A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies 9780230338111, 0230338119

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A MERICAN LITERATURE R EADINGS IN THE 21ST CENTURY Series Editor: Linda Wagner-Martin American Literature Readings in the 21st Century publishes works by contemporary critics that help shape critical opinion regarding literature of the nineteenth and twentieth century in the United States. Published by Palgrave Macmillan: Freak Shows in Modern American Imagination: Constructing the Damaged Body from Willa Cather to Truman Capote By Thomas Fahy Women and Race in Contemporary U.S. Writing: From Faulkner to Morrison By Kelly Lynch Reames American Political Poetry in the 21st Century By Michael Dowdy Science and Technology in the Age of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and James: Thinking and Writing Electricity By Sam Halliday F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Racial Angles and the Business of Literary Greatness By Michael Nowlin Sex, Race, and Family in Contemporary American Short Stories By Melissa Bostrom Democracy in Contemporary U.S. Women’s Poetry By Nicky Marsh James Merrill and W.H. Auden: Homosexuality and Poetic Influence By Piotr K. Gwiazda Contemporary U.S. Latino/a Literary Criticism Edited by Lyn Di Iorio Sand í n and Richard Perez The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo By Stephanie S. Halldorson Race and Identity in Hemingway’s Fiction By Amy L. Strong Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism By Jennifer Haytock The Anti-Hero in the American Novel: From Joseph Heller to Kurt Vonnegut By David Simmons Indians, Environment, and Identity on the Borders of American Literature: From Faulkner and Morrison to Walker and Silko By Lindsey Claire Smith The American Landscape in the Poetry of Frost, Bishop, and Ashbery: The House Abandoned By Marit J. MacArthur Narrating Class in American Fiction By William Dow The Culture of Soft Work: Labor, Gender, and Race in Postmodern American Narrative By Heather J. Hicks

Cormac McCarthy: American Canticles By Kenneth Lincoln Elizabeth Spencer’s Complicated Cartographies: Reimagining Home, the South, and Southern Literary Production By Catherine Seltzer New Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut Edited by David Simmons Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton: From Silence to Speech By Dianne L. Chambers The Emergence of the American Frontier Hero 1682–1826: Gender, Action, and Emotion By Denise Mary MacNeil Norman Mailer’s Later Fictions: Ancient Evenings through Castle in the Forest Edited by John Whalen-Bridge Fetishism and its Discontents in Post-1960 American Fiction By Christopher Kocela Language, Gender, and Community in Late Twentieth-Century Fiction: American Voices and American Identities By Mary Jane Hurst Repression and Realism in Postwar American Literature By Erin Mercer Writing Celebrity: Stein, Fitzgerald, and the Modern(ist) Art of Self-Fashioning By Timothy W. Galow Bret Easton Ellis: Underwriting the Contemporary By Georgina Colby Amnesia and Redress in Contemporary American Fiction: Counterhistory By Marni Gauthier Vigilante Women in Contemporary American Fiction By Alison Graham-Bertolini Queer Commodities: Contemporary US Fiction, Consumer Capitalism, and Gay and Lesbian Subcultures By Guy Davidson Reading Vietnam Amid the War on Terror By Ty Hawkins American Authorship and Autobiographical Narrative: Mailer, Wildeman, Eggers By Jonathan D’Amore Readings of Trauma, Madness, and the Body By Sarah Wood Anderson Intuitions in Literature, Technology, and Politics: Parabilities By Alan Ramón Clinton African American Gothic: Screams from Shadowed Places Maisha Wester Exploring the Limits of the Human through Science Fiction Gerald Alva Miller Jr. A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies Edited by Marshall Boswell and Stephen J. Burn

A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies Edited by

Marshall Boswell and Stephen J. Burn

A COMPANION TO DAVID FOSTER WALLACE STUDIES

Copyright © Marshall Boswell and Stephen J. Burn, 2013. All rights reserved. First published in 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–33811–1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A companion to David Foster Wallace studies / edited by Marshall Boswell and Stephen J. Burn. pages cm Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978–0–230–33811–1 (alk. paper) 1. Wallace, David Foster—Criticism and interpretation. I. Boswell, Marshall, 1965– editor of compilation. II. Burn, Stephen J., editor of compilation. PS3573.A425635Z65 2013 8139.54—dc23

2012039429

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: March 2013 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

C on ten ts

List of Abbreviations

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Preface Stephen J. Burn and Marshall Boswell

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1

Almost a Novel: The Broom of the System Patrick O’Donnell

1

2

A Fiction of Response: Girl with Curious Hair in Context Kasia Boddy

3 David Foster Wallace and the Mathematics of Infinity Roberto Natalini 4

“Webs of Nerves Pulsing and Firing”: Infinite Jest and the Science of Mind Stephen J. Burn

23 43

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“Location’s Location”: Placing David Foster Wallace Paul Quinn

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Mediated Immediacy in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men Mary K. Holland

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“ . . . ”: Language, Gender, and Modes of Power in the Work of David Foster Wallace Clare Hayes-Brady

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“The Constant Monologue Inside Your Head”: Oblivion and the Nightmare of Consciousness Marshall Boswell

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“The Chains of Not Choosing”: Free Will and Faith in William James and David Foster Wallace David H. Evans

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7

8

9

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CONTENTS

10 The Pale King, Or, The White Visitation Brian McHale

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11 The Novel after David Foster Wallace Andrew Hoberek

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Works Cited

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Notes on Contributors

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Index

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A bbr ev i at ions

Quotations from Wallace’s books are from the following editions, and are cited parenthetically with the abbreviations listed below: BOS GCH IJ SFT BI EM CL OB TIW

TPK CW BFN

The Broom of the System. New York: Penguin, 1987. Girl with Curious Hair. New York: Norton, 1989. Infinite Jest. 1996. Boston: Little, 1997. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. Boston: Little, 1997. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. 1999. New York: BackLittle, 2000. Everything and More: A Compact History of ∞. New York: Norton, 2003. Consider the Lobster. New York: Little, 2005. Oblivion. New York: Little, 2004. This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life. New York: Little, 2009. The Pale King. Ed. Michael Pietsch. New York: Little, 2011. Conversations with David Foster Wallace. Ed. Stephen J. Burn. Jackson, MS: U of Mississippi P, 2012. Both Flesh and Not. New York: Little, 2012.

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Pr eface

Toward the end of his life, David Foster Wallace wrote to William Kennick to praise his former philosophy professor’s provocative essay, “Who Needs Literary Theory?” Wallace explained that he’d found the essay fine and funny, not only because its arguments were cogent and true but because . . . there are elements of “theory” that I find interesting—mostly DeMan and early Derrida—but as you point out so well “theory” as dogma, as a Trojan horse for political agendas, or as a pretender to anything approaching philosophical rigor is pernicious and bad. I cannot tell you how dispiriting it is to have grad students spout theory dogma as revealed truth, or to pretend to “understand” Derrida without having read Heidegger or Husserl. So three cheers from this end. (letter)

Along with a cluster of similar remarks stretching back to the start of his writing career, this letter would seem to indicate a long-standing antipathy—or at the very least suspicion—toward literary criticism: “lit-speak,” he told Larry McCaffery, was “jargon we dress common sense in” (CW 29); reviews, he suggested to Richard Powers, were part of a communications loop that does not “include . . . the author” (CW 115). While the procedural appeal to literary theory attracted most of Wallace’s ire, his general wariness toward what Infinite Jest calls the “ozone” prose of some scholarly writing (1056n304) may make the academic study of his fiction seem an antithetical undertaking. Nevertheless, Wallace is one of the few major writers to have emerged from the 1980s M.F.A. industry with a solid grounding in the very same critical theory of which he registered so many reservations, and he was willing at times to see the writing of a 467-page novel (The Broom of the System), as no more than a “little poststructural gag” (CW 41). At the same time, for all his studied wariness, Wallace’s fiction is full of literary criticism. His sequence of novels begins with Rick Vigorous trying to write his own fiction by carrying out a collaborative critique of other stories. While Rick is clearly the object of Wallace satire, this is a parody whose edge is blunted by the fact that Wallace’s

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later work generates its own narrative momentum by either implicitly outlining an adroit commentary on other works, or—in the works that are “written in the margins” (as Wallace said of “Westward”) of earlier texts—by explicitly functioning as a critical act. Yet if Wallace’s work betrays a divided attitude toward scholarly research, when we trace the vectors in the opposite direction, it’s notable that academic appreciation of Wallace’s writing swiftly followed its publication, and by way of laying the foundation for the chapters that follow, it’s worth sketching the early evolution of such investigations. The earliest critical references to his writing are not studies or elucidations of his fiction, but rather attempts to position Wallace’s work as ancillary to another critical act. Presumably in recognition of his fiction’s critical energy, Wallace is first cited in an academic context by scholars seeking to draw his work into the magnetic field of their own critical agendas: just three years after his first novel was published, Arthur Saltzman quoted Girl with Curious Hair to frame a study of minimalism for Contemporary Literature in 1990; one year later, Cecelia Tichi’s Electronic Hearth invoked Wallace’s fiction and nonfiction to help articulate “the cognitive and perceptual acts that define a generation” that grew up in the “TV environment” (9); while in 1992, Judith McDonnell drew on Wallace’s work to make a larger argument about rap for the journal Popular Music and Society. Wallace is a sideline in such studies—an interesting new voice, a quotable perspective—but more than 20 years after this first critical moment, and in the dark shadow cast by Wallace’s suicide, the relationship between Wallace’s own writing and his critics’ has changed utterly. Although the coming years will likely bring variorum editions, juvenilia, and perhaps newly discovered short stories, such additions will fill out the total body of his work, but will surely be little more than adjuncts to a fictional project that is now already complete. At this point, much of the ground-clearing critical work on Wallace’s fiction has also been completed: Wallace’s writing is no longer simply a subsidiary component of a broader critical project, but has been read in terms of Wittgenstein, Buber, film theory, environmentalism, changing conceptions of the encyclopedic, and so on. His work has also provided the central focus for several book-length studies, two of which were written a decade ago by the editors of this book. The current volume is designed not to replace these studies, but rather to consolidate where Wallace studies stands after all the novels have been published. The chapters gathered in this collection fill out this skeleton history of Wallace criticism, by tracing and evaluating the scholarly work on Wallace, to date, while also connecting his fiction to larger critical arguments that run through the discipline. Such an approach is

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necessary because if Wallace’s fiction may initially seem suspicious of literary criticism, it is also true that professional literary critics have, so far, been slow to take on the substantial work of establishing the contours of Wallace’s achievement.1 Conversely, a disproportionate amount of the existing work on Wallace has been produced by independent scholars, graduate students, journalists, intrepid fans, bloggers, and the like. While this situation has guaranteed a lively and vibrant discussion, one whose variable quality has sometimes fruitfully circumvented whatever official channels govern the production of literary scholarship, this same heterodox approach to Wallace studies has also highlighted the need to submit his work to more rigorous study. Academic criticism is not—and should not be—the only conversation about Wallace’s work, but nor is it an irrelevant context when dealing with a writer who was the child of two academics, who enrolled in two advanced degree programs, and who spent most of his professional life as a college professor. A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies addresses this uneven situation with a more systematic and focused approach to Wallace’s fiction that attempts to capture the unusual combination of centripetal and centrifugal energies that characterize his work. The intrinsic complexity of Wallace’s books demands close attention to their unique organization and verbal density; but at the same time, these works insistently reach outside themselves, through layered allusions, metaleptic jumps, and a thematic obsession with connection. In line with this dual movement, our volume attempts a stereoscopic take on Wallace’s achievement, by alternating between chapters solely devoted to close examination of individual works, and thematically based chapters that accept his fiction’s implicit invitation to connect his writing to larger individual currents. Looked at in more detail, this approach testifies to the wide range of concerns, themes, and intellectual engagements that cohere around his work. While Wallace criticism has (for understandable reasons) predominantly focused upon Infinite Jest, we seek to redress the balance with detailed readings of each book of fiction. These studies are designed to provide the starting point for further critical readings of Wallace’s work by taking stock of where academic criticism of each work stands today. At the same time, they also attempt to advance that criticism by providing new perspectives that variously invoke granular synthesis, creative writing programs, antipsychiatry, feminist poetics, mentalese, and post-Pynchonian fiction by way of reframing and illuminating a given text. These work-specific readings are complemented by interchapters that (after the first two chapters) interrupt the procession of single-text studies by pressing larger segments of Wallace’s work into dialogue with eclectic critical environments,

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ranging through mathematics, the spatial turn in contemporary criticism, gender theory, the legacy of American Pragmatism, and the emergent field of post-postmodern literary studies. Along the way there are divergences between chapters: alternate readings of the same narrative sequences, arguments for different genealogies, and varying estimates of individual achievements. Our editorial stance has been that such plural readings are the natural territory of Wallace criticism, because what Wallace did take from the literary theory revolution was his belief that “once I’m done with the thing . . . it becomes simply language, and language lives not in but through the reader” (CW 40). Yet even this Barthesian statement does not go far enough: Wallace went beyond simply affirming Roland Barthes’s diagnosis of the “birth of the reader” (130), and elevated it to an architectural principle. His fiction is designed to enact rather than simply reflect Barthes’s “multi-dimensional space” (128) by deliberately creating an arena in which a variety of sometimes conflicting theoretical lenses find a rich breeding ground. The chapters in this volume do not attempt the illusory project of exhaustively covering the many dimensions of Wallace’s work, but, in concert, they do try to reflect the kaleidoscopic nature of the Wallacian text. Our hope is that, taken together, these chapters not only enrich our understanding of Wallace’s work but also mark out the coordinate points for more exacting estimates of his achievements. The editors are grateful to the David Foster Wallace Literary Trust for permission to quote from Wallace’s writing, and to everyone at Palgrave Macmillan for their support and patience throughout this entire process. STEPHEN J. BURN AND M ARSHALL BOSWELL Note 1. At risk of seeming to split hairs, there have also been difficulties in the extant body of Wallace criticism, with Infinite Jest’s textual labyrinth, in particular, acting (perhaps understandably) as an incubator for scholarly error. Even insightful studies of the novel have been prone to missteps, as in Michael North’s claim that the lethal entertainment “is never referred to by name in the novel” (Machine 164), when Molly Notkin—despite questioning the film’s existence— refers to the “lethally entertaining Infinite Jest” in the novel’s final stages (IJ 788). Elsewhere, Elizabeth Freudenthal’s essay on the novel describes the opening section as “the novel’s only instance of firstperson narration” (203), when, in fact, Infinite Jest not only includes other first-person sequences devoted to Hal (IJ 851–54), but also first-person sequences (IJ 127–28) that may stem from what Michael Pietsch called “an ‘I’ who may be the one trying to put everything together” (qtd. in Max 182).

CH A P T ER

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Almost a Novel: The Broom of the System Patrick O’Donnell

A new broom sweeps clean, but the old broom knows the corners. —Irish Proverb When I say: “My broom is in the corner,”—is this really a statement about the broomstick and the brush? —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (29)

The Broom of the System is apprentice work, a young man’s novel about his generation, in much the same way that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise (1920) is about the fabled jazz age generation and the amorous adventures of the homophonically named Amory Blaine. Both wise and wise-ass, Broom is clearly the product of the smartest kid in the class (and he really was). It could only have been written— this first novel, initiated as a senior thesis—by someone who has read everything he could get his hands on from the age of five, and absorbed it all not semiotically or hermeneutically, but in the manner of granular synthesis, a method of assimilating sound and information, according to the The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Music, comprised of sound “grains” assembled into short snippet[s] of about ten to a hundred milliseconds, an elementary particle as opposed to a complex soundscape. By combining different grains over time, and by overlapping several grains at the same instant of time, interesting sonic effects can be produced. The

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synthesis techniques in which different sound grains are combined is known as granular synthesis. . . . Since its inception, many composers have utilized granular synthesis as a musically powerful technique to create and manipulate complex sonic universes using basic particles” (Sarafin 207).

Think of granular synthesis in terms of writing, and this seems to me a fair ballpark description of how Wallace writes, or how he processes reading into writing. This comparison is based more on a reading of his fiction than on personal observation, which in my case was slight: he dropped into a couple of sessions of my course on narrative theory at the University of Arizona (we were reading Roland Barthes, who was still in vogue at the time, S/Z to be specific), he sampled, he wandered off. He was clearly not cut out for the long haul of a seminar; he had moved on to other venues, restless, endlessly absorbing, sampling, trying it on for size and noticing the tight fit, the lack of oxygen in the room. At the time and for many years afterward, I confess, as Wallace’s fame and cult grew, I more or less ignored his fiction, even as I was investing time and books and considerable energies into the teaching and study of contemporary American fiction. I don’t think it was personal—I barely even registered his presence in the class, save to notice what appeared to be the affectation of a headscarf and a distracted air that I took to be a sign of boredom but which easily could have been the look of one whose wheels spun at a much higher speed than normal. No, my view of Wallace for a long time—I am embarrassed to admit it—was that he was (as many of those critical of his fiction have repeatedly said) a Pynchon wannabe: the same encyclopedic excess, the same slapstick comedy spinning into the absurd, the same range and heft and heavy demands on the reader, save that (I thought) with Pynchon the payoff was bigger because (I thought) one got a world as complex, with as many blind alleys and odd characters and strange places on the map to explore, as the real one. What I didn’t notice, from first to last in Wallace’s writing, is the quality and depth of affect that he achieves in navigating the relational terrain between the culture one inhabits, identities, and emotion—a terrain Pynchon rarely explores, obsessed as he is with processes of signification. Pynchon’s writing is semiotic; Wallace’s is that of a naturalist, in the sense that he is interested in the affective, environmental relations between objects, animals, humans. The same author who writes The Broom of the System writes one of the most engaged and probing discussions of the relation between the human pleasure

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principle and animal suffering in “Consider the Lobster,” where lobsters, “basically giant sea insects,” are transformed into affective entities via a meticulous scrutiny of the specificities of natural science (CL 237). While Pynchon experiments with language in the hermeneutic mode (how many connections can one make between dispersed wordstrings with the Gadamerian hope that a quantitative array will eventually instantiate a qualitative enlargement of perspective?), Wallace experiments with language in the antinomic mode (How do we adapt ourselves to the inexorable frayed ends, blunt oppositions, and dissociations of human experience? How do we feel about having to do so? How does the writer sample the frayed, the blunt, the dissociative at the granular level, thus rendering experience as symptomatic?). In its interrogative registers, granularity, and cultural specificity, Wallace’s fiction, from first to last, requires a kind of sampling, a mode of reading that locates its partialities and inconsistencies, paying more attention to its noise and distortions than its harmonies. It is within this framework that I wish to consider Wallace’s first novel by scrutinizing a small sample of its elements.

Title An antinomy of old news: two familiar epigraphs, one from the philosopher who is widely acknowledged as one of David Foster Wallace’s primary intellectual sources, and one familiar to those of Celtic heritage, both coincidentally overlapping with their figuring of the relation between corners and brooms.1 Here, I am not so interested in frontally addressing the relationship between Wittgenstein and Wallace that others have previously assessed (justly troubling notions of influence and source), as I am in pursuing Adam Kelly’s call, in reading Wallace, “to show as precisely as possible (Wallace teaches us that absolute precision is necessarily impossible) how Wallace’s radical method for waking readers up to agency operates in his texts, and how this technique is linked to his highly original style” (“Death”). Understanding how Wallace articulates a relation between “agency” and “technique” in The Broom of the System —one that carries the dual sense inherent in Kelly’s formulation of awakening and alarming the reader—will demand a partial inventory of the novel, made up as it is of intentionally mismatched parts, precise in themselves, but imprecise in their joining. The title of the novel is, indeed, indicative of Wallace’s concern with “agency” as comprising an interactive and highly mutable ratio

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of “self” to “other,” which for Wallace is homologous to the relation of part to whole (we can consider Wallace’s generic sense of the novel as a totality made of up of many discursive and rhetorical parts). Wittgenstein’s elaborate discussion of the broom-object in Aphorism 60 of Philosophical Investigations is, in part, a reflection on the linguistic relation between part and whole and a querying of the method that enables the figuring of that relation. The questions raised by Wittgenstein’s thought experiment are as fundamental to rhetoric and the structuralist poetics of the novel as they are to philosophy: when it is recognized that the object (or language system, or novel) is comprised of parts, what becomes of its status as a whole? Who determines which parts are essential to the whole, and which are ancillary (Wittgenstein’s question might be applied ad infinitum to a series of smaller parts: the brush composed of bristles and wood, the bristles composed of animal hair or polyester blends that are parts of an animal or strands of fused elements, etc.)? To what extent is each part a whole unto itself, and to what extent is a part not a part and a whole not a whole unless the two are matched and joined instrumentally, aesthetically, rhetorically? These questions pertain to a form of philosophical investigation that Wallace conducts in The Broom of the System, beginning with its title, which refers to his exploration of the post-systematic nature of a contemporary “reality” made up of multiply mediated and, often, colliding forces, granular singularities, and narratives. Positing the relation of part to whole as an open question, and accepting that relation as indubitably asymmetrical and recursive comprises much of the work of The Broom of the System. The novel comprises a totality where binaries like “part/whole,” “self/other,” and “system/ chaos” are rendered dynamic in their deconstitution (Wallace breaks down a massive reality into its particularities and specificities) and recognized for their exclusions and the cultural logics that undergird them. The “excluded middle” of Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) that Oedipa Mass had registered abjectly as hermeneutic “bad shit” becomes in Wallace’s hands an arena—the novel itself— where a contentious, fractious, and dynamic set of relations between asymptomatic particularities and incorporative entities, identities self-destructive and obsessively domineering, and broken systems and generative disorders are allowed to play themselves out (181).2 There is, perhaps, a “healthy” or steady state to be achieved in this mediate comprehension of reality, but Wallace is more interested in observing the limit-conditions of a performative, deconstituted “real” that—as he writes of the vision of his favorite director, David

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Lynch—“is about somebody turning into somebody else,” where the long-short scrutiny of a facial expression “is just held there, fixed and grotesque, until it starts to signify about seventeen different things at once” (SFT 151, 163). One of Wallace’s favored techniques is to exaggerate to the point of absurdity to make visible the grotesqueness of agency or identity conceived in certain ways. Thus, Norman Bombardini, the owner of the building that houses the publishing firm of Frequent & Vigorous, the employers of the novel’s put-upon heroine, Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman. Presiding over a genetic engineering concern with a murky agenda, Bombardini (his name says it all) is the operatic limit-case of The Broom of the System. Announcing the parameters of “Project Total Yang” to Lenore and her obsessive boyfriend and boss, Rick Vigorous, in a restaurant where Bombardini is in the process of consuming nine steak dinners, he articulates an incorporative fantasy that exists at the extreme end of the novel’s sliding scale marking the fuzzy and dynamic relationship between “self” and “other”: “A full universe, Vigorous, Ms. Beadsman. We each need a full universe. Weight Watchers and their allies would have us systematically decrease the Self-component of the universe, so that great Other-set will be physically attracted to the now more physically attractive Self, and run in to fill the void caused by that diminution of self. Certainly not correct, but only half of the range of valid solutions to the full-universe problem. Is my drift getting palpable? Just as in genetic engineering, Vigorous. There is always more than one solution.” “I think I—” “An autonomous full universe, Vigorous. An autonomously full universe, Ms. Beadsman.” “What should I do with these mints, here?” “I’ll just take that bowl, thank you. Rather than diminishing Self to entice Other to fill our universe, we may also of course obviously choose to fill the universe with Self ” (BOS 91)

Following the binary logic of “Project Total Yang,” Bombardini plans to keep eating until he incorporates everything else, but his specific target or “significant other” in this regard becomes Lenore, whose problem lies at the opposite end of the spectrum: “she simply felt—at times, mind you, not all the time, but at sharp and distinct intuitive moments—as if she had no real existence” (BOS 66). But the “full/ empty” binary that both Bombardini and Lenore (at moments) map onto “self/other” binary—indeed, the entire question of thinking of objects and identities in binary terms—is deflected by Wittgenstein’s

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aphorism and the novel’s title: if an object can no longer be thought of as merely the collection of its parts, if the relation of part to part and part to whole is assymetrical and recursive, and if the entire room of the system is rendered problematic by the mere object of the broom that would sweep it of its impurities, then the idea of reality as comprised of “yin” and/or “yang” becomes moot. One aspect of Wallace’s investment in narratively tackling the familiar question of self versus other is rendering of this relation in affective terms: one is always partly full or partly empty; fullness and emptiness are dynamic physical states registered in the body that signify, at the extreme, sublime or impoverished emotional conditions as well as states of being and nonbeing. In fact, both Bombardini and Lenore implicitly recognize, from their positions of extremity (Bombardini, by novel’s end, a destructive engine by virtue of his sheer size; Lenore receding into the invisibility of the West), the erroneous logic of the binary that Wallace both elaborates and contests in the novel. Bombardini says it himself: “There is always more than one solution” even though he does not manage to think it through (BOS 91). If there is more than one solution, then there are more than two, et cetera (to use one of Wallace’s characteristic expressions). The narrator goes on in the inventory of Lenore’s consciousness to state that “as if she had no real existence, except for what she said and did and perceived and et cetera, and that these were, it seemed at such times, not really under her control. There was nothing pure” (BOS 66, emphasis added). “Nothing pure” might be considered an alternative title for a novel in which the system, because it is not one, cannot be swept (clean).

Plot The plot of The Broom of the System is an assemblage of half-finished stories, intentions gone awry, and discursive trajectories: despite its mass, the novel can be considered an ode to incompletion. Chronologically, it begins in 1981 in the Mount Holyoke dorm room of Clarice Beadsman, Lenore’s sister. Lenore, aged 15, is checking out the college scene, and there encounters future principals of the novel Melissa Sue Metalman (“Mindy”), a roomate, and Andrew “Wang-Dang” Lang, one of two intrusive frat boys from Amherst. After this sideways origin story, we are cast forward in time to late August, 1990 where we next encounter Lenore working as a switchboard operator in Cleveland at Frequent & Vigorous, a directionless firm mired in navel-gazing and incompetence, and conducting a treacherous affair with the domineering Rick Vigorous, the parodically phallic

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off-rhyme of his name suggesting his failure as both a businessman and a romantic partner who is hyperaware of his “freakishly small penis” (BOS 137). With the singular exception of Chapter 4, dated 1972, which transcribes a meeting between the governor of Ohio, Raymond Zusatz, several aides, and Ed Roy Yancy, vice-president of Industrial Desert Design, Inc., in which the planning of an immense artificial desert—The Great Ohio Desert, or GOD—is discussed, the remainder of the novel takes place between August 25 and September 11, 1990. Dates are important to Wallace: he scatters them liberally throughout the novel. Every chapter is dated by year, and many of them are sectioned into alphabetical parts, but the sporadic dating and layout of the chapters typifies the asymmetry that extends to every corner of the novel. The longest of 21 chapters is Chapter 11, which runs over 75 pages and is sectioned into 9 alphabetized parts; the shortest is Chapter 19, consisting of 2 sentences, and the remainder run the gamut in terms of length and plot complexity. The mismatch and hybridity of the novel’s parts goes well beyond these structural and temporal elements. Its story arcs (they might be better described as story squiggles) are conveyed through a mélange of discourses: transcripts of “rap” sessions between “Dr. Curtis Jay, Ph.D.” and Lenore, who is seeing the analyst to address her feeling that she does not exist (Rick Vigorous is also one of Jay’s patients— the fact that they are both seeing the same analyst further complicates their relationship); long conversations at a restaurant, on a plane, in a bar between Rick and Lenore in which Rick recounts shaggy dog stories he has received as editor of F&V’s literary magazine—actually his own as he appears to be sole contributor to the publication; excerpts from Rick’s journal, some of them containing entries from a sequence of stories he is writing about the adventures of an alter ego, one “Monroe Fieldbinder,” who takes on multiple roles as a parodic noir detective, insurance agent, Hemingwayesque hunter, and voyeuristic neighbor; dialogues with Lenore’s parrot, Vlad the Impaler, who has acquired the capacity to ventriloquize human speech at an advanced level in an assemblage of sentence-fragments from multiple speakers; an article excerpted from a professional advertising magazine; a transcript of a wedding; a passage from the duty log of a Chicago emergency room doctor; and letters, dreamwork, jokes, aphorisms, assorted puzzles, and codes. The Broom of the System is thus an encyclopedic novel—one that contains multiple knowledges, discourses, styles, lists, and catalogues.3 It may also be considered as pastiche, in Fredric Jameson’s sense of what constitutes postmodern parody: “the imitation of a peculiar or

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unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter” (Postmodernism 17). However, Jameson’s severely limited definition is contested by Wallace’s use of “linguistic masks,” “dead languages” (Vlad the Impaler comes immediately to mind), and “idiosyncratic styles” to appositely (and comically) convey a satirical portrait of American capitalism and the middle class in the 1980s, especially as these formations infiltrate the self/other dynamics of human relationships. The Broom of the System can be equally considered within the framework of “Menippean satire,” which Northrop Frye defined as a “loose-jointed narrative form”: The Menippean satire deals less with people as such than with mental attitudes. Pedants, bigots, cranks, parvenus, virtuosi, enthusiasts, rapacious and incompetent professional men of all kinds, are handled in terms of their occupational approach to life as distinct from their social behavior. The Menippean satire thus resembles the confession in its ability to handle abstract ideas and theories, and differs from the novel in its characterization, which is stylized rather than naturalistic, and presents people as mouthpieces of the ideas they represent. (309)

Yet, as much as the novel is invested in performing satirical work as it reveals the mental attitudes and philosophical positions of a variety of bigots, pedants, quacks (most notably, Dr. Jay) and cranks, it is equally invested—contra Frye’s definition of Menippean satire—in “persons,” and in exploring the nature (an aspect of its “naturalism”) of personhood existentially and affectively. These conceptual frameworks, then, both illuminate the subject of The Broom of the System and show the extent to which any attempt to categorize a novel that so thoroughly scrutinizes categorization (an act that depends upon a stable relation between part and whole) will fall short. Wallace places the generic categories of “novel” and “story” under such scrutiny at several points in the novel, most notably in a conversation between Rick and Lenore about a Fieldbinder story that Lenore dislikes, which leads to a debate over the role of context in storytelling. The story recounts a couple’s voyeuristic observation of the activities of the family next door, which may include an incident of child molestation. Lenore suggests that the story lacks an appropriate use of context: “Shouldn’t a story make the context that make people do certain things and have the things be appropriate or not appropriate? A story shouldn’t just mention the exact context its supposed to

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really create, right?” (BOS 335). Rick counters that the story is “like a story about a story . . . Almost a story about the way a story waits and never dies, can always come back, even after ostensible characters have long since departed the real scene” (BOS 335). He reveals that this story, like all of the Fieldbinder stories, is really about his need to separate “inside” from “outside,” “self” from “other”: I seem to remember that he [the anonymous author, i.e., Rick himself] said he conceived it as a story of neighborhood obsession . . . how it’s usually impossible for the respective neighbors to know about such things, because each neighbor is shut away inside his own property . . . Locked away . . . Kept private . . . Except that occasionally the Private leaked out . . . and became Incident. And that perceived Incident became Story. And that story endured, in Mind, even behind and within the isolating membrane of house and property and fence that surrounded and isolated each individual neighbor-resident . . . And that, as I recall, some of the references in the story . . . had to do with a context created by a larger narrative system of which this piece was a part. (BOS 336)

Rick’s defense of the story manifests his anxiety about boundaries of all kinds, between public and private, inside and outside, text and context, even as he explains the “aboutness” of the story—its life and repeatability—as a “leaking” or crossing of those boundaries. The Broom of the System can equally be thought of as “almost a novel,” one that is about, in part, its own categorical leakiness, its incapacity, among other things, to keep text and context separate, to be a “narrative system” or a piece of the larger narrative system of the novel as a genre that categorized as one of its elements. This recognition informs, once more, Wallace’s “sampling” technique, which registers the partial narrative, the symptomatic instance, in the collusions of text and context, as the “whole” story. Accordingly, The Broom of the System consists of a series of intersecting plots that are “almost” plots in the traditional sense, but something is always left out or unconnected in the novel’s multiple stories: the switchboard at Frequent & Vigorous, broken throughout the novel and continuously routing calls from every business on the circuit to a beleaguered Lenore and her coworker and roommate, Candy Mandible, serves as a comic metaphor for the disconnect between call and response, intention and act, and cause and effect that pervades the novel. The novel’s partial plotting formally signifies its being about the condition of the “almost” in several senses: almost

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a novel; almost inscribing a character with a completed agency and destiny; almost a part of a whole that is, itself, only almost a whole. A summary, then, of (almost all) of its plots. (1) The narrative of the disintegrating relationship between Lenore Beadsman and Rick Vigorous. Lenore’s problem: she lacks “identity”; Rick’s problem: he is a mini-Bombardini, attempting to incorporate Lenore’s identity into his own by compelling her to linguistically exteriorize her inwardness. Rick: “So then why do you love me?” Lenore: “Oh, gee. I’d really rather not do this now.” Rick: “No, I’m serious, Lenore, why? On the basis of what? I need to know, so that I might try desperately to reinforce those features of me on the basis of which you love me. So that I can have you inside myself, for all time” (BOS 286) . . . Lenore: “You want to know what I really don’t love? I don’t love this sick obsession with measuring, and demanding that things be said, and pinning, and having, and telling. It’s all one big boiling spasm that makes me more than a little ill, not to mention depressed” (BOS 289). The resolution to the plot of this narrative yields no spasm of epiphany, only to a series of vexed conversations between the pair that contribute to Rick’s ever-increasing desperation over “possessing” Lenore to the point of absurdity: venturing with her into the Great Ohio Desert, he handcuffs her to himself in a “remake” of Frank Norris’s McTeague (1899). Lenore takes up with Lang, and in the novel’s penultimate scene—a parody of romantic melodrama—with all of the principles gathered around Lenore, each demanding that she respond to a controlling need, she pronounces a single word, “Hey” (BOS 457), seemingly as a form of acquiescence to Lang’s offer of immediate departure to his family home in Texas. But this final, gnomic pronouncement or “telling,” along with her lighting out for new territories that is reported second hand in the novel’s final chapter, offers only a metonymic extension of the novel’s self/other problematic: the phallically named Lang, who has left his wife (the Mindy Metalman of the novel’s first chapter) because, in his words, she’s “just run out of holes in your pretty body, and I’ve run out of things to stick in them. My pecker, my fingers, my tongue, my toes . . . my hair, my nose, my wallet, my car keys. So on. I’ve just run the fuck out of ideas” (BOS 176–77), seems a postreflective version of Rick Vigorous, and there appears to be no language available to Lenore beyond the explicative syllable to advance our knowledge of her consciousness. The novel’s major figure thus disappears into a kind of “et cetera” of remoteness and repetition: how long will it take for Lang to conceive of her identity as a limited collection of “holes” or parts bereft of a whole as well?

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(2) The narrative of Lenore’s search for her great-grandmother, an Oxford-trained Wittgensteinian philosopher who has disappeared along with 15 other patients and staff from the Shaker Heights Rest Home. This narrative trajectory, a parodic conflation of quest-romance and conspiracy, has it that Lenore’s great-grandmother/mentor/substitute mother (also named Lenore) and a cabal of the elderly have escaped the home after coming into possession of research related to the manufacturing prototype of a baby food additive that will, supposedly, geometrically increase cognitive development in infants: the additive is the brainchild of R&D at Stonecipheco, a giant of the baby food industry presided over by Lenore’s imposing father, Stonecipher Beadsman. What Lenore’s great-grandmother and her group intend to do with the stolen information is unclear, though the conspiracy (and the influence of Lenore’s great-grandmother) seems to be far-reaching. Dr. Jay, for example, has been directed to analyze Lenore by her great-grandmother according to a certain invented method that accords with the Wittgensteinian language-training that the younger woman has experienced at the hands of the philosopher-elder. Lenore’s lifelong resistance to talking about herself, confessing her feelings, or emoting over the “big boiling spasm” of the self is related to her great-grandmother’s instruction in the nature of language as, from her perspective, fundamentally descriptive of the status of the object in its outward appearance (BOS 289). The “case” of the self is precisely what it appears to be, outwardly, on the surface of the body. Lenore takes on the search for the missing Lenore (the double-naming clearly suggesting that the quest for her great-grandmother is also a quest for herself) that leads her back to one point of origin at Amherst, where she discusses philosophy and conspiracy with her brother, Stonecipher Lavache Beadsman, and to another in the Great Ohio Desert (the scene of her entrapment by Rick Vigorous), but Lenore’s great-grandmother has disappeared for good from the novel in its opening pages, and what lies behind her disappearance, the intentions informing the conspiracy she apparently foments, and Lenore’s reasons for tracking her remain unknown. Under the aegis of a quest gone awry from the beginning of the novel, narrative intention itself goes wandering in The Broom of the System: motive, affect, direction are not so much hidden as outside the domain of the narrative, or only partially and sporadically visible. Affective or empathetic incapacity is one of Wallace’s primary concerns here and throughout his writing. (3) The narrative of the Beadsman family in which the relation between genealogy and destiny is tested in apposition to story of

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Lenore Beadsman as the heroine of an irresolute bildungsroman. While information about the Beadsman family going back several generations is provided sporadically throughout the novel and via several narrators whose memories and grasp upon historical reality is questionable, it seems evident that the family suffers from a “curse” that especially afflicts its female members. Like her great-grandmother, Lenore Beadsman’s “just plain grandmother” (BOS 37), Concarnadine Beadsman, is housed in the Shaker Heights Rest Home, but unlike the elder Lenore, who is there merely because of the physical effects of old age, Concarnadine is suffering an advanced case of Alzheimer’s. Lenore’s mother, Patrice Lavache Beadsman, resides in a sanitarium in Madison, Wisconsin, as the result, in part, of being driven mad by the machinations of her husband. Lenore’s grandfather (husband of Concarnadine and son of the elder Lenore) is Stonecipher Beadsman II, the founder of Stonecipheco Baby Food Products and one of the principal developers of East Corinth, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, viewable from the air as built in the shape of Beadsman II’s favorite movie star, Jayne Mansfield. Beadsman II has died spectacularly “in a vat accident during a brief and disastrous attempt on the part of Stonecipheco Baby Food Products to develop and market something that would compete with Jell-O” (BOS 45). Lenore’s father, Stonecipher Beadsman III has, among other things, virtually imprisoned his wife in a suite of rooms in the Beadsman mansion while she was pregnant with Lenore’s younger brother, Lavache, because he fears that her depressive behavior (primarily induced by his quite visible affair with the children’s governess) will adversely affect his children, to whom he administers standardized tests to determine who will oversee the Stonecipheco empire upon reaching maturity. Lavache Beadsman, brilliant but damaged, is a perennial student at Amherst, where he spends his time watching game shows and writing expert papers on every subject imaginable for other students while tending to his wooden leg. The prosthesis is the consequence of an injury he suffered when his mother fell from a trellis that she had climbed to view her children whom she has been forbidden to see through an open window in their upper-floor nursery; the fall results in Lavache’s immediate birth, his “leg . . . torn off in [his] explosive ejaculation from Patrice’s womb” (BOS 267). Lenore’s other brother, John Beadsman, “an academic in Chicago who was not well” (BOS 63), navigates in an out of therapy sessions and emergency mental health clinics. And after graduating from Mount Holyoke,

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Clarice, Lenore’s only sister, has gone into business and become the owner of a tanning-salon franchise; she is married to Alvin Spaniard, who has been made a vice-president at Stonecipheco, and has two children, Stonecipher (“Stony”) and Spatula. Like the Beadsman family, the Spaniard family is extraordinarily dysfunctional: they engage in an absurdist form of “family therapy” in which they don masks of themselves while watching an audience projected on their television screen “respond” to a scripted narrative that they each voice in turn: “There once existed,” Stony recites behind his mask, “a unit called the Spaniard family . . . What is more . . . the people who were in the family thought of themselves more as . . . members of the family than as real people who were special individual people. All they thought about was the family, and all they thought of themselves as was family-parts” (BOS 167). This mock-performance of the incorporation of the self into a larger whole (“special individual people” into “family unit”) is but a variation of Bombardini’s fantasy, and underscores the twisted relation between part and whole that the novel’s family narratives manifest: the Beadsmans are scattered across the realms, disappeared, institutionalized, literally (in Lavache’s case) with pieces missing; the Spaniards must conduct an irreal, hypersimulated ritual that anneals the “part” of self into the “whole” of family to sustain the domestic fiction. In both cases, all attempts to control the fate of the family or its individual members—to impose upon reality a genetic destiny, a determinate relation between the whole of the familial social order and the partiality of identity—result in comic disaster. The novel’s family narratives reveal Wallace’s sardonic take on the infamous opening line of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1873–77): “All happy families alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” as well as the recognition that repetition (as in giving all male heirs the same name) offers no historical certainty and that chance rules circumstance. Like the “most sadistic board game ever invented” (BOS 160) played by the Spaniard children, Chutes and Ladders, in which “certain rolls of the dice got you into board positions where you fell into chutes and slid ass-over-teakettle all the way down to the bottom . . . the chances of falling into chutes increas[ing] as you climbed more ladders” (BOS 160)—a game event realized in Patrice Beadsman’s unfortunate fall—destiny in The Broom of the System is a matter of climbing “up ladder after ladder until the End was in sight . . . nixed by a plummet down,” a “dashing of hopes and return to the recreational drawing board” (BOS 160–61). In other terms, a narrative without ends, a rising and falling without climax.

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The Broom of the System is composed of many other narrative grains and fragments, including multiple narratives of relationships such as that between Lang and his former wife, Mindy Metalman, or that between Rick Vigorous, his former wife, Lenore Peck, and his son, Vance, all of which are dysfunctional or lopsided in some way, indicative of Wallace’s portrayal of a social order in which relationality itself can only occur through a semi-chaotic system of misunderstandings, passive/aggressive physical and emotional encounters, and projections of fantasies. There is as well the novel’s dreams, primarily those of Rick Vigorous as related to Dr. Jay: of particular note is Rick’s dream of stimulating Queen Victoria’s clitoris with a hairbrush; his dream of being checked into a motel by an enormous mouse; and an elaborate dream of a phantasmagoric, eroticized Lenore emerging from the page of a manuscript as an ink drawing while Rick urinates, flooding the confines of his office. Additional miscellaneous narratives abound, including the Fieldbinder stories, the stories tracking the journey of Vlad the Impaler, stories illustrating the novel’s cultural architecture, including the construction of the Great Ohio Desert, the “Gilligan’s Island” bar frequented by the novel’s principals, or the elaborate revolving chair arrangement of Dr. Jay’s office. Binding many of these fragmentary narratives together is the connective narrative tissue of contingency and coincidence (the source of the novel’s many fatalistic and paranoiac moments) including the fact that Vigorous and Lang are both Amherst alumni and brothers in the same fraternity (“Psi Phi”), or the coincidence of Mindy Metalman being, at once, Clarice Beadsman’s former roomate, Lang’s former wife, and Vigrous’s backyard adolescent fantasy. As Lang says of the various coincidences leading to his becoming employed by Vigorous in translating material from the Greek for the Stonecipheco gene-altering food additive, “Ti symptosis . . . it’s just this expression . . . idiomatic modern Greek for, like ‘What a hell of a coincidence.’ Which this is, sure enough, let me tell you.” (BOS 234). The list of narrative particles, grains, threads, and linkages might go on: this novel is comprised of dozens of stories and potential stories, trajectories and partial lines of flight, and unconnected dots. Yet there is no singular system in The Broom of the System, no overriding graph or chart of the novel’s plots and subplots that could show how they are thematically or homologically related, as in Dickens, or bear the potential for paranoid connection, as in Pynchon. Even in those moments, as above, when coincidence might lead to narrative fate— perhaps Lenore is destined for Lang in the novel’s melodramatic dimension—the thin, frayed fabric of contingencies that ties one to

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the other, as well as Wallace’s insistence on the irresolute nature (and future) of his protagonist, suggest the degree to which the reality of plot, or the sense that reality is in any way plotted, is put into question in the novel. In another sense, plot reveals its partiality in The Broom of the System: all of these stories can only be filled out and connected (or not) through extrapolations entirely dependent on the unpredictability, responsiveness, and individuality of the singular reader, Wallace’s audience first and last.

Language Perhaps above all, The Broom of the System reflects on language as a figurative and communicative agent (or failure of agency); yet— despite the significant references to Wittgenstein—Wallace is neither interested in a systematic theory of language, nor in critiquing the notion of language as a system. Rather, the novel makes its investment in the deployments in various narrative rhetorics that, in Wallace’s hands, are indicative of a partial and often abrasive relationship between language and reality. Three symptomatic instances will suffice. (1) Antinomy. Classically (from the moment of Kant’s invocation of the concept in the Critique of Judgment), this is a form of paradox in which two equally valid statements contradict each other, and yet, because both are valid, each must be allowed to stand as authentic or truthful. There are several instances of antinomy in the novel, including a recurring instance explained by Lenore to Mr. Bloemaker, the director of the Shaker Heights Rest Home, as one of the elder Lenore Beadsman’s favorite philosophical conundrums that she has visualized in a cartoon of a man in a smock with a razor whose head is “an explosion of squiggles of ink” that she has drawn on the label of a Stonecipheco baby food jar: “Gramma really likes antinomies. I think this guy here,” looking down at the drawing on the back of the label, “is the barber who shaves all and only those who do not shave themselves.” Mr. Bloemaker looked at her. “A barber?” “The big killer question . . . is supposed to be whether the barber shaves himself. I think that’s why his head’s exploded here.” “Beg pardon?” “If he does, he doesn’t, and if he doesn’t, he does.” (BOS 42)

Lenore describes an antimony in which the subject of the statement (the barber) by virtue of his agency (he shaves all and only those who

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do not shave themselves) both must and cannot possibly shave himself (if he does shave himself, then the statement that he shaves only those who do not shave themselves is untrue; if he does not shave himself, then the statement that he shaves all who do not shave themselves is untrue). The linguistic example can be extended to a general condition in The Broom of the System in which, as we have seen, dream, fantasy, and obsessive projection contend with each other in an incomplete reality comprised of multiple and contradictory parts, inhabited by identities who attempt to (ful)fill themselves by emptying out (psychologically consuming and dominating) others. The novel’s relationships— particularly that of Rick and Lenore—illustrate what Slavoj Žižek has conceived as the antinomy of “extreme individualization” that characterizes contemporary identity: “the injunction to ‘be yourself,’ to . . . achieve self-realization by fully asserting your unique creative potential” (Ticklish 373). Žižek explains: “The inherent obverse of ‘Be your true Self!’ is therefore the injunction to cultivate permanent refashioning, in accordance with the postmodern postulate of the subject’s indefinite plasticity”; but in the pursuit of this postulate (Bombardini might be the star example), “individualization reverts to its opposite, leading to the ultimate identity crisis: subjects experience themselves as radically unsure, with no ‘proper face,’ changing from one imposed mask to another, since what is behind the mask is ultimately nothing, a horrifying void they are trying to fill in with their compulsive activity” (Ticklish 373). Žižek’s description could be applied almost word for word to the parodic scenes of the Spaniard’s family therapy, Bombardini’s attempt to fill himself by eating the world, or Rick’s fantasies of incorporating Lenore’s “insides” by getting her to talk. The linguistic and performative condition of identity in The Broom of the System is one in which self-actualization becomes its opposite, its other, an antimony that speaks to Wallace’s sense, “self” is always partial, in process, and (in part) self-destructive. (2) Hypotaxis/Parataxis. Both of these venerable means of thinking about how sentence structure conveys emotion and significance are freely deployed in The Broom of the System, and sometimes mixed together in the same sentence though they are stylistic alter egos. Hypotaxis refers to a complex sentence in which clauses and phrases are subordinated to signify the ways in which the primary meaning (often residing in the “independent” clause) of the sentence “dominates” its parts; parataxis refers, appositely, to a complex sentence (or a set of sequential simple sentences) in which subordination does not occur, indicating that each of the parts are “equal” or contentious in

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terms of semiotic and affective weight: the coordinating conjunction “and” is the connecting tissue of paratactic writing, and metonomy, which pursues the logic of substitution, is its favored figure of speech. One could argue that all writing is either hypotactic, or paratactic, or a mixture of both, but in Wallace’s novel these modes become reflexive as the writing itself, in effect, comments upon its capacity to represent a reality that has the status of an incomplete, or endlessly protracted sentence. Here is an example comprising Section B of Chapter 3, a single sentence of 238 words, devoted to the history of Lenore’s relationship with her great-grandmother: Well, now, just imagine how you’d feel if your great-grandmother —great it could really probably be argued in more than one sense of the word, which is to say the supplier of your name, the person under whose aegis you’d first experienced chocolate, books, swing sets, antinomies, pencil games, contract bridge, the Desert, the person in whose presence you’d first bled into your underwear (at sixteen, now, late sixteen, grotesquely late as we seem to remember, in the east wing, during the closing theme of “My Three Sons,” when the animated loafers were tapping, with you and Lenore watching, the slipping, sick relief, laughter and scolding at once, Gramma using her left arm and there was her old hand in Lenore’s new oldness), the person through whose personal generosity and persuasiveness vis à vis certain fathers you’d been overseas, twice, albeit briefly, but still, your great-grandmother, who lived right near you—were just all of the sudden missing, altogether, and was for all you knew lying flat as a wet Saltine on some highway with a tire track in her forehead and her walker now a sort of large trivet, and you’ll have an idea of how Lenore Beadsman felt when she was informed that her great-grandmother, with whom all the above clauses did take place, was missing from the Shaker Heights Nursing Home, in Shaker Heights, right near Cleveland, Ohio, near which Lenore lived, in East Corinth. (BOS 31, emphasis added)

In its hypotactic dimension, everything in this mini-novel of a sentence is subordinated to what comes in between and follows from the phrases (italicized above): “Well now, just imagine how you’d feel if your great-grandmother . . . were just all of the sudden missing . . . and you’ll have some idea of how Lenore Beadsman felt.” The casting of the sentence considered hyptotactically is notable: although it completes the trajectory of its invocation to the reader to “imagine” how Lenore feels upon learning that her great-grandmother is missing, it relies on a form of rhetorical doubling in its recursiveness and ventriloquy to do so, as if the sentence (and its narrator, addressing the reader in the second person) were unsure, despite the profusion of

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“evidence” it provides, that its language is able to nail down precisely how Lenore feels, as if it could not “imagine” on its own the affect it names. Paratactically, the sentence induces a seemingly endless cycling of equally recursive clauses that, we are assured, “did take place” (as if the performative efficacy and historical positing of the language is in doubt even as it unfolds), one clause leading to another, none gaining ascendency in terms of its significance. One of several Proustian details in the passage, the musical theme of the TV family sitcom “My Three Sons,” which ran from 1960 to 1972, is heard in the background (or, more precisely, you, the reader, are asked to imagine it playing in the background) as Lenore menstruates for the first time. The fact that “My Three Sons” depicts a motherless, all-male, yet idealized heteronormative family of the 1960s in contrast to the dysfunctional families of the novel, or that the partial subject of this nonperiodic sentence is—in one of Wallace’s awful-yet-funny isomorphic puns— Lenore’s period, may or may not be significant. The sentence reflects the casual, laid-back complexity of Wallace’s writing, which here relies upon certain kinds of narrative work to enact its sense and sensibility while, at the same time, putting into question its own capacity to complete its project as a sentence. This is more than yet another version of the postmodern reflexivity and recursivity that John Barth, that most self-reflexive of high postmodernists, parodically characterized in the context of navigational star-gazing during a sea voyage as “like that legendary bird that flies in ever diminishing circles until it vanishes into its own fundament” (Sabbatical 321). In the language of his fiction, Wallace is most concerned with bringing the reader in on what might be termed the “inconclusivity” of language in its tendency to always “imagine” that there is more than it can possibly reference. What might have been skepticism or despair in the face of the recognized limits of language, caught up in its own self-recognitions regarding linguistic agency and performative capacities, becomes in Wallace’s hands a narrative invitation to the reader to join “him” (that is, the narrator of the novel, or its many narrators) in engaging with an empathetic and (always) incomplete project of inculcating personality in the language of fiction. (3) Simile/Metaphor. Like hypotaxis and parataxis, metaphor and simile are obverse sides of the same figurative coin: while simile relies on the connective tissue of a conjunction to make a comparison between two seemingly unrelated or disconnected elements, metaphor is a form of verbal compression that transforms one element into another (etymologically, metaphor comes from the Greek metapherein, meaning “to transfer.”) What Wallace does with figurative

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language in The Broom of the System and throughout his writing—in effect, bending and breaking the rules implicit in the construction of figures of speech—further suggests how he views language itself as both limit and opportunity. In the passage above, recalling that the reader is asked to imagine the scene of her great-grandmother’s demise along with Lenore, the simile of “lying flat as a wet Saltine on some highway with a tire track in her forehead and her walker now a sort of large trivet” is a figurative mash-up that takes the generic “squashed flat as a pancake,” exchanges it for a real-world commodity recognizable to contemporary readers (a wet “Saltine” cracker), and tentatively conflates it with an entirely dissociated old-fashioned object usually placed beneath a hot serving dish to protect the table upon which it sits from the heat (“a sort of large trivet”). The comparisons engendered by the simile—disjointed, nonsensical, defamiliarizing—draw attention to the sketchiness of the language itself rather than enabling an empathetic connection to the vision of the elder Lenore lying dead in the road. Yet what might be viewed as a figural failure also becomes a means for enlivening a dead metaphor (“flat as a pancake”) and engaging readers in scrutinizing the language we use to describe events, real or projected, as well as situating us within a specific cultural horizon. We are consumers of brand names; we are inhabitants of a mediated world in which we more readily comprehend death or accident in cartoonish terms; we dwell within a contemporary culture that, as Wallace fictionalizes it, is an assemblage or bricolage of dissociated objects, forms, projections, and temporalities—one in which the Saltine cracker and the archaic “trivet” (something of a blast from the past of the Victorian novel) exist in adjacency as enjambed, and oddly inappropriate, descriptors of an old woman lying in the middle of the road. For Wallace, the force of figural language can be violent and hyperbolic: as Lang says to Lenore late in the novel, using a simile to do so, “You just seem weird about [words] . . . Like you take them awfully seriously . . . Like they were a big sharp tool, or a chainsaw, that could cut you up as easy as some tree. Something like that” (BOS 398). Perhaps the most elaborate figure of the novel occurs in one of Rick Vigorous’s journal entries that records a conversation between Fieldbinder and Dr. Jay in which Fieldbinder constructs an elaborate metaphor for “self”: Think of it this way, doctor . . . Think of the Self as at the node of a fanshaped network of emotions, dispositions, extensions of that feeling and

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thinking Self. Each line in the protruding network-fan may of course have an external reference and attachment. A house, a woman, a bird, a woman. But it need not be so. The line that seeks purchase in an attachment to an exterior Other is necessarily buttressed, supported, held; it thus become small, weak, flabby, reliant on Other. Were the exterior reference and attachment to disappear, unlikely as that obviously sounds in my own case, the atrophied line would crumble weakly, might also disappear. The Self would be smaller than before. And even a Self as prodigious as myself must look upon diminution with disfavor . . . Better to have the lines of the fan stand on their own: self-sufficient, rigid, hard, jutting out into space. Should someone find herself attracted to one of the lines, she could of course fall upon it with all the ravenousness that would be only natural. But she shall not be the reference. Only the ephemeral night-insect, drawn to the light that is intrinsically inaccessible. She may be consumed in the line’s flight, but the line still stands, juts out, rigidly, far into the space exterior to the Self. (BOS 351)

Recalling that Rick Vigorous is voicing Monroe Fieldbinder in this passage, the metaphor of self generated by Rick’s alter ego is a contradiction in terms that both reflects Rick’s voracious need to consume “the other” and one that obliterates the boundaries of its figurative construction. It is both mechanistic (the self conceived as a “network fan” replete with rigid, phallic protrusions) and organic (it’s octopoidal “lines” shooting out to grasp onto the other of house, bird, woman, or insect). As a metaphor, this image of self-sufficiency is weird, highly artificial, and nonsensical. If the point of metaphor is to attach referent to object in such a way that they both appear to be one (for example, in “a blanket of snow fell on the landscape,” the domestic object is annealed to the event of snow falling in such a way that artifice of snow falling in blankets seems natural and unremarkable), then Fieldbinder’s metaphor of the self is an abject failure. Instead of the metaphor working to naturalize the artifice, lulling us into inattention to the literal (an image of actual blankets falling from the sky would render the image of the snowy landscape absurd), Fieldbinder’s metaphor has the reader scratching his or her head trying to figure out how it works as a figure that conveys his (Vigorous’s) sense of self as both fragile and dominating, both mechanistic and organic, both self-sufficient and utterly dependent upon the “referent” of the other: what is a “network-fan” and what does it look like? What are the “lines” of the fan and how do they become projectiles attached to other objects? Only by doing a kind of violence to the language—by, in effect, linguistically jamming square pegs into round holes—is Fieldbinder able to make the metaphor “work,” but

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then it only works as a means of showing up the paradoxical fragility and tenacity of figural language. In the end, Fieldbinder’s metaphor achieves the opposite of its intended effect: as a figure of speech, it is self-destructive, and like much of Wallace’s reflexive rhetoric, speaks to the incomplete project of reality to which Wallace contributes and limns in his novel of incompletion. *

*

*

As this inventory of its title, plot, and rhetoric suggests, The Broom of the System encourages the reader to wander through a distended and often dissociated series of conversations, stories, images, dreams, landscapes, and tropes in pursuing the narrative of Lenore Beadsman and her uncertain destiny, conveyed third hand.4 The novel commends re reading, but not for the purposes of discerning the hidden connections missed the first time though that, once discovered, would make everything hang together. To conclude with a final comparison to Pynchon, in The Crying of Lot 49, an image of the reader is presented in the figure of Oedipa Maas, the novel’s protagonist, who, like Lenore, traverses the novelistic landscape searching for something that has been lost, but unlike Lenore, has been trained as a New Critic at Berkeley in the 1950s, “mothered over” in her “so temperate youth” by “Secretaries James and Foster and Senator Joseph, those dear daft numina” who “had managed to turn young Oedipa into a rare creature indeed, unfit perhaps for marches and sit-ins, but just a whiz at pursuing strange words in Jacobean texts” (104). While Pynchon’s novel pokes fun at the limitations of the textual hermeneutist, this is, at the same time, precisely the kind of paranoid reader The Crying of Lot 49 seems to demand—one who ferrets out the stray connections and decodes the strange words and hidden meanings with the sense that a final revelation that would “complete” reality is at hand. The Broom of the System might be considered “post-paranoid” in this regard: though Lenore, like Oedipa, suffers at certain moments from a sense that everything is conspiring against her, and though there do seem to be some half-baked conspiracies afoot, the landscape of the novel she inhabits is one that refuses to “add up” to a finality or totality, a singular, comprehensive plot, even if only in the offing. Against the simulated, broken, and absurdist systems offered by such spectacles as the Great Ohio Desert and the deep tunnels of the communication system underlying Cleveland, Wallace posits a reality that contains multiple, partial orders, languages, and selves. The novel points the way to the

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writing that Wallace will pursue throughout his career—peripatetic, curious, often incomplete and unvarnished, and open to surprise and the grotesque—and to his readers, who scrutinize the particularities of his work until it begins to mean 17 different things at once. Notes 1. See Marshall Boswell’s illuminating consideration of Wittgenstein’s and Wallace’s entangling ideas about the connections between words, objects, selves, and worlds (Understanding 21–64); Lance Olsen’s foundational (and frequently hilarious) essay on Wittgenstein, Wallace, and the etymological association of the word “broom” in “Termite Art”; and Wallace’s own Wittgensteinian commentary in “The Empty Plenum.” 2. The longer passage from which these phrases come in The Crying of Lot 49 reads: “The waiting above all; if not for another set of possibilities to replace those that had conditioned the land to accept any San Narcisco among its most tender flesh without a reflex or a cry, then at least, at the very least, waiting for a symmetry of choices to break down, to go skew. She had heard all about the excluded middles; they were bad shit, to be avoided; and how had it ever happened here, with the chances once so good for diversity? For it was now like walking among the matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless. Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be transcendent meaning, or only the earth” (181). Pynchon’s obsession with semiosis as the permanent condition of “the middle” is on full display here. 3. The classic (and, ironically, highly prescriptive) discussion of encyclopedic narrative is Edward Mendelson’s “Encyclopedic Narrative: from Dante to Pynchon.” As an encyclopedic narrative, The Broom of the System is much more flexible than the novels of Mendelson’s model, which in his view aspire to modes of epic and national narrative—that is, they aspire to a condition of systematicity that Wallace clearly rejects. 4. An excellent discussion of the novel as a genre that entices wandering and indirection is provided in Ross Chambers, Loiterature.

CH A P T ER

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A Fiction of Response: Girl with Curious Hair in Context Kasia Boddy

Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life. —Bakhtin, “Discourse” (293) Criticism is response. Which is good. —David Foster Wallace (GCH 240)

David Foster Wallace’s second book, Girl with Curious Hair, is best known for its concluding 144-page novella, “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way.” Along with Wallace’s 1993 essay, “E Unibus Pluram,” with which it is often paired, “Westward” has come to be seen both as a “manifesto” for fin-de-siècle fiction’s “next step” (Boswell, Understanding 68; Cohen 72) and the key to Wallace’s subsequent work. While not ignoring “Westward,” this essay argues that the novella should be read in the context of the collection as a whole, and that the volume itself should be read in the context of the place and time of its composition: specifically that of the 1980s intersections between graduate creative writing programs and the “economically viable domains of serious middlebrow fiction” (McGurl 29). Girl with Curious Hair can been seen both as an exemplary product of what Mark McGurl has dubbed “the program era”—Wallace wrote the stories while enrolled in the University of Arizona’s MFA program—and as an interrogation of that era’s modes and mores. In other words, as much as any literary critic, Wallace took his subject to

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be “the increasingly intimate relation between literary production and the practices of higher education” (McGurl ix). He was an avid reader of fiction by his MFA contemporaries, of the literary theory that then flourished in the academic side of the English Department, and of works of literary criticism that sought to ascertain the state, actual and potential, of the American novel. Wallace made his own contribution to that diagnostic tradition in a jeremiad called “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young” (1988). It was in this essay, rather than “E Unibus Pluram,” that he first revealed his “intense theoretical interest” in the forms, modes, and purposes of American literary fiction (Lipsky 231), as it was and as it could be “some distant hard-earned day” (GCH 332). In many ways, Girl with Curious Hair reads like a companion volume to the essay, articulating its central anxieties and offering preliminary solutions to the problems it raises.

Doing as Much as Possible The short story became the staple of the writing workshop for several reasons. In practical terms, short works are both faster to complete and easier to discuss in class than long ones. At a public reading in 2005, writing school veterans Chang-rae Lee and Lorrie Moore exchanged stories about their teaching experiences. “You really don’t want your students writing novels,” said Lee; “Absolutely!” Moore concurred (New Yorker). But the workshop’s attraction to short fiction is more than purely pragmatic. As Andrew Levy has noted, the short story is widely regarded as the perfect “practice field” for apprentice writers, being both formally easier than the novel—so that “beginning authors, or authors whose ability to compose a sophisticated narrative was otherwise impaired” might be able to have a go—and, in view of its constraints, more difficult, requiring “greater discipline and skill” (8). Short fiction, argues McGurl, offers “maximalism in a minimalist package” (375): the task for writers is “to do as much as possible within a very small space” (376). The first thing that reviewers noted about Girl with Curious Hair was just how much Wallace had done. The book’s “range” was particularly praised; the fact that each of the stories had “its own distinct style, its own set of rhetorics” (Alcorn 14–15). The narrators include an elderly Jewish man, a middle-aged trailer-park resident, a writing-school student, Lyndon Johnson’s personal aide, and a prototype American Psycho. Each was associated with a particular style of writing popular at the time: for example, the title story takes on “blank fiction”; “Everything is Green” is a version of what was known as “hick

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chic” (Yardley); and “John Billy” reads like a homage to two works Wallace would later describe as “direly underappreciated” (BFN 203): William Gass’s Omensetter’s Luck (1966) and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985).1 In 2005, Wallace praised McCarthy’s “ability to use antiquated, ornate English in ways that don’t seem silly or stilted” and said he was under “no illusion” he could do the same (CW 156–57). In 1988, however, he wasn’t so shy. As well as engaging with the literary trends of the 1980s, Wallace also addressed metafiction, a 20-year-old mode that he interrogates most directly in the book’s culminating novella. There he confronts John Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse,” “American metafiction’s . . . most famous story” (GCH 237), and, by using metafictional techniques himself, tries “to expose the illusions of metafiction” (CW 40). In other words, “Westward” is a version, as well as a repudiation, of “Lost in the Funhouse”—it’s not insignificant that it’s “nearly six times as long as its source text” (Rother 218)—just as Wallace’s “beyond postmodernism” statement, “E Unibus Pluram” has come to be seen as the equivalent of Barth’s 1967 clearing-the-decks essay, “The Literature of Exhaustion” (Boswell Understanding 9; Giles Global Remapping 164). The emulation, I would argue, extends to the level of the collection as a whole. Just as Barth arranged the stories in Lost in the Funhouse in such a way as to lead the reader from conventional well-made story (“Ambrose His Mark”) through a parodic struggle to construct such a story (“Lost in the Funhouse”) to the new beginning (“Menelaiad”), Wallace arranges Girl with Curious Hair to culminate with “Westward.”2 Wallace’s ambition then is not the “neutral practice” of pastiche, which Fredric Jameson defined as the “imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask” without “ulterior motives” (Postmodernism 17). His parodies, like Barth’s, are designed both to demonstrate the “used-upness of certain forms, or the felt exhaustion of certain possibilities” (Barth Friday 64) and to act as a provocation to new forms. Robert Coover, another of Wallace’s metafictional mentors, also believed that the variety offered by a story collection—in his case, Pricksongs and Descants (1969)—enabled a writer to dramatize the proposition that fiction was “at the end of one age and on the threshold of another” by presenting both old and new “modes of perception and fictional forms” (Coover 61–62). Girl with Curious Hair similarly presents itself as a transitional work, “on the cusp between two eras” (GCH 162). Its politics are the identity politics of generation and its audience “kids our age” (GCH 263). It is little surprise then that a recurrent tableau is the death of an

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old man observed, with detailed relish, by a young man—think of David Boyd looking at the “sharp points of [Lyndon] Johnson’s old men’s breasts” at the end of “Lyndon” or the company vice president, seen by his subordinate, “with his mouth fishily agape, forehead toad-white and sickly sour” in “Luckily the Account Executive Knew CPR” (GCH 118, 50). The literary implications of these scenes become clear if we remember Wallace’s characterization of elderly mimesis as surviving “on life-support” (BFN 64) and his later “definition of good art” as art that “locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow” (CW 26). Should Wallace pull the plug on what Paul Giles organically described as “sclerotic humanism” (Global 171)? Or should he pump in oxygen and bring it back to life? And what about almost-as-elderly metafiction? The collection’s interest in patricide (which is never less than sympathetic to the patriarch in question and with the condition of being a patriarch) culminates in the displacement of “charismatic” Professor Ambrose (Barth), emblem of the “preceding generation” (GCH 269), by the young Mark Nechtr—as his surname suggests, a bit like Ambrose, but also different. As Marshall Boswell notes, Wallace sets up his story “in deliberate accordance” with The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom’s influential model of literary history as Oedipal struggle (Understanding 103). Like Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System, and, to some extent, Infinite Jest, Girl with Curious Hair therefore represents a kind of K ünstlerroman, a portrait of the artist’s growth through his virtuosic engagement with other books. “Westward,” a story about apprentice writers, makes those self-referential concerns explicit, but they also occur in the more realist stories, stories that rely instead on the time-honored method of “figural” embedding (Chambers, Story 33). Whether the “figure” is a concert pianist, a game-show panelist, an engineering student, or an account executive, he or she is always “representative in some sense of ‘art’ or of the production and reception of narrative” (Chambers, Story 33). For Wallace, the key question that all these figures address is not simply “how to” write fiction (the provenance of the writing schools) but “why to” write fiction (GCW 237).

Fictional Futures for “Kids Our Age” Literary history can sometimes seem like a continuous revolution, particularly as we approach the present, when the temptation to act “as if the beginning of a new decade in its own right dictated a new

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set of cultural and political styles” (Lasch 53) becomes irresistible. In 1980, when Wallace began his university education, that temptation was stronger than ever. First, Ronald Reagan’s election was seen as “somehow consonant with broader social, economic and cultural transformations” (Thompson 4); then, on September 16, 1985, “when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation,” some declared the end of the American Empire (Vidal 17). In “Westward,” Wallace talks about Americans of his generation as poised in “this awkwardest of post-Imperial decades, an age suspended between exhaustion and replenishment” (GCH 254). Talk of a literary paradigm shift began even earlier. In 1982, for example, Larry McCaffery published The Metafictional Muse, a summation of the achievements of William Gass, Robert Coover, and Donald Barthelme. Praising these writers was a step toward burying them, as McCaffery also noted that “so-called artistic revolutions have a natural span” and are “inevitably succeeded by a new artistic climate generated by practitioners who do not share the enthusiasms of the previous group and who are anxious to define themselves as artists in new ways” (261). The desire to make it new was particularly pronounced in the nation’s universities that, since the Second World War, had established themselves as the “center of artistic activity in America” (Myers 148). McCaffery’s triumvirate were all Academicallybased: Coover at Brown University; Gass at Washington University in St. Louis; and Barth at Johns Hopkins (from which he had graduated in 1947). By the mid-1980s, the writer-as-student-turned-professor had become the norm—100 of the country’s 150 graduate writing programmes had been established in the previous 10 years (Howard 34) and in 1983, Barth estimated that the 2,500 “newly ordained fictionalists” were produced annually (Friday 108). In 1987, Rust Hills, fiction editor of Esquire, declared that the universities now supported “the entire structure of the American literary establishment—and moreover, essentially determine the nature and shape of that structure” (184). By the time Wallace became a graduate student, as he himself noted in “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young,” “rumors had agents hunting prestigious writing workshops like pro scouts at Bowl games” (BFN 37). The quest for the “conspicuously young” began in earnest in 1984, after a 28-year-old editor called Gary Fisketjon launched a stylish trade paperback series, “Vintage Contemporaries” (VC), with the aim of presenting “the Best of a New Generation” to that generation.

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VCs received their first publication in expensive, desirable paperback editions, modeled on, and marketed like, rock albums. The first book in the series, Bright Light, Big City —by Jay McInerney, Fisketjon’s classmate from Williams College—became a huge bestseller, and soon agents and editors looked to secure similar works about, and by, hip young people. At Bennington College, Brett Easton Ellis “watched with a mixture of fear and fascination” as Less Than Zero was transformed from “a student assignment into a glossy hardcover that became a huge bestseller and zeitgeist touchstone” (Lunar Park 7). Bennington was a particular powerhouse of youthful production—the class of 1982 also included Jill Eisenstadt and, coming later to success, Donna Tartt and Jonathan Lethem—as was Columbia University, where Gordon Lish, once Raymond Carver’s editor at Esquire and Knopf, taught the likes of Amy Hempel and David Leavitt.3 In 1986, Debra Spark introduced an anthology, 20 Under 30, by asking what features distinguished the “fiction people my age write.” The most obvious answer was that “many are, or recently have been, associated with universities or writing programs” (ix). The stories that make up Girl with Curious Hair should be understood as in no small part a response to this group of editors, writers, and teachers; they were written “under professors” (Lipsky 64) but with an eye on the literary mainstream. Another important context, however, was Wallace’s exposure to the academic side of the English Department, where the study of “Straight Literature” had been exposed to “Continental winds” (BFN 63). The rise of the creative writing program coincided with the rise of literary theory, or “Theory,” and, as Marjorie Perloff noted in 1986, it often seemed as if the study of literature had become a kind of battle “between the Creative Writing Workshop and the Graduate Seminar in Theory”: “The A Team accuses the B Team of writing impenetrable jargon and pseudo-Marxist double-talk; in return, the B Team accuses the A of being ‘soft and na ïve,’ and of failing to understand that all language is mediated” (45). In “Fictional Futures,” Wallace (a product of the A Team) aligns himself firmly with the B Team by name-checking a list of “aliens,” including Barthes, De Man, and Lacan, whom “the contemporary artist can simply no longer afford to regard . . . as divorced from his own concerns” (BFN 63).4 By 1988, as he pointed out, “language’s promotion from mirror to eye” was “yesterday’s news.” Today’s news, at least in the “leftist cultural world” (Lipsky 48) of Tucson that Wallace frequented, was written by the likes of Fredric Jameson, whose enormously influential essay on “the cultural logic of late capitalism” he quotes in “E Unibus” (SFT 65), and Donna Haraway,

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whose sense of the “leaky distinction . . . between the animal-human (organism) and machines” (10), provides a distinct leitmotif for Girl with Curious Hair.5 In Team-B’s Theory seminar, discussion increasingly turned away from linguistic matters toward what Jameson called “ethical criticism” (Political 44). Ethics—understood, quite precisely, as “the arena in which the claims of otherness . . . are articulated and negotiated” (Harpham 394)—played a part in debates on everything from Marxism, feminism, and posthumanism to postcolonial and queer studies, and also clearly informs the concerns, characters, and even the language of Wallace’s stories. In “Little Expressionless Animals,” for example, Julie tells her girlfriend Faye that “lesbianism is one kind of response to Otherness” (GCH 32), while “Lyndon” imports otherness to produce an ethically (if anachronistic) revisionist history. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson’s chief of staff, Walter Jenkins, had been arrested for making “indecent gestures” in a YMCA restroom (see Edelman); in Wallace’s story, LBJ is imagined instead sharing his deathbed with the AIDS-stricken Haitian lover of his openly gay advisor. But for all that the new ethical critics believed that their work was “conducted in the world” (Booth x), academic “Theory” remained a paradigm of hermeticism in the popular imagination. In June 1987, Jacques Barzun published an article in the New York Times, deriding the fact that “communication was rare” between theorists and “the public”: this was a shame, he concluded, because “language was not invented for monologues.” Barzun’s article so offended Wallace that he sent a response from Tucson. His letter is notable for two things: first, Wallace’s emphasis on the point of view of “us young readers and readees”; and second, its insistence that, “not all theorists” were “trying to erect walls of impenetrability” around literature. “Some,” he said, “might just be trying to come to grips with what they love” (“Matters”). The binary Wallace presents here—between the construction of defenses, and the attempt to breakdown those defenses in the name of love—would soon become familiar to readers of his fiction and essays. “Westward” contains Wallace’s most direct consideration of the relationship between Team A and Team B, not least in the Jamesonian attack it mounts on “Field Marshall Lish”6 and “the pained product of inglorious minimalist labor in countless obscure graduate writing workshops across the U.S. of A.” (GCH 265). The story contends that the creative writing class is not a refuge from, but rather an example of, corporate capitalism. Its products were not individualized pieces of artisanal handwork (as the term “workshop” suggests),

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but, as one critic put it, manufactured mechanically and en masse by an “assembly-line” (Aldridge 34).7 Metafiction in particular had become as “familiar as syndication,” an idea that Wallace dramatizes by aligning its academic “franchise” with that of the fast food chain McDonalds. Much of the plot of “Westward” involves the “Reunion of Everyone Who Has Ever Appeared in a McDonalds’ Commercial” (GCH 235); the organizer of the event, J. D. Steelritter, has also been hired to turn “Lost in the Funhouse” into a franchise of Funhouse discos. Wallace had taken Jameson’s argument that “aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally” (Postmodernism 4) and used it to show how metafiction had become “meatfiction” (GCH 310); easily digestible and unnutritious. The position of the writer in capitalist society was not, of course, a new subject. In “Paraguay” (a story published in 1970), Donald Barthelme imagined a world in which everyone would be given only “as much art as his system can tolerate” and the artist’s product would therefore be “minimized” and “air-dried,” his role reduced to supplying a “variety” of “bulk art” for the purposes of “distraction” (133). Barthelme was not unaware that the scenario he depicts could describe his own experience as a prolific contributor to the New Yorker. When Wallace began to write journalism in the 1990s, he too emphasized his position “as someone being paid” for his opinions (Giles Global Remapping 168), but even as early as 1987 he had been uneasily conscious of being an insider, a willing beneficiary of the publishers’ obsession with the “conspicuously young.” In 1985, only a few months after Ellis’s Less Than Zero became a succès de scandale, Wallace sent a chapter of The Broom of the System, the novel that he’d produced for his Amherst College undergraduate thesis, to a literary agent, along with a letter noting that he was roughly the same age as Ellis and Leavitt “whose fiction has done well partly because of readers’ understandable interest in new, young writing” (qtd. in Max 65). The novel appeared in Penguin’s “Contemporary American Fiction” series in 1987, just as Wallace completed his MFA: “Westward” was submitted “in partial fulfillment” of the degree on July 4. A month later, Esquire magazine produced a graphic “Guide to the Literary Universe” in which Lish and Fistekjon are placed at the “red hot centre,” along with Carver, who, we are told, “led a host of young disciples to embrace the minimalist style and the short-story form, the two dominant trends of the last decade” (53); Wallace was included as an “approaching comet.” Given this background, it’s hardly surprising that the stories in Girl with Curious Hair are so concerned with the relation of the marketplace to the workshop.

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Just This Side of Standing Still There’s a word for people like you, Mark. “Minimal.” You never really react to things. Even art. —(GCH 251) Minimal Mambo . . . the dancers appearing to be just this side of standing still. —( IJ 229)

“Three or four” of the stories that made it into Girl with Curious Hair were originally “workshopped,” a brutal process that, Wallace later admitted, gave him a “tremendous thrill” (Lipsky 263). His relish for a fight might also have been a factor in Wallace’s choice of Arizona, whose MFA programme he described as “incredibly hard-ass realist” (Lipsky 47), rather than somewhere like Johns Hopkins known to be sympathetic to other kinds of writing. Renamed in “Westward,” for legal reasons, as the East Chesapeake Tradeschool, Johns Hopkins ran a prestigious MFA presided over by John Barth, “Professor Ambrose” in the story. Wallace later told David Lipsky that he “was so in thrall to Barth” that becoming his student would have been “sort of a grotesque thing” (4). By going to Arizona, in other words, he could attack Barth from a safe distance while using Barth’s methods against his own teachers, engaged as they were in “the Resurrection of Realism” (GCH 265).8 Wallace’s “combative classroom manner” (CW 92) meant that, whenever he could, he liked to subvert the “good graduate-workshop story” (GCH 358). On first sight, his break-up tale, “Here and There”—the “only really autobiographical piece” in Girl (Letter to Steven Moore)—seemed a perfect example of an MFA tale; until, that is, we get to the student-professor argument. The protagonist, Bruce, is explaining (in some detail) the measures he takes to keep his girlfriend’s photograph safe in his car when he is interrupted by an instructor who reminds him that “fiction therapy,” to be effective, needed “a strenuously yes some might even say harshly limited defined structured space” (GCH 153). Bruce replies that he’s not interested in that kind of well-made fiction—the workshop product Wallace described elsewhere as “nice, cautious, boring . . . as tough to find technical fault with as . . . to remember” (BFN 60)— and continues in his digressive way. By inserting a “really blatant and intrusive interruption,” as he was to describe such moments in “Westward” (GCH 264), into “Here and There,” Wallace himself

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informs his readers (and teachers) that his story won’t be bound by the conventions of the realist workshop and instead aligns himself with the locus classicus of metafiction, “Lost in the Funhouse,” Barth’s exposition of the difficulty of saying something fresh about “‘the problems of sensitive adolescents’” (Lost 92). Wallace took great pleasure in the fact that contrary to his teacher’s judgment—Jonathan Penner, he said, “absolutely” hated the story—“Here and There” was published in Fiction magazine and then chosen for the 1989 O. Henry Prize Stories (Lipsky 263).9 During Wallace’s student years, the opposition between metafiction and what was known as the “new realism” or the “new minimalism” was often presented in stark terms. One of the starkest and most influential of those statements was made by John Gardner in 1978, in a fiercely polemical book called On Moral Fiction. Gardner argued for a return to what he called “life-giving” fiction and decried much of the writing produced during the preceding decade as “trivial” or “false” (Gardner 15–16.) The following year, William Gass, Gardner’s former teacher, responded to the charge, and a debate on the nature and value of fiction between the two writers appeared in the New Republic. “I have very little to communicate,” said Gass, “I want to plant some object in the world”; “I think [fiction] helps you live,” said Gardner, “I think with each book you write you become a better person” (qtd. in LeClair “William Gass” 47, 48, 52). Although many dismissed Gardner as “creating illusory polarities” (McCaffery 261), others championed him as a kind of standard-bearer. This was partly because Raymond Carver, one of the most fêted writers of the 1980s, had been Gardner’s student (at Chico State College in California) and often spoke of his debt to his professor, most notably in “The Writer as Teacher” that became the foreword to Gardner’s 1983 “how to” book, On Becoming a Novelist. Echoes of Gardner can also be heard in Carver’s various statements on the aims and purposes of fiction. Introducing the Best American Short Stories 1986, for example, he announced that “the day of the campy, or crazy, or trivial, stupidly written account of inconsequential acts that don’t count for much in the world has come and gone”; what he wanted was stories that “throw some light on what it is that makes us and keeps us, often against great odds, recognizably human” (xiv). We can find echoes of these remarks in Wallace’s own published views on the value of fiction. Asked by Larry McCaffery in 1993 about Carver’s “huge influence on your generation” (CW 45), Wallace was keen to distinguish Carver himself (an “artist,” a “genius”) from the “movement” he had initiated (CW 46). Indeed the distinction between “pioneers” and

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what he called “crank turners, the little grey people who take the machine others have built and just turn the crank” (CW 31), was one that preoccupied him greatly. The problem with minimalism then, was that, like metafiction, it lent itself so easily to the crank turning or assembly-line production associated with MFA writing; it was “so easy to imitate” (CW 46). Within months of the publication of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love in 1981, MFA students were “accusing each other” of writing Carver stories (Newlove 77). In “Everything is Green,” Wallace attempted his own “low-rent” tragedy (Carver Collected 323). The story is set in a trailer kitchenette the morning after a rainy night. Mayflower sits on a sofa lounger and keeps saying how green everything outside is. The narrator, Mitch, however, notices puddles gathering on a card table, among beer cans, and cigarette butts floating in ash trays. Like Carver’s men, who often have “things” that they want to say but then aren’t sure what those things “could possibly be” (Collected 295, 326), Mitch “can not feel what to say” (GCH 229). One of the charges that Wallace leveled against “catatonic realism,” a phrase that he borrowed from the critic Alan Wilde (Wilde 119), was that its protagonists were “blank perceptual engines, intoning in run-on monosyllables” (BFN 40). In “Westward,” he decried minimalism’s “obsession with the confining limitations of its own space, its grim proximity to its own horizon” (GCH 267). In “Everything is Green,” though, the main problem is the difficulty one person has in escaping the confinement of his own being: “In me there is needs which you can not even see any more, because there is too many needs in you that are in the way” (GCH 229). On one level, this sentence reads like a parody of monosyllabic minimalism; on another, however, it expresses one of Wallace’s most enduring and deeply felt preoccupations. Here the issue of solipsism is resolved when, in the final paragraph, Mitch turns to look not at the pastoral scene but at Mayflower herself, “and there is something in me that can not close up, in that looking. Mayfly has a body. And she is my morning. Say her name” (GCH 230). As Adam Mars-Jones notes, “minimalism in literature always seems to play hide and seek with sentimentality” (15); but that didn’t seem to bother Wallace. His critique of “neo-Realism” in “Westward” concludes with a volte-face into endorsement: “it’s some of the most heartbreaking stuff available at any fine bookseller’s anywhere. I’d check it out” (GCH 267). Wallace was less ambivalent about the variety of minimalism he dubbed, with reference to an upmarket department store, “Neiman-Marcus Nihilism” (BFN 39), although once again he

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distinguished the pioneer—Less Than Zero, he said, was “very, very powerful” (Lipsky 22)—from the crank turners. If wannabe Carvers set their stories in trailer-parks, the Brat Pack that followed in Ellis’s wake had only one subject—the “salon-tanned, morally vacant” wealthy young, “none of whom seemed to make it from limo door to analyst’s couch without several grams of chemical encouragement” (BFN 39–40). Once again Wallace’s critical diagnosis was accompanied by a parody, “Girl with Curious Hair.” The story personifies moral vacancy in the figure of Sick Puppy, a short-haired Young Republican who hangs out with, and buys drugs for, a group of curious-haired LA punks; he himself can’t get high, can’t, indeed, feel anything much (except when engaged in fetishistic sex whose appeal is rooted in childhood trauma). Wallace is adept at mimicking the Brat Pack fiction’s combination of “fake flash and punk and menace,” as Ellis later characterized it (Lunar Park 11), and its tendency to describe characters “in terms of what brands of stuff they wear” (CW 26).10 One of the first things the narrator tells us about himself is that he has “the English Leather Cologne commercial taped on my new Toshiba VCR and I enjoy reclining on my horsehair recliner and masturbating while the commercial plays repeatedly on my VCR” (GCH 55). The action of “Girl with Curious Hair” takes place at a Keith Jarrett concert. As someone who can use his art to express a “life story” of “special experiences and feelings” (GCH 66), Jarrett functions as a “counterpoint” to Sick Puppy (Boswell, Understanding 81). Jarrett improvises with “old melodies” so that “each of his piano concerts was different from all others” (GCH 66). Sick Puppy, however, is mired in the uniform clothing, behavior, and language of his class. As he can’t escape the inevitable progression of “prep school and college and business school and law school”(GCH 58), so he is lingusitically trapped in cliché—“like greased lightning” (GCH 58)—repetition— “instantly the instant” (GCH 56)—and tautology—“pain and unpleasantness are very unpleasant” (GCH 57). Unlike Mitch (who at least can “say her name”), Sick Puppy can see no way out of his “closed up” life: the limits of his language are literally the limits of his world.11 The story ends “And here’s what I did”—a line, Wallace told Steven Moore, that “is supposed to render performatively what sociopathology-in-spectation is: seeing something horrid and not only doing nothing about it but not even taking the trouble to say you did nothing: the blankness after the line says it for you” (Letter). Boswell argues that Jarrett’s improvised jazz performance “can be read as a self-reflexive description of Wallace’s art” (Understanding 81). But enlivening old melodies is only part of what Wallace wants to do.

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His other ambition, as he suggested to Moore, was avoiding “spectation.” The role model for this is Cheese, one of the punks and the story’s “intelligent” and “curious” analyst-moralist (GCH 67, 68). Wide-eyed behind his pink glasses (no unmediated access there), Cheese offers theories on everything from Jarrett’s technique to the politics of punk to Sick Puppy himself. More importantly, he has real relationships. While Sick Puppy simply uses his friends for expensive thrills, Cheese worries about their well-being. He looks out for Gimlet when she has a bad LSD experience (GCH 69), and is genuinely “interested” in the narrator “as a person” (GCH 64). Being a theorist need not be about erecting “walls of impenetrability,” then; it “might just be trying to come to grips” with something you could love. The character of Cheese allows Wallace to go beyond parody of a style that, as he said to McCaffery, simply dramatized “how dark and stupid everything is” (CW 26). Although Sick Puppy proves incapable of any response, Cheese’s attempt at intimacy and understanding is the most positive aspect of the story. The necessity, and difficulty, of communication is something to which Wallace returns repeatedly. In “Say Never,” Wallace’s old-Jews pastiche,12 Lenny Tagus can’t speak honestly to his mother but instead provides her with a “doomed exercise in disinformation” (a letter) and “a torrent of misdirections” (via the “electromagnetic communication with my flesh” that is the telephone [GCH 220]). But the problem is not caused, only represented, by technological mediation. In “Here and There,” an engineering student called Bruce13 both distrusts his ability to “unlock” his girlfriend “like a differential” (GCH 152) and despairs of her capacity to understand “the intimate importance of me” (GCH 156). Most of all, Bruce tells his fiction-therapist, he’s “afraid of feeling alone even when there’s somebody else there” (GCH 168). After breaking up with his girlfriend, he retreats to the Maine woods. A Thoreauvian withdrawal, it is implied, might enable him to find a way to “stop playing games with words in order to dodge the real meaning of things” (GCH 166). Once determined to be “an aesthetician of the cold” (GCH 155), Bruce begins to feel “the labor pains of a nascent emotional conscience” (GCH 165). He is “on the cusp of two eras” (GCH 162). Reading this story, it’s hard not to think of James Joyce’s The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and another cool clever boy, Stephen Dedalus, who, on the novel’s final page, records his mother’s prayer “that I may learn in my own life . . . what the heart is and what it feels” (275). An anxiety about their tendency to “bloodless abstraction” is one of the threads that connect Joyce to Barth to Wallace (GCH 254).

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The subject is first addressed in “Little Expressionless Animals,” the novella that opens the collection and that introduces many of its preoccupations. Here we get a portrait of the artist as a young woman. Julie Smith, a contestant on the TV game show Jeopardy, begins the story as an aesthetician of the cold; like Bruce, she’s a “poet of technology” (GCH 155). While off-camera she is “expressionless” and unable to communicate, once the show’s lights come on, her face “radiates a sort of oneness with the board’s data” (GCH 17). She has a rare power to “inform trivia with import”: She makes it human, something with the power to emote, evoke, induce, cathart. She gives the game the simultaneous transparency and mystery all of us in the industry have groped for, for decades. (GCH 25)

Julie represents a kind synthesis of the modes offered, in “Girl with Curious Hair,” by Jarrett and Cheese. Like Jarrett, she is able to express herself through second-hand materials—here game-show trivia—but it takes her a little longer than Cheese to learn what the heart is, to develop an emotional conscience. One afternoon, Julie and her girlfriend Faye leave the studio and go for a walk-and-talk through Los Angeles. Faye is worried about what to say when people ask about her sexuality and so Julie makes up a series of possible, increasingly complex and absurd, stories: “here’s one,” she says; “give them this one” (GCH 33, 34). Soon Faye joins in, becoming even more inventive. One story prompts another and eventually the tellers become less concerned about what to “give” other people and more focused on each other. Their exchange of stories is presented as a form of love-making, the kind that Bruce can only dream about.

“ The Stake of the Other”14 In 1993, Wallace described Girl with Curious Hair as “a very traditionally moral book,” telling his interviewers that he was writing for a “generation that has an inheritance of absolutely nothing as far as meaningful moral values” and that “it’s our job to make them up, and we’re not doing it” (CW 18). His problem, however, was how to distinguish that project from the creative writing classroom’s “naive pursuit of group therapy” (McGurl 308) and its affiliation with John Gardner’s “moral didacticism” (CW 18, 26). As I’ve already suggested, Wallace found an intellectually respectable alternative to “fiction therapy” (GCH 153) in the ethical turn of the Theory Seminar,

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in the work of critics like Haraway and Jameson. The contemporary philosopher whose ideas, and affable tone, seem closest to Wallace, however, is Stanley Cavell: in 1989, Wallace attended Cavell’slectures at Harvard, and after he died, two of Cavell’s books were found in his personal library.15 Cavell’s grounding in late Wittgenstein would have appealed to Wallace, as would his emphasis on the strenuous “work of becoming human” (New Yet 10) and his Romantic view of “the everyday” as “an exceptional achievement” (Claim 463). There is no space here to explore the connection in detail, simply to note that Wallace too believed that the “ordinary” was less a starting point than a “goal” (Critchley 38) and that he continually asserted how “distinctively hard” it was to be “a real human being” (CW 26). These issues in turn related to what he saw as the fundamental problem of making a “meaningful connection to the world” (SFT 33); what Wallace often calls “solipsism,”16 and what Cavell, in turn, describes as the “metaphysical problem” of our “progress from narcissism . . . to the acknowledgement of otherness” (Pursuits 102). For Cavell, a more traditionally psychological moralist than Jameson or Haraway, a prerequisite of making such a connection was assuming “the responsibility of making myself known to others” (Claim 351), which in turn entailed both the acknowledgment of others who can know that self and a late-Wittgensteinian faith in language as a public phenomenon; “the single most beautiful argument against solipsism,” said Wallace (CW 44). One character who assumes that Cavellian responsibility is the actress who appears on the David Letterman Show in “My Appearance.” Her husband tells her to “appear,” rather than to “be,” relaxed (GCH 181), while a friend advises her to “act as if you know from birth that everything is clichéd and hyped and empty and absurd and that that’s just where the fun is” (GCH 183). This is the Sick Puppy nihilist-minimalist solution, but it’s one that the actress refuses. She is “a woman who lets her feelings show rather than hide them” (GCH 185). “I was just the way I am,” she says afterward (GCH 199). By “moving,” against all odds, “into expression,” as Julie puts it in “Little Expressionless Animals” (GCH 42), the actress makes a commitment to a kind of existential authenticity and refuses, in Cavell’s phrase, to regard herself “as unknowable” (Claim 464). If Wallace’s understanding of language as a “function of relationships between persons” (CW 44) owes a lot to Wittgenstein, his sense of the nature of those relationships draws on an another early twentieth-century figure, the Russian Formalist Mikhail Bakhtin. English translations of Bakhtin’s works were published during the

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1980s and Wallace lists him as a stimulating “alien” in “Fictional Futures.” Bakhtin’s understanding of the workings of language centered on the concept of voice. More specifically, thinking about voice enabled him to distinguish between a “monologic” understanding of language, which, he said, pretended that the context of an exchange of words was unimportant, as if each utterance was “the word of no one in particular” (“Discourse” 276), and what he called a “dialogic” account. To think of language as “dialogic” is to recognize two factors: first, that there is no neutral point of view—“all words,” Bakhtin said, “have the ‘taste’ of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour” (“Discourse” 293)—and second, that the “expression of an utterance” is always a response, expressing “the speaker’s attitude toward others’ utterances” (“The Problem” 92), toward “someone else’s speech ” (Problems 185). An opposition between the monologic and dialogic is repeatedly presented in Wallace’s early stories: at one extreme, Sick Puppy reciting his life story in a way that “semi hypnotized” Cheese (GCH 73); at the other, Julie and Faye, lovingly exchanging utterances. For everyone else in the book, however, dialogical intimacy remains an aspiration. “Lyndon,” “Here and There,” “Everything is Green,” “Luckily The Account Representative Knew CPR” all end with a solitary voice calling out for a response. Or consider “John Billy,” which initially offers itself as a conventional mimicry of oral, that is, single-voiced, storytelling. The eponymous narrator has been given a simple task: “Was me supposed to tell Simple Ranger how Chuck Nunn Junior done wronged the man that wronged him and fleen to parts unguessed” (GCH 121). Once he starts, however, things get complicated—John Billy creates various metaphors and analogies, decides to relegate parts of his tale to “etc, etc” (GCH 123), is joined in his tale-telling by Chuck Nunn’s girlfriend Glory Joy, and corrected on points of interpretation by Nunn’s adversary, T. Rex. John Billy completes his “legend” but his ending is rather a pause as he offers further stories—“now go on and ask me . . . go on” (GCH 147). This suggestion that we’re still in medias res is the antithesis of the blankness that concludes “Girl with Curious Hair.” Like Wallace himself in his later, longer work, John Billy doesn’t want to stop talking, he doesn’t want to say good-bye. By considering his connections with the work of Cavell and Bakhtin, I’ve drawn attention to Wallace’s deep interest in what he saw as the fundamental difficulty of human interaction and to the ways in which he presented that difficulty as metaphysical, moral, and

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linguistic. But Wallace also, as perhaps was inevitable from a former math student and tennis player, described the problem geometrically. In “Luckily,” for example, two men leave an office building at the same time and proceed to the basement car park in “parallel lines”; despite differences in age and status, “they shared pain, though of course neither knew” (GCH 48). Their paths, their lines, finally cross when the Vice President in Charge of Overseas Production collapses with chest pains and the Account Representative comes forward to perform CPR. Intimacy, Wallace suggests, relies on proximity, but it’s not clear just how much is optimal. In “Little Expressionless Animals,” Julie tells Faye that “whole point of love” is to be “permeable” (GCH 13), “to get your fingers through the holes in the lover’s mask” (GCH 32), but in “Lyndon,” the President’s wife, Lady Bird informs the narrator that the word “love” refers to a relation between “separate things” and that it therefore requires keeping some distance (GCH 115). She and LBJ “do not properly love each other,” she says because “we ceased long ago to be enough apart for a ‘love’ to span any distance” (GCH 115). Lyndon himself imagines love as a federal highway, “lines putting communities that move and exist at great distance, in touch” (GCH 115). Other characters in the collection struggle to ascertain the nearness that intimacy demands, the correct way to approach “there” from “here” (“Here and There”). As Wallace put it in an essay about his tennis-playing youth, “geometric thinking” is “the ability to calculate not merely your own angles but the angles of response to your angles” (SFT 9). Off the tennis court, it is an even trickier business: think of Cheese tentatively placing his hand on “the wrist of the sleeve” of Sick Puppy’s coat (GCH 74), or the leaning “across” and “in” that link Letterman and the actress, the account executive and the company vice president, and Lyndon Johnson and David Boyd (GCH 199, 52, 118). Cavell describes the progress from narcissism to an acknowledgment of others as “the path and goal of human happiness” (Pursuits 102); for Wallace’s characters, however, happiness remains elusive. The outcome of “My Appearance” is the actress’s realization that she has a more intimate connection with Letterman than she does with her husband. In “Here and There,” Bruce stops “playing games with words” (GCH 166) but ends up “afraid of absolutely all there is” (GCH 172). “Lyndon” begins in a similar way, with David Boyd “burned-out cool” and “empty” (GCH 77), and ends with him “marked for a . . . a kind of frailty by the evident love and responsibility” he feels “toward others” (GCH 112). “Responsibility,” the story suggests, is more important than personal happiness; an idea that Wallace extends into

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a political context, when Boyd tells his Haitian lover Duverger that, “in this nation,” need and responsibility are “part of love” (GCH 99). Lyndon Johnson’s “love” (conceived in these terms) is then set against the desire for personal fulfillment and expression that seems to drive the “youths” of 1968. The story is sympathetic to Johnson’s remark that the antiwar protesters need to “go be responsible for something for a second” (GCH 107).17 Wallace often spoke of the relationship between writer and reader as “very strange and complicated” (CW 62), but ultimately, he argued, narrative voice was the key to creating “a feeling of intimacy” between the two (Lipsky 72). What I’ve attempted to demonstrate in this essay is the extent to which Wallace was a reader as well as a writer. In other words, the first feeling of intimacy that he hoped to cultivate was with the writers and critics whose work he admired. Each individual story engages in what Harold Bloom calls a “strong misreading” (xxiii) of its sources or manages what Bakhtin terms a “double-voiced discourse” (Problems 199), while the collection as a whole stages a debate about fictional futures. Ultimately, then, it didn’t matter whether Girl with Curious Hair achieved a “Reunion of All Who’ve Appeared” or simply provoked a “Collision” between the “old melodies” of realism and metafiction, creative writing and Theory, ethics and geometry. Speaking in many other voices, Wallace had made an important step toward the development of his own, inimitable (and soon to be much imitated) voice—the ultimate goal of the writing workshop. Notes 1. Wallace, however, claimed not to have read Blood Meridian until later (Max 165–66). Larry McMurty’s 1985 bestseller about Texas Rangers, Lonesome Dove, is another likely source. Boswell says the story is “mock Faulknerian” (85). 2. Any reading of the book’s shape must take into account Wallace’s prolonged negotiation with his editor, Gerald Howard. Although Wallace later agreed with Steven Moore’s assessment that “Luckily,” “Girl,” and “Here and There” were “weaker than the rest,” Howard liked them and so he “traded” their inclusion for that of “John Billy” and “Westward,” which “were supposedly ‘too hard to read’ for a commercial audience” (“Letter”). Wallace’s original lineup was as follows: “Little Expressionless Animals,” “Luckily the Account Representative Knew CPR,” “Other Math,” “Girl with Curious Hair,” “Lyndon,” “Here and There,” “All Things to One Man,” “Crash of ’62, ” “Say Never,” “Everything is Green,” and “Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way.” The scheduled publication at

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3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

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Penguin fell through because of legal problems concerning the use of real names in several stories; Wallace made revisions and Girl with Curious Hair was eventually published by Norton in 1989. The collection’s original title was “Long and Short of It ” (Max 87). Lish appears as Stanley Flunt in Leavitt’s roman à clef, Martin Bauman (2000). Boswell discusses Infinite Jest ’s “elaborate and ingenious critique of Lacan” (151–56). Giles argues that Wallace’s work developed “under the intellectual sign of posthumanism” (165). A joke on Lish’s nickname, “Captain Fiction” (see Hempel). Wallace picks up the phrase (BFN 61). The “New Real guys” mentioned in “Westward” are John Gardner; John L’Heureux, a former Jesuit priest who taught at Stanford; and Frank Conroy, director of the influential Iowa Writer’s Workshop from 1987 (GCH 265). Lipsky mistakenly gives the story a 1988 award. Although Wallace studied Less than Zero in an Arizona fiction survey class, he later denied having read the book, claiming A Clockwork Orange as the inspiration for “Girl” (Max 60, 73). A paraphrase of Tractatus 5.6 (Wittgenstein 68). Boswell says the story parodies Philip Roth (97–99) but Wallace’s target might be a “minor” “crank turner,” Wallace’s unsympathetic teacher at Amherst, Alan Lelchuk (CW 36). The name Bruce for his alter ego might be a nod to Robert the Bruce, the Scots king under whom Wallace’s “ancestor” William Wallace served (Lipsky 168). There are also three Davids in the collections (including Letterman). Borrowed from Cavell “Othello and the Stake of the Other.” Wallace’s personal library (held at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas) contains Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness and In Quest of the Ordinary. A copy of Gardner’s On Moral Fiction is also there. On Wallace’s disillusionment with Cavell as a teacher, see Max (132–33). Ryerson argues that Wallace often used “solipsism” simply as “a metaphor for isolation and loneliness” (27). Compare Wallace’s comments on anti-Vietnam protesters, who “may have hated the war” but “also wanted to be seen on television,” and on post-1960s “cynicism about authority” (SFT 34, 62).

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CH A P T ER

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David Foster Wallace and the Mathematics of Inf inity Roberto Natalini

Most mathematicians agree that mathematics is the science of patterns, and so it is possible to find mathematical structures more or less everywhere. But if math is ubiquitous, then it is especially important to locate the meaningful structures, rather than simply incidental patterns, when approaching David Foster Wallace’s pattern-obsessed fiction. Wallace used math to create something new in his work, but it was not his systematic approach to all his fiction. Although there are allusions to mathematical forms throughout his work—as in, say, the Zeno-like movement of “Westward,” constantly approaching but never reaching its zero-point destination—he claimed only to be “someone with a medium-strong amateur interest in math and formal systems, and . . . also someone who disliked and did poorly in every math course he ever took, save one, which wasn’t even in college” (EM 2). Nevertheless, as Wallace’s interviews make clear, mathematics was partly a rhetorical tool,1 a distinguished expansion of his already enormous vocabulary that helped differentiate between the average reader and the reader with enough mathematical knowledge to recognize that references to the hyperbolic functions, or to Fourier and post-Fourier transforms, and other detailed discussions were not always really meaningful. On the other hand, he considered math to be one of humanity’s great cultural enterprises and was interested, at a deeper level, in math as a language that could convey and transmit beautiful and difficult ideas, a sort of reservoir that provided the sometimes hidden narrative ingredients for his fiction.

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To understand Wallace’s interaction with mathematics, let us start from the end, with his book-length essay Everything and More, which he considered an exercise in “pop technical writing” (EM 1). Although Wallace explained in a letter to Prabhakar Ragde that his mathematical goal in this book was “not correctness . . . but simplicity, perspicuity for a non-math audience”—thus addressing the audience problem that he had outlined in an earlier review of what he called the “Math Melodrama” (BFN 212–13)—Everything and More begins by tracing a detailed history of infinity and mapping the specific complexities that arise from mathematical abstraction. Amongst the simplest paradoxes arising from abstraction is the Dichotomy, one of Zeno’s arguments against the possibility of motion. Suppose a pedestrian wants to cross a street: before she can get all the way across, she must reach the halfway point; before she gets to that point, she must make it a quarter of the way across, and so on. As Wallace explains, “The paradox is that a pedestrian cannot move from point A to point B without traversing all successive subintervals of AB” (EM 49). This circular paradox—what Everything and More calls the Vicious Infinite Regress or VIR—is a vital example for Wallace, because it is one of the simplest instances where a philosophical problem was solved using pure mathematical arguments. After many (often controversial) attempts to solve the VIR, the paradox was rigorously resolved by Karl Weierstrass using the modern definition of the limits and convergence of a series, and by Cantor and Dedekind via the construction of real numbers. As Wallace notes, The Dichotomy’s central confusion is now laid bare: the task of moving from point A to point B involves not a ∞ of necessary subtasks, but rather a single task whose “1” [the distance from A to B] can be validly approximated by a convergent infinite series. It is the mechanism of this approximation that Weierstrassian analysis is able to explain—meaning really explain, 100% arithmetically, without infinitesimal analogies, or any of the natural-language ambiguity . . . After Weierstrass, the Dichotomy becomes just another Word Problem. (EM 195)

For Wallace, Weierstrass’s achievement provides a paradigm for facing one of the central problems addressed in his fiction: how to escape the vicious circle of the infinite regress to reach a more stable knowledge. Mastering infinity was a way to escape the infinite circularity of word problems, and it could even apply to Wallace’s obsession with escaping solipsistic loneliness by communicating with another consciousness. Wallace’s fiction acrobatically stretches in new directions—through endnotes, footnotes, text boxes, and long digressions—to try to

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transmit our branching, complex thoughts and feelings through the linear, discrete form of written language. In “Good Old Neon,” a short story that was written around the same time as Everything and More, Wallace outlines this problem: This is another paradox, that many of the most important impressions and thoughts in a person’s life are ones that flash through your head so fast that fast isn’t even the right word, they seem totally different from or outside of the regular sequential clock time we all live by, and they have so little relation to the sort of linear, one-word-afteranother-word English we all communicate with each other with that it could easily take a whole lifetime just to spell out the contents of one split-second’s flash of thoughts and connections, etc.—and yet we all seem to go around trying to use English. (OB 150–51)

The countable universe of human language seems unsuitable to describe the continuous reality of our mind. Is it possible to create an accurate map of our mind in the mind of someone else? Everything and More ’s mathematical explorations are invoked by the word “paradox” in the preceding quote, and, in fact, Wallace’s technique adopts a form that’s analogous to the Weierstrass-Cantor paradigm. “Good Old Neon” presents itself as a proleptic narrative, and the narrator tries to explain how communication works after death: All the different words are still there, in other words, but it’s no longer a question of which one comes first. Or you could say it’s no longer the series of words but now more like some limit toward which the series converges. It’s hard not to want to put it in logical terms, since they’re the most abstract and universal . . . I don’t know if that makes sense. I’m just trying to give it to you from several different angles, it’s all the same thing . . . It’s the closest thing to what it’s really like. (OB 167)

Underneath this discussion of language, we see mathematics as the model for the possibility of direct communication. Like the mathematical approach to infinity, where, Zeno’s paradox was eventually reduced to a simple calculus exercise, Wallace hoped that “true” communication could be obtained by finding the right concepts and ideas, that is, the “good” definitions, to map and describe our thoughts in a new and more effective fashion. In this regard, Wallace’s writing might be seen as a serious attempt to create a sort of mathematics of human thought. As in mathematics, we cannot just solve problems by a straight reasoning, but we need to build up a whole set of tools and devices—as for instance the idea of “limit of a series,” which makes

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it possible to pass from the discrete and countable infinity of natural numbers to the continuous infinity of real numbers—to prove and to share our results. In a similar fashion, Wallace’s work adopts unusual narrative perspectives—in this instance, commingling different time periods (pre- and postdeath), but elsewhere mixing voices, narrative levels, and styles—which can be considered comparable attempts to use new forms to pass to another “level” of understanding that allows the author to share complex feelings with readers. Everything and More emphasized the emergence of Cantor’s mathematically rigorous and useful conception of infinity, which built on Weierstrass, against the older, dead end, sense of the Vicious Infinite Regress. Wallace emphasizes this opposition as one of the main themes in his most mathematical novel, Infinite Jest. The VIR presents looping arguments, trapping us forever in infinite cycles of repetitions, and it is most often present in the novel’s obsession with circles2 and elliptical movements. The lethal entertainment itself— Infinite Jest—is a pleasure without exit, an endless “recursive loop” (IJ 87): people under the cartridge’s influence cannot escape and are obliged to see the movie again and again in a fatal circle of addiction and pleasure. Cyclic patterns are also crucial for annular fusion, the source of energy which is one of Onanite society’s greatest technological achievements. Thanks to this process it is possible to create energy by using waste materials, since it is “a type of fusion that can produce waste that’s fuel for a process whose waste is fuel for the fusion” (IJ 572). The origin of the idea of annulation is reported in one of the novel’s mock autobiographies, when James Incandenza recalls helping his father repair a bedframe. At the end of this long account, we follow the boy into his room, where, by accident, the closet door’s brass knob is struck by a falling iron pole: The round knob and half its interior hex bolt fell off and hit my room’s wooden floor with a loud noise and began then to roll around in a remarkable way, the sheared end of the hex bolt stationary and the round knob, rolling on its circumference, circling it in a spherical orbit, describing two perfectly circular motions on two distinct axes, a non-Euclidian figure on a planar surface, i.e., a cycloid on a sphere. The closest conventional analogue I could derive for this figure was a cycloid . . . But since here, on the bedroom’s floor, a circle was rolling around what was itself the circumference of a circle, the cycloid’s standard parametric equations were no longer apposite, those equations’ trigonometric expressions here becoming themselves first-order differential equations . . . It occurred to me that the movement of the amputated knob perfectly schematized what it would look like for

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someone to try to turn somersaults with one hand nailed to the floor. This was how I first became interested in the possibilities of annulation. (IJ 502)

The appearance of this “cycloid on a sphere” has some interesting ramifications. First, it explains the shape of the tennis academy. Among the various mathematical structures mentioned in Infinite Jest, the very first one is revealed in the third endnote, which explains that “E.T.A. is laid out as a cardioid, with the four main inward-facing bldgs. convexly rounded at the back and sides to yield a cardioid’s curve,” which gives the whole structure a “Valentine-heart aspect” (IJ 983n3). A cardioid is a curve that lies in the Euclidean plane, and is traced by a point on the perimeter of a circle that is rolling around another fixed circle of the same radius (see figure 3.1). It is a special case of an epicycloid, a plane curve produced by tracing the path of a chosen point of a circle—the epicycle—which rolls, without slipping, around a fixed circle. On the other hand, the curve displayed on page 502 of the novel is, mathematically speaking, a spherical cycloid, that is a cycloid traced by a vertically inclined circle rotating along a fixed plane circle. Both curves are generated by rotating a circle along another circle in the plane, but the cardioid’s rotating circle lies on the same plane, while the spherical cycloid’s rotating circle is vertical. So, roughly speaking, the cardioid is just a flattened, twodimensional version of the spherical cycloid. E. T. A.’s shape, then, is a symbolic tribute to the old inspiration of its founder, while it is also a direct reference to a looping mechanism, a circle rotating around a circle, which belongs to the first species of infinity, Zeno’s endlessly recursive closed loops. At the same time, there is also a clear

Figure 3.1 The cardioid. This curve is generated by a circle rotating around another circle.

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link to one of the novel’s precursors, Don DeLillo’s mathematically inflected Ratner’s Star, which is set in a remote laboratory shaped as a “cycloid” (15).3 All these looping structures share circular, bounded forms. To overcome this kind of paralysis, Wallace looks toward the other kind of mathematical infinity—with limits, convergence, asymptotes, and so on—to go beyond our standard boundaries. We can get a deeper sense of how such a conception of infinity functions in Wallace’s long novel, by comparing a passage from Infinite Jest with an earlier passage from one of Wallace’s mathematically inflected essays. In Infinite Jest, Wallace gives a powerful description of Cantorian mathematical expansion, which holds both for the practices of tennis and writing: Schtitt . . . seemed intuitively to sense that [tennis] was a matter not of reduction at all, but—perversely—of expansion, the aleatory flutter of uncontrolled, metastatic growth—each well-shot ball admitting of n possible responses, n 2 possible responses to those responses, and on into what Incandenza would articulate to anyone who shared both his backgrounds as a Cantorian continuum of infinities of possible move and response, Cantorian and beautiful because infoliating, contained, this diagnate infinity of infinities of choice and execution, mathematically uncontrolled but humanly contained, bounded by the talent and imagination of self and opponent, bent in on itself by the containing boundaries of skill and imagination that brought one player finally down, that kept both from winning, that made it, finally, a game, these boundaries of self. (IJ 82)

This description of “Cantorian tennis” can be juxtaposed with a similar passage in “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley,” originally published in Harper’s in 1990 with the revealing title “Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes”: Competitive tennis, like money pool, requires geometric thinking, the ability to calculate not merely your own angles but the angles of response to your angles. Because the expansion of response-possibilities is quadratic, you are required to think n shots ahead, where n is a hyperbolic function limited by the sinh of opponent’s talent and the cosh of the number of shots in the rally so far (roughly). (SFT 9)

While the Cantorian tennis paragraph appears as an extension of the essay’s description, beyond the addition of the reference to Cantor, it is striking that the reference to the hyperbolic functions “sinh” and “cosh” have been removed. What Wallace is talking about is that, if

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you want to predict the evolution of a game, this prediction becomes more difficult and complex if (1) your opponent is good (sinh), and if (2) you have already exchanged a lot of shots (cosh). In fact, the number of shots you have to think ahead rises exponentially with these two factors. The function sinh(x) is the hyperbolic sine, and cosh(x) is the hyperbolic cosine, so the exchanges between the players (which we can think of as analogous to the exchanges between the writer and the reader) traces the form of a hyperbola, which is subjected eventually to an infinite expansion—“mathematically uncontrolled but humanly contained,” in Schtitt’s words. Another more direct reference to hyperbolas appears later in the novel, in connection with its related figure of speech, after a heavy drill session at E. T. A.: “Exhausted, shot, depleted,” says Jim Struck, grinding at his closed eye with the heel of his hand ... “Beat. Worn the heck out.” “Worn the fuck-all out is more like.” “Wrung dry. Whacked. Tuckered out. More dead than alive.” “None even come close, the words.” “Word-inflation,” Stice says . . . “Bigger and better. Good greater greatest totally great. Hyperbolic and hyperbolicker. Like grade-inflation.” . . . Hal raises his eyebrows at Stice and smiles. “Hyperbolicker?” “My daddy as a boy, he’d have said ‘tuckered out”ll do just fine.” “Whereas here we are sitting here needing whole new words and terms.” (IJ 100)

The new generation needs different tools and words to communicate familiar meanings—like the writers Wallace described in Capri, who adopted “postmodern formal techniques for very traditional ends” (“Le Conversazioni”), who tried, in short, to be “hyperbolic and hyperbolicker.” In an early thesis devoted to the novel, Chris Hager suggested that the figure of the parabola might provide an overarching structure for the novel (8–9, 20–24), but these references suggest that the hyperbola (unlike the circular VIR, another open structure, projecting to infinity) may provide a more suitable analogy for the novel’s structure. Hal and Gately—Wallace’s two most contrasting autobiographical projections—form the two branches of this curve: Hal, the young overeducated son of a grammarian, is devoted to his dictionary, drugs, and tennis; D. W. Gately shares his first two initials with Wallace, and, like his creator, has to live in a halfway house at

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the end of his twenties. They are close to merging in the middle of the novel, when they live a few hundred meters apart, and the relationship between their stories is reflected in the novel’s larger double symmetry: first, there is a mirror symmetry that Hager describes in the parabolic narrative structure of the book (e.g., Poor Tony Krause experiences a seizure around page 300, and then reappears some 300 pages before the book’s end); but there is also the inverse (hyperbolic) relationship between Hal’s rise and fall, and Gately’s fall and subsequent rise. The hyperbola’s foci could be located in the Eschaton incident and Gately’s fight with two Nucks, which respectively occur at 1/3 and 2/3 of the way through the novel. The two protagonists, as the two branches of the hyperbola, only meet beyond our view, which is to say at infinity, a point indicated by mysterious clues placed at the beginning and end of the novel. This seems consistent with some comments Wallace made in an online interview in 1996: There is an ending as far as I’m concerned. Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an “end” can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such convergence or projection occurred to you, then the book’s failed for you. (qtd. in Max 321n19)

The expanding infinity is directed toward the reader who stands at the “point of infinity”—that is, outside the book, from which vantage point the reader can see the connection between Hal and Gately that does not take place inside the novel. In this sense, the point of infinity is being used in both a geometrical sense (the point where all the stories asymptotically converge) and in the traditional perspectival sense (a distance point of view). To understand what really happens in the novel—why this projection at infinity it is not only a rhetorical figure—we have to change our point of view. Wallace had problems with his head; in addition to his well documented psychological difficulties, he also had problems with the relations he found, or didn’t find, between the worlds inside and outside his head. The head, our “terrible master” (TIW 56), gives us constantly the same point of view: we are alone at the center of the universe and true communication with other human beings seems impossible. The head is also the location of narcotic pleasure, as in Gately’s experience with Demerol: The mind floats easy in the exact center of a brain that floats cushioned in a warm skull that itself sits perfectly centered on a cushion

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of soft air some neckless distance above the shoulders, and inside all is a somnolent hum . . . and what you feel is mostly gratitude at your abstract distance from anything that doesn’t sit inside concentric circles and love what’s happening. (IJ 890)

In this case, the mind is disconnected, in a delusional but temporarily happy state, from the external world. The situation is different, however, when internal and external states start to interact and mix together. The book begins with the Hal’s claim, “I am in here” (IJ 3), and ends with Gately on a beach with the tide “way out” (IJ 981). This inside/outside dynamic is one of the novel’s main narrative strategies, and—as Dowling and Bell have observed—it represents a strong philosophical concern that accounts for the frequent oscillations between what a character sees as “in here” and what is seen as “out there” (212). To find a “way out” of our interior loneliness was, for Wallace, the main goal of literature, and was possible only through an artistic perception of reality. Toward the end of Infinite Jest, Joelle recalls discovering some sort of “flashes” in James Incandenza’s work that “betrayed something more than cold hip technical abstraction” (IJ 742). Repeatedly viewing his movie, Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell, she starts to sense a new meaning in a long static shot of Bernini’s statue: The whole film was from the alcoholic sandwich-bag salesman’s POV, and . . . his head . . . was on-screen every moment . . . except for the four narrative minutes the alcoholic sandwich-bag salesman stood in the Vittorio’s Bernini room, and the climactic statue filled the screen and pressed against all four edges. The statue, the sensuous presence of the thing, let the alcoholic sandwich-bag salesman escape himself, his tiresome ubiquitous involuted head, she saw, was the thing. The four-minute still shot maybe wasn’t just a heavy-art gesture or audience-hostile herring. Freedom from one’s own head, one’s inescapable P.O.V. (IJ 742)

The main strategy proposed by Wallace, in both Infinite Jest and This is Water, his Kenyon commencement speech, is to radically change our point of view so that we can escape from our heads. From a mathematical perspective, we can do this by performing an inversion process, namely a process creating an exchange between the inside and the outside, so that the world enters the mind and, at the same time, the mind invades the world. Such an inversion of our point of view arguably represents the novel’s main goal. In line with this goal, the author carefully plans a narrative strategy to enter our minds, which

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represents the consciously thinking part of the world external to the author. At the same time, the novel offers a window into the author’s mind: as Wallace said, originally of his nonfiction, “what I can do is . . . slice open my head for you. And let you see a cross-section of just a kind of average, averagely bright person’s head at this thing” (CW 86). This is not simply a metaphor. If we look more closely at the world depicted in Infinite Jest, what we find is an internal world turned inside out. From the perspective of biography, Wallace’s life experiences are the bricks used to build a new kind of world: competitive tennis, the halfway house, addiction, and depression. All the characters, on some level, are shadows of Wallace’s real life: in addition to Hal and Gately, there is Orin (who “wakes with his own impression sweated darkly into the bed beneath him” [IJ 43]) and Mario (“basically a born listener” [IJ 80], as Wallace was), the Moms, Marlon Bain, the P. G. O. A. T. All these characters seem like projections of his personal experiences, refracted through a complicated medium. More concretely, Infinite Jest ’s landscape is shaped according to this sort of inverted geometry. E. T. A. is shaped as a heart, just near a “lung,” which is regularly inflated. The M. I. T. Student Union is in the shape of a great realistic brain-frame. Excreting activities are performed in the surrounding neighborhoods. It is worth noting that all of the “inverted” buildings—the cardioidal E. T. A., the lung, the M. I. T. Student Union brain—are designed by the same person, the famous (fictional) mathematician, and “Avril’s old and very dear friend, the topology world’s closed-curve-mapping-Übermensch A.Y. (‘Vector-Field’) Rickey of Brandeis U., now deceased” (IJ 983n3).4 On the other hand, in a generalized inversion, the outside—American society, with its sadness and lethal search for extreme entertainment— enters our minds, and the minds of the characters, revealing its deeper nature to be just another form of addiction. It is interesting, therefore, to explore in further detail mathematical ideas that are naturally connected with the inversion of internal and external worlds. The concept of “inversion” has a precise mathematical meaning, and has been intensively studied since the nineteenth century. It is one of the elementary conformal (i.e., angle preserving) transformations5 studied by the German mathematician, August Ferdinand Möbius, and it is defined as the plane transformation that maps each circle of radius R on the circle of radius 1/R. For instance, a circle of radius 2 is mapped in the one of radius ½, and so on.6 To see the result of such an inversion, we can consider the inversion of a common chess board, centered in the origin (figure 3.2).

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Figure 3.2

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A chessboard after the inversion with respect to the unit circle.

The only fixed set in this map is given by the unit circle and so, what is inside the unit circle is mapped outside, and the other way round, and the point of coordinates (0,0) is formally exchanged with the point at infinity by the inversion. Analytically, we can introduce the standard (x,y) coordinates on the plane, and so the inversion transformation is just the map defined by the new variables x’=x/(x 2+y2), y’=y/(x 2+y2); when x=y=0, the mapped point is at infinity. Moreover, there is a direct connection between Möbius transformations and the Riemann sphere, a geometrical object named after the nineteenthcentury mathematician, Bernhard Riemann, which is obtained from what mathematicians call the complex plane by adding a point at infinity. Imagine a three-dimensional sphere lying on a two-dimensional plane and consider the map from this sphere on to the same plane, which is called a stereographic projection. This map is defined in the following way: for each point p’ on the surface of the sphere, there is only one straight line that also intersects the North Pole of the sphere. This line has only one point p of intersection with the plane on which the sphere lies, and this point p is the image according to the stereographic projection of the point p’ (figure 3.3). This transformation has a special feature: the North Pole itself will be in correspondence with the so-called “point at infinity” on the plane, since in this case every straight line intersecting only the North Pole on the sphere is a tangent to the North Pole, and so parallel to the plane, with no intersection with the plane itself. This way, any set in the plane has a one-to-one correspondence with a set on the sphere. Now, imagine the following operation, which creates a new transformation of the plane. Take a point on the plane, and find its map on the sphere. Then, move the sphere on the plane in a “regular”

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North pole Tangent line

P’

Riemann sphere

P

Figure 3.3 The Riemann sphere and the sterographic projection. The point p is mapped in the point p’.

way (for instance spin the sphere like a top, or just raise it along the vertical axis) and map back to the same point on the plane. This correspondence produces an important consequence: every elementary conformal Möbius transformation of the plane is now associated in a unique way to a movement of the Riemann sphere. In this association, the inversion corresponds to the movement that exchanges the position of the North and the South Poles. So the point at infinity can rigorously take the place of the origin of the plane, just by turning upside down the Riemann sphere. It may seem, at this point, that we are very far from Wallace’s natural territory. Yet, in Everything and More, Wallace observes, [in Riemann geometry] a line on the complex plane is the shadow of something called the Great circle on a Riemann Sphere, meaning a circle whose circumference goes through the R.S.’s north pole, which pole is defined, literally, as “a point at ∞” . . . 0 is the Riemann Sphere’s south pole, and ∞ and 0 are by differential geometric definition inversely related (because taking the inverse of a number on the complex plane is equivalent to flipping the Riemann Sphere over— long story). So that in Riemannian geometry, ‘0= 1/∞’ and ‘∞ = 1/0’ are not only legal; they’re theorems. (EM 177)

It is clear not only that Wallace was familiar with the Riemann Sphere and stereographic projection, but also, considering these ideas in relation with Infinite Jest, that we have a sort of visual explanation for the way the novel alters our point of view. When the sphere is in the standard

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position (the North, at the top) the point at ∞ is out of the plane, since the line that intersects only the North Pole does not intersect the plane (the author is a sort of deus ex machina, who imposes his vision, by remaining out of reach). But when inversion takes place, what is at infinity—the author’s point of view, and perhaps the author himself—is mapped into the center of the stage; what was outside becomes inside, and in this conceit we can “see” inside of the author’s head. This Riemannian material may appear to be a meaningless coincidence. Yet, we have seen that some curves can be seen as symbolizing different approaches to infinity: from Zeno’s infinity, flawed by paradox and infinite regression, which is expressed in E. T. A.’s cardioids, and by the lemniscate Orin traces on his Subjects’ flanks; to the parabolas and hyperbolas, standing for Cantorian expansion, the infinite potentiality of the relation between the text (or author’s mind) and the world (or reader), as in Schtitt’s discussion of Cantorian Tennis. Now comes a crucial point, which can hardly be considered a coincidence: the curve obtained as the result of a cardioid’s inversion is a parabola; the inversion of the leminscate yields the hyperbola. So, during inversion we can pass from one kind of infinity to the other; the way out from the cage of VIR can be found by passing to the superior dimension of the Riemann’s Sphere. This may seem to be a joke, little more than a metafictional trick to surprise the reader. In actual fact, it is one of the essential mechanisms driving the narrative fate of all the main characters. Orin, for example, is submitted to a radical inversion near the end of the book. The last time we see him, he is inside of an enormous “inverted glass” (IJ 971, emphasis added), in the same position as the roaches he asphyxiated in his bathroom: the bad dreams that have occupied his sleeping mind have become a part of his waking reality, and Luria Perec can now consider him as a “Subject,” in a total inversion of his point of view. Hal’s inversion starts during the Eschaton accident, when he “feels at his own face to see whether he is wincing” (IJ 342). But in his case there is a fatal problem, because there is no inside to exchange with the outside. Wallace explains: “one of his troubles with his Moms is the fact that Avril Incandenza believes she knows him inside and out as a human being, and an internally worthy one at that, when in fact inside Hal there’s pretty much nothing at all, he knows” (IJ 694). He is smart, a great tennis player with exceptional cultural knowledge, but he knows that “in fact he’s far more robotic than John Wayne” (IJ 694). So, after the inversion, we find that the external Hal, or better the collection of his past experiences, is completely sealed inside

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his head. He is “in” there, but he is completely isolated and unable to communicate with the external world, which, from his new perspective, appears to be empty and unreachable. He retains only the capacity to play tennis, since this ability is now hardwired into his body. Hal has now obtained a full citizenship in Schtitt’s second world, and the mind is no longer in position to disturb his body. Gately’s fate is to some extent the reverse of Hal and Orin’s. Aside from the digging scene recalled at the start of the book (IJ 17), the chronologically latest scene devoted to Gately is when “he felt an upward movement deep inside that was so personal and horrible he woke up” (IJ 974). The intrusion of the outside (the wraith) inside his head happens at the end of a long route out of the cage of addiction. Gately’s point of view has changed and the “upward movement deep inside” stands as just the beginning of a process of rebirth, which will follow a (failed?) attempt to divert the Continental Emergency. Eventually, the narrative ends with a scene on the beach, which, even if it precedes Gately’s meeting with the wraith in the novel’s chronology, nevertheless suggests that for Gately the inversion process operated in a better direction and he really has found a “way out.” In the case of James O. Incandenza, we can assume that his inversion occurs at the moment of his suicide. To escape his head, James O. Incandenza decides to put it inside a microwave oven. This action provokes an almost instantaneous inversion of his head’s contents.7 Perhaps here Wallace is nodding at one of Ratner’s Star’s fake theories: after death, DeLillo writes, “there’s some kind of turning inside out . . . An unknotting of consciousness in a space of n dimensions. A turning outward” (242). The mind(/soul?) of J. O. I. expands outside in the world, thus becoming one of the main characters in the second part of the novel. As a wraith, he “had no out-loud voice of its own, and had to use somebody’s like internal brain-voice if it wanted to try to communicate something” (IJ 831). With its mathematical foundations in Riemann and Cantor, this description fits perfectly with Wallace’s vision of the role of the literature. Even after la mort de l’auteur, his voice is entering our heads.8 Notes 1. See, for instance, Wallace’s use of the invention of calculus to critique Bret Easton Ellis’s work (CW 27–28). 2. On circles, see Burn, A Reader’s Guide (29, 41–42). With infinity specifically in mind, Michael North sees the novel’s fascination with incest as “the main pattern for this kind of infinity” (Machine 181).

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3. Actually a cycloid is a curve traced by a given point on a circle when the circle is rotating on a straight line, that is, the path traced by the valve of a bicycle tube, while the bicycle is moving. Instead, Infinite Jest ’s cardioid and spherical cycloid involve a rotation along another circle, a rotation on a rotation. Notice also that the book includes some other explicit references to Ratner’s Star. In DeLillo’s novel, for instance, when Billy Twillig wins a Nobel prize his mentor “did this trick he does with turning his jacket inside out without taking it off. That’s all that happened” (314). This can be compared to the scene in Infinite Jest, where A. Y. Richey “used to wow Hal and Mario in Weston by taking off his vest without removing his suit jacket, which M. Pemulis years later exposed as a cheap parlor-trick-exploitation of certain basic features of continuous functions” (IJ 983n3). These tricks are essentially the same one from a mathematical perspective, since they rely on the same topological properties of the surfaces under continuous deformations. 4. A. Y. Rickey is also the only fictional person in the list of famous mathematicians made by Pemulis (IJ 1072n324). 5. Other elementary Möbius transformations include dilations, rotations, and translations. 6. Even if the mathematical concept of inversion is not part of a high school student’s usual background, it is easy to understand. Popular and elegant presentations of this idea can be found in some classical books, which are mentioned in Everything and More, such as What is Mathematics? by Courant and Robbins and The History of Mathematics by Boyer. 7. The brainwas probably blown out through one’s eye sockets all around the kitchen walls, so that the skull might remain intact (Schmidt). Let us also notice a further inversion: James Incandenza (JI), produced Infinite Jest (IJ), which is just an inversion in a set of two points. 8. I would like to thank Elisabetta Carcano (alias Laura) of the wallace-l list for supporting me all the time in this research (and the wallace-l list for existing). I’m very grateful to Chiara Valerio, who forced me to present in 2008 a first elaboration about the relations between Wallace and mathematics at the “Festival della Letteratura” in Mantova, and to Stephen Burn, for his great help in preparing this essay. I have also to apologize to my students and collaborators for the time stolen from math. Don’t worry, I’m coming back!

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CH A P T ER

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“Webs of Nerves Pulsing and Firing”: Inf inite Jest and the Science of Mind Stephen J. Burn

Farragut was a drug addict and felt that the consciousness of the opium eater was much broader, more vast and representative of the human condition than the consciousness of someone who had never experienced addiction. —John Cheever, Falconer (43) To make so much of consciousness may have been my first mistake. —Philip Roth, The Anatomy Lesson (474)

David Foster Wallace’s second novel, Infinite Jest, had a long gestation. As Wallace explained to Marshall Boswell, he began the book, “or something like it, several times. ’86, ’88, ’89. None of it worked or was alive. And then in ’91-’92 all of a sudden it did” (letter). The finished book “worked” and “was alive” to the extent that Infinite Jest now stands, by common critical consent, at the heart of Wallace’s oeuvre. As his longest book, the novel deliberately overloads generic conventions, flaunting stylistic display and demonstrating an encyclopedic range of knowledge that courses through sport, national identity, addiction, media theory, linguistics, and mathematics.1 Yet for all the book’s intellectual plenitude and exuberant humor, it is also an anatomy of melancholy, and as the millennial self inventories its increasingly empty estate, the book becomes a harvest of souls, chronicling different ways to suffer.

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The novel’s many-sided construction has inevitably left it open to a broad spectrum of critical approaches. Tom LeClair’s early study addressed the book’s scale by articulating Wallace’s “radical realism,” a technique predicated on a panoramic vision designed to register personalities who remain only “background characters” in “most literary fiction” (“Prodgious” 32). In 2003, Boswell mapped much of the book’s intellectual context, tracing Wallace’s intertextual dialogue with Lacan, Kierkegaard, and William James. More recently, Jonathan Franzen described the book in broader terms, seeing “annotation, digression, nonlinearity, hyperlinkage” as the novel’s primary resistance strategies to a technological monoculture (Farther 34). Yet even as the book supports a multitude of different readings, and seems certain (as Charles B. Harris argues) to “ensure his permanence” (“David Foster Wallace” 170), there are nagging problems in the text, fractures in its surface, that disrupt our traditional expectations of narrative cohesion. Such problems were apparent even before the novel was published. In Fall 1995, Wallace sent a copy of the manuscript to Franzen, and one part of his long response precisely located some of the difficulties arising from the gap between the novel’s opening sequence and the chronologically earlier scenes that follow: I can’t quite figure it out on the basic story level. This is probably my problem, rather than the book’s, so forgive the rawness of this response . . . (Hal’s little communication problem in the opening scene can be due to 1.) extrapolation of the problem he was having in the lockerroom when we last see him in YDAU, 2.) later ingestion of DMZ, or [conceivably] 3.) exposure to the lethal Entertainment. Occam’s Razor invites us to look no further than possibility #1, meaning that his weird facial expressions and submammalian utterances in Year of Glad offer no clue about post-blizzard events.) . . . I understand that this is all extremely crude summarizing of extremely complicated themes; I’m aware of having only a small fraction of your capacity for metaphysics and sustained close analysis; I’m tired and depressed and oversmoked and slightly sick to my stomach today; I’m just trying to get a handle on what has happened. But what does happen after the blizzard? (letter)

Despite the novel’s critical and popular success, such questions dogged Wallace for years to come: before the book was published, Wallace’s editor Michael Pietsch protested the lack of resolution, prompting Wallace to insist “that the answers all existed, but just past the last page” (qtd. in Max 206), a position that he would later elaborate upon in a letter: “We know exactly what’s happening to Gately by

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end, about 50% of what’s happened to Hal, and little but hints about Orin” (qtd. in Max 199). Almost ten years later, the same questions would prompt the same response, as Wallace insisted in a 2004 radio interview that the novel “does resolve, but it resolves . . . outside of the right-frame of the picture. You can get a pretty good idea, I think, of what happens” (CW 145). While it’s possible to find theoretical justifications for these claims, it’s notable that Wallace privately conceded the point to Franzen, who recalls “that Dave admitted, when I spoke to him on the phone, that the story can’t fully be made sense of, but said that if I ever told anybody he’d admitted this he would deny he’d ever said it” (email). Yet if Infinite Jest ’s plot doesn’t exactly go where it’s meant to, it’s nevertheless notable that the novel has been widely read as if its vectors zeroed directly in on a larger goal: D. T. Max summarizes the orthodox version of this reading when he argues that “Infinite Jest . . . didn’t just diagnose a malaise. It proposed a treatment” (214). For many readers, this is a tempting position to adopt, perhaps in part because it outlines a utilitarian justification for reading such a dense and complex novel, while it also seems to fulfill the programmatic blueprint for fiction’s future that Wallace variously outlined in essays and interviews.2 But despite the wide currency such views enjoy, it’s notable that Infinite Jest ’s resistance to ordinary textual cohesion is not a simple matter of plot, and an antiteleological spirit infects the entire novel, refusing or parodying the notion of resolution or goal-reaching on multiple levels.3 Such resistance is manifest even in the book’s smallest narrative particles. Although Wallace often wrote with what the novel calls “the aural landscape” in mind (IJ 583), creating carefully structured assonant sequences (“in pine-shaded twilight he is almost glowingly white” [IJ 80]), one of the novel’s signature sentence structures itself embodies this antiteleological spirit, as we can see in the following example: “It’s hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency” (IJ 54). A micro model of the novel’s critique of linearity, such sentences strategically depend upon mildly unclear pronouns (“this”) to introduce a hint of ambiguity that’s dispelled when the sentence reaches its resolution and the final clause bends back to clarify the pronoun. The clarification, however, is both semantically unnecessary and so syntactically awkward that the sentence becomes more sclerotic than it would have been without the final clause. As the book is built from sentence to sentence, such small-scale syntactical torture forms a subterranean thread that ridicules the value of both progress and a final revelation: Wallace’s style here, as Robert Alter has argued in a different context, “is not merely

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a constellation of aesthetic properties but is the vehicle for a particular vision of reality” (4).4 This vision is extended in a number of the book’s thematic arcs that similarly resist notions of linear progress toward some goal: the idea that one moves “Straight ahead,” Gerhardt Schtitt insists at the tennis academy, “is myth” (IJ 80); James Incandenza’s movies are typically characterized by “no movement . . . that drew you along” (IJ 375); Hal envisages a “hero of non-action” who will succeed the postmodern age (IJ 142); while even the process of “cold fusion” is based upon annulation equations that trace “gaps and incongruities” rather than a clear path (IJ 185). Moving beyond the novel, this vision echoes through Wallace’s work. While his famous essay “E Unibus Pluram” is too frequently considered a kind of skeleton key to Infinite Jest, it, nevertheless sets out a similar dynamic when Wallace challenges the facile assumption that “etiology and diagnosis pointed toward cure” (SFT 67), an idea that is, in fact, so central to Wallace’s thought that he repeats it in the Pale King (TPK 486). In the world of Wallace’s novels, the diagnosis is painstakingly exact, but the final steps—whether cure or resolution—hardly ever come. The novel, then, is built around epistemic chasms, bottomless voids that forestall the routine gratification of narrative wholeness and whose implications ripple outward into the novel’s form and themes. But if this design makes the novel-as-panacea conceit hard to accept, an alternative approach to Infinite Jest is available if we focus less on Wallace’s explicit (and often misleading) claims about his work, and more on the concepts, language, and imagery that shape his explanations of what he was trying to achieve. Shortly after finishing the novel, for instance, Wallace wrote a short essay—eventually published as “The Nature of the Fun”—that contains important clues about how Infinite Jest works. Wallace begins his explanation with a metaphor borrowed from Don DeLillo’s Mao II (1991): [DeLillo] describes a book-in-progress as a kind of hideously damaged infant that follows the writer around, forever crawling after the writer . . . hideously defective, hydrocephalic and noseless and flipperarmed and incontinent and retarded and dribbling cerebro-spinal fluid out of its mouth as it mewls and burbles and cries out to the writer . . . you love it and dandle it and wipe the cerebro-spinal fluid off its slack chin. (BFN 193–94)

Although Wallace describes this set piece as a “perfect” trope for fiction writing (BFN 193) in general, the metaphor can also be mapped

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onto Infinite Jest to highlight three specific issues that help illuminate the novel’s hidden skeleton. First of all, the borrowing from DeLillo introduces the idea that a new work of fiction is not a discrete object, but a point on a web or network that’s vitally connected to ancestor works.5 This idea is underlined by the fact that DeLillo’s metaphor is itself a second-order metaphor, first borrowed from William Gaddis’s J R (1975), where Gibbs describes his interminable work-in-progress as an “invalid” whose “eyes follow you around the room” (603). The borrowing is only obliquely acknowledged in DeLillo’s novel—his fictional novelist, Bill Gray, shares his initials with Gaddis—but the idea of literary inheritance has been vital to critical appraisals of Infinite Jest. Although the novel scathingly refers to “Professor H. Bloom’s turgid studies of artistic influenza” (IJ 1077n366) and “misprision” (IJ 465), early readings of Infinite Jest stressed the extent to which Wallace was deliberately offering a coded rewrite of (variously) Hamlet, The Brothers Karamazov, and Joyce’s Ulysses.6 Yet even aside from such large-scale parallels, the idea of creativity as the strategic retooling of an earlier work is precisely embedded in references that initially seem to be merely contingent details. When Hal’s father dies, for instance, we’re told that Hal “listened to Tosca over and over” (IJ 41), and this allusion functions on several levels. On one level the opera’s famous “I lived for art” aria is surely being invoked, but since Puccini’s Tosca is itself a revision of Victorien Sardou’s La Tosca (1887), Hal’s rendition of Puccini’s rendition of Sardou, is itself an example of a story being told “over and over”: this is infinity at work in literary history’s closed field, constantly recombining a set of components to create endless variations, and the way such small details constellate into coherent patterns is just one sense in which the novel (like Madame Psychosis’s monologues) “seems both free-associative and intricately structured” at the same time (IJ 185). The first link in the web proposed by Wallace’s essay takes us back to DeLillo’s novel, and the minor variations between Mao II and Wallace’s revision point to a second important overlap between Infinite Jest and “The Nature of the Fun.” In the original sequence in Mao II, Gray looks at a sentence from his work-in-progress “and saw the entire book as it took occasional shape in his mind, a neutered near-human dragging through the house, humpbacked, hydrocephalic, with puckered lips and soft skin, dribbling brain fluid from its mouth” (55). Juxtaposing the original with Wallace’s reformulation, it’s clear that the two passages are initially separable in terms of each writer’s stylistic signature (DeLillo’s alliterative pairs; the oppressive rhythm of Wallace’s paratactic construction), but Wallace’s

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vocabulary also indicates a desire to be more precise in capturing a language for deformity, and amongst many small changes it’s notable that mere “brain-fluid” is upgraded to “cerebro-spinal fluid.” Like Franzen’s exploration of “the medicalization of human experience” in “My Father’s Brain” (How 19), Wallace’s passage reflects what I’m going to argue is Infinite Jest ’s attention to the essential ways that medical language and especially neural theories, invade and reorder our relationship to ourselves. Closely related to the passage’s neuroscientific overtones is the third aspect of “The Nature of the Fun” that’s important to a reading of Infinite Jest : Wallace’s willingness to see the various discrete episodes and sections of a book as a kind of gestalt entity, forming a body (in this case, an infant). Bodily gestalts are a recurring feature in Wallace’s fiction. Wallace begins his novelistic career with such a gestalt, when Broom announces that “the people of East Corinth . . . crawled and drove and walked” around a town shaped in “the form of Jayne Mansfield” (BOS 46), while the ground beneath the Bombardini building (metonymically, in this trope, the skin) is thick with tunnels “like nerves” for “the city’s . . . body” (BOS 127). Such images echo through the later books: Girl with Curious Hair opens with the characters beneath a “bulbous and wrinkled and shiny” gray sky that “looks cerebral,” (GCH 3), an appropriate setting for a story that’s partly preoccupied with cognitive functions (recall, explanation, assemblage of parts); as LeClair intuited in 1996, Infinite Jest ’s topography similarly “resemble[s] a prodigious human body” (“Prodigious” 35), while Broom’s tunnels are reprised beneath the buildings that comprise the tennis academy.7 The pattern alters to some extent in the Pale King, where the REC’s various elements combine to make a “mosaic representation of a blank IRS 1978 Form 1040” (TPK 281), but even this gestalt has a bodily resonance given that the novel’s epigraph blurs the meaning of form between bureaucratic paperwork and bodily form. Such gestalts partly serve a comedic function: they are a kind of cosmic joke about our failure to realize (in Richard Powers’s words) that “the world isn’t simply taking place at eye-level view, there’s lots going on above us and below us” (“Salon Interview”). But—taken together—Wallace’s conception of a book’s web-like history, his attention to the medicalization of experience, and the idea of the book as a body, provide a composite lens that helps bring certain aspects of Infinite Jest into sharper focus, clarifying both the novel’s narrative procedures and many apparently cryptic aspects of the fragmented plot. Such an approach, however, does not exhaust the novel’s

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meanings: Wallace’s fiction is always a product of a layered aesthetic, designed to constantly generate multiple meanings depending on which clues and interpretative layers the reader isolates.8 Nevertheless the extent to which a biologizing, or medicalizing, impulse runs through Wallace’s thought is striking, and is partially reflected by a brief collation of the Wallace comments quoted earlier in this essay: the book came “alive,” it can be seen as a living organism (an “infant ”), the writer performs a “diagnosis.” Turning to the novel’s title provides further support for this approach: the title’s allusion to Hamlet obviously introduces the concept of literary ancestry, while this allusion itself adds a focus on the physical body, since the title stems from a meditation prompted by a skull. It’s also worth noting here that Wallace typically embedded homophonic puns in his titles, which were often built around acronyms or shortened titles: “Good Old Neon’s” initials, for example, yield the appropriately bleak homophone gone; omitting the article and treating the Pale King as if it were a person’s name similarly throws up P. King, homophonically suggesting the peeking that underscores the posthumous novel’s obsession with vision and a “plurality of eyes” (TPK 54).9 Continuing in this mode reveals a further bodily dimension to Infinite Jest ’s title: in his notes for the novel, Wallace would sometimes abbreviate the title to In. Jest, a homophone, of course, for ingest. Drawing on such biological undertones, we can think of Infinite Jest as a zone in which a preoccupation with “living in your body” (IJ 158) and a nested set of allusions come together to interrogate and dramatize a range of theories of consciousness. If Wallace saw fiction as an exploration of what it is to be a “human being ” (CW 26), that exploration could not take place, for him, without reference to neuroscience and theories of mind. From this perspective, Wallace’s work seems to be built around what Oblivion calls “intricate exploded views of the human brain” (OB 285),10 and Infinite Jest ’s specific preoccupation is with forcing the reader “to learn how schizophrenia manifested itself in the human body’s brain” (IJ 48). To understand how the novel carries out this multileveled exploration, it’s necessary to trace the novel’s biomedical skeleton—elucidating multiple allusions to neuroscience and theories of mind—and to resituate the novel within the “web” of literary history that Wallace constructs, an approach that inevitably engages with his postmodern ancestors. “Postmodernism,” Fredric Jameson famously announced, “is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good” (Postmodernism ix). But while many postwar novels

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support his vision of “the consumption of sheer commodification as a process” (Postmodernism x), nature persists in much postmodern fiction through the movement’s often-overlooked negotiations with the mind’s biological substrate. A neural foundation is insistently present in many postmodern texts—from Joseph McElroy’s 1987 account of fantasies of the “right brain” in Women and Men (298) to John Barth’s increasing tendency to attribute behavior to “neurological . . . circuitry” (Last Voyage 242–43)—but this tendency is palpable perhaps nowhere more consistently than in Don DeLillo’s mid-70s fiction. Viewed from a neuroscientific perspective, DeLillo’s third and fourth novels— Great Jones Street (1973) and Ratner’s Star (1976)— are atomizing fictions that imply that the self, under the concentrating pressure of neuroscientific theories, cannot be represented as a unity, but must explode, distributing and isolating cerebral modules not in a single character but across a range of different personalities. I’ve argued elsewhere that Great Jones Street unfolds in this fashion according to Paul D. MacLean’s Triune Brain theory, which DeLillo most likely encountered in Nigel Calder’s study, The Mind of Man (1970).11 In this model, the human brain is divided into three functionally separate cerebral modules, which MacLean termed the reptilian, paleomammalian, and neomammalian brains. These three brains originate in three distinct phases of evolutionary history, with each brain’s disparate processes reflecting the broad potentials of their particular evolutionary moment. The reptilian brain is the oldest cerebral unit, representing what Calder likened to an “old crocodile under our skulls,” and governing both basic fear reactions (the binary fight-or-flight response) and reproductive urges (275). Next, is the paleomammalian brain, which can be compared to a “horse-like brain” (276), and is largely built around the limbic system, a neural structure that is “very much involved in emotional responses” (276). At the very top of this hierarchy is the neomammalian brain (effectively the cerebral cortex), which controls the special cognitive strengths that distinguish humanity. In Great Jones Street, DeLillo projects MacLean’s model on to the three-level building that provides the main theater for the novel’s action, and assigns one of MacLean’s cerebral modules to each of the characters according to the floor they occupy. Thus in the novel, Fenig is an exaggerated form of the cortex; Bucky Wunderlick is the midbrain; and the Micklewhite boy embodies the reptilian complex, with his character constructed around heightened fear responses— the “fundamental terror inside things that grow” (Great Jones 51). DeLillo reprises MacLean’s system in Ratner’s Star, imagining the

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triune brain as a “model for examining the relative depths of protohistoric and modern terror” (381), but he also supplements it with an emphasis on split-brain research. Evidently drawing on Roger Sperry’s studies of the opposed and complementary processing strengths of the two cerebral hemispheres, characters in Ratner’s Star function as individual representatives of qualities associated with each hemisphere. According to this framework, the novel classifies Billy Twillig as a character whose “right side of the brain outprocessed the left” (195), while Robert Softly—one of Billy’s doubles—represents “a parody of the left brain” (245). This atomistic approach to individual psychology partly explains why Ratner’s Star, in particular, is so often classified as a menippean satire, which, as Bakhtin argues, “destroy[s] the epic and tragic wholeness” of the individual to test “an idea” rather than “a particular human character” (Problems 116, 114). Yet it’s vital to note that DeLillo’s treatment of neuro-rhetoric—whether borrowed from MacLean, Sperry, or elsewhere—is neither simply a passive transcription of their claims, nor an attempt to borrow whatever scientific authority accrues to their viewpoints. Rather DeLillo’s fiction creates a psychological matrix that draws on such theories both to explore their incompleteness, and to force them into dialogue with competing discourses, a strategy that’s most markedly evident in Ratner’s Star, where neuroscience’s explanatory power is set against Thomas Nagel’s famous critique of such materialist explanations in “What is it like to Be a Bat?” (1974). In capsule form, Nagel’s essay argued that no theory that attempted (like MacLean and Sperry) to understand consciousness from a study of the brain’s physical basis could “account for the subjective character of experience” (445): in effect, we could not understand what it was like to be a bat purely from analyzing the physical structures of the bat’s brain. Nagel’s specific argument is incorporated in the novel through Maurice Wu’s belief that he can understand “bat consciousness” (394), though the substance of his research—collecting bat droppings— implies DeLillo’s skeptical attitude toward the physical basis of both Wu’s theorizing, and materialist approaches to the mind in general. But while Wu’s research program introduces Nagel’s argument into the novel, the broader philosophical implications of this theory reach their climax when Billy affirms the gap between quantifiable knowledge and existence, insisting that “there is something between what I know and what I am and what fills this space is what I know there are no words for” (370). In line with Wallace’s recombinant aesthetic, Infinite Jest can be thought of as another gestalt, a millennial update and hybrid

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reformulation of these two DeLillo novels. Critics have documented both explicit allusions and overarching plot parallels that reach back to both books,12 while Hal’s refusal of reductive theories in the opening scene (“I’m not a machine . . . I am not what you see and hear” [IJ 12–13]) closely parallels Billy’s claim that “I am not just this but more” (370). Aside from such general overlaps, however, Wallace evidently intuited both DeLillo’s compositional process of dramatizing specific neuroscientific theories13 and his tendency to atomize those theories across a cast of characters. Wallace’s fascination with the mind’s material substrate—a vision of “webs of nerves pulsing and firing” (IJ 168)—informs Infinite Jest on several levels. The novel bases its concept of a lethally entertaining cartridge on neuroscientific research carried out in the 1950s, while there are also clusters of explicit references to, for example, Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind (1949) and phrenology (IJ 521).14 Less obviously, submerged allusions infiltrate all areas of the novel so that theories of consciousness lie beneath the text like a watermark: thus, an apparently incidental title in James Incandenza’s filmography such as “Insubstantial Country” (IJ 992n24), does not just introduce a movie about the mind’s biological basis (the film may document a “temporal lobe seizure” [IJ 992n24]), but specifically invokes Julian Jaynes’s term for consciousness (“the insubstantial country of the mind” [1]) from the start of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976). The insubstantial realm of consciousness is the true territory explored and interrogated by all Wallace’s fiction, but in terms of DeLillo’s legacy, specifically, it’s notable that MacLean’s triune model of consciousness seems to be projected across the Incandenza children,15 unfolding according to the following hierarchy: 1) Hal = the neomammalian cortex: characterized by what the novel calls “coldly logical cognition” (IJ 322), Hal’s tendency to be “overcognitive” (IJ 896) is emphasized in the novel’s opening scene where low-level physiological failure—to speak, to move appropriately—is compensated for by a display of abstract thought, taking in Camus, Kierkegaard, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Hegel (IJ 12). More comically, his emphasis on thought rather than feeling is replayed when he visits the Inner Infant meeting expecting to collect “serious data” (IJ 801). Representing the opposing pole to Orin’s satyriasis, Hal takes “lifetime virginity” as a “conscious goal” (IJ 634), and ultimately considers emotions “to be like so many variables in rarified equations” (IJ 694).

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2) Mario = the paleomammalian brain: primarily composed of the limbic system, which Infinite Jest glosses as “the part of the brain that causes all sentiment and feeling” (IJ 698), Mario is unremittingly connected to relatively pure emotion rather than cerebrally conceived contempt. As “the least cynical person in the history of Enfield” (IJ 184), he admires Madame Psychosis because she talks about straightforward emotional material, “about heartbreak and people you loved dying” (IJ 592). 3) Orin = the reptilian brain: the first scene that takes Orin as a central character begins by stressing his connection to the reptilian past, as his body leaves a “fossilized image” on his bed (IJ 43). Orin is the book’s representative professional athlete, and he insists that “the pro ranks” are where “you’ll understand primitive” (IJ 243). He hates nail clippers, which Hal points out is a further evolutionary throwback, since nails are “the vestiges of talons and horns,” developing “long before the cerebral cortex” (IJ 242, 257). As is characteristic of the “deep reptilebrain level” (IJ 548), he is obviously connected to emotionless sex throughout the novel. These correspondences are suggestive rather than rigidly categorical, since this is just one interpretative strata in a richly layered text rather than a simple case of novelized theory. Yet the relative ages of the characters parallel the respective histories of each cerebral module (Orin, like the reptilian brain, is the oldest; Hal and the cortex are the most recent to emerge), and the coexistence of three evolutionary histories within a single moment might be linked to the scenes in the novel that see time as not linear but static, the “annularized Great Concavity’s No-Time,” a “clock with hands frozen eternally” (IJ 183, 558). Projecting MacLean’s theory in this way also illuminates a dimension of Wallace’s characterization strategy: as in DeLillo, these characters’ abilities are exaggerated within a narrow range to maximize their impact, while much of the book serves to underline the failure of the cortex—as embodied by characters that “identify their whole selves with their head” (IJ 272)—to operate in isolation. In this respect, it’s notable that Hal, in particular, tends to function in binary pairings that allow him to externally bolster the degree to which he’s “asymetrically hobbled” (IJ 269): moving down the evolutionary scales, he most frequently pairs with Mario, whom he “almost idealizes” (IJ 316), and the “reptilian Michael Pemulis” (IJ 50, emphasis mine). Taken together, the Incandenza boys represent the individual neural components of a single person “broken into pieces and trying

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to join” (IJ 952) and that the names, when laid out in this schematic, yield another typically medical acronym—this is the book’s HMO, albeit by negative example—seems consistent with the biological framework introduced by “The Nature of the Fun.” In fairly obvious ways, such splittings indicate an overarching argument about the need for unity and integration, over detachment and isolated specialization (a position that’s, of course, elaborated in the athletes’ outsized and asymmetrical bodies). Beyond the Incandenza family, however, MacLean’s vertical axis is invoked through Gately’s narrative as it stretches toward the unity that the Incandenza family has lost. Introduced in reptilian terms as resembling a “young dinosaur” (IJ 55), with a youth that’s closely connected to the legendary past (the mock Arthurian epic of “Sir Osis” [IJ 449]), Gately spends much of his early career with characters such as Bobby C, who, we’re pointedly told, has a “flat lipless head, like a reptile” (IJ 919). After his figurative rebirth in the amniotic waters at the book’s end, Gately—unlike the Incandenzas—is able to move between cerebral levels. He begins to remove himself from the world of addiction— which Wallace nearly always outlines according to reptilian codes of selfishness and fight-or-flight responses16 —and begins to experience (and sometimes literally relives) life in the emotional terms of the limbic system, as he “suddenly started to remember things . . . that he’d barely even been there to experience, in terms of emotionally, in the first place” (IJ 446). But while MacLean’s model provides a tool to decode the Incandenza family system and to reframe Gately’s story, the triune brain also allows Wallace to reach beyond DeLillo’s example because it introduces—at a relatively abstract neural level—a concept that seems central to his work and thought: schizophrenia. The functional separation between what MacLean called the three “biological computers” (339) of his triune system, creates an internal conflict of interests that MacLean termed a “schizophysiology” in which we “look at ourselves and the world through the eyes of three quite different mentalities” (qtd. in Sagan 55). Burdened with a self that’s agonizingly trisected between the sometimes conflicting processing strengths of the various cerebral modules, MacLean’s model prompted Arthur Koestler to announce that “man—normal man—is insane” (qtd. in Calder 276). The divide between the brothers’ skills can be seen, then, as indexing the family system’s schizophysiology, while in a broader sense Wallace’s total body of work is noticeably filled with references to internal division in general, and schizophrenia in particular. Whether Wallace is writing about cinema, weather systems,

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or transfinite mathematics, schizophrenia is regularly called in as an organizing trope in his nonfiction,17 while at the level of character, his fiction is full of schizophrenics: Lenore laments in Broom that her brother’s “still got this schizophrenic thing about his leg” (BOS 327); The Pale King universalizes the condition, diagnosing “the split self required by society” (TPK 540n), and describing Lane Dean as “broken and split . . . like all men” (TPK 42). Viewed through a broader lens, Infinite Jest ’s fascination with mental disorders forms a consistent current through the critical literature devoted to the novel. LeClair saw “the noise of mental illness” as one of the novel’s “conceptual bases” (“Prodigious” 34), while Catherine Toal reads the novel in terms of an opposition between “two distinct kinds of depression” (318). More recently, Mary K. Holland elucidates Infinite Jest ’s embedded links between “medical incapacitation” and physical “infantilizing” (235), Elizabeth Freudenthal argues that the novel features “obsessive-compulsive disorder, ad nauseam” (195), and Heather Houser diagnoses a “medicalized environmental consciousness” at work in the book (139). Such readings are pertinent to the novel’s thematic arcs, but it’s worth noting that the book’s more subtle details merge Wallace’s medical subtext with further webbed genealogies reaching toward his literary ancestors. Gately’s incarceration betrays echoes of Roth’s The Anatomy Lesson (1983),18 but in terms of the novel’s overall development, it’s significant that Lenz is the butterfly flapping its wings in the plot’s complex fractal system: his actions disrupt Gately’s rehabilitation, thus bringing him into contact with Hal, which leads to the 2009 exhumation of James Incandenza’s corpse. Given such a pivotal role, it’s notable that Lenz’s name is a double pun: in part, his name is a homophone for lens, which ties into both the novel’s fascination with cinema, and the more general act of vision, which I’ll argue is vitally connected to the novel’s treatment of the mind; in terms of literary history, however, he also shares his name with the eponymous hero of Georg Büchner’s Lenz (1836), whose already unhinged mind—bereft of any “coherent and sustaining relationship to the world” (Swales 100)—descends into madness. The plot’s crucial escalation, then, is strategically arranged to stem from a character whose name is synonymous with mental illness, which places the misfiring mind as the novel’s engine. In somewhat more specific terms, Infinite Jest also presents Wallace’s most detailed exploration of schizophrenia and the divided self. Self-division is ubiquitous in Wallace’s novel and is relayed on several levels. Sometimes spatial movement reveals such splits, as in our introduction to Erdeddy, which ends with the hapless addict trying to

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satisfy two impulses at once “so that he stood splay-legged . . . entombed between the two” (IJ 27). Elsewhere, a specifically schizophrenic division is evoked by the book’s peripheral sport: when Orin feels that tennis has left him a typically schizophrenic “psychic husk” (IJ 288), his substitute sport—football—merely confronts him with a sport characterized by “schizoid bounces” (IJ 289). Schizophrenic splits seem inescapable, and—like most aspects of Infinite Jest —these divisions can be parsed in multiple ways. Wallace’s favored term for a joint— “duBois” (IJ 75)—can be read, for instance, as evoking W. E. B. DuBois notion of “double consciousness,” a link that’s strengthened by the shared centrality of certain key words—particularly veil —in both texts. Equally the quality of “both ness” that Wallace locates in David Lynch’s cinematic vision could be invoked (SFT 211), along with the different ways that Wallace’s prose seems to be double-voiced.19 But more exacting parallels seem to point to R. D. Laing’s classic study, The Divided Self (1960), which Wallace read and annotated during the years when he was planning Infinite Jest. Laing’s work is often classified as an example of antipsychiatry, an approach that disdained routine therapeutic procedures, which were deemed actively damaging, in favor or “a different way of conceptualizing and acting upon mental disorders” (Pickering 72). Such a position has loose affinities with the scathing portraits of therapists that appear in every Wallace novel, from Broom’s Dr. Jay, to the amateur counseling carried out in the Pale King by Meredith Rand’s manipulative husband.20 More precisely, Laing’s own working procedure—what he called “the existential-phenomenological method” (18)—is effectively the process employed by novels in general and Infinite Jest in particular: Laing sought “not so much . . . to describe particular objects of [a patient’s existence] as to set all particular experiences within the context of his whole being-in-his-world” (17), and the wider implications of this approach provided Wallace with a skeleton that helps organize the novel’s overall structure, demarcate the central characters’ primary crises and histories, and allows Wallace to reach beyond clinical histories to address the larger literary field.21 When studying a schizophrenic patient, Laing argued, “it is in terms of his present that we have to understand his past” (32). Embodying this dictum, Infinite Jest is arranged to preface its long excavation of the Incandenza past with the chronologically most advanced narrative unit, a decision that ensures that a reader can only get to the past through the present. In line with Laing’s existential-phenomenological method, this narrative present carefully sets up Hal’s “being-in-his world” by emphasizing what Barth calls “texture.” As such, Wallace

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devotes his prose less to “Special Effects . . . than [to] the descriptive details” of his experience (Barth, Every 158), with fine-grained descriptions of sensory data, and location.22 Again emphasizing a holistic perspective, Laing stressed that the patient must not be considered “simply . . . abstracted from her family” but situated amid “the total family constellation” (183, 189): thus, the book’s movement into the past traces the family line back to the chronologically earliest narrative sequence, which functions as the novel’s origin story. In this scene, Wallace precisely locates a schizoid division as emerging from the family system, when he reveals that James Incandenza’s parents pressed him toward conflicting modes of existence: the mother characterizing him in terms of his “scientific-prodigy’s mind,” the father insisting “you’re a body” (IJ 159). Such a mind-body divide—where a patient “experiences himself . . . as a mind more or less tenuously linked to a body” (Laing 17)—is Laing’s typical schizophrenic mode, and in addition to its temporal organization, Infinite Jest is designed to explore schizophrenia against a backdrop of different kinds of embodiment. This investigation is introduced by the novel’s title—Hamlet ’s graveyard scene is, of course, addressed to a skull that’s been separated from a body— and the novel goes on to map a continuum of embodiment, with individual characters (in a fashion that again recalls DeLillo’s atomizing precedent) representing different gradations along this scale. Orin’s reptilian characteristics, for instance, might be reconceived as one extreme within this range, representing the mind’s near-total submergence in the body; Incandenza’s wraith, by contrast, presumably stands as the opposing pole of pure mind. In this schema, Lyle might represent some perfect midpoint: on one level he lives totally in and through the body, even living “off the sweat of others” (IJ 128); at the same time, he is—in a fashion that looks forward to The Pale King ’s Drinion—a radically mindful character, able to use his body in ways that suggest that mindfulness can transcend physical constraints. Lyle’s fusion may partly explain why James (like Hal with Mario or Pemulis) so frequently sought to offset his polarity by seeking out Lyle when he was alive (IJ 375, 379). The consequence of disembodiment, for Laing, is “people who experience themselves as automata, as robots, as bits of machinery, or even as animals” (23); such a condition is near universal in Wallace’s novel, from the opening scene, where Hal sounds “like an animal” (IJ 14), through the players whose heads are figured as “gears and cogs being widgeted into place” (IJ 635) to the barroom paranoids who insist that “most of these fuckers are—: metal people . . . under a

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organic layer that’s micro-thin” (IJ 733). In this respect, the tendency of Wallace’s fiction to imagine the body not as a living part of the self but as a gestalt figure for understanding the landscape—as a map— places us squarely in the world of the schizophrenic. As John Vernon argued in an early study of literature and schizophrenia, the map is a figure for the “transformation of the world into object” (14), and the disembodying process presumably reaches its apex when the body is objectified into a navigational tool for the mind. As reality is drained of color, this disembodying process leaches outward and “the world becomes a map of the world” (IJ 693). The origin of such schizophrenic problems can be located, according to Laing’s construction, in “early infancy” (77), when an individual fails to develop an existential position of “primary ontological security ” (39), that is, a “centrally firm sense of his own and other people’s reality and identity” (39). Without such ontological security, an individual is vulnerable to a variety of psychic traumas, including what Laing calls engulfment, in which “the individual dreads relatedness as such” and in which “the main manouevre to preserve identity under pressure from the dread of engulfment is isolation” (44).23 Such fears often stem from mothers whose controlling influence creates a child who cannot become an autonomous entity because he is too busy being “what [the mother] wanted him to be” (71). In these situations, the individual may try “to be nothing” (89) and can split into an inner self and “a false-self system,” that is a “mask . . . that such individuals wear” (73). The “false self of the schizoid person is compulsively compliant to the will of others” (96), becoming “a response to what other people say I am” (98). In a paragraph that Wallace marked, Laing concludes that the “most extreme form” of such obedience is “the catatonic” (102). Behind the mask, Laing finds (in another passage Wallace annotated) a “shut-up self, [which] being isolated, is unable to be enriched by outer experience, and so the whole inner world comes to be more and more impoverished, until the individual may come to feel he is merely a vacuum” (75). Laing’s model is generally registered throughout Infinite Jest, and Wallace alerts the reader to its seminal importance when he directly incorporates the language and form of Laingian schizophrenia in a passage near the end of the book in which Avril diagnoses Hal’s condition for Mario: There are, apparently, persons who are deeply afraid of their own emotions . . . [of] engulfment . . . This interpretation is “existential.” . . . certain types of person are terrified even to poke a big toe into genuinely

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felt regret or sadness, or to get angry. This means they are afraid to live. They are imprisoned in something (IJ 765–66, emphasis added)

That Avril can so precisely diagnose Hal’s condition but not cure it, is consistent both with the novel’s antiteleological spirit, and with the larger sense in Wallace’s work that knowing a disorder’s etiology may nevertheless offer little hope of alleviating the symptoms. Indeed, as Wallace wrote to Pietsch, his book explored “clarification of questions > solutions” (qtd. in Max 193). Nevertheless, in line with Avril’s diagnosis, Hal’s narrative closely follows Laing’s description: early in his life, Hal’s primary ontological security is exchanged for outer compliance as young Hal seems to be “trying as if his very life were in the balance to please some person or persons” (IJ 999n76). Within what the novel calls a “schizogenic . . . family” (IJ 1040n234), Avril has engulfed Hal’s identity, as she’s “got Hal’s skull lashed tight to hers” (IJ 1040n234). Under pressure of engulfment, Hal has already flirted with the possibility that he might “be no one” (in the transcript of Tennis and the Feral Prodigy [IJ 175]), and his sense of his own unreality grows during the novel’s final stages as he increasingly seeks isolation. Although the “almost ontological” effects of DMZ cannot be discounted (IJ 170), he fantasizes about “ontological erasure” (IJ 689) and suspects that he exists as “postures and little routines, locked down and stored and call-uppable for rebroadcast” (IJ 966). Closely following Laing’s claim that the schizophrenic individual will “come to feel he is merely a vacuum” (75), Hal concludes that “inside [him] there’s pretty much nothing at all” (IJ 694). The continuity from this condition to Hal’s state in the opening scene seems clear: on a basic level, Hal’s communication problems at the start illustrate Laing’s contention that “one of the great barriers against getting to know a schizophrenic is his sheer incomprehensibility” (163), while his barrage of allusions may also support Laing’s claim that the schizophrenic deliberately uses “obscurity and complexity as a smoke-screen to hide behind” (163). More specifically, at the novel’s opening Hal is obviously in the midst of a radical disconnection between his mind and body, since he can think but cannot turn thought into comprehensible speech, confidently summon what “will be seen as a smile” (IJ 5), or even type without producing “some sort of infant’s random stabs on a keyboard” (IJ 9). Such physical problems, however, do not explain why he is nevertheless able to play high-level tennis (“On court he’s gorgeous” [IJ 14]), a mismatch that presents—as Wallace scholarship attests24 —one of the enigmatic opening’s most vexing problems. Yet one way to resolve

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this apparent paradox is to read it as a vital and hidden clue pointing to the fact that Hal suffers from schizophrenia: tennis, Wallace observed elsewhere, is a sport that requires a “schizoid” vision taking in both “ball and court” (SFT 235), so Hal’s problems—as well as the ubiquity of robotic bodies at Enfield Tennis Academy (ETA)—seem counterintuitively to be perfectly calibrated for tennis success. Laing’s theory, then, seems to comprehensively explain Hal’s problems, and—critically—it does so in a fashion that has very little to do with the gaps in the novel’s plot. Comprehension, in Infinite Jest, comes not by moving forward, but by tracing where we’ve come from, making visible both familial and literary genealogies. Yet while schizophrenia forms a thematic nexus, drawing together sport, mental illness, and family history, it also reaches beyond the tennis players toward the Ennet House narrative. Laing observes that while the schizophrenic “self . . . is empty . . . one might call it an oral self in so far as it . . . longs to be and dreads being filled up. But its orality is such that it can never be satiated by any amount of drinking [or] swallowing” (144–45). In short, schizophrenia is a vital ancillary to addiction: it makes sense, then, that Hal is described as “by all appearances addicted to everything that is not tied down, cannot outrun him, and is fittable in the mouth” (IJ 1074n332); that Orin’s emergence from the same “family constellation” leaves him feeling like “an empty . . . husk” (IJ 288) that drives him to his own (albeit not necessarily oral) addiction; that the family’s patriarchs had alcohol addictions; and that at Ennet House “schizophrenia is . . . the norm” (IJ 435). In overarching fashion, Laing’s model of schizophrenia outlines an algorithm for character development and plot structure, but The Divided Self also influences other aspects of the book, providing, in particular, a governing metaphor that shapes the novel as a whole. Viewed in these terms, Wallace’s narrative technique in Infinite Jest might be thought of as a kind of schizo-narration that functions within the novel on two levels. The first level is hinted at toward the end of The Divided Self, when Laing quotes a patient’s explanation that “schizophrenics say and do a lot of stuff that is unimportant, and then we mix important things in with all this to see if the doctor cares enough to see them and feel them” (164). This double voicing can be considered the model for Infinite Jest ’s dialectical alternation between narrative progression and digression, and while it has literary precedents—paralleling Joyce’s use of a “blurred margin” in Ulysses (Ellmann 366)—as a governing metaphor, it makes the novel as a whole read like an elaborate Laingian case history.25 At the same

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time, Laing’s model also allows Wallace to draw visual perception into the novel’s core concerns. The schizophrenic—as conceived by Laing—is unusually preoccupied with vision, and Wallace marked a passage in The Divided Self where Laing argued that “no one feels more ‘vulnerable,’ more liable to be exposed by the look of another person than the schizoid individual . . . to the schizoid individual every pair of eyes is in a Medusa’s head which he feels has power actually to kill or deaden something precariously vital in him” (76).26 To some extent, this vulnerability helps contextualize the novel’s fascination with the medusa and the odalisque, even as it crystallizes Wallace’s general conception of fiction writers, who he described as “born watchers” who “dislike being objects of people’s attention” (SFT 21). Yet even more directly invoked is Laing’s earlier observation on this subject that “a schizophrenic may see that he is made of glass, of such transparency and fragility that a look directed at him splinters him to bits and penetrates straight through him” (37). This description clearly supports the idea that schizophrenia runs through the novel’s family system since the so-called glass delusion is at different times attributed to works produced by both Hal and his father (IJ 7, 989n24), while the centrality of vision can also be considered a secondary aspect of the novel’s schizo-narration. Wallace connects the eye with the operation of the brain when he revises the famous story of Phineas Gage’s brain injury (a staple of most neurology primers), in a recurring image of a “railroad spike” running through an “eye” rather than the left frontal lobe (IJ 485); but James Incandenza’s movie, Kinds of Pain, more directly clarifies the novel’s relationship to the function of the visual cortex. As Oliver Sacks has noted, “visual consciousness is a threshold phenomenon” (231n13), with much activity taking place below the conscious mind’s horizons. The significance of such nonconscious processes can be vividly illustrated when a movie is slowed down so that our routine experience of a fluid filmic narrative is revealed to depend upon the nonconscious brain stitching together a series of static snapshots. Kinds of Pain is a technical demonstration of exactly this fact, since it requires “PROJECTION AT .25 NORMAL” speed so that it reveals not movement, but “still-frame” images (IJ 987n24). Such a strategy affirms DeLillo’s later claim that “human perception is a saga of created reality” that’s engineered by “every eyeblink” (Point Omega 28), but it also opens up opportunities to think about the way Infinite Jest ’s structure unfolds: the novel’s emphasis on gaps and stasis rather than fluid linear progress can be thought of as an analogy that draws

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our attention to the static optical input that precedes conscious brain function. Rather than focusing on narrative development, Wallace invokes the example of preconscious input to make the plot “break into frames” (IJ 608), and this visual analogy works in two directions, providing not only a structural model for the novel, but also casting light on the role of Wallace’s reader. Wallace criticism has long postulated that his work’s fragmentary nature might be a gesture to the reader—suggesting that a representative reader is empowered by incompleteness to the point that she has “participated jointly in the game, instead of being on the receiving end of a barrage of authorial poses” (Jacobs, “American” 226). Such a reading is hard to square with the real ways that Infinite Jest does deliberately barrage the reader, but the novel’s core investment in optical science provides a way to reframe this relationship. If we take seriously the analogy between the eye’s static snapshots and the novel’s structure as a way to conceptualize the book’s obsession with vision, then we can see that this analogy situates the reader as the brain process that stitches those frames into a continuous whole. The logic underpinning this analogy does not necessarily invoke brains to empower the reader, but rather works in the opposite direction, by using the reader to comment upon the brain. Just as the reader is forced to piece the static units of the plot together in the hope of creating a soothing narrative whole that isn’t really there, so Wallace’s optical trope works to reveal the conscious mind’s dependence upon active processes that are forced to alter and mediate our sensory input to create meaning rather than presenting the mind’s eye as an unmarked lens through which we experience reality. While Wallace’s work famously explores the conscious mind’s war against itself, with its obsessive “inbent spiral[s]” (OB 181), his late fiction also displays an interest in neural operations that take place “out of conscious awareness” (TPK 93). Prefiguring such investigations, Infinite Jest ’s optical structure serves to highlight the active brain’s dangerous—because unperceived—primacy at the interface between sensory input and consciousness. Viewed in terms of the medical framework introduced by the “Nature of the Fun,” Infinite Jest seems to rehearse Laing’s theory of schizophrenia, and juxtaposing the novel and The Divided Self brings Hal’s problems, the dynamics of the Incandenza family system, and a skein of related aesthetic strategies into sharper focus. But the importance of this approach isn’t localized to the novel’s internal devices and personalities. Schizophrenia also functions as a supple tool that allows Wallace to project his concerns beyond the limits of mental phenomena to articulate both his place within, and his distance from,

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the late century’s literary field. Fredric Jameson’s famous discussion of schizophrenia in Postmodernism is clearly invoked in the novel, 27 but by drawing on Laing’s emphasis on ontological security, Wallace also articulates a more nuanced distinction between postmodernism and his own artistic blueprint. In Brian McHale’s lucid and influential model of the transition between modernism and postmodernism, the two movements can be distinguished in terms of their respective dominants : modernist fiction’s dominant is epistemological, raising such questions as “What is there to be known?; Who knows it?; How do they know it, and with what degree of certainty?” (Postmodernist 9); in postmodern fiction, by contrast, “epistemology is backgrounded, as the price for foregrounding ontology” (11), which leads to questions exploring “what kinds of world” there are and how they might be constituted (10). Though McHale contextualizes his analysis within a rich and varied theoretical matrix, one of the major sources of postmodernism’s ontological confusion is the rise of what McHale calls “the plural ontology of television-dominated everyday life” (128). Infinite Jest seems to deliberately replay McHale’s position through the novel’s account of Steeply’s father’s inability to distinguish between reality and “a plain old television program” (IJ 639). But even as Wallace reprises McHale’s theory, his novel also distances it, by displacing the disorientation that stems from television’s “plural ontology” onto a member of the previous generation, one of the novel’s many fathers who, while largely absent, nevertheless continue to orbit the book’s characters like satellites. Staying true to his first critical essay’s insistence that his generation required a different approach to television than the figurative parents who “regard the set rather as the Flapper did the automobile” (BFN 42), Infinite Jest incorporates postmodernism’s world-multiplying conception of television only to disavow its relevance to the current generation, while his novel instead grounds ontological disruption in cognitive processes that do trickle down from earlier generations.28 In his much-quoted 1993 interview with Larry McCaffery, Wallace argued that “good art” would apply “CPR to the elements of what’s human” (CW 26). To apply CPR , in this line, is generally taken as a loose synonym for revitalize, but in terms of Infinite Jest ’s overarching engagement with brain function, mental disorders, and theories of mind, CPR’s more precise denotation of a process that preserves brain function seems more than coincidental. Much that seemed excessive or digressive to the novel’s early readers appears, in light of the novel’s invocation of medicalizing discourse and neuroscience, to be tightly interwoven into a cohesive, informationally rich whole. Yet

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this coherence is based around thematic, rather than narrative, unity, and the novel employs its descriptive energies to provide a diagnosis but not a cure, because it is precisely the illusion that knowledge alone can redeem you that Wallace sets out to discredit by splitting MacLean’s model so that much of Hal’s helpless flailing can be seen to represent the perils of an isolated cortex. The brain as mapped by MacLean is fundamentally divided; the Laingian mind is prey to neurotic splintering; but perhaps art’s best hope, in Wallace’s eyes, is revealed by one last link back to an ancestor text and Georges Perec’s conception of a different kind of fragmentation. Perec is invoked in Infinite Jest through the shadowy figure of Luria Perec, whose name is split in two directions as Wallace fuses his literary forebear with a Russian neurophysiologist (A. R. Luria).29 But while much of this essay has been devoted to exploring the schisms connected to the neural half of this equation, Perec can be considered a kind of literary counterbalance. On one level, Perec’s lasting influence on the novel might be connected to An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (1975), which proposes to substitute straightforward narrative for a cataloguing impulse that excavates “that which is generally not taken note of” (3), a process that has significant parallels in both Infinite Jest and The Pale King. Yet the deeper connection may lie in the preamble to Perec’s earlier novel, Life A User’s Manual (1970), which opens with “a basic introduction to Gestalt” (xv). Perec’s representative gestalt is the fragmented form of the jigsaw puzzle, a solitary entertainment that—in Perec’s formulation—can be set against the internal divisions traced by the century’s psychologies, and seen as an interface between two minds. “Despite appearances,” Perec explains, “puzzling is not a solitary game: every move the puzzler makes, the puzzle-maker has made before” (xvii). Drawing on Perec, one way that Infinite Jest might function (in Wallace’s words) as “an anodyne against loneliness” (CW 16)—a loneliness that stems from our entrapment in the mind—is by simultaneously presenting its readers with two puzzles: first, Wallace (like Perec) conceives of narrative as a fractured puzzle that the reader must follow the writer by attempting to re assemble (rather than collaborating with him in its co-creation); and, second, he presents his characters as divided or atomized selves in a fashion that encourages readers to trace the psychic histories back to their schizoid origins. The emphasis on connection that underlies the puzzle reprises the web-like vision that underlies the book’s other obsessions—the endless links to earlier books, the biological pathways between the “webs of nerves” that embody the self—and Infinite Jest ’s thematic and narrative energies

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insistently foreground connection, even as the book can locate, but cannot replace, what the novel calls the “interior jigsaw’s missing piece” (IJ 350). Notes 1. It’s tempting to classify Infinite Jest ’s genre as a “novel epic,” by taking the terms outlined in a book written by two Amherst professors and dedicated to Dale Peterson, who oversaw The Broom of the System’s emergence as an undergraduate thesis. Griffiths and Rabinowitz’s Novel Epics (1990), focuses on Russian literature and describes the form in terms that might equally be applied to Wallace’s novel: such works possess a “double plot” that simultaneously outlines a story while alluding to its literary heritage (7); it is interested in the “documentation of fallen empires” (9); it has connections to cinema and ghosts (12, 16); it sees “time moving to apocalypse” (18); and presents the perfect form for “novelists who want to overcome . . . the anomie of their age” (18). 2. Mary K. Holland critiques this position in “The Art’s Heart’s Purpose,” arguing that, in fact, the novel “fails to deliver on the agenda that Wallace set for it” (218). 3. Wallace criticism has responded to this issue in a number of ways: by working from clues in the text, Boswell argues that “there is no conventional ‘release’ from the book, just as there is no final ‘release’ from the self” (Understanding 176); by moving beyond the text, and juxtaposing the novel’s irresolution with Wallace’s biography, Samuel Cohen argues that the novel’s “inconclusion” stems from Wallace’s exploration of “what it is like to live ‘in the middest’ of history” (64); disdaining the goal of explication, Jeffrey Karnicky reads the novel’s narrative “breakdowns” (103) by seeking to “catalog kinds of stasis [but] not with the goal of understanding them” (93–94). 4. For further discussion of Wallace’s sentences, see Sven Birkert’s discussion of the intermingling of comedy and anxiety in Wallace’s “orchestrations of language” (7); my exploration of the aural qualities of Wallace’s prose (Reader’s Guide 14–16); and Heather Houser’s reflections on Wallace’s tactical use of the passive voice and “strings of possessive prepositional phrases” (123). 5. Cohen has reasonably described Infinite Jest as employing “a voice built out of old voices” (77), and as I trace the various webbed-links backward from Wallace’s texts, I don’t want to suggest that Wallace couldn’t write a novel without forcing in multiple allusions, nor that he simply distilled earlier achievements in some facile imitation. Wallace, as I’ll try to demonstrate in this essay, saw such references as performing very specific functions, and when a fellow writer accused him of taking elements from his work he replied: “‘Your whole idea of

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6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

‘ripping off” seems a bit extreme and oversensitive, actually . . . Trust me: there are all sorts of weird bits and toss-offs from all over the place in that story . . . if you don’t get at least 50% of your toss-offs from the world around you—either observation, or somebody’s anecdote, or little snippets of other peoples art—all I can tell you is you’re a very unusual fellow.” Boswell’s Understanding discusses the novel’s relationship to Shakespeare and Dostoevsky (165–69); building on Boswell, Timothy Jacobs reads the novel as “a transposition of The Brothers Karamazov ” (266); my Reader’s Guide explores the novel’s relation to Joyce’s work (24–28). Essays by Natalini and Quinn in this volume consider Infinite Jest ’s bodily geography in more detail. In a related fashion, my 2004 essay “The Machine-Language of the Muscles” (later collected in revised form in my Reader’s Guide), argues that Infinite Jest unfolds according to a kind of psychic geography, where places are specifically referenced to highlight the novel’s larger argument about the self. Max notes that Wallace “reveled in Jacques Derrida’s essays, ‘The Double Session’ and ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’” (38), and the novelist may have found theoretical justification for the way his novel refuses to privilege any single interpretation in the infinite play of signification explored in those texts. Eyes are mentioned more than one hundred times in The Pale King. In “A Paradigm for the Life of Consciousness,” for example, I examine the way The Pale King develops a model informed by what Timothy Wilson calls “the adaptive unconscious.” For a full account of DeLillo’s engagement with neuroscience in this novel, see Burn, “Don DeLillo’s Great Jones Street and the Science of Mind.” Jeremy Green’s Late Postmodernism (2005) observes that Infinite Jest “includes allusions to DeLillo’s early work, notably End Zone and Ratner’s Star ” (218n10). See also, my Reader’s Guide (26, 35, 69–70). In a further link, Hal and Gately’s parallel relationship is stressed by the fact that the younger man is mostly known by his first name while the older man is known by his last; equally, in Ratner’s Star, Billy Terwilliger is known as Billy, while his mentor, Robert Hopper Softly, is typically referred to by his last name. Wallace, in fact, annotated one passage in his copy of Ratner’s Star with the name “Nagel.” For the lethal entertainment’s basis in experiments by James Olds, see Burn, A Reader’s Guide (3, 105n4). For Ryle, see the same text (71–75). In earlier essays, I’ve stressed different aspects of Infinite Jest ’s dualisms. The reading in this essay is intended to complement, rather than supersede those readings, since the different essays address different interpretative layers of Wallace’s complicated novel.

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15. Whether derived from DeLillo or not, the triune model seems to have wide currency in Wallace’s generation, and is clearly invoked in Franzen’s description of Midland Pacific’s headquarters in the Corrections (351), while it’s also an animating presence in Powers’s The Echo Maker (2006). 16. In this respect, an echo of MacLean’s “old crocodile under our skulls,” may be intended in the description of the former addicts who are associated with the distant past: “the old ruined grim calm longtimers . . . ‘The Crocodiles’” (IJ 354, emphasis added). 17. A Supposedly Fun Thing figures Lynch’s Lost Highway as representing “schizophrenia performatively ” (SFT 184), and describes the Illinois wind as “schizophrenic” (SFT 10); Wallace’s account of Cantor diagnoses an “abstraction-schizophrenia” that we owe to the Greeks (EM 30n18). 18. As far as narcotics go, for example, Gately’s favored drug, Demerol, has a reasonable literary pedigree: near the end of Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon (1981)—a novel beloved by Wallace—Will Graham is injected with the drug, and when Nathan Zuckerman is incarcerated in a Chicago hospital in the Anatomy Lesson, he learns that Demerol is “a great favorite with us folks whose pain drags on and on” (492). Zuckerman’s recovery seems to loosely prefigure Gately’s hospitalization, while—like many of Wallace’s characters—Zuckerman learns from his pain the consequences of isolating a sense of self in his head (“Your mouth is who you are. You can’t get very much closer to what you think of as yourself. The next stop is the brain” [Roth 495]). 19. For more on Wallace’s fiction in light of Bakhtin, see the essay by Boddy in this volume. Moving in a different direction, Frank Louis Cioffi sees the novel creating a “Divided Consciousness” in the reader, split between a “‘caught-up-in-the-story’ reading consciousness” and a mind that “tries to unravel the meaning of words” rather than plot (177). 20. There are other broad overlaps between the two. The Divided Self maps out a canon of artists who are in tune with schizophrenic energies, and make “the effort to communicate what being alive is like . . . without feeling alive” (40). While this description parallels what we might call Infinite Jest ’s normative psychology (most vividly evident in the novel’s many references to “death in life” [IJ 346, 698, 839]), Laing’s representative artists—Samuel Beckett and Francis Bacon—along with his other literary touchstone, William Blake, are all notable presences in Wallace’s novel. While Beckett was evoked in Wallace’s earlier work— Girl with Curious Hair ’s description of the “nothing-new sun” (GCH 347) echoes the opening of Beckett’s Murphy (1938)—Michael North has argued that Infinite Jest shares a fascination with “The mutual dependence, of Eye and Object” with Beckett’s Film (163). Francis Bacon’s work is one of the novel’s

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21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

touchstones for horror (IJ 199, 1031n162), while Blake is sometimes invoked as a bizarre consolation (IJ 379). Laing’s work is famously associated with the double-bind (derived from Gregory Bateson), but since such situations have been widely discussed in terms of Infinite Jest (even by Wallace himself) I have not re-covered that familiar ground here. Indeed, in the first critical essay about Infinite Jest, LeClair noted that Wallace’s novel was distinguished by an unusual attention to such textures, stressing his eye for the “particularities and histories of characters” (32). Laing draws on Kierkegaard, so we should be unsurprised, here, to find overlaps with Boswell’s discussion of “hiddenness” in the novel in relation to Kierkegaard’s aesthete (Understanding 140). In this collection alone, essays by Roberto Natalini and Clare Hayes-Brady explore alternative ways to address this issue. Even in terms of its smaller narrative units, Wallace’s fiction is never far from degenerating into case histories: Infinite Jest ’s description of “InterLace Telentertainment” slides seamlessly into an account of “carpal neuralgia” (IJ 60), while after just ten sections, The Pale King breaks down into a two-page list of “syndromes/symptoms associated with Examinations postings” (TPK 87). Cf. Morris Berman’s Coming to Our Senses (1989)—another of Wallace’s sources—in which Berman argues that “schizophrenia is a situation that can be called totally visual” (38). In Postmodernism (1991), Jameson diagnosed a “waning of affect in postmodern culture” (10), and Wallace seems to endorse this critique in his later association of the “lively arts of the millennial U.S.A.” with an “ennui” and “jaded irony” that voids any emotional freight (IJ 694). More specifically—and given that Wallace famously associated television with postmodern literary techniques—it is not a coincidence that the first time schizophrenia is named in the novel is in connection with the novel’s advanced form of television (Orin watches a documentary on “SCHIZOPHRENIA: MIND OR BODY ” [IJ 47]), and the Jamesonian angle is strengthed when the documentary’s patient is described as possessing “flat blank affectless . . . eyes” (IJ 47). Jameson’s Lacanian account of schizophrenia (“the schizophrenic is reduced to an experience of . . . a series of pure and unrelated presents in time” [Postmodernism 27]) can itself be read as a provocative analogy for Infinite Jest ’s structure; the validity of this connection, however, is partially questioned by the fact that it’s Molly Notkin—as her last name suggests (she is not kin), she is hardly an authorial surrogate—who comes closest to outlining Jameson’s vision of schizophrenia, when she insists that “the purportedly lethal final cartridge was nothing more than a classic illustration of the antinomically schizoid function of the post-industrial capitalist mechanism” (IJ 792).

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28. Yet even as Wallace’s twin allusions to Jameson and McHale mark the grounds of his difference from his postmodern ancestors, the book’s debt to Laing forges a further link back to Barth. While The Tidewater Tales (1987) proposes a “new scholarly-critical study . . . schizophrenia in the American literary imagination” (557), Barth also recognized that “schizophrenia . . . lies near the dark heart of writing” and described some of his work as exploiting “the Laingian scenario” (Friday 3, 140). Charles B. Harris has also read the Floating Opera (1956, 1967) in light of Laing’s The Divided Self and The Politics of Experience, documenting a case of “cultural convergence” rather than influence, since “The Floating Opera appeared before Laing’s books” (Passionate 29n4). 29. See Burn, A Reader’s Guide (110–11); in the Pale King Wallace describes Perec as “an immortally great fiction writer” (TPK 73).

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CH A P T ER

5

“Location’s Location”: Placing David Foster Wallace Paul Quinn

It seems counterintuitive to read David Foster Wallace as a writer of place, let alone a regional writer. The child of transplanted intellectuals, he was a citizen of the world of ideas. It is hard to imagine (or perhaps to stomach) the prospect of some future tour of the Midwest rebranded, along the lines of Hardy’s Wessex, as Wallace Country. (A gazetteer of metro Boston, ghost-mapped by Infinite Jest, as Dublin has been by Ulysses, appears more plausible.)1 Nevertheless, it is surprisingly instructive, if provocative, to examine his evocations of, and reflections upon, place, space, and region, even as they complicate or confound our assumptions about such writing. Location is never approached straightforwardly in Wallace’s work; reflexivity, mediation, and allusion divert and thicken empirical or phenomenal description. This essay sketches various ways in which place and region are represented, with particular emphasis on the intensely dialectical nature of Wallace’s topography. Specifically, it considers the dialectic of abstraction and concretion, or map and territory, evinced in a markedly cartographic imagination that nonetheless hankers after the real terrain that maps simplify or subsume; the dialectic of center and periphery that shapes a perspective selfconsciously and ambivalently positioned “between Coasts”; the negotiation of past and present inherent in the use of transhistorical and encyclopedic spaces; before turning, finally, to Wallace’s own, peculiar, regional yet universal, adaptation or sublation of encyclopedic form—the “tornadic.”

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Terrain= Map It is difficult to get to the heart of Wallace territory without prior reference to maps. Indeed, the vexed relationship between the abstraction of cartography and the empirical fact of real country is an abiding Wallace obsession, predisposed perhaps by the paradoxically map-like nature of his formative terrain. As the cast of his trailblazing novella, “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,” head-off in the direction their story’s title intends, the Central Illinois countryside “encases them in a cartographic obelisk, walled at the sides and tapered to green points at the horizons front and back” (GCH 299). Time and again in Wallace, descriptions of actual Midwestern topoi turn into meditations on maps; distinctions between the abstract and the concrete become malleable or moot. In his lyrical essay on regional space, “The Flatness,” Wallace’s fellow Midwesterner, former colleague and editor, Michael Martone, contends that “flatness informs the writing of the Midwest” (31). In this flatness, “everything is surface” (33). “The Midwestern landscape is abstract,” it resembles “a map as large as the thing it represents” (33, 29). The region where Martone and Wallace were raised, one can say, gives vivid topographical form to an idea that has long excited writers of a distinctively cerebral stripe. In his Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, Lewis Carroll, even more than Wallace a mathematically minded storyteller, fantasized about a map on the scale of 1:1. The cartographers of his narrative achieve their goal, but are prevented from fully unfurling their map when farmers object it will shut out the sunlight (545–46). This prefigures, at the level of intellectual play, a dark prospect of the actual eclipsed by the abstract that Wallace will worry over and rework throughout his career. Following Carroll, Jorge Luis Borges fabricated his own totalizing map, coinciding at every point with the Empire it depicts; a map that over time becomes frayed and ruined, its shreds rotting in the unforgiving deserts. Jean Baudrillard declared Borges’s conceit “the finest allegory of simulation,” before arguing, notoriously, that in our hyperreal postmodernity “it is the map that precedes the territory . . . and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map” (166). The “sovereign difference” between map and territory “has disappeared” (166) in a world generated by “matrices, memory banks and command models,” by “combinatory algebra” (167). This debate is replayed and parodied during the Eschaton sequence in Infinite Jest when Michael Pemulis, one of the war game’s Hall-of-Famers, screams at a younger boy who wants

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deteriorating conditions taken into consideration: “It’s snowing on the goddamn map, not the territory, you dick!” (IJ 333). While such allusions to the map-territory opposition place Wallace’s work squarely and self-consciously within well-rehearsed postmodern debates about simulation and the dreadful fate of the authentic, his markedly cartographic imaginary can also be situated within longer continuities. For example, while the Eschaton dispute clearly channels Baudrillard, there is, in additional, a carefully encoded premodern conception of space located not beneath the surface, but as the playing surface of the game: “the four courts of Eschaton’s earth-map” (IJ 340). This particular game is presided over by a game master, called Lord, who has to umpire, or “play God.” In various medieval mappae mundi, the image of Our Lord, or Christ in Majesty, sits in last judgment, the ultimate umpire, atop the circular map (Kline 64). This reference is doubly significant because such medieval artifacts were not only maps, but also encyclopedias, as dense with the accumulated information of their day, as Infinite Jest is with its. Various critics have remarked the way anthropomorphic allusions are scattered across that novel’s map of metropolitan Boston. Graham Foster, for example, notes that the word “map” is often used as slang for body/head/life, “linking the very existence of human beings to the territory they occupy” (45). On one level this signifies contemporary alienation, humanity reified and reduced to an abstraction; but Wallace’s evocations of place draw also on the manifold traditions that underlie encyclopedic form. Parts of his Boston are likened to a brain, heart, lung, and so on. This recalls not only the Burtonian Anatomy mode that surgically carves up a text, or an encyclopedic novel like Ulysses (1922) that slices Dublin into, among other things, dedicated body parts, but also, by extension, an older, analogical universe that was often represented spatially: whether in mappae mundi like the Psalter or the Ebstorf world maps shaped as the Body of Christ (Kline 230–32), or anthropomorphic city plans, such as those of Francesco di Giorgio Martini from the late quattrocento. One of Francesco’s most celebrated drawings shows a walled city in the shape of a human body, with a fortress supported like a crown at the head and towers ringing the feet and elbows (Pepper 115–16). Wallace’s analogous metro Boston is not so much a Body Public, or Body Politic, as a Body Institutional. MIT’s “cerebral rooftop,” complete with “convolutions,” (IJ 950) provides the brain; the Enfield Tennis Academy (E.T.A.) is shaped like a heart, and boasts an inflatable lung; many-institutioned Enfield is itself positioned as an extended “arm” of the city.2 As is often the case in Wallace, the extremities are inhabited by those without the

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walls of institutions, whether subsisting in the projects that ring metro Boston, or in the here-be-dragonscapes of trailer parks. These premodern and European antecedents help us situate Wallace’s use of place and space within a wider, transnational, encyclopedic tradition, but it should not be forgotten that the cartographic imagination is particularly crucial in the development of his own native literary canon. Indeed, American literature, it can be argued, what with its frontier myths, was founded on spatial reflection. Moreover, ever since D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), the American canon has often been critically defined in spatial terms and in contradistinction to the temporally freighted or archeologically layered literature of the Old World.3 Describing late capitalist American space, however, involves rather different challenges than did the eras of colonialism, primitive accumulation, or imperialism. The frontiers are more fluid, internal as well as external. “Of capitalist space we can posit a Spinozan pantheism,” writes Fredric Jameson, “in which the informing power is everywhere and nowhere all at once, and yet at the same time in relentless expansion, by way of appropriation and subsumption alike” (Representing 7). While this first mode of expansion, appropriation, persists in Wallace (most glaringly in the aggressively redrawn North American map in Infinite Jest), his most distinctive and radical contribution to this evolving spatial imaginary, I would argue, is to shift emphasis toward the latter mode, its much harder to render complement. Subsumption, in the Marxian sense, is first defined and developed in Capital, where it has distinct historical stages of “formal” and “real.” For Jameson, it extends into evermore encompassing postmodern phases, approaching a state “in which the extra-economic or social no longer lies outside capital . . . Where everything has been subsumed under capitalism, there is no longer anything outside it” (Representing 71). A state, that is, where exchange-value has, like Carroll’s and Borges’s maps, subsumed (etymologically, taken under) reality on a scale of 1:1. The resultant capitalist space is like the Expo building in Wallace’s State Fair essay writ large: “Every interior inch . . . is given over to adversion and commerce of a very special and lurid sort” (SFT 118). One of Wallace’s signal achievements, then, is to represent this historico-economic process of subsumption artistically, urgently, dynamically, and often translated into spatial or topographic terms. Thus, while the title of “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,” explicitly refers to an earlier American age of appropriation, to the unscrolling frontier and Manifest Destiny, the story’s westering movement leads ultimately toward the sunset of subsumption. The

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characters are on course to Collision, Illinois, and the apocalyptic reunion of all McDonald’s commercial actors, which, for the advertising magnate sponsor, J. D. Steelritter, will culminate in a longcherished goal: thirty years’ consumers, succumbing, as one . . . The revelation of What They Want will be on them; and in that revelation of Desire, they will Possess. They will all Pay the Price—without persuasion . . . Life, the truth, will be its own commercial. (GCH 310)

This rapturous dream-vision of total subsumption, of adversion and reality reaching a 1:1 scale (where truth: commercial are no longer distinct) recurs reconfigured throughout Wallace’s writing. The spirit of Steelritter haunts the business model of Belt and Britton in “Mr Squishy,” from Oblivion, where the world of advertising campaigns and focus groups is to be altered irrevocably, with flesh and blood Field Researchers no longer having to traverse real territory; consumer “tracking algorithms” (like Baudrillard’s matrices and combinatory algebra) will do their work for them (and take their jobs from them): For now, in Belt and Britton’s forward- looking vision, the market becomes its own test. Terrain = Map. Everything encoded. And no more facilitators to muddy the waters by impacting the tests in all the infinite ephemeral unnoticeable infinite ways human beings always kept impacting each other and muddying the waters. Team Δy would become 100% tech-driven, abstract, its own Captured Shop (OB 64)

In Wallace’s final work, The Pale King, we are given what in effect is a prehistory of the rapture of consumption that Steelritter dreams of, and that Belt and Britton work toward; in the New IRS, civic virtue will be replaced by the profit motive, and flesh and blood tax examiners replaced, or rationalized, by another abstracting algorithm, the “thanatoid- sounding,”4 ANADA (for “Audit-No Audit Discriminant Algorithm”) (TPK 68). Infinite Jest, too, can be read as the logical, if dystopian, fulfillment of processes we see launched in The Pale King ’s remorselessly marketizing 1980s; ONAN. (Organization of North American Nations) is the perfect geographical acronym for a society that, subsumed under capital, cannot relate to anything outside itself: a near future where absorption by the commodity form is all but total and time itself is sponsored. Wallace’s art traverses the critical distance of that “all but.” His forays into the late capitalist landscape, reveal, like Baudrillard’s twist

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on Borges’s fable, residual shreds of a real territory not yet entirely subsumed beneath the map of simulation. The Broom of the System describes a textbook Baudrillardian Desert of the Real, the Great Ohio Desert, or G.O.D., a faux- desert with concession stands around the rim, pointedly built over a real Wilderness, the Wayne National Forest. In his nonfiction, too, Wallace zealously excavates the natural, however hidden it is beneath synthetic layers. When he visits the Help Me Grow tent at the Illinois State Fair, for example, he carefully ponders the ground beneath his feet: “Solid bent-over investigative journalism reveals that in fact it’s artificial grass . . . A quick look under the edge of the fake grass mat reveals the real grass underneath, flattened and already yellowing” (SFT 89). As passages like this indicate, the aforementioned opposition between a geographically oriented American literature and an archaeological European one needs to be nuanced when applied to a writer so tirelessly dialectical as Wallace. The seemingly flat surfaces of the commodified or synthetic spaces he explores are shown to be nonetheless stratified, to contain hidden depths, and, subsequently, are sifted for traces of the real. In writers who come after Wallace, the dialectic of territory and map, actuality and abstraction, is less often expressed as an agon, more often resolved into a habituated irreality: not natural but naturalized. Thus, for example, in his encyclopedic novel, Reamde (2011), Neal Stephenson, an important writer who emerged from the field of science fiction and William Gibsonesque cyber-spatialities, moves effortlessly and exuberantly between the Midwest and the commodified virtual.5 The main protagonist is a billionaire game designer from Iowa who has constructed a massively profitable online gaming world, called, tellingly, “T’Rain.” Swathes of the narrative unfold in this pseudo-world and many of the characters feel entirely at home there, living the dream courtesy of an algorithm that has usurped the place of real terrain. In texts like this, the American novel has moved from mapping a territory to territorializing the map—“Settling” the virtual, as the pioneers tamed the frontier. In Wallace, however, we have not yet reached this sanguine point; his texts are complex, symbolic sites of resistance and struggle that seek to explore and defend, even if they often cross, the borderland between map and territory.

The Fringe That Is the Country’s Center Location plays a significant part even in Wallace’s most abstract works, and, equally, even his most concrete or personal evocations of local or regional spaces are wont to slide into abstraction. Tellingly, the conceptual term he developed and championed in his undergraduate

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philosophy thesis on modal logic, which James Ryerson calls “his only formal, systematic contribution to the world of ideas” (2), was “situational physical modality,” which was “highly sensitive to details of time and place” (11). In his book-length account of the mathematical concept of infinity, Everything and More, Wallace illustrates Zeno’s paradoxes and “Vicious Infinite Regress” with the following example: (1) Whatever exists is in a location. (2) Therefore, location exists. (3) But by (1) and (2), location must be in a location, and (4) By (1)–(3), location’s location must be in a location, and . . . (5) . . . so on ad inf. (EM 57) The contemplation of boundless horizons seems natural enough for anyone raised on the Midwestern flatlands, however troubling existentially. “ There`s nothing to hold your eye,” he writes of the Illinois landscape in “Westward,” “it can be scary” (GCH 244). Everything and More’s illustrative glimpse of “the dreaded regressus in infinitum” (EM 49) rewrites in spatial terms the dizzying recursivity that Wallace’s critics most often associate with his distinctive mode of meta-metafiction. Marshall Boswell, for example, writes that “Wallace’s work is not simply hyper-self-aware. It is always self-aware about its own self-awareness, and self-aware about that double self-awareness, etcetera, etcetera ad infinitum” (“A Gesture” 8). Despite the risk of cerebral vertigo inherent in locating location’s location, however, it is important to stress that abstract thought is by no means simply or exclusively an occasion for dread in Wallace. As Michael North observes, Everything and More ultimately celebrates Cantor’s mathematics because it “helps to make infinity thinkable and thus to reduce the intellectual and ethical paralysis it can induce. That there are infinite points of view, for example, need not mean that assertion is impossible” (“Everything” 10). That descriptions of place can, ideally, be properly attentive to both map and terrain, to intellectual abstraction and felt detail, is exemplified in “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley,” Wallace’s apparently most personal, most homespun text, a cerebral yet loving evocation of growing up in Philo, a “boxed township of Illinois farmland” (SFT 3). Its opening is both a parody of and an innovative contribution to the nostalgic mode characteristic of the memoir form. It might be subtitled, How Flat Was My Prairie? College math evokes and catharts a Midwesterner’s sickness for home. I’d grown up inside vectors, lines and lines athwart lines, grids—and,

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on the scale of horizons, broad curving lines of geographic force, the weird topographical drain-swirl of a whole lot of ice-ironed land that sits and spins atop plates. The area behind and below these broad curves at the seam of land and sky I could plot by eye way before I came to know infinitesimals as easements, an integral as schema. Math at a hilly Eastern school was like waking up; it dismantled memory and put it in light. Calculus was, quite literally, child’s play. (SFT 3)

This extraordinary passage exhibits two aspects of Wallace’s place-writing worth emphasizing here. First, an unlikely synthesis of rooted sentiment and mathematical abstraction; in Wallace, topography is often approached via topology or geometry. Infinite Jest, as early critic-cartographers of that novel have established, is thoroughly informed, structured, shaped, divided, by triangles, pyramids, Seirpinski gaskets, circles. So, too, Philo is presented here as Math maven heaven: Edwin A. Abbot’s mathematical fantasia Flatland relocated to Martone’s “The Flatness.” The second aspect the passage above brings home is Wallace’s habitual mediation of his region: here, it is evoked from a distanced perspective (the studied contrast of a hilly Eastern school), and tailored, albeit in a witty and conflicted fashion, for a “swanky” East-Coast magazine and the edification of an implied non-Midwestern readership. Philo, it should be stressed, to the consternation of the many critics who have taken “Derivative Sport” as straight autobiography, was not Wallace’s hometown. As Charles B. Harris definitively established from the author’s father, Wallace never “set foot in Philo” (“Hometown” 185). Born in Ithaca, New York, he was raised in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, a “plain of beanfields” north of Philo, according to the essay’s bucolic and decidedly nonabstract map reference (SFT 13). Philo (which boasts a water tower bearing the legend “Center of the Universe” alongside its zip code) is an almost-but-not-quite version of the truth, an alternate or parallel universe hometown, whose Greek name bears its own heartland-appropriate connotations. As reimagined by Wallace, then, Philo, although geographically a real place, is also a utopian “no place” where conventional divisions of intellectual labor do not obtain, and poetic observation, mathematical terminology, and even tennis, happily coexist as child’s play. This utopian, almost tender, dimension of his place-writing is often neglected by those critics for whom place in Wallace seems only to denote a denatured dystopia or soulless mediascape. What is more, the boxed townships of Illinois farmland where Wallace grew up are not simply backwaters—neither Urbana nor its

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body-double Philo. These gridded exemplars of American pastoral in fact, as John R. Stilgoe observes, “objectify the Enlightenment in America” (87, cf. Bayley 5). They are the result of Thomas Jefferson’s land ordinances that determined the organization of two-thirds of the United States; “a model example of European abstraction.” The grid concept and geometric order extrapolated William Penn’s urban plan for Pennsylvania across the Western farmlands (Stilgoe 88–103). To adapt a notorious Situationist graffito: Beneath the prairie, the flagstone! “By the 1860s,” writes Stilgoe, “the grid objectified national, not regional, order, and no one wondered at rural space marked by urban rectilinearity” (106–7). But whereas Thomas Pynchon in Mason & Dixon (1997) laments the imposition of this Enlightenment grid, Wallace is capable of delighting in the elegance, order, and geometry of the resultant territory; the logician and mathematician (as well as the nostalgic) in him cannot turn his back entirely on this Enlightenment project written into the land. The complex and paradox-provoking physical nature of the flat and map-like Midwestern terrain, is complemented by its ambiguous cultural location—actual center but (despite the underlying Enlightenment grid) perceived periphery. This is also often expressed in paradox: in The Broom of the System the Midwest is “both in the middle and on the fringe. The physical heart and the cultural extremity . . . this strange, occluded place . . . a place that both is and isn’t” (BOS 142); in “Westward” it is “the fringe that is the country’s center” (GCH 242). In Infinite Jest, the mysterious blind Dymphna’s vague Midwestern origins are pinpointed by Michael Pemulis as “Nowheresburg” (IJ 567). This contradictory sense of place seems to have been further compounded by an upbringing that, according to David’s sister, Amy Wallace, was grounded in ambiguity: “Growing up here we were the kids of academics, our parents were from somewhere else. The kids who had been here for generations treated us as if we were East-Coasters, and then when David went off to the East-Coast and realized they treated him like a hayseed, he realized he was from a place no one else was. Somewhere in the middle, I think that was David’s Midwest, the neither here nor there” (Interview). This geographic and existential space, somewhere in the middle and neither here nor there, is navigated in different ways and with varying degrees of success or discomfiture throughout the corpus. In his essay on language, “Authority and American Usage,” Wallace situates himself somewhere between the Prescriptivists and Descriptivists, explaining his propensity both to honour and creatively to breach grammatical rules by invoking his “two native English dialects—the

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SWE of my hyper-educated parents and the hard-earned Rural Midwestern of most of my peers” (CL 99). Even his signature use of footnotes and endnotes, as various critics have noted, can be read for its dislocating effect, disturbing received assumptions about what properly belongs in the main body of a text and what is merely supplementary, what is center and what is fringe. In Wallace’s most extended journalistic description of the region, his account of the Illinois State Fair, he self-mockingly engages in “pith-helmeted anthropological reporting on something rural and heartlandish” for a “swanky East-Coast magazine,” at the behest of the kind of editors whom, he surmises, every so often “slap their foreheads and remember that about 90% of the United States lies between the Coasts . . . ” (SFT 83). Even when evoking the territory in between, however, Wallace remains hyperconscious of those coasts; he is always aware of contexts of publication and reception, sometimes exhilaratingly, sometimes excruciatingly so. His assigned location is frequently refracted through another location: and that other location is often the East-Coast as enshrined in Harper’s Magazine, whose perspective he habitually anticipates and second guesses. At one point in the essay, Wallace enlists an old friend as a traveling companion: “No anthropologist worth his helmet would be without the shrewd counsel of a colorful local” (SFT 90). There is an easily skipped play on words here that alludes to the tradition of “local color” in literary journalism, a tradition Harper’s itself helped establish in the nineteenth century. Leigh Ann Litwiller Berte relates the early popularity of regional fiction, travel writing, and these local color vignettes to the growth of railroads and the need to exoticize those American spaces most distant (geographically or experientially) from the class-conscious East-Coast readership. Given that Wallace tends to be read almost exclusively within a postmodern or innovative literary fiction context, it is intriguing to consider “Ticket to the Fair” (to use the essay’s original Harper’s title) in a continuum with early Harper’s pieces like “A Stage Ride in Colorado” (July 1807) or “Wild Cattle Hunting on Green Island, Georgia” (July 1860). The disorientating new mobility of the nineteenth century produced a compensatory hunger for authentic places, what Berte calls “geographical essentialism” (172). The magazines provided vicarious rail journeys and a native exotica, “a rustic cultural foil to European travel writing” (188n6). Approached from this longue durée, then, one could argue that Wallace’s regional pieces, with their conflicted narrator interpreting his “exotic” yet “prosaic” territory to the coasts, stand at the end of a generic line.6

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In the journalism, Paul Giles writes, “Wallace foregrounds his role as someone paid for his reportage, and, therefore, as a compromised observer” (Global 168). It is not just the fact of being paid, however, but by whom, that informs this ambivalent reflexivity. His commission comes definitively from the East-Coast. Subsequently, as a rhetorical defence mechanism, the conflicted Wallace of the State Fair essay assigns the worst things he has to say about the lumpen elements of his own region to a temporarily and uneasily assumed East-Coast perspective: thus, for example, “Something East-Coast in me prickles at the bovine and herdlike quality of the crowd” (SFT 103–4). Or, prefacing what is probably his unworthiest journalistic moment: “This is going to sound not just East-Coastish but elitist and snooty. But facts are facts. The special community of shoppers in the Expo Bldg. are a Midwestern subphylum commonly if unkindly known as Kmart people. Farther south they’d be a certain fringe-type of White Trash . . . They’re the type you see slapping their kids in supermarket checkouts . . . I’m sorry, but all this is true. I went to high school with Kmart People. I know them” (SFT 120–21). Even with the apologies, and the inference that painful high school memories are being accessed, it is unedifying stuff ; one cannot imagine Pynchon, say, with his unwavering concern for the preterite, expressing such sentiments. But it is revealing that Wallace is careful to displace these observations onto an elitist “East-Coastish” viewpoint, one befitting the deep history of Harper’s. In his account of the journalism, Christoph Ribbat argues that Wallace makes belated amends to the Kmart people in This is Water, where the checkout line image is reprised, but invested with newfound sympathy. His Kenyon College graduation class audience is entreated to “choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line” (TIW 89). The mature Wallace, now well aware that facts are never just facts, chooses himself to look differently at the kind of Kmart person traduced in the earlier journalism; he is now able to find compassion not only for the extreme cases of certified suffering researched at AA half-way houses (or drawn from his own awful experiences), but also for the low-level, ambient miseries of the stressed and put upon. “The Suffering Channel,” from Oblivion, can be read as another, extended, response to the earlier writing, a deconstruction of the ambivalent regional journalism, with journalist Skip Atwater as, in Ribbat’s phrase, an “ albeit cartoonish stand-in for Wallace” (196). Skip is an exiled Midwesterner working for a swanky Manhattan-based magazine, Style. His journalistic color pieces are extreme parodies of

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Wallace’s own assignments as Midwestern village-explainer. Here the reductio ad absurdum of the parochial regional curiosity is an outsider artist who can defecate sculptured stools. This might be a genuine, authentic art, or it might be, as the consensus at Style has it, merely gross. Ambiguity is everything in this carefully poised narrative: the Style offices are based at the World Trade Center, and the story is poised, too, on the brink of 9/11—which global event removes any hope of this grotesque regional phenomenon going national, and demonstrates Wallace’s deft deployment of nested spatial scales. If the territory between coasts is on the periphery, out of sight and mind of the cultural center, so too, is the wider world beyond the coasts. Until, that is, something obscene or world-historical seizes the attention, or irrupts into view. While “The Suffering Channel” rewrites the journalism in tragi-comic mode, “The View from Mrs Thompson’s,” an essay also overshadowed by 9/11, revisits the Midwest in a very different register. It is immensely sympathetic to the working-class inhabitants of Bloomington, Illinois. We journey a mile away from Wallace’s home, “on the other side of a mobile-home park,” where he goes to watch the aftermath of the attack unfold at the home of Mrs Thompson, “one of the world’s cooler seventy-four-year-olds” (CL135). The congregants of the local church gathered there, mostly older ladies, sit watching TV and praying. Giles argues that Wallace’s writing “speaks to a new kind of American regionalism, one reliant less upon the distinct properties immanent within any given place than upon the cartographies relating ‘here’ and ‘there’ to all-encompassing global networks” (Global 175). To a large extent there is truth in this: Wallace’s writing on place is certainly relational, what with its hypertrophied sensitivity to contexts of transmission and reception. Nevertheless, distinct properties of place persist even when describing the most global and networked of events. Televison is portrayed here not simply as the homogenizing or flattening force that Wallace scholars, following “E Unibus Pluram,” tend to accentuate. Significantly, although the essay hinges on a global event that brings a nation together, television is also the occasion for reflection on regional particularities. In this Midwest, TV watching (and not only on this momentous day) is not the recourse of isolatoes, but an invitation to a communal hearth: “There don’t really tend to be parties or mixers per se so much here— what you do in Bloomington is all get together at somebody’s house and watch something” (CL 134). In a powerful and characteristic dialectical reversal, the arch delivery-device of homogenization becomes a defining source of regional specificity.

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The essay also effects a reversal of another sort. Wallace is able to reassure one of the ladies that, given the geography of New York City, a relative working there is unlikely to have been exposed to danger: “I end up doing pretty much the only good I do all day by explaining to Mrs. R- where Midtown Manhattan is” (CL 139). Contrary to his usual practice, then, he is explaining the East-Coast to the Midwest, even though, in an essay originally written for Rolling Stone, he is by implication simultaneously explaining to the sophisticated coasts why uninformed but fundamentally decent folks who don’t know where Midtown Manhattan is are nonetheless worthy of scrupulous and sympathetic attention. Wallace can never give simple, straightforward directions, there are always convolutions involved; location’s location must once again be taken into account.

The Tornado Continues . . . Not least of these complicating convolutions are the rippleeffectsgenerated by the elaborately allusive form of Wallace’s long novels. The Pale King was projected as an extended return not only to the writer’s home ground of Illinois, but also to the grand scale of the encyclopedic novel: a mode that by its nature (indistinguishable from its culture) invites transhistorical comparisons and references predecessor texts. In Wallace, such allusions are themselves often tellingly concretized and place-based, sedimented within locational form. When the fictional “David Wallace” escapes the orbital “monoculture” of Self-Storage Parkway and penetrates the Peoria Regional Examination Center’s inner sanctum, he finds a location that, Peoria or not, is anything but ordinary; its labyrinthine skewed perspectives and secreted rooms are inhabited by monkish IRS men, dependent on Rules and tithe-gathering, bent over strange scribal desks. This ascetic, contemplative environment seems to owe more to the archly premodern postmodernism of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1980), than to any realist novel of place or region. More glaringly, the REC’s elaborate facade renders in sculptural form (a wholly fictional version of) the official seal of the IRS, in which Bellerophon is depicted battling the Chimera, surely another loaded reference to Wallace’s career-long precursor-antagonist and fellow encyclopedic novelist, John Barth. Another carefully deposited allusion encapsulates the way Wallace’s place-writing, though fully contemporary, can be subtly intertwined, as befits the encyclopedic form, with older topographic sources and procedures. When “Irrelevant Chris” is inspired to join the IRS, or “called to account,” by the epiphanic lecture given by a pseudo-Jesuit

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(TPK 233), this clearly alludes to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and the powerful lecture by a bona fide Jesuit that so affects Stephen on retreat. Indeed, in some ways the allusion is very precise: Joyce’s Jesuit quotes the God of Genesis “calling His creature man to account” (127). What is most interesting here, however, is that Wallace employs his pseudo-Jesuit not only to lend a quasi-religious aura to his boredom-transcending characters, but also to insinuate into the novel (it is never made explicit) a specifically Jesuit “Spiritual Exercise”: composition of place. In the greatest encyclopedic novel, Ulysses, Stephen draws upon this technique to conjure up Shakespeare’s London for his audience at the National Library: “Local colour.7 Work in all you know. Make them accomplices . . . Composition of place. Ignatius Loyola, make haste to help me!” (188). When employing St. Ignatius Loyola’s “composition of place,” a person is enabled “to see with the eye of the imagination” an absent object or person by forming a vivid mental image of the place where that object or person is (or was) found. But, in another resonant example of the “doubled self-reflexivity” (to borrow Marshall Boswell’s term [Understanding 96]) habitual to Wallace, what is composed in Chris’s memory is not just a specific place—the DePaul lecture hall—but a place where composition of place is promoted. “You might wish to recall,” suggests the “Jesuit,” “this room, this moment, and the information I shall now relay to you” (TPK 228). Furthermore, Chris’s epiphany is prepped and enhanced by a drug-assisted process he calls “doubling,” a kind of chemically induced, hyper-aware, meta-dimension that makes the encyclopedic totality of experience seem momentarily graspable. The pseudo-Jesuit’s invitation to recall clearly works, for Chris “even remember[s] what I was wearing as I sat there—a red-and-brown-striped acrylic sweater, white painter’s pants, and Timberland boots” (TPK 190). Whereas Stephen Dedalus uses the technique in an outward-directed way, to evoke the Globe and its environs, Chris’s doubled-version of composition of place, in a quintessential Wallace move, circles back to incorporate an image of that place’s composer. Location is, once again, intimately bound up with the process of locating. These literary and religious allusions are self-conscious engagements with the wider encyclopedic tradition and seem to take us away from the specificities of region and its description, so let us conclude by considering the novel twist or adaptation of the encyclopedic imagination that Wallace employed to return to regional space, albeit in a radical and disorienting way; a twist that strives to get beyond the paradoxes and ambivalences sketched in section one and two by

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means of a synthesis of vertiginous abstraction and grounded material. “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley,” describes the writer’s home region not only as the mathematician’s idyll we observed earlier, but also as an exposed flatland buffeted by a phenomenon at once disruptive and sublime: “Tornadoes were, in our part of Central Illinois, the dimensionless point at which parallel lines met and whirled and blew up. They made no sense” (SFT 17). The geometrically delineated, logical pursuit of tennis (at least as practiced by so cerebral a player as Wallace, forever calculating angles) meets its counterforce in the irrational irruption of that essay’s climactic tornado: logic is turned on its head when, in a characteristic recursion, Wallace tries to return his own windblown shot. Art and tornadoes can do things that even mathematics and sports cannot. But tornadoes are not intrinsically or irretrievably irrational, they can, like the concept of infinity, with risk and effort be studied and understood. Tornadoes “were a real part of Midwest childhood” (SFT 16), Wallace writes, “Midwestern life is informed and deformed by wind” (SFT 5). In “Westward,” storm-watching is described as a “spectator sport in rural Illinois. Obscure elsewhere” (GCH 326). In “Derivative Sport,” Wallace remembers studying tornadoes at junior high school, and records that East-Central Illinois “is a proud part of what meteorologists call Tornado Alley” (SFT 15). He grew up within a regimen of Tornado Awareness Days and practice drills, ever alert for sirens. Historically, Champaign-Urbana, Wallace’s hometown, was not only conducive to amateur storm-watching, it was the site of a crucial breakthrough in the hard science of “tornadogenesis.” On April 9, 1953, Daniel Staggs, a chemical engineer based at Champaign’s State Water Survey Office was testing his weather radar when he captured a shape on his screen that looked like a huge hook. It was, it transpired, the first “tornado-related hook” to be identified in real time. At this moment, according to Thomas P. Grazulis, “The era of tornado research with radar was born” (29–30). It seems all too appropriate that Wallace’s home territory, so paradoxically map-like, as we have seen, a region where the concrete and the abstract seem to collide and combine so often and intriguingly in the writer’s imagination, should be the location where this natural phenomenon was first mapped, and thus translated into an abstraction: a “hook-echo” on the radar screen. In his introduction to The Pale King, the novel’s editor, Michael Pietsch, writes, It became apparent as I read that David planned for the novel to have a structure akin to that of Infinite Jest, with large portions of apparently

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unconnected information presented to the reader before a main story line begins to make sense. In several notes to himself, David referred to the novel as “tornadic” or having a “tornado feeling”—suggesting pieces of story coming at the reader in a high-speed swirl. (TPK viii)

One such reference is included in the “Notes and Asides” published with the text, the cryptic: “The tornado continues . . . ” (TPK 545). Tornadoes and the tornadic indeed run continuously throughout Wallace’s work, traceable to his early biographical fascination, but transformed from a merely regional phenomenon into a method of composition and a model of both the artistic process and thinking itself. “I know why I stayed obsessed as I aged,” he writes in “Derivative Sport,” “Tornadoes, for me, were a transfiguration” (SFT 17). Etymologically speaking, tropes and tornadoes are closely linked, both have root-meanings of turning. Although tornadoes are objects of terror, and “transfiguration” here is represented as something scarily sublime, an awesome verticality rearing up from “the Euclidian monotone of furrow, road, axis, and grid” (SFT 17) that otherwise marked his flat region, the figural is also the ultimate territory, or home ground, of a writer. Tornadoes, whether literal or metaphorical, twist and turn throughout the Wallace oeuvre but, crucially, when raised to the power of the “tornadic,” they allow him to remodel the encyclopedic mode for an age of information-bombardment rather than stately Enlightenment rationality and order. Moreover, the structural correspondence between the regional-meterological phenomenon and the narrative technique of Wallace’s long novels is more precise than one might first imagine. Thus, there are five scientifically accepted stages of a tornado life cycle; the first stage, “Dust Whirl,” is characterized by very high speeds of whirling dust and debris, when the “funnel cloud aloft and the dust swirl below may not appear to be connected” (Grazulis 38). This stage, before the tornado yields its organizational principles, corresponds to the initially confusing swirl of information that Pietsch associates with Wallace’s two encyclopedic works. Stephen Burn has remarked the way many of Infinite Jest ’s early critics, faced with its data-swirl and daunting scale, found that text “diffuse, and random” (Reader’s Guide 36). Nevertheless, he argues that complex interconnection ultimately reveals itself, for example, in the apparently random scene that in fact brings together the hitherto disconnected worlds of Don Gately, Hal Incandenza, and the entertainment cartridge that gives the novel its title. Gately is driving to a store in Inman Square; he “blows through,” his vehicle’s

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backwash “raising an odd little tornado of discarded ad-leaflets and glassine bags and corporate-snack bags . . . and one piece of the debris Gately’s raised and set spinning behind him, a thick flattened M.F. cup, caught by a sudden gust as it falls, twirling, is caught at some aerodyne’s angle and blown spinning all the way to the storefront of one ‘Antitoi Entertainment’” (IJ 479–80). For Burn, the “movement from low-level action to higher-level pattern is characteristic of emergent networks” (Reader’s Guide 58). It is characteristic of tornadoes, too. In the crucial second stage of tornado formation, the “Organizing” stage, the vortex becomes visible, the funnel cloud aloft and the dust swirl below connect up, like dramatis personae (high and low) and plot-strands in Infinite Jest. Gately’s is, indeed, “an odd little tornado,” comprised of ads and corporate waste, the branded debris of a lifeworld subsumed under capital. There is a comparable scene in The Pale King when Chris’s father is trapped by a Chicago commuter train’s door and dragged to his death across a crowded platform full of shoppers, raising a tornado of debris comprised of “numerous small, subdivided packages and individually purchased bags, many of these could be seen flying up in the air and rotating or spilling their contents in various ways” creating “the illusion that it was somehow spurting or raining consumer goods” (TPK 202). Examples like these, where the tornado is not literal but a metaphor for the whirlwinds of consumption that engulf us all, bear out Paul Giles’s claim that “the coruscating brilliance of Wallace’s posthumanist style involves finding objective correlatives for the American experience of dislocation, in order to describe how globalization works not just as a distant political theory but something that impacts the hearts and minds of the national community” (174). The tornadic, I would argue, is one of the most powerful and complex of such correlatives, allowing Wallace to invoke a force of nature that violently makes manifest dislocation, yet is always grounded in a specific location, to evoke the disorientation inherent in global capital, and by extension in our (turbulently naturalized) networked and commodified reality, which both arrives from above and emerges, at the local level, from the ground up. Like the tornadic itself, the organizing principles of this complex global capitalist lifeworld, although unquestionably there, are hard to discern or describe as a totality. Nonetheless, that is exactly what Wallace’s modulation of the encyclopedic strives to do. As noted regarding the ad infinitum clause, there is a constant struggle in Wallace between being overwhelmed by abstraction and mastering it, thinking it through. This struggle, what Ryerson calls “the agony

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of cognition” (1), is endured by any writer dedicated to interrogating the world in its encyclopedic totality, as Wallace was. In Everything and More, as we saw, Wallace dwells ruefully on “the dreads and dangers of abstract thinking” (EM 13); he ponders the etymology of “abstraction” and its literal meaning: drawn away (EM 8). “He was perpetually on guard,” writes Ryerson, of being drawn away “from something more genuine and real” (1). That the tornado with its ominous propensities could serve as a correlative for this uprooting abstraction is clear enough, but at the same time it should be stressed that Wallace’s interest in the tornadic is itself rooted in his home territory, and what could be more genuine and real than that ? Or, indeed, what realer than the physical matter and debris drawn into the coils of a tornado as irresistibly as heterogeneous materials and data are sucked up by an encyclopedic novel? Like so much associated with the Midwest in this radically revised regional writing, tornadoes are paradoxical: at once a reminder of home and utterly uncanny, nebulously abstract in appearance but a material phenomenon. By providing a dynamic figure, structure, or symbol, the tornadic allows Wallace to transform, or sublate, these paradoxes and tensions into a working model of art and thought—and thus go beyond them. What might lie beyond the agonies of cognition? What are the rewards for art and thought that achieve such a sublation? They are perhaps signaled in the notes for The Pale King, where Wallace acknowledges the “crushing, crushing boredom” attendant on proper, intense attention to the most tedious object; a boredom that will wash over you in waves “and just about kill you.” But, “Ride these out,” he promises, “and it’s like stepping from black and white into color . . . Constant bliss in every atom” (TPK 546). There is a deep-lying allusion here to what Grazulis calls “the most famous of all tornadoes” (41), the Midwestern one pivotal to The Wizard of Oz (and one that like many of Wallace’s own descriptions of tornadoes is tied up with a dream-vision).8 Avril Incandeza, in Infinite Jest, it should be noted, has a Xerox of Magaret Hamilton as the movie’s Witch of the West affixed to her study door (IJ 191), and, on a crucial date in the novel, sports a “steeple-crowned witch’s hat” (IJ 380).9 The film famously features a transformation from black and white into color,10 and involves an uplifting translation (or abstraction, a drawing away) to another stranger place that, it turns out, is really home all along. (The underlying message of Oz contradicts Thomas Wolfe’s famous aphorism: it is not that you cannot go home again—you cannot go anywhere else.) Characters and plot elements are sublated to another dimension; reconfigured as if by a twist of a kaleidoscope. Something

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akin to this latter effect occurs in “Westward,” when Mark writes a story-within-the-story that shuffles and recombines the main narrative’s cast (including actor Jack Lord, now a prison warder) in a “weird blind rearrangement” (GCH 356). The studio-created funnel that delivers Dorothy to Oz, then, prefigures, at the level of fantasy, the multivalent tornadoes that blow through Wallace’s writing: alien yet homegrown, abstracting yet freighted with debris and details, transcendent and grand scale, yet still insistently regional. Tornadoes are connected with place and with displacement in Wallace’s work; they are a process (the figural play of writing) and, as the “tornadic,” an arrangement of information. Like dialectics as defined by David Harvey they are “matter in motion,” both “wave” and “particle” (50). A spatial correlative for Wallace’s intensely pressured and exhilarating writing, the tornadic in these texts is not only an idiosyncratic adaptation of encyclopedic form able to mimic the spins and cycles of reflexive thought, and evoke the speed of contemporary information-overload, but it also turns on, tropes, transfiguration—the metaphorical itself—and that is the region where all true writers are ultimately located. Notes 1. Danielle Dreilinger and Javier Zarracina, in fact, mapped Infinite Jest ’s Boston geography when they proposed a “Wallace memorial tour” as a parallel to the Joycean Bloomsday. 2. The “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” sequence of stories is also carved up into institutional space: the geographically dispersed facilities where each troubled soul is interrogated are logged in lieu of latitude and longitude. 3. See, for example, Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination (33); Sally Bayley, Home on the Horizon (21). 4. In all likelihood, Wallace takes the term “thanatoid” from Thomas Pynchon`s Vineland (1990), another historical novel about Reagan`s America. 5. Stephenson was born three years before Wallace and spent a period of his childhood in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. Though the two writers never met, Stephenson examines theWeltanschauung they shared, one particular to the mindset of the Midwest American College Town (or MACT), in his foreword to the paperback edition of Everything and More, a text that is reprinted and revised in Some Remarks. 6. It is not only preppy editors at Harper’s, past or present, who find this territory head-slappingly ambiguous. In a memorial tribute, Dave Eggers, though a Midwesterner himself, recalls being fascinated by

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7. 8. 9. 10.

Wallace’s “exotic” yet “prosaic” mailing address, “Rural Route 2, Box 361, Bloomington, IL” (3). Which phrase summons up an unlikely constellation of Joyce, St. Ignatius Loyola, and Harper’s. D. T. Max’s biography notes that as a boy Wallace “devoured . . . The Wizard of Oz” (5). On further significances of this date and witch’s garb, see Burn, Infinite Jest: A Reader’s Guide, 63. Michael Martone in “The Flatness” recalls that when he was growing up, a taped Danny Kaye would appear before regional TV screenings of the movie to forewarn and reassure Midwestern children about the disorienting transitions between black and white and color (32).

CH A P T ER

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Mediated Immediacy in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men Mary K. Holland

Comprising 23 separate pieces and 37 or so different voices, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men aggressively explores the warped workings of relationships—largely male-female and primarily their linguistic workings—by creating personae that shock and disgust us with admissions of bad behavior, then add offense by demanding our identification and understanding. Though it has only begun to receive serious critical attention,1 its brazen solicitation of empathy for all kinds of mental, physical, and emotional disfigurements through likewise discomforting generic disfigurements represents a powerful development of themes and goals for fiction that David Foster Wallace had been articulating for several years, not only in Infinite Jest but also in his 1993 interview with Larry McCaffery and essay on television (“E Unibus Pluram: Television and U. S. Fiction”). Most essentially, the book continues his rejection of postmodernism’s unproductive irony in favor of a return to sincerity through metafiction. But to this concern about irony, Brief Interviews adds an unflinching critique of narcissism as an impediment to empathy and sincerity, most often as wielded by men in solipsistic “relationship” with women. Indeed, the collection is Wallace’s only work to focus on the intersection between problems of language and male-female relationships, or, as Wallace himself has described the book, on sex.2 The reader quickly finds, however, that Wallace is not so much interested here in the physical act of sex, whose juicy specifics get little to no mention in the book, as he is in the linguistic contortions men undergo to make the

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physical ones happen. Brief Interviews, then, explores the degree to which men’s sexual desire for women taints and often prevents any attempts by men to extend empathy, or anything like their “true” selves, to women because of the fraught interplay between language, desire, and power. Clearly the problem of linguistic power as deployed by desiring men to manipulate and objectify women was on Wallace’s mind as he was writing Brief Interviews. In 1998, he delivered his now-famous razing/“review” of John Updike’s Toward the End of Time, in which he criticizes the “radical-self-absorption” and “uncritical celebration of this self-absorption both in themselves and in their characters” of the “GMNs,” or Great Male Narcissists (Roth, Mailer, and Updike), whose fiction ruled the 1960s and 1970s. Wallace cites Updike’s characters particularly for being “deeply alone, alone the way only an emotional solipsist can be alone,” and therefore unable to love anyone, especially women—not so much despite as because of their obsessive praising and pursuing of women’s sexual parts (CL 53). Ultimately Wallace disparages both the novel’s main character and Updike himself for “persist[ing] in the bizarre, adolescent belief” motivating much of the hideous behavior in Brief Interviews as well: that sex is a cure for human despair (CL 59).3 This male appropriation of women in solipsistically conceived quests to escape despair is a gender-specific manifestation of the narcissism that Wallace has explored in fiction and nonfiction (most thoroughly in “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”), demonstrating it as both inherent to the human experience and as exacerbated by a culture driven by image, consumption, and technological modes of representation. In Infinite Jest, he also identifies narcissism as the primary fuel for postmodern irony. As in Jest, Brief Interviews tackles these twin problems of irony and narcissism through not only a return to earnestness via ironized irony and self-conscious metafiction, but also through formal innovations, such as footnotes, multiple narrative voices, and shifting points of view, which remind the reader at every turn that she and the fiction are constructing empathy together through language. Structurally, Brief Interviews does for the short story collection what Infinite Jest did for the novel, reimagining its generic form in order to accommodate its manifold clamor of self-conscious voices, and to traverse via technique the gulf between selves they express. Brief Interviews stands apart from both his earlier collection Girl with Curious Hair and the later Oblivion, in that it incorporates the most variety and innovation in the genre, ranging from quarter-page

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flash fiction to fully developed, though formally fractured and self-mediating stories. Yet it maintains throughout a dedication to the idea of the interview, in which every story depicts only one side and voice of what could be, needs to be, or is, a larger conversation. This consistent structural monovocality enacts exactly the interior solipsism and resulting communicative barriers that Wallace’s fiction as a whole aims to diagnose and overcome. At the same time, the interrogatory format of the many interviews and quizzes that make up a large portion of the book creates a mechanism for eliciting and examining characters’ and readers’ understanding of their beliefs, values, and selves, thus structurally insisting that the linguistically experimental stories be, as Wallace proposed in his 1993 interview, “for the sake of something” (CW 27). Though Wallace published nearly every story in the collection prior to the publication of the book,4 Brief Interviews is much more a short story cycle than a random collection of previously uncollected work. Its 23 pieces assert a kind of integrity by implying echoes and connections among themselves and a logic to their placements in the collection. Such connection and logic are not absolute, however, as part of the logic of the whole is its consistent insistence on its missing parts, and its refusal fully to explain the order in which we encounter them. In this way, the structure of Brief Interviews can seem more akin to that of Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition,5 which resists readerly attempts to connect and order its pieces both in its original 1970 text and in Ballard’s marginalia added 20 years later, than to the short story collection from which Brief Interviews most overtly takes its influence: Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse (1968). Unlike Barth, who declares in two different prefatory pieces his intention that the work be read as a “tale cycle” or “series” (Lost v, xi), Wallace makes no such request of the reader; indeed, he disclosed in an interview that his editor, Michael Pietsch, determined the final order for the collection (CW 93). And the work itself refuses to provide the kind of overt repetition of character and setting, or overarching thematic narrative arc, that makes the otherwise radically innovative Funhouse almost conventional in comparison. As Wallace’s novels loop rather than close by proceeding and ending in nonchronological and seemingly disconnected ways, so does Brief Interviews withhold overarching closure and coherence by comprising pieces and series of pieces that signify gaps, incompletion, and disorder as much as meaningful presence. The book offers only 18 out of what appear to be at least 72 interviews, and only 3 of what must be at least 24 “Example[s] of the Porousness of Certain Borders.” These recurring pieces, divided into

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identically titled sections, instigate a pattern of doubling, or echoes— repetition with a difference—that is also enacted by the two “The Devil is a Busy Man” stories, which, despite being altogether different in content, share the exact same title. Another doubling, or perhaps in this case splitting, results from the author’s failure to complete a story, or his insistence on a whole new way of defining a story as “complete”: “Adult World (II)” provides an outline for the end of “Adult World (I).” And like the multiple incomplete series, one piece, “Octet,” stubbornly identifies itself as eight-pieced while offering only four or five segments (Wallace makes it hard to tell), numbered up to not eight but nine. At every turn, the collection escapes or disappoints its own plans for itself, leaving the reader to make sense of the incommensurate mess in her hands. Conversely, it is the collection’s ability to compel its reader to do this logicking work, and to manufacture the compulsion from its faint logical promise, that provides its ultimate integrity. For as its pieces and incomplete series assert the gaps between and among them, so do their repetitions and echoes imply that they all participate in some larger whole, or series of wholes, that themselves might be connected. The mere fact of the multiple series that contain so many pieces suggests a unity outside of the book itself but to which each piece points. And, as I will discuss in more detail below, the interview series implies its own internal logic and narrative, while the collection as a whole suggests a logic to the arrangement of some of the series’ pieces, as, for example, in the placement of interview #20 as the last interview of the collection and “Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XXIV)” as the book’s concluding piece. Further, thematic overlaps accrue as voices in different pieces tell similar tales or set up similar quandaries.6 Characters often share oddly specific details: the narrator in “Church Not Made with Hands,” for example, remembers the same “bowl haircut” (BI 194) received by the tortured narrator in the book’s last piece (BI 319); and the County Mental Health Director of “Church” repeats the curious tick of the Depressed Person’s psychiatrist, habitually forming “cagelike” shapes with his hands (BI 45n1, 50, 54n4, 64n6[1], 208). Such strange overlapping, a kind of experiential doubling, functions as a more subtle and dispersed version of the dream/vision eerily shared by Gately and Hal of digging up the Infinite Jest cartridge that lies in the stead of Incandenza’s head. These repetitions create a palpable yet unexplained familiarity among characters and stories despite the collection’s estrangement of them among pieces disconnected by form and storyline. Further, the particular

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repetitions are themselves meaningful. The “cagelike” shapes formed by the County Mental Health Director signify the sacred space and comfort we cannot create for ourselves, no less in “The Depressed Person” than in “Church Not Made with Hands.” And the infantilizing “bowl haircut” suffered by the narrator of “Porous Borders” as he discovers his self-estrangement transfers that same painful discovery, retroactively, to our re reading of “Church”’s Day, who cannot find his way into that cagelike church. Separated by stories whose plotlines know nothing of each other, these characters through unexplained repeated minutiae occupy the same narrative of maturation and comment upon and extend each others’ journeys in it. This simultaneous assertion of absence and presence, silence and echo, fracture and connection suggests a shared human experience whose documentation in this collection is necessarily incomplete, as if the gathered texts function like the results of a survey—its pieces representing more than the sum of its parts, however much they remain discrete, each piece able to speak truly for only its one particular voice. In this way, Brief Interviews implies commonality of experience and struggle while also staying true to its fundamental poststructural acknowledgment of the irreducible singularity, particularity, and multiplicity of human experience. Thus, as is implied by the interview format itself, these pieces both enact the estrangement of the self and suggest that only in placing discrete selves in conjunction, connection, and proximity to each other can anything meaningful and beyond the self arise. The first three pieces introduce the problems and changed world texture that will occupy the entire book. The opening story greets us conspicuously from page 0, providing a blueprint for reading the collection thematically, and indicating, with the even-numbered right-facing pagination that it forces on the entire book, the structural contortions the stories will undergo in building these themes. With its slight 79 words, “A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life” reads a bit like a radically condensed version of Barthelme’s “At the End of the Mechanical Age” (1973), indicating that even a decade post-Girl, Wallace continues the patricidal work of riffing explosively on his postmodern ancestors. Postmechanical, Barthelme writes romantic love as the performance of a predictable narrative in compensation for all that is lost when God is reduced to a meter reader of grace, which “is electricity.” Postindustrial, Wallace reduces romance further while adding the sharp piquancy of social anxiety: girl and boy meet, “hoping to be liked,” then drive home separately, “with the very same twist to their faces,” while “the man who introduced

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them didn’t much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times” (BI 0). This anxiety to be “liked,” which Wallace himself baldly expresses in multiple interviews,7 opens the book as a formative human need. In collision with all the “acting-as-if” of interpersonal relationships, such anxiety produces a chasm of uncertainty into which all attempts to both know the other and rest secure in the other’s true love of the self fall obliteratingly: “One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one,” ends the story as it trickles into the meaningless void of the signifying chain (BI 0). This final uninflected repetition of unknowingness signifies all the stutteringly impotent attempts at knowing and communicating knowledge and empathy through language that will characterize the stories to come. The twisted faces, however, suggest not only the problem of ubiquitous masks in postindustrial social interactions and thus the constant question of sincerity in such a culture, but also the faith that something true remains beneath the façade to be discovered through empathy. The challenge remains, for this boy and girl, for the hideous characters to come, and for the reader disturbed equally by their hideousness and by the twisted narrative techniques that communicate it, to discover a method of getting behind masks built as unthinkingly by contemporary social forces as by always-elusive poststructural language. The cycle’s third story, “Forever Overhead,” emphasizes how gender and sexuality complicate understanding of self and other, in a narrative style that is a dramatic departure for Wallace. One of the two earliest published stories collected in Brief Interviews (both it and “Church with No Hands” first appeared in 19918), this story is surprisingly realistic and linear in its telling. Along with the book’s final piece, “Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XXIV),” “Forever Overhead” is one of few pieces in this collection that is more realist than metafictional, both in its narrative style and in its theme of a coming to self-awareness and an emotional maturity that includes the ability to empathize with others. Thus it provides the bildungs-roman heart of this narratively and structurally antirealist collection,9 a touchstone toward which the book’s metafictional pieces reach as they enact Wallace’s larger project of creating empathy in the reader and depicting acts of empathy by characters outside the bonds of realist fiction. “Forever Overhead” depicts with great tenderness and sensitivity a boy’s inner experience of standing perched at the cusp simultaneously of his body’s and mind’s sexual awakening, and of the diving board at a public pool. Preparing to take the plunge into adolescence and

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pool—both done, it can’t be helped, in a horribly public manner— the boy in his suspended animation between boyhood and manhood, air and water, also stands for the self’s splintered exile from itself, the private self bound by story’s end to “step into the skin and disappear” in the social mass that awaits it below (BI 16). Wallace signals this self-division in his use of second-person point of view, which both divides the boy from himself via externalized inner monologue, and extends the intimacy of his inner experience to the reader who inevitably becomes the owner of that second-person “you.” Estranged from himself by his sudden crop of “crunchy, animal hair” and newly “full and vulnerable” testicles, the boy has “grown into a new fragility” (BI 5) involving aches and “spasms of a deep sweet hurt” that herald his movement from childhood’s simplicity into the painfully sweet ambivalence of adulthood. In fact the boy registers much around him as complexly “sweet,” not only the “clean sweet smell you can’t believe comes from anything inside you” of his morning’s crunchy animal hair, but also the “bleached sweet salt” smell of the pool that awaits him, the coconut oil on the sweating bodies around it, and the Pepsi above which a bee floats madly, in tiny visual echo of his own expectant stance on the board. The bee connects the boy to his thoughts about his position in the world: “moving faster than it can think,” to seem to stay still, the bee is the boy’s lesson in perspective before he even reaches the end of the board to peer down. From the end of the board and the story, perspective is everything: “the water, of course, is only soft when you’re inside it,” and “cold is just a kind of hard”; “it all changes when you get back down” (BI 15, 16). The sweet bleach smell that connects the boy to his future self as a sexual person and a social person, the future he is poised to join with his plunge, is thus both an arriving and a leaving, and also simply the entrance into a multiple understanding of self in which one must always be negotiating between its parts in hellos and good-byes. The story ends with “Hello”—said to the boy? in the boy’s head to himself? to the reader in second-person address?—a salutation whose multiple valences speak both to the splintering of selves managed by the story and to the tender, earnest greeting the story wants to give to all of them, and to us. Such desire directly to meet and greet the other echoes the boy’s own repeated, simply and deeply felt moments of empathy, which he registers even amid his anxiety on the board and about his new awkward self. Of a varicose-veined woman he thinks “her legs make you feel like your own legs hurt” (BI 11); in the discolored board’s end he reads the residue of all the people who have come, also somewhat woundingly,

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before him: “the weight and abrasion of their disappearance leaves little bits of soft tender feet behind” (BI 14). Ultimately it is into these “eyes of skin” (BI 16) that he must step to accomplish his leap into the adult world and into—quite literally, given the image of the board’s accrued human detritus—the social body.10 But accomplishing such empathy in the adult world, outside one’s head, and in way that can be communicated to others, is hard and fraught, and this is the challenge of representation that the cycle confronts. Its second piece, “Death Is Not the End,” dramatizes the difficult problem of representing any “true” self through art and language. Through its only character, a poet, who demonstrates many of the qualities of the GMNs Wallace so excoriated in his review of Updike, the piece introduces the stultifying problem of narcissism, and suggests that “the end lies in this stasis, not in death itself” (Goerlandt 165). But it also suggests something equally unnerving about the formal vehicle for this thematic observation. Running three and a half pages but comprising one paragraph and only three sentences, the story merely describes a man lying motionless outside, and his surroundings, themselves “wholly still and composed and enclosed” (BI 4). Its three main verbs are insistently inactive. Seeming a bit of old-fashioned, massively descriptive realism, the piece turns on its head, or, better, fractures hydralike into many heads, when its final sentence entirely denies its object’s mimetic capacity—and then denies the denial. Ultimately the story asserts that its scene is “not like anything else in the world in either appearance or suggestion,” prohibiting a reading of the description as either visually mimetic or symbolically meaningful; a demure little footnote then adds, “that is not wholly true.” Initially devoted solely to describing “real life,” the story instead converts life into a kind of mimetic painting, or metaphor for a painting (as a linguistic pun on “still life”). If its final denial of the description’s veracity to real life (“not like anything else in the world”) questions the mimetic capacity of its realism, its more final denial of that denial, via footnote, seems to question the status of representation itself. The complicated series of realities and maskings created through this fracturing end becomes the literary equivalent of the twisted faces introduced in the first story, in a method that will continue throughout the cycle, as will the stories’ dependence on both linguistic and visual motifs to explore masking and communication of what selves might lie behind the masks. Here Wallace creates a postmodern revision of William Carlos Williams’s modernist manifesto, from “No ideas but in things” to “No ideas but in how we see and represent things.”

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Always for Wallace characters, one thing that lies behind the mask, and the thing that so often creates both the mask and the hideousness it is masking, is narcissism. In this cycle it erupts all over the place, but nowhere more baldly, horribly, and heartbreakingly than in the awkwardly titled “On His Deathbed, Holding Your Hand, the Acclaimed New Young Off-Broadway Playwright’s Father Begs a Boon.” Awkward, because the title contains all of the little we will know about the story’s son, and, worse, it contains all of him in a possessive appositive descriptor modifying “Father.” This story is about the father, the father’s needs, the father’s pain, the father’s words, and in this/his context, the needs, pain, and words of his boy do not matter at all. Dying, the father expresses his final need, to document for all posterity his feelings for his son: “Listen: I did despise him. Do” (BI 256). The hatred is born with the babe himself, as the man discovers through fatherhood his “disgust” and “loathing” (BI 259) for “the selfishness, the appalling selfishness of the newborn” (BI 257). Veteran Wallace readers, schooled in his abiding awareness of and anxiety about the infantile narcissism that is the dark heart of every human being, register the irony of the father’s resentment of his newborn’s “genius: to need ” (BI 266). Such a father encounters with monstrous envy his babe’s blithe indulgence in total fulfillment: “At home in his body as only one whose body is not his job can be at home. Filled with himself, right to the edges like a swollen pond. He was his body” (BI 264). This wholly indulgent and indulged state of being, the essence of infancy and the envy of all who have been shut out of it, the father characterizes as “an essential disorder of character. An absence of whatever we mean by ‘human’” (BI 258); as “Insanity. Solipsism” (BI 260). The irony of course is that in hating the child for the infant’s insatiable need, and for converting his wife into the baby’s mother—no longer his own—the father exposes his own relentless infantile need and solipsism. Critical response to Wallace’s work has leaned heavily on Lacanian ideas about the linguistic construct of the self in elucidating its complex explorations of how the self becomes constituted by language and in a linguistically determined world, and rightfully so.11 But this story, in conjunction with Wallace’s numerous other concerted explorations of the deleterious effects of the human being’s inherently narcissistic wiring, points to the importance in his work of essential Freudian ideas about primary narcissism, the tripartite self and its conflicted system of drives, the interdependent relationship between self and other, and the omnipresent threat of solipsism due to both the nature of the self and contemporary culture’s exacerbation of that narcissistic core.

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“The Depressed Person” refracts this problem of narcissism and its attending threat of blocked empathy for the other through the dilemmas of the fractured self and representation, resulting in a tone so multilayered that its final intention remains indeterminable, easily misread, or both. Published initially in Harper’s, this meticulous record of the tormented inner life of a profoundly, poignantly, annoyingly depressed woman—whose best confidante is a cancer-stricken friend whose calendar has been helpfully cleared by chemotherapy, and whose therapist kills herself—offended early readers by seeming to criticize a character who is suffering what we understand as a disease.12 But more accurately the woman is suffering narcissism: her need obsessively to know her self through its development in and reflection by the other, to fill her void with that reflected image. It is to this end that she applies, while skeptically ironizing, 12-step methods for coping, such as “reaching out to members of her Support System,” avoiding the “Blame Game” (BI 39), creating “Childhood Reconstructions” (BI 40), and attending “Inner-Child-Focused Experiential Therapy Retreat Weekend” (BI 46–47). The rampant capitalization and borrowed terms directly evoke Wallace’s highly ambivalent use of AA- and NA-speak in Infinite Jest, in which he posits elements of the 12-step programs as both methods of escape from and intensification of narcissism and its resulting addictive behaviors. Also as in Jest, one fundamental problem here is the woman’s method of dealing with her narcissistic need, not by sincerely engaging herself in others’ present lives, but simply by asking them, from the solipsistic safety of a telephone conversation or therapy appointment, to fulfill her needs. The woman is aware of the limitations of these one-sided methods of communication, but even these she interprets as further threats to her own self’s fulfillment: from a memory of her roommate making “gestures of repulsion and boredom” while talking on the phone to a boy in college, the woman creates further fear that she will be so dismissed (BI 43–44). Meanwhile, she is aware that she spends in therapy “$1080 a month to purchase what was in many respects a kind of fantasy-friend who could fulfill her childishly narcissistic fantasies of getting her own emotional needs met by another without having to reciprocally meet or empathize with or even consider the other’s own emotional needs” (BI 57n5). These anxieties for the self even in an age that offers technological and clinical aids to communication and self-discovery echo Wallace’s contemplation of the same in Jest. The woman’s anxieties about the room for misrepresentation created by telephones reprise the anxieties that evolve

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technology from telephone to videophone to video-inspired digitized representations of the self (IJ 146). Similarly, her understanding of the narcissism of her relationship with her therapist repeats the damning doubts of therapy culture exhibited in the fabulously ambivalent “inner-child” support group that Hal stumbles into and witnesses with growing horror (IJ 800–5). “The Depressed Person” ends with crucial questions that it does not begin to attempt to answer: “what words and terms might be applied to describe and assess such a solipsistic, self-consumed, endless emotional vacuum and sponge as she now appeared to herself to be? How was she to decide and describe— even to herself, looking inward and facing herself—what all she’d so painfully learned said about her?” (BI 69). Thus it once again asks, rather than elucidates, how we are to understand and communicate the self, and escape narcissism, all through language, “words and terms.” It also recognizes that the problem of literature is the problem of the self, and vice versa: both suffer from the necessity and prison of representation, the self forced to “look inward,” to build a separate self, to “face” itself, in some ill-fated, brutally fracturing, and multiplying act of self-recognition (BI 69). The 18 interviews in the cycle structurally recreate the problem of the one-sided conversation that characterizes narcissism and disables empathetic connection. Wallace highlights the selfishness of the responders, their disconnection from others, and the inherent self-centeredness as well as all the talking so unpromisingly involved in this particular method of knowing by omitting all questions, so that even his “interviews” become monologues (a technique he will repeat in The Pale King).13 Some of these “interviews” seem really to be halves of conversations with an emotionally or sexually intimately known (but structurally silenced) other. Many of them consist of men manipulating a woman, their interviewer, into doing their sexual and/or emotional bidding, and/or further forgiving them for their objectifying behavior, underscoring the structural and thematic challenge Wallace proposes to confront. For these men, irony—in its modernist meaning of saying the opposite of what one means in order to express a separate truth, or, to put it another way, lying with purpose—works, in bitter, nasty ways. One interviewee (#11) blames the woman, whom he is leaving, for driving him to leave her by fearing that he will leave; another (#2), in “confessing” his weaknesses, extracts gratitude and sympathy from this woman whose kindness he has repeatedly abused with his own greedy need, even as he recounts those abuses to her. These, and voices like them, enact a mask of earnestness to work toward cruel, ironic purposes.

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Another type of voice takes the opposite tack, enlisting our postmodern culture’s predilection toward irony, or academic culture’s fondness for irony’s handmaiden, poststructural indeterminacy, to feed their selfish needs while appearing kind, thoughtful, or otherwise worthy of admiration. One man (#46), seemingly an incarcerated rapist defending his crime, argues for the mental and physical degradation of women in the name of broader thinking (BI 116). Two men in conversation in interview #28 (they must be graduate students) use feminist and “post-feminist” beliefs to argue the gamut of sexist, objectifying prefeminist prejudices about women. Quite a few other voices articulate varying degrees of frightening misogyny and quotidian sexism through a more banal lack of self-awareness: one man declares his regard for women with choice lines like “I love how you can never understand them [and] the way you just can’t keep them from shopping no matter what you do” (BI 225–26). Another tells an elaborate account of how his love of the television show Bewitched led to masturbation fantasies in which he could manipulate the world, especially women, at his pleasure, and then to his current God complex, in which he connects his Bewitch ing masturbatory hand movements to the movements of the planets. It is exactly this onanism of self-absorption—power-hungry, pathetic, and objectifying everything the self desires—that defines, unreflected upon, all of these men’s relationships to women. The interviews achieve greater and more powerful unity in light of Wallace’s later revelation that they were all conducted by one woman, the book’s “protagonist,” to whom “something bad happens over the course of the book” (CW 90). Read through this lens, the chronologically first interview offered, #2, depicts the interviewer’s romantic partner pressing for her sympathy even while he is using and leaving her (after, he himself points out, she has “moved all the way out here” and “[had] to get rid of [her] cat,” BI 97). Interview #11 is for the woman a reprisal of both the dumping and being blamed for it. Taken together, these early interviews provide a motivation for the interviewer to make sense of such offensive behavior, generating and bridging future interviews. Later interviews follow these personally upsetting experiences with more appalling revelations, attempts to manipulate her (as in the wholly unselfconscious pick-up lines in interview #19), and also, increasingly, confessions of truly twisted minds conducted in various prisons and facilities (see interviews #15, 36, 46, and 59). According to the narrative set up by interviews #2 and 11, the entire body of interviews implies the woman’s dawning understanding that the objectification she suffers is part of a larger

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hideousness of gender relations whose spectrum spans from quotidian to pathological. That something very bad indeed does seem to happen because of the interviews (the last interview, #72, ends, “oh no not again behind you look out! ” BI 26) suggests that the book creates a moral universe: not by allowing the woman to prevail over these repeated male attempts to dominate her with their verbal abuse, but by ensuring our sympathy for her, by making plain her suffering at male hands.14 Or the book accomplishes this morality and clarity of purpose if we notice such a narrative arc, which we might not be likely to do.15 The text of the gathered interviews is itself incomplete, denying us an inaugural, perhaps more explanatory interview #1, and dissipating its narrative logic beyond easy recognition, through nonchronological placement and division among three groups of interviews dispersed throughout the collection. Thus the body of interviews repeats the collection’s larger structure of presence made out of absence, order in dialectic with disorder. Further, as in “The Depressed Person,” Wallace complicates matters enormously by embedding the interviews’ clear theme of abusive self-absorption in murky layers of narrative, tone, intention, and expectation. The pro-degradationist rapist who ends his interview by asking, “What if I did it to you? Right here? Raped you with a bottle?” (BI 124) not only verbally accosts us but also elicits our empathy by asking us to imagine suffering the same brutality he implies he has suffered himself. The man who ironically argues that being a “Great Lover” (BI 28) requires allowing his partner the supreme pleasure of pleasing him strikes us as quite earnest only a page earlier when he is extolling the virtues of mutual sexual generosity, a definition of “great” loving that sounds quite reasonable. Is it merely agreeing with him that makes him earnest for us? What constitutes earnestness in conversation, and how does one construct it in language? These interviews remind us that recognizing earnestness and generating empathy depend on perspective and values, negotiated between speakers; and that both require complex narrative construction and context to be present in language. Wallace demonstrates perhaps most brilliantly the complex slipperiness of earnestness and empathy, especially as represented through language, in the final interview presented in the collection.16 In it, a young man with a history of using women for sex describes how he was transformed by a woman’s totally “sincere” and “unposing” account of being raped by a psychotic man who spares her life simply because of her own act of empathy: she manages to create and sustain, even through the vicious act of “anti-rape” (BI 312), a powerful

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connection with the attacker that will not allow him to dehumanize and kill her. The young man illustrates that he understands her conversion of violation into caring complicity as at root an act of mothering, of meeting the rapist’s gnawingly infantile need of narcissistic fulfillment: he describes her “stroking the back of his head and whispering small little consolatory syllables in a soothing maternal singsong” (BI 310), and delivering “the well-known Female Gaze” (BI 312), in the face of the rapist’s psychotic reaction to his “infantile belief that without [mother’s] love he will somehow die” (BI 305). Further, her extraordinary act of empathy inspires the young man, once an empathy-poser like so many of the other interview voices, to participate in his own sincere acts of empathy as he retells her story for us. “Can you imagine,” he asks, How in her altered state of heightened attention to everything around she says the clover smells like weak mint and the phlox like mown hay and she feels the way she and the clover and phlox and the dank verdure beneath the phlox and the mulatto retching into the gravel and even the contents of his stomach were all made of precisely the same thing. (BI 309)

Later, while describing listening to her tell her story, he experiences his own heightened sense of awareness, “remembering in near-hallucinatory detail that evening’s outdoor concert and festival” (BI 311) where he had picked her up by masking his disdain for her “Granola Cruncher” “type” with a pose of sincerity. He notes that the first thing he admires about her (post-coitally) is her absolute lack of pose, her utter sincerity (BI 296, 297). From his powerful encounter with this shockingly sincere woman he learns not only how to empathize but also that doing so is our best way of coping nonpsychotically with that infantile need that motivates us all. He recognizes the psychotic man’s raping of the woman as a more extreme version of his own use of her, understanding that “it isn’t the motivation that’s the psychotic part” (BI 304), but the rapist’s extreme response to it, and realizes that “there had been far more genuine emotion and connection in that anti-rape she suffered than in any of the so-called lovemaking I spent my time pursuing” (BI 312). But ultimately this interview reminds us of the dangers lurking in every act of telling. The interview ends with the man attacking, brutally, sexually, and through language, his young, female, “feminist” interviewer—“Judge me, you chilly cunt . . . I don’t care . . . I know I loved. End of story” (BI 318). But even more revealingly, the interviewee

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belies his sincerity throughout: the response in which he documents his empathetic transformation also employs the same linguistic marks of objectifying women and posturing irony that he believes he has escaped. He refers to both the raped woman whom he “loves” and the interviewer as “types,” and scare-quotes words as diverse as “love,” “true,” (BI 317) and “brutal sex slayings” (BI 293), casting them in equal doubt. In fact, the narrator’s most powerful method of undercutting both his transformation and the power of the woman’s empathetic accomplishment lies in converting the entire account to words, language, and narrative, his “story” drawing attention to itself as such by referring to the “rising action” of the rape “anecdote” (BI 299), and contemplating the horror of the woman’s experience of “being left narratively alone in the self-sufficiency of her narrative aspect” (BI 298). Thus, this final interview suggests the impossibility of ever wholly transcending either the narcissistic self or language, while also demonstrating the necessity of using them in conjunction to try. Far more successful in using language, and narrative’s self-awareness as such, in the service of enabling rather than undercutting empathy and understanding is the cycle’s structurally and thematically central piece, the 30-page “Octet.” This piece comes at us as a series of pop quizzes that present the reader with moral and ethical dilemmas involving friend and family relationships, capped with questions requesting the reader’s judgment. What the quizzes do not do, though, is dictate the terms in which they expect the reader to make such judgments (one long quiz ends with the vague demand, “Evaluate”), or ask the questions the reader expects to be asked (after a scenario involving two “terminal” drug addicts: “Which one lived?”). The quizzes underscore the idea raised more implicitly by moments of tonal slippage that both communicating and reading empathy and earnestness are unavoidably matters of judgment and values, and that fiction’s ignoring this fact is at least unrealistic and at worst a form of dissembling. From the start, Wallace forces the reader to aid in both the answering and the interpretation of the quiz, implicating her in his project of value exploration. The story’s other defining metafictive element, footnotes (which sprout their own footnotes), also requires from the reader concerted engagement: the notes both impede the reading process, reminding the reader of the text’s constructedness, and literally move her, by forcing much page turning and eye scanning. Containing “excised” quizzes, these footnotes also allow the text to sprawl beyond our traditional sense of the text proper, as if to place the reader in intimate cahoots with a writer whose editor has held him insufficiently apart from his audience.

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As if these formal methods of bringing the reader into relationship with the writer were not enough, Wallace then deploys the second-person point of view to impose a direct shoe-swapping of reader and writer: “You are, unfortunately, a fiction writer,” pop quiz 9 begins (BI 145), then proceeds to obliterate realism’s fourth wall by telling us with “queer urgency ” (BI 146) about the need for “100% candor” (BI 148) in “interrogating the reader” (BI 151) “sincere[ly]” and “naked[ly]” (BI 154) that plagues said fiction writer—which is to say, us, the readers. By the end of the piece, Wallace has collapsed even these distinctions, making the “you” ultimately “more like a reader, in other words, down here quivering in the mud of the trench with the rest of us, instead of a Writer, whom we imagine to be clean and dry and radiant of command presence as he coordinates the whole campaign from back at some gleaming abstract Olympian HQ” (BI 160). Here he articulates the power-defined reader-writer binary only to collapse it as reader becomes a writer who is herself asked to make the imaginative empathetic identification back with the reader in whose position she began. Doing so allows him to accomplish the goals he set for himself in the 1993 interview: it is the literary equivalent of exactly that unthinkable act Wallace imagines in the story for his reader/writer, “addressing the reader directly and asking her straight out whether she’s feeling anything like what you feel” (154). Only, he never does ask her outright. Instead he mediates the question by placing it in the mouth of a character-writer who addresses the reader supremely indirectly, in that he has already asked the reader to imagine herself as, well, the writer. Wallace also creates empathy between reader and writer structurally, in a manner similar to Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse”: “Octet”’s metafictive narrative strategies intensify the fictitiousness of the story, throwing into relief an authorial voice that feels intensely real in comparison. In this way, Wallace revises realism, creating the feeling of reality not by allowing the reader to absorb herself into another world through the illusion of verisimilitude, but by creating a world so obviously false, constructed, written, that the voice responsible for writing that world, the man behind the curtain, seems to be sitting next to us here, in our world. In so doing, Wallace converts Baudrillard’s distinctively postmodern concept of the simulacra—that unreal thing that exists to convince us that the rest of the world is real, an idea that felt so threatening to human connection and even our notions of humanity in the 1980s and 1990s—into a method for sculpting through fiction a powerful human presence whose insistent engagement with the reader makes her feel, in her own life, less alone.

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Part two of “Adult World” more particularly extends the formal arguments of immediacy through mediation in “Octet.” An outline of a short story, it promises to complete its earlier part, therefore focusing on the writerly techniques meant to be harnessed to answer questions raised by Part I and give it “meaning.” Here we find writing laid bare: almost filmically, the outline shows us how it will manipulate our judgments of characters and of their own morally and ethically questionable decisions based on point of view employed, on what it will reveal and what it will deny. Just as many of the “interviews” in this collection make us cringe at the speakers’ unselfconscious revelations of brutal (and largely linguistic) techniques for manipulating women into emotionally and physically brutal encounters, “Adult World II” exposes the manipulations imposed on readers with every act of writing. One of the things this collection contemplates, then, is that we all, readers and writers alike, share in both the brutality and the promise of the acts of power enabled by language. Most experimental for Wallace in this cycle, in that it is neither neat realism nor his usual sharp-tongued metafiction, is the surrealistic, prose-poetic “Church Not Made with Hands.” This piece considers most overtly whether art can offer salve or salvation for the estrangements and sufferings of life. The story slips among settings and times, contained both in- and outside the mind of its main character, named only Day, while dreamily describing the grim days surrounding the near-drowning of his stepdaughter as he, unable to swim, watched helplessly. Its illogical impressionism mimicking both Day’s traumatized mind and the girl’s brain-damaged one, the story piles synesthesia upon synesthesia like thick ropes of paint, sculpting its narrative into a heavy tactility like the suffocating thing Day’s life has become since watching his stepdaughter breathe water instead of air. He “dreampaints” day and night, blurring the boundaries between word, painting, and music while all but erasing the boundaries between reality and dream, life and art. One dreamt memory suggests the promise of both art and dream to heal the ache of solitary consciousness: Day recalls a lecture on Vermeer’s View of Delft, described by his professor as offering “windows onto interiors in which all conflicts have been resolved” by its “razor-clear” rendering, so that “the viewer sees as God sees” (BI 203–4). Radiantly moved by the projected work of art, the professor offers this vision of art as method of empathy and understanding between people, and people and art: “Day can see how it’s the angle of the bright breeze against the screen that makes the wet face atop the priest’s lit shadow glow”; “big jelly tears” move artfully down his cheek to drop down to the “text” (BI 204).

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But later, the “defrocked professor of art,” now sacrilegiously praying to time, will lead Day in a dreampainted vision of a church sprouting from nowhere, encompassing him and the injured Esther, and allowing their peaceful ascension, until his glance back to see where he came from brings it all down. The failed vision seems to confirm an observation made by Day’s boss, whose habit of making steeples with his hands has taught him that “his one best church leaves no hand free to open the door” (BI 208). When wholly constructed by the self or the human, the promise and place of divine salvation remain inaccessible to both. The architectural component added to this vision by the church emphasizes the element of desired containment, the longing for a complex in which to be held, for space defined by the clear borders that make the View of Delft a vision of conflictless knowability. For all the blurring between genres, senses, types of art, and art and life achieved by Day and this story as they grapple with a trauma that cannot be adequately contained by any one of them, both man and story seem to long for a clarity they can’t even imagine for themselves. Piqued by his shattering failure to protect his stepdaughter, Day confronts his profound existential awareness that there is nothing and no one outside himself to bestow the peaceful fulfillment of clarity and meaning—no defined limits he can satisfyingly fill “right to the edges like a swollen pond.” Yet any framework he builds with his own hands “leaves no hand free to open the door.” Preventing this clarity seems to be his understanding that, as the 13-year-old boy perceives from the edge of the diving board, “it all changes when you get back down.” Like this socially awkward adolescent, all eyes on him as he hesitates between selves before stepping into those “eyes of skin” at his board’s end, Day also suffers from an overabundance of eyes, awash in an endlessness of disparate perspectives that causes all the blur. “The sky is an eye,” the story ends. “The night is the eye’s drawn lid. Each day the lid again comes open, disclosing blood, and the blue iris of a prone giant” (BI 210). Literature, and visual art, have long enjoyed, especially via a more monovocal traditional realism, contemplating and constructing the order they could make of the world through the narrative mastery of human perspective. Having shattered that mastery into the insecurity and mess of a world made wildly multiplicitous, and each subject the object of every other subject’s gaze, modernist and postmodernist art-making have become increasingly at home with the uncanny (unheimlich, “unhomely”) boundlessness of multiple subjective perspective. But in “Church,” Wallace pushes the problems of subjective perspective and of the impossibility of

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attaining a fixed position from which to know and be known one step further: he imagines the world as we know it as subject to and therefore constructed by the gaze of a giant other. It is the opposite of filmmaker Terrence Malick’s favored image, starlings flocking at dusk, the artful shapes made by their crazed masses and the beauty and seeming purpose of their unified body visible only to us outside their chaos.17 In Wallace’s vision, we are the chaos inside the unseen shapely body, never knowing if the giant sees us as beautiful. This anxiety about vision as a method of the self’s understanding the self and the other haunts the cycle, incumbent as the method is upon the simultaneously distorting and estranging necessity of perspective. Brief Interviews does not end with the final extended interview #20 and its toothsome revelations about empathy, sincerity, and the difficulty and possibility of maintaining both (especially while telling a story). Instead, it closes with “Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XXIV),” a rare first-person story, not interview, that wrests our empathy for its main character not through metalinguistic pyrotechnics but through ordinary realist internal monologue. As such, it ends the collection by returning it to the bildungs-roman discoveries of self, via traditional realist devices, that helped open the book with “Forever Overhead.” But “Porousness” adds an emphasis on the ways in which external perspective unavoidably bedevils self-reflection.18 In this final story, the boy narrator suffers a haircut at the hands of his mother, while suffering more acutely his twin brother’s galling miming of his every expression. Its first sentence painstakingly situates all characters and setting elements in relation to each other, and in a series of claustrophobic frames: “Mum” and boy stand between kitchen’s cold and stove’s heat, between open drawer and wireless-scanning “Da,” between “window gone opaque” and “the gilt ferrotype of identical boys.” This ferrotype picture contains and inhabits its own series of frames, including the boys’ “flanking a blind vested father” and the picture’s placement “in a square recession above the wireless’s stand” (BI 319). Inside this “funhouse” of framings—Wallace baldly invokes the comparison to Barth’s seminal experimentation in literary self-consciousness (BI 320)—sits the boy, unable to move, fully subject to the torture of his brother’s “hung” face, copying the boy’s expressions “with such intensity and so little lag in following that his face less mimed than lampooned my own, made instantly distended and obscene whatever position my own face’s pieces assembled” (BI 320). The boy’s discovery, akin to that of the adolescent diver, is the terror of knowing he can only see and know himself through reflection or representation, while every

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external presentation of that self must come, distorted and “obscene,” from the perspective of another. Also tormenting the boy is the further understanding that in the warped image of the “funhouse mirror” lies “the gross and pitiless sameness, the distortion in which there is, tiny, at the center, something cruelly true about the we who leer and woggle at stick necks and concave skulls, goggling eyes that swell to the edges” (BI 320–1). In other words, the grotesquery reflects aninescapable truth about who we are and how we see who we are. At first, he tries to escape confronting this face with “an unseen fit that sent my eyes upward again and again into their own shocked white.” But the boy finally realizes that “the last refuge was slackness, giving up the ghost completely for a blank slack gagged mask’s mindless stare—unseen and –seeing— into a mirror I could not know or feel myself without. No not ever again” (BI 321).19 This slackness is the permanent “lack of expression” adopted by the career men’s room attendant, whose son despised him for it (interview #42, BI 91), and it is the “anti-expression” of the rapist robbed of all satisfaction by his heroically empathizing victim (interview #20, BI 312). As in these other pieces, this final story posits disaffection as our refuge from what DeLillo, in The Names, calls the “self-referring” world in which self is constituted entirely through its representation to itself (BI 297). Significantly, that the household focuses on a framed “ferrotype” temporally locates this boy and his dilemma of identity at the beginning of our now banal age of technological reproduction. On the opposite side of the mechanical age from the characters in the opening story, and from those in the Barthelme story to which it alludes, this boy describes the sound of his mother’s scissors as “lalation of shears meant for lambs” (BI 320), thus envisioning himself as sacrifice to the image, himself being shorn of something meaningful, while, muted by cloth, only the shears do their mechanical talking. To end with a pre-postmodern moment and its discovery of the fracturing interactions among self, representation, and language that would characterize the postmodern period is to in some way end at the beginning, as if no distance at all has been traveled between such an inaugurating moment and the cycle’s many attempts to overcome the difficulties it bore. Thus the collection seems to imply that it (and we) cannot escape the suffocating and distorting conditions of language and representation in which it is made, and of the culture, intellectual and otherwise, of which it is a part and from which it is born. In this way the cycle seems no stranger to the discursive loop in which all of Infinite Jest, even its attempts to escape it, are trapped. But it seems

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equally fair to say that this cycle does create discrete moments, as in “Octet,” “Forever Overhead,” “The Depressed Person,” and its final interview, in which the reader can understand, even participate in, acts of empathy constructed through self-conscious acts of writing and representation. Always qualified by their encompassment in language, and in any number of the endless other framing devices that make up our making up of the world, these stories not only define the gap in the self and between selves but also build bridges between them with repeated invitations to “step into the skin and disappear,” to become the writer who is himself “more like a reader,” to see in a strange and mortal moment from the eye of the giant. All of these imagined acts of empathy begin by taking a perspective outside the self, and in the end it is this shifting, even doubling or multiplying, of vision that the collection diagnoses and enables, that it greets with terror and gratitude. For though the vision proves unsustainable in “Church,” it also provides, via a painting on canvas, its projection on a screen, and a blooming in Day’s mind, the only space into which salvation floods. And however sobering is the sheared boy’s discovery that he can only know himself through his distorted reflection by another, such knowing must be less painful, and more productive, than his eyes’ attempts to see blackly into himself. In this way the boy gains an external vision that allows him to escape the “looking inward and facing herself” that plagues the Depressed Person, whose profound solipsism is the mental equivalent of the boy’s inward-rolling eyes. Like the adolescent on the diving board who sees in a floating bee how thoroughly he masks his own inner turmoil, and how different it all looks from down below, Brief Interviews illustrates both the other’s distortion, even manipulation and domination of the self, and the self’s need of the other to represent the self. In so doing, it critiques and celebrates the power of language as a tool for such manipulation and as the material of vision, handlessly constructing a space capacious enough to house, rather than resolve, its contradictory impulses toward presence and absence, empathy and solipsism, sincerity and twisted faces, even realism and antirealism, knowing that “the lie is that it’s one or the other.” Notes 1. To date, Marshall Boswell and Zadie Smith provide the only concerted considerations of this collection (see Understanding David Foster Wallace and Changing My Mind, respectively); Adam Kelly, Iannis Goerlandt, and Christoforos Diakoulas treat portions of the

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2.

3.

4.

5.

collection in Consider David Foster Wallace. Only one journal article focuses on the book, but that too examines only its brief opening story, and then primarily to elucidate (with arguable relevance) Raymond Carver’s minimalism (Dan Tysdal, “Inarticulation and the Figure of Enjoyment: Raymond Carver’s Minimalism Meets David Foster Wallace’s ‘A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life’” in Wascana Review of Contemporary Poetry and Short Fiction 38.1 [2003]: 66–83). Charles Harris discusses the collection briefly but effectively in the context of Wallace’s singularity as an author (“David Foster Wallace: ‘That Distinctive Singular Stamp of Himself’” in Critique 51.2 [2010]: 168–76). Reviews of the book upon publication tended to express frustration with the book’s methods equaling their admiration of the book’s accomplishments. Wallace describes the book as his attempt to “deal with” sex, a topic he had not felt comfortable with before, in an interview with Lewis Frumkes in the spring of 1999. One year after writing this review, Wallace gave “Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness,” also published in Lobster, in which he repeated this concern that “our present culture is, both developmentally and historically, adolescent” (64n3). Of the 20 noninterview stories, Wallace published all but 2 (the second “The Devil Is a Busy Man” and, interestingly, the collection’s last piece, “Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XXIV)”) prior to the collection. Of the 18 interviews, Wallace published 9. The earliest stories, “Forever Overhead” and “Church Not Made with Hands,” appeared in 1991, while the pre published interviews did not begin to appear until shortly before Brief Interview’s own publication, one in 1997, seven in 1998, and another in 1999. This publication history suggests that the interview format that shapes and helps unify the collection came late in a writing process that had already produced a formally diverse body of texts over several years. While Ballard’s influence on Wallace has yet to receive critical attention, Wallace indicates his admiration for Ballard’s work as early as 1991, and specifically in terms of a work that had much in common with The Atrocity Exhibition. Ballard’s 1990 collection of stories called War Fever included two stories that were also included in the 1990 edition of The Atrocity Exhibition: “Notes Towards a Nervous Breakdown” and “The Secret History of World War 3.” In his review of this collection for the Washington Post on April 28, 1991, Wallace asserts his affinity for Ballard’s book, and for these specific pieces shared by The Atrocity Exhibition, for their “formal fun,” “Borgesian . . . involution,” and first-person confessional perspective. He also registers his dislike of their “poverty of affect” and tendency not to “give their readers a chance to exercise discernment or insight”—perhaps signaling the ways in which he would accept and reshape Ballard’s influence on his own later work.

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6. Boswell accounts for both the structural alternating between short and long pieces and these recurring themes by describing the book as arranged “in a dialectical pattern of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis” (182). 7. See the 1993 interview with McCaffery, the 1996 interview with Lipsky, and a televised 1997 interview with Charlie Rose (to name a few). 8. “Church Not Made with Hands” first appeared in Rampike (Winter/ Spring 1991), and “Forever Overhead” was first published in Fictional International 19.2 (Spring 1991). 9. The story of Ambrose operates similarly in Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, both in the title piece and in the collection as a whole (Ambrose’s story appears in three different pieces). 10. I find it interesting that Boswell reads “Step into the skin and disappear” quite differently, the boy “disappearing” into the skin of his “real” self, “safe from the self-consciousness that would displace it” (203). Wherever one locates the vectors of “real” versus “social,” their identities are clear, and anyway part of the point of the story is that “the lie is that it’s one or the other” (16). 11. See, for example, Catherine Nichols’s “Dialogizing Postmodern Carnival,” which reads Infinite Jest, quite wrong-headedly, in my opinion, in terms of the “tyranny of the symbolic order.” Much more helpful is Boswell’s elucidation of Wallace’s playful enlistment of Lacan in interviews #28 and #48 (191–93). 12. See Boswell p. 205. 13. Zadie Smith suggests that the questions “are not only formally ‘missing’ from the conversations, their respondents have internalized them” (268), solipsistically taking charge of both questions and answers. 14. The eight interviews that flesh out the interviewer’s backstory, as well as build a moral universe in which the rest of the book must be read, almost fully comprise the half that were not previously published, perhaps suggesting that they were written for this collection specifically to provide the narrative throughline and moral framework required by the book to make its formal innovations meaningful. 15. Like Barth’s Funhouse, whose “Seven Additional Author’s Notes” reveals keys for reading several of the book’s stories, some of which, like “Glossolalia,” remain inscrutable without them, the interviews themselves, identified as taking place in locations all over the country and over at least a four-year span of time, do not clearly ask to be read as conducted by one woman. Here is another surprising case, in fiction much accused of killing the author, of a text that relies on the input of its author to an extent that makes the death-ofthe-author argument seem ridiculous (or, as Wallace put it, “Greatly Exaggerated”). 16. While the bulk of the interviews published prior to the collection would not appear for another year (interviews #3, 14, 28, 30, 42, 48,

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and 51 were published in Harpers Magazine in October of 1998), interview #20 appeared first, in 1997 in the Paris Review. Here, though, it appeared as Interview #6, with the title “E———on ‘How and Why I Have Come To Be Totally Devoted to S———and Have Made Her the Linchpin and Plinth of My Entire Emotional Existence’.” The new interview number in the collection raises the question of whether the change was made to bring this piece in line with the larger narrative of the woman interviewer’s story as it unfolds across the course of Brief Interviews. 17. See Days of Heaven (1978) and Tree of Life (2011). 18. That this piece is one of only two noninterview pieces in the collection not previously published suggests that it finds its purpose in, or was perhaps written for the purpose of, adding to the realism introduced by “Forever Overhead” that counterbalances the metafiction of the rest of the book. It also provides a throughline from one realist bildungs-roman discovery to another that shapes the collection as a whole. 19. The perfect aural tactility of “blank slack gagged masks’ mindless stare,” its stringing of bland a’s and ah’s amid brutal consonant clusters, not only repeats via language the synesthesia showcased in “Church,” but also reminds us that Wallace, contemporary king of the encyclopedic, was also in moments too seldom discussed a master of poetic language. See the opening tableau of ThePale King as well.

CH A P T ER

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“ . . . ”: Language, Gender, and Modes of Power in the Work of David Foster Wallace Clare Hayes-Brady

It is becoming something of a convention among Wallace scholars to lament the comparative absence of well-developed female characters in his work. It is true that the female characters in Wallace’s novels and short stories do tend toward the archetypal, from the bookish, Converse-wearing Lenore to Avril’s towering maternality and the shattering beauty shared by Joelle and Meredith Rand. It is also true that there is a surprising absence of direct feminine narrative: those female characters that appear are remarkably quiet. By contrast, the masculine figures that populate Wallace’s writing are physically solid, vibrant, and vocal. However, this distancing represents an approach to women that—while it could be termed misogynistic—is not based in antipathy but in alterity.1 Wallace’s awareness of the inviolable strangeness of the female to the male consciousness leads to the opacity of his female characterizations, providing an oppositional balance with the forceful, dynamic males. Wallace’s women, who wield the influence if not the power, form the silent, shifting center around which his representations of masculinity can locate their stable orbits. Masculine linguistic power is characterized in Wallace largely by direct speech, linguistic play, and univocality, with oppositional characteristics such as excessive quotation or tonal slippage indicating a lack of coherent identity. By way of contrast, Wallace signifies the corresponding security and coherence of identity in female characters via vocal plurality, dialogue verbal manipulation, and, most interestingly,

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the infiltration of the vocal patterns of the men who seek to subjugate them. This essay explores the layered complexity of Wallace’s approach to language, gender, and power, in particular the power relationships between masculinity and femininity. This is not to suggest that Wallace’s attitude to femininity was misogynistic or unconsidered, but rather that the complex interrelationships of language, gender and power displayed in his work is not a matter of simple chauvinism or misogyny, but rather of balance and delicacy. Indeed, Wallace demonstrated an almost-pathological consciousness of gender politics in his constant invocation of a feminine subject. Such obvious consciousness of gender issues appears at odds with the comparative lack in his writing of fully developed female characters; however, while women are conspicuous in his writing either by their absence or their lack of development, that absence emerges as a consequence of Wallace’s awareness of their alterity. His hyperawareness of gender difference, paradoxically, paralyses his authorial capacity for empathy, leaving oblique engagement with femininity the only available means of exploring gender issues. Wallace’s treatment of the power struggles at play in linguistic exchanges takes place on ever-shifting ground. The balance of power moves between protagonists, never settling or resolving, and Wallace’s treatment of gender indicates a consistent and considered engagement with the relationships among language, gender and power. Wallace’s representations of masculine and feminine language are broadly contextualized in this essay against the work of several theorists of language and gender, including Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva, Paul Ricoeur, and Hélène Cixous. Wallace’s treatment of gender evokes Slavoj Žižek’s account of contemporary incarnations of courtly love themes, in which the female is disembodied and idealized out of potency. However, Žižek’s representation is complicated by the actual power dynamic that plays out through Wallace’s narrative, such that the complex representations of gender and power ultimately present an incarnation of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic; in other words, the competing vocabularies employed by masculine and feminine voices enact a powerful dynamic struggle between Self and Other whose conflict cannot be resolved but must instead be accommodated.2 From a perspective less concerned with conflict, Paul Ricoeur’s theory of narrative identity, expounded in Oneself As Another offers a similar dynamic. The intimate relationship of Self and Other as it relates to the specter of solipsism, a cornerstone of Wallace’s writing, is thrown into sharp relief by the play of gender in his work. To articulate the dialectic at play within the gender relationships that

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characterize Wallace’s fiction, this essay explores his separate articulation of masculine and feminine identities, before exploring how these distinct vocal qualities relate to each other. Prior to engaging with the fictional embodiments of gendered identity, however, it is worthwhile briefly outlining Wallace’s own engagement with questions of gender. As suggested above, these engagements are complex, often with undertones of conflict. Wallace’s references to his imagined readers always—to the point of affectation—envisaged the reader as female. “All the attention and engagement and work you need to get from the reader can’t be for your benefit,” Wallace told Larry McCaffery, talking about good writing. “It’s got to be for hers” (CW 50). Similarly, in “The Empty Plenum,” his review of David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress, he praises Markson’s ability to write in a feminine voice while simultaneously articulating anxieties about his own ability to do so. He refers to such work as “crosswriting” (i.e., men writing women) (BFN 100). Here, as elsewhere, Wallace demonstrates an acute consciousness of issues of gender, particularly those associated with language and power. Wallace mentions two emotions repeatedly with regard to gender conflict: guilt in women, and fear in men. In a radio interview with Michael Silverblatt, Wallace said, “My guess is that a certain amount of misogyny . . . is rooted in fear,” indicating an ambivalence regarding gender relations in general, and a surprising tolerance toward those who displayed misogyny in their attitudes. This fear forms part of the underlying structure of his fiction, particularly Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Similarly, in “The Empty Plenum,” he discusses a kind of cosmic feminine guilt, in two streams: Hellenic, involving guilt as object, and Evian, involving guilt as subject. In each case, the guilt is associated with actions on the part of men that are seen as resulting from the (in)action of the feminine. This negative cycle of guilt/fear ensures the separation of the two genders, allowing for the othering by each gender of its counterpart, thus reinforcing both the coherence and the separation of gender identities. The term “misogyny” specifically implies dislike, and has come to be freighted with ideas of fear, mistrust, and oppressive tendencies in the powerful male. Jonathan Franzen obliquely accuses Wallace of misogyny in his essay “Farther Away,” arguing that part of Wallace’s literary project was to sketch the edges of his own misogyny, noting the “near-perfect absence, in his fiction, of ordinary love” (39). I offer a slightly more nuanced vision of Wallace’s (admittedly frustrating) engagement with femininity and femaleness, however, one that is not based in fear, but in the compulsive need for an Other. In

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other words, Wallace’s “misogyny” is based in instability, in which the feminine functions as a stabilizing Other for the masculine Self. Images of self-delineation—particularly masculine self-delineation— recur frequently throughout Wallace’s writing. I suggest that the misogyny Franzen refers to might more reasonably be cast as the superseding of Wallace’s obvious consciousness of gender relations by his almost-obsessive fear of solipsism. This need for an Other to delineate the Self is central to Wallace’s literary relationships generally, but is most clearly on display in his representation of gender interaction, where it overpowers another obvious and abiding concern: the place of the female subject. As such, the dearth in Wallace’s fiction of what we might term direct feminine narrative stems from a—perhaps excessive—consciousness of the alterity of the feminine. In other words, the absence of the feminine is a matter of mystery rather than dislike. All that being said, it does not necessarily follow that Wallace is without fault in employing this representational strategy, merely that the fault is perhaps less simple than it initially appears. The term “misogyny” in its strict sense is both too negative for Wallace’s approach to women, and too positive, in the sense that the passion that informs misogyny implies sufficient subjectivity in the Other as to inspire fear, where Wallace’s women are beyond the human Other, to what Žižek, in his interpretation of the feminine as Lacanian real, refers to as “an inhuman partner in the precise sense of a radical Otherness which is wholly incommensurable with our needs and desires” (“From Courtly” 96). Wallace obliquely invokes Lenore Beadsman, the protagonist of The Broom of the System, in “The Empty Plenum,” as his first foray into “crosswriting” (BFN 100).3 Her primary characteristic is anxiety regarding the legitimacy of her own existence, which she seeks to locate through narrative. In this endeavor, and in her primary source of stories—her boyfriend, the editor Rick Vigorous—Lenore enacts the twin Ricoeurian theories of dual identity and narrative self-definition.. Of particular interest is the fact that Lenore uses her romantic relationship with Rick as the primary—and ultimately unsuccessful—locus of her linguistic self-definition. The interdependence of Self and Other is a cornerstone of Wallace’s writing as a whole, and the additional angles of both gender and sex in Lenore’s search for self-actualization highlight the relational/oppositional power struggle of masculine versus feminine language in his work. As both the first and the most narratively present female character in Wallace’s oeuvre, Lenore is an ideal model for the discussion of Wallace’s particular brand of écriture feminine.4

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Wallace was notoriously dismissive of his first novel. The Broom of the System is indisputably the work of a young novelist, exuberant and imperfect, but its very imperfection is it critical draw. As a relatively unrefined characterization, Lenore offers a useful perspective on Wallace’s early development of gender politics, in the sense that the devices that go to make up her characterization are less subtle than in later works. Both Lenore and her namesake, Lenore Sr., are obsessed by language; even in his first published work, Wallace connects language with power and both with gender. Of interest to the present question is how Lenore’s engagement with language and narrative evolves over the course of the novel. Lenore moves from a narratively unfixed presence, dominated by her (significantly absent) namesake, to a confident, self-contained character whose reliance on the extrinsic validation of narrative has been supplanted by her own solid identity, or what Ricoeur would call “attestation” (Ricoeur 21–23). 5 Significantly, Lenore’s inability to conceive of herself as an extralinguistic entity further highlights the two-dimensionality of the feminine in Wallace’s early work. Lenore makes clear that she “has decided that [she is] not real,” or that she is “really real only insofar as [she is] told”(BOS 248, 249), characteristics that have a broad philosophical significance to Wallace’s work as a whole, but which speak to the concerns of this essay in a specific way. Lenore represents the passivity of the feminine, which contrasts sharply with the active male—the tennis player, the criminal, the maker of objects, and doer of things—that permeate the narrative. Lenore does not tell, she is told. So although her journey is the central one of the story, she remains wholly out of reach to the reader, acted upon rather than active, always and only alien. Lenore contrasts sharply with her great-grandmother, whose absence is central to the novel, but whose linguistic control represents what would be the ultimate state of Lenore Jr.’s adjusted linguistic profile. Lenore Sr. exploits language by way of antinomies and riddles. She is also known as Gramma, which is significant in several ways. Nicknames are common in Wallace’s writing, and while they commonly have a comic aspect, they also function as signposts toward relationships between characters. The same holds true in this case. At the most obvious level, the word “Gramma” is strongly evocative of the word grammar, with its implication of rigid structure and control. However, the structures of grammar are complicated by the fluidity with which Gramma Beadsman manipulates language, particularly given her involvement in the pineal-gland baby food plot, which stimulates premature language development. At the same

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time, Gramma Lenore’s appropriation of a second identity allows for the younger Lenore to, as it were, claim the label “Lenore” (Boswell, Understanding 33). As such, Gramma’s double identity highlights the linguistic fluidity that characterizes her greatest strength. Associations between linguistic manipulation, grammatical structures, and powerful female figures continue throughout Wallace’s more mature work. In Infinite Jest, the primary embodiment of female power is Avril Incandenza, whom Wallace portrays as the archetypal maternal figure. Although she is peripheral to the action, Avril looms large throughout the narrative. Yet for all her power, Avril’s words are quoted by the men who surround her—men, it bears noting, whose narrative presence is stronger than hers. Avril’s power does not work along traditional lines; she is influential rather than potent. By way of contrast, Kate Gompert, who is one of very few female characters whose voice we hear directly, is significant for precisely the opposite reason. Kate is articulate, her speech direct rather than reported, but the purpose of her direct narrative is to demonstrate her lack of agency. While the more-or-less-hidden Avril and the wholly absent femme fatale Luria, whose narrative connection to Avril is definite but ambiguous, are dynamic forces, the present, articulate Kate is inert, passive, and without power. Later, the Granola Cruncher in “Brief Interview #20” exhibits the same silent potency as Avril, dominating the thoughts and linguistic direction of the man she has entranced, the narrator. Later still, Meredith Rand is described in The Pale King as immediately altering the dynamic of any male conversation into which she enters, influencing the linguistic exchange of the masculine speakers in incalculable but quite predictable ways. While this capacity to alter a dynamic is ascribed to Meredith’s beauty, it is also partly by reason of her unknowability. In all these cases, the feminine in Wallace’s writing is wholly Othered, Meredith in particular. This uncompromising alterity of Wallace’s female characters also avoids what Judith Butler, in her essay “Subjects of Sex/Gender/ Desire,” considered one of the potential traps of feminine literary representation, namely, asking “is the construction of the category of women as a coherent and stable subject an unwitting regulation and reification of gender relations?” (279).6 In Wallace’s writing of the Othered woman, he manages at once to beg the question and to offer an imperfect answer. While in one sense the physical absence of many of the female (prot)agonists makes literal their alterity, two characters in particular enact the unknowability (for the author at least) of their sex. Joelle Van Dyne, the Prettiest Girl of All Time (also an archetype) is physically

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distanced from those around her by her veil. Joelle is also physically distanced from the reader at a linguistic level by reason of her radio show: we most frequently hear Joelle’s disembodied voice. The fact of its disembodiment, however, is not noted in the way that Hal and Orin articulate their disembodiment in their exchange of telephone messages. Rather, Joelle’s vocal/physical disjunction is simply a fact of the narrative. By veiling herself, Joelle voids the possibility of visual engagement even when physically present. In Voiles, Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida variously explore the implication of veils and vision. The French savoir —to know—also evokes the idea of sight: (se) voir —to see (oneself) and of self-possession: s’avoir —to have oneself (Cixous and Derrida, Veils 28). Joelle’s veil might therefore be read as a declaration of her own selfhood, the delineation of her body as inviolate. Derrida points out the biblical association of the veil with the idea of violation. Indeed, in French, the two are almost anagrams: voile and violer, both also phonically associated with thievery (voler).7 Joelle’s veil, then, precludes the violation of her self by the gaze of another, or—it is implied—her violation of their mental state by her beauty. Although the novel never clarifies whether Joelle’s veil protects her or those around her, the veil symbol nevertheless highlights the larger issue of physical embodiment, which is itself one of Wallace’s chief markers for gender difference. In their physical and linguistic absence, his female characters invoke Ž iž ek’s representation of the feminine as the ultimate Other, actually inhuman, and so necessarily incorporeal. As Ž iž ek points out, the lady in these constructions is “a strictly secondary phenomenon, a narcissistic projection” (“From Courtly” 96). Such central physical absences directly oppose the bodily representations favored by Hélène Cixous, who paints femininity as ineluctably physical. However, Cixous’s injunction that “woman must write woman. And man, man” seems both to exacerbate the binaries she seeks in “Sorties” to overthrow, and to obviate any possibility of relational exchange. In other words, Cixous’s writing of the body seems designed to reinforce borders rather than to move for liberation, to embrace the binary where Wallace’s incorporeal women allow for multiplicity and flux (Cixous, “‘The Laugh of the Medusa’” 225).8 Absence and embodiment are also central to Toni Ware’s narrative in The Pale King. Her obsessive attachments contrast wildly with her mistrustful and threatening demeanor, signaling extreme ambivalence toward the idea of proximity and emotional interaction—in other words, connection with an Other.9 Toni’s childhood of flight and feigned death contains perhaps the most visceral instance of violent

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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 absolutely objectifies herself, to the point of rejecting selfhood to save it, a characteristic she shares with the Granola Cruncher in “Brief Interview #20,” a sort of intrapersonal enactment of Kristeva’s theory of abjection.10 Toni’s capacity for literal self-denial is in fact the strongest 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 the male 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. The passivity of the feminine subject in Wallace’s writing tempts a masculinist reading of his work. However, it is dangerous to read Wallace as a writer of absolutes in any arena. The absent female functions not in isolation, but in contrast, cooperation and combat with the present, active male. This oppositional strategy is a central component to Wallace’s larger project of subjectivity and selfhood. As such, while an isolated reading of the feminine is dispiriting, it takes on a separate character when read against and alongside the masculine. In sharp contrast to the Othering of feminine characters, Wallace’s writing is suffused with active masculinity, both of speech and of physicality. Typically, Wallace’s narrators and protagonists are male. While his female characters are inaccessible to the reader, the masculine subjects are richly interiorized. Where the feminine is disembodied, almost etherealized, the masculine is profoundly physical. In The Broom of the System, the two primary male figures are Rick Vigorous and Andrew Lang. Rick is linguistically unfixed, casting about for narrative certainty, like Lenore, whom he seeks to fix in place as his external sense of self. Despite his name, Rick is anything but vigorous. Rick exemplifies an unsuccessful masculine subject. His search for a suitable narrative and his need to be in a relationship at all times bespeaks the absence of a central subjectivity. By contrast, Andrew Lang demonstrates a masculinity of interiority. Michael Kimmel offers a distinction between manhood, which denotes “a man of strong character animated by an inner sense of morality,” and masculinity, which he assigns to “a sensitive personality, animated by a need to fit in.” Both concepts he sources to the nineteenth century. He goes on to explain: “Inner-directed men went their own way, could stand alone, tuned to the hum of an internal gyroscope; other-directed men scanned a mental radar screen for fluctuations in public opinions”

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(Kimmel 81). Andrew’s subjectivity is inner-directed, while Rick’s is other-directed, or more specifically Lenore-directed. Thus Andrew’s identity is fixed by his own interior life, whereas Rick’s is unfixed, externally located in his control or possession of a female object. Rick’s reliance on external narratives disrupts his masculinity, 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. It is telling that the final scene of the novel involves Rick and Mindy, with whom he begins a relationship after his attachment to Lenore ends. In the scene, Rick debates whether or not he should tell Mindy about Lenore and Lang. These two relationships illustrate successful and unsuccessful relationships: Lenore and Andy are two individuals sharing a relationship, which allows them to communicate successfully; Rick is the dominant character in his relationship and so he speaks at, and not with, Mindy. 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 the “blond bestower of validity” (BOS 347). The progress of their relationship is appropriately silent. Perhaps the most significant engagement between language and masculinity comes in the form of Hal Incandenza. Infinite Jest opens with the tennis prodigy and gifted linguist sitting mute in an interview for a college sports scholarship. The 13-page scene follows Hal’s internal monologue, which both describes the scene at hand and recalls incidents from Hal’s childhood and present. Hal before the onset of his disability is a clear embodiment of Wallace’s vision of masculinity: physically gifted, linguistically potent and direct. Even the opening narrative passage is notable for its fluency, and the obvious facility of the narrator with language. The clinical, analytical tone that pervades the scene weakens slightly when Hal begins to describe the mould-eating episode of his early childhood, at which point he takes on the vocal persona of his brother Orin, from whom he heard the story. Interestingly, although Hal has perfect mental command of language, he has lost not only the power of speech, but also the ability to master his limbs enough to write or even type clearly. The medically significant event that is identified only as “something I ate” (IJ 10) has so thoroughly damaged Hal that he is isolated inside his head, appearing to outsiders as “only marginally mammalian” (IJ 15). In this respect, the opening pages disrupt the possibility of masculinity: because Hal cannot communicate, he is no longer a man but

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an animal. In a Wittgensteinian twist, Wallace predicates manhood and masculinity on interaction. Kimmel’s observation that manhood is inner-directed while masculinity is Other-directed is useful to a point, but both gender characteristics necessitate interaction with an Other. Alterity is necessary to self, gendered or otherwise, and social exchange is necessary to the individual. While he is attempting to explain that he is not as damaged as he appears, Hal repeats the phrase “I believe” (IJ 12) four times within five lines of text, betraying an intellect fired by passion as well as by pure ability, in sharp contrast with the affectless tone of the rest of the narration of the scene. The twin concerns with grammar and major philosophers echo the central concerns of The Broom of the System, particularly the use of language to delineate the self. With this in mind, it is worth recalling Lenore Beadsman’s expression of fear that she might be no more than a story. The separation of abstract Self from concrete body implicit in Lenore’s fear is made abruptly real at the opening of the novel, when Hal opens his narration with the sentence, “I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies” (IJ 3).11 The detachment of Hal’s consciousness from his physicality is strengthened by the detached tone, already mentioned, with which Hal discusses the ultimately rather 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. In short, Hal’s intellectual life is ineluctably tied to, and limited by, his physical body. 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 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” (IJ 3)—through the descriptions of the physical toll of drills in the Academy (e.g., IJ 97–105) and sustained via the repeated references to small physical details of life in a sports academy. The novel also exhaustively canvases the physical implications of drug and alcohol addiction. Yet although Wallace establishes Hal’s tennis prowess early on, he curiously quaranties that prowess from Hal’s other physical limitations. We’re told Hal is a great tennis player, “gorgeous . . . possibly a genius” (IJ 14) who has reached the semifinals of the “prestigious WhataBurger Southwest Junior Invitational . . . as of this morning” (IJ 4). This evidently means that Hal’s capacity to play tennis has

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not been affected by the change in his condition, which is implicitly connected to a visit to an Emergency Room “almost exactly one year back” (IJ 16). However, that cannot easily be reconciled with the fact that Hal’s gestures in the interview room are animalistic, and that he is avowedly incapable of typing or writing clearly but instead produces “some sort of infant’s random stabs” (IJ 9). If Hal is so gifted a tennis player, how can he be unable to govern his movements sufficiently to write clearly? Perhaps this discrepancy reinforces the mystery of Hal’s condition by adding a bewildering and implausible symptom: that Hal’s disability extends only to communication, spoken, written, or nonverbal, but does not affect his performance in any other sphere. In any case, the very disjunction between physicality and language that characterizes Hal’s disability reinforces the connection of physicality and masculinity, just as Hal’s twin gifts in sports and language highlight the active masculinity that pervaded Wallace’s writing. Other characters with similar traits include the older brothers Lavache Beadsman and Orin Incandenza, both of whom are defined by peculiarities of their legs. Both characters are associated by their younger siblings with language: Lavache explains antinomies to Lenore and Orin telephones Hal to say, “I want to tell you” (IJ 32). In both cases, their speech is direct and unqualified. Don Gately, who is decidedly not linguistically gifted, describes his experiences in explicitly physical terms. In all such cases, male subjectivity is expressed, as well as masculine facility with language, has a clear physical component. The same dynamic holds true for many of the men in The Pale King, which is replete with male bodies. Interestingly enough, many of the male bodies in that novel are in distress, from Cusk’s excessive sweating to 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 novel’s final subsection is itself a meditation on the body, the fact of embodiment, its peculiar discomfort. The boy who seeks to kiss his extremities provides a singular portrait 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. His ambition, which simply put involves making contact with all of himself arrives early, aged six, when he “came to understand that unimaginable challenges lay ahead of him” (TPK 394). His goal of self-delineation is a journey toward 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. The project

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of self-Othering, evocative of Lacan’s mirror-stage,12 invokes and complicates the idea of the gaze of the other that is more commonly explored through gendered interaction, as, for example, in Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides (1993). That novel, and particularly the film adaptation, exposes what Julia Kristeva, in Tales of Love, calls the “two borders of narcissism and idealization” between which love operates (Kristeva 6). The Virgin Suicides, however, separates subjects from objects, offering a gender struggle founded in adoration rather than fear. Conversely, the episode of the boy in The Pale King compounds the subject and the object in the boy’s desire to “pierce that evil of inaccessibility—to be, in some childish way, self-contained and -sufficient” (TPK 401). Yet because he is “just a little boy,” he isn’t overtly aware of his own motivation, ironically implying that while he may be physically self-accessible, he is still psychically inaccessible, further reinforcing the idea that full, transcendent self-awareness is both extremely painful and probably impossible.13 As a rule, then, Wallace signals successful masculinity by direct speech, physicality, agency, and presence, and successful feminine identity by absent centrality, disembodiment or disguise, linguistic fluidity, and manipulation. Whereas instances of feminine bodies are associated with states of fugue—Meredith suffers from mental health issues and Toni lives a death-in-life—the depictions of masculine physicality involve decisive presence, subjective agency, and self-delineation. Yet while masculinity takes precedence in the context of presence and speech, feminine characters influence the masculine protagonists both linguistically and behaviorally. The genders are therefore intensely interdependent. As such, the interaction between masculine and feminine characters displays a Hegelian dialectic of power in which the power shifts constantly but the battle can never be won. Because the phrase “balance of power” implies an outcome or finality that does not exist in this case, given heavy weighting in favor of masculine agency, I use the term “dialectic” to avoid the implication of equality and to emphasize interdependence. The system of power exchange in Wallace’s writing is anything but stable, but the two sides are held in an unending exchange. Most importantly, such an exchange becomes clearest when we consider the episodic collision of the masculine with the feminine. Given this interdependence, it is possible to regard Wallace’s treatment of gendered linguistic exchange as grounded in a principle of “difference” rather than the more traditional dynamic of “dominance” and “subjection.” Sally Johnson helpfully delineates the two approaches when she argues that the original canon of feminist

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linguistic practice was founded in the “dominance” mode, responding to suggestions like Robin Lakoff’s that “women speak a ‘powerless language’, characterized by a tentativeness that conveys a lack of authority” (Johnson 9). Johnson then goes on to argue that it is important to consider “the complex role played by ‘difference’ in the construction of ‘dominance’”; that is to say, how different approaches to language construct different loci of power (25). One of the clearest instances of Wallace’s “difference” approach can be found in “Brief Interview #20,” involving a woman known only as “The Granola Cruncher.” The double-silencing of the feminine characters—Q., the narrator, and the “Granola Cruncher,” the story’s object—coupled with the extremely aggressive masculinity of the narrator, clearly portrays a linguistic power struggle mediated through gender exchange. 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 re appropriate her story by means of infiltrating his voice, so that his narration is full of her language. This apparently passive appropriation of power is savagely mirrored in the story of her 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 300). Exercising great power of will, she duly does so, ultimately going beyond submission to self-offering, 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” (BI 312), thus converting the rapist’s sadistic intent to an implicitly fatal masochism (“From Courtly” 99) The Granola Cruncher’s appropriation of her would-be rapist’s deed reads as a convincing parallel for much of the less graphic power play in Wallace’s other work, where many of Wallace’s other mute women subvert the controlling power of the narratively articulate men by taking control of the masculine voice. We see this in “#20,” as Eric increasingly peppers his speech with the exact words of the Granola

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Cruncher. The same pattern is visible in the relationship between Lenore and Rick in The Broom of the System, where Rick tries to establish his centrality in Lenore’s narrative but ends up quoting her words and reducing himself to caricature. That pattern is importantly absent from Lenore’s later, better relationship with Andrew Lang, who has no desire to mould her vocabulary and, unlike Rick, does not attempt to appropriate Lenore’s name by repetition. Similarly, in Infinite Jest, Avril’s obsession with language is often referred to by other characters, like her sons, who regularly quote or paraphrase her opinions about language. The fact that it is this story that stirs Eric’s feelings for her strongly implies that there is a violent, aggressive side to Eric’s attraction to the girl, as well as prurience in his desire to possess her. In an essay on sexual violence and feminist theory, Liz Kelly suggests that Western masculinity “draws on notions of virility, conquest, power and domination . . . sex and aggression are linked for most men” (347). The violence that is obvious in both Eric and the original assailant is linked with the iteration of their masculinity, and is complicated and undermined by the girl’s influence on both men, in her escape from death in the first instance and her appropriation of Eric’s articulacy as he narrates her. Whether the narrative conceit of the connection between souls is or is not legitimate, the outcome of the story—namely, the girl’s surviving the attack and her assailant’s emotional breakdown and flight—directly undermines the question itself, rendering the question of what “really happened” irrelevant. In an essay on this story, Cristoforos Diakoulakis offers the Derridean definition of love from Sauf le Nom: “this infinite renunciation that somehow surrenders to the impossible” (Derrida, On the Name 74). Derrida’s definition resonates with the girl’s response to her rapist. This renunciation also once again evokes Kristeva’s description of the abject, particularly since Kristeva’s discussion of same includes specific references to rape. The girl’s abjection of her self, her total submission to her attacker, falls neatly under Derrida’s image of love that surrenders (in the French, “se rendre,” literally “gives itself”) to the impossible. Her power resides in this very same abjection or renunciation of the self: as she abjects her subjectivity, renouncing her very identity and giving herself wholly to the impossible Other, she robs that Other of its object, which is the domination of her now buried self. In this way we can say that Derrida’s definition of love as abject renunciation of the Self appropriately contains the seeds of its own opposite. By refusing to fight, to submit to the traditional dynamic of the crime of rape, the girl actually negates the power struggle inherent in such a

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dynamic. Paradoxically, like the Lisbon sisters in The Virgin Suicides or Toni Ware in The Pale King, the Granola Cruncher’s apparent passive rejection of power is in fact an appropriative act. Such a reversal of traditional dynamic further complicates the Derridean definition of love: love is not mere submission but also a subversion of power dynamics, the appropriation of power by virtue of its rejection. The repudiation of identity, under these circumstances, becomes its most irrefutable confirmation, signposted in the narrative by the narrator’s inability to control his own vocabulary. The question of naming, always a significant one in Wallace, merits particular attention as regards the ideas of relationships and love that mark this narrative. We know the names of neither the interviewer (Q.) nor the girl (“the Granola Cruncher”). The narrator mentions, late in the narrative how her name became a source of fascination: “I kept saying her name and she would ask What? and I’d say her name again” (BI 317). This obsessive repetition is presented by the narrator as positive, an effort to overcome the singularity of the Other by naming, imbuing her name with awe, the tender act of a lover. However—especially given that the repetition itself reinforces the narrator’s position of privilege, because only the narrator knows her name—this reading seems hollow. In view of the power play at work in the story as a whole—the background story of the rape, Eric’s fixation on knowing the girl, on keeping her with him, saying “can you see why there’s no way I could let her just go away after this?” (BI 317)—the act of naming takes on a much more sinister aspect. Rather than symbolizing tenderness, Eric’s naming seems more like an attempt to possess the girl, to establish dominion over her in a more complete way even than her attacker. In this context, his naming seems rather aggressive than amorous. Far from empowering his lover by naming her, Eric seeks to control her by possessing her. The problematic desire to possess and circumscribe female characters recurs in a number of Wallace’s works, notably, as discussed earlier, in The Broom of the System, in which acts of nomenclature are similarly significant, though perhaps more overtly symbolic than here. The issue of naming arises close to the end of the narrative. The narrator provides his obsessive desire to keep and define the girl as evidence of his love for her. This is another instance of the implicit connection of language, gender, love, and power: by naming the girl, he seeks to master her identity, as if naming becomes knowing. His desire for mastery combines love and fear; he has been moved to love by her story, or so he thinks, yet he fears submitting to her influence. In this regard he mirrors her attacker, who, he suggests, “regards

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rape and murder as his only viable means of establishing some kind of meaningful connection” (BI 303) and yet for whom this process “is the killer’s psychotically literal way of resolving the conflict between his need for connection and his terror of being in any way connected” (BI 305). For the narrator, that act is not literal but figurative: the domination he seeks is not physical (literal) but nominal (linguistic), again linking power to language and both to love. The complexity of the narrator’s attitude to the girl, the striking mixture of adoration and contempt, also maps on to Wallace’s expression of the attitude of a writer to his readers, the “love-hate syndrome of seduction” (CW 32) that he saw as characteristic of much of his generation’s fiction writing. 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 while offering something potentially important, leads to what Wallace saw as “this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader” (CW 25). It is not difficult to see this dynamic at play in the story, where the narrator despises the girl’s lifestyle and outlook, and 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 that Wallace described the tendency he saw in his own work and others’ to challenge the reader with long sentences, too much data, or the intentional frustrating 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. While this story is a useful exemplar of Wallace’s approach to gender, it also has a more general significance for the way language is used. When Eric transfers his anger to Q., he not only equates her with the Granola Cruncher, but also demonstrates what occurs when anyone, irrespective of gender, loses linguistic control. Besides its implications for reading the process of communication in Wallace, this story shows a link between language, gender, and power that is nowhere else as clear. The Granola Cruncher’s story draws a violent parallel with Rick and Lenore’s relationship in The Broom of the System, in which he seeks—and fails—to narrate her identity, a desire that comes into conflict with her desire to locate her own narrative. In both cases, the dynamic between the characters culminates in the male agent’s loss of verbal control and the severing of the connection between masculine and feminine, with the female character assuming narrative control.

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The late story “Oblivion” provides a provocative coda to this exploration of repression and revelation in the creation and maintenance of a coherent identity. The narrator, Randall, has distinctively irritating vocal characterization, a trait he shares with several of Wallace’s protagonists, including the memorable narrator of “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.” The clear 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). Names, family, and identity are repeatedly invoked, and of particular note is the narrator’s reference to Hope’s father as “Father” (including scare quotes), despite the fact that “I myself [Randall] had my own father” (OB 191). We ultimately learn that Randall’s voice is in fact narrating Hope’s dream. The parenthetical 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 paradoxical naming of Dr. Sipe as “Father,” which is 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 undermining the primacy of the conscious mind. “Oblivion” presents an extreme vision of the language appropriation discussed earlier in this essay. 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.14 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 the gender dynamic has been reversed. The 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 (CW 39), a desire related both to the isolation of the Self that Wallace seeks, paradoxically, “both to deny and affirm” (CW 32), and to the nature of hierarchical representation in art. 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 Yin, “Oblivion” suggests that the integrity—and so the isolation—of the Self is essential, that only communication, and not domination or collapse, can relieve the solitude necessary to that integrity, and that identity depends on separation.

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As “Oblivion” demonstrates, identity and exchange are dependent on a plurality of agencies. While univocality is presented as a mark of the successful masculine self, that Self exists in concert with Other narratives. The balance of masculine and feminine identities, both linguistic and narrative, has significance beyond simple gender struggle; it speaks to the delicate balance of Self and Other that pervade Wallace’s writing, as has been observed by several scholars. As this essay has shown, there is a decisive difference between the representations of successful masculine characters and those of powerful feminine characters. However, while it is tempting to dismiss the difference as misogyny or even simple laziness, the stories “Brief Interview #20” and “Oblivion” in particular display a significantly more complex reality of gender relations. The comparative silence of the feminine characters may or may not mask an antagonism toward the opposite gender on the part of the author, but the author’s motivating sentiment is not at issue here. What is of interest, though, is the way that that silencing of feminine characters functions in relation to the agency of the masculine ones. As shown by the reading of “Brief Interview #20” and “Oblivion,” the successful interchange between identities depends not on equal exercise of power, but on an Hegelian master-slave dialectic, wherein an apparently simple balance of power is disrupted by the dependence of the apparently dominant party on the apparently submissive one. In other words, it is arguable that the “submissive”—or in this case decentralized— character in fact holds an insidious kind of power that is much harder to challenge because it is so much less direct. Wallace demonstrates the possibility of this kind of power exchange most clearly via the appropriative power of the reported feminine, whereby the masculine presence is infiltrated by the recalled feminine vocabulary, to the destruction of the decisive voice that characterizes successful masculinity. Wallace’s attitude to and representation of women is by no means beyond reproach; as earlier suggested, his characterizations are frequently archetypal, almost stereotypical. The persistent distancing of the female voice, coupled with his ostentatious invocation of a female reading subject bespeaks a constant consciousness of the very issues the author dexterously evades by writing around his women. However, based on the differential reading of gendered linguistic exchange offered here—rather than the dominant one—it seems clear that the gender power dynamics in Wallace’s writing both depend on and reinforce the active presence of the masculine and the absent opacity of the feminine.

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Notes 1. In brief, the idea of alterity should be taken to refer to the untouchable otherness, which might perhaps be referred to as “foreign-ness” of a differentiated self. In other words, the idea of alterity should highlight the otherness of an other, with emphasis not on the interdependent self/other dynamic, but rather on the disconnectedness that is also part of that relationship. See Thomas Docherty, Alterities: Criticism, History, Representation for definition and exploration of this concept. 2. In brief, Hegel suggested that the apparent dynamics of the relationship between a master and a slave are complicated by the consideration that the master’s position is predicated upon the slave’s, thus according the slave some degree of mastery. The theory offers an approach to power that is less simplistic than traditional perspectives, which is useful in a consideration of the different kinds of powers sought and exercised by different gender identities. 3. The term “protagonist” here is deeply problematic, given the aforementioned tendency toward absence; the female characters might more accurately be called agonists than protagonists. 4. The essay “Writing the Body: Towards an Understanding of l’Ecriture Feminine” offers a useful perspective on this puzzling term. Of particular relevance to a consideration of Wallace’s feminine writing is Jones’s reference to Kristeva’s idea of the negative function of women. Jones argues that “‘woman’ to Kristeva represents not so much a sex as an attitude, any resistance to conventional culture and language; men, too, have access to the jouissance that opposes phallogocentrism” (363). The concept of woman as attitude further complicates the self-confessedly autobiographical writing of Lenore Beadsman by suggesting both that Wallace’s literary sensibilities may be female and that Lenore’s linguistic resonances are male. 5. 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. Oneself as Another, the published version of his Gifford Lecture series, is significantly referenced in Infinite Jest (IJ 543). 6. This question is taken up by Sally Johnson with specific reference to language and gender construction in the essay “Theorizing Language and Masculinity: A Feminist Perspective.” 7. Wallace had enough French to read Camus in the original, so it is plausible that such a connection would have occurred to him. 8. See also “Sorties,” in Kemp & Squires. 9. Toni might arguably be read as a serious parallel to Norman Bombardini in The Broom of the System, whose inability to connect with an Other leads to the solipsistic physicality that threatens to overwhelm Lenore.

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10. Significantly, both Toni and the Granola Cruncher share distinct maternal attributes, which they abjure during their ordeals, paralleling Kristeva’s interpretation of the infant’s delineation of the self by rejection of the maternal. (See Powers of Horror) 11. The same theme is further expanded in The Pale King, in the shape of the boy who seeks to kiss his extremities, physically enacting the same cycle of self-delineation. 12. The fact that the boy’s mother is absent adds to the Lacanian implications of the scene. 13. Arguably, indeed, the boy also presents an embodiment of Norman Bombardini’s project: he seeks to be both Self and Other to himself, thus reducing the universe to himself (contrary to Norman’s expansion into the universe). Again in the figure of the boy we see Wallace’s antipathy to the idea of solipsism in any form, his vision of the interdependence of Self and Other, which is writ large in his depiction of gender difference. 14. This ending might be read as a mirror of Wallace’s own gradual about-face from seeking to mistrusting “distinct problems and univocal solutions” (CW 32).

CH A P T ER

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“The Constant Monologue Inside Your Head”: Oblivion and the Nightmare of Consciousness Marshall Boswell

Nightmare of Consciousness Of all of David Foster Wallace’s books, Oblivion is the bleakest. Though the eight stories that comprise the collection provide brief instances of humor and postmodern play, these moments are rare and easy to miss, or at least to forget, amid the ponderous intensity of the prose and the hermetic isolation Wallace imposes upon his protagonists. From first to last, the book is a somber portrait of souls in isolation. Yet these stories also deepen what Stephen Burn has called “Wallace’s career-long fascination with consciousness” (Burn “Paradigm” 373). Each of these long, introspective pieces explores with tireless ingenuity both the linguistic nature of interior experience and the neurological mechanisms of the mind. Although Wallace has amply explored solipsism before—it is, after all, one of his signature themes— Oblivion looks beyond mere solipsism to explore the multiple ways in which his characters are not only alone inside their heads but also controlled, sometimes to the point of madness, by the layered, nested, entropic workings of their interiors. To quote the registered motto of O Verily Productions, a fictional company that figures prominently in “The Suffering Channel,” the collection’s concluding novella, “CONSCIOUSNESS IS NATURE’S NIGHTMARE” (OB 282, all caps in original). By the end of the book the reader is obliged to wonder if the title, which is culled from

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one of the collection’s most prominent stories, a long tale about a couple with sleeping problems, also refers to a state of consciousness deeply to be desired. Even the layout of Oblivion’s pages clues us into Wallace’s concerns. Aside from scattered sections of dialogue in “The Suffering Channel,” the stories provide almost zero in the way of character interaction or dramatic action. Rather, the entire volume appears on the page as a vast, unbroken wall of text, the collection’s small type filling page after page all the way to the narrow side and top margins, often without paragraph breaks. Each story locates the reader in the protagonist’s word-drunk interior and traps her there for the story’s grueling duration. Three stories in the collection—“Mister Squishy,” “Good Old Neon,” and “Oblivion”—conclude abruptly and unexpectedly with narrative twists that open up an outer layer of interiority into which the story’s principal layer has been nesting all along. Meanwhile, Wallace’s famously detailed and loquacious prose gets stretched to the absolute breaking point, as sentences often run for the length of half a page. To open the book at random is to encounter a visual analog for the state of consciousness Wallace depicts in the stories themselves. The list of characters at the mercy of their minds constitutes the collection’s core dramatis personae. Terry Schmidt, the mild-mannered Focus-Group facilitator who anchors “Mr. Squishy,” maintains two simultaneously running lines of thought: one focusing on his work as a data researcher, and the other, assigned to “the limbic portions of Schmidt’s brain” (OB 31), preoccupied with a detailed plan to inject poison into the sealed packages of a snack cake in the hopes of bringing “almost an entire industry down on one supplicatory knee” (OB 30). Schmidt even admits that he is “simultaneously fascinated and repelled at the way in which all these thoughts and feelings could be entertained in total subjective private while [he] ran the Focus Group” (OB 31). Similarly, the unnamed narrator of “The Soul is Not A Smithy” spends the bulk of his story creating in his head an elaborate, private cartoon narrative using the small spaces of a window screen as panels, thus rendering him more or less (the word is apt here) oblivious to the substitute teacher at the front of the room, who has for some reason snapped and begun helplessly scrawling “KILL THEM ” over and over again on the classroom chalkboard.1 In “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,” the first-person narrator, while trying to explain the intricacies of his and his mother’s liability suit against a cosmetic surgeon, cannot stop returning to an unrelated episode in which a young boy from his neighborhood fell

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through the roof of the narrator’s garage and was bitten to death by the narrator’s collection of venomous spiders. Finally, in “Oblivion,” an upper-middle-class husband obsessively outlines the intricacies of a fight between him and his wife regarding his alleged snoring and his concomitant conviction that his wife is only dreaming about the snoring, a fight that, in the story’s own words, “just went on and on,” with constant doubling back and repetitions, very much like a fever dream—which the story in fact turns out to be. All of these characters are trapped inside their heads as their minds perseverate independently, even mechanistically, so much so that the narrator of yet another story, “Another Pioneer,” repeatedly refers to brain activity in terms of the programmatic action of “CPUs” and the “Boolean paradigm” (OB 134, 131). In its abandonment of narrative action in favor of dense description, Oblivion calls to mind Georg Lukács’s famous indictment of naturalism, “Narrate or Describe?”2 In an earlier essay in this volume, Patrick O’Donnell helpfully describes Wallace as a “naturalist, in the sense that he is interested in the affective, environmental relations between objects, animals, humans” (2), a generic categorization that, although originally directed at the young Wallace of The Broom of the System, is equally apt for the mature author Oblivion and The Pale King, both of which address the dehumanizing effect of white-collar office work in the tornadic information age. So while Lukács’s essay, which first appeared in 1936, looks back to the first wave of late nineteenth-century naturalists, its basic argument applies strikingly to Wallace’s work. Description, Lukács argues, “becomes the dominant mode in a period in which, for social reasons, the sense of what is primary in epic construction has been lost” (127). The reason for this loss is “the development of capitalism,” which spurred “the continuous dehumanization of social life” and “the general debasement of humanity” (127). To make his point, Lukács contrasts the work of Tolstoy, Scott, and Balzac with that of Flaubert and Zola: in the work of the former, “we are the audience to events in which the characters take an active part”; in the work of the latter, “the characters are merely spectators, more or less interested in the events,” with the result that “the events themselves become only a tableau for the reader” (116). Although both Flaubert and Zola seek to depict the “brutality of capitalist life” and the alienation resulting from commodity culture writ large, their focus on technical description as opposed to dramatic narrative yields “a series of static pictures, of still lives connected only through the relations of objects arrayed one beside the other according to their own inner

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logic . . . The so-called action is only a thread on which the still lives are disposed in a superficial, ineffective fortuitous sequence of isolated pictures” (144). What is a bug in Zola and Flaubert, at least according to Lukács, is a deliberate feature of Oblivion, most of which takes place in conference rooms, airplanes, and office cubicles, the shadowless incandescent light and synthetic furniture enhancing the characters’ alienation and isolation. Hence, when Lukács remarks of Zola’s technique, “investigation of social phenomena through observation and their representation in description brings such paltry and schematic results that these modes of composition easily slip into their polar opposite—complete subjectivism” (140), he inadvertently outlines one of Wallace’s key purposes. Tom Sternberg, from “Westward the Course of Empire,” is perhaps the earliest precursor to Oblivion’s lonely isolates, much the same way Girl with Curious Hair, Wallace’s first collection, shares a similar structure to its later coeval, as both collections alternate long and short pieces before concluding with a novella whose primary theme is art, Wallace’s or otherwise.3 As is typical in Wallace’s early work, Sternberg is fundamentally a comic character, and so Wallace accordingly depicts Sternberg’s loneliness, solipsism, and narcissism with broad, cartoonish strokes. In addition to being neurotic to the point of paralysis, Sternberg also has a “reversed eye” (GCH 253) that looks, presumably, at his brain aswim in amniotic fluid and surrounded by the cave of his skull. Yet these comic touches also disclose a serious component to Sternberg’s character. Wallace’s narrator declares: “Like many Americans of his generation in this awkwardest of post-Imperial decades, an age suspended between exhaustion and replenishment, between input too ordinary to process and input too intense to bear, Sternberg is deeply ambivalent about being embodied; an informing fear that, were he really just an organism, he’d be nothing more than an ism of his organs” (GCH 254). That “informing fear” of being embodied runs throughout Oblivion, as does the tension between “input too ordinary to process and input too intense to bear.” But Oblivion’s tortured interior and dramatic monologues also invoke another early figure from Wallace’s oeuvre, the college student Bruce from the story “Here and There,” also included in Girl with Curious Hair. For various and complex reasons, Bruce has broken up with his long-distance college girlfriend just when they appear to be ready for the altar. After first hiding away in the library to work on his senior thesis, which his girlfriend describes as “an epic poem about variable systems of information- and energy-transfer” (GCH 154),

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a sardonic reference to Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System, Bruce flees to his Aunt and Uncle’s house, where he eventually breaks down while trying, and failing, to fix a failing stove, the latter perhaps symbolizing a centralizing source of warmth and sustenance that his interior lacks. The entire story is designed as a three-way correspondence between Bruce, his fiancé, and the couple’s “fiction therapist,” to whom Bruce admits: “Whole periods of time now begin to feel to me like the intimate agonizing interval between something’s falling off and its hitting the ground” (GCH 165). To this chilling description of absent-spiritedness, he adds, I begin to feel as though my thoughts and voice here are in some way the creative products of something outside me, not in my control, and yet that this shaping, determining influence outside me is still me. I feel a division which the outside voice posits as the labor pains of a nascent emotional conscience. I am invested with an urge to “write it all out,” to confront the past and present as a community of signs, but this requires a special distance I seem to have left behind. (GCH 165–66)

In his conviction that something “outside” of him is controlling his thoughts and voice, Bruce, even more than Sternberg, anticipates Oblivion’s paralyzed isolates, and yet Bruce holds out hope for a way out, namely by sharing this sense of a divided self with others via a Wittgensteinean “community of signs,” a key concept in Wallace’s apprentice fiction.4 Early in his career, Wallace went so far as to deem Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, which posits language as a “game” requiring a community of players, as “the single most comprehensive and beautiful argument against solipsism that’s ever been made” (CW 44). As we shall see, for the Wallace of Oblivion, Wittgenstein’s solution might not be enough. At the book’s center, physically and thematically, sits “Good Old Neon,” the collection’s best and most celebrated stand-alone story. One of the three O. Henry Prize Stories for 2002, the story has received even more attention in the wake of Wallace’s 2008 suicide. The story’s narrator, Neal, a former classmate of a one “David Wallace,” cannot escape from an overwhelming conviction that he is a “fraud,” a self-absorbed narcissist whose emotional life is pure hollow affect. Ultimately, he realizes that “maybe the real root of my problem was not fraudulence but a basic inability to really love” (OB 165), an insight that compels him to kill himself in a planned automobile accident. As in Vladimir Nabokov’s late novella Transparent Things

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(1972), Neal narrates his story from beyond the grave, a perspective that allows him to imagine, at story’s end, “David Wallace” gazing at Neal’s yearbook photo and “trying, through the tiny keyhole of himself, to imagine what all must have happened to lead up to [Neal’s] death in a fiery single-car accident he’d read about in 1991” (OB 178). A standout high-school athlete and scholastic powerhouse, Neal imagines that he must have appeared to “David Wallace” as someone with a “seemingly almost neon aura around him” (OB 178). While gazing at Neal’s yearbook photo, “David Wallace” tries “to reconcile what this luminous guy had seemed like from the outside with whatever on the interior must have driven him to kill himself in such a dramatic and doubly painful way” (OB 181). Although the story is, ostensibly, Neal’s dramatic monologue, both this final twist, as well as the improbable posthumous chronology, confirm that “David Wallace” is in fact imagining Neal’s voice to understand his motives. Neal himself admits that “it doesn’t matter what you think about me, because despite appearances this isn’t even really about me”; rather, he relates the events leading up to his suicide so that the reader will “have at least some idea of why what happened afterward happened and why it had the impact it did on who this is really about” (OB 152). Enter “David Wallace,” who, we are told, has recently “emerged from years of literally indescribable war against himself,” and who undertakes this project “fully aware” of “the cliché that you can’t ever truly know what’s going on inside someone” and yet determined “to prohibit that awareness from mocking the attempt or sending the whole line of thought into the sort of inbent spiral that keeps you from getting anywhere” (OB 181). “Good Old Neon” can profitably be read as the middle part of a trilogy of pieces that begins with “The Depressed Person,” from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and ends with Chris Fogle’s one hundred-page dramatic monologue from The Pale King, Wallace’s unfinished novel the writing of which overlapped with the writing and publication of Oblivion, as has been amply demonstrated by Stephen Burn and others.5 All three of these pieces deal in varying ways not only with narcissism but also with doubling self-consciousness, what “David Wallace” describes above as “line[s] of thought” that turn into paralyzing “inbent spiral[s].” Not only do both Neal and the anonymous “Depressed Person” go to therapists who die mid story, but it is also possible to read Neal’s diagnosis of his “fraudulence” and “inability to love” as a more accurate description of the DP’s own self-diagnosed depression, which, according to the story, is impervious to all known cures, including prescribed antidepressants.

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Neal’s conviction that he “experienced everything in terms of how it affected people’s view of [him] and what [he] needed to do to create the impression of [him he] wanted them to have” finds a positive analog in Chris Fogle’s habit of taking the drug Obetrol and experiencing what he calls “doubling,” a state of consciousness in which one is both aware and aware of one’s awareness. What’s more, both Neal and Chris Fogle experience blinding revelations from two random snatches of televised dialog. In Fogle’s case, he comes to terms with the pointlessness of his 1970s “wastoid” existence while watching the opening credits of As the World Turns, during which the announcer declares, “You’re watching As the World Turns ” (TPK 222). Similarly, Neal finally decides to kill himself after hearing an analyst character on a Cheers rerun declare, “If I have one more yuppie come in and start whining to me about how he can’t love, I’m going to throw up” (OB 168).6 Because “Good Old Neon” shares key component with each of the other two pieces, it effectively links all three. “The Depressed Person”’s vicious portrait of depression disguised as narcissism gets revisited in “Good Old Neon” as narcissism and nihilism full bore, while Neal’s suicide gets redeemed by Chris Fogle’s triumphant conversion from 1970s “wastoid” nihilist to committed IRS agent, a job in which he will end up rubbing elbows with a one “David Wallace,” who appears in both texts. As with the fictional character “Philip Roth” in Roth’s Operation Shylock (1993) and The Plot Against America (2004), and the “Tim O’Brien” character who appears in O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990)—not to mention the “Richard Powers” character who narrates Powers’s Galatea 2.2 (1995) and the “Jonathan” who is the hero of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated (2002)—“David Wallace” both is and is not David Foster Wallace. When the character first gets introduced in The Pale King, Wallace insists that “David Wallace,” who speaks in the first person, is “the real author, the living human holding the pencil, not some abstract narrative persona” (TPK 66), a denial of fictionality that only enhances the fictionality, similar to the way John Barth’s Ambrose, in “Lost in the Funhouse” (1968), declares that, “as with other aspects of realism, it is an illusion that is being enhanced, by purely artificial means” (Lost 73). According to the rules of this game, as established by Roth, Wallace can peek through his narrative and perform his self-disclosure while simultaneously disavowing all connections to himself. As such, by casting Neal’s monologue as “David Wallace’s” projection, Wallace both invites and dares his readers to read Neal’s story as thinly disguised autobiography.

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Jonathan Franzen, in “Farther Away,” accepts this dare. Franzen mentions “Good Old Neon” immediately after providing a devastating analysis of Wallace’s darker side and resulting suicide, an analysis that bears striking similarities to Neal’s own self-diagnosis that, according to the story’s logic, is actually “David Wallace’s” imaginative projection. Most tellingly, Franzen declares: “David’s fiction is populated with dissemblers and manipulators and emotional isolates, and yet the people who had only glancing or formal contact with him took his rather laborious hyperconsiderateness and moral wisdom at face value” (Franzen 39). Conversely, Franzen insists that, in his fiction, Wallace “gave us the worst of himself: he laid out, with an intensity of self-scrutiny worthy of comparison to Kafka and Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky, the extremes of his own narcissism, misogyny, compulsiveness, self-deception, dehumanizing moralism and theologizing, doubt in the possibility of love, and entrapment in footnotes-within-footnotes self-consciousness” (39). In language that eerily echoes Neal’s admission of “a basic inability to really love,” Franzen cites “the near-perfect absence, in [Wallace’s] fiction, of ordinary love” (39). Instead, Wallace creates “characters scheming to appear loving or to prove to themselves that what feels like love is really just disguised self-interest” (39).7 Franzen goes on to declare: “If love is nevertheless excluded from his work, it’s because [Wallace] never quite felt that he deserved to receive it” (40). In Franzen’s view, Wallace, like Neal, felt “undeserving” of the adulation lavished upon him, a feeling that was “intertwined, ultimately to the point of indistinguishability, with the thought of suicide, which was the one sure way out of his imprisonment; surer than addiction, surer than fiction, and surer, finally, than love” (41). Finally, both Franzen and Neal (and, by extension, “David Wallace”), deeply distrust “adulatory public narratives” of suicide, such as the bromide that the suicide victim was “almost too good for this world”—a phrase Neal “seemed unable to keep from fantasizing a lot of [his mourners] saying after the news of [his suicide] came through” (OB 170)—or that “this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you,” as Franzen—sardonically quoting “Starry Starry Night,” singer-songwriter Don McLean’s schmaltzy tribute to Vincent Van Gogh—imagines Wallace’s idolators saying of him. “The Suffering Channel” provides yet another clue as to how we might understand the relationship between “David Wallace” and his creator. The novella circles around Brint Moltke, a chronically shy Roto Rooter employee who somehow or other creates “literally incredible” works of art from his own feces. It’s no accident that his initials are

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B. M. The story’s protagonist, Skip Atwater, a journalist for a supermarket celebrity magazine called Style, tries to convince his editors to run a feature on Moltke, in the course of which effort he concludes that the story’s angle should focus on “the conflict between Moltke’s extreme personal shyness and need for privacy on the one hand versus his involuntary need to express what lay inside him through some type of personal expression or art” (OB 271). Moltke’s wife, who suspects that her husband is “some kind of closet exhibitionist,” credits Brint’s gift to his “abusive childhood” in general, and nightmarish potty training specifically, yet also acknowledges “the terrific shame, ambivalence, and sheer human suffering involved in his unchosen art” (OB 271, 328). Wallace does not play Brint for laughs. Quite to the contrary, he goes to great length to establish shit as an elaborate objective correlative for interior shame and the benefits of sharing that shame. Shit is both “wholly common and universal” and part of “personal private experience” (OB 244). While talking about Moltke’s odd gift, a group of female interns and editors begin trading stories about “intergender bathroom habits and the various small traumas of cohabitation with a male partner” (OB 265). In one story, a woman farts while a male administers oral sex, after which the male “lost literally about twenty pounds of illusion in that one second” and, as a direct result, is now “almost unnaturally comfortable with his body and bodies in general and their private functions” (OB 263). In another story, a woman tells a man on their first date that he must leave the room so that she can “take a dump”; while the man waits for her to finish, he realizes “that he loved and respected [the] woman for baring to him the insecurity she had been feeling,” a moment that marked “the first time in a long time he had not felt deeply and painfully alone” (OB 264). Atwater himself has one of his most searing self-revelations while in a bathroom stall (OB 270).8 Shit, then, represents those parts of “private experience” that people “don’t want to be reminded of” (OB 244) but which are nevertheless universal and worth sharing. Brint Moltke’s art is an involuntary transformation of those shameful truths into art. If Moltke can be read as a figure of the tortured artist, then the child savant in “Another Pioneer” might similarly be read as Wallace’s wry parody of the artist as wise sage, an honorific often bestowed upon Wallace himself. Both Wallace’s earlier story collections included a mythic parody, starting with the William Gass pastiche “John Billy” in Girl with Curious Hair and resuming with “Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko” from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, which updates John Barth’s Chimera- era postmodern mythic cycles

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for the cable television era. “Another Pioneer” continues this tradition. Couched in the scholarly jargon of archetypal hero cycles popularized by Joseph Campbell and others, the story comes to the reader in the form of a pedantic academic lecture that the first person narrator “derived from an acquaintance of a close friend who said that he had himself overheard this exemplum aboard a high-altitude commercial flight” (OB 116). The numerous layers of narrative remove contrast with the centralized position of the savant child, who sits on a raised chair, totally alone, in the exact center of the village of which he is a citizen, where he answers questions posed to him by his more “primitive” fellow villagers. The child’s alleged brilliance initially refers to his “cognitive ability, raw IQ,” but later comes to involve “sagacity or virtue or wisdom or as Coleridge would have had it esemplasy ” (OB 119, 120). In keeping with the book’s overarching depiction of life in the information age, Wallace humorously depicts an elaborate economy of “question consultants” that develops in the wake of the child’s unexpected gifts, with the “consultant caste” helping villagers maximize the value of their questions. Eventually, a neighboring village, in an effort to neutralize the child’s power, sends over a shaman, who, with a single whispered question, undermines the child’s self-confidence. Though the story’s speaker can only speculate as to the exact wording of the question—which varies according to different versions of the tale—he does offer one key “variant,” which reads as follows: “You, child, who are so gifted and sagacious and wise: Is it possible that you have not realized the extent to which these primitive villagers have exaggerated your gifts, have transformed you into something you know too well you are not?” (OB 138). In other words, what if you’re a fraud? The possibility of fraudulence grips the child with every bit as much intensity as it does Neal, to the extent the shaman’s question bends “the child’s cognitive powers back in on themselves and transformed him from messianic to monstrous, and whose lethal involution resonates with malignant-self-consciousness themes in everything from Genesis 3:7 to the self-devouring Kirttimukha of the Skanda Purana” (OB 136). The story ends with the villagers abandoning both the village and the child, who sits alone and bewildered in his central chair as the village ignites into flames all around him. Both the involuntary nature of Brint’s gift and the boy’s uncanny intelligence bear closer scrutiny primarily for the way these episodes resonate with the lack of mental control that befuddles so many of the book’s other key figures. Not coincidentally, the key take away advice Wallace offered to the graduates of Kenyon College in his celebrated

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commencement address to that body, later published as the chapbook This is Water, was “to exercise some control of how and what you think” (TIW 53). Perhaps nothing Wallace published did more to burnish his public image as, in Franzen’s sardonic words, “a great and gentle soul” and a “lost national treasure” (Franzen 38). Throughout the speech, Wallace drills down on the fact that our thoughts and belief systems are not “just hardwired . . . or automatically absorbed from culture, like language,” but rather “a matter of personal, intentional choice” (TIW 27, 28). Conversely, what is “hard-wired” is a “default setting” of “natural, basic self-centeredness,” a conviction that we are each “the absolute center of the universe,” and “the realest, most vivid and important person in existence,” a notion borne from the fact that we are each “the absolute center of” every experience we have ever had (TIW 37, 36, 39). As such, the speech’s heartfelt plea for us “to be a little less arrogant” and to exercise “a little critical awareness about [ourselves] and [our] certainties” almost, but does not entirely, masks Wallace’s much darker disclosures regarding how difficult it is “to exercise some control over how and what you think,” and, conversely, how easy it is to remain “hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your head” (TIW 33, 53, 50). Nevertheless, he insists that “if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about ‘the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master’” (TIW 55–56). Immediately after this passage, Wallace points out that “it is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in . . . the head ” (TIW 57–58). Missing from the published version of the speech is the original address’s subsequent line: “They shoot the terrible master.” So whereas the speech urges the listener to avoid “going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out” (TIW 60), Oblivion depicts with chilling intensity adult lives that meet, point by point, that very same description. No character better exemplifies this predicament than Terry Schmidt, the protagonist of “Mr. Squishy,” which originally appeared in McSweeney’s No. 5 in 2000 under the pseudonym Elizabeth Klemm, a subterfuge that fooled basically no one. Though possessed of “a vivid and complex inner life” (OB 26), Schmidt nevertheless spends his days—and the story—trapped in soulless conference rooms with Focus Group participants who provide him with marketing data about consumer products that he must then sift through to determine which pieces of statistical data “made a

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difference and which did not” (OB 12). In his early days on the job, Schmidt hoped “to persuade tablesful of hard-eyed corporate officers that legitimate concern for consumer wellbeing was both emotionally and economically Good Business” (OB 29); by the time of the story’s historical present, he can no longer ignore “the starry-eyed puerility and narcissism of these fantasies” any more than he can believe, as he once did, that he was “fundamentally different from the common run of man, unique and in certain crucial ways superior, more as it were central, meaningful” (OB 30). Yet this last belief Schmidt now understands is shared by “a large percentage of bright young men and women” largely because—in language that Wallace would requote five years later in This is Water—“they themselves have been at the exact center of all they’ve experience for the whole 20 years of their conscious lives” (OB 30). Like Neal, Schmidt both acknowledges his “default setting” of “natural, basic self-centeredness” and distrusts it entirely. Uncharacteristically, Wallace provides very little in the way of a compensatory payoff for achieving this level of clarity. And here he lays bare the dark but insistent tug of nihilism that is the dialectical obverse of his otherwise hopeful posthumanism. In each of his major works leading up to and including Infinite Jest, Wallace includes some variation of Schmidt’s delusion of uniqueness but always with the understanding that, because the illusion is universal, it is therefore a check against true solipsism. Mark Nechtr, the hero of “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,” most clearly exemplifies this dynamic when the narrator lists among Mark’s key misconceptions his belief “that he’s the only person in the world who feels like the only person in the world,” which the narrator goes onto describe as “a solipsistic delusion” (GCH 305). Later in the text, the advertising genius J. D. Steelritter observes not only that “solipsism binds us together” but also that this same shared solipsism is an advertiser’s “meat” (GCH 309). Corollary to this diagnosis-as-cure strategy is Wallace’s stated intention, again to quote “Westward”’s narrator, to design his work always with the “Reader” in the position of “a lover, who wants to be inside,” with the work’s “Exit and Egress and End in full view the whole time” (GCH 331, 332). Conversely, the stories in Oblivion provide no way out. Each possible egress or exit out of the cave of self that is the story’s one and only entry point proves to be another framing interiority, such that many of the stories are designed like “Russian dolls within Russian dolls,” to quote Corey Messler, whose blurb is included in the paperback edition. The characters are instead left marooned inside their interiors, “hypnotized”

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as Wallace put it in This is Water, “by the constant monologue inside their heads” (TIW 50) and left to manage a constant stream of “input too ordinary to process and input too intense to bear” (GCH 254). Schmidt’s entire vocational life consists of input too ordinary to process, though process it he must, all in the hope of locating “tiny gems of statistical relevance amid the rough raw surfeit of random fact” (OB 9). Throughout both Oblivion and its compositional companion The Pale King, Wallace is preoccupied with entropy, which, as The Pale King ’s mysterious Dr. Lehrl explains on more than one occasion, is “a measure of a certain type of information that there is no point in knowing . . . Real entropy had zippo to do with temperature” (TPK 12). This concern also sits at the center of “Deciderization 2007—a Special Report,” Wallace’s introduction to the Best American Essays 2007 for which he served as guest editor. There he describes “U.S. culture right now” as a “culture and volume of info and spin and rhetoric and context that I know I’m not alone in finding too much to even absorb, much less to try to make sense of or organize into any kind of triage of saliency or value” (BFN 301). This surfeit of information that there is no point in knowing also occupies the interiors of these characters, forcing the reader into the position of sorter and organizer of all this information, a task that a Jesuit professor of accounting, a key figure in Chris Fogle’s The Pale King monologue, identifies as the last bastion of heroism available in contemporary life. “In today’s world,” the professor affirms, “boundaries are fixed, and most significant facts have been generated. Gentlemen, the heroic frontier now lies in the ordering and deployment of these facts. Classification, organization, presentation” (TPK 232). Nevertheless, both Oblivion and The Pale King confirm that such work is soul-destroyingly dull and dehumanizing. In Schmidt’s case, none of the data he is collecting for Felonies!, the chocolate snack cake being marketed by the Mr. Squishy company, is meaningful. Rather, it is the “entropic converse” of useful, sorted information, “a cascade of random noise meant to so befuddle the firm and its Client that no one would feel anything but relief at the decision to precede with an O[verall] C[ampaign] C[concept]” that Schmidt’s employer, Reesemeyer Shannon Belt Advertising, had already developed in advance (OB 44). In other words, the data being collected “made no difference. None of it” (OB 45). So Schmidt’s job, in addition to being mind-numbingly dull, is also, in the purest sense, pointless—or so he thinks. For running parallel to Schmidt’s interior monologue is a concurrent narrative detailing an elaborate plan, hatched by the advertising firm’s top brass, and unknown to Schmidt, to sabotage

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the entire phony Focus Group Schmidt is leading. The plan involves planting a “mole” in the room, in this case the story’s mysterious first-person narrator, who is wired with a prosthesis and bag that will projectile vomit quantities of masticated snack cake at the exact moment a daredevil on the outside window abruptly inflates an enormous balloon replica of the Mr. Squishy logo. The idea is to see “how the facilitators reacted to unplanned stimuli, how they responded to their Focus Groups’ own reactions” (OB 65). Once Schmidt could be shown unable to cope with this unexpected random intrusion into the orderly data collection process, Awad, the plan’s mastermind, can proceed with replacing human facilitators with computer networks, thus “doing away as much as possible with the human element,” the primary source for the “unnecessary random variables in those Field tests” (OB 62). Schmidt, then, paradoxically suffers from a conviction that his contributions “make no difference” while simultaneously functioning as the element in the process that “makes a difference” in the data. Though he does not appear to know of the plan hatched around him—nor do we see the plan take effect, as the story ends just prior to full implementation—Schmidt’s ghastly obsession with poisoning the snack cake supply suggests that he has intuited his diminishing value to the company and longs to hit back. Even more disturbing, because we know that Schmidt will soon be fired from his job and replaced by a machine, we can infer an increased likelihood that Schmidt, post severance, will carry through with his plan. Wallace presents none of the above as linear narrative. Rather, the plot unfolds along the margins of Schmidt’s interior monologue, framing his narrative much the same way Awad’s plot itself will box him in and expel him from his job. The reader must piece together the story’s basic narrative from the welter of marketing acronyms and concrete details. Whereas Lukács positions Flaubert’s or Zola’s readers as “merely observers,” Wallace tasks his readers with entropic task of ordering and assessing his dense descriptive tales. Nearly a dozen internally defined acronyms clutter the pages of “Mr. Squishy,” none of which bear upon the story’s emotional trajectory, while a sizable portion of “The Suffering Channel” consists of detailed background data on secondary characters, precise descriptions of hotel rooms and pay-phone kiosks, and brand-name cataloging of clothes. The narrator of “The Soul is Not A Smithy” displaces the story’s key event—the “hostage” crisis inaugurated by the crazed substitute teacher—to the story’s periphery, focusing instead on his elaborately detailed “panel” narrative, whose import both to the narrator and

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to the story’s framing narrative the reader must determine. Far from animating the stories, this process of data ordering directly replicates the characters’ predicament. What Lukács calls Zola’s “passive capitulation” to the dehumanizing effects of capitalism becomes in Oblivion an active function of the stories themselves; what Lukács calls “the capitalist prose” of the late nineteenth-century naturalists becomes in Wallace’s art the data-overloaded prose of the information age. In many respects, Wallace is guilty here of the imitative fallacy. In trying to depict contemporary existence as a whirlwind of useless, alienating, and unremittingly boring data, he also produces a book that is, for vast stretches, dull and alienating. Lukács levels a similar charge against Flaubert, who “complained unceasingly and passionately of the boredom, pettiness and repugnance of the bourgeois subject-matter he was forced to depict” (126). But Flaubert, Lukács argues, not only “confused life with the everyday existence of the bourgeois,” but also “struggled throughout his life to escape the vicious cycle of socially determined preconceptions” (125, 126). Lukács goes on to assert, “Because he did not battle against the preconceptions themselves and even accepted them as incontestable facts, his battle was tragic and hopeless” (127). As might be said of Madame Bovary, Oblivion can at times be critiqued as a beautifully stylized depiction of bourgeois boredom that is itself deadly dull. Unlike Flaubert, Wallace does not position his readers as outside observers who can share in the author’s contempt. The stories are not, as in Flaubert, mere “tableau”; they are a cascade of data and concrete detail that the reader must sift and sort. Although this task hardly alleviates the arduous work of reading the book itself—if anything, it increases the tedium—it does succeed in forcing the reader to experience what is being depicted. In this way, then, Wallace collapses Lukács dichotomy between the narrative impulse in the epic, in which readers “experience” the events, and the descriptive mode of such capitalist art such as Zola’s and Flaubert’s, with the difference that in Wallace’s art of the information age, the reader experiences what is being described. In many respects, this strategy hardly marks a shift in Wallace’s art, for the same could be said of much of his work. In its portrayal of addiction, isolation, and a world run amok with nonstop input and entertainment, Infinite Jest plunges its reader into a massive labyrinthine text that simultaneously entertains, overwhelms, and isolates. Yet in the case of that famous book, the payoff resides in the empathetic bond Wallace creates between text and reader. By invading the reader’s interior, Infinite Jest both dramatizes and alleviates the loneliness of interior experience. And as early as 1993, Wallace was already speaking

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about forcing his reader “to work hard to access [his work’s] pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort” (CW 22). Conversely, Oblivion repeatedly undermines many of the techniques for alleviation that Wallace had already established. In Infinite Jest, addicts sit in AA meetings and share their anguish; young athletes gather in sweaty locker rooms and mentor to their “little buddies”; even Don Gately, who admits to feeling “trapped inside his huge chattering head” as he lies paralyzed in his hospital bed, gets visited by a wraith who talks to him in what the narrator describes as a “dialogue” with something similar to a “give-and-take” (IJ 922, 923). The characters in Oblivion have no one to talk to, and if there are “wraiths” inside their head, these wraiths are malevolent, engaging not in dialogues but in a battle for control. As for the pleasures that once emerged from completion of the “hard work” Wallace has set for this readers, those, too, seem to be abandoned in favor of a persistent confrontation with pain and suffering. Oblivion even casts doubt on Wallace’s long held belief that language can bridge the gulf between us, and that fiction “can allow us imaginatively to identify with characters’ pain” so that “we might then also more conceive of others identifying with our own,” an agenda he deemed “nourishing, redemptive” (CW 22). Neal, in “Good Old Neon,” best articulates Oblivion’s more pessimistic vision of language as solution to our loneliness. In the middle of his narrative, Neal observes, “I know that you know as well as I do how fast thoughts and associations can fly through your head” (OB 150). Not only do the thoughts and associations fly by so rapidly that “they seem totally different from or outside of the regular sequential clock time we live by,” but they also “have so little relation to the sort of linear, one-word-after-another-word English we communicate with each other with that it could easily take a whole lifetime to spell out the contents of one split-second flash of thoughts and connections” (OB 151). Neal insists instead that our attempts to communicate what’s going inside us are “a charade,” for the simple reason that “what goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of” (OB 151). Here Wallace appears to be nodding in the direction of Steven Pinker, author of the Language Instinct, published in 1994, two years prior to Infinite Jest. Pinker makes a brief appearance in Infinite Jest, in the form of his alleged participation in a panel discussion with Avril Incandenza on “the political implications of prescriptive grammar” that took place “during the infamous Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts convention credited with helping incite the M.I.T. riots of B.S. 1997” (IJ 987n). Wallace also takes the Language Instinct to

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task in his review Brian Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern American Usage¸ reprinted in Consider the Lobster as “Authority and American Usage.” Among many other things, the essay addresses what Pinker himself calls “prescriptive” and “descriptive” approaches to grammatical rules, the former concerning itself with the “prescribed” rules for proper speech, and the latter offering a scientifically “objective” description of how people actually talk. Wallace forcefully disagrees with Pinker’s “descriptive” approach to the rules of grammar. His early training in Wittgenstein convinced him that language is public and that communication would be “impossible without consensus and rules”; as a result, the Descriptivist argument “is open to the objection that its ultimate aim—the abandonment of ‘artificial’ linguistic rules and conventions—would make language itself impossible” (CL 88n). Wallace does, however, grant Pinker’s underlying argument that humans might very well be “wired with a Universal Grammar” (CL 93). Similarly, in Neal’s description of thought and associations that outpace the linear structure of language, Wallace also seems to be embracing Pinker’s description of “mentalese,” or “the language of thought” (Pinker 56). Pinker spends dozens of pages trying to demolish the idea that language shapes thought rather than vice versa—“If there can be two thoughts corresponding to one word,” he says at one point, “thoughts can’t be words” (79)—an attempt that even requires him to address Wittgenstein’s famous aphorism regarding the alleged absence of consciousness in animals: “A dog could not have the thought ‘perhaps it will rain tomorrow’” (qtd. in Pinker 56). These arguments all lead Pinker to conclude that “people do not think in English or Chinese or Apache; they think in the language of thought” (81): in other words, mentalese. While describing the relationship between language and mentalese, he writes, Any particular thought in our head embraces a vast amount of information. But when it comes to communicating a thought to someone else, attention spans are short and mouths are slow. To get information into a listener’s head in a reasonable amount of time, a speaker can encode only a fraction of the message into words and must count on the listener to fill in the rest. But inside a single head, the demands are different. Air time is not a limited resource: different parts of the brain are connected to one another directly with thick cables that can transfer huge amounts of information quickly. Nothing can be left to the imagination, though, because the internal representations are the imagination. (81)

The verbal echoes between this passage and Neal’s description of his interior are striking and, quite possibly, not accidental. Deliberately

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or not, Wallace, throughout Oblivion, seems clearly to embrace the possibility of a sublayer of interior experience that precedes language and, in many cases, masters it. What’s more, Pinker’s comparison of “mentalese” to a machine built of “thick cables” finds an echo in Wallace’s “CPU” model of consciousness, very much the same way Pinker’s description of the winnowing process that governs the transition of mentalese into language resonates with Wallace’s sustained use of information theory and entropy to explain the particular contours of information-era dread and anxiety. All this being the case, then, Oblivion remains unique in Wallace’s oeuvre in its unrelenting pessimism. His youthful ambition, as he explained back in 1993, to create art that “locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical” (CW 26) gives way, in Oblivion, to dense description without redemption. The stories instead yearn for escape, for a release from the prison-house of interiority, but offer no exit. Even in its unfinished state, The Pale King can be seen to be a corrective, or at least a dialectical partner, to Oblivion’s haunted insularity. Borrowing Wallace’s key terms from “Authority and American Usage,” D. T. Max observes: “While Oblivion was descriptive, The Pale King was supposed to be prescriptive. It had to convince the reader that there was a way out of the bind [of consciousness]” (280). Wallace was justly fond of Lewis Hyde’s description of irony as “the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage,” a line he quotes prominently in “E Unibus Pluram” and subsequently invokes throughout Infinite Jest, such as in the novel’s early depiction of Joelle van Dyne as “excruciatingly alive and encaged” and in that section’s subsequent description of James O. Incandenza’s film Cage III, the final image of which leads the narrator to conclude: “What looks like the cage’s exit is actually the bars of the cage” (SFT 67; IJ 222). In Oblivion, that cage is consciousness itself. Vladimir Nabokov once fancifully described “the marvel of consciousness” as “that sudden window swinging open on a sunlit landscape amidst the night of non-being” (“Interview” 22). The characters in these late-period fever dreams rattle desperately at that Nabokovian window only to discover, upon successfully springing the lock, not a sunlit landscape but rather another enclosure. In that sense, Nabokov’s “night of non-being” is just a lovely alliterative way to describe oblivion.

Notes 1. Also of importance here is the narrator’s obsession with a disturbing dream sequence from the motion picture The Exorcist (see OB 94–97).

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Though the narrator never overtly makes the connection, the reader can easily intuit a thematic overlap between a film of demonic possession and the deranged behavior of the substitute teacher, whom the local paper later describes as “Possessed” (100). I am indebted to the anonymous author of an essay titled “Information Overload?: The Ethics of Description Across Media” for directing me to Lukács’s formative essay in the context of Wallace’s work in general. I am indebted to Stephen Burn for the keen insight in this sentence’s second half. It’s also worth noting that both collections preceded a major novelistic statement. For more on the importance of Wittgenstein’s work in Wallace’s apprentice fiction, see Boswell, “The Broom of the System: Wittgenstein and the Rules of the Game,” in Understanding David Foster Wallace (21–64). In fact, Burn, after reading through Wallace’s papers at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, speculates that the first seeds of the novel might have been planted as early as 1989. But the bulk of the writing seems clearly to have hit a stride around 2005, which is when the “Author Here” sections are set. What’s more, the two books share a wide range of thematic concerns and, in many cases, direct phrases. In a footnote, Burn points out, “As one example of the blurrings of the edges between works, Michael Pietsch [Wallace’s editor at Little, Brown] notes that both Oblivion’s final story and the opening of The Pale King are preoccupied with shit, art, and death” (Burn “Paradigm” 386n4). To cite one obvious instance of overlap, in §7 of the novel, Claude Sylvanshine and his fellow new IRS agents are carted to the Regional Examination Center via 14 “Mister Squishee [sic]” trucks (TPK 47). One more unrelated instance of textual overlap: early in “Good Old Neon,” Neal quotes the line “Or like a leaf that doesn’t believe in the tree it’s part of, etc.” (152). This same line, which is a paraphrase from DeTocqueville, also appears in §19 of The Pale King, which section dramatizes a debate about civic duty and the 1980 presidential election between Carter and Reagan. The text reads, “DeTocqueville’s thrust is that it’s in the democratic citizen’s nature to be like a leaf that doesn’t believe in the tree it’s part of” (141). In his recent Wallace biography, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, D. T. Max quotes a letter Wallace wrote to writer Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of Prozac Nation, in which he admits, among other Neal-like observations, “I go through a loop in which I notice all the ways I am—for just an example—self-centered and careerist and not true to standards and values that transcend my own petty interests, and feel like I’m not one of the good ones; but then I countenance the fact that here at least here I am worrying about it, noticing all the ways I fall short of integrity, and I imagine that maybe people without

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any integrity at all don’t notice or worry about it; so then I feel better about myself . . . ; but this soon becomes a vehicle for feeling superior to (imagined) Others . . . It’s all very confusing. I think I’m very honest and candid, but also proud of how honest and candid I am—so where does that put me” (203). Wallace, in the wide-ranging correspondence Max chooses to quote, sounds this theme throughout the biography. 8. “The Suffering Channel” is hardly Wallace’s only attempt to explore the various ways in which bathrooms aid in self-reflection. One is reminded, for instance, of the scene early in Infinite Jest in which Hal, after his interview breakdown, repairs to a bathroom and wonders “why U.S. restrooms always appear to us as infirmaries for public distress, the place to regain control” (IJ 13). In addition, “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” #42 provides a detailed catalogue of the sounds and smells of a public bathroom as witnessed daily by the narrator’s father, a bathroom attendant. It is also perhaps fruitful to compare Atwater’s behavior in bathrooms, both public and private, to that of John Updike’s Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, specifically the “Rabbit” of Rabbit is Rich, which is preoccupied throughout with the Freudian connections between shit and money (“filthy lucre”), and which features episodes of anal sex as well as long descriptions of bathrooms and toilets. Wallace had a vocal and clearly ambivalent relationship with Updike’s most famous creation, as testified by his homage/parody, “Rabbit Resurrected,” which appeared in the August 1992 edition of Harper ’s. When Atwater visits the Moltkes’ bathroom, we are told, “nothing but an ingrained sense of propriety kept Atwater from trying to press his ear to the wall next to the medicine cabinet to see whether he could hear anything. Nor would he ever have allowed himself to open the Moltkes’ medicine cabinet, or to root in any serious way through the woodgrain shelves above the towel rack” (OB 304). Conversely, Rabbit, when he visits the bathroom of his rival Webb Murkett, rifles through the medicine cabinet, where he finds a damning package of Preparation H, which leads him ruefully to conclude, “Medicine cabinets are tragic” (Rabbit is Rich 286).

CH A P T ER

9

“The Chains of Not Choosing”: Free Will and Faith in William James and David Foster Wallace David H. Evans

Infinite Jest is a book containing many secrets, and containing many individuals with secrets. Characters are drawn to mysterious spaces, like Hal Incandenza, who is “as attached to the secrecy as he is to getting high” (IJ 490), to the ETA Pump Room, or poor Tony Krause to his narrow toilet stall in the Armenian Foundation Library men’s room (IJ 301). Some carry their secrets around with them, invisible even when in plain sight. Randy Lenz, for example, keeps his emergency stash of cocaine in a curiously deceptive container—a hollowed out copy of “Bill James’s gargantuan Large-Print Principles of Psychology and The Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion” (IJ 543) better known as the Varieties of Religious Experience. The inappropriate contents of this tome should, no doubt, suggest to the wary reader that the book he holds in his hands must also be approached with some suspicion, perhaps a suspicion of the metaphor inherent in the idea of the “contents” of a work of art.1 But equally important is Wallace’s choice of the particular author whose work is honored in its deliberate misappropriation. Is there, one cannot help but wonder, any significance in this fact for our understanding of the relation of the two writers? Obviously, you are about to read an argument that there is. But the mention of James in Infinite Jest is not the only reason for thinking so. Wallace himself admitted his fondness for the philosopher and psychologist. During a 1996 interview he was asked to name,

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in standard interviewed author fashion, his favorite writers. In the group portrait of those who made him “feel unalone—intellectually, emotionally, spiritually . . . human and unalone and . . . in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry” (CW 62), James appears yet again. To be sure, the vivid style and metaphoric vigor of James’s prose has been admired by many over the years, including Rebecca West, who claimed that James wrote “philosophy as though it were fiction” (11). For his part, Wallace, who started out wanting to be a professional philosopher like his father, is an intensely philosophical fiction writer. Nevertheless, it is slightly surprising to find James sharing space with such improbable peers as John Donne, A. S. Byatt, and “35 per cent of Stephen Crane” (CW 62). Given these direct allusions, it is somewhat odd that James has been pretty much ignored as one of Wallace’s precursors and influences. James Ryerson, for example, in his introduction to Wallace’s undergraduate honor thesis in philosophy published in 2011 as Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will, invokes Descartes, Voltaire, Sartre, J. L. Austin, Derrida, and above all Wittgenstein among Wallace’s philosophical inspirations, but never mentions James, despite the fact that the latter’s Pragmatism anticipates some of the central themes of Philosophical Investigations. I am going to propose, however, that William James was a crucial figure for Wallace, a figure with whom he could recognize remarkable parallels, both in terms of the moral dilemmas they confronted in thought and life, and in terms of the solutions that they attempted to apply to them. I will focus on two issues that concerned both writers deeply: first, the place of free will in a world where the self seemed to have been reduced to an effect of immense inhuman structures and processes; and second, the nature and possibility of religious belief in a culture dominated by scientific and naturalistic assumptions. We should take Wallace at his word, that is, when he says that James made him “feel unalone— intellectually, emotionally, spiritually.” Scholars have long recognized a close connection between James’s thought and his biography. It is no denigration of the value of the version of pragmatism that would become his most important contribution to philosophy to argue that it can be seen as a response to his own emotional and moral dilemmas. Indeed, pragmatism affirms that the only justification for any philosophical idea is that it satisfies some fundamental need of the philosopher. James’s own emotional life was a troubled one; from his late adolescence on he suffered from recurrent bouts of depression, sometimes so severe that he considered

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suicide. There is evidence that on at least one occasion he checked himself into the McLean Hospital (Menand 13–14).What appears to have been most disheartening about these episodes is the sense of passivity and paralysis that accompanied them, rendering the very thought of action futile; a suggestive entry in his diary from this period says that the outer world “seems to be void or evil, my will is palsied. The difficulty: ‘to act without hope,’ must be solved” (qtd. in James William Anderson 374. The first subject is conjectural). The anxiety caused by the threat of paralysis appears frequently in James’s writing, including one of the most famous passages in his works, the description of an experience of “panic fear” in the Varieties of Religious Experience. In Varieties, James attributes this account to a French correspondent, but he later admitted that the experience was his own: Whilst in this state of philosophic pessimism and general depression of spirits about my prospects, I went one evening into a dressing room in the twilight to procure some article that was there; when suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day on one of the benches, or rather shelves against the wall, with his knees drawn up against his chin, and the coarse gray undershirt, which was his only garment, drawn over them inclosing his entire figure. He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non human. This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other. That shape am I, I felt, potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him. There was such a horror of him, and such a perception of my own merely momentary discrepancy from him, that it was as if something hitherto solid within my breast gave way entirely, and I became a mass of quivering fear. (134–35)

The causes of his depression have been debated over the years, but what is more important for philosophical history is that he interpreted his personal distress in the terms of one of the great intellectual debates of the later nineteenth century, the question of free will versus determinism. The loss of a sense of agency during James’s periods of depression resembled all too distinctly the condition of human beings in the picture of the world offered by the most advanced scientific theories of the time, a world of inhuman mechanical processes, in which individual free will was a mere sentimental chimera. In 1869, for example,

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he wrote to his friend Thomas W. Ward: “I’m swamped in an empirical philosophy—I feel that we are Nature through and through, and that we are wholly conditioned, that not a wiggle of our will happens save as a result of physical laws” (Letters 152–53). The personal and the philosophical seemed to reinforce one another in a vicious circuit offering no escape: James’s sense of moral paralysis was explained by the regnant doctrines of determinism, while those doctrines appeared to have found verification by the empirical evidence of his own predicament. Natural science and logic had made the unpredictability of free will simply inconceivable, and James could find no grounds either in himself or in the external world for imagining an alternative. At this point an event took place that would come to be seen as a crucial turning point in the narrative of James’s intellectual journey: his discovery of the writings of the French philosopher Charles Renouvier, in which he found an escape hatch from what he later called the “iron block” image of the universe offered by determinism. A much quoted entry in his diary, dated April 30, 1870, reads as follows: I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier’s second Essais and see no reason why his definition of free will—“the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts”—need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present—until next year—that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will . . . [I will] believe in my individual reality and creative power. My belief, to be sure, can’t be optimistic—but I will posit life (the real, the good) in the self-governing resistance of the ego to the world. Life shall be [built on (?)] doing and suffering and creating. (Letters, 147–48) (emphasis in original)2

The strictly philosophical merits of James’s argument can be debated, but his assertion was, for him, as decisive as Bartleby’s explosive declaration: “I prefer not to.” In both cases, it is the affirmation of the possibility of choice that is central. A world without choice is a world without agency, and so for James a world without humanity. If objective evidence and natural law seemed to argue for belief in such a world, then a higher law must be invoked, one which legitimized the role of subjective interest in the choice of belief. In James’s opinion, the scientific or philosophical insistence on the necessity of objectivity had elevated truth to the position of an insatiable god who demanded the endless sacrifice if its own idolators. Throughout his career, he would insist on the individual right to “believe at our own risk any hypothesis that is live enough to tempt our will” (Will to Believe 32)

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and to resist the arguments of those who propagated the assumption that “truth, to be real truth, ought to bring eventual messages of death to all our satisfactions” (Meaning 87).3 What is original Tautology about James’s argument is that it does not invoke a Cartesian subject or agent that precedes its action, something secure from the molestations of “physical laws.” Rather the action itself is the agent. His inspiration is to put activity rather than passivity at the core of our relation to the world. One thing that James emphasized throughout his writings was the creative role of the act of cognition: “In our cognitive as well as in our active life we are creative . . . Man engenders truths upon [the world].” (Pragmatism 123). In this sense, it is not the chooser who chooses so much as it is the act of choice that brings into being both the chosen and the chooser, which in this case are one and the same. One might think that, as a thinker and writer, Wallace found himself in a situation that could hardly be more different from that of James. From the perspective of the later twentieth century, the positivist conception of science against which the philosopher struggled had come to seem an historical relic as quaint and culturally specific as stovepipe hats and button shoes, consigned to a dusty museum by the sharp critiques of cultural theory and science studies. I would argue, however, that the scientific determinism James found so dismaying has its equally oppressive late twentieth-century counterpart in the image saturated sensorium that comprises the postmodern situation. Like the determinist model of the physical universe, the society of the spectacle reduces the self to a passive spectator with no active role to play. The individual is converted into an entirely reflective and predetermined consumer of commodities that are increasingly spectacles themselves. For Wallace, this situation is made even more dire by the fact that the most “advanced” theoretical responses to this degradation of the individual reinforce that degradation by assailing the very category of the individual, forcing upon one “the dilemma of having to deny yourself an existence independent of language” (CW 45), and rendering any na ïve appeal to the traditional notion of what Infinite Jest calls “this hideous internal self” (IJ 695) a philosophical nonstarter. However, I want to propose that, like James, Wallace found a solution to this discouraging situation by appealing to his predecessor’s conception of choice as an act that brings into being the actor, and preserves what it means to be human. It should not be surprising that the threat of paralysis is the central theme of Wallace’s greatest novel, Infinite Jest, whose title alludes to the play about the most famous procrastinator in literature, the

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victim of “paralyzing doubt about everything” (IJ 900).4 The fear of immobilization haunts the novel; the word “paralysis” and its derivatives appear some 40 times, according to my Kindle edition. The book begins with a scene in the course of which Hal Incandenza winds up lying “catatonic” (IJ 12) on the floor of a men’s room; it concludes (ignoring the endnotes) with Don Gately “flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand” (IJ 981). Gately is in fact remembering a past episode in a fever dream, but his present situation is hardly more active, since he is lying in a hospital bed after his violent run in with Hawaiian-shirted Canadians, “effectively paralyzed and mute” (IJ 828). The threat of stasis ties together the three overarching narrative lines, those of Gately and the Ennet House rehab center, Hal and the ETA, and Rémy Marathe and the Assassins des Fauteuils Roulants, each protagonist in his way a version of the “catatonic hero” whose advent Hal’s seventh-grade term paper proclaims (IJ 142). The struggling addicts are the most obviously entrapped, having surrendered their free will and humanity to the debilitating habit that dictates their lives. The consequence of their psychological dependence is underscored by its reflection in the literal catatonia of the “objay darts” warehoused in the nearby Unit #5, the “Shed.” Throughout the novel, drugs are associated with isolation and incarceration. Ken Erdedy, for example, “once he had dope . . . would not leave his bedroom except to go to the refrigerator and the bathroom, and even then the trips would be very quick” (IJ 19–20). A still more miserable case is that of Poor Tony Krause, who winds up crouching for days, like James’s epileptic patient, in a toilet stall in the men’s room of “an obscure Armenian Foundation Library” (IJ 301). In Gately and Fackelmann’s climactic drug binge that concludes the novel, the two lie semi-comatose in their own excrement for days, the latter incapable of taking action even to escape his own horrific fate. The world of ETA—a preserve of pampered prodigies, in training for a shot at the Show, the opportunity to become international superstars—seems at first to share little with that of Ennet House, but as the novel develops it becomes clear that they have some essential things in common. Both, after all, occupy the same hill, Ennet House at the foot and ETA on the flattened top, its elevated position symbolizing clearly enough the immense social and economic height that separates it from the former. It is a sort of locus amoenus, a meticulously landscaped walled garden whose athletically gifted and cultivated denizens could hardly differ more from their physically decrepit and psychologically troubled neighbors. Yet the two sites are not opposites but rather two stages in a single process. The hill bears

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a distinct resemblance to Dante’s purgatorial mountain, and both groups of Wallace’s characters, like Dante’s, are on a journey to a better self. Dante’s mountain also has an earthly paradise on its summit, but it is a place of dangerous temptation rather than the proper end of the pilgrim’s ascent. As he enters the garden, Dante is given a choice by Vergil; he must use his free will (“arbitrio” ) to choose whether to stay where he is or go on in the direction of full humanity (“seder ti puoi e puoi andar ”) (Purgatorio XXVII, ll. 140, 138). Likewise, ETA. is a deceptive paradise, which, in the process of training its students, in fact dehumanizes and empties them of agency. Troeltsch explains the philosophy clearly: “It’s no accident they say you Eat, Sleep, Breath tennis here. These are autonomical. Accretive means accumulating through sheer mindless repeated motions. The machine-language of the muscles . . . Until [fifteen] you might as well be machines, here, is their view” (IJ 117–18). Or, as Charles Tavis puts it to a potential recruit: “What we actually do for you here is to break you down in very carefully selected ways, take you apart as a little girl and put you back together again as a tennis player . . . we will take apart your skull very gently and reconstruct a skull for you that will have a highly developed bump of clarity and a slight concave dent where the fear-instinct used to be” (IJ 520–21). ETA’s goal is to turn its students into highly effective but empty shells, like the “husks of Lemon Pledge that the school’s players used to keep the sun off” (IJ 223) in Orin Incandenza’s weirdly fetishistic collection. Even a trophy product of ETA like Hal ultimately feels that his success has come at the cost of his humanity, and that there is a vacancy at the core of his being. Emotions and values have become for him no more than algebraic “variables” that “he can manipulate . . . well enough to satisfy everyone but himself that he’s in there, inside his own hull, as a human being” even though he feels that “he’s far more robotic than John Wayne” (IJ 694), the school’s model of technical tennis perfection and its own sure bet to make the Show. His collapse in the first chapter comes when he tries to break out of his hull, and to assert that he is more than the supremely efficient ball striking mechanism he has been turned into: “I’m not a machine. I feel and believe . . . I’m not just a creātus, manufactured, conditioned, bred for function” (IJ 12). But by this point it is too late, and Hal is too “damaged” (IJ 14) for such an affirmation of free will. The target of Wallace’s satire, however, is not simply the debilitating training regimen of one school, but rather America’s addiction to the dehumanizing effects of professional sports. Amateur athletics has traditionally had as its goal the education of the “whole man”; the

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professionalization of sports, in which ETA participates, creates on the contrary human beings reduced to particular hypertrophied parts, like Hal’s right arm that looks like a “gorilla’s arm . . . pasted on the body of a child” (IJ 173) or his brother Orin’s “big left leg” (IJ 43), producing a world that recalls Emerson’s surreal vision in “The American Scholar” of a society “in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man” (Emerson 54).The purpose of such specialization is, of course, to produce a champion, but the corollary of the champion’s success is the failure of everyone else.5 The relentless preordained spectacle of the champion reduces all other participants in the game to the role of what the wraith who visits Gately in the hospital identifies as “figurants,” extras who fill the background of the drama. “What a miserable fucking bottom-rung job that must be for an actor, to be sort of human furniture,” reflects Gately (IJ 835), and the Lemon Pledge gag turns very sour indeed when we realize that this is the fate most likely awaiting every player at ETA, and for that matter every participant in the Show, excepting only one: to live as “human furniture.” But the immobilizing effects of both the addiction to drugs and the addiction to sports are ultimately less important than that of the other addiction in the novel—the addiction to what Wallace likes to call “spectation,” the debilitating mass craving for passive entertainment. Unlike the first two, this is a universal national addiction, which reduces the viewing public to inanimate consumers of prepackaged and easily digestible commodified images. In his essay “E Unibus Pluram,” Wallace made the association explicit, stating that “watching TV can become malignantly addictive” (SFT 38).The malignancy of the addiction consists in the fact that television gives us exactly what we want, simultaneously shaping its unending spectacles to our desires, and ceaselessly legitimizing our insatiable desire for the spectacular. The posture of the viewer becomes ever more disablingly passive as, Wallace argues, television absorbs even its own critique into its entertainments. The novel’s great whatzit, James Incandenza’s short film, “Infinite Jest,” is of course Wallace’s emblem for this process, an entertainment so perfectly pleasurable that it “paralyze[s]” (IJ 940) the viewer, leaving him “an empty shell” (IJ 508). The book’s conceit is that dissemination of this legendary tape would render Americans void of free will; its bitter joke is that they already are. The round of solitary pleasure offered by “the Entertainment” is perfectly designed to imprison the citizens of the ONAN in the unending satisfaction of their desire, and it is no accident that, according to Joelle van Dyne,

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the opening scene involves two people trapped in the glassy cage of a revolving door, both of them coming over and over again (IJ 938–39). The circular relations between pleasure and compulsion are another version of the annular patterns that dominate Infinite Jest, and permit of no exit for an ONAN-ist; a critique is only possible for a character positioned outside the national addiction to passive amusement, like the Quebecois separatist Rémy Marathe. Ironically, Marathe and his fellow members of the Assassins des Fauteuils Roulants (AFR) are literally immobilized, incapable of independent ambulation, but like Odin’s sacrifice of his eye, the loss of Marathe’s lower members has apparently been compensated for by the gifts of freedom and enlightenment, and it is Marathe who is able both to diagnose the malady and suggest a cure. Strikingly, that cure turns out to be the same one to which William James resorted: the affirmation of the reality of choice. Twice in the course of the nightlong conversation between Marathe and Hugh Steeply, they dwell at some length on the question of choice. In the first instance, their initial topic is the treachery of Rod Tine, chief of the US Office of Unspecified Services, motivated by his “great and maybe even timeless love” for Luria Perec (IJ 105). When Steeply defends the “kind of tragic quality, timeless, musical” of Tine’s love, Marathe responds contemptuously that what Steeply calls love is in fact fanatical attachment. The problem, however, is neither attachment as such nor its degree; in fact Marathe concedes that both are inevitable. Rather, Tine’s problem is that he did not exercise freedom of choice: Are we not all of us fanatics? I say only what you of the U.S.A. pretend you do not know. Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. What you wish to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen . . . Make amusement all you wish. But choose with care. You are what you love . . . For this choice determines all else. No? All other of our you say free choices follow from this: what is our temple. (IJ 107–8)

Steeply makes one more attempt to stand up for overpowering emotions, but for Marathe this is to surrender both freedom and dignity: Then in such a case your temple is self and sentiment. Then in such an instant you are a fanatic of desire, a slave to your individual subjective narrow self’s sentiments; a citizen of nothing. You become a citizen

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of nothing. You are by yourself and alone, kneeling to yourself . . . In a case such as this you become the slave who believes he is free . . . You believe you would die twice for another but in truth would die only for your alone self, its sentiment. (IJ 108)

This is a philosophical dialogue, and although Marathe has the most to say, it would be risky to conclude that the novel endorses his point of view. When he advances a similar argument later it is in the rather more grotesquely comic context of his own marriage to the woman without a skull. During a boozy conversation in a bar with Katherine Gompert, he describes the moment when he rescued his future wife from death and found a meaning for his life. When he first sees her crossing the street and minutes away from being run over by a truck, he is “transfixed by horror inside me, unable to move” (IJ 778). Conversely, the moment he stops thinking about himself, he finds he can act, releasing the brake on his wheelchair and racing to her aid. As he explains it: “The moment broke my moribund chains, Katherine. In one instant and without thought I was allowed to choose something as more important than my thinking of my life” (IJ 778). And although he freely admits that he is now “chained” to his handicapped wife, he still insists, “I needed this woman. Without her to choose over myself, there was only pain and not choosing . . . this choice, Katherine: I made it. It chains me, but the chains are of my choice. The other chains: no. The others were the chains of not choosing.” (IJ 780–81). Like Steeply, Katherine speaks up for “passionate love,” but Marathe diagnoses her need as a soft-focus version of the national addiction to passive pleasure, arguing that “the love you of this country speak of yields none of the pleasure you seek in love. This whole idea of the pleasure and good feelings being what to choose. To give yourself away to. That all choice for you leads there—this pleasure of not choosing” (IJ 781).Similarly, James Incandenza’s film “Infinite Jest,” the mysterious weapon of mass diversion which the AFR seeks to unleash on the United States, will not kill so much as reveal that American culture is “already dead.” As Marathe explains to Steeply: “This appetite to choose death by pleasure if it is available to choose—this appetite of your people unable to choose appetites, this is the death” (IJ 319). It would no doubt be a considerable oversimplification to identify Marathe as Wallace’s spokesman; there is surely something valid in Steeply’s objection: “Now you will say how free are we if you dangle fatal fruit before us and we cannot help ourselves from temptation. And we say ‘human’ to you. We say that one cannot be human without

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freedom” (IJ 320). Not coincidentally, in what is no doubt his most widely read work of prose, namely his 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address, published in book form as This is Water, Wallace, speaking in his own voice, makes a case for the importance of the act of choice in terms that borrow liberally from the ferrovehicular assassin’s lecture: There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship— be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.(TIW 99–102)

Wallace’s speech is in effect an extended paean to the importance of “choice.” The acquisition of the ability to “choose” is, he argues, the whole purpose of a liberal education: “‘learning how to think’ really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed” (TIW 53–55). Nor does an unhosed life exhaust the benefits of selective attention; as he continues, the power of choice takes on truly redemptive implications: “if you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention . . . it will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars: compassion, love, the subsurface unity of all things” (TIW 92–93).6 If, as I have suggested, Infinite Jest should be understood as a kind of Purgatory, a spiritual half-way house, it would be misguided to expect to find salvation for any character. But Hal and Gately, like Dante’s pilgrims, seem to be moving in the direction of freedom, and in each case, the decisive event is the critical choice that they make to assert control over their own lives. Both, to quote James, assert the possibility of “self-governing resistance.” Hal gives up his marijuana habit, and breaks with the consequent immobilizing “marijuana thinking,” and its “paralytic thought-helix” (IJ 335).7 More dramatically, he will break with the institution from which his marijuana habit was a self-defeating escape, the oppressive culture of professional sport, declaring his independence in the opening

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scene of the novel—unfortunately to an audience that is incapable of understanding it. In a book whose leitmotiv is pain, it is given to Don Gately to endure the most excruciating of choices. Lying in his hospital bed, suffering agonies from his bullet wound, he refuses the offer of various pharmaceutical pain relievers. Physically incapacitated, he has no action left for him but that of choice, to resist the drugs that would allay his misery, but at the cost of abandoning the free will he has so painstakingly realized, and shutting the gate on his own self-determination. As with James, the choice is what makes the chooser, or as Wallace remarked elsewhere, “a self is [not] something you just have . . . the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle” (CL 64). I wish to turn now to a second topic in which I will argue that James’s thought offered a model for Wallace, that of religious belief. One of the most discouraging things about the contemporaneous scientific interpretation of the universe for James was that it left no space for either God or meaning. His position was frustratingly difficult because religious options in late nineteenth century were becoming increasingly polarized between the agnosticism/atheism of the scientists and the ever more rigid dogmatism of the High Church apologists, or in America, of protestant fundamentalists. As a consistent celebrator of chance and openness, James was constitutionally opposed to dogmatisms of any sort, but he was also unsatisfied by what he saw as the intellectual intolerance of the hard antitheists, contemporary thinkers such as T. H. Huxley and W. K. Clifford, who argued that faith without evidence was intellectually irresponsible. James’s solution to this dilemma was to reconceptualize faith: though he had not at this point worked out a fully pragmatic conception of truth, in his early defense of belief he is already using something like it to understand the meaning of religious faith in a distinctive way. The truth of faith, he 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. Faith “becomes” true by its results. As James will put it in a later essay, the “verity [of an idea] is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its very-fication.” (Pragmatism 97). This represents a radical detranscendentalizing of religion. No longer Nietzsche’s Platonism for the people, faith is, for James, defined by its efficaciousness in this life and this world, not in any other. The believer, therefore, has a right to believe what truths he may, if those truths give him a reason to live; it is not the substance, but the result of belief that matters.

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The most thorough articulation of this position is offered in what is probably his best-known, and most controversial, lecture, “The Will to Believe,” but his own personal stake in this dispute and his own fear of the implications of the arguments of those who decry faith unsupported by evidence as irresponsible is most clear in an earlier essay, “The Sentiment of Rationality.” This essay not only makes a similar defense of the legitimacy of faith against Huxley and Clifford, but also indicates what most alarmed him about their arguments, for they contained an implicit threat of the sort of paralysis that haunted James’s own intellectual and private life. His rhetoric becomes ever more impassioned as the essay approaches its conclusion: If this really be a moral universe; if by my acts I be a factor of its destinies; if to believe where I may doubt be itself a moral act analogous to voting for a side not yet sure to win,—by what right shall they close in upon me and steadily negate the deepest conceivable function of my being by their preposterous command that I shall stir neither hand nor foot, but remain balancing myself in eternal and insoluble doubt? . . . Yet obvious as this necessity practically is, thousands of innocent magazine readers lie paralyzed and terrified in the network of shallow negations which the leaders of opinion have thrown over their souls . . . And if I, in these last pages, like the mouse in the fable, have gnawed a few of the strings of the sophistical net that has been binding down [their] lion-strength, I shall be more than rewarded for my pains. (Will to Believe 89)

Like James, Wallace struggled with the possibilities of faith in a fundamentally secular world. The question of Wallace’s religious attitudes is a vexed one; he said that he tried twice, unsuccessfully, to join the Catholic church (CW 99); however, it has been argued that he really should be thought of as something of a postmodern Puritan (Theo Anderson). He was no more attracted than the philosopher to institutionalized religion, but he was equally unsatisfied with the vision of the universe offered by atheism.8 The most important parallel between his religious attitudes and those of James, however, is his focus on the consequences of faith in the life of the individual rather than on the nature of the divine. As the passage from the Kenyon address quoted above suggests, it is of little moment to him whether one worships “JC or Allah, . . . YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess.” He is even prepared to accept that “the mystical stuff” is not true (TIW 94). What matters is what a particular faith makes of you: “If you worship money and things . . . then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough . . . Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure

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and you will always feel ugly . . . Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid . . . Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid” (TIW 103–10). In other words, “the capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.” (TIW 129). Additional insight into Wallace’s religious attitudes can be gained by looking at a section of his last, unfinished novel, The Pale King. The subject of that work, the Internal Revenue Service, is not an obviously religious one, but one section clearly wants us to think of James’s reflections on faith in Varieties : the monologue of Chris Fogle. Fogle’s story is one of conversion, not to a particular religious faith, but to faith itself, a commitment to “service” and discipline—“heroism”—that confers a meaning on his world. Fogle, a self-confessed seventies wastoid, has spent his adolescence, to the despair of his father, in a fog of druggy indolence, with sense of neither direction nor purpose, until, as he recalls with a sort of hallucinatory vividness, “the Monday of the last week of regular classes for the Fall ’78 term” (TPK 222–23). As James observes in the chapter on “Conversion” in Varieties, part of the conversion process is an inexplicable change in attitude: “We have a thought . . . repeatedly, but on a certain day the real meaning of the thought peals through us for the first time” (163). In a scene that echoes the annular metaphorics of Infinite Jest, Fogle is sitting in his dorm room, “trying to spin a soccer ball on my finger, and watching the CBS soap opera As the World Turns ” (TPK 223). Apart from the significance of the title, the televisual genre is revealing, since the soap opera creates a parallel social universe ruled by Hegel’s bad infinity, whose existence continues in order to continue its existence. Fogle’s conversion must first involve first an aversion—a turning away from the ever-returning cycle of passivity that constituted his prior existence, “the reiteration of the simple fact of what [he] was doing, which was, of course, nothing” (TPK 225). What makes it possible to change his “direction” (TPK 226) and break out of the “directionless drifting” (TPK 225) and repetitive circling that defined his life hitherto is, ironically, the repetition of something he has heard a hundred times before, but never listened to: the announcer’s familiar declaration, “You’re watching As the World Turns” (TPK 224). When he does listen to this line, the real meaning peals through him for the first time, and he is “suddenly struck by the bare reality of the statement” (TPK 224), and by the slightly delayed recognition of the “show’s almost terrifying pun” about the viewer’s wasting his life while “real things in the world were going on” (TPK 224). This amphibolic revelation prepares the way for the beginning of Fogle’s conversion,

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and it should be no surprise that self-creation by way of the act of choice is crucial to that process: “If I wanted to matter,” he reflects, “I would have to be less free, by deciding to choose in some definite way. Even if it was nothing more than an act of will” (TPK 226). The climax of Fogle’s conversion takes place by way of a similarly fortuitous accident—an apparently wrong turn that takes him to a different classroom from the one he had intended and into one where a substitute Jesuit and former tax assessor is delivering a lecture on Advanced Tax. As he proceeds, the Jesuit’s lecture turns into something like a sermon, as he claims for accounting the aureole of saintliness, and effectively identifies the pallid auditor in his “designated work space” (TPK 232) with the ascetic athlete of God in his cave or atop his pillar: “this is heroism . . . This is effacement, perdurance, sacrifice, honor, doughtiness, valor” (TPK 231). The difference, however, is that this is an entirely private faith, without an audience even in the form of god, and an askesis without heavenly reward. The lecturer ends his “hortation” (as Fogle calls it) with a stern confirmation—“Gentlemen, you are called to account” (TPK 235)— but the account at issue here will not be that of a sinner to his creator, but that of a human being to himself, someone with a life-story that now has a meaning.9 Infinite Jest ’s attitude toward faith is more ambiguous. Certainly the novel’s representations of institutionalized religion are too grotesque to be taken seriously, as in the case, for example, of James Incandenza’s rare commercial success, Blood Sister: One Tough Nun, featuring a “tough and street-smart nun [who] wimple or not still rides her Hawg from parish to parish and still knows akido and is not to be fucked with, is the word on the streets” (IJ 705); or the competitive reminiscences exchanged by two unnamed members of Ennet House about their cults of choice in their abusing days: “And then our Divinely Chosen’s Love Squads made us chop wood with our teeth when it got cold. As in like subzero wintertime.” “Yours let you keep your teeth?” “Only the ones for gnawing. See?” “Sheesh.” (IJ 730)

However, against these hyperbolically satiric vignettes, there are occasional eruptive and redeeming moments of grace, like Mario Incandenza’s spontaneous grasp of the “fuliginous hand” (IJ 971) of Barry Loach, who has made himself look “homeless and disreputable and louse-ridden” in a last-ditch effort to demonstrate that “the basic

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human character wasn’t as unempathetic and necrotic” as his brother thinks (IJ 969). But by far the most important attempt to conceive of a form of religious faith that is possible in a post-metaphysical age is accorded to Gately. His very name may be intended to suggest a religious resonance, with its recollection of Christ’s admonitions in the Sermon on the Mount: “Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in there at:/Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it” (Matthew 7:13–14). To be sure, there is not much that is Christian in an orthodox sense about Gately, who has evidently grown up “with 0 in the way of denominational background or preconceptions” (IJ 443). Yet his disgust with his “Diseased will” (IJ 443) and his desperation to escape the hell of his own creating are as sincere as that of the most Bunyanesque of repentant sinners. The AA/NA program that is Gately’s last hope of course puts a belief in a “Higher Power” at its core. The novel allows space for some reservations about the program’s “Attitude of Platitude”; Blood Sister, according to one character’s reading, is the elder Incandenza’s allegory of “Boston AA as just an exchange of slavish dependence on the bottle/pipe for slavish dependence on meetings and banal shibboleths and robotic piety” (IJ 706), but he is hardly to be taken as a reliable critic. What the novel seems to endorse, however, is not the reality of a Higher Power, or even belief in a Higher Power, so much as the willingness to act as if one believed in a Higher Power. Gately, speaking to an AA meeting, struggles mightily with the group’s enjoinder to surrender to divinity, by staging an opposition between two different conceptions of God. The first is concerned with passive representation, with realizing an adequate idea of the nature of the divine, and at this Gately frankly confesses his utter failure: when he “prays or meditates or tries to achieve a Big-Picture spiritual understanding of God as he can understand Him, he feels Nothing—not nothing but Nothing, an edgeless blankness that somehow feels worse than the unconsidered atheism he Came In with” (IJ 443). Against this he offers a different conception of a religion that is, like that of James, active rather than passive, oriented towards effecting results in this world rather than towards understanding the nature of the other: “His sole experience so far is that he takes one of AA’s very rare specific suggestions and hits the knees in the A.M. and asks for Help and then hits the knees again at bedtime and says Thank You, whether he believes he’s talking to Anything/-body or not, and he somehow gets

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through that day clean” (IJ 443). It is, he freely admits, a form of faith that is indistinguishable from superstition: “He feels about the ritualistic daily Please and Thank You prayers rather like a hitter that’s on a hitting streak and doesn’t change his jock or socks or pre-game routine for as long as he’s on the streak” (IJ 443). Gately recognizes that his accommodation of the mystery of the Godhead to human understanding by way of an “unwashed athletic supporter” (IJ 443) is not likely to persuade the literalist, but this is precisely the point. “The whole defence of religious faith,” affirms James, “hinges upon action” (Will to Believe 32n4). What matters is not the “picture,” but the liberating effect of the act of faith in the individual life, which for Gately means “just how good it is just to be getting through the day without ingesting a Substance” (IJ 444). Gately’s willingness to act as if he believes liberates him from the narcotic that has been paralyzing him, but only insofar as he liberates himself from the effort to understand the Divine Substance, an effort that inevitably brings him into a confrontation with a “Nothingness” that leaves him sick and afraid of life (IJ 444). One of the things that drew Wallace to James, I would argue, is the latter’s lifelong conviction that philosophy should be of some use in the life of the individual. His writings are infused with his belief that his intellectual struggles and the pragmatic reconception of truth that emerged from them could provide real practical help for others, could liberate, in the rather melodramatic but sincere words of “The Sentiment of Rationality,” the “lion-strength” that was the natural endowment of his audience. Wallace shared James’s desire to speak to his readers’s emotional health, declaring his hope that his writing might be “nourishing, redemptive,” that it might apply “CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness” and “illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human” (CW 22, 26). There is however, a distinction to be made, a distinction, perhaps, rooted in the fact that the novelist was always more conscious of the fictionality of fiction and the difference between language and reality. Unlike James, Wallace was sadly aware of the limited power of words to affect the world, regardless of an author’s hopes. So much, at least, is suggested by the curious character of Kate Gompert, who appears in only a few, but highly significant, scenes. She is first introduced to the reader in a passage that looks like the most explicit of all the novel’s allusions to James’s panic fear episode. James’s patient had “his knees drawn up against his chin” and was “black haired” with “greenish skin.” Kate is also first observed from the perspective

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of a visiting doctor, who notes “her knees drawn up to her abdomen and her fingers laced around her knees,” her “black bangs,” and “her face obscured by the either green or yellow case on the plastic pillow” (IJ 68). In Varieties, James calls the panic fear induced in him by the apparition “the worst kind of melancholy” (134); Kate’s misery will later be described by the narrator as “the worst kind of depression” (IJ 695). For James, the real “horror” of the scene was that he could not hold himself back from a vertiginous identification with the patient: “That shape am I, I felt, potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him.” Readers have often seen Kate Gompert as a version of Wallace himself, suffering, like her creator, from a chronic depression and a feeling of “horror . . . Like something horrible is about to happen, the most horrible thing you can imagine” (IJ 73), and the description, on pages 692–98, of the “level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it” she feels is sometimes read as a kind of disguised suicide note. The novel does not give us Kate’s fate, any more than it does that of Hal or Gately; we are left only with possibilities. Tragically, Wallace’s own death indicates one of those possibilities, a fate from which no amount of either literature or philosophy can finally defend us. James’s noble hope was that he might have provided a possible answer to the question of despair; Infinite Jest, wiser perhaps in this regard, seems to confess that literature can leave us at best only with the hope for hope. Notes 1. As is suggested by the role of the endnotes, for example—ordinarily outside of a book’s contents, but here containing vital “insider” information. 2. I do not mean to imply here that either the cause or cure of James’s depressive episodes was in fact philosophical, only that he interpreted his own emotional distress in philosophical terms. As Menand observes, “depression is not a problem, it’s a weather pattern” (25), and such resolution as James achieved probably had more to do with changes in his emotional life, such as his marriage, than with intellectual insights. 3. For a good discussion of the objectivist scientific consensus of the time, and the self-denying ethos it gave rise to, see Levine. 4. Readers have often made comparisons between Hal Incandenza and Hamlet; this connection takes on a further significance in the light of the historian George Cotkin’s argument that William James “in a sense metaphorical and empirical . . . came to construct and interpret his life along the culturally inscribed lines of Hamlet” (41).

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5. Not surprisingly, the players at ETA come to define themselves entirely in terms of their ranking: “‘Hey there, how are you?’: ‘Number eight this week, is how I am.’” (IJ 693). 6. Wallace’s focus on the importance of “attention” is distinctly reminiscent of James’s description of free will in the Principles of Psychology : “The essential achievement of the will, in short, when it is most ‘voluntary,’ is to ATTEND to a difficult object and hold it fast before the mind . . . Effort of attention is thus the essential phenomenon of will.”(1166–67, James’s emphasis). 7. A later note elaborates on the paralyzing effects of marijuana: “Bob Hope-smokers . . . Marijuana-Think themselves into labyrinths of reflexive abstraction that seem to cast doubt on the very possibility of practical functioning, and the mental labor of finding one’s way out consumes all available attention and makes the Bob Hope-smoker look physically torpid and apathetic and amotivated sitting there, when really he is trying to claw his way out of a labyrinth” (IJ 1048n269). 8. “You know, I enjoy church and I enjoy being part of a larger thing. I think it’s just not in my destiny to be part of an institutional religion, because it’s not in my nature to take certain things on faith.” (CW 99). In the original draft of this interview, which Patrick Arden has posted on his own website, Wallace goes on to say: “With atheists it’s fun to say, ‘If you presume that religion has no force, not just literal force but sort of moral or metaphorical force—that none of the point of being here resides in religious stuff—then what is the point of being here?’” (Wallace, “David Foster Wallace Warms Up”). 9. For further a more detailed analysis of the influence of Varieties on this novel, see Marshall Boswell’s article “Trickle-Down Citizenship: Taxes and Civic Responsibility in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King.”

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CH A P T ER

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The Pale King, Or, The White Visitation Brian McHale

Readings The title page reads, The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel. How can one responsibly comment on an unfinished novel, posthumously published, pieced together by an editor from materials retrieved from the author’s workroom? Anything one ventures to say about the lost whole that would have been The Pale King will inevitably be speculative. Where does one even begin? Literally, where does one begin? Since the order of chapters has been determined by the editor, Michael Pietsch, and might well have been different if David Foster Wallace had lived to complete his novel, it is not clear whether the present §1 warrants the kind of interpretive weight we typically give to novelistic beginnings. Nevertheless, accidental or unauthorized though it may be, this beginning does resonate. In the space of two dense paragraphs, it evokes the sensory impressions of a Midwestern landscape on a summer morning—presumably somewhere near Peoria, Illinois, the novel’s main setting; possibly on the very mid-May day in 1985 when several of the characters arrive for “intake processing” at the Internal Revenue Service’s Regional Examination Center there. The text literally draws us into this landscape, addressing us in the second person, metaleptically reaching across the divide between worlds: “Look around you.” It ends by inviting us—no, instructing us—to read this landscape closely, almost microscopically: The pasture’s crows standing at angles, turning up patties to get at the worms underneath, the shapes of the worms incised in the overturned

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dung and baked by the sun all day until hardened, there to stay, tiny vacant lines in rows and inset curls that do not close because head never quite touches tail. Read these. (TPK 4)

A world of death and excrement, yielding hieroglyphs that may be read, if one only knew the code: where have we seen this before? I am reminded (and perhaps I’m not the only one) of another novel in which the patterns of the world appear potentially legible—in which, for instance, “stones [that] the water has left behind shining black wait like writing in a dream, about to make sense printed here along the beach”; in which even raindrops seem to solicit an act of reading: Big globular raindrops, thick as honey, begin to splat into giant asterisks on the pavement, inviting him to look down at the bottom of the text of the day, where footnotes will explain all. He isn’t about to look. Nobody ever said a day has to be juggled into any kind of sense at day’s end. (Pynchon, Gravity’s 108, 107)

The novel I am quoting from, of course, is Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)—another text that, like The Pale King, sometimes reaches metaleptically right across the divide between worlds to buttonhole us, cajoling us, implicating us, even insulting us (“You used to know what these words mean”; “Which do you want it to be?”; “You will want cause and effect. All right.”; “Ha, ha! Caught you with your hands in your pants”) (480, 133, 676, 709).1 This is far from the only echo of Gravity’s Rainbow that I detect in The Pale King, as will become clear in what follows. However, even as I hear the echo, I can’t help but notice a telling difference between these texts. In Pynchon’s, the world is typically poised on the brink of legibility, but the act of reading doesn’t actually happen, or is outright refused (“He isn’t about to look”). Here at the outset, however— granted that it is the outset—Wallace’s text seems, by contrast, to affect a certain confidence that the world can be read. Perhaps Wallace is bluffing, or being ironic; or perhaps he is rebutting his postmodern precursor, the Pynchon of Gravity’s Rainbow: “Read these.”

Anxieties In an influential omnibus review entitled “The Panic of Influence,” A. O. Scott once claimed that Wallace was “haunted by a feeling of belatedness,” of being preempted and overshadowed by his postmodern precursors (39). Another, more constructive and forward-looking

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way of putting this would be to call Wallace a “post-postmodernist,” as many critics have done by now.2 If it means anything beyond sheer sloganeering, “post-postmodernism” surely implies acute consciousness of one’s postmodern precursors, both their imaginative achievements and their limitations, as well as engagement in some kind of creative dialogue with them, potentially ranging from mimicry and pastiche all the way to parody, polemic, and other forms of resistance, rebuttal, and overcoming. The inevitable quote, it would appear, in any discussion of Wallace’s post-postmodern belatedness is the one from his interview with Larry McCaffery in the Review of Contemporary Fiction, where Wallace names names: “If I have a real enemy, a patriarch for my parricide, it’s probably Barth and Coover and Burroughs, even Nabokov and Pynchon” (CW 48). That even is especially interesting and ambiguous, as though Wallace were expressing regret about having to kill off precursors he admired as much as Nabokov and Pynchon.3 Barth and Coover and Burroughs, even Nabokov and Pynchon: all of these father figures are certainly present in Wallace’s fiction, sometimes embraced as models, sometimes slyly subverted, sometimes actively resisted, and even travestied. Robert Coover’s presence seems especially strong in the early short fictions of Girl with Curious Hair, along with that of Donald Barthelme and Max Apple (neither of whom are mentioned in the quote from the McCaffery interview). Barth, whom Marshall Boswell calls Wallace’s “primary fictional father” (Boswell, Understanding 9) is notoriously the object of oedipal resentment in the novella “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” (also from Curious Hair), which, according to the disclaimer on the copyright page, is not only “written in the margins of John Barth’s ‘Lost in the Funhouse” but also in the margins of a story by Cynthia Ozick, another name overlooked in the McCaffery interview. Burroughs’ is a more diffuse presence, detectable perhaps in Wallace’s grotesque bodily humor and elaborate, campy “routines,” but certainly in his preoccupation with addiction and control. The mock-scholarly apparatus of Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962) is surely the main precedent for the over-the-top endnotes of Infinite Jest, and it is impossible to ignore the echo of Nabokov in the title of Wallace’s last novel—though exactly how The Pale King might be related to Pale Fire is harder to say. What about Pynchon? Tom LeClair identifies Wallace as one of three novelists of his generation—along with Richard Powers and William T. Vollmann—who stand in a conspicuously filial relation to Pynchon, and of the three it is Wallace whom he regards as the most

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ambivalent toward Pynchon’s legacy—the most patricidal, shall we say (“Prodigious” 12). Certainly, at the outset of his career Wallace seems to have been all but overwhelmed by the Pynchon precedent. His first novel, The Broom of the System, seems abjectly imitative of the Crying of Lot 49 (1966), hardly more than a rewrite of it.4 Its heroine, Lenore Beadsman, is transparently modeled on Pynchon’s Oedipa Maas; her eccentric shrink, Dr. Jay, seems to owe everything to Dr. Hilarius of Lot 49 ; the plot in both cases is driven by suspicions of an all-encompassing conspiracy; both heroines undertake tours of contemporary subcultures and underworlds; in both cases, the climax is withheld; and so on. Wallace reportedly claimed not to have read Lot 49 until after he had published Broom, which Boswell, for one, finds implausible, so closely does Wallace’s novel appear to be modeled on Pynchon’s.5 I’m inclined to give Wallace the benefit of the doubt here, however. This may be one of those cases, like the pervasive influence of Ulysses on subsequent generations of modernists, where one need not actually have read a novel (as Faulkner, for instance, sometimes professed not to have read Joyce) to pick up everything one needed to know about it second-hand from one’s contemporaries, from writings about the novel, from “common knowledge.” Whether or not Wallace actually knew that he was imitating Pynchon in Broom, he subsequently learned to put up greater resistance to Pynchon’s dangerously attractive precedent—not, however, without leaving traces of his struggle with his precursor. His effort to deflect or inoculate himself against Pynchon’s influence is readily apparent in Infinite Jest, where Wallace takes preemptive action by having a character, Orin Incandenza, use the pseudonym “Jethro Bodine,” adopting the surname of a recurrent Pynchon character.6 Challenged, Orin defends his pseudonym as “A private chuckle,” a little in-joke (IJ 1014 n110). It is Wallace’s “private chuckle” too, of course; but just as not knowing he was imitating Pynchon in Broom didn’t save it from being swamped by the latter’s influence, so the knowingness of his sly little gesture in Infinite Jest doesn’t prevent that novel from being permeated with Pynchon’s presence throughout. That presence is detectable not so much at the level of Infinite Jest ’s plot, world, or characterization—though it is certainly traceable there, too—as at the finer-grained level of incident, phrasing, and local texture. Hal Incandenza, in a disturbing dream, turns his head “to look back at what’s been right there all along, the whole time” (IJ 61–62), just as, time and again throughout Gravity’s Rainbow, ominous faces in dreams and hallucinations turn to look threateningly at the dreamer: “a face he knows begins to turn” (145); “The pilot is

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turning to Rózsavölgyi . . . whose eyes are these, so familiar, smiling hello, I know you, don’t you know me? Don’t you really know me?” (648).7 Rémy Marathe’s and Hugh Steeply’s all-night conversation, perched on a ridge high above Tucson, Arizona, begins with their shadows being projected across the landscape in the “well-known ‘Bröckengespenst ’ phenomenon” (IJ 88; see also 994n38), much as Tyrone Stothrop’s and Geli Tripping’s shadows are projected from the peak of the Brocken itself in Gravity’s Rainbow (334–36). Later that same night, the rising constellations seem to gaze over Marathe’s shoulder (IJ 507–8), recalling the “watchmen of world’s edge” who, from their vantage point far out to sea, bear witness to Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck’s confession to Slothrop on the beach (217–18). The “incredibly potent” drug DMZ, whose “effects are less visual and spatially-cerebral and more like temporally- cerebral and almost ontological” (IJ 170; see also 996n57), seems akin in its effects to Pynchon’s Oneirine, whose “property of time-modulation” means that the crew of the John E. Badass, having ingested a massive dose of the drug, are not where they are supposed to be when a German torpedo intersects with their course: “the two fatal courses intersect in space, but not in time. Not nearly in time, heh, heh” (395). At the climax of the catastrophic Eschaton match in Infinite Jest, the game computer’s hard drive, monitor, and modem are catapulted into the air; in slow motion, the “hardware that’s now at the top of its rainbow’s arc” (IJ 34) descends onto the unfortunate referee. That “rainbow’s arc” is gravity’s rainbow—the parabolic flight path traced by V-2 rockets and other ballistic missiles. I could go on. Many other such details, threaded throughout the texture of Infinite Jest, testify to Pynchon’s presence in Wallace’s text, and in his imagination. They also testify, however, to Wallace’s resistance to his precursor. More often than not, the details that most strongly recall Pynchon have been torqued in some way, displaced or reoriented, reflecting the counterpressure that Wallace exerts against the insistent pressure of Pynchon’s texts. Thus, for example, the ominous turning-face gesture in Infinite Jest has been displaced from the dream figure onto the dreamer himself. This displacement is similar in its antithetical spirit to the worm-trails of The Pale King, natural hieroglyphs that we are urged to read, whereas the equivalent hieroglyphs of Gravity’s Rainbow— wet stones, raindrops—remain illegible or go unread. It’s no accident if this all sounds reminiscent of Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” (introduced in 1973, the same year as Gravity’s Rainbow). Arcane though his apparatus is, Bloom’s basic insights into

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the agonistic relationship of powerful imaginations to their precursors, and the countermoves (swerves, inversions, deflations, etc.) that successors undertake to evade, contain and counteract their precursors’ influence, are amply borne out, first by the postmodernists’ relationship to their modernist precursors, then by the post-postmodernists’ relationship to the postmodernists. Others before me have noticed the relevance of Bloom’s anxiety model to Wallace. For instance, A. O. Scott’s title, “The Panic of Influence,” only kicks Bloom’s “anxiety” up notch; while Boswell argues that Wallace’s “Westward the Course of Empire” amounts to a Bloomian misprision of Barth’s “Funhouse” (Boswell, Understanding 103–4).8 For that matter, Wallace himself seems somewhat uneasily aware of the potentially good fit between Bloom’s account of influence and his own filial (and patricidal) relationship to his precursors. In the same way that he tries to inoculate himself against Pynchon’s influence in Infinite Jest by making a knowing (nudge-nudge, wink-wink) allusion to Gravity’s Rainbow, so he also tries to inoculate himself against Bloom’s anxiety model by preemptively subjecting it to explicit parody (IJ 911; see also 1077n366). How anxious a book, in Bloom’s terms is The Pale King, and anxious about whom? Here, too, as in the McCaffery interview, Wallace names names. Using as his mouthpiece the character “David Wallace,” his fictional alter ego—not a straightforwardly autobiographical figure, by any means, but not entirely divorced from the author’s self, either—Wallace admits to having dreamed “of becoming an immortally great fiction writer à la Gaddis or [Sherwood] Anderson, Balzac or [Georges] Perec” (TPK 73). “Anderson” perhaps indicates Wallace’s career-long commitment to capturing the American Midwest, while “Balzac.” “Perec,” and “Gaddis” perhaps testify to the scale of his ambitions generally.9 What strikes me most in this list of names is the absence of Pynchon from it, which looks to me like evasiveness. If the tip-offs to Pynchon’s intertextual presence in Infinite Jest are certain keywords and phrases—the name “Bodine,” the mention of the “rainbow’s arc,” and so on—then such tip-offs abound in The Pale King as well. Some of these keywords are so closely identified with Pynchon as to almost bear his copyright: “entropy” (TPK 12, 16); “thanatoid” (TPK 68), which pertains to members of a community of TV-addicted zombies in Vineland (1990); and especially, “the preterite,” one of Pynchon’s signature terms, which appears twice in § 24, both times associated with the pseudo-autobiographical character “David Wallace” (TPK 292, 298).10 The presence of such Pynchon trademarks proves nothing in itself, of course, but it does prompt

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one to wonder whether Pynchon’s presence permeates this last novel as it did The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest before it, and what measures Wallace may have taken to evade that influence—even as (presumably) he succumbs to it.

Approaches A case in point: our first approach to the IRS’s Midwestern Regional Examination Center outside Peoria in § 24 (TPK 256–309), for which our guide is none other than “David Wallace,” reconstructing for us his first impressions from notes he claims to have made on the day of his “intake processing” as an IRS examiner. Previous episodes have been set inside the Exam Center, but this is our first look at it from outside. Similarly, we have heard from “David Wallace” before, in the “Author’s Foreword” that has been displaced to § 9,11 but this is the first occasion on which “Wallace” mingles with some of the novel’s other characters. “Wallace’s” first-person narrative is heavily footnoted, and the footnotes feature metaleptic address to the reader, recalling § 1: we are being put in the picture, literally. “Wallace” approaches the Exam Center as a passenger in a minivan packed with new IRS recruits or transfers from other postings, and his account amounts to an exercise in cognitive mapping. He specifies Peoria’s geographical situation, then the center’s location relative to Peoria’s downtown (TPK 265–66), then the beltway and special access road that lead to it (TPK 269–74). As his distance and viewing angle change, different perspectives of the Exam Center come into view, until he finally reaches the main entrance (TPK 274–81). It is a tour-de-force of narrativized description— a description animated and rendered dynamic by the changing position of the experiencer. Once again, I am reminded of Gravity’s Rainbow: our first direct exposure to “The White Visitation,” a country house on the southern coast of England, formerly a mental asylum, now requisitioned to house a psychological-warfare unit, and the setting for crucial episodes in the novel’s plot (84–85). Pynchon works here from the inside out, beginning by plunging us into the house’s backstory and the internal political squabbles of its current inmates, then, in the chapter’s long, virtuosic final paragraph, pulling back from the building to its surroundings. It is the verbal equivalent of a traveling shot: we pass from interior architectural details to exterior ones (balconies, gargoyles), then to a view from further away (“from a distance no two observers . . . see quite the same building,” [84]), then withdraw along the drive and all the way out to the main gate where a sentry

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“stands port-arms in [the] masked headlamps” of an approaching car (84–85). It is just here, where the retreating perspective intersects with the approaching car, that the text shifts into second person: “your masked headlamps”; “you must halt for him” (emphases added). Who is you, exactly? It is hard to say; but it certainly includes us, Pynchon’s readers. Let’s hypothesize that “David Wallace’s” approach to the Exam Center in The Pale King both evokes and resists the model of Pynchon’s White Visitation. I’ll fill in further details of that model below, but for now, let’s consider only Wallace’s strategies of resistance, which so far appear to be twofold: reversed direction and amplification or hypertrophy. Where Pynchon pulls back from the building to its periphery, Wallace, reversing direction, advances toward the building (albeit obliquely and by stages). To put it another way, Wallace in effect places his alter ego in that car that turns up at the check post in the last lines of Pynchon’s chapter: “David Wallace” is you! In addition, Wallace amplifies, inflating an episode that occupied a five-hundred-word paragraph of Gravity’s Rainbow into fifteen dense, footnoted pages of The Pale King. Reversed direction, amplification—to these two we can add a third strategy of resistance, namely displacement. What seems to me to clinch my working hypothesis about “David Wallace’s” first day at the Exam Center is its climax (pun intended). The episode ends on a somewhat scabrous and thoroughly politically incorrect note, when Ms. Chahla Neti-Neti—dubbed by her colleagues “the Iranian Crisis”— fellates “David Wallace” in an electrical closet of the Exam Center, on the mistaken assumption that he is a powerful senior administrator (TPK 308n67, 309). This is, one might say, the very same blow job that the conniving behaviorist Edward Pointsman receives from Maudie Chilkes (171–72), an administrative secretary, in a storage closet of the White Visitation, which Mr. Pointsman interprets (correctly) as sign that he has gained the upper hand in internal power struggles. Wallace displaces that blow job—from the powerful Mr. Pointsman to the powerless “David Wallace,” via a comedy of mistaken identity, and in time from a later phase of Mr. Pointsman’s career to the first day of “Wallace’s”—and in the process torques it, giving it an extra ironic spin beyond what it already had in Pynchon’s scenario.

Talents The Peoria Exam Center of The Pale King and Pynchon’s White Visitation have this much in common, at least: they both belong to

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the same chronotope, in Bakhtin’s sense, the same spatial-temporal category, which we might call the chronotope of the special unit. (In the Service-speak of The Pale King, the preferred term might be the Post; see TPK 244). The “special unit” occupies its own dedicated space—in both of our cases, its own spatially complex building; each has its own special assignment or mission, typically short term rather than permanent; and crucially, each brings together a collection of eccentrics possessing special talents.12 Real-world analogues of the “special unit” of fiction abound. The White Visitation, for instance, seems to have been modeled on a number of wartime institutions, but especially on the decryption unit housed at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, famous for cracking the German Enigma code and for its association with Alan Turing, one of the fathers of computer science.13 The special talents of those assembled at the White Visitation, typically for this chronotope, are extremely heterogeneous. Some of the staffers are conventional scientists (Mr. Pointman’s group), others practice “fringe” science, while still others possess psychic powers. Carroll Eventyr is a spiritualist medium; Ronald Cherrycoke reads people’s minds by handling their personal effects; the Reverend Paul de la Nuit produces strings of numbers through automatic writing; Margaret Quartertone is able to induce distant recording apparatuses to register her voice; and, most bizarrely of all, Gavin Trefoil can modify his skin color at will. Like other institutions belonging to this chronotope, the White Visitation is riven by conflict and incompatibilities among the talents housed under its institutional roof. Different factions reflect different worldviews: scientists versus occultists, and among the scientists themselves, determinists (Mr. Pointsman) versus adherents of stochastic processes (Roger Mexico), and so on. Some of these special talents are more or less decorative, merely serving to add texture, complexity, and comedy to Pynchon’s story word. Others have pivotal narrative functions; for instance, Eventyr’s séances facilitate flashbacks from England in 1944–45 to Weimar-era Berlin. A few serve thematic functions integral to the novel’s deep conceptual design. Of these the most important are Slothrop and “Pirate” Prentice, neither of them staff members of the White Visitation, yet both deeply implicated in its operations. Prentice, a captain in Special Operations, cooperates with the unit housed at the White Visitation, while Slothrop is the main object of its research— its prized guinea pig. Prentice’s talent is the ability to experience other people’s fantasies, and he is assigned to “manage” the fantasy lives of individuals whose time would be better spent on the serious

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business of waging war. Slothrop’s talent, notoriously, involves his sexual response to the V-2 rocket. Many of these same features of the “special unit” are discernible in the Exam Center of The Pale King, despite the incompleteness and fragmentary nature of the text. Lacking the larger framing context that, had he lived to do so, Wallace might have provided (or maybe not), we are compelled to turn for orientation to the “Notes and Asides” gleaned from Wallace’s notebooks and the margins of the surviving typescripts (TPK 539–47). Here we learn that Merrill Erroll Lehrl, the upstart HR Systems Deputy—presumably the “Pale King” of the title (TPK 128)—having displaced the center’s former director, DeWitt Glendenning, is recruiting examiners with special talents.14 (Unless, that is, it is Glendenning who is doing the recruiting—Wallace’s notes are contradictory; see TPK 539). Lehrl (unless it is Glendenning) is on the look out for immersives, examiners with the capacity to utterly lose themselves in concentration (TPK 546–47), an invaluable talent in view of the soul-destroying boredom of examining tax returns, of which we have so much evidence in the course of this novel. The form of the immersives’ talent varies, but apparently in every case it is correlated with childhood trauma (TPK 543), which explains the backstories that are such a conspicuous feature of the text that Wallace left us.15 Thus, for example, Claude Sylvanshine, one of Lehrl’s right-hand men, is a “fact psychic.” Subject to “sudden flashes of insight or awareness [that] are structurally similar to but usually far more tedious and quotidian than the dramatically relevant foreknowledge we normally conceive as ESP or precognition,” Sylvanshine possesses “Random-Fact Intuition,” or RFI (TPK 118). He knows, for instance, all about an observatory in Fort Davis, Texas, on a day in 1974 when an eclipse was predicted, and about the milkman who was boffing the observatory director’s wife (TPK 120); he knows that a trainer at the Exam Center is planning to kill herself, and exactly when and how she plans to do it (TPK 332); he knows all about an incident involving an adult male’s severed thumb (though he doesn’t know whose life that incident belongs to; TPK 415–16); and so on (see also TPK 7, 13, 18, 46, 316). No doubt Sylvanshine’s talent bears some resemblance to Cherrycoke’s “reading” of personal effects at the White Visitation, but it bears even a closer resemblance to “Pirate” Prentice’s talent. Just as Prentice is the fellow who has other people fantasies, so Sylvanshine is the one knows other people’s facts ; indeed, it’s hard not to see Sylvanshine’s talent as torqueing or troping on Prentice’s. Extraordinary as Sylvanshine’s talent is, it is less valuable in the context of the Exam Center’s mission than Chris Fogle’s. Nicknamed

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“Irrelevant” Chris Fogle for his garrulous and digressive storytelling style, he is able to keep track of the exact number of words he speaks, hears, or reads (see TPK 158, 160, 161, 214, 220, 225, 230, 246). He also professes to have a drug-induced capacity for intense self-awareness, which he calls “doubling” (TPK 180–84, 187–88).16 While either of these talents, one might think, would be sufficient to qualify him as an “immersive,” we also learn from the “Notes and Asides” that he may possess knowledge of a 5-digit string that produces total concentration (TPK 539, 541).17 Unfortunately, no trace survives in the text itself, as published, of this aspect of Fogle’s manifold talents. Other examiners’ talents are less fully developed, or left ambiguous. David Cusk concentrates to stave off attacks of copious sweating (TPK 318, 319). Toni Ware is mainly distinguished by her horrifically traumatic childhood experiences—supposedly a good predictor of “immersive” talent—which leave her “damaged goods” (TPK 443); is her talent perhaps related to her ability to “play dead” (TPK 441)? Leonard Stecyk is preternaturally, and ultimately intolerably, nice. Is this talent valuable in some way to the mission of the Exam Center, or has Stecyk been brought in by Lehrl to drive the other examiners crazy, as the “Notes and Asides” suggest (TPK 540)? Lane Dean Jr. seems utterly bereft of “immersive talent,” as does “David Wallace.” And what about the boy who aspires to kiss every part of his body (TPK 394–407)? He is manifestly talented, in a potentially immersive way, but which of the examiners would he grow up to be, if any of them? Finally, the most striking of all the examiners’ talents is Shane Drinion’s. We learn initially that he possesses machine-like intelligence but is defective in reading and relating to interlocutors’ emotional cues, both perhaps symptomatic of Asperger’s syndrome (TPK §46). In these respects he recalls Pynchon’s Marcel, not one of the talented staffers assembled at the White Visitation, but rather a comic-book-style superhero—literally a mechanical man, possessing a powerful intelligence but “unfortunately much too literal with humans” (688).18 Drinion, too, has something of a tin ear for metaphor, humor, irony; “You’re a very literal person,” his fellow examiner Meredith Rand tells him (TPK 481). But Drinion’s most astonishing talent, beyond his intelligence and Asperger’s-like blind spots, is his ability, when lost in concentration, totally immersed, to levitate. As he begins to become immersed in Meredith Rand’s narrative, “no part of his bottom or back is touching the chair,” although the “slight gap between Drinion and the chair”

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is initially so slight that it would pass unnoticed “unless somehow a bright light were shined from the side” (TPK 469). Continuing to listen, he rises higher and higher in his chair, to Meredith’s mild puzzlement (TPK 471, 497–98, 504–5). Levitation while concentrating is a feature of Drinion’s on-the-job performance as well; “One night,” we learn, “someone comes into the office and sees Drinion floating upside down over his desk with his eyes glued to a complex [tax] return” (TPK 485). If, as someone tells us elsewhere, the IRS is on the side of the laws of nature, including the law of gravity (TPK 105), then Drinion seems somehow to be on the other side—the side of lightness of being, the side (despite his humorlessness) of levity. Whatever other meanings might attach to Drinion’s talent, it certainly seems to allude slyly to the motifs of gravity and lightness that run through Gravity’s Rainbow, beginning with its very title.19

Subuniverses Well, so what? So what if the talented pool of staffers assembled at the Midwest Examination Center seem to be displaced and distorted versions of those at Pynchon’s White Visitation? So what if Wallace’s Exam Center belongs to the same chronotope as the White Visitation, and so what if the former appears to be modeled on the latter? What use is it to ferret out these traces of Pynchon’s influence on Wallace? For one thing, if we posit that Wallace’s Exam Center is in some sense a version of the White Visitation, then that could usefully inform our speculations about the ultimate shape that The Pale King might have been moving toward—about the lost whole, of which only these fragments have survived. It might help us fill in some of the gaps and bridge over some of the disconnections that are consequences of the text’s incompleteness. In other words, we might hypothesize that, had he managed to finish his novel, Wallace would have aimed to do with the Midwestern Regional Examination Center something like what Pynchon did with the White Visitation. But this speculation, this “something like,” would also need to take into account Wallace’s resistance to Pynchon, the displacements, deflections, and torqueing symptomatic of his influence anxiety. What, then, is the purpose of this chronotope of the “special unit,” in Wallace as in Pynchon, beyond those functions that I mentioned above—decorative, narrative, thematic—in connection with the unit’s specially talented staff? One hypothesis might be that Pynchon and Wallace share an interest in the way that institutions—in this case, “special units”—both constitute worlds in themselves (microcosms)

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and also project versions of the world at large. I am proposing, in other words, an analysis in the spirit of an influential text of Pynchon’s own historical moment (though there is no reason to think that he himself was particularly aware of it), namely Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality (1966). A seminal contribution to the sociology of knowledge, The Social Construction of Reality treats institutions as apparatuses for producing and sustaining “subuniverses of meaning” that mingle and jostle in modern pluralistic societies. While every society possesses a “shared core universe,” its constituent “partial universes,” associated with different institutions and subcultural enclaves, coexist in a state of competition and mutual accommodation (Berger and Luckmann 79–83, 115 and passim). Institutions, however, are also susceptible of “reification,” in the sense of acquiring a spurious “ontological status,” as though they existed “independent[ly] of human activity and signification” (Berger and Luckmann 84). In other words (though this is not quite the language that Berger and Luckmann use), they risk being mistaken for autonomous worlds. These sorts of insights, it seems to me, animate Pynchon’s treatment of the White Visitation. His “special unit” realizes and dramatizes both aspects of institutions as “subuninverses”: their world-modeling aspect and their world-making aspect. The White Visitation, enclosed within its secure perimeter and housing a heterogeneous population of eccentrics and misfits, constitutes a “small world,” something like a scale model of the wartime world that surrounds it. It can perhaps even be viewed as a mise en abyme, a mirror and microcosm, of the world at large—the world of England at war, of the “war effort.” This reading is perhaps confirmed by the presence at the White Visitation of a certain “long-time schiz,” a holdover from its days as a mental hospital, who believes he is the “War.” Identifying with the War’s ebb and flow, he falls dangerously ill on the day of the Normandy invasion, recovers when the Germans counterattack at the Bulge, and is fated to die (apparently) on V-E Day (133). Does this schizophrenic function as a kind of metonymy, a figure for the institution that shelters him, itself a scale model of the War? As for projecting a world, here the telling episode is the supposed “creation” of the Schwarzkommando. As part of a psychological-warfare campaign to undermine Nazi morale, psywar specialists at the White Visitation fabricate evidence that black conscripts from Germany’s former African colonies are manning V-2 rocket emplacements inside the Reich, and then arrange to plant the evidence where German troops will find it (76, 114–15). Outrageously, as the perpetrators

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of the hoax subsequently learn, it turns out that such black-African rocket troops, the Schwarzkommando, actually exist! The megalomanic director of the fake footage claims credit for literally bringing the Schwartzkommando into being, and a sort of ontological panic ensues at the White Visitation (279–80). Leaving aside its grotesquely comic hyperbole, so typical of Pynchon, this episode can readily be seen, in the spirit of Berger’s and Luckmann’s analysis, as reflecting the way institutions project worlds, or parts of them—the way they function as world-building apparatuses. It is no stretch, I think, to see that Wallace shares with Pynchon, and for that matter with Berger and Luckmann, a long-term fascination with institutions as microcosms and as world-building engines. He has a substantial track record, in his nonfiction writings, of bringing a sociologist’s eye to bear on such institutions as state fairs and cruise ships (in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again), as well as on the adult-video industry, political campaigns, talk radio, and even the Maine Lobster Festival (in Consider the Lobster). Wallace’s fiction, too, foregrounds institutions and the worlds they build. This institutional dimension of his fiction is palpable already in The Broom of the System, with its old-age home, college campus, therapeutic practice, and televangelist ministry, but it becomes more pronounced in his treatment of the tennis academy and halfway house in Infinite Jest, and stronger still in the market research company, glossy-magazine editorial office and cable-TV station of the late stories in Oblivion. Wallace seems fascinated, in his nonfiction and fiction alike, with what we might call the ecologies of institutions, with the special languages they develop as part of their world-building and world-sustaining apparatus, and with their self-perception as scale models of the world at large. “Like all psychically walled communities,” he writes in “Big Red Son,” “the adult industry is rife with code and jargon” (CL 23n18), and he goes on to sample some of it, as he does the technical vocabulary of political campaigning in “Up, Simba!” (CL 167–70) and the specialized register of talk radio in “Host.” The episodes set at ETA in Infinite Jest are shot through with technical language from the registers of sport (tennis) and education, while specialized AA discourse, pharmaceutical terminology, and criminal antilanguage (often glossed; see IJ 201–4, and the endnotes throughout) mingle at Ennet House. Such institutions, their status as “walled communities” reinforced by their use of specialized languages, typically perceive themselves as separate from but also as mirroring the larger society. “So much about today’s adult industry seems like an undeft parody of Hollywood and the nation

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writ large,” Wallace writes (CL 29), while talk-show hosts “(like professionals everywhere) tend to see their industry as a reflection of the real world” (CL 323). With respect to institutions, their ecologies, and the worlds they mirror and project, The Pale King clearly continues the preoccupations found elsewhere in Wallace’s writing. Using nearly the same phrase he had previously applied to the porn industry, Wallace writes of the IRS that “like most insular and (let’s be frank) despised government agents, the Service is rife with special jargon and code ” (TPK 69n; emphasis added); and indeed, Service-speak and IRS nomenclature—often glossed, though not always—are everywhere in this novel (e.g., TPK 242, 244, 305n63). The perception of the IRS as constituting a distinct subuniverse, separate from society at large yet also a microcosm of it, is articulated several times, in different ways, in the course of the novel. A bureaucracy, somebody tells us (but who?), is “a parallel world, both connected to and independent of this one, operating under its own physics and imperatives of cause.” “The bureaucracy is not a closed system,” he or she goes on; “it is this that makes it a world instead of a thing” (TPK 86). Much later, another unidentified speaker declares: “I learned that the world of men as it exists today is a bureaucracy” (TPK 437). The “world of men” is a bureaucracy, and the institution of the IRS, while continuous with that world, forming part of it, is also, perhaps by virtue of its “insularity,” a scale model of it. What “world,” exactly, does the Midwestern Regional Examination Center of The Pale King model and project? Lacking a full “institutional ecology” of the Exam Center, presumably because of the unfinished condition of the text—though of course there’s no guarantee that Wallace would have provided a fuller picture even if he had finished it—we are reduced to speculation. But perhaps we can extrapolate from Pynchon’s The White Visitation, of which the Exam Center appears to be in some sense a version. If the White Visitation models the War en abyme, and projects parts of the War (such as the Schwarzkommando), then perhaps the Exam Center, if we had a full picture of it, would have been seen to model and project nothing less than the United States: America en abyme. But this is only a guess.

Hauntings Nobody, in my view, ever offered a better (or more concise) reading of Gravity’s Rainbow than Laurie Anderson did in her song “Gravity’s Angel,” recorded on her 1984 album, Mister Heartbreak.

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Here, among other things, she reminds us that the world of Gravity’s Rainbow is populated not only by angels but also by ghosts : “this ghost of your other lover walked in.//And stood there. Made of thin air. Full of desire” (Anderson, “Gravity’s Angel”).20 While no episode in Pynchon’s novel precisely corresponds to this incident, 21 Anderson’s insight is nevertheless sound: Gravity’s Rainbow is certainly a haunted novel, one in which ghosts, phantoms, and apparitions abound. A little English girl is haunted by the unquiet ghost of her father, fallen in the war (178–90); Slothrop, on the lam in the north-German countryside, is visited in a dream by the ghost of his friend, Tantivy Mucker-Maffick (561); ambiguous phantoms, somewhere between “likenesses of the dead [and] wraiths of the living,” haunt the underground missile factory where slave laborers were once worked to death (308); and so on. The White Visitation, in particular, is a kind of haunted house, as its name perhaps suggests it ought to be. Though at least two deaths are reported to have occurred on its grounds—including that of the “long-time schiz” who thought he was the War—it is not these dead who haunt the house, but rather the spirits whom Eventyr contacts through his séances. If an eccentric English country house, formerly an insane asylum, with a suggestive name seems a good candidate for haunting, then surely an Internal Revenue Exam Center in Peoria must be a very poor one. Nevertheless, the Exam Center of The Pale King is indeed haunted, so we are told, by at least two ghosts (as opposed to the hallucinatory “phantoms” with which examiners are apt to be afflicted from time to time). One is the ghost of Garrity, who in life had been an inspector for the mirror works that formerly occupied the Exam Center site, and the other that of Blumquist, a tax examiner who actually died at his desk and whose death went unnoticed by his coworkers for four days (§26, §4). The reality of at least one of these ghosts is confirmed when Garrity visits Lane Dean Jr. at his desk (TPK 382–85), and speaks to him using words and allusions that Lane himself does not know (just as James Incandenza’s “wraith” does when he haunts Gately in the hospital nearly the end of Infinite Jest). Garrity can’t be merely a figment of Lane’s imagination, because his knowledge exceeds Lane’s; ergo, he must be real. If the “Notes and Asides” are to be believed, haunting, at least by Blumquist, the deceased examiner, actually improves living examiners’ productivity (TPK 542). If this is so, then the ghosts would have fulfilled the same function as the examiners’ special talents: that of enhancing concentration and helping to counteract the deadening effects of boredom. Ironically, these hauntings are themselves

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boring: boring ghosts, perhaps ghosts of boredom. In this respect, they recall Gravity’s Rainbow yet again: this time, Tchitcherine’s haunting by a phantom who might be Nikolai Ripov, a Stalinist appartchik sent to enforce party discipline, but is just as likely due to the long-term effects of Oneirine, recognized for producing “the dullest hallucinations known to psychopharmacology” (717). In the end, this haunting proves to a real visitation by Ripov, but either way, it would have been equally boring. What is the point, then, of this motif of boring hauntings in The Pale King? Again, given the incomplete status of the text, and consequently the fragmentary nature of the motif itself, it is hard to say for sure. Perhaps, as I’ve just suggested, the ghosts merely function as figures of boredom personified. Whether they do or not, they may also serve to reflect Wallace’s anxiety about Pynchon’s influence, and his resistance to it. Recall A. O Scott’s metaphor, an all but inevitable one is this context: Wallace, he wrote, is “haunted by feeling of belatedness” (emphasis added). The Pale King, we might say, literalizes that metaphor—as did Infinite Jest before it, if we are to believe Tom LeClair, who identifies the wraith of James O. Incandenza that visits a feverish and hallucinating Gately with Pynchon (“Prodigious” 32–33).22 If the ghosts of the Exam Center both personify boredom and are identified with Pynchon, then perhaps this motif can be seen as yet another device for deflating or degrading the literary precursor, for reducing Pynchon’s influence to manageable proportions, cutting it down to size.23

Disappearances One striking feature of The Pale King, as I have already noted more than once, is the presence among its cast of characters of a surrogate of its author, a character named “David Wallace” (§9, §24, §27, perhaps elsewhere).24 The Pale King is in part a pseudo-memoir—“more like a memoir than any kind of made-up story,” “David Wallace” insists (TPK 67; also 70, 73). Its factuality is strenuously asserted, and also slyly discredited. But beyond what appears to be its obvious purpose, that of problematizing life writing and authorial presence, it is hard to speculate about what other purposes “David Wallace” might have served had the real David Wallace (as opposed to the textual one) lived to complete it. Once again, “Notes and Asides” suggests a possibility. A work note, keyed to no particular chapter, reads: “David Wallace disappears—becomes creature of the system” (TPK 546). Here Wallace’s

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debt to Gravity’s Rainbow is so blatant, so undisguised, that one can only assume that, had he lived long enough, he would surely have found some way to skew or camouflage this naked acknowledgment of Pynchon’s influence. Notoriously, Pynchon’s Tyrone Slothrop disappears.25 Dispatched into the Zone, the anarchic, heterogeneous power vacuum that succeeds the fall of Hitler’s Reich, he goes native, gradually losing his identity. He begins “to thin, to scatter” (517); his selfhood disperses. Eventually it becomes “doubtful if he can ever by ‘found’ again, in the conventional sense of ‘positively identified and detained’” (726). The “story about Tyrone Slothrop, who was sent into the Zone to be present at his own assembly—perhaps, heavily paranoid voices have whispered, his time’s assembly,” lacks a punch line: “The plan went wrong. He is being broken down instead, and scattered” (752). In the end, only Seaman Bodine (the character whose name Orin Incandenza appropriated in Infinite Jest) can still manage to see him as some sort of “integral creature” (755). Slothrop’s disappearance is ambivalent. On the one hand, it can be seen as a psychic defeat, a loss of self to the systems of incipient postmodernity; Slothrop, like “David Wallace,” becomes “a creature of the system.” If this is the version of Slothrop’s disappearance that the real David Wallace was modeling the textual “David Wallace’s” on, then this tends to corroborate our uneasy sense of The Pale King as a fivehundred-something-pages suicide note, loaded with premonitions of Wallace’s own self-willed disappearance. But there is another side to Slothrop’s disappearance. It can also be viewed as a liberation, an escape from the “albatross of self” (635) with which Slothrop had been saddled by those who conditioned and manipulated him. In this reading, the programmed self gives way to a condition of “just feeling natural” (638). Moreover, there is even some hope that in his dispersal Slothrop has seeded the Zone, and that “fragments of Slothrop have grown into consistent personae of their own” (757). If Wallace had lived to resolve the fate of “David Wallace,” perhaps the liberatory influence of Pynchon’s model would have leaked or bled through into The Pale King. Sadly, we will never know for sure. The Pale King is, after all, unfinished.26 Notes 1. See Brian McHale, “‘You used to know what these words mean’: Misreading Gravity’s Rainbow,” in Constructing Postmodernism. 2. Stephen J. Burn, Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism, especially 19–26; Robert McLaughlin, “Post-postmodern Discontent: Contemporary Fiction and the Social World”; Robert McLaughlin, “Post-Postmodernism.”

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3. Unless this is a gesture of humility: “If I were so audacious as to claim Nabokov and Pynchon as forebears, I would even have to include them in my patricidal resentment.” 4. See Olsen, “Termite Art”; cf. Boswell, Understanding, 51; Stephen Burn, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (first edition), 14. 5. Boswell, Understanding, 215n18. 6. Stephen Burn reminds me that “Jethro Bodine” was also a character on the long-running CBS sitcom of the 1960s, The Beverly Hillbillies, so Wallace’s allusion here is double, with the sitcom reference perhaps serving to screen and deflect the Pynchon reference. 7. All emphases in these quotes are the authors’. See also the turning-face experience in Jeni Roberts’s nightmare in “Adult World (I),” from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (179–180). 8. I’m not sure I agree, actually: Wallace’s rewriting—or counter writing—of Barth strikes me as just a bit too programmatic, too calculated, to qualify as genuine misprision in Bloom’s sense, which entails a certain degree of un consciousness and inadvertence. In fact, I would even speculate that Wallace’s overt dialogue with Barth might serve to deflect attention away from more genuine sources of anxiety—perhaps including Pynchon. 9. Stephen Burn informs me (personal communication), on the basis of his work on Wallace’s correspondence, that Wallace seems not to have read Gaddis until relatively late, so that his mention of him in 1993’s “E Unibus Pluram” seems unlikely to reflect any particular indebtedness, but just a general recognition of Gaddis’s stature. 10. Cf. “preterition” in “The Suffering Channel” (OB 270, 284). See also this sentence: “A certain amount of situational setup and context to the incident Leonard Stecyk no longer recalls, not even in dreams and peripheral flashes ” (TPK 417; emphasis added). Compare Pynchon: “Those like Slothrop, with the greatest interest in discovering the truth, were thrown back on dreams, psychic flashes, omens, cryptographies, drug-epistemologies . . . ” (Gravity’s 592). 11. In this case, Pietsch, the editor, evidently had explicit authorization for the out-of-order placement of the “Foreword” (TPK vii). 12. Akin to the “special unit” chronotope is that of the “school for superheroes,” where those who possess special talents are trained and nurtured, familiar in popular culture from the X-Men’s academy and the Hogwarts of the Harry Potter series. 13. Bletchley Park itself, since the declassification of its top-secret accomplishments beginning from the 1970s, has yielded a number of fictional treatments, including Christine Brooke-Rose’s novel/memoir Remake (1996) and Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon (1999). 14. Compare, in Gravity’s Rainbow, Mr. Pointsman’s sidelining of Brigadier Pudding as director of the White Visitation by exploiting his survivor’s guilt and masochism. 15. Cf. also Cayce Pollard’s talent, in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2003), which involves knowing intuitively which logos

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will succeed with consumers, but with the downside of being physically allergic to most commercial branding. Cayce’s special talent no doubt descends from the talents of Pynchon’s White Visitation staff. Fogle also reports experiencing his own memories as though they were someone else’s (TPK 162), another echo of Prentice’s talent for having other people’s fantasies Do we catch here another echo of the White Visitation, this time of the number strings of the automatist, Reverend de la Nuit? For instance, Marcel exhaustively parses his fellow-superhero Maximillian’s greeting, “Hey man gimme some skin man” (Gravity’s 688). Cf. the grotesquely comic-ironic experience of “levitation” and “gravity” in Wallace’s “The Suffering Channel” (OB 270, 278, 279). See Brian McHale, “Gravity’s Angels in America, or, Pynchon’s Angelology Revisited.” The closest match is probably Slothrop’s fantasy in which his tryst with Geli Tripping is violently interrupted by the arrival of her “other lover,” Tchitcherine (Gravity’s 298); Tchitcherine, however, is no ghost, but only a figment of Slothrop’s overheated imagination. Recall that the reality of Incandenza’s wraith is confirmed in the same way that the reality of Garrity’s is confirmed in the Pale King : in both cases, the ghost’s vocabulary and range of allusion outstrip his “host’s” knowledge. There is precedent for this strategy in Bloom’s “revisionary ratios,” both in the relationship to the precursor that he calls kenosis, which involves a self-deflation that also serves to deflate the precursor, and in what he calls apophrades, or the return of the dead. See Bloom 14–16 and passim. Cf. sudden, belated appearance of “David Wallace” in last paragraph of “Good Old Neon” (OB 180–81). The first edition of Burn’s Wallace’s Infinite Jest (79), suggests a parallel between the disintegration of Hal’s selfhood in Infinite Jest and Slothrop’s dispersal. My thanks to Lisa Samuels, for asking me (politely), “So what?”

CH A P T ER

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The Novel after David Foster Wallace Andrew Hoberek

In August 1996, around six months after the publication of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Junot Díaz published Drown, the hybrid novel/short story collection1 that grew out of his time in the MFA program at Cornell University. Drown begins like this, We were on our way to the colmado for an errand, a beer for my t ío, when Rafa stood still and tilted his head, as if listening to a message I couldn’t hear, something beamed in from afar. We were close to the colmado; you could hear the music and the gentle clop of drunken voices. I was nine that summer, but my brother was twelve, and he was the one who wanted to see Ysrael, who looked out towards Barbacoa and said, “We should pay that kid a visit.” (3)

This paragraph, the opening of Drown’s first story (or section) “Ysrael,” displays in miniature many of the qualities that characterize the book as a whole: the lyrical first-person voice composed of simple words and the occasional vernacular phrase (“that kid”); the mix of the specific (the unitalicized Spanish words for a kind of general store common in the Dominican Republic, and for uncle) and the universal (childhood, the tension between self and family); the themes of coming-of-age and retrospection. Gestated in an MFA program, Drown in turn became a writing seminar mainstay, a fact no doubt attributable to the way in which it simultaneously exemplified “the large body of work—some would say it is the most characteristic product of the writing program—that most often takes the form of the minimalist short story” (McGurl 32) and extended this body of work into the terrain of multiculturalism and Latino writing.

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Yet Drown went 11 years without a follow up—an interregnum Díaz himself has attributed to a combination of post-9/11 politics and personal issues2 (“An Interview”)—and when his second book did appear, it was very different from the first. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) opens not with the domestic subject matter of minimalism but, on the contrary, nothing less than the history of the Western hemisphere: They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles. Fukú americanus, or more colloquially, fukú— generally a curse or doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World. Also called the fukú of the Admiral because the Admiral was both its midwife and one of its great European victims; despite “discovering” the New World the Admiral died miserable and syphilitic, hearing (dique) divine voices. In Santo Domingo, the Land He Loved Best (what Oscar, at the end, would call the Ground Zero of the New World), the Admiral’s very name has become synonymous with both kinds of fukú, little and large; to say his name aloud or even to hear it is to invite calamity on the heads of you and yours. (1)

If Drown embodies the minimalist characteristics of “exclusion” (in the Ernest Hemingway / Raymond Carver sense of leaving things out of stories), “privacy,” “contemporaneity (a narrow span of story time),” and reduced “verbiage or syntactic complexity,” then Oscar Wao clearly embodies the opposed characteristics of maximalism: “inclusion,” “publicity,” “historicity (the great sprawl of historical fiction),” and amped-up syntax (consider that final sentence, with its parentheses and semicolons).3 Oscar Wao does contain the material of minimalist narrative—family life, ill-fated love affairs, personal failure—but it insists upon mapping these subjects against the larger histories of the Dominican Republic (especially its time under the dictator Rafael Trujillo) and the Dominican diaspora. As Michiko Katkutani wrote in her New York Times review: “It is Mr. Díaz’s achievement in this galvanic novel that he’s fashioned both a big picture window that opens out on the sorrows of Dominican history, and a small, intimate window that reveals one family’s life and loves” (“Travails”). The transition from Drown to Oscar Wao, I would like to suggest, is not just a personal but a broadly literary-historical one: in the period since the mid-1990s, serious American fiction, and to a certain extent

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creative writing programs as well, have turned from minimalism back to the maximalism (embodied at the time by the big postmodern novel a la Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, and Stanley Elkin) that it eclipsed beginning in the mid-1970s. In Díaz’s case, two novels underwrite this transition. One is Michael Chabon’s 2000 book about a pair of comic book creators The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay, which won the Pulitzer Prize and thereby licensed the turn to previously disreputable genre models among a cohort of novelists in their mid- to late-forties including Díaz, Jonathan Lethem, Colson Whitehead, Jennifer Egan, and Aimee Bender. The same shift from minimalism to genre that we see in Díaz’s oeuvre also occurs, a bit earlier, in Chabon’s—indeed, it is the real subject of Chabon’s 1995 novel Wonderboys —and Whitehead’s recent New York Times piece “How to Write” mounts an extended parody of minimalism with its burlesque of “the famous editor-author interaction between Gordon Lish and Ray Carver” and its advice to “Try to keep all the good stuff off the page.”4 The other book is, of course, Infinite Jest, whose influence on Oscar Wao was immediately apparent to Kakutani—so much so, indeed, that she mentioned it twice, describing Díaz’s book as “so original it can only be described as Mario Vargas Llosa meets ‘Star Trek’ meets David Foster Wallace meets Kanye West” and mentioning its profusion of “David Foster Wallace-esque footnotes and asides” (“Travails”). The idea that Oscar Wao’s originality lies in its indebtedness to its sources in fact points toward one of Wallace’s crucial contributions to the twenty-first century novel, a point I will return to in my conclusion. But for now I’d like to take up the second of Kakutani’s claims. The use of footnotes might seem to mark a superficial resemblance between Oscar Wao and Wallace’s most famous novel, but in fact it gets at the heart of the contemporary departure from minimalism. If minimalism is characterized by Hemingwayesque exclusion, by the notion that Whitehead (only slightly) parodies with his advice to “keep all the good stuff off the page,” then Wallace’s footnotes not only put this material back, but also put it back in a state of explicit awkwardness. Footnotes violate the aimed-for transparency and fluency of minimalist prose, gesturing toward academic and other forms of propositional writing and (as anyone who has read Infinite Jest knows) making it both physically and cognitively difficult to coordinate the main narrative and the notes. They function, in this regard, like what Don DeLillo calls, in another context, “the offsetting breeze of Dave’s plainsong— OK then and sort of and no kidding and stuff like this ” (“Informal” 23).

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This stylistic tic—the signature element of Wallace’s voice—does at the level of Wallace’s sentences what the footnotes do at the level of Infinite Jest as a whole, calling even further attention to their departure from “the aestheticized inarticulacy of [minimalism’s] highly crafted, paired-down sentences” (McGurl 300).5 Consider just one inordinately long sentence from Infinite Jest : So on 1 April. Y.D.A.U., when the medical attaché is (it is alleged) insufficiently deft with a Q-Tip on an ulcerated sinal necrosis and is subjected at just 1800h. to a fit of febrile thrushive pique from the florally imbalanced Minister of Home Entertainment, and is by highvolume fiat replaced at the royal bedside by the Prince’s personal physician, who’s summoned by beeper from the Hilton’s sauna, and when the damp personal physician pats the medical attaché on the shoulder and tells him to pay the pique no mind, that it’s just the yeast talking, but to just head on home and unwind and for once make a well-deserved early Wednesday evening of it, and but so when the attaché does get home, at like 1840h., his spacious Boston apartments are empty, the living room lights undimmed, dinner unheated and the attachable tray still in the dishwasher and—worst—of course no entertainment cartridges have been obtained from the Boylston St. InterLace outlet where the medical attaché’s wife, like all the veiled wives and companions of the Prince’s legatees, has a complimentary goodwill account. (IJ 34–35)

This sentence is light years away from the opening sentences of Carver’s aptly titled “Nobody Said Anything”—“I could hear them out in the kitchen. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but they were arguing” (Where 1)—not only in its length and the deliberate sloppiness of its syntax, but also at the level of word choice: the colloquialisms (“and but so,” “at like”), unattached as they might be in a minimalist short story to a first-person narrator6; the medical jargon; the military time notation. We can find an analogue for this, too, in Oscar Wao, which supplements the Carveresque English and Dominican Spanish of Drown with the nerdspeak that the narrator Yunior never quite manages to contain in the dialogue of the would-be science-fiction author who is the book’s title character: “Perhaps if like me he’d been able to hide his otakuness maybe shit would have been easier for him, but he couldn’t. Dude wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber or a Lensman her lens. Couldn’t have passed for Normal if he’d wanted to” (21). As this brief passage suggests, Díaz, perhaps even more than Wallace, takes a kind of pure joy in the violation of the proprieties laid down by minimalist practice and pedagogy.

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Much commentary on Wallace’s place in literary history focuses, quite naturally, on his relationship to postmodernism. Wallace himself preemptively licensed this line of critique with his frequently cited 1993 essay “E Unibus Pluram,” in which he argues that television has “institutionalized” (SFT 68) and thereby defanged the irony that was central to the fiction of Pynchon, Gaddis, Ken Kesey, Don DeLillo, William Burroughs, and Robert Coover (SFT 66). Whereas these authors had worked “to illuminate and explode hypocrisy” (SFT 65) by “exploiting gaps between what’s said and what’s meant, between how things try to appear and how they really are” (SFT 65), television—and the contemporary “image-fiction” (SFT 50 ff.) like Mark Leyner’s 1990 My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist that is complicit with it—offers not resistance but a disempowered, cynical knowingness. Critics’ tendency to pose Wallace in opposition to “a strawman postmodernism” elaborated through an insufficiently critical reading of this essay (Burn, Review 467) ignores, however, a crucial point: Wallace’s Fredric Jameson-influenced account of 1980s and 1990s postmodernism as serving “the ends of spectation and consumption” (SFT 64) is largely political rather than aesthetic. Momentarily setting aside Wallace’s call for a new generation of fiction writers who might be willing to eschew irony and risk “accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Credulity” (SFT 81), his fiction self-evidently draws on many of the devices of postmodernism. Other essays in this collection demonstrate this point in detail, although here we might note one feature of Wallace’s writing in particular. “Ultimately,” Stephen J. Burn has noted, “Wallace seems to have been most consistently appreciative of those postmodern novels that inhabit the zone where modernism and postmodernism shade into each other in the form of the encyclopedic novel” (Reader’s Guide 26–27). The elements that Wallace adopts from encyclopedic postmodernism—the incorporation of multiple (high and low) styles; the intentional violation of canons of good taste, literary and otherwise; and, at the most basic level, a commitment to length rather than excision—all suggest that he turns to postmodernism in reaction against minimalism. Caryn James’s New York Times review of Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System, recognized that Wallace deployed the techniques of postmodernism against a then-dominant minimalism. After noting that “the very mention of a first novel by a 24-year-old barely out of college might make a reader say, ‘enough is enough’—enough pared down, world-weary creative writing projects,” James described Wallace’s first novel as “an enormous surprise, emerging straight from the excessive tradition of Stanley Elkin’s Franchiser, Thomas

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Pynchon’s V, John Irving’s World According to Garp [sic].” “As in those novels,” she wrote, the charm and flaws of David Foster Wallace’s book are due to its exuberance—cartoonish characters, stories within stories, impossible coincidences, a hip but true fondness for pop culture and above all the spirit of playfulness that has slipped away from so much recent fiction. (22)

That Wallace himself understood his fiction as operating in this way is suggested by his less frequently cited criticism, in “E Unibus Pluram,” not of postmodernism but of “the self-conscious catatonia of a platoon of Raymond Carver wannabes” (SFT 64 ). By adducing these writers as an example of “the degree to which televisual values influence the contemporary mood of jaded weltschmerz, self-mocking materialism, blank indifference, and the delusion that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive” (SFT 63), Wallace links it with his discussion of late postmodernist image-fiction as reproducing rather than critiquing television’s own self-mocking irony. Indeed, Wallace himself cites David Leavitt, generally considered a minimalist, as a practitioner of image-fiction for his tendency to imagine “brand loyalty [as] synecdochic of identity, character” (SFT 43). The hinge between these two groups no doubt consists of the Brat Pack writers Bret Easton Ellis, Tama Janowitz, and Jay McInerney, who were the most prominent young literary celebrities when The Broom of the System appeared. Sometimes classified as minimalists (McInerney in particular studied with Carver and Tobias Wolf at Syracuse), the members of the Brat Pack wrote prose characterized by both lean, efficient sentences and a fascination with brand names and the other accouterments of mass culture. A representative paragraph of Ellis’s 1991 American Psycho reads, for instance, “Later, the next night in fact, three of us, Craig McDermott, Courtney and myself, are in a cab heading toward Nell’s and talking about Evian water. Courtney, in an Armani mink, has just admitted, giggling, that she uses Evian for ice cubes, which sparks a conversation about the differences in bottled water, and at Courtney’s request we each try to list as many brands as we can” (247). While Ellis’s fascination with upscale brands, not to mention the extremities of his plot, distinguish the content of his fiction from that of the Carveresque minimalists, his writing bears obvious similarities with theirs at the level of style.7 This style differs markedly from that of both Wallace’s contemporaneous writing and from the majority of literary fiction circa 2012,

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and it is here, with Wallace’s elaboration of an intentional bad form starting at the level of the sentence and extending outward, that we must begin to assess his impact on twenty-first century American writing. Wallace’s intentional violations of proper literary form place his work within another American literary opposition even more long-standing than the one between minimalism and maximalism: the opposition between approved forms and the kind of strategic rule-breaking that characterizes the work of, for instance, Walt Whitman, the Mark Twain of Huckleberry Finn (1884),8 and the Beats. For authors in this tradition (who include, among Wallace’s contemporaries, Dave Eggers), bad form in the aesthetic sense merges with bad form in the social sense to connote sincerity 9: in the process of speaking from one’s deepest self, one cannot bother with, or is indeed actively hindered by the artificiality of, the canons of good form. It is his participation in this periodic revival of bad form, rather than any pursuit of avant-garde innovation (which is often implicitly or explicitly committed to the refinement of form), that constitutes Wallace’s true literary legacy. This helps to explain why Wallace’s example did not in fact initiate a revival of the big postmodern novel. His most obvious heir, in this narrow sense, might be Mark Z. Danielewski, whose 2000 House of Leaves combine Wallace-esque features (footnotes, an obsession with a lost or perhaps apocryphal film) with an ergotic exploration of the novel as a medium. But Danielewski’s work is far from representative, and House of Leaves had much less impact on subsequent fiction than, as I have already suggested, Chabon’s novel of the same year. Indeed, from a somewhat larger perspective, the postmodern novel was not even moribund during the years leading up to Infinite Jest, but had rather relocated from the avant-garde cutting edge to other sites: international fiction (Salman Rushdie, Haruki Murakami), multicultural fiction (Leslie Marmon Silko, Karen Tei Yamashita), even genre fiction (Neal Stephenson, pre-breakout Jonathan Lethem). And if the stylistic elements of high postmodernism increasingly appeared in sites other than experimental fiction, experimental fiction at the same time grew increasingly distinct from postmodernism. While George Saunders is one contemporary experimentalist who has much in common (albeit not length) with Wallace,10 others such as Ben Marcus have very little: Marcus revives a different tradition, descended from figures such as Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, and John Hawkes and invested in the play of language and meaning, the elaboration of new patterns of thought using poetic as well as novelistic techniques.11

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Here James Wood’s notorious 2001 review of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) “Human, All Too Inhuman,” although often criticized for its dismissal of the work of Smith, Wallace, and others, actually offers a number of vital insights into Wallace’s role in recent literary history. Wood groups White Teeth and Infinite Jest, along with Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet (2000), Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (1997), and DeLillo’s Underworld (1997), as examples of the emerging genre he calls “hysterical realism” (41). While this roll call, along with Wood’s invocation of E. M. Forster’s notion of “flat” characters (see Forster 67–78), might suggest that he is offering a critique of high postmodernism, the fact that Infinite Jest is actually the chronologically earliest book here should give us pause. And in fact, Wood’s essay lives up to its title in that what is at stake is clearly a kind of realism. He traces these authors’ problem with characterization, again via Forster, back to Charles Dickens, and his description of their plots begins with characteristically postmodernist forms of irrealism but takes an interesting turn: Recent novels—veritable relics of St. Vitus—by Rushdie, Pynchon, DeLillo, Foster Wallace, and others, have featured a great rock musician who, when born, began immediately to play air guitar in his crib (Rushdie); a talking dog, a mechanical duck, a giant octagonal cheese, and two clocks having a conversation (Pynchon); a nun called Sister Edgar who is obsessed with germs and who may be a reincarnation of J. Edgar Hoover, and a conceptual artist painting retired B-52 bombers in the New Mexico desert (DeLillo); a terrorist group devoted to the liberation of Quebec called the Wheelchair Assassins, and a film so compelling that anyone who sees it dies (Foster Wallace). Zadie Smith’s novel features, among other things: a terrorist Islamic group based in North London with a silly acronym (KEVIN), an animalrights group called FATE, a Jewish scientist who is genetically engineering a mouse, a woman born during an earthquake in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1907; a group of Jehovah’s Witnesses who think that the world is ending on December 31, 1992; and twins, one in Bangladesh and one in London, who both break their noses at about the same time. (41)

As this list reminds us, Underworld and White Teeth are not in fact unrealistic at all. And in general what bothers Wood is not impossibility (Wallace’s lethal entertainment shows up here, but his catapults that shoot American waste into the Great Concavity/Convexity do not) but implausibility, which Wood considers a kind of cheat: “The conventions of realism are not being abolished but, on the contrary,

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exhausted, and overworked. Appropriately, then, objections are not made at the level of verisimilitude, but at the level of morality: this style of writing is not to be faulted because it lacks reality—the usual charge against botched realism—but because it seems evasive of reality while borrowing from realism itself. It is not a cock-up, but a cover-up” (41). Where Wood errs, arguably, is in reducing all kinds of realism to, and judging them by the standard of, one sort: the complex, psychologically fleshed out variety that we associate with writers such as Gustave Flaubert, Henry James, and Forster himself.12 But what he gets right, for our purposes, is describing Wallace as a kind of realist. This makes biographical sense. As Evan Hughes has detailed in a recent piece in New York magazine, Wallace was the youngest member of a literary scene whose members have gone on to success as (in a number of cases quite self-conscious and even militant) realists: Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides, Rick Moody, the memoirist Mary Karr. It is harder to see the similarities between Wallace and Franzen in the wake of Franzen’s 2002 New Yorker essay “Mr. Difficult,” in which he declares his ambivalence about the difficult “Status” novel written by authors such as William Gaddis and his preference for the “Contract” novel based upon “a balancing of self-expression and communication within a group” (How 240).13 “Mr. Difficult” was taken by Ben Marcus and others, not without justification, as a manifesto against experimental writing in general and postmodernism in particular (see Marcus, “Why Experimental Fiction”), but treating Franzen’s essay as a retroactive explanation of his career in fact obscures some crucial points about it. His first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City (1988), looked more like Wallace’s own debut of the year before than anything else: both books departed from minimalist expectations in ways influenced by postmodernism (although Franzen’s story of a scheme by the female former police chief of Bombay, S. Jammu, to monopolize power in St. Louis has more in common with early DeLillo than it does with Pynchon and others); neither made anything like the splash that their authors’ later works would. As Burn has noted in his book on Franzen, both he and Wallace (as well as Richard Powers) represented an emergent “post-postmodernism” that “explicitly looks back to, or dramatizes its roots within, postmodernism” ( Jonathan Franzen 19). If in the works of these writers “the balance between the importance of form and something closer to a conventional plot grounded in a recognizable world . . . is weighted toward plot to a greater degree than in the work of the postmodernists” ( Jonathan Franzen 20), nonetheless their writing constitutes “a development from, rather than an

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explicit rejection of, the preceding movement” ( Jonathan Franzen 19). In the long view, Wallace and Franzen are less opposites (champion of postmodern difficulty versus proponent of realist engagement) than opposite ends of a spectrum defining an emerging cohort of writers who sought to assimilate the postmodern tradition in the interests of replacing one unnecessarily narrow version of realism (minimalism) with a more expansive version harkening back to Dickens and others. The big postmodern novel was, for this cohort, not an end in itself but a route back to a different kind of bigness: the large-scale, sprawling, multicharacter narrative that dominated nineteenth-century realism and, indeed, the novels that preceded it. One way to understand Infinite Jest, I would suggest, is as a return not to postmodernism but to the form of the novel in place before even the rules of realism were fully formulated, when the novel strove for the impression of social mimesis, but had not chosen this as its singular mission and had not yet fully formulated its strategies for doing so.14 In contrast to Wood’s complaints that Infinite Jest fails to participate in the putatively progressive development of realism via the ever-increasing refinement of psychological depth, we might instead see Wallace as engaged in a project of exploring the various strategies by which the novel seeks to represent reality. As Elizabeth Freudenthal suggests, Wallace is not so much unable to convey psychological depth as committed to the elaboration of “anti-interiority” as a mode of subjectivity that is “founded in the material world of both objects and biological bodies and divested from an essentialist notion of inner emotional, psychological, and spiritual life” (192). Freudenthal identifies Wallace’s fascination with pharmaceuticals and the recovery movement as key sites for this project, and with this in mind we can see how Franzen’s 2001 The Corrections, with its formal as well as thematic exploration of senile dementia and antidepressants, moves beyond the traditional realism Franzen has since come to champion (albeit perhaps in less thoroughgoing ways than the work of authors such as Wallace and Powers).15 In a similarly-nuanced reading of Infinite Jest, Samuel Cohen has noted,“The joyousness of Wallace’s pastiches, his perfect ear not only for the way other people talk but also for the way other writers write, his inclination to take in all the culture in which he swims” (75). Cohen here emphasizes the latter term to get at the friendly dimensions of Wallace’s relationship with postmodernism, but it’s worth lingering over Wallace’s engagement with “the way other people talk” insofar as this has long been a central preoccupation of realist representation. While DeLillo’s pseudonymous 1980 novel Amazons

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(cowritten with Sue Buck and published under the name Cleo Birdwell) inspired the dialogue of Infinite Jest ’s Quebecois separatists, for instance,16 something different seems to be going on in the sections involving the Alcoholics Anonymous member Don Gately. Consider, for instance, this passage about Gately’s pre-AA life as a drug addict and housebreaker: As an active drug addict, Gately was distinguished by his ferocious and jolly élan. He kept his big square chin up and his smile wide, but he bowed neither toward nor away from any man. He took zero in the way of shit and was a cheery but implacable exponent of the Don’t-Get-Mad-Get-Even school. Like for instance once, after he’d done a really unpleasant three-month bit in Revere Holding on nothing more than a remorseless North Shore Assistant District Attorney’s circumstantial suspicion, finally getting out after 92 days when his P.D. got the charges dismissed on a right-to-speedy brief, Gately and a trusted associate paid a semiprofessional visit to the private home of this Assistant D.A. whose zeal and warrant had cost Gately a nasty impromptu detox on the floor of his little holding-cell. (IJ 55)

As third-person narration rather than dialogue, this passage might seem to be even less interested in “the way people talk” than the dialogue of Wallace’s separatists. But the hallmark of this passage—and indeed of all the subsequent passages involving Gately, Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, and the various Boston-area AA chapters—is the mixture of the narrator’s writerly diction (“ferocious and jolly élan”) with other fragments of speech clearly reflective of Gately and his Boston underclass milieu (“He took zero in the way of shit”; “Like for instance once”; even the abbreviation of Public Defender). This is no less artificial in its way, of course, than Steeply and Marathe’s dialogue. Its formal analogue, however, is not postmodernism but rather, perhaps surprisingly, the Boston crime novels of Dennis Lehane and the Boston-set films (many based on Lehane’s books) that have proven reliable Oscar-bait since 1997’s Good Will Hunting. With their fascination with the white ethnic southern New England accent, these novels and films are perhaps the contemporary epicenter of a realist interest in “how other people talk,” one with obvious continuities to the local color tradition. And insofar as Gately’s dialect serves to distinguish him and his compatriots from the students of ETA and others from different backgrounds, it serves (like local color more generally) one of the classic goals of the realist tradition, which is the concrete representation of class and other forms of social difference.17

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Lehane early on demonstrates a similar interest in mapping the social terrain of Boston. Speaking of the African American woman he has been hired to find, for instance, Patrick Kenzie, the narrator of Lehane’s 1994 A Drink Before the War, writes, Jenna Angeline, like me, was born and raised in Dorchester. The casual visitor to the city might think this would serve as a nice common denominator between Jenna and myself, a bond—however minimal— forged by location: two people who started out of their separate chutes at identical hash marks. But the casual visitor would be wrong. Jenna Angeline’s Dorchester and my Dorchester have about as much in common as Atlanta, Georgia, and Russian Georgia. (17)

As the invocation of the two Georgias makes clear, Lehane is interested in a difference that goes beyond language, even if language is his tool for representing it. Here we might speculate that amidst the late twentieth-century dominance of minimalism—and, on a longer scale, the rise since the late nineteenth century of the kind of psychologically inflected realism that Wood champions—genre fiction became a preserve for some of the traditional functions of realism. Hence the fact, toward which I’ve been driving, that the most realistic parts of Infinite Jest are also the ones that sound, to our Dennis Lehane and Ben Affleck trained ears, the most like genre fiction. With this in mind we can begin to understand why Wallace’s DNA is if anything more apparent in the work of contemporary realists than of experimental writers. This work includes, of course, writing by Wallace’s cohort, including two major novels—Franzen’s Freedom (2010) and Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot (2011)—that are among the recent subgenre of books that contain “direct allusions to Infinite Jest ” or characters based on Wallace (Burn, Reader’s Guide 2–3). But it is not by any means limited to books by these authors. Egan provides an interesting case since she combines an interest in genre models with a more traditionally realistic bent—although the distinction seems like less of a distinction if we think about her work in relation to Wallace’s. Consider, for instance, Chapter 12 of Egan’s 2010 A Visit From the Goon Squad. This is perhaps the most remarked upon section of the book because it is the most formally innovative, told entirely in the form of a PowerPoint presentation by the teenaged daughter of Sasha, the woman Egan introduces at the start of the novel as the assistant to record executive Bennie Salizar. Alison has not been born in these early passages, and indeed Chapter 12

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is set in the reader’s future, as we learn from the date—“May 14th & 15th, 202-”—on her second slide (177). This slightly estranged near-future setting should immediately remind us of both The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest, and in fact the whole chapter can be read as an homage to the long section of Infinite Jest devoted to the Interdependence Day screening of Mario Incandenza’s film, based on his dead father’s The ONANtiad, about the origins of the ONAN (IJ 380–442). Where Wallace alternates between elaborate transcriptions of the on-screen action, descriptions of it, and accounts of the screening itself, Egan simply gives the PowerPoint; where Wallace specifies the font size of the headlines that “Mario as auteur” employs in imitation of “his late father’s parodic device of mixing real and fake news-summary cartridges, magazine articles, and historical headers” (IJ 391), Egan simply presents texts in various fonts. In this way Egan goes even further than Wallace in offering a formal concomitant to what Freudenthal describes as anti-interiority’s representation of subjectivity in the interface between the mind and the material world: the PowerPoint reveals Alison to be, like Mario, most able to express herself through the indirect procedures of art. Dana Spiotta employs a similar technique in her own rock novel Stone Arabia (2011), which incorporates portions of the character Nik Kranis’s massive, multimedia history of his fictional career as a rock star. In Egan’s case especially, this technique risks, in Wallace’s words, “accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Credulity.”18 Elsewhere, though, Egan turns her science-fictional setting, as Wallace often does his, to the satirical intensification of contemporary social tendencies: “Alex glanced over at Rebecca, who scorned the term ‘pointer’ and would politely but firmly correct anyone who used it to describe Cara-Ann . . . Now that Starfish, or kiddie handsets, were ubiquitous, any child who could point was able to download music—the youngest buyer on record being a three-month old in Atlanta, who’d purchased a song by Nine Inch Nails called ‘Ga-ga’” (254). In a reading of Infinite Jest as a novel of artistic development, Cohen suggests that the opening scene in which Hal Incandenza struggles to convey his thoughts to a group of college administrators investigating his academic record can be understood as an image of profound anxiety not only about Hal’s personal coming of age but also whether “the artist will ever escape his influences and grow out of his clever youth” and whether “the contemporary American novel will ever reckon with its postmodern inheritance and find whatever form it will take next” (76). But in the wake of modernism and postmodernism, asking what form the novel will take next is inevitably

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implicated in what Cohen elsewhere cannily describes as “the generic expectation of literary history [as] a story of innovation, of radical breaks driven by the Bloomian urge to slay the literary father or by historical changes that render current forms unusable” (73). From this perspective the most important thing about Wallace’s fiction may well be that it refuses the imperative to absolute originality that drove novelistic innovation throughout the twentieth century. As I have been suggesting, Wallace’s work, and Infinite Jest in particular, reside at the tipping point of a major shift not in experimental fiction but in realism: from the small-scale domestic dramas of Carveresque minimalism to a revival of the large-scale, sprawling, multicharacter novel. But there is good reason not to understand this shift as some sort of advance on previous literature. As McGurl points out, the terms “minimalism” and “maximalism” describe not stages in a progressive literary history (Hemingway, following Stein, invents a better way of writing fiction) but rather poles between which particular works, and particular moments in literary history, swing (377). As we have seen, Wallace, so far from moving beyond postmodernism, in fact employs it to license a renewed maximalism. This renewed maximalism returns, moreover, not only to Pynchon and other postmodernists, but also to the premodernist novel—sprawling, multicharacter, unafraid of mass culture—that was temporarily displaced from the main line of literary history by the modernist and postmodernist drive for literary progress. Infinite Jest ’s account of Johnny Gentle’s obsessive-compulsive program for projecting US waste outside of US territory can be seen, in this light, as a subtle parody of the modernist-postmodernist drive to eschew any form that has already been employed. We might see the waste and detritus everywhere in Wallace’s novel, that is, as a figure for the remnants of literary history itself that modernism and postmodernism continually tried to push away.19 Wallace’s books invited American writers to see literary history not as a series of outmoded styles waiting to be superseded, but rather as a storehouse of formal options (whether realist, experimental, or generic) awaiting renewal. Surveying contemporary fiction, one sees ample evidence that Wallace’s contemporaries and successors have taken him up on his offer. Notes 1. In an interview published on the BookBrowse website, Díaz says: “Since its inception, Drown was neither a novel nor a story collection, but something a little more hybrid, a little more creolized. Which was why we didn’t put ‘Stories’ or ‘A Novel’ on the cover. We wanted

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3. 4.

5. 6.

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folks to decide what it was, as long as they didn’t foreclose that it could also be something else” (“An Interview”). In response to a question from the BookBrowse interviewer about the 11-year period between his books, Díaz says: “I wish I could have written four, five books in the span of those years. Just couldn’t do it. Didn’t help that the novel I was trying to write at the start of that period was about the destruction of New York City by a psychic terrorist . . . a novel that 9/11 ended real fast. Had to rethink the whole thing, was too busy experiencing the transformations in-country to write about them in an interesting way . . . But it was more than just being sideswiped by history. Other stuff. Being scared, for sure. I can put the pressure on myself like nobody’s business. Years of depression didn’t help (if you’d grown up in my family you would have been depressed too). My own struggle against myself” (“An Interview”). These qualities are taken from McGurl (377). Whitehead writes: “What isn’t said is as important as what is said. In many classic short stories, the real action occurs in the silences. Try to keep all the good stuff off the page. Some ‘real world’ practice might help. The next time your partner comes home, ignore his or her existence for 30 minutes, and then blurt out ‘That’s it!’ and drive the car onto the neighbor’s lawn. When your children approach at bedtime, squeeze their shoulders meaningfully and, if you’re a woman, smear your lipstick across your face with the back of your wrist, or, if you’re a man, weep violently until they say, ‘It’s O.K., Dad.’ Drink out of a chipped mug, a souvenir from a family vacation or weekend getaway in better times, one that can trigger a two-paragraph compare/contrast description later on. It’s a bit like Method acting” (“How to Write”). McGurl is here speaking specifically about Carver, but the point clearly applies to minimalism as a whole. Carver: “I elbowed George. I thought he would wake up and say something to them so they would feel guilty and stop. But George is such an asshole” (1). Walter Benn Michaels argues that Ellis’s interest in brands marks his old-school realist difference from the identity-focused mainstream of late twentieth-century writing: “It’s this interest in money and class rather than culture and race that establishes American Psycho as the novel of manners (rather than mores) it declares itself (beginning with an epigraph from Judith Martin) to be, with its notorious insistence on documenting the dinners, the toys, and above all the clothes of its ‘yuppie scum’ and with its establishment of [Patrick] Bateman himself as the rightful heir of men like Edith Wharton’s Larry Lefferts” (150). I include Twain at the suggestion of Stephen Burn, who notes (personal correspondence) that Huck Finn is the source of Wallace’s beloved word “fantods” and that there is an annotated copy of the

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9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

novel in Wallace’s archive at the University of Texas. Huck Finn is apposite in another sense, if we bear in mind that we mean the novel as it actually exists and not the one that Hemingway nominates, contingent on an act of proto-minimalist editing worthy of Gordon Lish—“If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating”—as the source of “All modern American literature” (22). For other accounts of Wallace’s relationship to the category of sincerity, see Giles, “Sentimental Posthumanism” and Konstantinou. Burn limns Wallace’s influence on Saunders in Reader’s 9–12. Marcus’s writing is to my mind highly illuminated by Michael Clune’s account of how the poet John Ashberry draws upon the representational techniques of novels to “familiarize” his radically unfamiliar images. Clune argues, for instance, that Ashberry “uses dialogue to show ‘all that remains unsaid’ about a thing, to provide the thing with a background, to demonstrate its familiar shape . . . By placing a thing in dialogue, placing it between people, he transforms it from a surprising juxtaposition to a familiar thing instantly recognizable to the ‘anyone’ of a world. Another way to put this is that dialogue kills Ashberry’s figures” (454). Marcus, especially in his most recent novel The Flame Alphabet (2012), similarly embeds his unusual images in an implicitly quotidian but largely unexplained context to make us apprehend the strange as though it should be familiar. Forster, notably, doesn’t collapse this distinction. He acknowledges that Dickens was not so much uninterested in or bad at characterization as he was committed to a different version of it. “Nearly every one [of Dickens’s characters] can be summed up in a sentence,” Forster writes, “and yet there is this wonderful feeling of human depth.” While Dickens “ought to be bad . . . his immense success with types suggests that there may be more in flatness than the severer critics admit” (71). “I craved academic and hipster respect,” Franzen writes, “of the kind that Pynchon and Gaddis got and Saul Bellow and Ann Beattie didn’t. But Bellow and Beattie, not to mention Dickens and Conrad and Bronte and Dostoevsky and Christina Stead, were the writers I actually, unhipply enjoyed reading” (How 247). The English novelist Tom McCarthy suggests in his study Tintin and the Secret of Literature that the early novel’s struggle to ally itself “to solid values of honesty and accuracy” often led to the most transparently artificial devices: the scenes in which the hero of Don Quixote reads and discusses the manuscript in which he is supposedly appearing, for instance, cannot in fact be read mimetically, but can only function as “paradox and playfulness” (5–6). This is the reason why early novels like Quixote and, in the English canon, Tristram Shandy, are sometimes incorrectly identified as the first works of postmodernism. Burn notes the resonances between “Wallace’s love

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of adjectivally inflated titles” and the “overly explanatory titles” of the first English novels (Reader’s 24) in the midst of a more general survey of Wallace’s indebtedness to the novelistic tradition through James Joyce (Reader’s 23–25). Rachel Greenwald Smith’s “Postmodernism and the Affective Turn,” on Powers’s experimentation with nonindividualist modes of subjectivity in the Echo Maker (2006), offers a companion piece to Freudenthal’s account of Infinite Jest. See Burn, Reader’s Guide 26. I would argue for a connection (both through Amazons and independently) with Pynchon as well. For example, the conversations between the separatist Marathe—with his comically convoluted syntax, incorrect idioms, and article confusion—and the cross-dressing American agent Hugh Steeply— with his clipped, hard-boiled diction—seem to me to bear the imprint of Pierce Inversarity’s “Lamont Cranston voice” (3) in the Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and the exaggerated accents Pynchon periodically gives other characters. By the same token, the phone conversations between Hal Incandenza and his brother Orin— “Why do I always get the feeling I’m interrupting you in the middle of some like vigorous self-abuse session?” It was Orin’s voice. “It’s always multiple rings. Then you’re always a little breathless when you do.” “Do what.” “A certain sweaty urgency to your voice. Are you one of the 99% of adolescent males, Hallie?” (IJ 135–36) —capture perfectly the bluff, masculine tone of much of DeLillo’s dialogue, especially that of the earlier novels. The connection between Wallace and Lehane becomes clearer when we recall Fredric Jameson’s account of Raymond Chandler as “primarily a stylist,” whose “sentences are collages of heterogeneous materials, of odd linguistic scraps, figures of speech, colloquialisms, place names, and local sayings, all laboriously pasted together in an illusion of continuous discourse” (“On Raymond” 123–24). At the same time, Jameson notes how Chandler’s detective Philip Marlowe serves a realist function: “As an involuntary explorer of the society, Marlowe visits either those places you don’t look at or those you can’t look at: the anonymous or the wealthy and secretive” (128), and in this way “the form of Chandler’s books reflects an initial American separation of people from each other, their need to be linked by some external force (in this case the detective) if they are ever to be fitted together as parts of the same picture puzzle” (131). One slide, for instance, is titled “What I’m Afraid Of,” and consists of various sizes of panels featuring the statements, “That the solar panels were a time machine,” “That I’m a grown-up women coming back to this place after many years,” and (in a series of embedded windows), “That my parents are gone, and our house isn’t ours

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anymore. It’s a broken-down ruin with no one in it. Living here all together was so sweet. Even when we fought. It felt like it would never end. I’ll always miss it” (241). 19. Heather Houser, who reads Infinite Jest ’s obsession with waste thematically, as an index of its “environmental imagination of toxification” (Houser 130), also sees the novel’s form as cognate with its thematic concerns, suggesting that it explores whether “excess” can function as “a peculiar form of control” (131).

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C on tr ibu t or s

Kasia Boddy is a lecturer in the English Faculty at Cambridge University. She has published extensively on contemporary US fiction, and her books include The American Short Story since 1950 (2010) and, as editor, The New Penguin Book of American Short Stories (2011). Marshall Boswell is the author of Understanding David Foster Wallace (2003) and John Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered Irony in Motion (2001). He served as guest editor for a two-part special issue of Studies in the Novel devoted to Wallace’s work as a novelist. In addition, he is the author of Trouble with Girls (2003), and a short story collection, Alternative Atlanta (2005), a novel. He is professor and chair of the Department of English at Rhodes College in Memphis, TN. Stephen J. Burn is the author of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: A Reader’s Guide (2003, 2012), and Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism (2008). He is the editor of Conversations with David Foster Wallace, and coeditor of Intersections: Essays on Richard Powers. He is associate professor at Northern Michigan University, and is currently editing a volume of David Foster Wallace’s letters. David H. Evans is associate professor in the English Department at Dalhousie University, where his specialty is twentieth-century American literature. His publications include William Faulkner, William James and the American Pragmatic Tradition (2008), and articles on Herman Melville, Robert Frost, Flannery O’Connor, and Don DeLillo, among others. He is currently working on a book-length study entitled The Plot for America: the Fate of Epic Vision in 20th Century American Narrative. Clare Hayes-Brady received her doctorate from Trinity College Dublin in 2011, on communication in the work of David Foster Wallace. She has presented and published widely on Wallace’s work, as well as on other aspects of contemporary literature including film and transatlantic exchange. She is currently working on a critical overview of Wallace’s work, with particular attention to his short fiction.

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Andrew Hoberek is associate professor of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia, where he teaches twentieth- and twenty-first-century US literature. The author of The Twilight of the Middle Class: Post-World War II American Fiction and White-Collar Work, he is currently pursuing (among other things) a project on contemporary writers’ relationship to genre fiction. He is a member of both Post45 (www.post45.org) and the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (http://artsofthepresent.org). Mary K. Holland is assistant professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz. Her book, Succeeding Postmodernism: Language and Humanism in Contemporary American Fiction (Continuum, 2013), reads twenty-first-century fiction as returning to humanism and realism through poststructuralism, using works by Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Mark Danielewski, A. M. Homes, Cormac McCarthy, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Steve Tomasula. Recent essays on literature and film appear in Critique and The Journal of Popular Culture. Brian McHale is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at the Ohio State University. He is one of the founding members of Project Narrative at Ohio State, and served as president of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) in 2010–11. The author of three books on postmodernist fiction and poetry—Postmodernist Fiction (1987), Constructing Postmodernism (1992), and The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole: Postmodernist Long Poems (2004)—he has also published many articles on modernism and postmodernism, narrative theory, and science fiction. He is coeditor, with Randall Stevenson, of the Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Literatures in English (2006); with David Herman and James Phelan of Teaching Narrative Theory (2010); with Luc Herman and Inger Dalsgaard of the Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon (2012); and with Joe Bray and Alison Gibbons of the Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature (2012). Roberto Natalini is an Italian mathematician and research director at the Istituto per le Applicazioni del Calcolo of the Italian National Research Council. His scientific work is focused on Partial Differential Equations, and a variety of areas of applied mathematics, including mathematical biology and the conservation of monuments. He is known for his work popularizing mathematics, and he is one of the principal contributors to the Archivio DFW Italia, the main reference source for Italian readers of Wallace’s works.

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Patrick O’Donnell is professor and chair of the Department of English at Michigan State University. He has authored and edited a dozen books on twentieth- and twenty-first-century American and British fiction including, most recently, The American Novel Now: American Fiction Since 1980 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), The Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century American Fiction (coedited; Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), and Approaches to Teaching Faulkner’s AS I LAY DYING (coedited; MLA, 2011). He is currently completing a book on the contemporary British novelist, David Mitchell. Paul Quinn is a freelance writer, independent scholar, and documentarian. He has written on contemporary, modernist, and postmodernist literature for various publications including the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, PN Review, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, and Poetry Review. He has also produced numerous documentaries, interviews, and essays on literature, the arts, and cultural history for the BBC. Endnotes, a documentary he produced about David Foster Wallace, was first broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 2011.

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Inde x

Abbot, Edwin A., 94 Alter, Robert, 61 Anderson, Laurie, 205–6 Apple, Max, 193 Bacon, Francis, 83n20 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 37–8, 39, 40, 67, 83n19, 199 Ballard, J. G. The Atrocity Exhibition, 109, 128n5 “Notes Toward a Nervous Breakdown,” 128n5 “The Secret History of World War 3,” 128n5 War Fever, 128n5 Barth, John, 27, 31, 66, 72–3, 99, 125, 159, 209n8 “Ambrose his Mark,” 25 The Floating Opera, 85n28 “Glossolalia,” 129n15 “The Literature of Exhaustion,” 25 Lost in the Funhouse, 25, 109, 129n15 “Lost in the Funhouse,” 25, 30, 32, 157, 193 “Menelaiad,” 25 Sabbatical, 18 “Seven Additional Author’s Notes,” 129n15 The Tidewater Tales, 85n28 Barthelme, Donald, 27 “At the End of the Mechanical Age,” 111 “Paraguay,” 30 Barthes, Roland, 28 S/Z , 2 Barzun, Jacques, 29

Bateson, Gregory, 84n21 Baudrillard, Jean, 88–91, 122 Beckett, Samuel Film, 83n20 Murphy, 83n20 Berger, Peter, 203–4 Berman, Morris, 84n26 Berte, Leigh Ann, 96 Bewitched, 118 Birkerts, Sven, 81n4 Blake, William, 83–4n20 Bloom, Harold, 39, 63, 194–7, 209n8, 210n23 The Anxiety of Influence, 26 Boddy, Kasia, 83n19 Borges, Jorge Luis, 88–91 Boswell, Marshall, 22n1, 34, 40n1, 41n4, 41n12, 59, 60, 84n23, 100, 127n1, 129n6, 129n10–11, 189n9, 193, 194, 196, 209n8 “A Gesture Toward Understanding David Foster Wallace,” 93 Understanding David Foster Wallace, 82n6 Brooke-Rose, Christine, 209n13 Büchner, Georg, 71 Burgess, Anthony, 41n10 Burn, Stephen J., 102–3, 151, 156, 169n5, 209n6, 209n9, 210n25, 215 “The Machine-Language of the Muscles,” 82n7 “A Paradigm for the Life of Consciousness,” 82n10 Burroughs, William, 193 Butler, Judith, 136

246

INDEX

Cantor, Georg, 44–6, 48, 56, 83n17 Carroll, Lewis, 88 Carver, Raymond, 28, 30, 128n1, 214 What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, 33 “The Writer as Teacher,” 32 Cavell, Stanley, 37–9 In Quest of the Ordinary, 41n15 “Othello and the State of the Other,” 41n14 Pursuits of Happiness, 41n15 Chabon, Michael, 213, 217 Cixous, Hélène, 137 Clifford, William Kingdon, 182, 183 Cohen, Samuel, 81n5, 220, 223–4 Conroy, Frank, 41n8 Coover, Robert, 28, 193 Pricksongs and Descants, 25 Danielewski, Mark Z., 217 Dante, 177 Dedekind, Richard, 44 DeLillo, Don, 66–8, 70, 73, 77, 83n15 Amazons, 220–1 End Zone, 82n12 Great Jones Street, 66, 82n11 Mao II, 62, 63 Ratner’s Star, 48, 56, 57n3, 66–7, 82n12 De Man, Paul, 28 Derrida, Jacques, 137, 144–5 “The Double Session,” 82n8 “Plato’s Pharmacy,” 82n8 Díaz, Junot, 224–5n1–2 The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, 212–13, 214 Drown, 211–13, 214 Dickens, Charles, 14, 218, 220 Dostoevsky, Fyodor The Brothers Karamozov, 63, 82n6 Eco, Umberto The Name of the Rose, 99

Egan, Jennifer A Visit from the Goon Squad, 222–3, 227–8n18 Eggers, Dave, 105–6n6 Eisenstadt, Jill, 27 Ellis, Brett Easton, 56n1, 216, 225n7 Less Than Zero, 27, 30, 34, 41n10 Lunar Park, 27 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 178 Eugenides, Jeffrey The Marriage Plot, 222 The Virgin Suicides, 142 Exorcist, The, 168–9n1 Fisketjon, Gary, 27, 30 Foer, Jonathan Safran, 157 Forster, E.M., 218, 226n12 Francesco di Giorgio Martini, 89 Franzen, Jonathan The Corrections, 83n15, 220 “Farther Away,” 133–4, 158, 161 Freedom, 222 “Mr. Difficult,” 219, 226n13 “My Father’s Brain,” 64 The Twenty-Seventh City, 219 Frye, Northrop, 8 Gaddis, William, 209n9, 219 J.R., 63 Gardner, John, 36, 41n8 On Becoming a Novelist, 32 On Moral Fiction, 32, 41n15 Gass, William, 27, 32, 159 Omensetter’s Luck, 25 Gibson, William, 209–10n15 Giles, Paul, 98, 103 Grazulis, Thomas P., 101, 104 Griffiths, Frederick and Stanley j. Rabinowitz Novel Epics: Gogol, Dostoevsky, and National Narrative, 81n1 Hager, Chris, 49, 50 Haraway, Donna, 28, 37 Harris, Charles B., 85n28, 94, 128n1

INDEX

Harris, Thomas, 83n18 Harvey, David, 105 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 68, 132, 149n2 Hemingway, Ernest, 226 Hempel, Amy, 28 Hills, Rust, 27 Hobbes, Thomas, 68 Holland, Mary K., 81n2 Howard, Gerald, 40n2 Hughes, Evan, 219 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 182, 183 Hyde, Lewis, 168 James, William, 60, 171–5, 179, 181–8, 188n2, 188n4, 189n6 “The Sentiment of Rationality,” 187 The Varieties of Religious Experience, 173, 184, 188, 189n9 “The Will to Believe,” 183 Jameson, Fredric, 7–8, 25, 28, 29, 37, 65–6, 85n28, 215 Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Captialism, 78, 84n27 Jarrett, Keith, 34 Jayne, Julian The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 68 Jenkins, Walter, 29 Johnson, Sally, 142–3, 149n6 Joyce, James, 35, 82n6, 106n6 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 35, 100 Ulysses, 63, 76, 89, 99 Kant, Emmanuel Critique of Judgment, 15 Kennick, William, ix Kierkegaard, Søren, 60, 68, 84n23 Kimmel, Michael, 138–9, 140 Kristeva, Julia, 144, 149n4, 150n10

247

Lacan, Jacques, 28, 41n4, 60, 129n11 Laing, R. D., 71–8, 84n23 The Divided Self, 71, 76, 77, 78, 83n20, 85n28 The Politics of Experience, 85n28 Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature, 90 Leavitt, David, 28, 30, 216 Martin Bauman, 40n3 LeClair, Tom, 60, 84n22, 193–4 Lee, Chang-rae, 24 Lehane, Dennis, 221–2, 227n17 Lelchuck, Alan, 41n12 Lethem, Jonathan, 28 L’Heureux, John, 41n8 Lipsky, David, 31, 41n9, 129n7 Lish, Gordon, 28, 30, 41n3 Luckmann, Thomas, 203–4 Lukács, Georg, 153–4, 164–5 Luria, A.R., 80 Lynch, David, 4–6, 71 Lost Highway, 83n17 Malick, Terrence, 125 Days of Heaven, 130n17 Tree of Life, 130n17 Marcus, Ben, 217, 219, 226n11 Martone, Michael “Flatness,” 88, 106n10 Max, D.T., 41n15, 61, 82n8, 106n8 McCaffery, Larry, 27 McCarthy, Cormac, 25, 40n1 McCarthy, Tom, 226n14 McElroy, Joseph, 66 McGurl, Mark, 23–4, 224 McHale, Brian, 79 McInerney, Jay, 216 Bright Lights Big City, 28 McLean, Paul D., 66–7, 69–79, 80, 83n16 McMurty, Larry, 40n1 Mendelson, Edward, 22n3 Möbius, August Ferdinand, 52 Moore, Lorrie, 24 Moore, Steven, 34–5, 40n2

248

INDEX

Nabokov, Vladimir, 155–6, 168, 193 Nagel, Thomas, 67 Natalini, Roberto, 82n7, 84n24 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 182 Norris, Frank, 10 O’Brien, Tim, 157 Ozick, Cynthia, 193 Perec, Georges, 80, 85n29 Perloff, Marjorie, 28 Peterson, Dale, 81n1 Pietsch, Michael, 60, 75, 101–2, 109, 169n5, 191, 209n11 Pinker, Steven, 166–8 Powers, Richard, ix, 64, 83n15, 157 Puccini, Giacomo, 63 Pynchon, Thomas The Crying of Lot 49, 2, 14, 21, 22n2, 95, 97, 105n4, 194, 227n16 Gravity’s Rainbow, 192–5, 197–208, 209n10, 209–10n14–18, 210n21 Mason & Dixon, 95 Vineland, 105n4, 196 Quinn, Paul, 82n7 Ricoeur, Paul, 132, 134, 135, 149n5 Riemann, Bernhard, 53, 56 Roth, Philip, 41n12, 157 The Anatomy Lesson, 59, 71, 83n18 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 68 Ryerson, James, 41n16, 93, 103–4, 172 Ryle, Gilbert, 68 Sacks, Oliver, 77 St. Ignatius Loyola, 100, 105n6 Sandou, Victorien, 63 Saunders, George, 217 Scott, A.O., 192, 196, 207 Shakespeare, William, 82n6 Hamlet, 63, 65, 73

Spark, Debra 20 Under 30, 28 Sperry, Robert, 67 Spiotta, Dana, 223 Staggs, Daniel, 101 Stephenson, Neal, 209n13 Reamde, 92 Some Remarks, 105n Stilgoe, John R., 95 Tartt, Donna, 28 Tolstoy, Leo, 13 Twain, Mark, 217, 225–6n8 Updike, John, 170n8 Toward the End of Time, 108 Vermeer, Johannes, 123, 124 Wallace, David Foster “Adult World (I),” 101, 123, 209n7 “Adult World (II), 110, 123 “All Things To One Man,” 40n2 “Another Pioneer,” 153, 159–60 “Authority and American Usage,” 95–6, 167 “Big Red Son,” 204–5 Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, 107–130 “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,” 105n1, 117–121 “Brief Interview #2,” 117–18 “Brief Interview #11,” 117–18 “Brief Interview #20,” 110, 119–21, 125, 136, 138, 143–6 “Brief Interview #28,” 118 “Brief Interview #46,” 118 “Brief Interview #42,” 170n8 The Broom of the System, ix, 1–22, 26, 30, 64, 71, 72, 82n1, 92, 95, 134–6, 138–9, 140, 141, 144, 146, 147, 149n4, 149n9, 150n13, 194, 204, 215–16 “A Church Not Made of Hands,” 110–12, 123–5, 128n4, 129n8, 130n19

INDEX

Consider the Lobster, 128n3 “Consider the Lobster,” 3 “Crash of 62,” 40n2 “Deciderization 2007—a Special Report,” 163 “The Depressed Person,” 116–17, 127, 156–7 “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley,” 48, 93–4 “The Devil is a Busy Man,” 110, 128n4 “The Empty Plenum: David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress,” 22n1, 133, 134 “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” 23–5, 28, 62, 98, 107, 168, 178, 215–16 Everything and More, 44–9, 54, 57n6, 93, 104, 126, 129n11 “Everything is Green, 25, 33, 38, 40n2 “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young,” 24, 27–8, 38 “Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All” (“Ticket to the Fair”), 96 Girl with Curious Hair, 23–42, 64, 108 “Girl with Curious Hair,” 34–6, 40n2 “Good Old Neon,” 45, 65, 152, 155–8, 166–8, 169n6, 210n24 “Here and There,” 31–2, 35, 38–9, 40n2, 154–5 “Host,” 204–5 Infinite Jest, ix, xi, 26, 46–52, 54–6, 57n3, 59–85, 87–9, 91, 93, 95, 102–3, 104, 107–8, 116–17, 136–7, 139–41, 144, 165–6, 168, 170n8, 171, 175–82, 185–8, 188n1, 188–9n4–5, 189n7, 194–6, 206–7, 208, 211, 221–4, 227n16 “John Billy,” 25, 38, 40n2, 159

249

“Little Expressionless Animals,” 29, 36–7, 39, 40n2 “Luckily the Account Representative Knew CPR,” 26, 38–9, 40n2 “Lyndon,” 26, 29, 38, 39 “The Math Melodrama,” 44 “Mister Squishy,” 91, 152, 161–4, 204 “My Appearance,” 37 “The Nature of Fun,” 62–4, 70, 79 Oblivion, 65, 91, 97, 108 “Oblivion,” 147–8, 152, 153 “Octet,” 110, 121–3, 127 “Other Math,” 40n2 The Pale King, 61, 64–5, 71–3, 82n9, 84n25, 85n29, 91, 99–104, 105n5, 130n19, 136, 137–8, 141–2, 149–50n9–13, 156–7, 163, 168, 169n6, 184–5, 191–3, 195–202, 205–8, 209n10, 210n16–17, 210n22 “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,” 152–3 “Rabbit Resurrected,” 170n8 “A Radically Condensed History of Post-Industrial Life,” 111–12 “Say Never,” 35, 40n2 “The Soul is Not a Smithy,” 152, 164–5 “The Suffering Channel,” 97–8, 151, 158–9, 164, 170n8, 204, 209n10, 210n19 A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, 5, 83n17 “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” 108 This is Water, 51, 97, 160–1, 163, 181, 183–4 “Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko,” 159 “Up, Simba!,” 204 “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s,” 98–9

250

INDEX

Wallace, David Foster —Continued “Westward the Course of Empire takes its Way,” x, 23, 25–7, 29–31, 33, 40n2, 43, 88, 90, 93, 101, 105, 154, 162, 193, 209n8 “Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Borders (XXIV),” 110, 112, 125–6 Weierstrass, Karl, 44–6 West, Rebecca, 172 Whitehead, Colson, 213, 225n4 Wilde, Alan, 33

Williams, William Carlos, 114 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1, 3–6, 15, 37, 155, 167, 169n4, 172 The Philosophical Investigations, 4 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 41n11 Wizard of Oz , 104, 106n8 Wood, James, 218–20 Žižek, Slavoj, 132, 134, 137, 143 The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology, 16

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