch called 49

50

51

52

The work of Charles Sanders Peirce, in fact, links many of Wallace’s philosophical concerns. Peirce’s writing encompassed pragmatic philosophy and the philosophy of communication—in both of which fields he is regarded as a founder—as well as early work in both formal logic and transfinite mathematics, all of which were direct influences on Wallace’s work. Peirce is not discussed in detail here, as he is not directly referenced in Wallace’s work, but his influence on Wallace’s work merits consideration by other scholars. Isaac Catt, “The Cash-Value of Communication: And Interpretation of William James,” in Recovering Pragmatism’s Voice, ed. Lenore Langsdorf and Andrew R. Smith (New York: SUNY Press, 1995), 106. Lenore Langsdorf, “Philosophy of Language and Philosophy of Communication: Poiesis and Praxis in Classical Pragmatism,” in Recovering Pragmatism’s Voice, ed. Lenore Langsdorf and Andrew R. Smith (New York: SUNY Press, 1995), 195–211. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 174.

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The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace a radical view in epistemology. That radical position, once stated, offered endless opportunities for writing ever more on the subject—for continually responding to technical attacks, with much fun in the doing, and with a guarantee of ongoing labor. If somebody criticizes such a position on a technical point then one can concede something and modify one’s position slightly, or one can attack with counterarguments, or one can expatiate a new direction and on and on.53

In other words, Rortian pragmatism involves a self-perpetuating, always reactive dialogic project, much like Wallace’s radically problematized narrative structures, perpetually building on themselves and rupturing their own boundaries. That pragmatism is specifically encoded in the nonending of Broom, which bursts out of the borders of coherent structure, gesturing at further conversation beyond the narrative borders. O’Donnell notes the “post-systematic nature of contemporary reality” in Broom; Wallace’s resistance, then, to closure, his tendency to leave things “often incomplete and unvarnished, and open to surprise and the grotesque” is a marked path from the beginning of his work.54 In response to the situation of contingent truth, Rorty describes the kind of person who can cope with it: the Liberal Ironist. The Liberal Ironist does not expect rational answers, much less “right” answers, to complex moral questions—there is no “order beyond time and change which both determines the point of human existence and establishes a hierarchy.”55 Instead of worrying about the Truth as extrinsic, awaiting discovery, the Liberal Ironist seeks coping strategies for the world as it appears to her. The conditions for ironism are laid out in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity as follows: 1.

2. 3.

53

54 55 56

She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered. She realizes that argument phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts. Insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others’; that it is in touch with a power not herself.56 E. D. Hirsch, “Rorty and the Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” New Literary History, 39.1 (Winter 2008): 41. O’Donnell, “Almost a Novel,” 20. Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, xv. Ibid., 73.

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This state of mind is a destabilizing one, as Rorty admits, since it can put “ironists” in danger of becoming what Sartre called “metastable”;57 that is, unable to take themselves or anything else seriously because of their acute awareness that they and the world are mediated by language and that nothing about them cannot be restated and so changed. Lenore fulfills all of the criteria for liberal ironism, but she goes further, falling into metastability. Her awareness of incompatible vocabularies ceases to be helpful to her and becomes problematic in itself, destabilizing her sense of her own identity, making her question her objective existence, as LaVache points out. Being so aware of her own contingency and the contingency of others makes Lenore a cipher in her own eyes. She is mistrustful of her own self-image because the final vocabulary she currently uses is not one of her own creation and is consequently uncomfortable and insufficient. She does not trust her own capacity to work—or rather talk—her way out of the existential mire into which she feels she has wandered, because she does not have any way of thinking about her thinking, as LaVache points out when they are discussing the antinomy of the barber (again evoking Wittgenstein, and indeed Russell, by way of Derrida). The problem of getting outside of one’s own problem is echoed in Jest’s tragic Kate Gompert, whose psychic pain is too consuming for her to get outside it, leaving her catatonically solipsistic. The irony implicit in Lenore’s metastable condition—that she is, of course, a character in a story—highlights the question of fiction’s interaction with reality. A central paradox of literature is that, despite knowing that fictional characters are just that, we “acquire beliefs about them and even argue about their true nature,”58 the difference between a human character and a fictional character being merely the plane of revelation. That is to say, the character is a set of abstract qualities. Both a human character and a fictional one comprise such qualities, but where the human character becomes manifest in behaviors, the fictional character is “a set of properties identified by descriptions under the conventions of storytelling.”59 Lamarque’s argument here evades the central point of controversy: this difference is intuitively qualitatively obvious, but only insofar as we can trust our perception. This is precisely the concern expressed by Lenore as to whether her life consisted only of what might be said about it. Interestingly, resolution is offered in the novel in a somewhat ironic form: the plane of Lenore’s existence ceases to trouble her 57

58

59

Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes. (London: Methuen and Co., 1972), 57–60. Peter Lamarque, “Fiction and Reality,” in Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Lamarque, (Scotland: Aberdeen University Press, 1983), 52. Ibid., 69.

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and she comes to accept her personhood. However, as we have noted, Lenore’s acceptance of her autonomous existence within a fictional system problematizes the idea of autonomous existence within any system, closing the novel not with a resolution, but with a transfer of the original problem to the reader, again structurally working against closure. Boswell referred to Broom as “first and foremost a work of metafiction,”60 but I do not fully agree. While the “direct and immediate concern with fiction-making itself ” that characterizes the metafictionist,61 is undeniably present in Broom, it is superseded by a much more pressing concern: how to actually live in a linguistically unstable world, the same concern Wallace observed in Wittgenstein’s Mistress. Broom offers a structural meditation on exactly that instability, forcing the novel’s form to replicate the linguistic labyrinth of its characters; the novel explores, and indeed exploits, the conventions of metafiction, but does not allow the work to be overwhelmed by its metafictionality. Rather, Broom is more a work that interrogates metafiction by means of its own devices, and finds it wanting. In fact, if Broom were indeed a work of metafiction, it would be hopelessly self-defeating: the whole function of the novel is to blow open the closed communication systems envisaged by the early Wittgenstein, whereas metafiction functions by closing off channels of communication and interpretation, rendering meaning ever more inward-looking and limited. Wallace uses metafictional devices to draw on the combined powers of Rorty’s suggestion of communal, constructed truth, and Ricoeur’s ideas of narrative identity and sense-making with regard to the structure of the novel; if truth is indeed a construction of those who perceive facts, then the reader must surely construct her own coherent narrative from the incoherent events and facts with which she is presented. Add to this the Wittgensteinian complication of the validity of errors and you have the foundation of a complex but richly rewarding artistic agenda. Far from embracing the inward-directed, Armageddon-bound exclusive self-reflexivity of late-century metafiction, Broom goes outside the confines of “the used-upness” of both classical authoritarian narrative and metafiction,62 exploiting these to look not only at the dynamic of language and selfconsciousness, but the relationship between these and the world as we must live in it, falling into McCaffery’s category of meta-metafiction. Broom’s resistance to 60 61

62

Boswell, Understanding David Foster Wallace, 31. Larry McCaffery, “The Art of Metafiction,” in Metafiction, ed. Mark Currie (New York: Longman, 1995), 182. John Barth, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” in Metafiction, ed. Mark Currie (New York: Longman, 1995), 162.

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closure ruptures its own recursive cyclicality by challenging the very distinction between textual and literal existence (in Lenore’s search for objective selfhood) and by abandoning the structural norms of textuality with its ending, as well as literalizing some of the chief philosophical questions at its core, most obviously the literal crossed communication wires at Frequent and Vigorous and the search that does not reach a satisfactory narrative end, and indeed arguably ends further from coherence than where it began. It is important not to confuse the metatextual concerns of the novel—those of meaningful existence in a linguistically unstable world, the narrative elements of selfhood—with its metafictional strategies, which mirror the experience of living in such a world. Further, by encoding these challenges into the narrative of a character in a book who really is just a character in a book, but who comes to terms with linguistic and existential instability, the rejection of closure, the absence of certainty, and the failure of the ostensible quest become loci of semantic plurality, in which the commitment to try to communicate is the only meaningful telos. It is also worth noting that the application of Russell’s paradox to Lenore’s situation at once links and divides mathematics and the philosophy of communication: in mathematics, the insolubility of the paradox is its defining feature. However, in a philosophical—specifically existential—scenario, the same antinomy becomes a dynamic, rather than a paradox, mapping on to the Both/And mindset that characterized Wallace’s writing. The inclusion of the self/other element of the paradox in LaVache’s reasoning looks forward to the paradoxical dynamic interdependence of isolation and connection that animated Wallace’s philosophy of communication. In this dynamic reliance, Lenore is implicitly contrasted with Norman Bombardini, whose intention is to make his unilateral existence so immense that it needs no other for definition. Wallace’s conception of solipsism seems to have something to do with Fichte’s isolated Ichheit, the self-describing, self-legitimating I that is associated with complete subjectivity, here literalized in the form of Bombardini.63 Indeed, Horn argues that Wallace’s conception of solipsism misunderstands Wittgenstein’s work on it, given that “Wittgenstein focused on the instead on the logical difficulties in trying to state the problem of solipsism [ . . . ] a problem that Wittgenstein tried to show could never be sensibly stated.”64 I 63

64

J. G. Fichte, Foundations of Transcendental Philosophy (Wissenschaftslehre) nova methodo (1798/99), trans. and ed. Daniel Breazeale (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992). Patrick Horn, “Does Language Fail Us? Wallace’s Struggle with Solipsism,” in Gesturing Toward Reality, ed. Robert K. Bolger and Scott Korb (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 247.

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argue that Bombardini functions as Wallace’s response to this; the problem of solipsism (like many of the problems Wallace encountered) could not, indeed, be stated sensibly in philosophical terms, and it is precisely for this reason that Wallace became a writer of fiction; Bombardini is not a statement, but, as Wallace noted, a literal incarnation of the problem, which bypasses the need for extensive—or logical—explication. Indeed, Horn’s dismissal of Wallace’s interpretation of Wittgenstein’s approach to solipsism (which I suggest is more Fichtean than Wittgensteinian), which he extends to encompass Wallace’s approach to moral or religious language, actually highlights one of the more interesting connections between Wallace’s writing and his philosophy: instead of undertaking logical explorations of challenges, Wallace takes the absurdist route, embodying problems as a way of examining them. Wallace also notes this tendency in “The Empty Plenum” as “Deep Nonsense,” which “manages somehow to ‘show’ what cannot ordinarily be ‘expressed’” (BFN, 80), and in the work of Kafka, whose complex literalism he saw as central to the comedy and pathos of his work. While Wittgenstein was the dominant—or the most overt, at least— philosophical presence in The Broom of the System, in which Wallace laid out the questions that would preoccupy him, Rorty would become more and more central later in Wallace’s career, as he arrived at tentative answers to those questions. However, while pragmatic philosophy does appear to be the direction Wallace’s thinking took, this takes us only so far. Partly because they are so decisive, Wallace’s engagements with Rorty and Wittgenstein in particular showcase his pluralistic employment of often competing modes of discovery; as with his literary heritage, Wallace’s writing is not easily confined to a single mode of thinking, but makes constant and extensive use of plurality. Wallace was profoundly influenced by technical philosophy, as a philosopher and the son of a philosopher, but his writing broadens the focus of academic philosophy so that it becomes a method for making sense of the world as it appears. In other words, the fiction involves an application of abstract technical philosophy to the complex felt reality of life at the turn of the millennium. The working philosophy of communication discussed here and elsewhere takes linguistic philosophy away from the insular focus on words, incorporating that stream of investigation into a broader project concerned with how we can, and should, do things with words. The redemptive capacity of language is made clear again and again, but only in the context of active engagement, a word that comes to signify the particular kind of attention

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Wallace urged his readers to pay to the world around them. Wallace’s writing throughout his career would return time and again to the concerns introduced in Broom, which should not be regarded, as it tends to be, as the promising juvenilia of a talented but unformed writer, but rather as a stark and confident declaration of artistic and philosophical intent.

5

“Something to Do with Love”: Writing and the Process of Communication

Philosophy and communication The central theme of this book is Wallace’s concern with human connection and the establishment of the self among selves: the importance of this concept to his writing would be difficult to overstate. Given the constant uses of and references to plurality in his work at every level, it is perhaps unsurprising that the central concern of his work—communication—should also be fundamentally plural. Communication continued to be of central importance in Wallace’s later cultural and political conceptions of connection, since these forms of connection are also linguistically enacted and mediated. Critical to any study of this theme is an exploration of the working philosophy that drove and underpinned this preoccupation. This chapter undertakes such an exploration, outlining the process of communication that animates his work both within and beyond textual borders. The fundamentally unfinished nature of that process is intimately tied to the conceptual and practical pluralism of Wallace’s work, and to the consistent failures of the title. Indeed, nowhere are the instances of those failures more clearly visible than in an examination of the many attempts at communication between characters, and between writer and reader. To facilitate a discussion of Wallace’s conception, exploration, and execution of the process of communication, this chapter articulates the combination of theory and practice that he developed over the course of his career to explore the central questions of communication and meaningful exchange, which might in loose terms be called his philosophy of communication, exploring how communication is represented and interrogated, and how it contributes to his overall artistic project of working against solipsism.

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Two points at which Wallace articulated himself on the subject bear mention here: first, the title of this chapter, which is taken from the McCaffery interview, and which provides probably the strongest articulation of Wallace’s fundamental understanding of writing. In the interview, Wallace suggested that (good) writing, communication, and connection had “something to do with love.” In the short essay “Greatly Exaggerated,” Wallace ranges himself alongside “those of us civilians who know in our gut that writing is an act of communication between one human being and another” (SFT, 144), highlighting again the dynamic process of communication; it relies on multiple agents engaging in mutual exchange, rather than on a unidirectional transfer of information. It is perhaps interesting to note that this definition of writing came in an essay on poststructuralism, one of the few direct theoretical engagements Wallace undertook with poststructuralism or deconstruction. By situating his understanding of writing in such surroundings, Wallace implicitly (or really, almost explicitly) and offhandedly repudiates the whole postmodernist problematization of language, in a way that jars strikingly with his own linguistic struggles. Fittingly, Wallace’s own early training in academic philosophy provides the linguistic framework within which his conception of communication can be expressed: there are certain conditions necessary for communication to take place, including interlocutors or a writer/reader relationship, a text or speech act, a common language (insofar as a socially constructed language with potentially infinite idiolectical resonances can be regarded as common) and the physical capacity for the information to be exchanged (literacy, ability to hear, etc.). These conditions make up what Wallace suggested be called the “physical modality simpliciter” (FTL, 148). The system that exists when these conditions are satisfied gives rise to the physical possibility of communication, but is insufficient for communication to actually take place. This modality must be accompanied by a “situational physical modality” or mode in which the situation-specific conditions must also obtain, completing the system of conditions necessary for the desired outcome to be possible. In the case of Wallace’s philosophy of communication, that situational physical modality is termed love, and signifies a disposition whereby the agent is willing to give of herself in order to understand or be understood. Using the symbolic language of academic philosophy—avoiding as far as possible the ambiguity of literary language—the central hypothesis of this study might be put as follows: χ is defined as a successful communication outcome.

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Let α be a state such that all physical conditions necessary for communication are satisfied on the part of the speaker/writer. Such conditions include the capacity to speak/write; articulation of speech act/written fragment; public articulation; presence or projected presence of listener/reader; and all further conditions necessary for communication to be physically possible. Let β be a state such that all similar conditions are satisfied on the part of the hearer/reader. As in α, these conditions include ability to hear/read; common language; access to the speech act/written fragment at this or any time, and all further conditions necessary for communication to be physically possible. Let ε be a state such that the terms of “love” are satisfied, “love” here being defined as above: in short, a sacrificial disposition characterized by a willingness to give of the self in order to facilitate communication, consistent with a simultaneous renunciation and reinforcement of the boundaried self. χ ⇔ α^β^ε1

This is a statement of the hypothesis only, in simple philosophical terms; philosophical issues find different levels of meaning in different modes of expression. De la Durantaye offers the opening of Virgil’s Aeneid and Aristotle’s meditation on necessity from On Interpretation as an example of this phenomenon. With this in mind, while the hypothesis offered above is a clear articulation of the founding question, the investigation, and defense of the hypothesis occur in an exploration of Wallace’s literary application of the equation, which is the central focus of this study. This dynamic of exchange positions love—the capacity to surrender and yet maintain the self—as the catalyst (ε) in this process of communication: necessary to and unchanged by the reaction between interlocutors, or author and reader. Simply put, within a relation of dependent oppositionality such as writer/reader, where the situational physical modalities and the physical modality simpliciter necessary to communication obtain, there is a necessarily sacrificial disposition, here termed “love,” which must also obtain in order for communication to take place. Further, the balance of these elements is not fixed, giving rise to the possibility of multiple—though not infinite—communication outcomes. In this sense, the philosophy is also quasi-Bakhtinian; each utterance is pregnant with the possibility of perpetual dialogism. In fact, each utterance depends on dialogic engagement for success, and remains open to further engagements. 1

χ occurs if, and only if, conditions α, β, and ε are all satisfied.

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Love as a function of distance In the short story “Lyndon,” Mrs. Johnson says that she and her husband “do not love each other anymore. Because we ceased long ago to be enough apart for a ‘love’ to span any distance” (GCH, 115). While this is the clearest articulation of love conceptualized as exchange, it is not the only one. In “Solomon Silverfish,” Solomon and his wife repeatedly talk about being part of each other, with Solomon seeing his wife as both object and beyond object. Sophie, his terminally-ill wife, understands that “for the Solomon-who-she-loves she is not just her body or what is inside it” (SS, 65) and that in his healthy, mobile otherness he is “a magic person now more so than ever, and why there was such a love for him in her soul that it was saving her even in very mortal sickness” (62). For the Silverfishes, love is transfigurative, healing, and immortal, always unfinished. Paradoxically, then, according to these boundaried definitions of love, we cannot love without the isolation that it is fiction’s job to rupture, because love—or connection—can only be between and never within. Wallace referred to this in relation to his admiration of Wittgenstein: what made Wittgenstein “a real artist [was] that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.”2 That is to say, in the absence of the possibility of connection, isolation offers the ultimate horror. The absence of an other—solipsism—entails the loss of the self. In other words, the coherence of the self as a teleological imperative is in fact completely selfdefeating. What Mrs. Johnson, in “Lyndon,” calls her husband’s “great intellectual concept: the distance at which we see each other, arrange each other, love” (GCH, 115), could equally be called Wallace’s great intellectual concept: the paradoxical interdependence of isolation and connection.3 It is also useful to bear in mind Derrida’s definition of love in Sauf le Nom: this definition of love articulates the 2

3

Larry McCaffery, “An Interview with David Foster Wallace,” The Review of Contemporary Fiction. 13.2 (Summer 1993): 143. Importantly, this does not appear to have been strictly true. As Ryerson points out in his introduction to Fate, Time, and Language, Wittgenstein appears to have revised his philosophy not out of a horror of solipsism but following a series of technical objections to the scope of his argument. This articulation on Wallace’s part seems more eisegetical or even projective than accurate, and is perhaps more useful to a reading of his own fear and treatment of solipsism than as an interpretation of Wittgenstein’s philosophical progression. This is, of course, not to suggest that Wallace originated the idea of the interdependence of self and other; philosophically it is prefigured at least as far back as Aristotle in his work on friendship (see Elijah Millgram, “Aristotle on Making Other Selves,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 17.2 (June 1987): 361–76). Similarly, in literature, writers upon whom Wallace explicitly drew, such as Joyce, Beckett, and Kafka, explored the instability of interpersonal dynamics and identity through a fictional lens well before Wallace did. However, the situation of love and other emotions as functions of distance, and the related interdependence of isolation and connection, might be regarded as one of the clearest articulations of Wallace’s vision of communication.

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sacrificial nature of love, its renunciation of coherence, and infinite process of surrender. The original French, se rendre, means both to give oneself and to make oneself, and thus implies both the destruction and creation of the self. This definition of love enriches an understanding of Wallace’s explicit connection of art with love. In the McCaffery interview, Wallace explicitly links successful art with love: “the big distinction between good art and so-and-so art lies somewhere in the art’s heart’s purpose, the agenda of the consciousness behind the text. It’s got something to do with love.”4 This passage of the interview with McCaffery emphasizes the transaction implicit in art, the process whereby the reader gains something from the text, an emphasis that reflects Derrida’s use of the term se rendre, with the continuous implication of giving. This “love” is the love referred to in the articulation of Wallace’s philosophy. It is this vision of love as a part of creativity that moves Wallace’s philosophy of communication from outright contradiction to workable paradox. In terms of the philosophy that animated Wallace’s creative endeavors, the paradox of distance is integral to the philosophy of communication that this book outlines. In order for the isolated writer to reach the isolated reader, to rupture both loci of solitude, allowing communication to take place, there is a necessary relationship of exchange. Reader and writer enter into a complex relationship, centrally characterized by absence. The text, in which a good author offers something substantial to the reader, is the only mediator, the language that may link the two ends. Imparting information (i.e., the author writing the text) is one part of a complex dynamic interpretive process, in which all the other steps—the author having written the text, the reader reading, processing, and finally absorbing the text—are equally important. For Wallace, it is in this process that “serious fiction’s purpose [ . . . ] to give [the reader] imaginative access to other selves” is achievable.5 The connections that are explored, albeit sometimes clumsily, in Girl with Curious Hair are investigations of this dynamic process. The end result of what might be called the process of fiction is the same as Mrs. Johnson’s definition of love as that which “joins separate things” (GCH, 115). Communicative exchange, like love, both reinforces and comforts the necessary isolation of the mind, necessitating recognition of both the subjective self and the subjective other. By reason of love’s simultaneous rejection and celebration of the boundaried self, the conditions of disconnection and boundaried selfhood cease to be obstacles to 4 5

McCaffery, “Interview,” 148. Ibid., 127.

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communication and instead become part of the process. Distance, loneliness, and the horror of solitude: these are the things that make connection possible. In terms of the philosophy that animated Wallace’s creative endeavors, the paradox of distance is integral to the philosophy of communication that this study outlines. Wallace’s philosophy of communication, then, could be described as a (hypothetically perpetual) self-replenishing dialogical project, predicated on the desire for and inevitable failure to reach the other, like the love-entity of “Order and Flux in Northampton,” “possessed of a desire for the attainment of the very love-object whose fundamental unattainability is that love’s animating breath and bread” (OFN, 97). Taking on board the idea that love and distance are somehow connected, and that meaningful exchange of any kind can take place only between and not within, the creative process becomes an exchange of this kind of love. While he talked about the communicative process, and of the writer’s duty to “give something to the reader,” Wallace also spoke of the reader’s responsibility to take part in a relationship with the writer, to realize that “this process is a relationship between the writer’s consciousness and her own [the reader’s], and that in order for it to be anything like a real full human relationship, she’s going to have to put in her share of the linguistic work.”6 Wallace articulates the responsibility on both sides: “one of the things really great fiction-writers do [ . . . ] is give the reader something.”7 This giving is unselfish and must come not from the desire to be loved, but “out of the part of you that loves the thing, loves what you’re working on. Maybe just plain loves” (148). Interestingly, this conception of an unselfish or sacrificial cultural transaction resonates strongly with the theme Lewis Hyde’s 1983 book The Gift, which argues for the value of culture as a gift rather than a commodity, and was one of the mainstays of Wallace’s personal library. In this conceptualization of the gift-transaction, Kelly ties Wallace to Derrida, “plac[ing] gift and economy in conceptual opposition: in interview, he contrasted ‘an artistic transaction, which I think involves a gift’, with ‘an economic transaction, which I regard as cold.’”8 Kelly’s argument that the gift-transaction involves less manipulation than the economic transaction is, I think, slightly naïve; Wallace was clear about the manipulation inherent in his writing, but defended it on the grounds that its intentions were sincere, a problematic kind of neo-Platonic or Caesarian authority. 6 7 8

Ibid., 138. Ibid., 148. Adam Kelly, “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction,” in Consider David Foster Wallace, ed. David Hering (Universal City, CA: SSMG Press, 2010), 140, quoting Michael Silverblatt “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (2),” Bookworm. KCRW, podcast audio, August 3, 2000.

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Given the way the complementary ideas of love and exchange frame Wallace’s writing project as a whole, it is useful to recall Derrida’s definition of the one by the other. The twin implications of se rendre—that is, the giving of the self implied by rendre and the simultaneous reiteration of separateness by the reflexive se—symbolize the delicate dynamic of the communication as Wallace envisaged it.9 The love that Derrida defines, this balance of self and other, corresponds to Wallace’s vision of the contract of exchange with the reader, in which we see the paradox of mental access to another mind and simultaneous reiteration of the self by that very access. Nicholas Royle quotes Derrida at Institute of Contemporary Arts conference in 1985: “deconstruction is love,”10 offering a decisive link between Derrida’s method of deconstruction and the idea of emotional connection. However, this link is complicated by two typically aphoristic phrases—“how to love anything other than the possibility of ruin?” and “when we love we love till death.”11 The latter phrase resonates strongly with Wallace’s (negative) statement that “we love things to death, now.”12 While the two phrases use markedly similar language, Wallace’s emphasis indicates an opposing perspective to Derrida’s: the former indicates the endurance of love unto ruin (thus making ruin the object of love), whereas the latter hints at the destructive power of too much love; by engaging too enthusiastically with a concept, it is possible to neutralize it: love incorporates its own destruction. Love is an exceptionally powerful force for Wallace, necessary and constructive at one level, but utterly destructive at a certain pitch. Again, the destructiveness of ultimacy, the deadening force of the positive, comes to the fore here; to love wholly is to destroy, to encompass, and preclude growth, enacting that closure Wallace so strongly resisted. In the early story, “Order and Flux in Northampton,” Wallace investigated the nature and power of love, envisaging love as a separate entity, “a small homunculoid presence inside Barry Dingle, a doll-sized self all its own” (OFN, 92). This distinct love-entity explicitly sees itself as a “catalyst” in Dingle’s life, and is sustained by the unrequitedness of Dingle’s love for Myrnaloy Trask, “forever optically distant or unreal” (91). Like the definition of love as part of the process of communication, then, this love is always necessarily 9

10 11 12

Christoforos Diakoulakis traces Wallace’s engagement with Derrida through the idea of love in his essay “‘Quote Unquote Love . . . a Type of Scotopia’: David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,” in Consider David Foster Wallace, ed. David Hering (Universal City, CA: SSMG Press, 2010), 147–55. Nicholas Royle, After Derrida (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 140. Ibid., 68, 135. McCaffery, “Interview,” 135.

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unfinished, unachievable, longed for even in the inevitability of either failure or death, encompassing even in its giving the process of its own destruction.

Must we mean what we say? The term “love” as used in this study, then, means a very specific act of selfsacrifice, radically disembodied and desexualized, wherein the originator of a text (spoken, written, or otherwise) and the recipient of the same text (one or many, immediate or removed) enter into a sort of covenant characterized by mutual self-offering. Like Barth, Wallace retained a belief in the author’s power and responsibility—what Barth described as the heroism of the creative mind—stopping short of wholesale mort d’author abrogation. The outcome of a successful instance of this relationship would be meaningful (although not necessarily fixed) communication between author and reader by way of the text. While the desire for author/reader exchange animated Wallace’s articulation of the function of art, forms of communication and connection were legion within the confines of his writing as well. Both narratively and structurally, Wallace thoroughly and constantly investigated the means and modes of communication in a society that had violently disassociated itself from ideas of objective meaning. The characters in Wallace’s narratives are often hidebound by language and their relationship to linguistic mediation, unable to bend words to their purpose. This challenge is perhaps most literally enacted in The Broom of the System, but similar episodes of linguistic entrapment and its attendant obstacles to meaningful communication would recur at every stage in Wallace’s narrative development. In each case, the sacrificial disposition Wallace encouraged for author/reader communication offers the tantalizing possibility of meaningful connection, although that possibility is never fully realized. Wallace’s preoccupation with meaningful communication is closely linked to the question of sincerity. Kelly’s work on the New Sincerity of post-postmodernist literature aligns Wallace with a number of contemporary American writers who evinced a desire to move beyond postmodernist representation into a space that both accepted the contingency of textual communication and allowed for the possibility of sincere literature, in another instance of the kind of balanced opposition that characterized Wallace’s work on many levels. Questions of sincerity and authenticity are particularly potent in the nonfiction, in which Wallace frequently—and often disingenuously—articulates his uncertainty about

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the relative positions of author and reader, repeatedly assuring the reader of his sincerity and creating straw-man us-and-them binaries to establish an illusory relationship of trust, breaking the structure of the text to involve the reader as a textual co-producer and bestower of validity. Something of a paradox exists in this situation, in the sense that this illusory relationship is used as a proxy by which Wallace can convince us of the things he—apparently sincerely—wishes us to believe. In his fiction, particularly his later fiction, Wallace appears to grapple with the anxiety of authenticity, a concern bound up with a mistrust of language that has its roots in the philosophical developments of the twentieth century. His stylistic focus is offset by a recursive metacognitive engagement with his own desire for authenticity and its effect on the sincerity of his sincerity, or what might, appropriately, be termed metasincerity, and which throws into relief the ambiguous distinction drawn by Wallace via Derrida between intention and motive. He wrote to Elizabeth Wurtzel: “It’s all very confusing. I think I’m very honest and candid, but I’m also proud of how honest and candid I am—so where does that put me?”13 All of Wallace’s fiction shares an abiding concern with authenticity, and with revelation of one kind or another. The short stories in particular play with notions of intention and deception. The complex interplay between truth and narrative that implies philosophical engagement with Ricoeur and Rorty forms Wallace’s primary challenge to the idea of truth and sincerity as simple ends. By playing with perspective over the course of his short fiction, Wallace was able to explore that complexity at the level of the sentence, in a way that neither long fiction nor his brand of ruminative journalism allowed for. It is perhaps important at this point to recall that sincerity and truth, though certainly linked, are decidedly not identical. Wallace was deeply committed to a truth “associated with [. . .] sincerity.”14 It is the liminal space between sincerity and truth that the short fiction so precisely depicts; of particular note in this regard are Wallace’s tendency to use first-person narrators and his career-spanning focus on storytelling and self-representation (“My Appearance,” “Suicide as a Sort of Present,” “Good Old Neon,” and “Oblivion” are a few of many examples). In this liminal space, the spaces between articulation, interpretation, and authenticity are open to perpetual exploration, and it is here that we see Wallace’s ideation of communication at work both within and without the narrative confines of his work. 13

14

David Lipsky, “The Lost Years and Last Days of David Foster Wallace,” in Conversations with David Foster Wallace, ed. Stephen J. Burn (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 175. Kelly, “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity,” 146, emphasis mine.

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The title story of Wallace’s first collection, “Girl with Curious Hair,” furnishes a useful example of Wallace’s complex invocation of authenticity. It is typical of his early work, somewhat more violent and crude in execution than the later— though still distressing, more refined—violent episodes in his fiction. Within the context of a consideration of Wallace’s approach to communication, the most significant characteristic of this story is how he forces the reader to consider the narrator as something more than the sociopath he initially seems. Talking about Bret Easton Ellis’s work, Wallace said that its fault lies in its mere mimicry of “dark times, and stupid ones,” but that great fiction should “find a way both to depict the times’ darkness and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.”15 Wallace’s (post)humanism went beyond abstraction to encompass commitment to authentic humanity in all its messy imperfection, viewing it with a gaze that took account of the violent, deformed, and disturbing: “[w]hen showing rather than telling, Mr. Wallace allows his characters to function in both a symbolic and a living context.”16

Crossed wires: Communicating an authentic self Boswell notes that the first symptom of crisis in The Broom of the System is the crossing of the telephone lines at Frequent and Vigorous, Lenore’s place of work, a none-too-sophisticated but surprisingly evocative metaphor for the profusion and breakdown of interpersonal communication endemic to modern society. Interestingly, though, Wallace uses this breakdown in communication to break open the closed vocabulary of Lenore’s life, exposing her to new and unfamiliar voices and concerns, so that she can locate her “feelings of being [herself]” (BS, 172), or her authentic sense of self, and thus function as an autonomous and rounded person, without worrying over her linguistic construction, or the perception of her self-presentation. This is a rather subversive notion; it is a commonplace of the twenty-first century that the key to happiness is communication. Wallace appears to suggest that, while communication is key to redeeming the isolation of the late-postmodern self, connection is not to be achieved by “talk, talk, talk. Tell, tell, tell” (120). Noise, in the surreal landscapes of a Wallace narrative, does not guarantee communication; rather, in order to 15 16

McCaffery, “Interview,” 131. Jennifer Levin, “Love Is a Federal Highway,” review of Girl with Curious Hair, by David Foster Wallace, New York Times, November 5, 1989, Books.

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communicate meaningfully and sincerely, it is necessary to enter an accord, as Andrew and Lenore do, that does not depend on constant babble, but on an equal and continual dynamic exchange. It is only by means of this that Lenore can escape the overrelationality that threatens her sanity, and claim the coherent locus of will and power that her communicative self can control. Following on from the recognition of the subjective other, the ability to balance the needs of self and other becomes the mark of a mature subjectivity. Given that the recognition is linguistically mediated, it makes sense to seek a linguistic method of maintaining this balance, and here again we turn to Wallace’s philosophical preoccupations. While the influences of Wittgenstein and Rorty have been canvassed, one more theorist is of particular use when considering Wallace’s engagement with narcissism and identity. Paul Ricoeur’s work on identity and communication challenged the view that identity was unitary and cohesive. A distinguished writer on many subjects, it is his work on hermeneutics, which commenced around 1960, that is of relevance here. In particular, the central tension of same and self in the concept of identity, which Ricoeur laid out explicitly in the Gifford Lecture Series of 1985–6,17 but which were prefigured in work prior to those lectures, and the concept of narrative identity are relevant to Wallace’s work. Ricoeur’s conception of the world was one in which “action is [ . . . ] symbolically mediated”18—that is, mediated by language and, crucially, by narrative. In Oneself as Another, the published version of his Gifford Lectures, Ricoeur posits the existence of two separate and opposing strands of individual identity, the idem and the ipse. In Ricoeur’s conception of the self, “the narrative constructs the identity of the character”;19 we use stories about ourselves to make sense of the world and our place in it. This idea of narrative identity is suggested and complemented by the idea of a dual self in constant conflict. Ricoeur rejects the idea of an independent self, without reference to the world around it, but does not hold that the self is entirely contingent, either. The idem, which provides the self with its spatiotemporal identity, is the antiCartesian element that is a function of its culture and surroundings, the inherited and imposed. The ipse, then, is the unique, spontaneous element of the character, 17

18

19

Infinite Jest includes a specific mention of the annual Gifford Lecture series, which may point to an intentional invocation of Ricoeur, although William James was another lecturer in this series, another possible resonance. David Carr, Charles Taylor, and Paul Ricoeur, “Discussion: Ricoeur on Narrative,” in On Paul Ricoeur, ed. David Wood (London: Routledge, 1991), 182. Paul Ricoeur, “Narrative Identity,” in On Paul Ricoeur, ed. David Wood (London: Routledge, 1991), 195.

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the creative and self-determining. The idem takes its cue from the Latin for “same,” and it is the part of the individual that relates to other people, the commonalities that give rise to societies, and indeed the need for language. The ipse, by contrast, is selfsufficient and self-referencing, the element of character that makes us different from each other, the kernel of unreachable selfhood that keeps us separate. The salient point is that self and other are not purely oppositional. Quite the contrary: rather, they are interdependent and mutually defining, like the se rendre of Derrida’s definition of love. Without elements of each, the self has no meaning, either in the sense of overdeveloped self (solipsism) or overdeveloped empathy (overrelation). First, self will always be at odds with same: there will always be chaos in the individual, caused by the unresolved, irresolvable tension of commonality and difference. Secondly, for the individual to find meaning s/he must be able to compare experiences and evaluations with an other, so that individuality is dependent not only on similarity but also on plurality. Finally, the individual must accept his/her position as an other as well as a self. If the second consequence of this paradigm is true—that the fractured and struggling self must rely on others to make sense of itself—so must the self function as other for the others that are also selves in their own right. In other words, the self, far from being a coherent entity, does not merely rely on the other for definition; it actually necessitates and facilitates the existence of an other, as inscribed in Wallace’s vision of inevitably failing communication. Wallace’s investigations of Wittgenstein’s meaning-as-use and language games, of Rorty’s constructed truth paradigm and of Paul Ricoeur’s theory of self-narrative raise important questions in Broom that would persist throughout his career, telling stories of self-creation and -destruction, the unraveling of paper-thin self-narratives and the deconstruction of perceived truth. Although the founding concerns are Wittgensteinian, Wallace’s work also deals with Ricoeurian concerns as regards self and identity; there are strands of us that are narrated by others and strands that are narrated by ourselves, but ultimately we rest on the kernel of spontaneity that Ricoeur referred to as the ipse, externally manifested as the untouchable subjectivity of the other. The center cannot hold if the center is a void, and it is locating this internal, stable but flexible self that occupies Lenore while the world spins further and further from her grasp.

Dynamic communication: Reader, writer, text With respect to the process of communication, favorable conditions alone are not enough; there must be a conscious choice to take part in the process, an act of love.

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Further, the result is not fully predictable: we are in the realm of alchemy rather than chemistry. Where the system works, and where the choice is made to engage, the outcome is unique in each reaction. Wallace’s articulation of this exchange between author and reader as a relationship clearly displays his awareness of the contingent nature of communication, without succumbing to the stereotypically postmodernist rejection of meaning. This dynamic approach allows for a plurality of interpretation without sacrificing the possibility of legitimate meaning. In other words, the freedom Wallace offers his readers is not the freedom to indulge, to be spoon-fed—the pursuit of pleasure at all costs symbolized by the Entertainment of Infinite Jest—but the freedom of play within a system, the freedom of choice and interaction. Essentially, Wallace’s project is to encourage the reader to choose to be engaged. By the (chronological) beginning of the novel Infinite Jest, Hal Incandenza has undergone a painfully literal version of Wittgenstein’s “tragic fall,” the “loss of the whole external world,” a description in this case of infantile narcissism rather than solipsism.20 Where in the case of the philosopher, that loss was the loss of certainty regarding the relationship of language to reality, in Hal’s case it is the loss of any ability to relate to that world—he is variously described as like an infant and like an animal, both categories of creature without the power of linguistic production. Wallace’s take on Wittgenstein’s final position on language was “in order for language to even exist, it must always be a function of relationships between persons.”21 Hal, in his inarticulate state, embodies a structural failure of communication, but also a challenge to the very possibility of language, tragically imprisoned in his own mind, and thus sentenced to involuntary solipsism (thus the repetition of “I am” in the opening pages of Jest). Wallace saw Wittgenstein’s later philosophy as “the single most comprehensive and beautiful argument against solipsism that’s ever been made.”22 Language must always be a social instrument, in cause and in effect. The articulation of the social nature of language is the basis for Wallace’s engagement with Ricoeur and Rorty, whose philosophies are also important to the novel. This conclusion, challenged and proven within the first thirteen pages of the novel, is rearticulated throughout the text in a variety of situations, including language barriers, secrecy, the addiction/recovery/relapse cycle, and the soporific death-by-comfort of contemporary America as embodied in the eponymous film, each situation enriching and deepening the exploration arising from the opening scenes. 20 21 22

McCaffery, “Interview,” 143. Ibid. Ibid.

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Wallace meditates on the role of the author in this communicative dynamic in the early essay “Greatly Exaggerated,” where he argues that authors are not merely machines for producing texts, but that “authors are monkeys who mean” (SFT, 139), implicitly confirming the importance of authorial intentionality. While the position of the author in the process of communication—particularly given the necessary remoteness of the author both physically and temporally—is challenging, the tendency of reader response theory to elide, evade, murder, or in other ways silence the authorial figure does not solve the problem. Wallace’s conception of dynamic communication allows for the complexity of the author’s absent presence by making it a third pole in the process of communication, active but absent. While all three elements of the process are required for balance, in order for communication to take place, either within or without a text, there must be a leap of faith on both sides, with the hope that solid ground can be reached in the unseen middle. While length and volubility are arguably some of the central features of Wallace’s writing as a whole, the short fiction encapsulates the author/reader relationship that was so important to Wallace, as well as presenting and exploring challenges of communication in a variety of settings, in ways that the longer fiction and nonfiction were unable to do. Wallace mentioned the perverse delight that he and other writers took in “setting up and disappointing expectations,” implying that the frustration of expectations is a mere trick of power.23 However—and bearing in mind that the McCaffery interview was very early in his career—that same frustration engages clearly with the more enduring tendency to reopen and resist fixed outcomes, in keeping with the idea of communication as an ongoing project. Similarly, he seemed to undermine this expressed hostility by invoking the “weird, delicate, I-trust-you-not-to-fuckup-on-me relationship between the reader and the writer.”24 The delicacy of this relationship is perhaps even more pronounced in short fiction than longer prose; the short story affords the writer little chance to retrace steps that have gone awry, and minimal guidance or context for the uncertain reader. Indeed, it has been argued that the brevity of the short story form makes it uniquely suited to the contemporary mindset—“a matter of hit or miss, and it is perhaps for this reason that it suits modern consciousness—which seems best expressed as flashes of insight alternating with near-hypnotic states of indifference,”25 a phrase that evokes the cyclical stupor of addiction and epiphany that characterize Infinite Jest in particular. 23 24 25

McCaffery, “Interview,” 130. Ibid. Nadine Gordimer, “The International Symposium on the Short Story: South Africa,” Kenyon Review, 30.4 (1968): 460.

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Wallace’s short fiction arguably reflects his conscious engagement with this zeitgeist. Where a novel allows a writer to contextualize the action, to weave a linguistic background in which narrative consistency is bolstered by a carefully constructed fictional world, a short story has only its own limits to rely on. “Octet” is one of the most complex stories from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and has become one of the most-studied of Wallace’s stories in recent times, perhaps because of its direct engagement with the figure of the author, and the complex relationship between writer and reader. The pop-quizzes in “Octet” are redolent of the Rick Vigorous stories in The Broom of the System, but their dialogic structure makes them the most direct engagement with questions of authorship and mediation in Wallace’s career. Playing archly on the postmodern reader’s usually cynical relationship with metafiction and mediation, Wallace employs both the tactic of postmodernist metafiction and the assumed response on the part of the reader. By anticipating the reader’s response as conditioned by late-postmodern culture, Wallace prevents the closure of the system of interpretation. This compounds Holland’s observation that “Octet” “stubbornly identifies itself as eight-pieced while offering only four or five segments,”26 further destabilizing any sense of structural integrity, as well as disrupting the border between fictional and literal worlds. The proliferation of illusory titular referentiality mirrors Wallace’s erroneous intertextual appropriations, similarly gesturing toward an externality that is itself fictionalized. In the midst of this instability, by directly facing the reader’s cultural inclinations, Wallace challenges the reader to consider those inclinations at the next remove: what McCaffery suggested might be termed “meta-metafictionality.”27 This layering of worlds is mirrored in Broom’s Lenore, whose eventual acceptance of her personhood destabilizes the cogito of the extra-fictional subject. By having Lenore assume ownership of her selfhood within the self-reflexively fictional confines of the novel, the narrative undermines the reader’s own ontological status, in a complex inversion of Rortian liberal ironism. Wallace’s recognition of the always-mediated nature of writing, and his direct approach to the issue, obviates the high postmodernist response of exposing that mediated nature. As a consequence, the story provides as a fait accompli the primary challenge of postmodernist interpretation, using its ostensible conclusion to break open the 26

27

Mary K. Holland, “Mediated Immediacy in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,” in A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, ed. Marshall Boswell and Stephen Burn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 110. McCaffery, “Interview,” 136.

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expected closure of the narrative system, exposing the narrative to multiple— perhaps infinite—new directions. It is furthermore worth noting how many of the stories in the same collection end with questions, or with the beginning of a new conversation—the final “Hello of “Forever Overhead,” the tirade of abuse that closes “Brief Interview #20”— directing the narrative way from its own telos in a quasi-Rortian undertaking to keep the conversation going. It also, even furthermore, striking how little quantitative stability there is in Brief Interviews, which is full of titles that echo “Octet” in their implicit reference to a system of numbering that is disrupted by absence; Holland mentions “Adult World II.”28 It is worth adding, of course, the titular interviews themselves, as well as “Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders,” number XI, VI, and XXIV, which appear in Brief Interviews but whose sequence in fact ruptures even the bounds of the collection, with number VIII published in McSweeney’s in 1998—under a pseudonym—and ultimately being published as “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” in Oblivion in 2004. In keeping with the porousness of these narrative borders, a number of Wallace’s short stories were later incorporated as fragments of novels, blurring the boundary between short story and novel and questioning the deployment of textual fragments. Wallace also tended to interrupt his fictional voices in various ways, by way of unheard questions, sudden changes of address or abrupt endings. The short story is uniquely suited to structural experimentation of this kind: “the form of the short story has lent itself to the presentation of the partial, the incomplete,”29 and the shadowed presence of the unspoken in a dialogic narrative—situation, background, thought process, and so forth—is particularly powerful in the short fiction. This tendency also contributes to the sense of isolation and alienation that pervades much of Wallace’s writing, highlighting “the irreducible singularity, peculiarity and multiplicity of human experience” while simultaneously suggesting “that only in placing discrete selves in conjunction, connection and proximity to each other can anything meaningful and beyond the self arise.”30 To this I would add that it is paradoxically only by placing such selves into such relations that the selves or the relations have any meaning in their own right. Wallace spoke of the disconnection between individuals in much of his nonfiction—the “great despair and stasis in U.S. culture” (SFT, 49)—as well as 28 29 30

Holland, “Mediated Immediacy,” 110. Clare Hanson, Re-reading the Short Story (London: Macmillan Press, 1989), 2. Holland, “Mediated Immediacy,” 111.

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referring to it in interviews. He also referred to the communion of minds that he believed should be the outcome of good literature: “You’re trying somehow both to deny and affirm that the writer is over here with his agenda while the reader’s over there with her agenda, distinct.”31 This passage again invokes the Both/And dynamic central to Wallace’s writing, as well as reaffirming that recurring tension between the desire to reinforce and the desire to collapse the boundary between writer and reader. It is only in the context of this tension that communicative exchange can take place: the dichotomous simultaneity of interpretive resistance (active) and capitulation (passive) that characterize a reader’s engagement with the text allows for the dynamic relation of the reader’s self to the writer’s absent other. Wallace articulated the goal of fiction as being “to aggravate this sense of entrapment and loneliness and death in people, to move people to countenance it, since any possible human redemption requires us to face what’s dreadful.”32 Although Wallace regarded reading as fundamentally transactional, “an economy like any other where goods are bought and sold,” he seems to suggest that through the motif of sacrifices or gifts, both within the texts and in Wallace’s own vision of writing’s exchange, writing can transcend the economic, “into the realm of the gift of sincerity.” 33 By engaging in this process of unselfish exchange, we might be able to “countenance” the horror of endemic irony and move past it, because the dynamic of voluntary exchange allows for progress even in the absence of belief, a model of belief and progress clearly grounded in the structures of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Communicative action and commitment despite disbelief—within, between, and beyond texts and individuals—is posited in Wallace’s writing, then, as the only possible source of relief from postmodern isolation. These processes of interruption and interrogation, structural, narrative, and formal, are necessarily always unfinished, moving outside of their bounds, messily overflowing into other narratives, disrupting conventional structures of number and name, resisting linearity and closure. Such resistances, messy and complex as they are, highlight the messy complexity of the human experience, in which failing again and failing better is the only way to make (contingent, endlessly protean) meaning.

31 32 33

McCaffery, “Interview,” 137. Ibid., 136. Kelly, “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity,” 146.

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Narcissism, Alienation, and Commun(al)ity

“Be my tiny Yin”: The solipsistic trap Easily the most-canvassed of all the concerns of his career is Wallace’s interest in the notion of solipsism, which he regarded as the worst of all possible worlds. Solipsism, the illusion of being the only mind in the universe, the unconscious generative impulse of everything you encounter or imagine, is depicted time and again as the loneliest of conditions. The antithesis of meaningful communication for Wallace is not miscommunication or even silence, but the short circuit of solipsistic communication, the condition of being permanently and irrevocably alone in “tiny skull-sized kingdoms” (TIW, 117). This chapter looks at identity formation in a world dominated by narcissism, solipsism, and alienation, exploring how themes of connection and alienation build on the philosophy of communication already articulated. The narcissism for which Wallace’s work is famous exists and operates at a precognitive level, maintaining an infantile attachment to need and satisfaction. By exploring the recurrence of infantile narcissism and images of childish need, as well as the groups, conscious and unconscious, to which we pledge ourselves, the present chapter shows how a mature consciousness, aware of itself as both subject and object, is needed to work against the specter of solipsism. The offered solution, the simultaneous retreat into and emergence from the isolation of the coherent self, conceptually mirrors the pluralism that marked Wallace’s work in more concrete ways, and is arguably the foundational Both/And dichotomy within his work, as this chapter makes clear. While the entrapment of solipsism is a horror on one end of the spectrum, the chaos of the fully unboundaried self is also frequently imagined, especially

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in the short fiction, including the protagonist in “John Billy,” whose empathic powers of observation become grotesquely destructive; the child in “Another Pioneer,” whose wholesale psychic engagement with the world results in his rejection and death; the child in “Suicide as a Sort of Present,” whose love for his mother is so total as to be overwhelming; the couple in “Oblivion,” whose vocabularies bleed into each other to the extent that the wife fully loses her identity, and, harrowingly, the twisted “generosity” of the Granola Cruncher in “Brief Interview #20,” resulting in the breakdown and probable suicide of her assailant, and a variety of others. Each of these cases marks a point on the spectrum of absent to rigid identity. While the inability to accept the reality of another cognitive presence (subjective solipsism) is one kind of loss of identity, and the inability to reach out to it (infantile narcissism) is another, these episodes warn of a third possibility: the loss of self by the overacceptance or even the psychic absorption of the other, the rejection of the boundary between one mind and another, or objective solipsism. In other words, the repudiation of the self/other divide results in the total loss of either or both. The dangers of overidentification, as well as the peril of totalizing self-projection, are well articulated in Wallace’s work. Interestingly, however, this angle of the phenomenon does not appear to have attracted much critical attention, perhaps owing to Wallace’s explicit horror of traditional solipsism. Holland points to “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” as one of the founding texts of “the peculiarly postmodern angst of late twentieth century American culture,”1 arguing that the very purpose and stated aim of the cruise: “its obsessive desire to relieve the passenger of all decisions and duties” promises to reduce us to “the bliss of the infant’s narcissistic existence.”2 This promise, made on the cruise ship as a promise of pleasure and seduction, is rendered horrifying in Wallace’s deconstruction of it, and the infantilizing nature of the contemporary need for comfort recurs again and again through his writing. While the “infantilizing removal of responsibility for the self ” is evocative of Infinite Jest’s Entertainment,3 and the fear of society choosing death by pleasure, the same motif of infantilism ties in to the suspension of both ability and desire to communicate. 1

2 3

Mary K. Holland, Succeeding Postmodernism: Language and Humanism in Contemporary American Literature (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 63. Ibid., 63–4. Ibid., 64.

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Narcissism, infancy, and the inner child In this regard, and returning to the theme of literalizing thorny issues, babies and images of infancy are everywhere in Wallace’s work, from the feral infant of Infinite Jest and the wailing child of “Incarnations of Burned Children.” Stonechipheco makes its money—and creates havoc—through baby food. Hal refers to himself as “an infantophile.” Infantilizing images such as the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment and the Inner Infant Recovery Meeting (IJ, 795–808) permeate the novelistic consciousness of Infinite Jest. The precocious knowledge of the infant prophet in “Another Pioneer” is met with reverence, then fear, and finally brutality. Infancy in Wallace’s work is perverse and unhomely, not the blissful, comfort-filled haven that narcissistic theory would suggest it to be. The infant in “Incarnations of Burned Children” is trying, and failing, to communicate the source of his pain to those who might relieve it. His is a structural failure, an absence of one of the physical modalities necessary for communication. The infantilism of Hal’s interiority is a prison, and the feral baby challenges the very essence of infancy by having to provide for itself, instead of having his needs met in the way that narcissistic recollections of infancy function. Perhaps the most intricate reference to infancy in Wallace’s work is Vlad the Impaler. As a cockatiel, a bird capable of reproducing human speech but lacking subjectivity, Vlad is a perfect guinea pig (or perhaps guinea fowl?) for testing the pineal-gland baby food. The pineal gland is associated with language acquisition in children. In birds, the pineal gland regulates circadian rhythm, light sensitivity, and—interestingly, given Lenore Sr.’s condition of coldbloodedness—temperature. Vlad, then, can be said to oppose Gramma; he mirrors infancy, while she is dramatically Methuselan, and the tenuous link between language and temperature by way of the pineal gland, as well as Gramma’s actual responsibility for Vlad’s condition, place them in decisive relation. Vlad’s rapid acquisition of language embodies the development of language capability in the absence of reflective subjectivity, much as if a baby learned to form and imitate words without the informing consciousness behind them. Vlad’s position is also the reverse of Hal’s hyper-articulate silence, which offers subjectivity unmatched by loquacity. Infancy, then, or its avian avatar in Vlad’s case, presents a radical invocation of incommunicability, the abject failure of communication due to the absence of subjectivity. The implicit connection of communicative subjectivity with maturity then very directly suggests that Freud’s primary narcissism is a prison rather than a paradise, further strengthening Wallace’s rejection of adult

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narcissism as a trap. Wittgenstein’s theory of social language presupposes the ability to use language, but his statement that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world,”4 in view of Vlad’s enhancement and Hal’s entrapment, takes on a new significance when related to the idea of narcissism; the limits of the infant world are delineated by the absence of language. In this respect, solipsism becomes a specifically linguistic problem. The infant’s narcissistic appropriation of the world is based on the cataclysmic lack of connection, due to the absence of linguistic capacity. The absence of communicative ability negates the possibility of connection, which in turn negates the possibility of the other. Maturity, then, is the state of recognizing the integrity—linguistic and psychic—of other lives, as Butler suggests in Frames of War; maturity suggests the breaking of the narcissistic frame of reference characteristic of the infant consciousness. In view of this connection, we might then read the tentative “Hello” that closes “Forever Overhead” (BI, 13) as a dramatization of the process of becoming an empathic subject. Supporting this hypothesis are the story’s lyrical meditations on the body as object, both the bodies of others and the boy’s own body, enacting the emerging recognition of shared object-hood that marks freedom from narcissism and solipsism. By contrast with “Forever Overhead”, “Suicide as a Sort of Present” dramatizes the aberrant narcissism of an adult with respect to her child.5 Structurally speaking, the story is among the least immediately challenging of Wallace’s short fiction: told in the third person, the story starts on a formally unthreatening note, evocative of a children’s story: “There once was a mother” (BI, 241). The mother’s struggle to achieve perfection, and more significantly, approval, which is the witnessing of perfection, followed by a repudiation of the desire for perfection and approval, leading to self-loathing which in turn strengthens the need for perfection and approval, is a cycle that is explicitly revisited by the narrator of “Good Old Neon,” in Oblivion, as well as forming an implicit part of several of the titular interviewees. For the mother, however, her instinctive (personal) dislike for the child is overruled by the (social) convention that “no good mother can loathe her child” (243). Consequently, whenever her natural tendency to loathe imperfection emerges in relation to her child, the mother is “instantly plunged into such a chasm of self-recrimination and despair that she felt it just 4

5

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), §5.62. The story is a slightly edited update of “Self-Harm as a Sort of Offering,” which appeared in the Mid American Review, 18.2 (Spring 1998).

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could not be borne” (243). The final paragraph of the story, just seven lines long, is the dramatic locus of the narrative. “She could not, of course, express any of this. And so the son—desperate, as are all children, to repay the perfect love we may expect only of mothers—expressed it all for her” (244).6 In light of the ending, the opening line loses its luster of parental sacrifice and is recast as a shift not in circumstance but in identity. Following her son’s suicide, the woman is no longer a mother. As with the AA members in Jest, the drug addicts and the tax workers of other texts, the mother’s identification as such embeds her in a specific community, metalinguistic but linguistically mediated, like the ones Wallace referred to in Quack This Way. As a mother, she is part of a system of Wittgensteinian rules and expectations. No longer a mother by the close of the narrative, she is adrift from that narrative metanetwork. The final inversion also dramatically reverses the parent/child dynamic: the mother’s fundamentally infantile inability to communicate her internal turmoil ruptures the expected empathic relationship of parent and child; her desire for perfection is literally deadening, preventing both her own metaphysical maturation into an empathic subject, and her son’s literal development into a functional adult. Their relationship is a model of the abject failure of communication. Perfection, then, signals and entails stasis and death, as we saw in “Westward,” again highlighting Wallace’s resistance to closure in any form. The tactic of sudden narrative reversal also mirrors the suddenness of the son’s act, highlighting the absence of any real acknowledgment on her part of the alien subjectivity of her child; he is seen only as an object of her will. The mother’s worry about how she should behave in the eyes of others becomes paramount, coloring her relationship with the child. The sentence “No good mother can loathe her child” is a good example of this coloring; on the first reading, this sentence implies that the woman was a good mother and as such naturally loved her child. However, in light of the ending, the word “can” reads not as a fact but as an imperative: it is not the case that the woman instinctively loves her child, but rather that she knows that to be a good mother, she must love her child. Her consequent charade of love leads to her child’s adulation of her and so his own, finally ruinous self-loathing. The mother’s failure to admit of failure in herself becomes the ultimate failure of her son, a damaged and imperfect child whose mother’s outward perfection cruelly highlights his own flaws.

6

Notably, the son is only accorded a gender (a first gesture toward an independent self) when he takes destructive action.

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The many parent/child relationships depicted in Wallace’s writing offer a way of investigating relationships of love and sacrifice without the messy sexual elements—at least overtly—while simultaneously inscribing the social nature of humanity on a small scale. Families offer small structures within which to explore communication, connection, sharing, and sacrifice, as well as pressure and alienation, offering communities of meaning, and of course Wittgenstein’s family resemblances continue to be significant. Again, with families, naming and nicknames are deeply significant. In Infinite Jest, Avril’s nickname “The Moms” affords her a looming power in the lives of her sons; she is implicitly plural, somehow universal. In Broom, LaVache’s adoption of different names for different groups, the perpetuation of the male name Stonecipher and the pointed reference to language and identity implicit in Lenore Sr.’s nickname “Gramma” all point to the complex web of relationships within which the individual identity is mediated by association with family. When Lenore visits her sister Clarice and her family, the Spaniards, the family puts on a family play arising out of family therapy. Each family member has a mask of his or her own face, and two other masks of nondescript faces. During the family drama, the family name is altered slightly to Spaniard. The central focus of the drama is identity and self-definition. This conceit draws attention again to the concept of naming as meaning, as discussed earlier with regard to nicknames. Notably, in the scene immediately before this one, Alvin Spaniard is watching a television program about the Russian child-gymnast, Kopek Spasova, who is visiting Ohio with her father and manager, Ruble Spasov. The family name is of little literary interest, but the first names are notable for their relation to each other—the Russian version of dollar to cent—again positioning identity as relational. The familial relationship of father and daughter is defamiliarized, and thus highlighted, by the concurrent relationship in a different context of their first names, a kind of onomastic genealogy that literalizes the Wittgensteinian concept of family relationships. In the performance of their identity, the Spaniards assume their characters and an “audience-disc” is inserted, bringing up on screen the image of an auditorium that gradually fills with people, a virtual audience for their family theater. The story deals explicitly with a group called “the family members” who love their fellow family members to distraction, so much so that they define themselves only as family members, to the detriment of their own identities as people, embodying the problematic loss of self associated with overidentification. For this section, the “actors” are in nondescript white masks. Each member of the (actual) family has a

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number of lines to speak. The performative nature of identity is obviously central here, and the tone of comic absurdity showcases Wallace’s tendency to explore areas of serious philosophical concern with a light touch. This literalized “game” of performative identity looks forward to the performativity integral to the AA system illustrated in Infinite Jest, and highlights the necessity of witnessing for the narrative of identity. Meredith Rand, the beautiful bore of The Pale King, discusses her self-harm with—or rather, at—Shane Drinion. Rand evokes Wallace’s earlier depictions of mental health issues, from the imprisoning methods of Dr Jay in Broom through “The Depressed Person,” echoing his very early story “The Planet Trillaphon As It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing” and both the mother in “Suicide As A Sort of Present” and Neal in “Good Old Neon.” Wallace’s ambivalence about therapy comes through sharply in his writing, but he was an inveterate reader of self-help books. Wallace’s interest in self-help, while perhaps unexpected, is by no means out of sync with his study of philosophy, and in fact further underscores important elements of his aesthetic and moral work. As a “fine but troubled” writer openly and persistently concerned with living a good life, with ethics and with the complex morality of being alive in a difficult time, Wallace “found some years’ grace through the literature of self-help, [and] his relationship to that literature shaped his work and studies.”7 Indeed, Bustillos points out that “because of his history with AA, Wallace had been conditioned to accept certain premises of self-help literature that ordinary readers might balk at,”8 and indeed it is true that Wallace’s ambivalent relationship with self-help— both the literature and the systems such as AA—pervades his writing, with “the most complete and persuasive account of his ideas” occurring in Infinite Jest. 9 While Hal is certainly the obvious parallel to Wallace’s own persona in the novel, “there are equally deep parallels between Wallace and Gately,”10 a comradeship that speaks to a broader pattern in Wallace’s writing, which we have seen in various guises throughout this book: the tension between the highbrow, intellectual, expert side and the folksy, unintellectual, anti-authoritarian side. The Hal/Gately mirroring split strongly iterates that tension, and the resolution of the problem, which is not a resolution but an accommodation, a deferral of the problem. The fact that Hal and Gately are apart for almost the whole novel

7

8 9 10

Maria Bustillos, “Philosophy, Self-Help, and the Death of David Wallace,” in Gesturing Toward Reality, ed. Robert K. Bolger and Scott Korb (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 127. Ibid., 132. Ibid., 128. Ibid., 129.

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further underscores the resistance to closure that marks Wallace’s work; instead of working through the tensions between the Hal-side and the Gately-side, Wallace simply observes them existing, opting for messy, frustrating multiplicity over clean, clinical closure. With regard to the influence of self-help literature on Wallace’s writing Bustillos notes “the author’s irresistibly sunny voice” as a distinguishing feature of successful self-help writing,11 a description of Norman Vincent Peale that is strikingly evocative of the way Wallace has been described by Smith, Lipsky, and others. The “impervious sun” Lipsky wrote about was key to Wallace’s authorial persona, particularly in the nonfiction, and seemed to offer a way for him to balance expertise with accessibility, although this balancing act was not always successful. Wallace’s engagement with the literature of self-help—in some ways its own branch of moral philosophizing—speaks to the non, even anti-academic side of his persona, the Us to the “swanky, East-Coast” Them, or the civilians to the “hardcore theory wienies” (SFT, 83, 144). Through his engagement with self-help, we again see Wallace as a Perfectionist and a pluralist, concerned “not with what should compel us to change our behavior, but with what does,”12 not with the way we ought to think about ourselves, but with the way we do. The contrast of the self-help reader and the philosophy reader in Wallace reflects the author and reader concerned with the sublime and the ridiculous of cultural production and consumption, with The Simpsons and The Odyssey, with Stephen King and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Self-help literature also has a secularized Christian tone about it that echoes through Wallace’s writing, from AA to the traces of transcendentalism that tie him to Emerson and Thoreau. As Evans has pointed out, Wallace’s spirituality was Jamesian in its ambiguity, and coupled with the Pragmatic heritage highlighted by Tracey and other critics including myself, this ambiguity resolves itself in “a highly inclusive, pro-Enlightenment, post-secularist, post-postmodern approach” to faith and the world beyond.13 Like Gately’s hostility to the idea of praying to a “God you believe only morons believe in” (IJ, 350) as demanded by the AA system, the conflicting draws toward cynicism and faith are mirrored in “Up, Simba!,” with the desire for something to believe in struggling with the belief that “the need to believe is bullshit” (CL, 229). Returning to Meredith Rand’s self11 12

13

Ibid., 132. Jon Baskin, “Untrendy Problems: The Pale King’s Philosophical Inspirations,” in Gesturing Toward Reality, ed. Robert K. Bolger and Scott Korb (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 149. Bustillos, “Philosophy, Self-Help,” 137.

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harm, she recounts the advice of her late-night attendant, later her husband: it didn’t matter why she was cutting herself; what mattered was that she was doing it. While it contrasts sharply with the curative trajectory of AA’s “fake it till you make it doctrine,” however, the “truth” behind either proposition—AA’s higher power or the “cause” of Rand’s cutting—is irrelevant; it is the process that is important: curative, in the case of AA, and harmful, in the case of self-harm. Baskin notes that “Wallace does not care what we call the problem, what matters is how we treat it,”14 which might equally be read as a commentary on Wallace’s writing in general, concerned with living in the world as it is, pragmatic and flexible. Taking up this thread, Baskin highlights Chris Fogle’s calling to account in The Pale King as an example of Cavellian Perfectionism. Baskin identifies this scene because it is “more Perfectionist than (philosophically) therapeutic,”15 in the sense that Fogle responds to an outside stimulus, a lecture, rather than voluntarily embarking on his own journey of self-discovery. However, the process of conversion again mirrors the AA journey, with Fogle changing his mind about what, “in his conformity with his culture [he] had previously viewed as banal or pathetic”—or, I venture to add, moronic. In suddenly accepting this rhetoric, Fogle joins a linguistic or rhetorical community. Like Gately, surrendering to something he does not believe in and finding it transformative, Fogle listens to someone who epitomizes what he has previously dismissed, and similarly finds it changing him, despite—or perhaps in some ways because of—his erstwhile resistance to it, again tracing the same narrative trajectory of progress based in the acceptance of fundamental uncertainty, fundamental instability. Bolger highlights this when he quotes a 2005 email from Wallace regarding AA: “It’s not overcoming the in[d]ividual ego’s terror of annihilation. It is about cathecting enough other people and enough of the world [ . . . ] that we literally care more about the universe than about our own flesh-sac and its needs”.16 In other words, only by surrendering our narcissistic impulses to whatever else exists—even without any control over or understanding of what that might be—can we improve the loneliness and annihilating despair to which we are subject; Wallace goes on to say “each minute bit of progress yields hugely disproportionate gains in terms of less fear, less depression, less loneliness.”17 14 15 16

17

Ibid., 149. Ibid., 148. Robert K. Bolger, “A Less ‘Bullshitty’ Way To Live: The Pragmatic Spirituality of David Foster Wallace,” in Gesturing Toward Reality, ed. Robert K. Bolger and Scott Korb (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 45. Ibid., 45.

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“We are ourselves Other”: Alterity and the narrative self With regard to the loneliness of the narcissistic or solipsistic self, Thomas Docherty explores a paradox that arises from Ricoeur’s theory of dual identity in Alterities, wherein to identify in the other a means by which to establish a coherent self—as Ricoeur’s theory would suggest is necessary—means to posit the other as existing only to satisfy that need: “it is as if they exist only for the present moment in which the subject identifies itself.”18 In other words, identifying the other as necessary to the self leads, paradoxically, to a form of solipsism: the belief that the other is in fact a projection of the self. Docherty evades the necessary conclusion of solipsism by positing the idea of alterity to supplant that of otherness. Alterity, by contrast with simple otherness, implies the inaccessible self that inheres within another, thereby protecting some element of the other from exploitation in reference to the self. Ricoeur’s theory of dual identity enriches the Wittgensteinian identity games that Wallace enacts in Broom. The definition of self by other is repeatedly addressed at a number of stages in the text, explicitly and comically by the Spaniards in their family drama, and at a more complex level during the Amherst conversation with LaVache. Lenore, according to her brother LaVache, has “decided that [she is] not real” (BS, 248), or that she is “really real only insofar as [she is] told” (249), charges that are borne out by any number of other passages in the text, most obviously Lenore’s “rap sessions” with Dr. Jay, and indeed by Wallace’s own admission in the interview with McCaffery. On the basis of the two drawings, LaVache proposes that Lenore view the whole mysterious situation as part of a sinister game being played by Lenore Sr. Its outcome, he posits, is that Lenore Jr., by trying to consider her own existence, renders herself irrevocably other, and so, if we take the original premise—that “all Lenore is is her act of thought” (BS, 247)—to be the case, Lenore is nonsense, and as such cannot possibly exist. In a sense, he is treating Lenore’s search, and indeed life, as one of Wittgenstein’s antinomies; by applying logic to a set of circumstances he arrives at a patently impossible conclusion: that Lenore is both self and other, both Lenore and notLenore, which maps directly on to Wittgenstein’s qualification for nonsense (a proposition being both p and not-p). As we have said, this being the case leads directly to her nonexistence, which is made ridiculous by the manifest fact of 18

Thomas Docherty, Alterities: Criticism, History, Representation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 7.

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her (fictional) existence, in an absurdist reironizing of existential instability. In view of the above, the antinomies in this scene function, as suggested earlier, as signposts to the unraveling of logical meaning, rather than as clues to the disappearance of the senescent philosopher. The self/other element of the paradox in LaVache’s reasoning evolves the question to include a dynamic interdependence of isolation and connection that make up a central element of Wallace’s philosophy of communication, tying it to the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. LaVache’s argument that “we are ourselves Other” (BS, 248) is here pointing out the futility and ultimate self-destructiveness of relying too much on interpretation, as we have said, and if we apply Ricoeur’s theory of identity to Lenore’s quandary of confused selfhood, she emerges as lacking ipseity in her character. In other words, her reliance on the stories of others is too strong, and she has not yet created a story for herself. Her confusion, in this reading, is perfectly natural: by means of the idem-identity we can use the stories and speechacts of others to relate to our own experiences and further solidify our ipse-identity. However, the stories of others cannot be used to create an ipse-identity, and as such, overreliance on external narratives renders a character one-sided and dysfunctional. Lenore, then, is in danger of overidentification, which Wallace repeatedly involved in his short fiction, and her progress through the narrative charts her movement beyond that essentially linguistic entrapment in solipsistic recursion. In Ricoeur’s view, the inevitable tension between idem and ipse is partially resolved by the use of narrative. The idem is the part of our identity that is given— cultural history, family, and so on—and so it appropriates and is mediated by other people’s stories. The ipse, on the other hand, is unique to the individual, spontaneous, creative, and self-creating. It writes its own story, and turns to the narratives of others for reference. We use narrative to create an ordered “human time” out of the inchoate, uncontrollable cosmic time, as well as to impose some commonality on “felt time” (i.e., the personal experience of the passage of time, which is by no means linear)19 since “human lives become more intelligible when they are interpreted in the light of the stories that people tell about them.”20 He goes on to argue that “self-knowledge is an interpretation; self-interpretation, in its turn, finds in narrative [ . . . ] a privileged mediation.”21 What necessitates

19

20

21

An important point here is that Ricoeur was writing in French, in which the words for “story” and “history” are the same, “histoire.” Paul Ricoeur, Soi-même Comme un Autre [Oneself as Another], trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 188. Ibid.

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narrative identity, in his philosophy, is the inevitable discord between the discontinuity of the changing person over time and the permanent selfhood that means the child and the man are the same person in some way. This was a theory introduced in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason,22 but because it was not specific to identity, the inevitable tension of the permanent and the mutable self was not really addressed. For Ricoeur, this tension, and the tension of idem and ipse, necessitates the mediating influence of narrative, public, and private. Ricoeur is less forthcoming on the temporal experience of the ipse. In The Course of Recognition he refers to our ongoing struggle for mutual recognition, which is “a struggle against misrecognition of others at the same time that it is a struggle for the recognition of oneself by others,” in language that strikingly evokes some of the central ideas of Cavell’s philosophy.23 While this hints at an internal consciousness of the necessity of narrative to “the dialectic of order and disorder,” demonstrating an awareness of the way our identities engender “second-order stories, which are themselves intersections between stories,”24 it remains focused on the public, interpersonal nature of these intersecting narratives. Importantly, however, another, altogether more private form of storytelling exists and is at least as important, that of the lonely person’s imaginative self-narrative. The “if . . . then” paradigm associated with linear temporal experience is crucial to human behavior, which is, at survival level, based on a fairly rational analysis of necessity, cause, and consequence. Because anything above this survival-level thought process involves reflection, memory, and an abstract awareness of the disjunction between inner and outer time, a discord arises. Narratives allow us to cobble together the inchoate episodes of our lives and fix them into a temporal span, lending them a basic if illusory harmony. Wallace challenges this linear temporal inclination in the short story “Good Old Neon” from Oblivion, in which the deceased narrator explains “Words and chronological time create all these total misunderstandings of what’s really going on at the most basic level” (OB, 151). In a Ricoeurian paradigm, then, narratives are devised to impose a comprehensible order on otherwise troublingly scattershot lives. Story becomes the anchor of identity, and understanding of ourselves and those around us as characters, stems from this basis. More importantly, by telling stories, we anchor 22

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Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Martin Weigelt (London: Penguin, 2007), §A104, A352. Paul Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, trans. David Pellaur (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 258. Paul Ricoeur, “Reflections on a New Ethos for Europe,” in Paul Ricoeur: The Hermeneutics of Action, ed. Richard Kearney (London: Sage Publications, 1996), 6.

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ourselves in groups of others, and are witnessed by them. It is not sufficient to say that we tell each other stories in order to present ourselves. We tell ourselves stories in order to locate or delineate ourselves, without which process the idem gets into trouble because we cannot differentiate ourselves from others. In this way the two theories mentioned earlier, the conflicted self and the mediating function of narrative, work to strengthen and enrich one another by way of entry into an involuntary linguistic network.

“It’s what we have in common”: Community, cynicism, and the involuntary network The AA system in Jest is conceptually reflective of Wallace’s conceptions of alienation and connection. It is also narratively and structurally central to the novel,25 functioning narratively as a synecdoche of the addictive propensities of the novel’s wider milieu, and structurally as another symbol of the poisonously recursive language of the postmodern apocalypse. The AA structure is grounded in collectivity and the inescapability of shared experience. Reaching “the fork in the road that Boston AA calls your Bottom” (IJ, 347) is the novel’s primary impetus toward the desire—or rather the need—to give, to connect in some way, even if that way has seemed and continues to seem insipid or inane. Again, it is the need to connect and not the success in connection that is represented as the first step toward redemption. This isolation-progression of an individual at the heart of a group is consistent with Wallace’s vision of contemporary society, “taking it as axiomatic that the present is grotesquely materialistic,” but recognizing “that we as human beings still have the capacity for joy, charity, genuine connections.”26 It is also, importantly, consistent with Wallace’s approach to late postmodern literature as a complexly cyclical enterprise that resists progress as illusory, and with his vision for the future. Read in these terms, the end of the novel—particularly Gately’s efforts to resist medication—is a distinctly ambiguous analogy for the plight of late postmodernism as Wallace represented it. In this, Infinite Jest again exploits the condition of the “contemporary extreme,” in the way it “enact[s]

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A number of critics have traced the structural significance of AA in Jest, including Burn and Carlisle in their companion volumes. While AA is narratively significant to swathes of the plot of Infinite Jest, its more pervasive influence is largely architectural. Larry McCaffery, “An Interview with David Foster Wallace,” The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 13.2 (Summer 1993): 132.

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an aesthetic that does not strive for harmony or unity, but, instead, forces the confrontation between irreconcilable differences, most notably the difference between reality and art,”27 a description strikingly resonant with Wallace’s larger resistance to closure. Taking the idea of the contemporary extreme as a guiding pattern, a clear connective path is discernible between the structure of the novel, the process and pattern of addiction and recovery, and “the Entertainment” at its core, still, always, resisting the sense of an ending and cleaving to ideas of beginning and process. The Entertainment, ultimately, functions as an empty referent (in the sense that we hear of it but never see it; it is a semantic possibility, but nothing more) around which cluster the issues that make Infinite Jest so exact a commentary on the condition of contemporary America. In this sense it mirrors one of the primary challenges of postmodern life: the absence of a center. Infinite Jest, of course, shares this feature with The Broom of the System, its central absence being Lenore Sr., and with Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, where the interviewer is silenced, and with The Pale King, with its explicitly tornadic structure. The literal decentering of the subject, the absent-presence at the center of a system of signs, links Wallace’s work strongly with the Heiddegerian-Derridean composite of sous-rature, with Wittgenstein’s later vision of language as a system of socially consensual signs, and with Rorty’s radical neopragmatism, where the subject-centered epistemology of classical pragmatism has been displaced, or replaced, by “an ethnocentric solidarity” or system of identifying contingencies.28 The physical absence-or-presence of the Entertainment, and the narrative irrelevance of its physical absence-or-presence, invokes Derrida’s challenge to the metaphysics of presence, complicating the challenge by adding a neopragmatist application. In a Rortian paradigm, the consequences of the Entertainment are linked not to its concrete presence, but to its abstract meaning, a reading that also obliquely echoes the meaning-as-use paradigm encountered in Wittgenstein and encodes Wallace’s engagement with Helenic, or passive, responsibility, the guilt of the to-be-looked-at object, which was central to Wallace’s interrogation of gender. In other words, with the Entertainment as the absent center of the novel, we are left with a center that is “not so much 27

28

Alain-Philippe Durand and Naomi Mandel, Novels of the Contemporary Extreme (London: Continuum, 2006), 1. Lenore Langsdorf and Andrew R. Smith, “The Voice of Pragmatism in Contemporary Philosophy of Communication,” in Recovering Pragmatism’s Voice: The Classical Tradition, Rorty and the Philosophy of Communication, ed. Lenore Langsdorf and Andrew R. Smith (New York: SUNY Press, 1995), 7.

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empty, as called into question.”29 It is not the center, then, that matters, but the question—or in Rortian terms, not the truth, but the vocabulary. The annularity of the AA system—a circle with no center, anti-hierarchical, and focused on process over achievement—echoes the annularity of much of the architecture of Infinite Jest, from the idea of annular fusion to the circular geography of much of the action. This connection of the literary topography with the structures of the central locus of action is mirrored in The Pale King, with the use of § to designate chapters. In Jest, the AA structure could also be read as evoking the annularity of late postmodernist fiction, in its constant self-referentiality and complex internal order: as Arminen points out, AA has succeeded without “professionalization of leadership or the emergence of a bureaucracy.”30 While it is true that the structures of AA itself contribute a narrative shape to Infinite Jest, there are also parallels between the addiction spiral and the spiral system of postmodern literature. The point of Arminen’s article is that part of the therapeutic work of AA stems not just from speaking about the addiction experience, but from the reciprocal work of relating the individual’s story to those of other addicts. “[M]embers, again and again, invoke and mutually display their newly found identities” and while the focus is largely personal, “they also repeatedly refer to co-contributors’ turns of talk in order to make their own experiences recognizable to, understandable to, and ‘shareable with’ the recipients.”31 The necessity not just of speech, but of active participation that is implicit in the idea of “co-contributor references” mirrors once again the conception of communication and responsive witnessing expressed throughout Wallace’s work.32 Importantly, too, the reciprocal nature of the “sharing” in AA encodes the sharer’s identity within a specific set of symbols. The obligatory phrase uttered by each contributor at the opening of their narrative—“My name is X and I am an alcoholic”— fixes the speaker’s identity as part of a group, in the kind of community structure Andrew Warren identifies when discussing jargon. Particularly in the context of 29

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Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 2002), 36. Again here, it is important to note the similarity to Broom: Lenore Sr. is not absent as such, but missing, or problematically decentered. As the end of that novel shows, Lenore is in fact literally below the surface (echoing again the possibility that the Infinite Jest cartridge has been buried with its maker). Similarly, in both novels, the burial (figurative or literal) of the decentered object is linked with difficulties in communication: Lenore Sr.’s presence in the tunnels causes the crossing of telephone wires, and Hal’s implied presence at the exhumation of his father along with Gately and Wayne takes place in the year between the end of the novel and its opening, in which time Hal has lost his capacity to communicate. Ilkka Arminen, “Sharing Experiences: Doing Therapy with the Help of Mutual Reference in the Meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous,” The Sociological Quarterly, 39.3 (Summer 1998): 491. Ibid., 492. Ibid., 491.

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a narrative of addiction, the AA system works in concert with Wallace’s broader project of identity. That is to say, the identifying phrase both separates one (I) as an individual and integrates one as part of a network, functioning as a narrative analog of Ricoeur’s idem/ipse balance. This performance of ritual speech, especially the articulation of the name, guards against the danger implicit in addiction throughout Infinite Jest, which is the loss of the self, a threat that is embodied in the nameless addicts—yrstruly, C., even Don, who was known as Bimmy—who are known only by nicknames within the immediate group of addicts, like the anonymized characters whose identities are subsumed into their primary characteristics. Indeed, the vanishing of the addicted self is a common theme of narratives of addiction and alcoholism.33 Alienation, anonymity, and community are explored through the AA sections of Jest, which positions its adherents in a metacommunicative system without the need for identification. AA offers an iteration of direct narrative interaction on a micro level, but the participants are members of a larger system, too, the commun(al)ity that is the unconscious community of communal experience. One subchapter of the novel contains unattributed snatches of dialogue from Ennet House residents in which they discuss various aspects of their illness and recovery. The anonymity of these passages—a key attraction of the AA system for the founder of the Ennet House program—means that the dialogue is abstracted from its speakers, so that the passage becomes almost a snapshot of the nonspecific concerns of the inmates of the halfway house, reducing the identity of the addict to a series of isolated clichés. This, of course, is mirrored in the traditional AA procedure, which encourages anonymity both in its insistence on first names only and in its removal of individual autonomy, wherein the addict surrenders to a higher power to give them sufficient strength to overcome the addiction that has already suppressed their autonomy. The Ricoeurian balance of idem and ipse is central to the healing process offered by AA, where it appears in the guise of shared experience therapy; again, the necessity of a responsive witness, encoded in the AA structure, reflects Wallace’s conception of the asynchronously reciprocal dynamic between author and reader. Structurally speaking, AA permeates the narrative beyond its narrative relevance, falling in with the theme of annularity so central to the novel as a whole. The central AA motto “one day at a time” “a long time ago anticipated the ‘postmodern wisdom’ that the identity is never fixed,”34 which is central to Wallace’s 33

34

Philip McGowan, “Fog People: The (Non-)Identity of the Alcohol Dependent in U.S. Literary and Cultural Representations” (Thesis, Trinity College Dublin, 1997). Ilkka Arminen, “Sharing Experiences: Doing Therapy with the Help of Mutual Reference in the Meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous,” The Sociological Quarterly, 39.3 (Summer 1998): 492.

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work and late postmodernism generally. The working of AA is interrogated by Gately, who, as part of his job as a resident staffer, observes and encourages new inmates, who are convinced that “this slapdash anarchic system of low-rent gatherings and corny slogans and saccharin grins and hideous coffee is so lame you just know there’s no way it could ever possibly work except for the utterest morons” (IJ, 350). Gately’s perspective is from the step after this one, where he has come through the cynicism of the disappointed addict and has spent his time praying to “a God you believe only morons believe in” (350) and has reached the point at which the clichés become meaningful and true.35 The adherence to this greater system—even cynical adherence—marks those in AA as connected, even if they are unacquainted, members of the commun(al)ity of this chapter’s title. Warren’s articulation of narrative modeling as fundamental to Wallace’s ethical project is pertinent to a reading of both Jest’s use of AA and Broom’s reliance on narrative self-definition, offering membership of a narrative commun(al)ity as an anodyne against alienation; by extension, we as readers—doing our “fair share of the heavy lifting”—become part of a similar commun(al)ity.

What’s your story? Narrativity and narcissism Warren points out the drive to narrative performance as “a central aesthetic and ethical tension in Wallace’s oeuvre. The opening section of each novel ends with an allegory of both reading and narrative.”36 Warren is here referring to the two later novels—“Read these.” and “So yo then man what’s your story?” respectively—but to these I would add the pervasive obsession with narrative that marks Broom. Warren argues that this “modeling of narrative within narrative [ . . . ] gets to the heart of why Wallace writes fiction at all”;37 this sense that the self is and must be mediated through narrative embodies Wallace’s engagement with Ricoeurian theories of identity. It is particularly telling in The Pale King that Claude Sylvanshine, upon whose consciousness the minor facts of others’ identities intrude, is troubled by “the story problems” in his study for 35

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The AA system as it is presented here contains another echo of Hamlet, in the protagonist’s injunction to his mother to “assume a virtue if you have it not [ . . . ] refrain tonight/and that shall lend a kind of easiness/to the next abstinence” (William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2003), 3.4.162–9), advice mirrored in AA’s fake-it-till-you-make-it doctrine. Andrew Warren, “Narrative Modeling and Community Organizing in Infinite Jest,” Studies in the Novel, 44.4 (Winter 2012), 389. Ibid.

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the Certified Public Accountant (CPA) examinations; Sylvanshine is unable to execute his own narrative because it is persistently disrupted by the narratives of others, a late echo of Lenore’s resistance to outside narration. Stories, in Broom, mostly occur in or around Lenore and Rick. Lenore’s relationship with Rick is founded on stories; she, searching for a center to her character, seeks by her pursuit of narrative to make sense of the world, which seems to her to be entirely made up of narrative. In this she would be applauded by Wittgenstein and challenged by Ricoeur. The understanding of the self is inescapably mediated by our interaction with signs and symbols; to this extent Wittgenstein’s assertion that we are only what can be said of us fits with Ricoeur’s view. However, while the self is greatly influenced by and dependent upon the circumstances in which it exists and functions, it is not a pure function of external influences. Lenore devours the stories Rick tells her, seeking herself in them. Rick, by contrast, the publisher and writer, seeks to write a satisfying story about himself, with Lenore as the heroine, casting them as members of a narrative network. Dotted throughout the novel appear a number of abortive stories written by Rick about the character Monroe Fieldbinder—a thinly veiled version of himself—a sort of hard-boiled detective figure with a wry smile and a mysterious past. The stories are extremely formulaic, lacking in direction or originality, which indicates the same Ricoeurian malady as Lenore: an unbalanced idem-identity. A similar danger fuels Lenore’s search in Broom, spurring her overreliance on story and causing her to mistrust her own existential independence. Lenore’s movement from overdeveloped idem to a healthy ipse/idem balance at the close of the novel prefigures the ritual of AA self-definition, which roots the disorienting experience of the ipse in a safe network of idem responses in an effort to foster appropriate conditions for growth toward healthy self-definition and management. Rick’s possessive attachment to Lenore is a kind of relationship that recurs throughout Wallace’s writing, in which one party seeks to dominate the other. This dynamic does not allow for communication, but tries to collapse identities into each other, moving toward an abject failure of communication. In the final analysis, both Rick and Lenore are using stories to define Lenore: Rick so that he can control her, Lenore so that she can be free. In this context, it is particularly notable that as Lenore’s self-assurance—or what Ricoeur would call her attestation38—grows over the course of the novel, her desire to hear stories 38

Attestation is the balance of the idem and the ipse. More specifically, it is the belief of a character in herself, which cannot be verified by empirical investigation or extrinsic proof, but is based on confidence. Ricoeur introduced the term in Oneself as Another (21–3).

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grows less. When she and Rick are in the G.O.D, late in the novel, he offers her a story, which she rejects. Once she embarks on a relationship with Lang, the incidence of stories is remarkably low. Having located her self and claimed, as discussed earlier, the identity of Lenore Beadsman—making, as Dr. Jay points out to a distraught Rick, the symbol of herself real “because its reference is real” (BS, 346)—Lenore no longer feels the overwhelming need to be narrated. In other words, because Lenore has a self to which the name Lenore can refer independently of what is said about her, she has located the ipseity that was lacking when she relied on Rick for validation. In contrast to Lenore, Rick’s reliance on stories grows throughout the novel. Before Lenore’s quest for her great-grandmother begins, Rick has supplanted his need for ipseity by focusing on Lenore as the center of his life. As the tale progresses and Lenore begins to move away from him, Rick becomes more and more inert, and is thus reduced, in a Ricoeurian sense, from the state of a person to the state of a character, a reduction that is explicitly prefigured in the family drama enacted by the Spaniards. The difference between character and person is defined by the ability to initiate action and generate genuine emotion, as well as the feeling of independent selfhood. This is reflected in the text in the increasing reliance displayed by Rick on external narratives, either in the context of his relationship with Lenore, where he clings to them as an increasingly ineffective means of controlling her, or in his private life, where he retreats further into his Fieldbinder stories and grows more and more interested in his dreams. When, in Part 2 of the novel, he is faced with Lenore’s freedom from his “network,” as Dr. Jay puts it, Rick refers to Lenore as “the object of [his] adoration and the complete reference and telos of every action” (BS, 347), and so when Lenore removes herself from that central position (this action elevating her from character to person) Rick is left without a solid identity. It is worth noting that this is one of only two direct references to teleology in Wallace’s fiction (the other occurring in “Order and Flux in Northampton,” with Dingle’s love-entity regarding Myrnaloy Trask as his telos).39 Both instances involve the desire to possess the object of affection, to become one with her. Rick’s desire to appropriate Lenore, mirrored in other characters across Wallace’s writing, is a strongly negative characterization of solipsistic 39

In the nonfiction, Wallace refers to David Lynch with regard to teleology, saying “Art film is essentially teleological,” going on to argue that such a goal “can easily degenerate into pretentiousness and selfrighteousness and condescending horsetwaddle, but the agenda itself is large-hearted and fine” (SFT, 169).

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appropriation, suggesting that the search for stability is a dangerous one. When Lenore removes herself from her central position in his life, Rick is left without a solid identity. Following this, he enters into a relationship with Mindy, the cipher of Lang’s abandonment, a perfect candidate for his narrative definition and consequent possession. It is telling that the final scene of the novel is one between Mindy and Rick, in which they are discussing whether or not he will tell her about Lenore and Lang. Rick’s constant narration of life continues to the end: ultimately, ironically, Rick’s obsessive reliance on narrative is the defining feature of his character, and the thing that gives him the ipseity he needs for balance. Rick turns out to be literally incapable of solitude. While Lenore achieves self-actualization, and so ceases to rely on narration, able instead merely to use it, Rick must always have someone to tell. It is perhaps fitting, therefore, that he should close the novel by explaining to Mindy: “You can trust me [ . . . ] I’m a man of my” (BS, 467), cut off before he can say “word.” Rick’s final, truncated piece of selfnarration, then, dramatically embodies the deferral of closure, one of the most overt instantiations of the novel’s anti-teleological bent. Although his character will never become a person, Rick finds an unstable security with the vacuous Mindy, and Lenore is free to pursue her independent ipseity with Andrew Lang, the “blond bestower of validity” (347). The progress of their relationship is appropriately silent.

Addiction, affect, and anonymity Infinite Jest involves a variety of motifs related to connection, community, and alienation. The novel’s action takes place in a future where numerical years have been replaced by corporately sponsored named years. The addictions explored in Jest—to drugs, entertainment, and consumption—are distinctly modern issues, exemplified above all by the “Libertine Lady” (33) symbolic of Subsidized Time, who represents both the gathering pace of addictive—one might even say consuming—consumerism. These addictive behaviors also underscore the radical arrogance of a period that regards itself as historically anonymous, free of history, the juxtaposition of which might usefully be read in reference to either Jameson’s Postmodernism or de Man’s “Literary History and Literary Modernity.” Both of these texts problematize the relationship of

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contemporary society to time and the idea of history in a way literalized here by Wallace. Indeed, a reading of de Man’s essay through the lens of Ricoeur’s theory of narrative and time further sharpens the interest of Infinite Jest’s Subsidized Time. De Man’s suggestion that literature, modernity, and history are each inherently opposed to one another—that literary history, literary modernity, and historicized modernity are all logical contradictions—is challenged by Ricoeur’s 1988 account of “human time” in Time and Narrative Volume 3, where he argues that we use narrative to impose order on the aporetic dysphoria of history and the present. Boswell points out that the disruption of time in Jest mirrors the disrupted temporal experience of the postmodern subject; this is prefigured in Broom by the geographic disruption of Ohio, defamiliarizing the familiar landscape and disorienting the subject. In this respect, Subsidized Time represents an iteration of neoliberal economic politics, incorporating a society’s sense of time itself into a corporatized, self-referential system. Further, Subsidized Time in particular offers a challenge to Ricoeurian human time, as well as narratively encoding the ahistorical arrogance of postmodern capitalism. Subsidized Time, then, might be read as a de Manian reference to rupture with history, where much of Wallace’s engagement with time is governed by a Ricoeurian sense of the importance of organizing narrative. Jest, as we have seen, is both an encyclopedic novel, working to incorporate as much as possible into its borders, and a novel of the contemporary extreme, “set in a world both similar to and different from our own: a hyper real, often apocalyptic world progressively invaded by popular culture, permeated with technology and dominated by destruction.”40 The Pale King, by contrast, has a much narrower focus, dealing in large part with the question of how an individual might deal with the deadening mundanity of the contemporary world, specifically the almost unimaginable tedium of the IRS office. The boredom inherent in this kind of work is represented as a kind of soul-crushing process of automation. In this sense, although it is not an encyclopedic novel in the same vein as Jest, The Pale King does conform to Durand and Mandel’s definition, though the sense of apocalypse is perhaps geared more toward posthumanism than extinction. Isolation and the loss of self are explicit concerns from the opening of Jest, which begins with Hal Incandenza’s astonishingly fluent, agonizingly lonely internal monologue, which lasts thirteen pages. 40

Durand and Mandel, Novels of the Contemporary Extreme, 1.

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In the novel, the United States and Canada have amalgamated to form the Organization of North American Nations, a name most significant for the acronym O.N.A.N., with its implications of excessive self-pleasuring, wasted potential and isolation; the society is characterized not by overt destruction, but rather by excess. However, it is in this very excess that Wallace demonstrates the greatest destructiveness, most clearly figured in the substance abuse that permeates the novel. The wasted fecundity implicit in the name onanism is compulsive masturbation, named for the Biblical spiller of seed, also mirrored in the large portions of the north-eastern United States and southern Canada that form an immense and dangerously fertile landfill, and the isolation that comes with the solitary nature of masturbation is reflected throughout the novel, but most particularly by reference to the preference of one of the novel’s many addicts, Erdedy, for masturbation (solitude) over sex (companionship) when he is taking drugs (IJ, 21). These themes persist into The Pale King, with its constant themes of isolation and the dysfunctional relationships it portrays. Indeed, the central action of the novel is predicated on the solitude of IRS agents, its explicit theme the alienation of the working individual. As Boswell points out, though, this individual is also bound up with and complicit in a system of civic duty and labor, positioning her once again in an unconscious commun(al)ity.41 Although written after Jest, The Pale King is set around the same time as Broom, and a number of the same issues recur in all three novels, particularly questions of alienation and meaningful communication, each dealt with in different ways.

Argot, you go: Jargon, sharing, and reciprocity Besides direct forms of sharing like the specific narrative interactions of AA, Rick’s obsessive storytelling and the frantic self-narration of Brief Interviews, artificial or metalinguistic systems offer another form of connection for Wallace’s characters. These systems include shared argots—the language of drug addiction, for example— along with the shared vocabulary of popular culture, for which Wallace was so noted in his work, and the jargon of sports training. Establishing a common vocabulary between subjects fosters a metacognitive network between them, a tactic Wallace used frequently to establish rapport with readers of his nonfiction. Elsewhere, within texts, these shared linguistic systems position characters in unspoken relationships of 41

Marshall Boswell, “Trickle-Down Citizenship: Taxes and Civic Responsibility in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King,” Studies in the Novel, 44.4 (Winter 2012).

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alignment, generating relationships of connection but not necessarily acquaintance; Ennet House, the AA, and Enfield Tennis Academy (ETA) are three such networks in Jest. With regard to Wallace’s resistance to endings, it is particularly interesting to note that all three are places of progression—a halfway house, a tennis academy, a recovery group—rather than completion, each pregnant with the potential for success or failure. All the characters in these situations are on their way to somewhere else, outside the bounds of the story, both reaching to a point of closure outside the bounds of the novel, made radically unreachable by the novel’s annular structure, which ends before it begins, and highlighting the centrality of process, the necessarily unfinished nature of community, commonality, and communication. Addiction is less a feature in Broom than in Jest, but the obsessive reliance on narrative displayed by both Lenore and Rick, and the mindless parroting of Vlad the Impaler both prefigure elements of obsession and entertainment in Jest. Mirroring Lenore’s reliance on stories, the textual connection of the Entertainment (televisual) with DMZ (pharmacological) and Joelle (physical) in Jest articulates a spectrum of addictiveness that is not simply biological, but psychological in nature. Drug use is the most obviously isolating situation in the novel, and has a language all of its own, one that so isolates the user that the language becomes its own circular reasoning, exclusive of any interlocutor. Warren calls this “jargony argot,” a term so delightful I will not attempt to offer another, and argues that it recurs throughout Wallace’s work, pointing to the tax speak of The Pale King and the pharmacopeia of Jest. The novel is permeated by the various argots of drug use, ranging from Erdedy’s paranoid stasis to Hal’s obsessive secrecy and Pemulis’s cautious knowledgeability, among many others, spiraling down in both articulacy and intelligence to its ultimate devolution into the incoherent rambling of “yrstruly.”42 Warren points out that, by means of the use of these kinds of jargon, “the reader is slowly drawn into the novel’s language community,”43 an inculcation mirrored in the nonfiction, which is discussed in more detail in the next chapter. The incapacity to communicate is exacerbated and highlighted by a shared drive toward isolation in the novel’s drug users. Erdedy is waiting for “the woman who said she’d come” (IJ, 17), but later it becomes clear that one of the common features of his drug binges is solitude (his habitual selection of masturbation 42

43

This character’s self-identification as “yrstruly,” which is simultaneously first-, second-, and thirdperson, displays the terminal alienation of the character. The name “yrstruly” evokes the voice of one of Wallace’s earliest narrators, Sick Puppy, in Girl with Curious Hair, a sociopathic young Republican who refers to himself as “yours truly” on several occasions, indicating the gradual disconnection of his name from his identity, which is complete in the tragic figure of yrstruly. Andrew Warren, “Narrative Modeling,” 396.

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over sexual intercourse during these episodes, [21]). Hal is “as attached to the secrecy as he is to getting high” (49), and later reveals his “strong distaste about smoking dope with/in front of all these others” (329). Pemulis’s connection with drugs is, as a dealer, altogether more sociable, yet the formality of his language— requiring his customers to ask him to “please commit a crime” (156)—imposes an immediate and conscious distance between Pemulis and his interlocutors. The dialogue of drug users and addicts throughout the novel uses much of the same terminology, resulting in abject failures of communication because the speakers are so self-involved that they do not recognize alterity or other subjectivity. Similar use of argot embeds the narrator of the short story “The Depressed Person,” collected in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, in a broader therapyspeak network that serves to highlight her cataclysmically infantile narcissism and neediness. Fifth or sixth in Brief Interviews, depending on the status of “A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life” as story or apostrophe (it appears on page 0 of the collection, again problematizing the structural integrity of the collection), the story opens starkly: “The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror” (BI, 31). The pain of the depressed person, as she is uniformly referred to, consumes and blinds her, and her inability to express her pain forms the basis of all her communications, leading to an abject failure of communication; she sees her interlocutors purely as a support system for her, not as agents with autonomous subjectivity. The depressed person, like Kate Gompert in Jest, is solipsistically consumed by her pain. The narrative style is clinical, free of moral direction. The deadpan narration reveals a self-obsessed neurotic who leans parasitically on her “Support System,” women from her school and college days— they are never called friends; they are categorically relegated to the metanetwork of supporters, in which relationship there is no reciprocity—calling them three and four times in a night to “process this grief and loss and find some way to survive” (BI, 48–9) subsequent to the death due to “accidental” overdose of her therapist. This death and another supporter’s serious illness are only fleetingly alluded to, highlighting the blind self-absorption of the central character. Unlike the mother in “Suicide as a Sort of Present,” for whom hiding her misery is of paramount importance, the depressed person is compulsive in her attempts at communication, but her communication is utterly one-sided; the insistent, unending wail of a baby with unmet needs. Both the depressed person and the mother embody the abject failure of communication. Both stories offer

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instances of the failure of communication even where a speaker and a listener are present, because while the necessary physical conditions are satisfied, the catalyst of love—the giving disposition, the acknowledgment of the subjective other—is missing. The reciprocity required for communication to take place, as distinct from mere expression, is wholly absent in the depressed person, while the mother refuses to move beyond her own narcissism and reach out. In terms of Wallace’s vision of communication in fiction, the plight of the depressed person almost parodies unsuccessful writing, or writing in which what he called the “click” is absent;44 there is no room for the reader, and so the dynamic of exchange is truncated. The deadening logorrhea of failed communication is the endgame of late postmodernist literature, as envisaged by the cri-de-coeur “you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on,”45 spoken by Beckett’s anonymous narrator, realized in “The Depressed Person” by Wallace’s unappealing—and fittingly unnamed—protagonist. Indeed, while we have discussed the functions of naming within Wallace’s work, it is also worth noting just how frequently he anonymizes his characters, either by never naming them or by decontextualizing elements of conversation. We have already seen the importance of anonymity to AA in Jest, particularly characterized by divorcing a subject from his or her history and the disappearing identity of addicts. The depressed person is one of a number of characters— largely but not exclusively female—whose names we never learn, some wholly anonymized, like Q, some who are known only by epithets, including the parents in “Incarnations of Burned Children,” and the Mother in “Suicide.” Those characters who are named are often embedded in a particular network of references by means of their name: The Pale King’s Toni Ware’s first name, an anagram of “Not I,”46 strongly evokes Beckett’s anonymized, radically decontextualized protagonists, particularly in light of Toni’s cataclysmic abjection of subjectivity, and the Beckettian echoes are stronger again throughout Oblivion, and in “Good Old Neon” most strikingly. Claude Sylvanshine’s status as a fact psychic puts him into involuntary connection with the wider world, absurdly mirroring the variety of metalinguistic networks into which Wallace places his characters. By way of Sylvanshine’s initials, Burn connects the novel with C. S. Lewis and An Experiment in Criticism, in which Lewis discusses reading as what 44 45 46

McCaffery, “Interview,” 138. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (London: Faber 2010), 134. Stephen J. Burn, “‘A Paradigm for the Life of Consciousness’: Closing Time in The Pale King,” in Studies in the Novel, 44.4(2): 382.

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Burn calls “a solution to the metaphysical loneliness we suffer within the prison of ourselves.”47 Noting Lewis’s identification of attention as a key component of Lewis’s theory of the value of literature, Burn quotes Lewis’s judgment that “we must attend even to discover that something is not worth attention,”48 going on to connect this with the capacity of literature to allow us “to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts,”49 strikingly evocative of Wallace’s stated belief that good writing should “give imaginative access to other selves.”50 Conley Wouters further links Sylvanshine to Claude Shannon, the father of information, a compelling link given the burgeoning information overload under discussion in the novel. Wallace’s use of involuntary networks highlights the fundamental connectedness of human experience, made voluntary by narrative engagement. We have briefly traced Wallace’s conceptual evolution from linguistic connectedness to narrative identification and finally toward engaged citizenship; at each stage he dramatizes the choice between alienation and connectedness, depicting the necessity of choosing the latter over the former, even given our justified cynicism regarding the absolute efficacy of language. Balancing this tension—the confused navigation of the border between the “need to believe and the conviction that the need to believe is bullshit” (CL, 229)—requires again that “muddy bothness” (SFT, 211) that resists certainty, that mistrusts perfection as solipsistic death and that ruptures the narcissistic borders of the closed self time and again. This bothness is structurally evoked in the incomplete circularity of Jest and the “tornadic” The Pale King in particular, recursive but not closed, suggesting that the structural resistance to closure is another iteration of Wallace’s fundamentally political narrative disruption of the radical individualism of neoliberal America.

47 48 49 50

Ibid., 379. C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 132. Ibid., 137–8. McCaffery, “Interview,” 127.

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Fleshing out the story: Skeletal narrative and the interpretive gap A challenge for scholars of Wallace’s work has been aligning his nonfiction work, and the perspectives expressed in interviews, with his fiction. The unusual narrative voice for which Wallace is probably best known is distinguished by a number of features, and can be difficult to pin down, and there are striking differences between the fictional and nonfictional voices. Lipsky maintained that Wallace’s fiction got progressively bleaker, after the 1996 publication of Infinite Jest, which he contrasted with the “impervious sun” of the nonfiction.1 Whether that trajectory was sustained is a debatable point, and heavily problematized by the implicit possibility of redemption so clear in The Pale King, but it points to a marked distinction between the two styles. The various kinds of narrative dynamic this chapter identifies are emergent properties of the same basic conceptions of narrative and communication that have been explored up to this point. This strategy, which I have termed “skeletal narrative,” is one whereby Wallace destabilizes a narrative by means of elements embedded within the narrative itself, a sort of iteration of the dialethic imperative of deconstruction, such that every text, every narrative, every theory, contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction. Voice in the nonfiction is markedly different, but shares a number of the same concerns and strategies. Chief among these strategies, although differently deployed, is the way in which Wallace uses coded linguistic structures to establish a rapport with readers at the expense of some straw-man other.

1

David Lipsky, “The Lost Years and Last Days of David Foster Wallace,” in Conversations with David Foster Wallace, ed. Stephen J. Burn (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 154.

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Interestingly, while critical attention to Wallace’s work has of course skyrocketed since his death, the nonfiction remains largely underworked, perhaps in part because Wallace himself noted on several occasions that he considered himself a fiction writer rather than a journalist. Stylistically different, the two strands are often treated as separate concerns, with evidence of Wallace’s political outlook more usually being sought in the nonfiction, and I engage here with Wallace’s attention to political issues, encounters that are again tied up with forms of narrative, vocabulary, and authority. At its core, this chapter explores the unique vocal structures Wallace deployed in his work, both fiction and nonfiction, dominated by multiplicity, placing the two strands side by side, examining their strategies at the level of the sentence. Tracing the strategies at work in Wallace’s writing shows that the resistance to closure worked at every level of structural design, and links the two strands together as part of a coherent whole. In the fiction, Wallace makes use of a skeletal narrative structure, in which narrative voice is undermined by elements encoded within its own vocabulary, while in the nonfiction, by repeatedly and explicitly undermining the idea of expertise, repudiating his own status as authority on any of the subjects he writes about, Wallace creates an illusory linguistic network between author and readers, not unlike those described in the previous chapter. The use of skeletal narrative as a strategy in the fiction ruptures the boundaries of narrative in ways that resist or fail ending, while the persistent, ostentatious rejection of expertise in the nonfiction destabilizes the conventional roles of author and reader in ways that problematize ideas of truth, sincerity, and coherence. The distinct vocal strategies that mark both forms of writing, then, themselves resist closure and embody the failure of coherent communication, bringing the reader in as detective in the fiction, and collaborative partner in the nonfiction, so that they do indeed “put in [their] share of the linguistic work,” just as Wallace intended.2 Wallace’s vocal and structural disruption of narrative is clearly aligned with the structural fracture that repeatedly proliferates and resists closure, and more broadly pertinent to his broader project of connection. Skeletal narrative refers to a strategy by which Wallace embeds the seeds of textual and interpretive unraveling within the narrative voice of a story; a narrator (often but not always first-person) begins to tell a story, but through asides or tonal slippage reveals another layer of narrative under the surface,

2

Larry McCaffery, “An Interview with David Foster Wallace,” The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 13.2 (Summer 1993): 138.

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ultimately losing control of the primary narrative vocabulary and confessing or revealing what was hidden. Philosophically speaking, this skeletal structure, one of the defining features of Wallace’s fiction, combines Wittgensteinian attention to error with Rortian mistrust of received truth, to create a narrative style that blurs the real/fictional divide by making the reader a co-producer of the text, in response to the text’s copious narrative blanks. The same creative invitation to the reader is in evidence in Broom, where at no point does the story achieve coherence, instead working entropically outward from a muddled center, and leaving the central mystery of the story unresolved. Here, and throughout Broom and a good deal of Wallace’s later work—both fiction and nonfiction—the ideas of pragmatism recur time and again. In Rortian terms, the construction of a suitable vocabulary was of primary importance to Wallace, but where he perhaps departed from Rorty was in his treatment of the unraveling of mendacious vocabularies by means of such strategies, where errors and flaws in a vocabulary reveal the underlying truth. Rorty’s influential Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature provides the title of one of Wallace’s more harrowing short stories. This story, the slow, unsettling revelation of a disturbed and disturbing character, unfolds in fits and starts, consistent with this skeletal structure, which is also visible in embryonic form throughout Broom. The same strategy is particularly common in Oblivion, including such stories as “Oblivion” itself, “The Soul is Not a Smithy,” “Mister Squishy,” which is interesting as one of the rarer third-person narratives, and “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,” but its origins can be traced throughout the fiction. The formulation of this structure continues, at the level of the sentence, the proliferating structural disruption we have already observed in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, exemplified by its complex pagination and problematic numbering. In the short sentences and asides that a careless reader can often miss in a less stilted narrative, we come to understand that the sub-narrative in a skeletal narrative structure—in “The Suffering Channel,” the imminence of 9/11, for example—is exerting an influence on the protagonist that they are either as yet unaware of or would rather not reveal, turning the whole story into “something glimpsed [ . . . ] in passing.”3 Wallace’s mode of revelation seems to conform to Pritchett’s definition of the short story, and perhaps even push the limit of its conventional interpretation.

3

Raymond Carver, “On Writing,” in The New Short Story Theories, ed. Charles E. May (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1994), 277.

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An early and rather unsophisticated example of this technique is “Girl with Curious Hair.” In this early story, the revelation of the sub-narrative feels quite contrived: it emerges while the narrator, Sick Puppy, is contemplating his friend Cheese’s assertion that he “was unable to conceptualize a Sick Puppy such as myself, and [ . . . ] that he also did not understand the happiness that was exuded by me at virtually all moments” (GCH, 70). Beyond simply the collapsing structure of his narrative voice, his language itself is stilted, swinging from register to register, making peculiar use of emphasis and slang, conveying the overall impression of someone who does not speak English very well. He does not seem to lack intelligence, but his language production and relationship to time are profoundly strange, both indicative of sub-par social skills. In this way, he also looks forward to Hal in Infinite Jest. He speaks disaffectedly, or rather, without affect, to the point of psychopathic or autistic lack of empathy, yet apparently functions well in more than one social group, notwithstanding his peculiar idiolect. He is, in other words, a morass of contradictory information, the quintessential product of a paradoxically overinvolved and hyperisolated late twentieth-century society, a clear embodiment of the problematic plurality of the postmodern.4 The tactic of slowing a reader’s progress through the narrative—which is one of the chief elements of skeletal narrative structure—is clumsy but effective here, caused by the stilted narrative voice. As would become standard practice for Wallace, much of the salient detail of a protagonist/narrator’s life and character is exposed not by the events of the plot at hand, but by means of the short sentences and asides that punctuate the narratives; these sentences come usually from the narrator themselves, rather than from some external source. Sick Puppy, for example, reveals himself to be incapable of picking up social cues by his interpretation of circumstances. When other members of the audience of the concert at which the surface narrative’s action unfolds avoid the obviously volatile group, Sick Puppy imputes approval and generosity to their avoidance: “The other crowds coming to see Keith Jarrett’s concert were in approval of our bunch’s happy go luckiness and gave us a generous amount of room and privacy in the Concert Hall’s spacious lobby” (GCH, 57). This scene, among others,

4

While Wallace’s place as a (post-)postmodernist will continue to be discussed by critics, it is worth commenting on how many of his characters exist in definitively postmodern surroundings. Boswell has noted Wallace’s persistent return to the 1960s and 1970s as a narrative locus. This is hardly coincidental given his explicit engagement with the work of the postmodern patriarchs, but is also interesting for the encounters with politics that take place in these narratives.

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makes his awkward social interactions seem almost innocent, or childlike. However, the violence that characterizes the social interactions of his friends, his sexual attachment to fire and the drug culture that surrounds him complicate this innocence, savagely undercutting the unformed, almost childish character that seems to emerge from such profound absence of social awareness. In considering the origin of his “happiness,” Sick Puppy recalls an incident from his childhood, one of few times in his life he recalls being unhappy, where he and his eight-year-old sister find pornography in his brother’s room and he attempts to mimic what he sees with his sister, which he recalls “failed to make my sister happy” (GCH, 72). This, it is implied, is Sick Puppy’s first encounter with his own sexuality, and the episode ends as follows: “my father entered the room when she [the sister] called him and saw us committing a sexual act and he took me down into his workshop by our playroom in our home’s basement and burned my penis with his gold lighter” (72). Implicitly, this episode accounts for his later dissociative behavior and sexual fetishes. The revelation of Sick Puppy’s underlying trauma is, as earlier suggested, clumsy, particularly relative to later stories such as “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” or “Oblivion,” but it is this very clumsiness that makes it a useful illustration of the development of the skeletal strategy. The protrusion of the sub-narrative through Sick Puppy’s present-day narrative throws into relief his disturbing relational style, providing the possibility of a reason behind his demeanor. On the one hand, the skeletal narrative allows Wallace to consider the ways in which it is possible to fail to engage with the world, as with Sick Puppy’s peculiar conversation style. On the other hand, the skeletal structure also shows how, even during a narrative of one’s own construction, suppressed elements of one’s identity or past can filter through. Skeletal narrative, then, allows for the exploration of twofold obstacles to engaged communication, internal (demeanor), and external (trauma). In other words, while Sick Puppy’s affectless narration depicts one form of communication block—a lack of genuine engagement—the sub-narrative, or what emerges in his flashbacks, depicts the trauma that (implicitly, at least) has given rise to this demeanor, thus incorporating both an abject failure of communication in the form of alienation, and a structural one in the form of a traumatic decentering of subjectivity through bodily and sexual trauma. What most accounts for the jarring discord between style and substance is the narrator’s primary register, which sounds outdated and odd in its emphasis: “Gimlet is a bisexual who is keen as anything on oral sex” (GCH, 55–6). The ironic mode here serves to defamiliarize contemporary conversations about

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sexuality; in the late twentieth century, and in its art, sexuality has become mundane. This “trivialization of sexuality is especially ironic,”5 because, having been recognized as a fit subject for study and discussion, it has lost its power to shock. Looking to Sick Puppy’s sexual appetites, and sexual violence generally, Wallace’s ironic treatment of the subject by mediating it through Sick Puppy’s quasi-nostalgic mode of expression re-distances sexual depravity from the realm of the mundane. In other words, Wallace takes an existing, exhausted irony—sexuality’s loss of subversive power—and re-energizes it by deploying a decentered nostalgia as a second layer of ironic reference. The irony Wallace uses is both underscored and undermined by its own conventions. Elsewhere, Wallace similarly subverts—or rather reironizes—the normative irony (irony that involves the reader in “amiable communities”)6 of postmodernism’s debased sexual language by distancing its delivery and employing a deadpan narrative tone, in “Brief Interview #20.” In that story, the vocalization is accompanied by the ironic re-objectification of the rape victim by the man who claims to love her, a humorless but powerful polarizing irony that conforms more to Handwerk’s definition of ethical irony than to the self-mocking tone of much postmodernist irony, including some of Wallace’s own ironic metafiction. The comic potential of ironic tonal disjunction is replaced in “Girl” by a sense of instability and unpredictability that can be ascribed to the difference in register between the innocuous, almost childish, phrase “keen as anything” and the explicit adult sexuality of “bisexual” and “oral sex.” By reironizing the already exhaustively ironized, Wallace urges a consideration of the ironic modes that have come to seem inescapable, if not actually natural.

Deceit, deception, and disruption: Trauma and the self The skeletal narrative technique combines the destabilization of narrative structure with specific self-erosion in the narrative voice. One of the finest examples in Wallace’s work of the skeletal technique is “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.” The story opens in the middle of a sentence, gesturing toward an ongoing monologue, alerting the reader to what is not said. Furthermore,

5 6

Terry Eagleton, After Theory (London: Penguin, 2003), 3. Wayne Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 28.

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the linguistic patterns in the opening paragraphs crucially belie the prominence of the sub-narrative in the mind of the narrator: for example, the repeated use of arachnoid terminology such as mandibular distension, species, specimen, and habitat, all of which are used in the opening two pages in reference to the narrator and his mother. The incorporation of these terms subtly primes the reader’s ear for segue into the sub-narrative, as well as setting up a discordant note in the primary narrative. The first overt narrative reference to the sub-narrative takes place on the second page: “There also are the goggles and specially constructed gloves for field work, it is far from impossible to find specimens on a public bus even though surveys as yet have yielded no fruit” (OB, 183). The sentence occurs, apparently irrelevantly, in the middle of a discussion of a bus journey to the office of a lawyer. Wallace’s use of linguistic patterning, perversely, makes the reader less inclined to catch the early, oblique references to the sub-narrative, because of the similar language used in both plot strata. Furthermore, references to the sub-narrative are almost uniformly structured as continuations of an earlier train of thought: “There also are” (183), “And nor did I have anything against the boy” (184) and so forth (emphases mine). This tendency heightens the sense that the reader is simply reading the continuation of some forgotten conversation, making the shift between strata marginally less disruptive to the narrative flow. Here and elsewhere, the false sense of confidence established by a first-person narration can trick a reader into complacency regarding a character’s motivations and honesty. The capacity of the sub-narrative to infiltrate the super-narrative mirrors the power struggle in “Brief Interview #20,” with the added complexity of locating the conflict in a single consciousness, rather than dividing it between two competing identities. Besides its usefulness as an example of skeletal narrative structure in Wallace’s work, “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” is also the point at which Wallace’s philosophy visibly diverges from Rorty’s doctrine of constructed truth, which is particularly interesting given that it is the most direct reference to Rorty’s work. The story is marked by its narrator’s consistent, distinctive narrative style, characterized by unorthodox vocabulary and unusual patterns of speech. A Rortian interpretation of successful communication entails the narrator’s control over his narrative: a fully formed and coherent vocabulary implies control over language. However, while the narrator of this story is certainly in control of his vocabulary, he is equally certainly not in control of his narrative. The Rortian conception of truth as a social construction is useful up to a point, but control of vocabulary is not enough to counteract the outward pressure of

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concealment or deception on an individual basis. In other words, there are layers to the language we use that may betray a truth we cannot evade or wholly deny. This narrative structure underscores the divergence of Wallace’s thinking from Rorty’s, in the sense that while interpretations may vary and be valid, there are certain truths that transcend the process of interpretation and narration; where Rorty avoids discussing deception, Wallace embodies and tests its conditions as part of the fiction. As regards the philosophy of communication under discussion here, skeletal structure highlights the underlying (although limited) fixity that characterizes Wallace’s philosophy, limiting the profusion of otherwise potentially infinite avenues of interpretation. “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” might be read as a combination of structural and generative failure, here resulting in a stalled avenue of exchange where what he says and what a reader interprets are disconnected, thus offering a failure, albeit unconventional, of the communication under discussion here. The failure represented by this narrative, then, offers both a vision of the narrator’s structural failure to engage, and the generative failure presented by the gap between narrative strata, in which gap interpretive possibilities flourish. The artful instability that pervades this story is visible in several of the stories in Oblivion, including the title story, where what is almost articulated is as important as what is actually said. The opening story of the collection, “Mister Squishy,” which deals with the vicissitudes of the marketing industry and utilizes its vocabularies, unravels its narrative threads by way of the corporate inflection of its narrator’s personal, interior voice. This seductive use of the coded jargon of the industry invites the reader in, just as Warren noted of Jest, constructing a false intimacy that offers a fictional analogue to the forced complicity of the coded language in the nonfiction. The closing story of this collection, “The Suffering Channel,” engages satirically with the cultural marketplace of modern art and reality television, but on careful reading reveals itself to be quietly interrogating some of the most pressing fears of an age of global conversation and confrontation, and in both of these stories Wallace depicts the corporate exploitation of the “jargony argot” of imagined commun(al)ities. Oblivion, then, is the collection in which Wallace mastered revelation by stealth in the form of this skeletal narrative structure, characterized by a dual plot structure, a jarring narrative style, and intricate linguistic patterning. The use of repressed trauma to challenge the idea of truth-construction recurs throughout Oblivion and the role of repression and revelation in the creation and

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maintenance of a coherent identity is a natural extension of the idea.7 The title story of the collection, arguably the best-crafted of all the short stories, marries all the narrative strategies discussed earlier, and is particularly notable for its mimetic narrative voice. The narrative takes the shape of a monologue, typically distinctive and tic-riddled. Wallace exploits this instability, again using linguistic patterning and the breakdown of a controlled vocabulary to bring about the destruction of the fallacy. The story strikes—or seems to—at the heart of the American dream, and its obsession with self-presentation, appearing to depict a self-conscious man named Randall through his own voice, as he struggles with marital difficulties and a sexual attraction to his stepdaughter. The title appears, initially, to refer to the marital strife occasioned by an argument over Randall’s snoring, which he insists is a delusion of his wife’s sleeping brain. Randall, like the narrator of “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,” has an elevated opinion of his own intellectual standing. Resulting vocal characteristics include the interpolation of unnecessary Latin phrases, italicization, and the use of exaggerated inverted commas as a sort of conversational crutch, ostensibly indicating his disdain for contemporary argot, but actually revealing a narrator uncomfortable with his own voice, a discomfort that proves crucial once the sub-narrative is revealed at the close of the story. The uneasy edge to the voice keeps the reader alert to the parenthesized interjections that begin to creep in just over halfway through the story (OB, 222 and onward). In terms of the linguistic patterning discussed earlier, the title itself becomes part of Wallace’s narrative weaving. The oblivion of the title initially refers to the sleep that eludes Randall and his wife, but comes to be associated also with forgetting, repression, hallucination, and dreams. As in many of Wallace’s stories, names, family, and identity are repeatedly invoked, and of particular note is the narrator’s reference to Hope’s father as “Father” (including inverted commas), despite the manifest fact that “I myself [Randall] had my own father” (191). The second important implication of the discomfort that clearly marks the narrative voice, of intratextual rather than interpretive significance, is signaled by this paradox of “Father,” and partially explains the constant rephrasing of normal words. The stilted nature of the voice, more pronounced in this than any other story, is not only intended to unbalance the reader, but foreshadows an absolute reversal in the last halfpage of the story, where it transpires that the complex and involved narrative in Randall’s voice is actually the fevered dream of his wife. The parenthetical 7

See Thomas N. Tracey, “Representations of Trauma in David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion,” in Consider David Foster Wallace, ed. David Hering (Universal City, CA: SSMG Press, 2010), 172–86.

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interjections, ascribed within the confines of the dream to sleep-deprived hallucination are actually the encroachment of the real on the dream world. This twist also explains the confused naming of Dr. Sipe as “Father,” perfectly natural given that Hope’s subconscious recognizes a different relationship with him; the obsessive need to rephrase, indicating the lack of certainty or control within an alien vocabulary, and finally the embedded language of sleep, subtly undermine the primacy of the conscious mind. “Oblivion” presents an extreme vision of the concept of language appropriation. By displaying linguistic appropriation in this way, Wallace literalizes the loss of self by way of overidentification with another subject (objective solipsism). Philosophically speaking, it functions as a cautionary adjunct to earlier explorations of the dynamics of language and power. In this case, Randall’s vocabulary has infiltrated his wife’s mind almost fully, causing the complete collapse of her autonomous identity, as shown by her confusion on waking: “Wait—am I even married? [ . . . ] And who’s this Audrey? [ . . . ] None of this is real” (OB, 237). The linguistic dynamic in this relationship is unidirectional, or to put it another way, the relationship is almost completely univocal. Randall’s marriage to Hope projects the end product of the burgeoning relationship of the narrator with the Granola Cruncher in “Brief Interview #20,” although here the gender dynamic has been reversed. This reading also evokes Mrs. Johnson’s explanation in “Lyndon” of love as a function of distance, and the relationship between Solomon Silverfish and his wife, when Too Pretty says “My man say his bitch his life. Say his bitch him” (SS, 78). In “Oblivion” Randall and Hope are no longer in love, but it is not because they have fallen out of love; rather it is because they have collapsed into each other. Here, however, although it is safely confined to a dreamscape, the collapse is potentially destructive, where for the Silverfishes and Mrs. Johnson, the collapse seems mostly positive. This collapse of the boundary between self and other reflects, or rather refracts through a human lens, the postmodern desire to break down boundaries, which McCaffery refers to in one of his questions to Wallace, a desire related both to the isolation of the self that Wallace seeks, paradoxically, “both to deny and affirm,” and to the nature of hierarchical representation in art.8 This desire for collapse is, of course, comically foreshadowed by Norman Bombardini’s project of expansion and absorption in The Broom of the System. Like Bombardini’s farcical Project Total Yang, “Oblivion” suggests that the integrity—and by corollary the isolation—of the self is essential, that only communication, and not domination 8

McCaffery, “Interview,” 137–41.

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or collapse, can relieve the solitude necessary to that integrity, and that identity depends on separation. A similar dynamic plays out in a different way in “The Soul is Not a Smithy,” whose title presents a challenge to Joyce’s vision of the malleable consciousness of an artist. This story channels the memory of a damaged child to recall the nervous breakdown of a troubled substitute teacher. More obviously than “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,” this narrative is constantly infiltrated by snatches of remembered dialogue and media language; the narrator does not recall the events of the day with any clarity and as a consequence the story unfolds at an angle, with events mediated through the recalled childhood of the narrator. The narrator at one point actually states that he “did not literally see or know what began to unfold [but] received the full story so many times [that it] nearly feels as if [he] were present as a full witness from the beginning” (OB, 85). The story is punctuated by reference to what the narrator learns about the event after it, and contains block capital interjections by what seems to be the same narrator as an adult. The implications for a Rortian reading of this story are twofold: first, despite the narrator’s claim of not having been a “full witness,” the story that emerges contrasts with what we see of the dramatic media coverage of the event, for example the significant fact that according to the recollection of the four students present during the episode’s denouement, Mr. Johnson, the disturbed substitute, “had not appeared to confront, resist or threaten” (99) either the students or the armed officers who entered the room and fatally shot him. In fact, the four concerned later agreed that “the real truth” was that there was no perceived threat other than the substitute’s fairly clear fugue state to their safety, contrary to the Board of Inquiry’s finding that “the jagged length of chalk, the broad arm motions, and the proximity of Mr. Johnson’s briefcase” (99) were the perceived dangers that called for the use of force. In a challenge to Rortian terms of collective contingency, this development shows how, even if a socially agreed-upon version of events is accepted, as is the case with this narrative, and even if the eye-witness was not fully engaged, as is also the case here, a perspective that has made its way into the eye-witness’s subconscious will ultimately assert itself. Secondly, this view is compounded by the encroachment of the events at hand on the imagination of the narrator at the time: the reason for his being trapped in the classroom was an intense daydream, in which the narrator recalls constructing an elaborate narrative that unfolded through the squares in the classroom window. As events in the classroom began to unfold, although he was not watching, those events began to infiltrate the narrative in the window, ultimately resulting in a distressingly grisly

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plot twist that finally restores the boy to full awareness of his surroundings. In other words, even within tightly controlled circumstances like an intense daydream, our minds are subject to infiltration by facts we can neither control nor ignore. Within the story, the narrator recalls the insistence of this phenomenon as follows: The lone, nightmarish panel [caused by the dim awareness of the tension around him] appeared in the window as just a momentary peripheral snapshot [ . . . ] much the way such single, horrible flashes often appear in bad dreams—somehow the speed with which they appear and disappear [ . . . ] makes it even worse. (OB, 94)

This avowal, which is much extended within the narrative, seems to directly challenge the idea of an author’s control over his/her work, particularly when taken in connection with the title. By extension, it is implied that our use of language is necessarily infiltrated by things we know to be true at a precognitive level, whether or not we believe them, cognitively, to be true, which again presents a challenge, albeit preliminary, to Rorty’s conception of the pliable nature of truth. The fact that this challenge takes place in a narrative outside the primary narrative, once again disrupting its structural integrity, further supports the story’s titular resistance to Joyce’s hope for coherent narrative of identity. Wallace referred to the role of the outside world in narrative in the McCaffery interview, pointing out that a reader’s construction of a story is predicated on their “own life outside the story” and that “‘her reaction to the story’ [and] ‘her take on the story’ [ . . . ] are the story.”9 “The Soul is Not a Smithy”—along with much of Wallace’s writing—may be labeled metafictional: an adult recalling the felt experience of a later-agreed “true” story, during which experience the child-narrator is constructing his own narrative. However, the label “metafiction” seems to me to focus on the aesthetic of the story, dismissing the more complex interrogation of broader ideas of truth and authenticity in society; “The Soul is Not a Smithy” is full of references to war and memorialization, and takes place in a Civics classroom, arguably invoking a nostalgia for the lost coherence of identity displayed by the narrator’s fictional father, which marks an earlier instance of the yearning after 1950s masculinity that Boswell identifies in The Pale King. Indeed, the substitute’s breakdown occurs during a discussion of the Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States, inviting parallels between slavery and the miserable servitude of the narrator’s father’s daily job, which is portrayed as soul-destroying in the child’s daydream. The undertones of political disquiet, and the mention of the apparently fictional textbook From Sea to Shining Sea: The Story of America in words and 9

McCaffery, “Interview,” 141.

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pictures, further suggest rather an investigation of broader social narratives, an incredulity toward narratives of national identity, than an exercise in metafictional aesthetics. This incredulity is in keeping with both the political implications of Wallace’s engagement with Rorty and with the title’s explicit rejection of such narratives. An alternative, explicitly political, reading of the story has recently emerged, situating Wallace as a conservative writer, evoking the 1950s as a period of stability, a politics analogous to some illusory creative pre-postmodern period in which sincerity in communication was taken for granted.

Monologue, dialogue, and plurality One structural hallmark of Wallace’s stories is their tendency to be narrated in the first person, either as a monologue or as part of a dialogue. This occurs across the board, but is most noticeable in the short fiction, particularly the eponymous interviews from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, where the truncated narratives operate as a peculiar hybrid of monologue and dialogue that in their very incompleteness draw attention to, and so rupture, the bounds of their own construction, a strategy that occurred also in Jest. In structuring conversations in this way, rather than trying to bring authenticity back to traditional narrative exchange, a concept denuded of it by “a postmodern cynicism that selfrighteously proclaims the end” of all such things,10 Wallace finds another way of resisting apocalyptic postmodern anomie. In Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Wallace literalizes the strategy, isolating the voices of the interviewees by muting their interlocutor, the female known as Q. A particularly striking example of both these features is “Brief Interview #20.” The interview, as becomes clear over its course, takes place in a bar, where the interviewee is explaining to Q that he only came to love the woman in question after she related the story of her violent rape and near-death at the hands of a psychotic sexual predator. In a sense, the story narratively mirrors its own plot: it is by means of the narration of a “quoteunquote love” (BI, 263) story (albeit encompassing a twisted and disturbing vision of love) that the meaning of love can be divorced from its invocation of “the most worn down of stereotypes” and released from ironic abasement.11 10

11

Cristoforos Diakoulakis, “‘Quote Unquote Love . . . A Type of Scotopia’: David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,” in Consider David Foster Wallace, ed. David Hering (Universal City, CA: SSMG Press, 2010), 147. Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (London: Cape, 1979), 151.

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In this case, the power relations are starkly mediated by gender. Told from the point of view of the man, this story is striking for the silence of two of the three central characters, the woman the story is about, and the woman the story is for. Furthermore, the “Granola Cruncher” is silenced in two ways, both by the narrator and by her assailant. However, as the narrative progresses, the narrator begins to lose control: on the one hand, he begins to respond more directly and emotionally to Q’s unseen questions, his coherent narration ultimately devolving into the misogynistic rant that closes the interview. On the other hand, the “Granola Cruncher,” muted in both his narrative and hers, which he has appropriated for his own purposes, begins to reappropriate her story by means of infiltrating his voice, so that his narration is full of her language, a strategy that reappeared in a number of Wallace’s later stories, including “Oblivion,” as we have already seen. This apparently passive appropriation of power is savagely mirrored in the story of the Granola-Cruncher’s rape, where she “determines that her only chance of surviving this encounter is to establish a quote connection with the quote soul of the sexual psychopath” (BI, 256). Exercising great power of will and putting herself into the position of object, voluntarily decentering her subjectivity, she duly does so, ultimately going beyond submission to selfoffering, robbing the act, and so the agent, of power. In the end, although she is technically raped, the Granola Cruncher finds herself with the upper hand, realizing that “her focus and connection were inflicting far more pain on the psychotic than he ever could have inflicted on her” (266). The importance of this story for a consideration of Wallace’s encounter with gender and power is explored in the next chapter, although as I have written elsewhere, it is difficult to disentangle language and gender in Wallace’s work generally.12 The complexity of the narrator’s attitude to the girl, the striking mixture of adoration and contempt, maps on to Wallace’s expression of the attitude of a writer to his readers, the “love-hate syndrome of seduction” that he saw as characteristic of much of his generation’s fiction writing.13 For Wallace, there was an inescapable paradox in the relationship between author and reader, and in “Brief Interview #20” that paradox is made manifest. The complex relationship between author and reader, in which the author depends on the reader’s approval as well as offering something potentially important, leads to what Wallace saw as 12

13

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. Marshall Boswell and Stephen Burn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 131–50. McCaffery, “Interview,” 130.

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“this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.”14 It is not difficult to see this dynamic at play in the story, where the narrator despises the girl’s lifestyle and outlook, yet finds himself almost obsessively in need of her approval and love. As a consequence, he attempts to master her, to prove his own superiority, in much the same way as Wallace described the tendency he saw in his own and others’ work to challenge the reader with long sentences, too much data or the intentional frustration of expectations. When that does not work, and the narrator realizes that the power balance in the story has shifted to the girl, he loses his control over language altogether, transferring his rage to the other mute female character in an incoherent tirade. The transference of anger in the final paragraph demonstrates the effect of a total loss of power on the linguistic control of the narrator, offering a clear psychological link between linguistic dominance and other forms of power.

LIEBESTOD: Vocabulary, communication, and the death of the self Vocal appropriation, then, is one means by which Wallace’s narrative borders are troubled. In Infinite Jest, we see this occur in the other direction: in lieu of appropriation, we encounter vocal projection, on the part of the Wraith, into the mind of the suffering Don. The novel is full of problematic forms of communication, not least among them the brilliant, damaged Hal. Hal’s reflection on his situation is pervaded by his linguistic intelligence, far more than his skill at tennis, which is the ostensible reason behind his scholarship interview. The essay titles listed by the Deans confirm a preoccupation with grammar, and Hal’s own memories, slightly later in the book, of the bizarre episode involving the “professional conversationalist” (IJ, 27–31) reveal an almost eidetic memory and obsessive interest in research that includes memorizing the Oxford English Dictionary. His reflections in the university center on philosophy and language. While he is attempting to explain that he is not as damaged as he appears, he repeats the phrase “I believe” (12) four times within five lines of text, indicating an affective consciousness, in sharp contrast with the flat tone of the rest of the narration of the scene. The twin concerns with grammar and philosophy obviously echo the central concerns of The Broom of the System, and it is worth recalling Lenore 14

Ibid.

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Beadsman’s expression of fear that she might be no more than a story. Similarly, Hal’s name can also be read as a reference to the computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is particularly interesting give Wallace’s expressed fear that he was “just a 98.6˚ calculating machine,” which he noted was replaced by the fear that he was “nothing but a linguistic construct.”15 Hal, then, marks a development from Lenore’s specifically linguistic confusion to a confusion grounded in technology and the proliferation of information, a posthumanist instability associated with Wallace’s suspicion of both entertainment and information.16 Given his obsessive loquacity, Hal’s assertion that he has “become an infantophile” (16) seems to make use of the wrong term, unusual for so scrupulous a linguist. Infantophilia is a form of pedophilia, and Hal shows no sexual inclination toward toddlers, and it is safe to take from the many references to infant-like behavior that Hal means that he has been infantilized, not that he has become an infantophile. Such small slippages of language are never accidental in Wallace’s writing, and in a character who prides himself on his linguistic acuity, a mistake like this is significant indeed, taking up the theme of error that threaded through Wallace’s novels, from the mistaken autographing of Wittgenstein’s book in Broom to the slightly inaccurate Québécois throughout Jest, destabilizing the narratives just slightly. The peculiar inarticulacy of the opening section is mirrored in the final pages of the novel by Don Gately’s situation. Gately, who appears in Hal’s memory in the opening section, is the focus of the final nine pages of the novel, at the end of just over one hundred pages of narrative alternating between Hal and Gately. This episode takes place on November 20, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, “immediately pre-fundraiser-exhibition-fête” (IJ, 964), the fête being the Whataburger Invitational. In other words, assuming the Whataburger Invitational takes place at the same time each year, the novel closes precisely a year before it opens. This puts Hal’s recollection of “the only other emergency room [he has] ever been in, almost exactly one year back” (16) at the same time as Gately’s final appearance in the novel, and Gately refers to the episode in the graveyard mentioned by Hal in his opening reverie. The narrative links between the two protagonists, which crop up throughout the novel, align the characters quite distinctly, although their eventual relationship is never clear. Both characters struggle with drug addiction and come 15 16

McCaffery, “Interview,” 142. Conley Wouters traces this connection in “‘What Am I, a Machine?’ Humans, Information and Matters of Record in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King,” in Studies in the Novel, 44.4 (Winter 2012): 447–63.

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from complexly dysfunctional homes with absent fathers. Both characters are physically imposing, and both are prominent figures in institutions that regulate their lives: Hal’s Big Buddy position and his status as the son of the deceased headmaster of the Enfield Tennis Academy mirrors Gately’s job as live-in staffer at the nearby Ennet House facility. Despite their geographic proximity, the two meet, it is implied, some time shortly after the close of the novel, in the emergency room. Hal’s presence there is referred to in the opening scenes and presumably has something to do with the language issues that become clear in his opening monologue, possibly ill-effects from having ingested the DMZ that Pemulis lost. Gately has been shot in the arm defending Randy Lenz and has been refusing pain medication out of fear of relapsing into addiction. Hal and Gately are linked in several ways, both direct—their eventual relationship and trip to Himself ’s grave or their common connection with Joelle van Dyne—and indirect—like their shared drug habits and physical prowess. For all their common features, there is one thing that sets Gately and Hal apart, one that becomes important when considering the links between the novel’s opening and closing: the difference in their levels of education. While Hal is a prodigy who writes fluidly and articulately about complex literary, mathematical, and philosophical issues, Gately left school at seventeen, during “his sophomore year of class and his junior year of ball” (906), having harbored a drug habit from the age of nine and being convinced by a lackadaisical education system of his innate stupidity. In sharp contrast to Hal’s prepubescent dictionary-memorizing escapades, Gately scraped through most of his high-school courses, but “English just fucking killed him” (905). In the final section of the novel, when the narrative spins between Hal and Gately, Gately’s passages are notable for their inaccuracies of spelling and grammar and the generally low standard of articulation. Given this difference between two otherwise similar characters, it is interesting to observe the similarities between their internal monologues and linguistic patterns at the beginning and the end of the book. References to hospitals and to heads and bodies punctuate both narratives. While Hal talks about the heads and bodies of the University Deans in the first scene, and Gately of the doctors who lean over him as he floats in and out of consciousness, both characters describe the sensation of disembodiment occasioned either by sedation or by immense pain. In the hospital after being shot, Gately recalls his long acquaintance with narcotics, as the doctor treating him tries to offer him drugs to ease his pain. One memory that comes to him is how “when he was Pebbled or narculated in any way he’d become this totally taciturn withdrawn dead-like person [ . . . ] He got real, like, interior”

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(IJ, 893). This description of his drugged state resonates clearly with the images of Hal presented in the opening monologue and in the narrative passages interspersed with Gately’s hospital thoughts at the end; in these passages Hal, like Gately, is uncommunicative and inward-directed, as well as being mostly horizontal, on the carpet in his room later on and on the floor in the opening scene following his attempt to communicate. If we attribute Hal’s altered state to the ill-effects of DMZ, the two stories align themselves still more closely, as both the immediate and longterm effects of the drug cause sensations of disembodiment, an inability to function unaided in the world, and a withdrawal into the life of the mind. Hal’s internal monologue is more articulate than Gately’s, but much of the substance is similar. For example, both characters consider language, Hal from the point of view of a fluent and articulate speaker and Gately from the perspective of one who lacks a similar command of language. The fact that Gately “hasn’t got clue one about where ghostwords like SINISTRAL or LIEBESTOD mean or come from, much less OMMATOPHORIC” (884) complements the linguistic focus of Hal’s first monologue, and Gately’s serene slide into hallucination evokes Hal’s early assertion that “there are, by the O.E.D. VI’s count, nineteen nonarchaic synonyms for unresponsive” (17).17 Warren points out that terms that interrupt Gately’s monologue “are, of course, straight from James Incandenza’s private stash.”18 The extent of the intrusion of Incandenza/the Wraith on Gately’s “brain-voice” throughout this section is unclear, and the explicit invocation of the Wraith’s voice at times complicates this relationship further, so that “we are still left wondering what exactly the Wraith ‘says’ to/through Gately.”19 The collapsing of vocabularies here, which in some ways mirrors that of Randall and Hope in “Oblivion,” offers another instance of the rupture of vocal boundaries, albeit not in the service of a skeletal narrative; Gately’s mind—the “skull-sized kingdom” Wallace was so ambivalent about—is penetrated by an outside subjectivity, simultaneously aggravating and obviating the distinction between self and other. Don’s mental invasion by the Wraith offers a radical iteration of the kind of boundary blurring seen in “Oblivion” and “Brief Interview #20,” echoing Vlad the Impaler’s use of vocabulary unsupported by understanding.

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19

The appearance of the term “liebestod,” meaning love-death, here is interesting; the connection of love with death further highlights the notion of death as a consummation, the end of a process, equating closure with stasis, perfection, or attainment with mortality. Andrew Warren, “Narrative Modeling and Community Organizing in Infinite Jest,” Studies in the Novel, 44.4 (Winter 2012): 404. Ibid., 403.

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“They are sort of disingenuous”: Establishing us-and-them in the nonfiction In the nonfiction, Wallace establishes a persona that, for all its erudition and incisiveness, mimics the transcript of a conversation, or what Lipsky referred to as “the way you flattered yourself your brain might really sound.”20 Although stylistically different, the nonfiction shares a number of features and concerns with the fictions that can be traced through the construction of narrative. In “Deciderization 2007,” Wallace articulated the belief that nonfiction writing was a more challenging enterprise than fiction: “Writing-wise, fiction is scarier, but non-fiction is harder—because non-fiction’s based in reality, and today’s felt reality is overwhelmingly, circuit-blowingly huge and complex” (DSR, 14). Speaking to Scocca in 1998, Wallace noted “I’m not a journalist, and I don’t pretend to be one.”21 He persistently and perhaps disingenuously, repudiates political affiliation in his more obviously political work (e.g., his repeated avowal that he is “not a political journalist” in “Up, Simba!”), and discussed politics more (apparently) openly in the essays concerned with artistic production. This repeated abnegation of qualification is one of many figurations of a deeply problematic tendency to reject ideas of authority and authorship throughout the nonfiction, in ways that dovetail interestingly with the structural and vocal instability of the fiction. Willa McDonald cautions that, “while the persona may reflect the writer’s personality, it’s worth remembering that it’s nevertheless created—deliberately—by the writer.”22 In other words, Wallace is using a Scheherazadean charm to, in some way, trap the reader into liking him. Besides surreptitiously evading the task of establishing genuine trust, the tone Wallace adopts has an artistic angle as well, making the essays easy and pleasurable to read. For Wallace, this was one of the features of good writing, the “stomach magic of, ‘God damn, it’s fun to read. I’d rather read right now than eat.”23 In other words, the desire for a positive response from the reader is in some profound way bound up with Wallace’s beliefs regarding what constitutes good writing, another facet of the 20

21

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David Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (New York: Broadway Books, 2010), xxix. Tom Scocca, “Interview with David Foster Wallace,” in Conversations with David Foster Wallace, ed. Stephen J. Burn, (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 83. Willa McDonald and Susie Eisenhuth, The Writer’s Reader: Understanding Journalism and NonFiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 127. Lipsky, Although of Course, 36.

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sacrificial aspect of his authorship, the idea that one had to be “willing to die, sort of, in order to move the reader.”24 In 1995, Wallace embarked upon a pleasure cruise on the MV Zenith. Arising out of this trip is one of his best-known pieces of journalism, the tragicomic “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” in the collection of the same name. At the beginning of the essay, Wallace bemoans his very presence on the ship. “A certain swanky East-Coast magazine approved of the results of sending me to a plain old simple State Fair last year to do a directionless essay thing” he says. “They are sort of disingenuous, I believe, these magazine people” (SFT, 256–7). Right away, Wallace establishes a spurious us-and-them relationship, one that characterizes his nonfiction in general.25 This use of coded language involves some of the “jargony argot” discussed in the previous chapter, and invokes ideas of politics and engagement that connected Wallace’s engagement with language and citizenship, involving readers in a system of imagined community and exploiting forms of loyalty of which they may not be aware. This practice of manipulative grouping challenges the form of sincerity proposed by Kelly in “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity,” given that it is both motivated and predictable. The imagined community of citizenship and its attendant “duties,” the subject of The Pale King, are here prefigured by the use of exclusive rhetoric, the exploitable language of belonging. The confidential tone of the writing, its studied casualness and gently pejorative references to the “swanky East-Coast magazine” lend the writing a folksy charm that forms an uneasy alliance with his obvious intellectual acuity.26 The cruise-ship essay was funded by Harper’s, owing to the success of an earlier article of this type, published as “Ticket to the Fair” in July 1994 and reprinted in the collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again under the much more typical title “Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All.” While lightly dismissing the “magazine people” as disingenuous, Wallace draws paralliptical attention to his own disingenuousness in writing the piece at all. Despite the implicit distancing in the phrase “these magazine people,”

24 25

26

McCaffery, “Interview,” 149. The colloquialism that fosters this “us-and-them” sense is partly caused by Wallace’s tendency to structure his fiction as one side of an implicit dialogue, which itself gives the illusion of confidence and intimacy in a fictional context. Along with the use of coded and patterned language, this is one of the subtler stylistic links between Wallace’s fictional and nonfictional writings. In his interview with Larry McCaffery, Wallace describes the relationship between writer and reader: “I think I can see it in myself [ . . . ] this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader” (McCaffery, “Interview,” 3). This duality accounts for the at once naked and disingenuous impression of Wallace’s careful establishment of reader rapport.

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he does not explicitly deny that he is one of them. Wallace is himself quite brazenly disingenuous in deprecating the value of “this tropical plum assignment w/ the exact same paucity of direction or angle” (SFT, 256), as though he had been mistakenly asked to write these essays, an intrusive propensity to repudiate expertise or even qualification that persisted throughout his work. This tendency involves the creation of a spurious “us and them” relationship between writer and reader. This pattern seems to fit better with Wallace’s often-visible authenticity anxiety, as well as adding an “aw shucks” quality to the writing, embodying an aspect of the Democratic Spirit he admired in good nonfiction. In this, Wallace implicitly obeys Kierkegaard’s command that the writer should avoid “appeal[ing] to his cleverness [ . . . ] for in that case he is sidetracked”, a dictum Wallace appears to have taken to heart across his career.27 The strange combination of a highbrow consciousness and a democratizing artistic drive leads to a unique form of writing that is at once exclusively erudite and explicitly, compulsively inclusive. The casual journalism for which Wallace is famous exemplifies this peculiar balance, as between the inclusive jokiness (e.g., renaming the ship the Nadir as opposed to the Zenith) and the cringing description of the brochure (“Dante this isn’t [ . . . ] the dreamy mise en scenes [sic] and breathless prose” [SFT, 265]) he investigates the sad, stultifying reality of luxury and mass relaxation with an eye for the bleak as well as the absurd, invoking and balancing oppositional styles and images. The confident colloquial tone that dominated the nonfiction is opposed by an increasing tendency toward stilting in the fictional narrative voices, iterative rather than expansive, hostile and exclusionary rather than welcoming. However, that superficial difference is perhaps undermined by Wallace’s inclination—which grew in parallel with the iterative tendency—to write passages of fiction as dialogic, either fully realized or half-transcribed. With a fiction style that tended increasingly toward the mimetic and a nonfiction style noted for its intimate conversationality, it is interesting to note too that David Lipsky said that Wallace “could talk in prose.”28 Speech and writing are held in balance; writing mirrors speech, and speech mirrors writing. This reciprocal balance reflects an unusually uncomplicated vision of the relationship of speech and writing; Wallace does not enter into the poststructuralist attack on the primacy of Logos, providing a defense for neither speech nor writing. Rather, he turns the deconstructive principle back on itself, taking aspects of both and 27

28

Søren Kierkegaard, “Of the Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle,” in The Present Age, trans. Alexander Dru (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 109. Lipsky, Although of Course, xiv.

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balancing them in a structural embodiment of interpretive plurality called for by Derrida’s method. This Both/And balance, characteristic of so much of Wallace’s work, is evoked by Bochner and Waugh in the essay “Talking-with as a Model for Writing-About,” which deals with the importance of Rortian neopragmatism to contemporary rhetorical theory, and makes the case that “the significance of the conversational is not to be taken lightly,” and that it is possible, by mingling the fluidity of speech with the structure of writing, to “reach into the heart of communication in unexpected and edifying ways.”29

Radical sanity: Humor and the nonfiction Wallace’s engagement with and use of humor again highlights his resistance to closure. In a brief critical essay on the humor of Franz Kafka, Wallace suggests that the reason his students (and, by extension, most American readers) feel that they do not “get” Kafka is not that his humor is too subtle, but rather its “radical literalization” (CL, 63) of many of the tropes of conventional literature, adding a peculiar weight to his words. Wallace provides a series of examples of this reading of Kafka’s work, and the argument for his “anti-subtle” perspective is persuasive; interestingly, the radical humor he identifies in Kafka’s writing is one of the primary forms of humor he himself uses, most obviously in the repeated tendency to literalize thorny philosophical issues in his fiction. In his treatment of Kafka, Wallace’s attitude to irony takes on a Kierkegaardian simplicity, in the sense that it “adds nothing essential to the process of self-consciousness. Instead [it] directs our attention to what we already know” in a new and revelatory way.30 Wallace’s exploration of Kafka’s comedy sketches an outline of his own attitude to the functions of both humor and literature on a broader scale, particularly his account of the functions and cultural shifts of humor, with implications for his writing that are visible in every phase of fiction and every kind of nonfiction. He not only comments on the linguistically untranslatable elements of comedy, but also attends to the culturally intransitive aspects of what we find funny. His footnoted lament over the “lallating function” (64) of American humor shows

29

30

Lenore Langsdorf and Andrew R. Smith, “The Voice of Pragmatism in Contemporary Philosophy of Communication,” in Recovering Pragmatism’s Voice: The Classical Tradition, Rorty and the Philosophy of Communication, ed. Lenore Langsdorf and Andrew R. Smith (New York: SUNY Press, 1995), 17. Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony, 28.

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his awareness of writing for an overwhelmingly American readership and his eagerness to depict a reality alien to their way of thinking. By means of his analysis of Kafka, we see how Wallace’s unmistakable combination of the bleak and subtle and the broad and comforting came into being, offering a challenging, often troubling, and always rewarding vision to the reader who understands that “our journey towards home is in fact our home” (64) and that ambivalent complexity is the hallmark of reality. Comedy serves to shadow the tragic more deeply, in a way strongly echoed in the moments of humor in Wallace’s fiction, and the tragedy of the world he paints makes its moments of levity all the more precious, although they occur in the bleakest of circumstances. The sense of the journey as not more important than, but actually supplanting, the destination mirrors both the anti-teleological impetus and the commitment to process I have identified throughout this study. The plurality of situating humor in balance with, instead of in opposition to, tragedy further embeds the Both/And dynamic in his writing and frustrates the instinct to define the mood of his work. Similarly, in the nonfiction more broadly, rather than simply seeking to tonally erase the boundaries between high- and low-brow concerns, Wallace uses the processes of sous-rature and parallipsis to find new modes of expression. The ultimate effect of the comic style in which this piece is written is to shadow more deeply the pathetic, almost tragic reality of organized “fun” in a way that no serious essay could quite capture. At one point he makes his position explicit, as follows: “There is something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that’s unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes and simple in its effect: on board the Nadir—especially at night, when all the ship’s structured fun and reassurances and gaiety-noise ceased—I felt despair” (SFT, 261). The authorial glossing underscores the sadness to which he refers, serving to personalize the experience, once again forcing the reader into alignment with his authorial standpoint. Humor is not always intended to ironize tragedy; it sometimes works to ironize nostalgia. The slightly mocking tone of the State Fair essay loosely masks the nostalgic pleasure with which Wallace watched events unfold. In that piece, the mockery is more affectionate than sardonic, as it is in “Supposedly,” but in both cases the tone invites the reader to identify with Wallace as a sophisticated observer who is at once knowing insider and urbane outsider, both participant and bystander. This use of coded language echoes the earlier, more explicit establishment of a conspiracy of sorts between Wallace and his readers, the us-and-them construction of Wallace’s relationship with his

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readership, who are invited to join him and to trust him, as opposed to his editors, who are distanced, and by implication excluded. In “Federer Both Flesh and Not,” Wallace’s tone is one of breathless excitement, tripping over himself to clearly portray the sheer genius he sees in Federer’s tennis. Here, Wallace again establishes himself as part of a group of inexpert enthusiasts, inviting the reader to be part of the group, but differentiating himself—in line with his readers—from professional sports writers. In creating this identity, Wallace would frequently transcribe precisely words or phrases that struck him, rather than to paraphrase or to quote in a traditional way: “How long is it since you did Absolutely Nothing? I know exactly how long it’s been for me” (SFT, 268). The direct address to the reader disrupts the boundary of the article, while the ostentatious capitalization clearly indicates that Wallace is parroting the marketing vocabulary of the cruise, echoing, perhaps even internalizing, the conventional language of luxury and ease, making the experience seem more immediate for the reader. His arch appropriation of the cruise-ship vocabulary is partly playful and partly serious. It is playful in the sense that the appropriated language appears in an obvious and self-conscious style, as in the capitalizations above, or, more frequently, as obtrusive capitals: “talking me through it as BIG DADDY shoulders a path through the fray” (269). “BIG DADDY” is, we have already been told, the slogan on the t-shirt of the man so named. This positioning of the appropriated words functions as a light mockery of their style: the juxtaposition of such conventional language with the expression of actual thought causes an absurd disjunction that reads in this case as comedy. However, its more serious function is also discernible in this juxtaposition: the appropriation and displacement of this vocabulary reprises the us-and-them in-joke element of Wallace’s rapport with his readers, bringing them into his linguistic sphere, which is thus subtly strengthened as the article goes on, in much the same way Warren refers to with Infinite Jest and its deployment of language communities. Linguistic appropriation, as we have seen, persists throughout the fiction in particular, and functions in two ways: first, the initial act of appropriation tends to be the exercise of power by one voice over another, silencing and proscribing narrative. This power often proves to be illusory, as—secondly —the appropriating subject often finds that they cannot control this vocabulary, which problematizes and undermines their own subjectivity. In the cruise ship essay, however, it marks Wallace’s ironizing propensity, undermining the vocabulary of marketing by defamiliarizing it and slowing it down, in the same way as the

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narrative voice of skeletal technique works. The reinforcement of the writer/ reader bond by means of coded language (in this case doubly coded, in its original context and again in the context of its juxtaposition) is useful also because it establishes the parameters of the piece without the need for a framework: the writer does not need to explain the function of the piece, which makes it more flexible and less bound to a statement of intent. Indeed, the Kierkegaardian ironic critique discussed with respect to the fiction is similarly important for the nonfiction; by decontextualizing and highlighting the absurd jargon of the ship’s marketing, Wallace ironizes our immersion in such jargon, moving to liberate dialogue from the strictures of coded language, while his own re-coding of marketing-speak re-ironizes the original context. The communicative or interpretive potentialities that emerge from this questioning stance encode the helical change of Hegelian dialectic, replacing the implicit resolution of Socratic argumentation with an open-ended dialogic cycle. “Consider the Lobster” takes the same tone as “A Supposedly Fun Thing,” where Wallace mixes technical observations with anecdotes from his experiences. In “Consider the Lobster,” Wallace spends two paragraphs defining, in terms of strict taxonomy, what a lobster is: “a lobster is a marine crustacean of the family Homaridae, characterized by five pairs of jointed legs, the first pair terminating in large pincerish claws used for subduing prey. Like many other species of benthic carnivores, lobsters are both hunters and scavengers.” The writing goes on in a similarly technical vein for another fourteen lines, at which point Wallace’s tone shifts drastically: “The point is that lobsters are basically giant sea insects [ . . . ] And it’s true that they are garbagemen of the sea, eaters of dead stuff ” (CL, 237).

“I’m not an expert at it. I don’t pretend to be”: A Caesarian section Wallace’s nonfiction functions as “an incarnation of democratic ideals”; his writing is pervaded by the sense of the writer’s genuine desire to communicate in an authentic way with his readers.31 The qualities we identify in his writing—“the properties referred to when we use such terms as ‘perceptive’, ‘sensitive’, ‘glib’,

31

G. Stuart Adam and Roy Peter Clark, Journalism: the Democratic Craft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), xviii.

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‘emotionally mature’ [ . . . ] and, I am tempted to add, ‘sincere’”32—resist efforts at criticism that avoid ad hominem judgments. The deployment of these terms signifies “‘the artist-in-the-work’ [because these terms] are used to signal the place where artist and work merge together.”33 Beardsley’s argument that the narrative I is an empty referent34 does not solve the question of sincerity, but simply obviates it in what might be termed a proto-Rortian reframing of the question. If the narrative I is not equated with the author (as Beardsley suggests it ought not to be), then there is no question of sincerity, as “questions of sincerity arise only where there is no unfettered license to pretend to views, feelings and attitudes that one does not have.”35 If the narrative I is a character or construction (i.e., a work of art), these questions do not arise. However, Lyas goes on to argue that sincerity does matter in a work, and that “if we discovered that Pasternak did not have the kinds of attitudes expressed by the controlling intelligence of Dr Zhivago, [ . . . ] that would not be a matter of indifference.”36 Wallace’s repeated efforts to establish rapport are of course tied up with elements of the New Sincerity Kelly has traced in his work. This effort demonstrates precisely the problem that Kelly identifies in the concept of sincerity: the difference between intent and motive. Kelly points out that the distinction comes from Infinite Jest, where “sincerity with a motive,” a phrase that occurs almost exactly in this form on two occasions, is a thing to be feared. Wallace’s sincerity in wishing to connect with his readers is not necessarily in doubt, but the distinction between motive and intent that Kelly relies on here appears to break down; Kelly argues that even the writer “will never know whether they have attained true sincerity,”37 but Wallace’s construction of the rapport is fundamentally and obviously disingenuous, a problem not addressed in the distinction between authenticity and sincerity, or that between intent and motive. Indeed, the very possibility of sincerity, which as Kelly points out depends on trust, both the reader’s and the writer’s, is essentially undermined by the initial presence of discernible mendacity. By this reckoning, Wallace’s use of coded language in his nonfiction preordains the failure of his sincere 32

33 34

35 36 37

Colin Lyas, “The Relevance of the Author’s Sincerity,” in Philosophy and Fiction, ed. Peter Lamarque (Scotland: Aberdeen University Press, 1983), 19. Ibid. Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1958), 349–40. Lyas, “The Relevance of the Author’s Sincerity,” 22. Ibid., 33. Adam Kelly, “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction,” in Consider David Foster Wallace, ed. David Hering (Universal City, CA: SSMG Press, 2010), 140.

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communication by obviously breaching trust as he seeks it. On the other hand, this kind of coded language is a stylistic signature in Wallace’s writing, and as Zadie Smith points out in an essay on literary failure, “style is a writer’s way of telling the truth.”38 Smith goes on to argue that “that novelist . . . who came of age under postmodernity is naturally skeptical of the concept of authenticity. We were taught that authenticity was meaningless. How, then, to deal with the fact that when we account for our failings, as writers, the feeling that is strongest is a betrayal of one’s deepest authentic self?”39 Authenticity, then, and the potential for sincere self-revelation, is a complex relationship of the self to the world, rather than a simple relationship of the self to the truth. Related to the use of coded language in Wallace’s authorial persona is his recurrent rejection of expertise; although most common in the scholarly writing, this propensity asserts itself in various guises throughout the nonfiction. This tendency to simultaneously repudiate and—by drawing attention to—assume expertise may be seen as an extension of the proselytizing bent Giles identified in Wallace’s work; instances of recantation and paralliptical reinforcement were another aspect of the Protestant literary legacy into which Wallace entered. There are significant downsides to Wallace’s colloquial tone, chief among them a tendency to be slapdash in his deployment of important concepts. The conflation of two overlapping but diverse concepts, a feature of Wallace’s persistent repudiation of expertise and authority, is one of the major failings of his nonfiction, betraying a surprising tendency to simplify concepts to the detriment of exactness. In Everything and More, for example, Wallace visibly struggles with the level of ability he should expect from his audience, jumping through several rhetorical hoops in order to make the appeal as broad as possible. Chief among these is the “IYI” sections. “IYI,” as Wallace explains early in the text, stands for “if you’re interested,” and precedes a paragraph or footnote “designed for readers with strong technical backgrounds, or unusual interest in actual math [ . . . ] they (the chunks) provide a more detailed look at stuff that the main discussion glosses or breezes through” (EM, 2–3). This phrase highlights two of the major difficulties with the text. First, the very concept of IYI shows how Wallace was writing two books in one, for two wholly different audiences, and could find no better reconciliation of the wildly different requirements than suggesting that those readers who knew their

38 39

Zadie Smith, “Fail Better,” The Guardian, January 13, 2007. Ibid.

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integrals from their differentials should ignore up to half the text. This forces the text to veer between registers in a way that Wallace, unusually, does not seem able to control. Rather than the easy negotiation of erudition and colloquialism that distinguishes Wallace’s nonfiction in general, Everything and More seems disjointed and ill-fitting, making it difficult to read, along with Wallace’s admission that he has “glossed” certain elements of the mathematics with which nonmathematicians might not be familiar. As a consequence, the mathematical side of the argument is sketchy, making it easier for the nonmathematician to relate to, but rendering its credibility unsteady at best; the solution he offers to Zeno’s Dichotomy is actually a solution to the Achilles versus Tortoise problem, which, though they have the same import, are different questions. Wallace’s excuse is that it “amounts to the same thing” (EM, 104). In seeking to cater to the readers at two levels, Wallace succeeds in missing both targets, which is the danger of tailoring a voice for the broadest possible appeal. In seeking to connect with everyone, it is possible to connect with no one. While Wallace’s mathematical bona fides are genuinely amateur, the same resistance to authority is visible in areas in which he is truly expert. In “Greatly Exaggerated”, the disingenuousness of Wallace’s authorial tone is twofold, both repudiating erudition and establishing rapport. On the one hand, Wallace distances himself from the “professional critics and hardcore theory-wienies” (144) he thinks will be interested in the 226 dense pages of Hix’s book, which is somewhat complicated by the fact that he was writing for the Harvard Book Review, in which this review originally appeared, in 1992. Once again, Wallace distances himself falsely from a group in order to establish a relationship with the reader. This tactic is more complex—and often less successful—in the scholarly writing, because, as shown here, Wallace frequently is an expert in what he writes about. With that in mind, such distancing seems outright mendacious. By linguistically encoding the opposition that may or may not exist between him as author/narrator and the implicit “them”—in this case critics and theoreticians—Wallace attempts to solidify his alliance with the reader. However, the disjunction between this alliance and the tone and content of the essay’s substantive portions serves to underscore Wallace’s disingenuous construction, thus perhaps putting the reader even more on guard. The same issue recurs in “Up, Simba!,” Wallace’s coverage of John McCain’s 2000 nomination bid, which includes such declarations as “My own résumé has ‘NOT A POLITICAL JOURNALIST’ right there at a very top” (CL, 156) and full of the frequent personal digressions that had by this stage become an integral part of Wallace’s signature style. Wallace positions himself as a wide-eyed neophyte,

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with no experience as a “trail” reporter, or “pencil.” He demonstrates the same self-deprecating cynicism about writing for Rolling Stone as he did for Harper’s in “A Supposedly Fun Thing,” and again repudiates all claims to expertise or qualification. Wallace articulates and reinforces his Average Guy credentials by mentioning his “dogs with professionally diagnosed emotional problems” (157) and mentions his personal politics (“I, the author, am not a Republican” (157)), which he claims is at the request of his editor. The point of this inclusion, he opines, is to alleviate any suspicion that Wallace is either pro- or anti-McCain, to reassure the reader that the essay is “just meant to be the truth as one person sees it” (157). While this is typical of Wallace’s nonfiction generally, and particularly resonant with the Democratic Spirit he so fervently espoused in “Authority and American Usage”, it also falls victim to some of the pitfalls of that spirit. Ramal notes that “Wallace appeals to the reader’s commonsense”; more than this, though, Wallace flatters the reader’s commonsense.40 But, as Wallace remarked of Garner, his refusal to assume the position of expert, while in keeping with his broader resistance to fixity, rather undermines his capacity to educate. In terms of fostering rapport with the reader, the persistence of this repudiation comes to read like Caesar refusing the crown while simultaneously wielding its power.

“Both flesh and not”: Encoding plurality Wallace’s use of voice is the most striking element of his writing, the one gushed over or excoriated by critics, the one remembered and imitated by readers (and critics). While we know that Wallace thought of himself as a realist, the manically inclusive narrative style does not seem to fit comfortably with traditional notions of realism. James Wood suggested the dismissive term “hysterical realism.”41 This feature of Wallace’s writing constitutes a large part of what I consider to be his crucial contribution to contemporary literature, and this kind of realism, as he explicitly saw it, needs an appropriate terminology. Hysterical, certainly, is too dismissive, implying an involuntary incapacity to control vocal output. Wallace’s aim was not to winnow out detail but to absorb it, to present the felt

40

41

Randy Ramal, “Beyond Philosophy: David Foster Wallace on Literature, Wittgenstein and the Dangers of Theorizing,” in Gesturing Toward Reality, ed. Robert K. Bolger and Scott Korb (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 182. James Wood, “Human, All Too Inhuman,” The New Republic Online, July 24, 2009. http://www.tnr. com/article/books-and-arts/human-all-too-inhuman.

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reality rather than the filtered story. It is undeniably the case that the twentyfirst century unfolds against a frenetic, loud and bewildering backdrop, but replicating the hysteria of a real situation does not make writing hysterical. As such, Wood’s suggestion of “hysterical realism” is too narrow in its scope to cover the complexity of this emerging style. Tom LeClair offers the term “radical realism,” much closer to the sense of intentionality surrounding this inclusivity.42 Wallace’s defense of his realist bona fides, in the Miller interview and prior to that in the McCaffery interview, articulates the conviction that the breathless, jargon-riddled texture of his writing and the writing of those who followed him are not only natural and realistic but somehow profoundly authentic (even in their disingenuousness and manipulation), the only responsible way to represent a world characterized by what he would come to call Total Noise in “Deciderization 2007.” Wallace identifies the grandeur of Roger Federer’s talent as a function of flexibility: “with Federer, it’s not either/or” (BFN, 33). As we have seen in this chapter, Wallace’s responsive realism, be it hysterical, radical or mimetic, is intimately related to his commitment to process over product, his choice of the opening of Both/And over the closure of either/or. The vocal production at work in both fiction and nonfiction persistently destabilizes and problematizes boundaries of self, language, narrative, and community. Challenging authority, narrative coherence, and argumentative synthesis, this questioning stance highlights the plural, perhaps infinite, potentialities of communicative transaction. Wallace’s insistent vocal disruption, though differently deployed in the fiction and the nonfiction, plays up the interpretive gap within which the generative failure of communication takes place, a locus of infinite(ly) meaningful possibilities.

42

Tom LeClair, “The Prodigious Fiction of Richard Powers, William Vollman and David Foster Wallace,” Critique 38.1 (1996): 12–37.

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“Personally I’m Neutral on the Menstruation Point”: Gender, Difference, and the Body

“She’s over there”: Acknowledging the other Wallace’s lack of engagement with female characters is palpable throughout his work, and may account, in part, for the heavy bias toward the Y chromosome that characterizes his readership. His imagined reader, though, was always She. His first novel had a female protagonist, nominatively doubled by a powerful (though absent) matriarch. In his conversations about writing and reading, he invariably used the female form to refer to the reader. He was manifestly aware of feminist discourse, literary, political, and philosophical. In a footnote to “The Empty Plenum,” Wallace observes that “themes of nomination-as-enfranchisement, presence-as-privilege, also run through much of the feminist theory with which this novel’s author [David Markson] reveals himself familiar” (BFN, 112n45), which seems to confirm Wallace’s own subscription to—or at least awareness of—those themes. However, it is a notable feature of Wallace’s writing that his writing of both female characters and romantic relationships is patchy at best and enormously problematic at worst. A similar pattern governs the appearance and exploration of issues of racial difference; again, Wallace’s characters are chiefly white, male East-Coasters. Wallace’s engagement with issues of diversity and otherness in general have not always been part of the critical conversation on his work, and this chapter deals with some of the issues arising out of his representation of and engagement with other forms of identity, chiefly gender, and to a lesser extent race. While Wallace’s direct engagement with race was very limited, a section in the early, cowritten text Signifying Rappers discusses his complex awareness of his own status of privileged white masculinity. The later sections of the chapter explore the representations of gender difference and engagements with the body as object, overall situating these

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deeply problematic encounters within the context of Wallace’s broader creative project. While issues of diversity are one of the major weaknesses of his writing, this chapter explores the ways in which such challenging encounters ventilate issues of individual identity in ways that Wallace was unable to do elsewhere. It is simple to accuse Wallace of misogyny or racism, given the overwhelmingly white masculine focus and characterization. It is also easy to accuse him of being anti-romantic, taking account of the—sometimes explicit—tendency to replace sexual and romantic liaison with sexual violence, solitary masturbation, and unfulfilling marriages or relationships in the process of breakdown, with which the short fiction is rife. However, attention to Wallace’s own possible prejudices, while perhaps not unwarranted, is not germane to an investigation of their treatment in his writing, and within his writing, the approach to gender and gender relations is not as simple as mere hostility, but is inflected with ideas of power and narcissism, as well as encoding and exploring many of the fears about solipsism that dogged the rest of his work. Specifically, I argue that Wallace’s encounters with difference allowed him scope to dramatize the complexity of recognizing both the subjective self and the subjective other, along with learning to recognize the self as object. The absence or failure of relationships may be read as a literalization of Wallace’s own ideas about the challenges of connection, and the weakness of his female characters speaks strongly to the concerns he expressed about “access to other selves,”1 and his own authorial inability to gain this kind of access. However, it is also worth noting that while Wallace repeatedly identifies the problematic gender and race relations in his work, etiology is not cure; identifying a problematic engagement with the nonwhite or nonmasculine does not constitute a solution to the problem, though Wallace engages almost compulsively in this kind of preemptive diagnosis throughout his writing. Arguably, this paralyzing consciousness of alterity also bespeaks an ambivalent sense of identity politics, since by refusing to “speak for” someone else, Wallace is implicitly assuming and privileging the identity he does speak for—White, American, male.

Exploitative signification: Rap and the white subject In this respect particularly, it is worth looking at Signifying Rappers, the profoundly flawed 1990 collaboration with Mark Costello. Wallace’s contributions to the book, which are clearly delineated—the book is not so much cowritten as 1

Larry McCaffery, “An Interview with David Foster Wallace,” The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 13.2 (Summer 1993): 127.

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bi-written—speak explicitly of his anxieties over writing about a subject that he not only knows little about, but from which he is explicitly excluded. Issues of inclusion and exclusion, which are tied, also, to Wallace’s own ambivalence about claiming expertise in any area, recur in his nonfiction. The swooping, digressive prose that became a hallmark of Wallace’s writing, with its delicate balance of the colloquial and the impossibly erudite, is tentative but discernible in his passages of Signifying Rappers, typified by such sentences as “Confession: D.’s first sampler draft, of which this brief digressive riff is but a fossil, began as more about rapas-synecdoche than about rap esse” (SR, 38). The focus for Wallace is how rap represents us to ourselves by means of reinforcing our sense of otherness, most simply with regard to urban race conflicts, and how this “decoct-and-simplify phenomenon is not necessarily racist, or even specifically racial. It looks, rather, to be just a phylogenic part of human circuitry” (35). In other words, following a digression in to the critical importance of stereotypes and synecdoches, Wallace ostentatiously informs us that he will not be talking about them. Such parallipsis is most visible in the early fiction, and particularly blatant (Wallace’s word) in “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,” where a professed aversion to metafiction draws attention to the workings of metafiction within the text. Similarly, here, Wallace professes an abandoned intention to deal with rap as a synecdoche for problematic race relations, which draws attention to that analogy in the reader’s mind, while Wallace does not have to deal with it directly. Wallace’s attraction to rap was extremely ambivalent, but was grounded in questions of its authenticity. “This music,” he avers, “had some kind of hard edge to it” (46), which he contrasts with the other, more commercial music of the time, in which “covers of classic covers of classic tunes are themselves covered and then climb corporate charts” (46). It is the very rawness of rap that lends it its truth. However, Wallace is not entirely sure what its authenticity is, exactly, and in this respect, he fears it. Specifically, he fears that it is not for him, fears being the alienated other. He struggles to decide whether rap merely represents the decocted-and-simplified desires of the other, or whether it in fact represents the reality of the other: whether, in other words, rap is a stereotype or a synecdoche?2 Wallace uses this uncertainty to account for “the root and hidden 2

A reading of this uncertainty provides its own possible answer to the question Wallace poses in the text regarding the difference between a stereotype and a synecdoche. By this reading, a stereotype is an inadequate synecdoche, inadequate because the speaker does not understand the whole and so cannot legitimately simplify it. A synecdoche represents a truth, a fact, like Harvard, or Hollywood, or a smiley-face. A stereotype, then, represents an inauthentic or mistaken view. It is interesting, in view of this, to consider the relationship of the synecdochal and the fractal, particularly as it pertains to the fractal architecture of Infinite Jest and the function of the titular film and the arguably synecdochal apocalypse-game, Eschaton.

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white mainstream fear: what if cutting-edge rap really is a closed music? not even pretending it’s promulgating anything controversial to its young mass audience? What if rap scares us because it’s really just preaching to the converted?” (45). What if, in other words, rap music doesn’t care about him? The primary concern here is that rap is a closed system, a language that, while he can understand it in a basic sense, will never communicate meaningfully to him. This fear speaks to Wallace’s ambivalent relationship with race and otherness; Jonathan Franzen quotes a letter from Wallace in which he said “it’s not an accident that so many of the writers ‘in the shadows’ are straight white males. Tribal writers can feel the loneliness and anger and identify themselves with their subculture.”3 This phrasing, particularly out of context, offers a deeply problematic view of the privileged status that he persistently invoked, particularly in light of his complex engagements with diversity in its various forms. Indeed, the implicit message of Signifying Rappers seems to be that rap threatens the privileged status of the young writers, and is ultimately used to reinforce that status: the inaccessible foreignness of rap music, with its sociocultural exclusivity, is ultimately turned into a reassuring other. By making an object out of rap music, forcing it into relation with the white subject, Wallace and Costello attempt to possess it as cultural collectors in line with Baudrillard’s system of collection. With rap turned into a curiosity, a collectible item, then, it is possessed and neutralized, absorbed into a relationship with whiteness that reinforces the position of the dominant power.4 Wallace points out that the fear that thrills the white mainstream audience is attractive because it vindicates the sense of difference, of insurmountable otherness, that separates the rap audience from the mainstream. This twin attraction—selfdefinition by inclusion for the rap audience and self-reinforcement by Outsider Status for the “young white American mainstream”—is analogous to Ricoeur’s theory of the interdependence of self and other. Rap, in this text, functions the way narrative did for Ricoeur, both inclusive and exclusive and as such definitive of a whole self, in relation to a distinct other. This balance and its place in contemporary culture would remain important to Wallace’s writing until its end, with the public performance of identity and the implications of the necessary separation of self from other becoming central features of his work. Signifying Rappers in particular, then, vividly displays Wallace’s anxieties over assuming an identity that is not his own, over the chasm between his experience and those of others, whose 3 4

Jonathan Franzen, “Perchance to Dream,” Harper’s Magazine, 292. 1751 (April 1996). Jean Baudrillard, “The System of Collecting,” in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal and trans. Roger Cardinal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).

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sovereignty in their “tiny, skull-sized kingdoms” unsettled and fascinated him, and over the incommensurability of vocabularies that characterized his philosophical engagement with concepts of language as a whole. It is plausible that the same paralyzing awareness of difference prevented Wallace from attempting to articulate a different ethnic perspective on the world, although there is insufficient scope to explore this in the same way, given the absence of explicit ethnic references in the work; his protagonists are not simply white, they are rather without ethnic identifiers, in most cases, given the obliquity of Wallace’s descriptions, making the omission harder to identify than the concrete silence of the female experience. There is one specifically identified “Negro servant,” Wardine, in “Lyndon,” and one “Caribbean Negro,” the lover of the protagonist, Boyd. Jest contains references to “Orientoid types” (IJ, 708), referred to by one of the few peripheral characters identified as black. Besides these, there are a number of characters who might be read as nonwhite—some of the men in Brief Interviews, perhaps, or one of the Deans in Infinite Jest, and the character of Too Pretty in “Order and Flux in Northampton” speaks in the kind of argot associated with stereotyped black characters. This vernacular also appears at times in Infinite Jest, suggesting that while Wallace envisaged some of his peripheral characters as nonwhite, their race existed mostly as a linguistic construct, and a problematically rendered one, at that. Besides the ambivalent self-criticism of Signifying Rappers, Wallace also briefly approached the linguistic construction of race in “Authority and American Usage,” defending his rejection of SBE (Standard Black English) as a legitimate classroom language “because SWE is the dialect our nation uses to talk to itself ” (CL, 109). His only other concession to ethnicity was a tendency to refer to “particularly American” kinds of experience, thus simultaneously highlighting and glossing over the variety of experiential heritages of gender and ethnicity with which he was implicitly dealing. What is particularly striking about Wallace’s few female characters is that they are, almost exclusively, engaged in struggles to tell their own stories, recurrently working against narrative appropriation, either because they have difficulty with language or because someone else is trying to tell their story for them. Again, this silence is not due to Wallace’s disdain or fear of femininity; it is not simple misogyny that perpetuated a masculine perspective in his work. Rather, Wallace was overwhelmed by what he saw as the alterity of the female experience; that is to say, its total alienation from his experience of the world.5 Indeed, Wallace

5

See my essay in A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies for an in-depth reading of this question with regard to “Brief Interview #20.”

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wrote that he “consider[ed him]self sensitive to the technical/political problems involved” (BFN, 100) in writing in a feminine voice. His writing of female characters is flawed, but interestingly so. These flaws, such as they are, emerge from a Cavellian conception of the distinction between selves, the necessity of maintaining the separateness of the self that Cavell explored in Must We Mean What We Say?, which Wallace mentioned specifically in “The Empty Plenum.”

Philomela weaving: Mute women, masculine crisis, and power dynamics While Wallace’s engagement with ethnic diversity is (at best) mostly implicit, he was explicitly engaged with concepts of gender difference, in ways that were also deeply complex. Wallace noted that he had experimented with “crosswriting” (BFN, 100), or writing as a female voice, an experience he shared with David Markson, referring specifically to the character of Lenore Beadsman. The term crosswriting might suggest the simple attempt by a male writer of a female voice, or vice versa, but Wallace himself suggested that Lenore was a poorly disguised avatar for his own youthful existential conundra, suggesting that his use of the term “crosswriting” implies the full-scale adoption of a female persona, rather than the simple act of attempting to write a rounded female character. This appropriative act, though not necessarily malicious or controlling in intent, prefigures the problematic gender interactions that would come to characterize much of his writing, particularly the short fiction. Lenore’s struggles for selfdetermination are tied up with her struggles with linguistic self-definition, searching for the words that will frame the space she takes up in the world. Her gender is largely incidental, secondary to her existential quandary, more relevant to her position in her family than integral to her identity. Lenore’s femininity is largely relational, shadowed and shaped by her relationships with the men around her, to whom she turns for support, explanation, and for the shape of her self in the world. In this way, Lenore embodies the kind of Hegelian dialectic of servitude characteristic of Wallace’s engagement with ideas of identity and connection; “the dreary binary of Same and Other that has plagued not only the legacy of dialectics, but the dialectic of sex as well.”6 Lenore’s dependence on the masculine subjects who 6

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 103.

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surround her, reproduced in the majority of Wallace’s female characters, evokes traditional images of passive, malleable feminine identity—subjection rather than subjectivity. Lenore’s existential dependence on the radically constituted other encodes that “radical and constitutive relationship to alterity” of the self in the act of becoming;7 the separation of gender offers a clear distinction of self and other, furnishing a literalized, recognizable dichotomy of identity. By “cross-writing” as Lenore, then, Wallace engages as a decisively male writer in “the construction and deployment of an audacious female voice [ . . . ] as a means of indirectly engaging with questions about the formation of [his] own subject position,” implicitly displacing his selfhood onto a radically unfamiliar other.8 Combined with his recurrent reference to the she-reader, and the openly semi-autobiographical character of Lenore, Wallace’s appropriation of female subjectivity in Broom can be read as a means of embodying the Ricoeurian paradigm of narrative identity. Among all of Wallace’s female characters, Lenore is the one most concerned with the question of her name; while a number of other characters in the novel explore issues of naming, Lenore is the only character whose name is, effectively and problematically not her own. Questions of nomination and selfownership are problematized throughout the novel, by the efforts of others to prescribe Lenore’s story, and to appropriate her name. Wallace’s observation on Wittgenstein’s Mistress protagonist Kate, feeling “a twinge of envy whenever she countenances the possibility of things existing without being named or subjected to predication” (BFN, 237) highlights contradictory impulses in female protagonists, both Markson’s Kate and his own Lenore, not only to take possession of their own names but also to reject the Adamic imposition of these names, repudiating both patriarchal identity categories and linguistic communities. The power of naming is clearly visible with the protagonist of “Brief Interview #20,” in which the narrator seeks to claim the girl by repeating her name, and in “Oblivion,” in which the narrator subsumes his wife’s narrative wholly into his own voice. Joelle Van Dyne, by contrast, in Infinite Jest, mirrors LaVache in Broom, having a variety of nominative referents that include names, epithets, and noms de guerre. Wallace makes much of the “Evian” aspects of Wittgenstein’s Mistress, but does not explicitly refer to the masculine nature of Adamic language and its capacity to reduce the female to passive, subject to 7 8

Sarah Salih, The Judith Butler Reader (Oxford: Blackwell Books, 2004), 91. Rina Kim, “Introduction,” in Cross-Gendered Literary Voices, ed. Rina Kim and Claire Westall (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 2.

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male observation, which seems strongly implied here. Interestingly, the use of nicknames or multiple nominative forms tends to suggest a stable underlying identity that is able to sustain several referents simultaneously. By contrast, the search for a single name enacts precisely the kind of teleological pursuit that Wallace works against throughout his writing, seeking the closure and sterile positivity of pure self-referentiality. This movement away from the single nominative offers an interesting inversion of Wittgensteinian theories about naming, evoking in its reversal much of the work of Gottlob Frege on Millian naming. Fregean descriptivism suggests that “the content of a name is not the object it refers to [as Millianism would suggest] but rather a mode of presentation of that object, where a mode of presentation is something that picks out that object.”9 Wallace mentions Frege, “a Wittgenstein-era titan,” by name in a footnote to “The Empty Plenum,” in the context of naming and ownership, and the appropriative distinction between mentioning and using a name. (BFN, 80n7). The name, then, depends on context and usage. By extension, if the object (or subject) to which a name refers is sufficiently stable, the referring nominative can change without affecting the named object, as with LaVache in Broom. Tracey notes that LaVache translates as “The Cow,” possibly echoing Wittgenstein’s description of language’s relationship to philosophy as “the money we use to buy the cow.”10 This dynamic of naming, nicknames, and power is particularly problematized in Wallace’s treatment of gender, when at times his female characters have nicknames imposed on them, taking from them the control or articulation of their own identities: the Granola-Cruncher in “Brief Interview #20” is a case in point. Nominative anxiety is compounded for female characters by the imposition of names by a patriarchal system (think of the restrictive depiction of family in Broom, and LaVache’s resistance to his father’s name). It is also significant that the novel does not end with Lenore’s successful self-articulation—indeed, as we have observed, the novel does not end at all—but rather dissipates into multiple textual and discursive possibilities. By resisting both the structural and the narrative teleological imperatives, Wallace highlights the peril of completion and the necessity of the continuing. The same 9 10

Ben Caplan, “Millian Descriptivism,” Philosophical Studies, 133 (2007): 182. Thomas N. Tracey, “The Formative Years: David Foster Wallace’s Philosophical Influences and The Broom of the System,” in Gesturing Toward Reality, ed. Robert K. Bolger and Scott Korb (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 165.

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urge is visible in the short fiction, where the structural confines of the stories are ruptured in various ways, structural, formal, and thematic. By means of invoking both longer narratives and broader cultural events, by displacing and challenging the linear experience of reading and by repeatedly framing and distancing narratives, Wallace encodes within the fabric of his work the same radical anti-teleology that brings Lenore’s journey to an opening. In an interview with Michael Silverblatt, Wallace said that Brief Interviews was fundamentally about loneliness, as was everything he wrote.11 The desire to aggravate the solitude of that loneliness returns us to the communicative imperative of love. In the world he was writing about, however, love is a messy and complex topic: “Every ‘I love you’ is surely pornographic [ . . . ] ‘Love’ is nothing but a fabrication, a figure, an invention if you will: it is a story—untruth.”12 This postmodern mistrust of love, one of the “untrendy emotions” mentioned in “E Unibus Pluram,” accounts for some of the stranger stories that make up this second collection; rather than accepting and working with the burlesque, debased version of love permitted by the intellectual heritage of postmodernism, Wallace explores some of the darker, more secret parts of love, “because he knows it is only that, the recital of love, a story [ . . . ] which preserves its possibility”; that is to say, only in its witnessing can love continue, a problematic model in many ways.13 Love—in its various forms—is the primary consideration of the titular interviews in Wallace’s second collection, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Q, the primary, significantly absent, voice of Brief Interview extends and problematizes this motif. Centering on the brief interviews of the title, conducted by this silenced voice, the collection has largely been read as a grouping of misogynistic voices talking through their fundamental hostility to women. This reading is understandable, and certainly valid in part; there is no disputing the fact that misogyny is rife in this collection in particular. By extension, it is easy to read Wallace’s broader work around gender as simply dehumanizing. However, there is a complex reversal of power at play within that recognizable, conventional dynamic. Brief Interview #20, an exceptionally violent story dealing with a young woman’s voluntary abjection of her subjectivity in the face of a violent sexual attack,

11 12

13

David Foster Wallace, “Bookworm,” Interview with Michael Silverblatt, KCRW, August 3, 2000. Cristoforos Diakoulakis, “‘Quote Unquote Love . . . A Type of Scotopia’: David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,” in Consider David Foster Wallace, ed. David Hering (Universal City, CA: SSMG Press, 2010), 147. Ibid.

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involves complex recursivities of power, ultimately suggesting that the young woman’s choice to empathize with her rapist—to concentratedly and wholly break down the psychic barrier between self and other—robs the rapist of his power. The reversal may imply a shifting of the traditional male/female power balance, but the story is more interesting for its reframing: the narrator, another man, is seeking to explain to Q how he has—he believes—fallen in love with the victim. In respect of power and vocabulary, the rape and double silencing of a female victim occurs twice in Wallace’s writing, in Interview #20, and in Infinite Jest, where an AA member recounts a disabled woman’s rape at the hands of her step-father. The rape victim’s story is appropriated by the AA member, whose identity is occluded in the narrative, further distancing the story from attachment to any subject. Both stories evoke the myth of Philomela, whose tongue was cut out to prevent her accusing her rapist and who patiently wove the story of her attack into a tapestry; in an inversion of this muting and retelling, the girl’s story has been appropriated and resexualized, positioning the narrator as another sexual predator, subjecting her narrative to his gaze, occupying the narrative space of the female subject.14 Like Rick in Broom, the interviewee “kept saying her name” (BI, 270), which has been read in places as an affectionate gesture, but which in keeping with the idea of nomination-as-enfranchisement seems altogether more proprietary, and is followed by the outright threatening “can you see why there’s no way I could let her just go away after this?” (270). This appropriation of the girl’s name mirrors Wallace’s own avowed earlier appropriation of female identity in Broom’s Lenore, and the same pattern is borne out in a variety of narrative forms, both structural and thematic, most obviously with the deeply problematic Q, who not only cannot claim her identity through her own voice, but has even her name occluded by the figures around her. While she is the central figure of the interview stories, readers are left to read her character into the silences and ellipses, the absences left by the male responses, strongly evocative of Faulkner’s Caddy Compson. Female silence in literature invokes and embodies issues of subjection and self-identification, as well as reinscribing forms of masculine power and agency, reinforcing the subject/object boundaries that complicated questions of connection and solipsism. Q’s silence challenges the reader to explore the relationship of feminine narrative agency to straightforward patriarchal discourses, as Marder suggests, highlighting, if not answering, the question around whether “if there is no experience ‘outside’ of patriarchal structures, and no discrete language ‘outside’ 14

Wallace mentioned weaving in relation to feminine patience in “The Empty Plenum,” invoking not Philomela but Penelope (BFN, 90).

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of patriarchal discourse, in what terms can this experience be spoken?”15 By overtly silencing Q—by refusing to even attempt to speak the experience of a marginalized feminine subjectivity—Wallace borrows a mode of resistance to the system that mutes female narrative agency, a mode that involves appropriating the features of the oppressive system to draw attention to and subvert the system. This method of resistance by subversive appropriation is strongly mirrored in Wallace’s encounters with postmodernist discourse more broadly, and persists through his engagement with theories of communication, mirroring his tendency to literalize or otherwise embody problems in order to work through their permutations. Reading Q as a latter-day Philomela figure, then, we might see the broader collection as Q’s tapestry of accusation. Q’s silence offers a tentative answer to Marilyn French’s call for literature that “may show patriarchal attitudes destroying a character or a world, but the narrative does not approve the destruction.”16 Masculinity in Wallace’s writing and characters is dominant, but subscribes to the myth of masculinity in crisis, attempting to narrate and occupy instead of converse and understand. The fear to which this misogyny is ascribed, then, is not merely the reaction of a masculine subject that feels itself under threat from the feminine, but rather more subtly, the terror of a narcissistic subject who feels his primacy challenged by the very existence of a subjective other, with this fear specifically reified in the distinction of genders. Since women offer an unknowable other to masculine subjectivity, at least by way of unexamined heteronormative expectations, Brief Interviews’ investigation of self–other dynamics is played out upon this stage in a grotesquely literal way.

Girls on film: Subject, object, abject Q’s silence is the most powerful voice in the collection, shaping and framing the confused outpourings of her subjects; in this respect, Wallace invokes the Helenic responsibility he talked about in “The Empty Plenum”: that is to say, the guilt or responsibility borne by an object. Q is always-only an absent object to the reader, and we see her only in the effect she has on those around her; hers is the quintessential power of the nonsubject. The striking absence of the feminine in Infinite Jest offers a further iteration of the narrative appropriation of female 15

16

Elissa Marder, “Disarticulated Voices: Feminism and Philomela,” in Language and Liberation: Feminism, Philosophy and Language, ed. Christina Hendricks and Kelly Oliver (New York: SUNY Press. 1999), 148. Marilyn French, “Is There a Feminist Aesthetic?,” Hypatia, 5.2 (Summer 1999): 34.

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experience. While the novel depicts a largely homosocial, hypermasculine set of environments, what Boswell has called the “absent center” of the novel is decisively associated with the feminine.17 It is notable too that the film is made by a man, in order to communicate with his adolescent son—a boy in the act of becoming a man—and that the central femininity of the film—the object of the object, as it were—maintains its secrecy absolutely. The connection of femininity, film and to-be-looked-at-ness can be traced back to Wallace’s earliest works: in “Order and Flux in Northampton,” Barry’s love-entity is fixated on Myrnaloy Trask, whose name obviously refers to the actress Myrna Loy. Loy’s fame began as a silent film star, and Myrnaloy’s association in the story with vision and objectification is highlighted throughout the story. What we know of Jest’s Entertainment suggests strong associations with the feminine, not least its status as object, its inherent to-be-looked-at-ness. Wallace himself commented that “to be an object of desire (by hirsute characters), speculation (by hirsute author) [ . . . ] is to be almost Classically feminized, less Eve than Helen” (BFN, 99). Both are figures of destructive power, but Eve by agency and Helen by passiveness. Figuring the Entertainment as feminine links destructive power with Helenic passiveness; it is in their very status as objects that films and women are dangerous. Ely has argued that “while the ‘notion of sexual difference’ represented” by the film is very much a “masculinist logic or set of values,” the film itself “might offer new ways to explore ‘sexual difference’ in order to locate new or unacknowledged representations of femininity.”18 In other words, The Entertainment, like the muted Q, may offer a reappropriation of a kind of passive power, using silence or absence to open the text to infinite possibilities of eisegesis. Feminine silence, then, may be read as another way in which Wallace disrupts the circularity of patriarchal systems of narrative, passively rupturing structure by acquiescence rather than revolution, a possibility that further builds on the same Helenic theme “when one is a woman, one who [sic] can effect change & cataclysm not as an agent but merely as a perceived entity.” This recurrent theme of the cataclysmic power of the object problematizes the simple self/other dynamic, positioning the object as also a potential locus of power or influence. Peter Brooks charts the development of “the body as an epistemophilic project,”19 arguing that “man as knowing subject postulates woman’s body as the object to be 17

18 19

It is also worth noting here that the central absence of Broom—Gramma Lenore—is also a powerful and nominatively plural figuration of feminine influence. Danielle Ely, “Into the Womb of Infinite Jest” (Unpublished MA thesis, 2011), 3. Peter Brooks, Body Works: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 5.

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known.”20 That epistemic project here is one of violence and silencing; not only do the masculine subjects seek to know the female objects (particularly characterized by the Entertainment) but that knowledge must itself be possessed and kept secret. Karnicky draws attention to another of Incandenza’s films, The Medusa vs. The Odalisque, as another phase in this movement, emphasizing the competing implications for directionality of gaze—on the one hand, the Odalisque, a sexual object with no purpose other than beauty and pleasure, and on the other, the Medusa, whose gaze is deadly, a “woman who is unapproachable”21 and whose returning gaze displaces the subjectivity of the gazer—as evidence of Incandenza’s fixation with vision. This argument implicitly invokes Derrida’s description in Memoirs of the Blind of what he called the “Medusa effect,” whereby it is impossible to look on a face “without coming face to face with a petrified objectivity, with death or blindness,” strongly evoking that Eve/Helen dichotomy once more.22 Objectivity, then, in the sense that Derrida uses it here, is somehow transferable. That is to say, the death of subjectivity in a screen representation can be passed to the viewer by means of the met gaze (as in the myth of Medusa), who is posited as the ultimate voyeuristic subject, leaving him or her literally objectified, robbed of subjectivity and agency. This traumatic decentering of subjectivity by the subjective gaze of an other marked Wallace’s engagement with the body more broadly, as we shall see. Royle suggests that this disabling power that inheres in images is “ghostly, stunning, even terrifying,”23 a description that resonates with the simultaneous attraction and terror of the film Infinite Jest, which may be either astonishingly beautiful or unutterably horrifying. Linked to Jest’s Entertainment, and to each other, throughout the novel are two other items: Joelle Van Dyne, and the drug DMZ. Joelle, who is also known by the epithets “P.G.O.A.T.” (Prettiest Girl of All Time) and Madame Psychosis, is linked in different ways to all the male Incandenzas, the erstwhile lover of eldest son Orin who worked on his father’s last three films, each involving improbable and compelling beauty. She is also the presenter of a radio show that Mario, the damaged middle child, finds “terribly compelling” (IJ, 184). On this radio show, early in the narrative, Joelle reads the catalog of reasons one might join UHID, the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed (187), including “the fatally pulchritudinous” (190). Madame Psychosis/Joelle is a member of the UHID, from 20 21 22

23

Ibid., 97. Ibid., 12. Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascala-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 73. Nicholas Royle, After Derrida (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 129.

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which organization a “veiled legate” visited ETA “to discuss with Mario issues of blind inclusion v. visual estrangement, of the openness of concealment the veil might afford him” (317).24 The links between Joelle and Hal are less direct: the name Madame Psychosis, evocative of the Greek philosophy of the transmigration of souls (metempsychosis), is also used to refer to the mysterious drug DMZ “in some metro Boston chemical circles” (170), named after Joelle’s radio show. There are further parallels between Joelle and the “vaunted and elusive” (IJ, 215) DMZ, including links with the central nervous system. DMZ is described as a “C.N.S. [Central Nervous System]-rattler” (IJ, note 8), Joelle as “the twirler who owned his [Orin’s] soul” (292). Furthermore, Joelle, like the film, is hidden from view: DMZ is extremely difficult to obtain. The concealment of all three objects is owed to the ambiguity of their effects; Joelle is, by various accounts, either disfigured after having acid thrown in her face or “deformed with beauty” (538). Joelle, like the Entertainment and the elusive drug, is described and identified in terms of her effect on the male subjects around her, visual, aural, and sexual. Hence, Joelle falls into the category Wallace identified in “The Empty Plenum,” “historically passive, per- & conceived as an object and not a subject” (BFN, 99). Joelle’s description of her beauty’s effect—“once they’ve seen me they can’t think of anything else and don’t want to look at anything else and stop carrying out normal responsibilities” (538)—precisely echoes the effect of the final cut of Infinite Jest. The ontological status of object, then, is disrupted and rendered paradoxically powerful-without-subjectivity, offering to-be-looked-at-ness, or the capacity to hold attention, as a kind of power in its own right, which participates in Wallace’s preoccupation with free will and the direction of attention.

“How can you love what you can’t hold on to?”: Love, sex, and the solipsist Romantic relationships in Wallace’s writing are remarkably problematic. Instances of successful relationships or marriages are vanishingly few. For a writer who was so concerned with connection and meaningful exchange, it is, in this respect at least, conspicuously absent from his fiction writing. Rick’s relationship with Lenore devolves very quickly into a one-sided 24

See Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida. Veils, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001) (original publication in French, voiles, Paris: edition galilée, 1998) for a consideration of the symbology of veils.

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dependency that dramatizes the narrative interdependence of self and other. The inevitable demise of their relationship charts Lenore’s development toward whole selfhood and has comparatively little narrative value outside of this. Norman Bombardini’s epistolary proposition to Lenore further highlights the inescapable narcissism of the novel’s characters. The unhappy marriage of Andrew Lang and Mindy Metalman looks forward to the union of The Pale King’s Meredith Rand and her husband in the one-sided nature of their conversations, the vacuous beauty of the woman and the rescue fantasy played out in their relationship. The chief marital relationship in Infinite Jest is between Avril and Jim, and ends in his suicide, hardly the ideal of romantic harmony. The initially rather sweet romance of Bruce and Mildred and “tiny incontinent Harriet Bonk-Green” (IJ, 39) is alwaysalready truncated by Bruce’s addiction, an inescapable outcome in the recursive structure of the novel. In Girl with Curious Hair, “Here and There” tells the story of a breakup, the loss of connection, by interweaving two related but divergent narrative voices, symbolizing the disintegration of a previously coherent narrative union. The story unfolds during a therapy session in which the breakdown of the couple’s relationship is discussed by both parties, with the initial rupture being ascribed by the girl first to her partner’s apparent unwillingness to kiss her, which he denies, and later to his physical distance. In other words, their union dissolved because the distance between them, physical or metaphysical, became unbearable. On the other hand, the danger of trying to collapse the distance between selves is also dangerous, as we have seen with Rick and Lenore, and “Oblivion.” Love is powerful, and so dangerous; it must be held in balance. Wallace’s narrative treatment of actual love, throughout the short fiction in particular, provides a useful framework within which to explore its conceptual importance. Brief Interviews is full of narrations of unsuccessful attempts at relationships. The prevalence of this wholesale failure is at least partially accounted for by reading relationships as iterations of engagement, or as failures of the imperative of desexualized love that Wallace talked about in relation to communication as a broader concept. Again, we may see these relationships as dramatizations of Wallace’s deep anxieties regarding the In-der-Welt-sein of a collective subjectivity simultaneously under attack by both integration and alienation, with romantic attachment functioning as a synecdoche of separation and difference in general. In articulating these failures, Wallace demonstrates the necessary process of “approach[ing] the

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other in a spirit of openness and questioning, repeatedly asking the other ‘Who are you?’ without expecting or hoping for a conclusive answer.”25 If romantic love is a central failure of Wallace’s work, sexual liaison is not a great deal more successful. References to the preference for masturbation over sexual contact pepper Infinite Jest from its earliest pages, amid the whispered fear of a nation pleasuring itself to death. The very nation in question, the Organization of North American Nations, encodes the concept of wasted fertility in its name. Interestingly, one account of a successful and apparently relatively healthy sexual relationship is between the psychotic proto-Patrick Bateman represented by Sick Puppy and Gimlet, a drug-addled punk. Infinite Jest is marked by episodic sexual violence. Brief Interviews is rife with sexual violence, from the rape of the Granola Cruncher to a particularly harrowing account of rape-by-bottle in “Brief Interview #4.” It is interesting to approach “Girl with Curious Hair,” and indeed Mark Nechtr’s peculiarly bloodthirsty fictional output in “Westward,” as the blueprints or practice runs for Wallace’s later engagement with the human body; the bodily aspect of the violence in “Girl” is at once dulled and heightened by the detachment with which its narrator views it. This effect emerges from the framing language Wallace has his narrator use, which further reinforces the Jamesonian sense of fragmentation, in keeping with the distancing vocalization discussed in the last chapter. It is particularly interesting to note the prevalence of such distancing strategies around narrative engagements with sex and the body. The various ways a relationship can fail echo through the short fiction. In “Little Expressionless Animals,” Julie explains to her lover that she dislikes animals “because animals’ faces have no expressions” (GCH, 41). She attributes the same quality to men, whose faces “move through different configurations of blankness” (41). For Julie, this blankness is the ultimate horror; just as the motion of waves is “what keeps oceans from just being very big puddles” (41), the changing of expression is all that keeps people human, interesting, lovable. Julie describes love as something almost physical: “how could you ever even hope to love what you can’t grab onto?” (41), more visceral than emotional. Interestingly, this relationship, in which the physicality, the tangibility of love, is most clearly expressed, marks one of few direct engagements in Wallace’s writing of homosexual love, another being Boyd’s relationships in “Lyndon”. The world inhabited by Wallace’s characters is defiantly heteronormative. This heteronormative dynamic appears to complicate the relationship between 25

Salih, Judith Butler, 3.

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gender difference and the self/other dynamic Wallace is constantly exploring; if relationships between genders are always-already stereotyped, where does this leave the occasional flashes of homoerotic attachment? In this case, Julie’s attachment is to the physically other, which marks another kind of solipsism: for her, a romantic or sexual relationship is predicated on the physical, the tangible distance between her and the other. By contrast with the conventional narrative of love as a collapsing-into-each-other (which Wallace dramatizes memorably in a number of stories, notably “Oblivion”), “Little Expressionless Animals” offers a vision of love as reflection rather than difference; the similarity of the women’s bodies is underscored by their physical separateness. In fact, the relationship in this story suggests that where sexual engagement is used as a shorthand for a working-out of the self/other dynamic, the gender of those involved does not much signify; Julie and Faye are shown complimenting each other in bed (4). This scene presents the two as mutually admiring, but also as complementary. Julie’s later assertion that she likes “words with univocal meanings” (10) further indicates the discomfort with ambiguity suggested by her dislike of “blankness.” The crucial physical separateness of the women is highlighted throughout the story, prefiguring the later attention to the body as object through which Wallace explores the emergence of self-awareness. Boyd, the first-person narrator of “Lyndon,” the story perhaps most concerned with love in this collection, traces a series of relationships from university in the early 1950s through to 1968, when he works for President Johnson. Boyd is gay, and spends much of the narrative considering its effect on his life. At one point, his lover, Duverger, a relation of the Haitian ambassador to the United States, accuses Boyd of not loving him, dramatizing the isolation of failed communication. Duverger’s speech, which passes from French to English, highlights the structural challenges of communication; “he had little English he was proud of; we spoke a kind of pidgin when alone” (GCH, 99). Duverger insists that Boyd’s love belongs to someone else (implicitly President Johnson), saying “ce n’est not I.” He accuses Boyd of needing without loving, casting them as bound together without affection in language that again echoes Beckett. Boyd responds “Need, responsibility: these are part of love, in this nation” (99). Boyd’s connection of love with responsibility again highlights the duty of paying attention that characterized Wallace’s image of love throughout his career.26 26

Duverger gets sick in the story, “dying of something that was not malaria” (110). His nationality and the timeline of the story imply that Duverger contracts the early American strain of HIV/AIDS, believed to have emerged in the United States between 1966 and 1968.

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Boyd’s relationships with Duverger and Johnson are intimately tied to masculine embodiment. By contrast with the lovers of “Little Expressionless Animals,” sex is described as aggressive and mechanical. However, Wallace’s approach to the male body was often surprisingly tender. In a collection as rife with fear, hostility, and misogynistic vocalization as Brief Interviews, it is surprising to note the comparative lyricism of much of the characterization of masculinity and the male body that punctuate the collection. The squinting emergence of a young boy into adolescence in “Forever Overhead,” which can be read as a nod to the emergence from infantile narcissism into a balanced subjectivity and awareness of the self as object, voiced in such a way that “the unmediated sensory overload of puberty overlaps [ . . . ] with a dream of language.”27 Language, then, and the possibility that “words might become things”, that the self might somehow be unmediated, that language might somehow rise to the “difficulty of reality,” become dreams of childhood; the necessity of living with things for which we have no language is the mark of maturity. Indeed, that relationship is made literal in the boy’s confused recollection of the “deep sweet hurt” of a wet dream, for which he has, as yet, no name; yet it is an integral part of his adolescence. By linking the problems of linguistic control with the representation of a specifically masculine emergence into sexual maturity, Wallace seems to present mature masculinity—subjective, active, and metalinguistic—as the ideal state. The story is notable, too, for its detailed attention to the bodies and states of things outside the self, “concrete details so finely drawn they seem to have been drawn from the well of your own memories,” positioning the boy as an object among objects.28 The question of bodies in Wallace’s writing generally is something of a vexed one. Gregory Phipps has offered a meditation on the ideal athlete in Infinite Jest, and Wallace’s own interest in sport would seem to invite readings of the body throughout his work. Hal’s inability to express his internal monologue not only dramatizes Wittgenstein’s theory that the limits of language mean the limits of the world, but also problematize mind/body dualism, showing that the body cannot always be subjected to linguistic will, in another literalization of a philosophical problem, this time of Schopenhauer’s complex interaction between body, mind, and will. Orin refers to the answering machine as the “Disembodied Voice” (IJ, 1009, so capitalized), decisively separating body and communication. Wallace’s engagement with the body, then, aligns with the dualism of the body posited by

27 28

Zadie Smith, Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (London: Penguin Books, 2009), 262. Ibid., 262.

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Schopenhauer, at once idea and object. 29 The question of embodiment is critical to a reading of Wallace’s gender politics. Wallace’s treatment of bodies tends to conform to the physical, active male, and the ethereal, passive female, a divide that persists in The Pale King, where the subjectivity of the masculine characters is emphasized, while the objectivity of the feminine is also highlighted. The question of coming to regard the self as object as it is explored in “Forever Overhead,” evoking Lacan’s mirror stage, forms part of the process by which the strands of identity become clear. Awareness of the body normally prefigures awareness of the self, often through illness or discomfort. The Pale King is full of instances of illness of various kinds, from Cusk’s excessive sweating to Meredith’s stint in the hospital, along with the violence and disease that follow Leonard Stecyk. More abstract illness and pain occur in the shapes of the discomfort and ultimate deformity of the child who contorts his body to kiss every part of it, whose story segment contains a meditation on pain, and the violence of Toni Ware’s childhood, which leads to her learning to play dead. The novel is full of bodies, most of them somehow in distress. Indeed, the novel’s final subsection is itself a meditation on the body, the fact of embodiment, its peculiar discomfort. This preoccupation is a recurring theme in all the novels, from the cold-blooded Lenore Sr. and Norman Bombardini’s obesity and John’s extreme thinness in Broom to the veiled Joelle Van Dyne and the constant references to athletic bodies and Gately’s incoherent pain at the end of Infinite Jest. The separation of abstract self from concrete body implicit in Lenore’s fear is made abruptly real in the opening of Jest, when Hal opens his narration with the sentence: “I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies” (3). The detachment of Hal’s consciousness from his physical situation is underscored by the detached tone with which Hal discusses the violent events of his afternoon at the University of Arizona. In fact, the only passion in Hal’s narration arises in his discussion of the intellectual pursuits now denied to him by his inability to express himself; the degradation of his physical self prevents the exercise and improvement of his abstract, intellectual sense. Where Lenore is concerned that her physical existence may be an illusion, Hal is daily beset by the insurmountable reality of his physicality. The physical self is of central importance in Infinite Jest, particularly as regards Enfield Tennis Academy. References to the physical appearance of a number of the 29

Bennett aligns The Pale King in particular with Schopenhauer, discussing the twin themes of boredom and pain. The body in pain in Wallace’s writing frequently occurs in conjunction with frustrated efforts of will and linguistic attempts: Gately’s efforts to choose pain over relief in the final pages of Jest represent a failure of both will and communication.

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players recur throughout the novel, from Hal’s detailed description of his position in the interview room, legs crossed “ankle on knee, hands together in the lap of [his] slacks” (3) and his reference to Tavis’s crossed arms, “their triceps; flesh is webbed with mottle [ . . . ] the two halves of his mustache never quite match” (5) through the descriptions of the physical toll of drills in the Academy (e.g., 97–105) and repeated references to small physical details of life in a sports academy. The physical implications of drug and alcohol addiction are also canvassed repeatedly and in detail throughout the story. The universality of Avril Incandenza’s maternity— contrasted with the inarticulate yearning of James O’s desire to communicate with his son, to which end he creates the poisonous Entertainment, itself intimately tied (we think) to motherhood and the feminine—is further complicated by Avril’s sexual agency, particularly her involvement with John “No Relation” Wayne, whose defiant nickname invokes its own dismissal, repudiating the strongly physical masculinity associated with his namesake, indicating a confidence in his masculinity that is its own referent. The complex interdependence of female sexuality and deflected incestuous desire invites a Freudian reading of the narcissism of Avril’s sons, particularly Orin’s distancing of the “Subjects” he sleeps with (who are of course not subjects to him, but objects), the collectivity of whom he refers to as a “gynecopia” (1009). Further, Avril’s explicitly sexual maternity and her other defining characteristic—her status as Militant Grammarian—links the female and maternal body with the body of language.

See you, see me: Acknowledging the self as object The physical travails discussed in The Pale King are various in effect, but awareness of the physical self is often presented as a response to the gaze of some powerfully subjective other, whose mere observation of the self traumatically decenters it. Cusk’s sweating arrives with puberty, when, as observed in a footnote, “psychodynamically, he was, as a subject, coming to a late and therefore traumatic understanding of himself as also an object” (TPK, 92n1). Cusk’s sweating problem is related to his awareness of his self, not just as a self but as an other, echoing LaVache’s estimation of Lenore’s self-image. It becomes particularly pronounced when he is aware or afraid of the gaze of other subjects: relinquishing his subjectivity and becoming an object has made him lose control of his body. Here, then, the masculine subject is problematized by the awareness of the possibility that it may not only be a subject. This violent decentering is

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contrasted by both the dreamy self-othering of the boy in “Forever Overhead” and by the story of Toni Ware. The decentered self, of course, is not a specifically masculine experience, though it is here literalized in the masculine body; rather, it is one of the central characteristics of the postmodern. The goal of voluntary self-othering, of changing one’s place in the system of relations, is enacted in The Pale King in the ethical exaltation of engagement, but the physical ramifications of such engagement, including the necessity of recognizing the agency of another and so the fundamental alterity of the self, occasion complex literalizations of the resulting discomfort. Episodes of violent self-othering in The Pale King are prefigured in the opening monologue of Infinite Jest, in which Hal is portrayed as wholly trapped in his own mind. The scene follows Hal’s internal monologue, which both describes the scene at hand and recalls incidents from Hal’s childhood and present. Hal presents most clearly out of all Wallace’s work the chasm that exists between the mastery of language and the possibility of communication. This narrative passage is notable for its fluency, and the obvious facility of the narrator with language. A clinical, analytical tone pervades the description of the situation in which Hal finds himself, which weakens slightly when Hal begins to describe the mold-eating episode of his early childhood, in which he appropriates the vocal persona of his brother Orin, from whom he heard the story; it is telling that he needs to assume a separate voice to tell this story. This linguistic fluidity contrasts sharply with the narrative thrust of the episode, which is that Hal is incapable of communicating. Particularly interesting about the pathology of Hal’s disability is that, while he has perfect mental command of language, he has lost not only the power of speech, but the ability to master his limbs enough to write or even type clearly. In other words, a medically significant event that is identified only as “something I ate” (IJ, 10) has damaged Hal physically so that he is isolated inside his head, appearing “only marginally mammalian” (15) to the outsider. These multiform sufferings, and the clear distinction between subjective identity and physical objecthood, hint at Wallace’s engagement with the problem of dualism. Reading Wallace’s engagement with the body as reflective of a Schopenhauerian balance between subjectivity and objecthood, we might see a challenge to Fichte’s self-positing subjectivity, the all-encompassing and self-legitimizing Ichheit or I-hood seen in Norman Bombardini, and in that challenge some comfort to Wallace’s fear of solipsism. Wallace’s Schopenhauerian conception of the objecthood of the body of the knowing subject, and his engagement with the literal body throughout his writing speaks to a post-Kantian desire to

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locate the self both in opposition to and in cooperation with the unknowable other, rather than to seek the self-creating Fichtean Ichheit. Fichte’s imperious subjectivity is even more frighteningly solipsistic than the Cartesian “I think” model that Wallace obliquely objects to in “The Empty Plenum,” where he champions Kate’s “marvelous inversion of the Cogito & Ontological argument” (BFN, 115n48). The very fact that the physical subject can be decentered by the agency of another subject serves to legitimize the possibility of true subjective agency in both self and other. The decentering of the self is profoundly, often physically, uncomfortable, but it is a necessary step in dismissing the specter of solipsistic entrapment. Indeed, based on Wallace’s representation of the body, we might trace the actions of heroism as they appear in physical form, following Schopenhauer’s theory of the body as objectified will, and here we might think of Shane Drinion’s unconscious tendency in The Pale King to levitate when he is concentrating, only to cease as soon as his concentration is broken. The workings of will on the body are perhaps most obviously and traumatically literalized in the narratives of women under attack—Toni Ware and the Granola Cruncher most obviously, and Clenette in Infinite Jest—but recurs throughout other writing as well. The overdeveloped, lopsided musculature of the residents of Ennet Tennis Academy, the fecal artisan of “The Suffering Channel,” the concentrated anguish of the infant in “Incarnations of Burned Children” and the adolescent boy in “Forever Overhead,” whose lack of control over his body mirrors the psychic turmoil of emerging into adulthood, all offer instances of the body as manifestation of will. The physical discomfort of the objectified self is a common affliction in Wallace’s writing: for example, Leonard Stecyk’s life seems to be dogged by misery, violence, illness, and pain. It is only partly due to misfortune: Leonard’s kind nature is partly to blame, inspiring as it does psychotic rage and violence in almost all those who know him. While Stecyk’s nature tends to inspire violence, however, it is another accident that as it were stabilizes his social life. Stecyk offers an opposition to Cusk’s obsessive self-consciousness, and the discomfort occasioned to Cusk by the realization of his alterity is instead turned outward by Stecyk’s lack of self-consciousness, resulting in displaced violence and pain. The boy who seeks to kiss his extremities provides another instance of the deforming intrusion of full self-consciousness—that is to say, of awareness of the self as always also an object, to be looked at or acted upon, like Keats’s knight-at-arms in “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” evoked in the novel’s title, who comes to awareness of himself only under the gaze of another. The boy’s ambition to make contact

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with all of himself arrives early, aged six, when he “came to understand that unimaginable challenges lay ahead of him” (TPK, 394), in contrast to Cusk, whose self-awareness emerges with puberty. The injuries sustained by the child in his pursuit of this ambition begin with “a flat pop in the upper part of his back and then pain beyond naming” (395), later named as the “traumatic T3 subluxation” (404) that leads him to his first encounter with Doctor Kathy, the chiropractor who serves as his “formal introduction both to incremental stretching and to the adult idea of quiet daily discipline and progress towards a long-term goal” (396). The boy’s goal of physical self-delineation functions as a basic literalization of the drive toward full self-awareness: physically outlining the object that is his body enacts the othering of his self by linking the inner consciousness with the outer physicality, echoing the literally sickening self-awareness that comes upon Keats’s knight after he sees himself being seen. The boy wants to become physically accessible to himself, to “pierce that evil of inaccessibility—to be, in some childish way, self-contained and -sufficient” (401). It is further suggested that this motivation is unknown to him, being “just a little boy,” ironically implying that while he may be physically self-accessible, he is still psychically inaccessible in his motivation for this quest, further reinforcing the idea that full, transcendent self-awareness is both extremely painful and probably impossible. By contrast with the traumatic decentering of the self experienced by Cusk and Hal, and to a lesser degree Leonard and the nameless boy, the voluntary displacement of subjectivity is presented in the narrative of Toni Ware as a possible (though extreme) defense against hostile objectification. The violence and fear of Toni’s upbringing are close to the surface, meaning that their influence on her life is more clearly visible. Her obsessive attachments contrast wildly with her mistrustful and threatening demeanor, signaling extreme ambivalence toward the idea of proximity, emotional interaction, or communicative exchange. Toni’s childhood of flight and feigned death contains perhaps the most visceral instance of violent discomfort and self-awareness, in which she is so focused that she can literally disconnect her eye contact, playing a convincing corpse as her mother is murdered beside her. Toni’s response to threat, this game of “play dead,” contrasts in its focus with the boy’s self-delineation, but has essentially similar results. Her action also evokes Joelle Van Dyne’s decision to veil herself away from the gaze of others, robbing external subjects the capacity to objectify her. Rather, Toni absolutely objectifies herself, to the point of rejecting selfhood in order to save it, a characteristic she shares with the Granola Cruncher in “Brief Interview #20.” Toni’s capacity for literal self-denial is in fact the strongest

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affirmation of her self-sufficiency, her feigned death the mark of her absolute life. With regard to the idea outlined in the case of other characters of the gaze of the other as a final mark of selfhood, Toni arguably transcends the nauseating othering of another subject’s active gaze by instead actively abjecting her agency, by making herself the ultimate other—that is to say, a final object, totally passive in death, closed and perfect, foreclosing any kind of communication (in this case, unwanted). By feigning death, Toni can force the illusion of the structural failure of communication by removing one of the physical modalities.

Foreign bodies Infinite Jest opens with the phrase “I am seated” (IJ, 3), followed by a neutral description of Hal’s surroundings. More significantly still, Hal repeats the phrase “I am in here” twice, at the end of the opening paragraph (3) and again as the Deans realize the seriousness of his condition (13). Hal’s voice, fluent and articulate though it is inside his head, remains almost affectless, purely descriptive, reducing him to a conduit of pure perception. Offsetting this flat calm is the high incidence of the verb “to be.” Hal himself says either “I am” or “I am not” (in one tense or another) twelve times throughout this passage, with a further fourteen occurrences of the verb attributed to other voices but speaking about Hal. The first time “I am” occurs, it is part of the narrative, thought rather than direct speech. The second time Hal attempts to articulate the phrase from his position facedown on the floor. This phrase, which does not have an immediate or concrete referent, would seem to be the only instance in which Hal seeks the articulated reassurance of his continued existence, a consciousness trapped in a body. As Burn points out, Hal’s repetition of this phrase evokes—perhaps even answers—Hamlet’s question “who’s there?,” one of a long list of invocations of that play—Jest’s most frequent intertextual reference, though by no means its only one. Hal’s scene with the severed head of his father, also an invocation of Hamlet, further highlights his later isolation within his own, nonsevered, head. Burn also rightly points out that this oblique answer to “who’s there?” highlights Hal’s condition.30 Its positioning at the beginning and the end of the scene keep Hal’s awful embodiment at the forefront of the reader’s mind. Significantly too, Hal draws specific attention to the vexed question of “whether the damaged even have interested wills” (IJ, 16). 30

Stephen J. Burn, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: A Reader’s Guide (New York: Continuum Contemporaries, 2003), 40.

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Hal does not canvass the point further—nor, by his narration, do the men in whose charge he has found himself—but the sentence betrays the extent to which Hal has been affected by whatever it is that has caused his damage. Rather than—or perhaps as well as—reflecting the kind of fear-based misogyny that Wallace identified in the characters of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, gender, the limits of the body, and the alien feminine offered Wallace a shorthand for the exploration of concepts of alterity that occupied much of his writing; representations of gender and the body offered scope for exploration of his fear of solipsism and the ontological status of the self. In his exploration of the feminine subject as historically object, Wallace finds the space to embody the inaccessible other whose existence offered a challenge to infantile narcissistic self-regard. Problematic though it indisputably is, the silence and silencing of the female voice in his work also partially investigates a form of resistance to power, encoding ideas of the cataclysmic power of the to-belooked-at object, which is reflected in the Entertainment at the heart of Infinite Jest, among other motifs, engaging strongly with the theories of Wittgenstein and Ricoeur on identity and communication. Wallace also uses the body, often in pain, to dramatize coherent alterity. By embodying the recognition of the subject as simultaneously also-always object, Wallace invites consideration of the inaccessible selfhood of the other, using gender and the body to dramatize the unbreachable distance between individuals.

Conclusion

The work of establishing Wallace Studies as a legitimate field of study has been comprehensively performed in the years since his death. While it is, as I have already suggested, early to herald the critical arrival of a “new Wallace,” it is exciting to note the development of a new critical perspective, a second wave of scholarship, as it were. In that regard, while I have chiefly been interested in Wallace’s artistic and philosophical response to the human condition in the late twentieth century, I have also attempted to outline some of the problems with his artistic project that have yet to be addressed by critical work, chief among them his reluctance or inability to move beyond the borders of his own privilege, highlighting the particular alienation of the privileged and his fear of that privilege being threatened. The alienation of “angry, confused, lonely white males”1 is the same alienation that Wallace sees and fears as exclusive, unrelated to him, in the racially and sexually marginalized characters he draws so broadly throughout his work, appropriated by the very hegemony that privileges his perspective, leading to his impoverished recognition of the other. Given the title of this book, coming to a conclusion initially seems paradoxical, or at least self-defeating. In view of that, let what follows be more an opening than a closing, ending with questions, rather than answers. This concluding section offers a recapitulation of the main themes of the book, and draws them together to advance a reading of Wallace’s work that is fundamentally grounded in its insistence on plurality and resistance to closure, an insistence politically, artistically, and ethically connected with “what it is to be a fucking human being.”2 This study has offered a reading of Wallace that posits a strong thematic 1 2

Jonathan Franzen, “Perchance to Dream,” Harper’s Magazine. 292.1751 (April 1996). Larry McCaffery, “An Interview with David Foster Wallace,” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 13.2 (Summer 1993): 131, emphasis original.

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coherence, both chronological and generic. I have explored the concerns that dominated his writing, showing that they are traceable back to his earliest work, and that they unite the seemingly distinct fiction and nonfiction. In making this argument, the book drew out the underworked The Broom of the System, along with some of the early stories, and proposed and developed a number of interdependent key points. Wallace has been shown to be a deeply culturally embedded writer, whose work balances philosophy with literature, and who works within a strong sense of both moment and heritage. The consistency of his creative and philosophical concerns is paramount to any consideration of his career, particularly those around human connection and the dangers of the isolated self. This consistency links his work in its development from questions of language through those of entertainment or culture and finally into a meditation on politics, citizenship, and heroism. Each of these central concerns posits the existence of external systems within which the individual must struggle to articulate her identity, resisting the traps of narcissism and solipsistic ideation. To avoid these traps, Wallace proposes a model of communication that simultaneously recognizes and challenges the boundaried self, focused on process rather than product and necessitating a sacrificial disposition, here termed love, in order for communicative exchange (never complete and never fully successful) to occur. In the representation of communication as well as the structural features of his writing, Wallace evinced a strong resistance to closure, which is demonstrated in the multifaceted failures of communication; in a structural resistance to ending; in the tendency to undermine expected numbering systems; in the implicit externality of the narrative scope; and in the use of voice. Finally, this process of communication necessitates both the recognition of the self as also always object, and by extension the existence of the alien subjectivity of the other, which works to undermine the solipsistic trap Wallace saw in the systems within which contemporary life plays out. The disingenuousness of his repeated abrogation of expertise and continued professions that he was unable to write beyond his own perspective, even as he insisted on the central importance of the perspective of the other, do not excuse the erasure of otherness from his work, and yet that very erasure, problematic though it is, speaks deeply to the central concerns of his writing—narcissism, solipsism, and the idea of human connection—all of which are intimately tied structurally, stylistically, and thematically, with the failure, or noncompletion of communication—the failure, in other words, to rupture one’s own perspective. Wallace’s own artistic failures, which he compulsively noted himself, mirror in

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many ways the failures of his characters and their narratives. Much of the work imagines the search for various kinds of perfection, all of them illusory, as well as depicting acts of communication that never quite find purchase, due to the inevitable interpretive gap. While this gap appears initially problematic, as with Lenore Beadsman in Broom, it emerges as a necessary part of living in the world. By acknowledging the interpretive gap that inheres in human communication, we acknowledge the radical subjectivity of the other, which forces a recognition of the self and the other as living in a state of relation. As we trace the constant resistance to closure—often aligned with death in its finality—throughout Wallace’s writing, the pragmatic importance of continuity is foregrounded; the concept of dissolving (rather than solving) problems by means of reframing the question. Importantly, in this model, no solution is offered; or rather, the solution is unending, a continuing process of engagement and attention, a continuing exercise of will. In this respect, we can trace the endurance of the idea of will to belief from The Broom of the System through to The Pale King, insisting that it is only by believing in the possibility of human connection, only by choosing that possibility again and again, never completing the process, never closing the door, that the possibility exists at all. It is in the failure of communication that the possibility of redemptive connection lives. The conceptual centrality of sincere communication to Wallace’s writing, both within and beyond the text, has been compellingly established by scholars including Kelly and Burn, among others, but as I have suggested here, it is not without its troubles, and examining the process rather than the outcome allows for a more coherent reading of Wallace’s work as a whole, one that links his body of work along thematic, formal, and stylistic lines, persistently returning to the need to try. I have therefore outlined the thematic, structural, and stylistic recurrences of that process—and its failure—throughout his writing. The theme of choosing to fail, of choosing generative imperfection over encompassing perfection, breaking open rather than closing off, has arisen in every thematic and structural exploration of Wallace’s writing throughout this book, clearly demonstrating its prevalence both culturally and formally. The representation of perfection as deathly, deadly, or deadening continuously casts failure as an artistic, cultural, and political life-force. I began this study by outlining the idea of failure as a generative trigger, taking a number of thematic approaches to articulate Wallace’s engagement with ideas of rupture and incompleteness. The book has taken as its focus the resistance to closure that centrally characterizes his work at structural, narrative, and moral

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levels, working as an introduction to the dominant themes of Wallace’s writing, and opening new points of discussion for existing and emerging readers and scholars. Wallace’s approach to sincere communication, both narratively and thematically, is central as a recurring response to what he saw as the inane, selfabsorbed commoditization of language and society, but the completion of that communication is always deferred, asynchronous, potential. The recurrences of incomplete or unsuccessful attempts at communication highlight the solution to the problems of solipsism and narcissistic entrapment that dogged Wallace as both author and person. Ironically, the very failure of the effort to communicate proves the necessary alterity of the interlocutor, their untouchable, inviolate foreignness. This alterity, then, undercuts the problematic possibility of selfprojection by resolutely holding itself apart from the self, and the existence of an other, an alternate subjective agent, positions the self as object as well as subject, thus dividing the world into I and not-I. The distance necessitated by love allows for this distinction; those who are too close “contain each other” (GCH, 116) instead of keeping each other at enough of a distance to see and love each other. We see this literalized in Wallace’s treatment of the body, perhaps more clearly than anywhere else. Complex and deeply problematic as his treatment of gender, sex, and the body undoubtedly is, it nevertheless illustrates the traumatic coming-to-awareness that results from seeing the self as object that is also integral to the Hegelian dynamic of self-recognition that emerges from failed communication, both textual and interpersonal. Having established this coherence across Wallace’s writing, I have suggested that this resistance to closure is connected to Wallace’s redemptive ambitions for literature, and for his conception of what it meant to be alive and engaged in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first century. In this respect, the political or civic elements of his writing come to the fore, and the remainder of this chapter considers the ethical and political elements of writing, reading, and thinking. While many critics have variously identified Wallace’s horror of solipsism, his obsession with sincerity and a corresponding ambivalence regarding postmodern irony, and his detailed attention to contemporary culture as the central elements of his writing, articulating a common thread linking these pillars does pose a challenge, and in some ways they cut across and undermine one another at times. Drawing on existing work dealing with all these elements, I have shown that these themes are indeed intimately connected, unified by the radical antiteleology that characterizes Wallace’s work. Furthermore, that position is a fundamentally political response to the condition of neoliberal America, and

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as we have seen, Wallace’s work became progressively more concerned with the sociopolitical situation of late capitalist America, indolent, passive, and addictively disengaged. The development of Wallace’s philosophy of communication, then, can only clearly be read in tandem with his broader philosophical and ethical outlook. Leland de la Durantaye argues that Wallace’s primary ethico-philosophical motivation is a critique of the idea of free will. As we have seen, freedom is a decidedly ambivalent force in Wallace’s writing, its threatening side perhaps best embodied in the Entertainment at the heart of Infinite Jest, which finds an analog in Wallace’s suspicion in respect of the freedoms offered by unfettered postmodernism. Notwithstanding this ambivalence, de la Durantaye is right to put freedom at the center of Wallace’s ethics. Wallace was deeply interested in freedom and the exercise of free will, but was careful to highlight its connection with responsibility. In line with the general distinction between focus and entertainment, between agency and passivity, subjecthood and objecthood, positive liberty of the kind de la Durantaye identifies aligns clearly with the decision to pay attention; for Wallace, it seems clear that the path out of deadening negative liberty is to choose what is important, to choose engagement over apathy. By contrast, negative liberty, as proposed by Isaiah Berlin, depends on the specific combination of a number of different criteria, one of which is the number of choices available to the chooser. Wallace literalizes the stasis of multiplicity in the character of Erdedy, paralyzed between the door and the telephone, but the broader sense of freedom from restriction governs much of the addictive behavior in the novel. Jest in particular seems to propose that indulging negative liberty—the freedom-from that Marathe argues underpins American identity—in a world that provides infinite ways to please the infantile ego, leads to the recursive stasis embodied in the addictive spirals of the novel’s characters, structure, and narrative directions, offering a challenge to the classical definitions of freedom offered by such thinkers as Hobbes, whose Leviathan proposed that “A free man is he that [ . . . ] is not hindered to doe what he has a will.”3 Addiction becomes the endgame of negative liberty, a paralysis in which the infantile, narcissistic ego holds sway over the rational, political cogito. Jest suggests, as we have discussed, that the limiting of liberty by law or morality works not necessarily to prevent the enslavement of the weak by the

3

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard E. Flathman and David Johnston (London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997), 115.

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strong, but rather to prevent the outright reversion of a society to pre-mirrorstage narcissistic dependency. De la Durantaye articulates a connection between Fate, Time, and Language and This Is Water, clarifying some of the positions Wallace assumes through his use of technical language. He draws the conclusion that Wallace saw a liberalarts education as a path to free will. Importantly, however, that freedom is not the freedom to indulge oneself into a catatonic state, but the freedom of “being conscious and aware enough to choose [ . . . ] how you construct meaning from experience” (TIW, 54). De la Durantaye articulates Wallace’s vision as follows: “freedom is not about having as few fetters as possible; it is about leading an examined life. Freedom is about being a good person, choosing to be a good person, every day.”4 Freedom consists in choosing to pay attention to the people around us. The process of communication—that strange combination of embracing and crossing the borders between minds, stopping short of wholesale identification—is the only possible source of relief from the isolation of our individuality, providing the hope of an escape from the solipsistic traps, both self- and other-centered, whose threat inheres in late postmodernist “freedom.” A foundational element of his work that persisted from his philosophy thesis through to his final words, the connection of will, attention, and heroism is also intimately linked with his treatment of narcissism. Lenore’s metastability in Broom also depicts an advanced incarnation of negative liberty: she is so free from stricture that she begins not to believe in herself. This exceptionally free-floating sense of identity mirrors Rorty’s conception of the metastable liberal ironist, whose openness to relativism is so wholehearted that the very sense of self is compromised. As discussed in earlier chapters, Lenore’s emergence into recognition of herself as both subject and object marks a progression beyond Rortian metastability, or to apply a Ricoeurian lens, the movement from character to person, a shift caused by Lenore’s decision to believe in herself, again reflecting the central position of choice in Wallace’s writing. The significance of choice—and the capacity to choose—are themes that emerged in Wallace’s thinking before even The Broom of the System. Wallace’s undergraduate thesis, published as Fate, Time, and Language, undertook an investigation into the philosophy of Richard Taylor and specifically the doctrine of fatalism, or the idea that human acts are predetermined. Wallace’s thesis responds to this paradigm, offering a deconstruction of Taylor’s famous six-point argument in favor of fatalism. While the thesis itself is not especially groundbreaking, its focus on the centrality of will 4

Leland De la Durantaye, “How to Be Happy,” Boston Review, March 2011.

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to the human experience is striking. This is true not least because the branch of philosophy within which Wallace was working—modal logic, working out atomic statements of fact and their connection to one another—tends to abstract itself from the felt reality of the world, working in logic and truth-values. Much of the work of this discipline involves exploring retrospective causality, as Wallace does on occasion when literalizing a challenging concept. This has elements in common with the classical pragmatism of Peirce that Rorty would both embrace and repudiate, particularly the use of abductive reasoning, which takes an effect and retrospectively estimates the cause. The difference between abductive reasoning and fatalism is the pragmatic outlook: in fatalism, the occurrence of B necessitates the cause A, whereas in pragmatism, the occurrence of B suggests the cause A. Even Wallace’s earliest engagement with technical philosophy shows inclinations toward a pragmatic outlook rather than a staunchly causative one. In this sense, we might read Wallace’s invocation of free will throughout his work as somehow fundamentally Jamesian rather than Wittgensteinian— pragmatic rather than logical; indeed, Wallace mentioned James by name in “The Empty Plenum.” Jamesian pragmatic ethics are structurally encoded in Wallace’s insistence on process over conclusion. A “much quoted entry in [James’s] diary” reads “My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will”, which invokes Bartleby’s “I prefer not to.” As Evans notes, “it is the affirmation of choice that is central.”5 Similarly, Wallace’s fiction and nonfiction seems to embody the necessity of commitment, the power, and agency of simple decision. It is not the outcome that matters, but the process; “the truth of faith, [James] proposes, is not to be measured by how it corresponds to a state of affairs, but by its practical consequences in the life of the individual.”6 Theories become true not in a cosmic sense, but in the sense of effect or efficacy—the consequences, as Wallace put it, “for persons, of the practice of theory” (BFN, 78). Kevin Timpe suggests that belief for the sake of it is simple self-deception— “we tend to believe those things that we want to be true precisely because of the satisfaction that such beliefs bring”7—but goes on to argue that recognizing this and consciously assuming a habit of “intellectual humility” could help us to “avoid selfdeception.”8 Another way of articulating this is the AA motto, which is “fake it till 5

6 7

8

David H. Evans, “The Chains of Not Choosing,” in A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, ed. Marshall Boswell and Stephen Burn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 174. Ibid., 182. Kevin Timpe, “This Is Water and Religions Self-Deception,” in Gesturing Towards Reality, ed. Robert K. Bolger and Scott Korb (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 57. Ibid., 67.

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you make it,” largely understood as advising adherents to behave as if they believe in the system, on the understanding that at some point the system will work for them. This motto is borne out in the experience of Don Gately, who discusses precisely this balance of cynicism and naiveté, one that Wallace also articulated as an artistic credo in “E Unibus Pluram,” with its invocation of the New Rebels of sincerity. Again, it is easy to see this affirmation as being in alignment with the process of communication explored in preceding chapters, and indeed to link it further with the resistance to closure. The choice to take part in an endlessly self-repeating process, to have some faith in the transaction between writer, text, and reader, evoking too Cavell’s judgment that we can only acknowledge, but never know, the state and intention of the other: this is the potential and always-incomplete remedy to solipsism. Bennett argues that, per Schopenhauer, the end of boredom is necessarily death; in fact, that “it leads directly, ineluctably, to suicide”;9 however, he also correctly notes that Schopenhauer’s pessimism is not a good fit for the ultimately redemptive possibility of Wallace’s final novel; the possibility of bliss, of immersion that Wallace discusses in the notes to the novel, moves the narrative away from death. Bennett also notes that “we spend our lives being distracted from such pain by various forms of ‘stimulation,’”10 but boredom and stimulation are very close to each other in Wallace’s writing; he also links mindless activity to death by way of entertainment. It is not boredom that is killing for Wallace, but passivity, and the need for engagement—linguistic, cultural, and political—pervades his writing as both an ethical and an existential imperative from beginning to end. The definition of heroism advanced in Wallace’s writing is one of engagement, of process and not of completion—the “minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer” (TPK, 230). Such heroism, the unwitnessed ongoing-ness of the minutes, hours, weeks, years, is positioned as the only response to the contemporary condition, and Wallace’s work implies that only the relentless repetition—the very present-ness, the incompletion or failure—of that form of heroic, attentive, open citizenship could evade the solipsistic trap. The final note to The Pale King is a description of people immersed in mundane tasks, which Wallace described as heroic, and ends with the brief sentence “It’s the ability to be immersed” (TPK, 547, emphasis original). The heroic potential of attention—itself a manifestation of the 9

10

Andrew Bennett, “Inside David Foster Wallace’s Head: Attention, Loneliness, Suicide and the Other Side of Boredom,” in Gesturing Toward Reality, ed. Robert K. Bolger and Scott Korb (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 73–4. Ibid., 80.

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free will to which Wallace cleaved throughout his career—is a further embodiment of the necessity of process over product; like Shane Drinion, our levity, the promised bliss, disappears the moment our well-directed attention is interrupted. Heroism is a form of continuity—a process rather than a state—and is like failure in this respect, unseen, unrecognized by anyone, and always only without the telos of possible recognition. Wallace’s heroism, in fact, is fundamentally anti-teleological; there is no achievement of heroism, only its ongoing repetition and consistent failure. Love and the sense of boundaried identity, which as we have seen entails narrative performance, are directly connected with politics and civic engagement from Wallace’s earliest work. The same connection of politics and narrative identity is mirrored in the later connection of narrativity with citizenship in stories including “The Soul is Not a Smithy” in particular. Burn draws a line from The Pale King to systems of ethics and values of the 1950s, noting “an examination of the durability of such older value systems in a changing world in The Pale King, with Chris Fogle’s father perhaps providing the clearest example.”11 The same examination is visible less clearly in the Civics classroom of “The Soul is Not a Smithy,” via its images of Iwo Jima and the American flag, as well as the family values explored in the child’s window narrative. In both narratives, citizenship is presented in direct contrast to the kind of addiction to entertainment figured in the Entertainment in Jest, echoed in The Pale King by Fogle’s alienation, symbolized by his moment of reflexivity watching As the World Turns. Fogle’s enrolment in a class on the literature of alienation provides an implicit contrast with the communal experience of taxation, a shorthand for civic engagement. Burn notes a connection between this class and Wallace’s “belief in fiction’s ability to invert loneliness,” by way of Walker Percy’s discussion of the same phrase.12 Political engagement is thus repeatedly presented as an anodyne against alienation, despite the systemic cynicism of political discourse; by choosing to believe, we validate the choice. While Wallace repeatedly repudiates politics in his nonfiction, the necessity of being an engaged citizen comes to the fore in a number of essays, and is at the forefront of This is Water. In “Deciderization 2007,” he complained “To really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time” (DSR, 8).The political asides in “Authority and American Usage” and the cultural commentary of “David Lynch Keeps His Head” are iterations of this struggle, along with the 11

12

Stephen J. Burn, “‘A Paradigm for the Life of Consciousness’: Closing Time in the Pale King,” in Studies in the Novel, 44.4 (2) (Winter 2012): 376. Ibid., 379.

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complex patriotism of “The View from Mrs Thompson’s.” Boswell notes that “more so than any of his other major works, The Pale King wrestles directly with matters of real-world politics and [ . . . ] civics.”13 Boswell is correct, of course, but it is also worth noting how subtler iterations of civic engagement pervade the rest of the writing; the Civics classroom in “The Soul is Not a Smithy,” the Young Republicans of “Girl with Curious Hair,” and of course the dramatic juxtaposition of love, culture and politics in “Lyndon.” That connection, which is fundamental to an understanding of Wallace’s ideas of communication, also offers a lens through which to view the later engagement with politics. Boswell points out that “the ‘civics’ debate in The Pale King directly reprises [Wallace’s description in the McCaffery interview] of the 1960s as a ‘free and freeing’ period that eventually inspired a childish desire for parental authority.” 14 Lyndon Johnson’s terms as vice-president and president ran from 1961 to 1969, neatly compassing the period to which Boswell refers here. The consideration of civic virtue that infuses The Pale King seems to circle back to Wallace’s early writing on love, sacrifice, and the self in striking ways. Early in “Lyndon,” the narrator, who believes that he is being interviewed, sits quietly in the corner. Johnson upbraids him: “don’t just sit there with your mind in neutral, boy” (GCH, 82). Johnson’s injunction seems to prefigure Chris Fogle’s transformation from 1970s wastoid to productive member of society, which transformation is largely effected by joining a system of civic administration—in this case the White House mail room—and taking one’s place in the adult world. Lyndon’s explicit juxtaposition of love, the boundaried self, and the exercise of one’s civic duty provides the basis for the proposed conceptions of both communication and heroism, which are intimately linked and further tied to the duty of engaged citizenship to combat the radical individualism of neoliberal America. Late in the story, the ailing president meditates on the general irresponsibility of “these youths that are yippies and that are protesters and that use violence and public display [ . . . ]. They ain’t never once had to worry or hurt or suffer in any real way” (GCH, 106). This diatribe is strikingly evocative of Fogle’s own review of his youth, his experience of what “Jimmy Carter was ridiculed for calling ‘malaise,’” of feeling “in a way, too free, or that this kind of freedom wasn’t actually real” and of realizing “that [he] might be a true nihilist [who] drifted and quit because nothing meant anything” (TPK, 223).

13

14

Marshall Boswell, “Trickle-Down Citizenship: Taxes and Civic Responsibility in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King,” Studies in the Novel, 44. 4 (Winter 2012): 466. Ibid., 471.

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Fogle’s turn of phrase here functions almost as a confirmation of Lyndon’s judgment that there are “some folks that need suffering to even be Americans inside [ . . . ] I’m believing in the youths of America’s need for some genuine stimulation” (GCH, 106). The choice here of the phrasing “I’m believing” highlights the continuity of choice, the necessity to choose again and again to believe, not just once. Johnson’s conviction that there must be a worse in order to choose a better chimes with Fogle’s embryonic nihilism, although the two are fictionally about a decade apart. Fogle’s conversion, which has strong religious overtones that again invoke William James, whose martial language in “The Moral Equivalent of War”—which appears in Fogle’s conversion scene—echoes the situation of Johnson’s speech against the backdrop of Vietnam, an echo that is also taken up in “The Soul is Not a Smithy.” All three texts, which more or less run the full period of Wallace’s career, invoke the civic engagement of paternal figures, “men that I was youths with,” as Lyndon calls them (that is to say, men who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s). It’s striking that Wallace tends to put ideas of civic engagement into the mouths of such men, as if it could not be taken seriously if spoken by a younger person. It’s also striking that the “youths of America” to whom Lyndon refers are the same generation Wallace himself identified in “Up, Simba!” as being the last generation to be genuinely politically engaged. The complex nostalgia for this generation, which Burn and others have identified, may be read as a conservative political position, but it can also be seen as a simpler nostalgia for an illusory pre-postmodernist In-der-Welt-sein, which allowed for the deep engagement of the self with the world, which has been lost in the modern, televisual world. The connection of freedom with heroism is perhaps the central political act of Wallace’s writing. Wallace’s closest nonfictional approach to politics and civic duty is in “Up, Simba!,” his 2000 account of John McCain’s presidential campaign, in which he tries to see beyond the political jargon he would later call “childish and totally unconducive to hard thought.”15 In “Up, Simba!” particularly, Wallace engages deeply with the idea of commitment to service for its own sake, a virtue he sees embodied in McCain, who, not coincidentally, is one of the generation of men Lyndon Johnson talked about. In McCain and his effect on voters, Wallace sees the embodiment of the kind of civic duty to which he returned so frequently in his writing. Closely linked to that responsibility is the duty of the reader, the voter, the citizen, to choose to believe in the political system despite endemic 15

Dave Eggers, “Interview With David Foster Wallace,” The Believer, November 2003.

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cynicism. Wallace’s resistance to teleology ultimately devolves responsibility for the perpetuation of the communicative process on to the reader. This responsibility is tied up with the understanding that only through maintaining and accommodating the interpretive gap can we truly acknowledge the radical subjectivity of the other, so to antagonize the soporific fog of solipsism. Wallace’s final word on John McCain could equally be a summation of his own approach to human connection: “whether he’s truly ‘for real’ now depends less on what is in his heart than on what might be in yours. Try to stay awake” (CL, 234). The purpose of all of this engagement, this struggle against solipsism, the magic of good writing, is ultimately a humanist one, a hard-won way of being in a corrupted and debased linguistic, cultural, and physical space. Resisting closure allows the subjective self to keep aggravating its own boundaries. In choosing to keep the conversation going, in choosing, over and over again, to engage, to pay attention, to open up instead of to close down; in admitting that “the paradox [of the boundaried self] can’t be resolved, but somehow it can be mediated—re-mediated”;16 in choosing to try again, and fail again, to reach over the wall to another consciousness, we continue a cycle of perfectibility. As we “are believing,” as we choose, again and again, to continue, we may find ourselves inhabiting a world that, through sheer force of will, is “not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the subsurface unity of all things” (TIW, 93). In resisting ending, then, the twin workings of literature and philosophy can help locate a beginning.

16

McCaffery, “Interview,” 137.

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Index addiction 4, 41, 53, 95–6, 124–6, 130, 132–3, 152–3, 186, 197, 201 Adorno, Theodor 3, 42, 191 Negative Dialectics 3 affect 11, 45, 130, 140–1, 190 Alcoholics Anonymous 109, 115–19, 123, 125–8, 132–3, 135, 176, 199 alienation 6, 25, 108, 111, 113–17, 119, 121, 123, 125–7, 129, 130–3, 135, 141, 171, 181, 193, 201 alterity 15–16, 42, 43, 47, 83, 130, 144, 178, 181, 197–8, 201, 206 anonymity 126, 130–2 Aristotle 4, 95–6 Barth, John 24, 44–5, 48–51, 54, 63, 88, 100, 149 Barthelme, Donald 63 Baskin, Jon 30, 118–19 Baudrillard, Jean 34, 36, 72, 83, 170 Beckett, Samuel 8, 19, 45, 96, 135, 183 Berkeley, George 43, 55 Boddy, Kasia 64 Borges, Jorge Luis 44, 48, 71–2 Boswell, Marshall 2, 16, 32, 38–40, 50, 54, 65–7, 70, 73–4, 76, 88, 102, 107, 131–2, 140, 148, 150, 178, 199, 202 Both/And 2, 9, 24, 26, 31, 33–4, 40, 45, 89, 109, 111, 158–9, 166 Burgess, Alexis 31 Burn, Stephen 2, 15–16, 22, 30, 38, 43, 50, 54, 63, 67, 101, 107, 113, 123, 135–6, 190, 195, 201, 203 Burroughs, William 63 Butler, Judith 23–4, 28–9 Caesar 98, 165 Cantor, Georg 13, 78 Carroll, Lewis 81–2 Cavell, Stanley 3, 11–14, 25, 28, 30, 46, 65, 82, 119, 122, 172, 200

citizenship 6, 9, 32, 47, 62, 68, 136, 156, 194, 200–3 civic duty 15–16, 32, 132, 148, 196, 201–3 closure 1–5, 9, 11–12, 17, 21 Feb 26, 28–30, 35, 38–40, 42, 45, 56–7, 61, 79–80, 86, 88–9, 99, 107–9, 115, 118, 124, 130, 133, 136, 138, 154, 158, 166, 174, 193–6, 200, 204 cockatiel 83, 113 communication 1, 3–6, 8–19, 24, 26, 28–31, 34–5, 46, 59, 62–3, 65, 69, 72, 76, 80, 83–5, 88–90, 93–107, 109, 111, 113, 115–16, 121, 125, 128, 132–5, 137–8, 141, 143–4, 146, 149, 151, 158, 163, 166, 177, 181, 183–5, 187, 190, 191, 194–8, 200, 202, 205 Cortázar, Julio 48 Costello, Mark 42, 168, 170 deconstruction 24–7, 38, 76, 94, 99, 104, 112, 137, 198 deMan, Paul 13, 77, 131 Den Dulk, Allard 23, 53 Derrida, Jacques 16, 24–6, 71, 82, 87, 96–9, 101, 104, 124, 158, 179–80 Dewey, John 85 Diamond, Cora 14 Dickens, Charles 41, 47, 60, 63 Docherty, Thomas 37, 120 dogs 165 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 49, 60, 118 Ellis, Bret Easton 63, 102 Ellroy, James 35 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 46–7, 60, 118 entertainment 2–3, 71–2, 130, 133, 152, 194, 200–1 Entertainment, the 18–19, 53, 61, 105, 112, 124, 178–80, 186, 191, 197 Evans, David 11, 118, 199

220

Index

failure 2–10, 12, 16, 18–19, 22, 24, 26–7, 30, 33, 35, 39, 48, 61, 63, 69, 76, 79, 89, 93, 98, 100, 105, 113, 115, 128, 134–5, 141, 144, 162–3, 166, 181–2, 185, 190, 194–6, 200–1 abject 4, 6, 63, 113, 115, 128, 134–5, 141 generative 4–7, 22, 26, 30, 63, 79, 144, 166, 195 necessity of 2, 3, 10–11, 126, 175, 201, 203 structural 4, 6, 63, 69, 105, 113, 141, 144, 190 Farnol, Jeffrey 44, 55 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 89–90, 187–8 Finn, Ed 45 Franzen, Jonathan 1–2, 30, 38–9, 45, 170 freedom 4, 28, 33, 53, 105, 114, 129, 197–8, 202–3 Frege, Gottlob 78, 174 free will 4, 9, 11, 21, 33, 180, 197–9, 201 Garner, Bryan A. 28, 32–3, 165 gender 4, 17–18, 115, 122, 124, 146, 150, 167–8, 171–5, 177, 183, 185, 191, 196 Gifford Lectures, The 103 Giles, Paul 36, 46, 163 Handwerk, Gary 52, 142 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Freidrich 26, 161, 172, 196 Heidegger, Martin 25–6 heroism 1, 60–1, 100, 188, 194, 198, 200–3 Holland, Mary K. 16, 18, 29, 35, 107–8, 112 Horn, Patrick 68, 89–90 Hyde, Lewis 98 information 7, 19, 34, 46–8, 69, 136, 152 ironism, Kierkegaardian 42, 53, 158, 161 ironist, liberal 86–7, 198 irony 22, 34, 36, 45, 52–3, 56, 76, 84, 86–7, 109, 142, 158, 196 ethical 52, 142 normative 52, 142 Socratic 53 James, William 11, 13, 103, 118, 199, 203 Jameson, Fredric 27, 55, 130, 182 Johnson, Denis 41

Johnson, Lady Bird 96–7, 146 Johnson, Lyndon 96, 147, 183–4, 202–3 Joyce, James 8, 43, 48–9, 59, 96, 147–8 Kafka, Franz 19, 60, 90, 96, 158–9 Kant, Immanuel 122, 187 Keats, John 43, 48, 59–60, 188–9 Kelly, Adam 11, 35, 98, 100, 156, 162, 195 Kierkegaard, Søren 13, 42, 53, 151, 157–8 Kierkegaard, Søren and the artist 42, 157 King, Stephen 55 Konstantinou, Lee 48 Korb, Scott 32 Lamarque, Peter 87 language games 14, 33, 69–73, 75–7, 79, 83, 85, 104 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 13 Lewis, C. S. 135–6 Lipsky, David 15, 41, 72, 118, 137, 155, 157 literalization 2–3, 12, 13, 17–19, 34, 70–1, 77, 113, 116–17, 131, 146, 149, 158, 168, 173, 184, 187–9, 196–7, 199 Lord, Jack 55 love 4–5, 9–11, 16, 19, 35, 58, 69, 93, 95–100, 104, 112, 115–16, 129, 135, 142, 146, 149–51, 154, 171, 175–6, 178–84, 194, 196, 202, 204 Luther, Connie 57 Lynch, David 23–4, 29–30, 38, 129, 201 McCaffery, Larry, Interview with DFW 10, 13, 33, 51, 67, 75, 88, 93, 97, 106–7, 120, 146, 166, 202 McCain, John 17, 164–5, 203–4 McDonald, Willa 155 McDonald’s 55 Malamud, Bernard 41 Marskon, David, Wittgenstein’s Mistress 1, 2, 68, 167, 172–3 Max, D. T. 11, 73 May, Charles E. 44 metafiction 29, 51–2, 55–6, 58, 72, 89, 142, 148–9, 167 Miller, Laura 3, 166 modal logic 10, 21, 41, 199 Moore, Marianne 43

Index naming 59, 66, 69–70, 73–5, 77, 116, 135, 146, 157, 173–4, 189 and family 69–70, 73, 75, 116, 174 and identity 59, 66, 73–5, 173–4 and philosophy 56, 74, 174 and power 73, 75, 77, 173–4 narcissism, narcissistic 5, 6, 8, 11, 16–19, 35, 48, 82, 103, 104, 111–14, 119–20, 135–6, 168, 177, 184, 190, 194, 196–8 neoliberalism 22, 68, 131, 136, 196, 202 neopragmatism 80, 124, 158 nicknames 74–5, 116, 126, 174, 186 nostalgia 17, 38, 46, 49, 142, 148, 159, 203 Olsen, Lance 65–7, 70–1 Ozick, Cynthia 44 Peirce, Charles Sanders 85 performativity 71, 117 Philomela 172, 176–7 philosophy 1, 2, 4, 9, 11–14, 16, 21–5, 30, 34, 37, 41, 43, 59, 65–8, 74–98, 105, 108, 110, 117–18, 144, 151, 174, 180, 194, 197–9, 204 pineal gland, avian 82, 113 human 82, 113 Platonic 10, 98 plurality 2, 22–4, 30, 34, 36, 42, 50, 60, 62, 80–1, 89–90, 93, 104–5, 140, 149, 158–9, 165, 193 post-postmodernism 1, 2, 41, 45–6, 54, 62, 100, 118 posthumanism 36, 131, 152 postmodernism 1, 6, 26–7, 34, 36–7, 45–6, 50–1, 56, 58, 62–3, 83, 123, 127, 130, 142, 175, 197 poststructuralism 26, 94, 157 pragmatism 11, 12, 14, 31, 67, 76, 80–6, 90, 118–19, 134, 139, 195, 199 Pynchon, Thomas 45, 47–8, 50, 59–60, 63 race 17, 167–72 realism 1, 44, 63, 81, 165–6 resistance to ending 2, 4, 8, 9, 12, 19, 21–2, 26, 30, 42, 61, 65, 79, 81, 86, 88, 115, 118–19, 124, 133, 136, 138, 158, 165, 193–6, 200, 204

221

Ricoeur, Paul 16, 18, 24, 65, 88, 101, 104–5, 120–2, 126–31, 170, 173, 191, 198 Rorty, Richard 2, 3, 11, 13, 14, 23, 34, 43, 53, 59, 65–7, 76, 79–90, 101–5, 124, 139, 143–4, 148–9, 198–9 The Consequences of Pragmatism 82 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature 80–2, 139 Russell, Bertrand 78, 87, 89 Ryerson, James 21–2, 96 Saunders, George 41 Schopenhauer, Arthur 13, 184–5, 187–8, 200 Shakespeare, William 43, 48, 127 Shannon, Claude 136 Shechner, Mark 41, 63 Shelley, Percy 48, 60 sincerity 12, 22, 34–5, 52, 100–1, 109, 138, 149, 156, 162, 196, 200 skeletal narrative 17, 137–44, 154, 161 Smith, Zadie 1, 118, 163 solipsism, solipsistic 3, 5, 6, 10–12, 16–19, 22, 25, 33, 66, 67, 87, 89–90, 93, 96, 104–5, 111–12, 114, 120–1, 129, 134, 136, 146, 168, 176, 180, 183, 187–8, 191, 194, 198, 200, 204 Sterne, Laurence 48 Taylor, Richard 11, 21, 198 television 35, 41, 46, 49, 71, 82, 116, 133, 144, 203 Thoreau, Henry David 46, 118 Trilling, Lionel 35 Tyler, Anne 63 Updike, John 14, 47, 49 Vollman, William 45, 166 Vonnegut, Kurt 7, 47 Wallace, David Foster, “Another Pioneer” 5, 40, 112–13 “Authority and American Usage” 30, 32–4, 165, 171, 201–2 and Blue Velvet 24 Both Flesh and Not 160 “Brief Interview 4” 182

222

Index

“Brief Interview 20” 77, 108, 112, 142–3, 146, 149–50, 154, 171, 173–6, 189 Brief Interviews with Hideous Men 3, 8, 17, 59, 77, 98–9, 107–8, 112, 124, 132, 134, 136, 142, 146–7, 149–50, 154, 171, 174–6, 181–3, 189, 191 The Broom of the System 2, 3, 6, 13, 15–16, 19, 28, 31, 34, 38, 44, 53, 59, 61, 66–91, 100, 102, 103, 107, 116–17, 120, 124–5, 127–8, 131–3, 139, 146, 151–2, 173–4, 176, 178, 194–5, 198 “Consider the Lobster” 161 and “crosswriting” 172 “David Lynch Keeps His Head” 23–4, 211 “Deciderization 2007” 47, 62–3, 155, 166, 201 “The Empty Plenum” 8, 67–8, 78, 90, 167, 172, 174, 176, 180, 188, 199 Everything and More 31, 33, 78, 163–4 Fate, Time and Language 21–2, 96, 198 “Federer Both Flesh and Not” 160, 176 “Forever Overhead” 108, 114, 184–5, 187–8 “Getting Away From Already Being Pretty Much Away From It All” 156 Girl With Curious Hair 2, 28, 52, 97, 102, 133, 140–2, 181, 182, 202 “Good Old Neon” 40, 101, 114, 117, 122, 135 “Greatly Exaggerated” 94, 106, 164 “Here and There” 5, 181 Infinite Jest 2, 3, 4, 12, 15, 18–19, 28, 39, 44–5, 50, 53, 56, 59, 61, 66, 71–3, 78, 87, 103, 105–6, 112–17, 123–7, 130–7, 140, 144, 149, 151–4, 160, 162, 169, 171, 173, 176–91, 197, 201 “Kafka’s Heroic Sanity” 9, 158–9 “Little Expressionless Animals” 182–4 “Lyndon” 16, 96, 146, 171, 182–3, 202–3 “Mister Squishy” 61, 139, 144 Oblivion 28, 59, 108, 122, 135, 139, 144 “Oblivion” 101, 112, 141, 144–6, 150, 154, 173, 181, 183

“Octet” 28–9, 107–8 “Order and Flux in Northampton” 5, 98–9, 129, 171, 178 The Pale King 11, 59–61, 131–6, 137, 148, 152, 156, 181, 185–8, 195, 200–2 “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” 11, 43, 59, 98, 139–45, 147, 177 “The Planet Trillaphon as it Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing” 117 “A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life” 134 Signifying Rappers 32–3, 42, 167–71 “The Soul is Not a Smithy” 8, 59, 139, 147–8, 201–3 “The Suffering Channel” 6, 48, 57, 101, 139, 144, 188 “Suicide as a Sort of Present” 57, 101, 112–15, 117, 134–5 “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” 112, 156–61, 165 This Is Water 31, 188, 201 “Ticket to the Fair” 156 “The View From Mrs Thompson’s” 202 “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” 28, 43–4, 50–9, 61, 115, 169, 182 Warren, Andrew 125, 127, 133, 144, 154, 160 Waugh, Patricia 25, 51 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1, 3, 7, 12–18, 24–5, 33–4, 43, 59, 65–90, 96, 103–5, 114–16, 120, 124, 128, 139, 152, 165, 173–4, 184, 191, 199 family resemblance 69–70, 116 language games 14, 33, 69–73, 75–9, 83, 85, 104 meaning-as-use 69–74, 79, 104, 124 Philosophical Investigations 69–70, 78 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 14–15, 68–71, 77, 80, 114 Wood, James 165–6 Wurtzel, Elizabeth 101 Zeno’s Dichotomy 164