Global Wallace: David Foster Wallace and World Literature 9781501320668, 9781501320699, 9781501320682

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David Foster Wallace Studies Vol. 1 Series Editor Stephen J. Burn, University of Glasgow, UK

Advisory Board Kasia Boddy, University of Cambridge, UK Marshall Boswell, Rhodes College, USA Paul Giles, University of Sydney, Australia Luc Herman, University of Antwerp, Belgium Mary K. Holland, The State University of New York at New Paltz, USA Steven Moore, Independent Scholar, USA

Volumes in the Series Vol. 1. Global Wallace Lucas Thompson Vol. 2. The Wallace Effect Marshall Boswell Vol. 3. Wallace’s Dialects (forthcoming) Mary Shapiro

Global Wallace David Foster Wallace and World Literature Lucas Thompson

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2017 Paperback edition first published 2018 Copyright © Lucas Thompson, 2017 Cover design: Daniel Benneworth-Gray Cover image © Creative Commons All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Thompson, Lucas, author. Title: Global Wallace : David Foster Wallace and world literature / Lucas Thompson. Other titles: David Foster Wallace and world literature Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. | Series: David Foster Wallace studies ; 1 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016020576 (print) | LCCN 2016037003 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501320668 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501320675 (ePub) | ISBN 9781501320682 (ePDF) Subjects: LCSH: Wallace, David Foster–Criticism and interpretation. | American literature–Foreign influences. | Internationalism in literature. | Literature and society–United States–History–20th century. | American fiction–20th century–History and criticism. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM/ General. | LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General. Classification: LCC PS3573.A425635 Z88 2016 (print) | LCC PS3573.A425635 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016020576 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-2066-8 PB: 978-1-5013-4270-7 ePub: 978-1-5013-2067-5 ePDF: 978-1-5013-2068-2 Series: David Foster Wallace Studies Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed and bound in the United States of America To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

for Catherine

Contents Series Editor’s Introduction

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Introduction. Wallace and the World “Territorial reconfigurations”: Wallace and world literary space

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Wallace and World Literature A genealogy of world literature Resisting Bloom’s “Influenza”: Influence and intertextuality An Emersonian pragmatist: Wallace’s global quotations

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Wallace and Latin America “The wacko Latins”: Manuel Puig and the lure of Latin  American experimentalists Depoliticizing Manuel Puig and Jamaica Kincaid Code-­scrambling Borges Programming literary influence

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Wallace and Russia Wallace’s Dostoevsky obsession Retelling The Death of Ivan Ilyich in “Good Old Neon” Holographic influence

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Wallace and Eastern Europe: Kafka and Others High art precedents: Wallace and the European literary   tradition Posthumanizing Kafka Wallace’s Kafkaesque comic sensibility A literary “touchstone”: Transposing Kafka French Existentialism’s Afterlives: Wallace and the Fiction of   the US South “Ooohhh, the big, sexy like philosophical term”: Wallace and   French existentialism Walker Percy and “ontological insecurity”

25 36 46

51 59 71 85

93 106 111 117 117 126 142 155

161 161 170

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Flannery O’Connor’s “bloody grace” Americanizing existentialism 6

African-American Appropriations: Race, Hip-Hop, and Popular   Anthropology The “erasure of difference”: Wallace and race “Another Pioneer” and popular anthropology Ms. Chahla Neti-Neti and Joseph Campbell Signifying Rappers: Wallace’s racial ethnography Wallace as intertextual “sampler”

Conclusion. “It’s a Small Continent After All”? Wallace and the World Acknowledgments Bibliography Index

180 190

197 197 205 216 220 232

237 245 247 265

Series Editor’s Introduction Lucas Thompson’s Global Wallace is the first volume in Bloomsbury’s new series, David Foster Wallace Studies. The series is driven by the belief that the exponential growth in interest in Wallace’s work during recent years necessitates a corresponding evolution in the way we think about Wallace’s writing. It is no longer necessary to make a case for Wallace’s worthiness as a subject of scholarly attention when, as Jonathan Franzen notes, “a literary establishment that had never so much as short-­listed one of his books for a national prize [has] now united to declare him a lost national treasure.”1 Nor, as books and essays on Wallace proliferate, is it necessary to offer a book-­bybook appraisal of a body of work that has already received its preliminary surveys, and whose abiding obsessions and contours are largely clear. What is now needed is work that has absorbed the lessons of earlier scholarship and is ready to move Wallace criticism into new areas, rather than, as N. Katherine Hayles writes of Mark Taylor, acting as if the critic were “Robinson Crusoe, surveying a trackless beach, when in fact there are critical footprints everywhere.”2 This series attempts to facilitate that movement by publishing volumes that find a way to alter the horizons of Wallace scholarship. The focus of some of these volumes will be Wallace-­intensive, taking as their goal the need to develop new perspectives on the now extant body of Wallace’s work; others will respond to the particularly urgent need to see Wallace in context, putting his work back into its vibrant literary, social, and cultural context. Whether re-­formulating the axioms of Wallace criticism, bringing his work into dialogue with unexplored theoretical models, or remapping the coordinates that govern our understanding of contemporary fiction, the series will emphasize work that does not re-­invent the wheel, but builds on earlier scholarship in an effort to genuinely advance Wallace studies. Wallace criticism really begins in the early 1990s, though with few exceptions,3 his significance for academics at this time hinged almost entirely Jonathan Franzen, Farther Away (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 2012), 38. N. Katherine Hayles, “Rewiring Literary Criticism,” review of Rewiring the Real, by Mark C. Taylor, Los Angeles Review of Books, June 15, 2013, accessed April 21, 2016. Online access: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/rewiring-­literary-criticism/. 3 Some notable examples would include a group of short essays, in an ANQ issue devoted to “The Future of American Fiction,” which singled Wallace out as “a young writer worth watching”; earlier still, Neil D. Isaacs devoted a page to discussing “the figure of the stand-­ up comedian” in Broom. See, Steven Moore, “Fin de Siecle,” ANQ 5 (1992): 224; and Neil D. Isaacs, “Fiction Night at the Comedy Club,” New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly 11 (1989): 309. 1 2

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on his writing about rap music.4 With the publication of Infinite Jest (1996), this critical asymmetry was gradually corrected thanks, in part, to the novel’s obvious cultural range and significance, but perhaps also to the quality of the early essays—by Tom LeClair, Hayles, and Frank Cioffi—devoted to it. Built over these foundations, twenty-­first-century Wallace criticism remains, at its best, a diverse field that “contains within itself an open . . . dialogue on the viabilities of its major methodological choices,”5 and it is important not to oversimplify its variety. Some of the most innovative recent approaches, for instance, manage to convincingly read Wallace’s work through unexpected dialogues with numismatics (Jeffrey Severs), approaches to the “infowhelm” (Heather Houser), and institutional frameworks (Mark McGurl). Nevertheless—and with that caveat in mind—it is possible to trace some of the field’s most persistent preoccupations. Perhaps the first lesson we learn when looking back on the extant body of Wallace scholarship is that to write about Wallace for many critics is to write about the mechanics of literary influence. For good reasons, Wallace scholarship has carried on a kind of stereoscopic project, where the Wallace text under investigation is read in parallel with some antecedent work that is laid alongside it. This approach was inaugurated by LeClair’s pioneering reading of Infinite Jest as the work of a “Pynchon protégé,”6 was extended in early note articles linking Wallace to Stendhal (by Timothy Jacobs) and Shakespeare (by Jonathan Goodwin), and continued through Marshall Boswell’s alert reading of Broom’s dialogue with Updike to Brian McHale’s account of submerged Pynchonian traces in The Pale King. The second lesson we learn is about the Americanness of Wallace’s American literature. By far the most common reference points that Wallace scholarship invokes are to what Steven Moore calls the “totemic postmodern masterpieces” that key American writers produced in Wallace’s formative years (Moore, more expansive than most, identifies Pynchon, Gaddis, Delany, Coover, Barthelme, Barth and Sorrentino as the central figures).7 Even where more cosmopolitan traditions are envisaged, overseas writers (most often Dostoevsky) tend to be normalized to fit within a narrow American trajectory. See, among others, David Sanjek, “ ‘Don’t Have to DJ No More’: Sampling and the ‘Autonomous’ Creator,” Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal 10 (1991): 607–24; Gregory Stephens, “Interracial Dialogue in Rap Music,” New Formations 16 (1992): 62–79; and Philip V. Bohlman, “Musicology as a Political Act,” Journal of Musicology 11 (1993): 411–36. 5 Eric Hayot, “Against Periodization; or, On Institutional Time,” New Literary History 42 (2011): 739. 6 Tom LeClair, “The Prodigious Fiction of Richard Powers, William Vollmann, and David Foster Wallace,” Critique 38 (1996): 36. 7 Moore, “In Memoriam David Foster Wallace,” Modernism/Modernity 16 (2009): 1. 4

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Neither trend is entirely aberrant. Reading Wallace in stereoscopic fashion has persisted, in part, because it responds to a real dimension of Wallace’s artistic practice. Equally, properly rigorous accounts of Wallace’s specifically American literary ancestry—such as Charles B. Harris’s exemplary reading of Wallace’s relation to Barth—deepen our understanding of the writer’s national reference points. These two approaches, then, have provided what we might think of as the generative axioms for some of the best Wallace scholarship to date, yet at the same time these axioms also mark the explanatory horizons of this approach to understanding of Wallace’s writing. It may be, for instance, that Wallace’s intertextual compositional process typically requires an appeal to an ancillary text, yet it has been rare for critics to formalize their discussion of Wallace’s patch writing into a larger model of cultural transmission. Equally, while we need to better understand Wallace’s American engagements, we need to do so without effacing, for instance, his fascination with Latin American writers, which stems back at least as far as his seminal exposure to the Boom writers in Andrew Parker’s classes at Amherst. Part of the significance of Lucas Thompson’s monograph precisely lies in its axial reconsideration of these elements of Wallace studies. In addressing Wallace’s varied revisionary strategies, Thompson engages with and critiques received models for cultural transmission—notably Harold Bloom’s map of “enigmatic patterns” between poets8—while he also formulates Wallace’s conception of literary influence in fluid terms that move across a sequence of different analogies (the programmer, the holograph and so on) as the writer’s career progressed. This framework allows him to offer a pioneering challenge to the orthodox view of Wallace’s American genealogy, which is replaced by the most expansive map to date of Wallace’s eclectic reading. The familiar white male core of US postmodernism is convincingly supplemented by both much richer accounts of literary ancestors that have been (in some cases) only partially acknowledged (from Dostoevsky, through Kafka, to Walker Percy), and by a sequence of unexpected names (from Jean Rhys to Jamaica Kincaid). Thompson’s approach is simultaneously centrifugal— reaching out from Wallace’s texts to connect his writing to larger currents in World Literary studies—and centripetal—probing into the core of Wallace’s working procedures, especially as they are revealed by his archival materials. In this latter respect, Thompson seems to me to have examined the Harry Ransom Center’s archive of Wallace’s paper in more detail than any other critic, and I find it hard to imagine a serious Wallace reader who will not learn something new about Wallace’s work from these pages. Indeed, while D.T. Harold Bloom, The Anatomy of Influence (New Haven: Yale, 2011), 4.

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Max’s indispensable Every Love Story is a Ghost Story (2012) has provided us with the most extensive account of Wallace’s life that we currently have, it necessarily did so in the typical mode of biography that privileges the suffering man over the story of books such as Oblivion; Thompson’s volume might, on one level, be thought of as the counterpoint to Max’s project, inasmuch as its exhaustive archival dimension restores the biography of the books. There is still significant critical work to be done on Wallace’s American genealogy,9 and perhaps such research might begin by trying to think beyond the novel. For all the references Wallace made to Louise Glück and other poets, for example, scholars have rarely explored the importance of poetry to his work. Similarly, while Wallace described reading Donald Barthelme’s “The Balloon” as a seminal moment in his growth as a writer, with few exceptions (notable, albeit brief, comparisons by Mary K. Holland and Lee Konstantinou), the duration of his relevance to Wallace’s growth has rarely been discussed. How might the combination of adult and childlike perspectives in “Me and Miss Mandible” map onto “The Soul is Not a Smithy”? How does Barthelme’s use of just one side of an interview (the questioner’s) for part of “Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel” relate to Wallace’s own interview-­based narration? In somewhat larger terms, Wallace’s place within writer networks might also merit investigation, especially in relation to Somerville, Massachusetts, where Wallace, Franzen, and Richard Powers all lived in the 1980s. Yet, as Thompson persuasively shows, this is only one part of Wallace’s story, and his fiction’s scope needs to be rethought beyond national boundaries. Global Wallace is, in my view, a fitting volume to open this series both because of the way it enlarges our previously narrow understanding of Wallace’s contexts, and because of the rigor and quality of its insights. Those insights open up new avenues for investigation—I find myself wondering, for instance, how Wallace’s interest in Craig Raine’s Haydn and the Valve Trumpet (1990), for instance, might be read in dialogue with Martian poetry and what Cioffi called Wallace’s tendency to “syntactically reinvent . . . the English language”10—but they are also a timely companion to our growing understanding of Wallace’s global influence. If Thompson demonstrates that Wallace drew on larger swathes of world culture than readers have previously recognized, then it is also true that Wallace is himself beginning to exert a more expansive influence beyond the boundaries of his Thompson, himself, has contributed to such work in his essay “ ‘Books are Made out of Books’: David Foster Wallace and Cormac McCarthy,” Cormac McCarthy Journal 13 (2015): 3–26. 10 Cioffi, “ ‘An Anguish Become Thing’: Narrative as Performance in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest,” Narrative 8 (2000): 162. 9

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Anglo-American readership. Wallace’s standing in Italy, for example, is sufficiently strong to sustain the first journal issue devoted to exploring his engagement with mathematics, and sufficiently widespread to prompt critics to lament his influence on writers such as Alessandro Raveggi.11 Similarly, growing interest in Finland has prompted the publication of an edited volume titled Mitä David Foster Wallace Tarkoittaa? (What Does David Foster Wallace Mean?).12 Readers in English—like those in other countries—are themselves still coming to terms with what Wallace meant, but Global Wallace reminds us that that meaning was constructed in far more extensive networks than we’ve previously realized. Spring 2016 Stephen J. Burn

Roberto Lucchetti and Roberto Natalini’s “David Foster Wallace e la Matematica” appeared in Lettera Matematica Pristem, late in 2015; on Wallace’s influence on Italian writers, see, for instance, Daniele Giglioli’s “Il Ragazzo Pesce e gli Autori Sommersi dal Magistero di David Foster Wallace,” Il Corriere della Sera, January 20, 2013, 14. 12 Ville-Juhani Sutinen, ed., Mitä David Foster Wallace Tarkoittaa (Turku: Savukeidas, 2015). 11

Introduction. Wallace and the World

In many ways, David Foster Wallace was a profoundly American writer. Indeed, it is difficult to think of another turn-­of-the-­century literary figure who addressed American cultural concerns so overtly, nor one who so deliberately signaled that his work was intended to be read along national lines. Wallace spoke at length about the desire for his novels and short stories to respond to a quintessentially American condition: He claimed to have used his early fiction to map a particularly “American type of sadness,” stated that his primary intention in 1996’s Infinite Jest was “to do something real American, about what it’s like to live in America at the turn of the millennium,” and conceived of The Pale King (2011) as an investigation into what America’s taxation agency might reveal about the national character.1 Similarly, his nonfiction often explicitly addressed those psychological proclivities that Wallace saw as endemic to the national character. There are endless examples of such statements from Wallace’s wide body of nonfiction: His 1992 review of Tracy Austin’s tennis memoir, for instance, draws attention to “the comparison-­based achievement we Americans revere”; his 2001 address on Franz Kafka discusses the comedic expectations of undergraduate students whose “neural resonances are American”; and “Consider the Lobster” (2004) characterizes the “pure late-­date American” tourist experience as being “alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit.”2 Moreover, his 2003 essay on John McCain addresses “a very modern and American type of [political] ambivalence,” and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999) addresses what Wallace saw as the “spiritual emptiness of hetero-­sexual interaction in post-­modern America.”3 Laura Miller, “The Salon Interview: David Foster Wallace,” in Stephen J. Burn (ed.), Conversations with David Foster Wallace (Jackson: The University Press of Mississippi), 59. 2 David Foster Wallace, “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart,” in Consider the Lobster (New York: Little, Brown & Company, 2005), 142; Wallace,“Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness from Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed,” in Consider the Lobster, 62; Wallace, “Consider the Lobster,” in Consider the Lobster, 240. 3 Wallace, “Up, Simba,” in Consider the Lobster, 229; Lorin Stein, “David Foster Wallace: In the Company of Creeps,” Publishers Weekly 245, no. 18, May 3, 1999. Online access: http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/print/19990503/21964-david-­foster-wallace-­in-the-­ company-of-­creeps. 1

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Within his fiction, many of Wallace’s characters reach for similarly abstract truths about national preoccupations and experiences. Steeply, from Infinite Jest, describes the “genius” of the American social structure as centering on the dictum that “each American seeking to pursue his maximum good results in maximizing everyone’s good” (424), and The Pale King’s DeWitt Glendenning claims that “Americans are in a way crazy. We infantilize ourselves. We don’t think of ourselves as citizens—parts of something larger to which we have profound responsibilities” (132). In the same vein, Skip Atwater, the protagonist of the 2004 story “The Suffering Channel,” suggests that “the great informing [drama] of the American psyche” is the “management of insignificance” (284). Moreover, Wallace’s national focus was often given an extra layer of specificity, in his oft-­stated thesis that his own generation of US citizens have an even narrower and more tightly focused subset of concerns. Wallace claimed that the impetus behind Infinite Jest stemmed from the realization that his own generation was experiencing “a very American illness,” suggesting that “the idea of giving yourself away entirely to the idea of working in order to achieve some sort of brass ring that usually involves people feeling some way about you.”4 His characterization of “sub40” Americans in his 1997 review of John Updike’s Toward the End of Time is even more specific about the particular problems besetting his own generation, with Wallace noting that “[t]oday’s sub-40s have different horrors, prominent among which are anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without once having loved something more than yourself.”5 These examples, taken from across Wallace’s career, form a small sample of his views on what he took to be the uniquely troubling aspects of being an American. They are indicative of both the depth of Wallace’s engagement with US culture and of his strategic attempts to dictate the terms of his own reception, by signaling his own contributions to a national conversation. Since Wallace’s critique of late-­capitalist US culture is so clearly visible throughout his work, both scholarly and nonscholarly readers alike have sought to position Wallace as an archetypally American figure. Indeed, his work ostensibly fulfills William Dean Howells’s famous exhortation to US writers, to focus on intrinsically American themes and thereby find the originality and singular “distinction” of American life. “I would have our American novelists be as American as they unconsciously can,” Howells

Laura Miller, “The Salon Interview: David Foster Wallace,” 64. David Foster Wallace, “Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think,” in Consider the Lobster, 54. My emphasis.

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Introduction

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proclaimed in an 1891 essay, arguing that though Matthew Arnold had found nothing particularly noteworthy about American life, this erroneous assessment should encourage novelists to prove the great poet (and other naysayers) wrong: Matthew Arnold complained that he found no “distinction” in our life, and I would gladly persuade all artists intending greatness in any kind among us that the recognition of the fact pointed out by Mr. Arnold ought to be a source of inspiration to them, and not discouragement.6

In fact, Wallace is frequently positioned as an exceptionally incisive interpreter of American culture, the preeminent representative of his literary generation. Steven Moore argues that Wallace’s lexical brilliance allowed him to capture “the way modern America sounds in all its cacophony better than any of his contemporaries”; Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly argue that his writing catalogues myriad forms of “modern American lostness”; and Stephen J. Burn positions Wallace as “arguably the most intellectually-­gifted American writer of his generation,” a writer whose “prose range was unparalleled.”7 Even more forceful is Burn’s later assertion that “Wallace was, in a non-­trivial sense, an American writer—engaged with the cultural, social, and political issues thrown up by his nation state—and his artistic inheritance draws heavily on American arts.”8 As these examples reveal, the overwhelming critical impulse has been to restrict interpretations of Wallace’s fiction to a narrow, American context, within what Rémy Marathe, in Infinite Jest, describes as the “walled nation” (127) of the United States. Biographer D.T. Max is similarly concerned with emphasizing the particularly American aspects of Wallace’s artistic project, interpreting his work with exclusive reference to the US postmodern literary tradition. Perhaps most tellingly, Don DeLillo, himself a significant influence on Wallace’s career, described the younger writer’s style as embodying the very adjective American, concluding his 2007 memorial tribute with: “Youth and loss. That is Dave’s

William Dean Howells, Criticism and Fiction (London: McIlvaine & Co., 1891), 138–39. Steven Moore, “In Memoriam David Foster Wallace,” Modernism/Modernity 16, no. 1 (2009): 2; Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, “David Foster Wallace’s Nihilism,” in All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 27; Stephen J. Burn, “Infinite Jest and the Twentieth Century: David Foster Wallace’s Legacy,” in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: A Reader’s Guide. Second Edition (New York: Continuum, 2012), 18. 8 Stephen J. Burn, Introduction to Conversations with David Foster Wallace, xii. 6 7

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voice, American.”9 This latter comment shows the Wallace-­as-national-­ metonym interpretation at its purest, though many scholars have made similarly territorial claims, positioning his work as the apogee of a particularly American brand of culturally incisive, ambitious literature, and tracing its diffuse legacy within contemporary US fiction. Burn, for instance, suggests that Wallace’s legacy exerts considerable force on current American literary trends, arguing that “[d]espite only publishing two novels, the imprint of [his] fiction nevertheless circulates through the bloodstream of American fiction.”10 Wallace’s frequent pronouncements on the state of contemporary US literature invite such interpretations, and many scholarly readings have hewn closely to Wallace’s own conception of his work, focusing on connections between Wallace and an earlier generation of postmodernists, and revealing his many important interventions within the American postmodern tradition. The predominately American focus surrounding Wallace’s reception is thus, in some ways, a natural extension of the recurring themes within his work. Along with the many explicit references to US culture detailed above, Wallace often focused on particularly American phenomena: The rapidly changing American media landscape, hyper-­consumerism, advertising, US sports, entertainment, and politics are all recurring interests throughout his fiction and journalism. It is also the case that Wallace’s narratives are invariably set in geographically specific American locations. Indeed, Lee Konstantinou points out that across Wallace’s career, his fictional settings became increasingly US-centric, with the posthumously published novel The Pale King being “even more inward-­looking that its predecessors,” making “little reference to anything outside the territorial boundaries of the United States.”11 Moreover, Wallace was deeply familiar with an enormous range of American literary texts, with much of this reading informing the way he taught American literature to undergraduates at Amherst College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College. But though the widespread emphasis on Wallace as a quintessentially American figure has some justification, the argument of this book is that such obvious American investments have

Don DeLillo, “Informal Remarks from the David Foster Wallace Memorial Service in New York on October 23, 2008,” in The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, eds. Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou (Iowa City: The University of Iowa Press, 2012), 24. 10 Stephen J. Burn, “Infinite Jest and the Twentieth Century: David Foster Wallace’s Legacy,” Modernism/Modernity 16, no. 1 (2009): 12. 11 Lee Konstantinou, “The World of David Foster Wallace,” boundary 2 40, no. 3 (2013): 9–10. 9

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obscured the more oblique, though equally important, global dimensions of Wallace’s work. My claim is that alongside Wallace’s primary focus on American themes and his ongoing conversation with “the early [American] postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties,” there is also a more subtle, international literary exchange taking place in his work.12 The more counter-­intuitive—and partially occluded—aspect of Wallace’s intellectual life was his profound engagement with a diverse body of world literature, with those texts that, in David Damrosch’s phrase, “circulate beyond their culture of origin.”13 This engagement can be traced back to Wallace’s years at the University of Arizona’s creative writing department, where he railed against the widespread MFA emphasis on studying—and ultimately learning to write within—a particular tradition of American literature. Mark McGurl’s The Program Era (2009), which positions creative writing institutions as “the sine qua non of post-­war literary production,” attests to the narrowly American focus of creative writing programs, and of their frequent status “as shrines to vivacious American individualism.”14 For Wallace, such a rigidly nationalistic focus was disabling and unnecessarily limited. In a later interview, he emphasized the program’s narrow, parochial approach to literature: One of my big complaints about Arizona was that though I liked a lot of the students, and I liked a lot of the regular faculty, I didn’t much like the creative writing faculty. They really disparaged the idea of learning how to write as part of learning how to take part in the tradition of Western letters.15

Wallace’s assessment resonates with similarly disparaging and provocative comments from Horace Engdahl, who in his 2008 role as permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy addressed the long absence of US Nobel Prize laureates by suggesting that Europe still is the center of the literary world . . . not the United States. . . . The US is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t Larry McCaffery, “An Expanded Interview with David Foster Wallace,” in Conversations with Wallace, 24. 13 David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 4. 14 Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 368, 255. 15 Hugh Kennedy and Geoffrey Polk, “Looking for a Garde of Which to Be Avant: An Interview with David Foster Wallace,” in Conversations with David Foster Wallace, 15. 12

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Global Wallace really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.16

Although Wallace might have taken issue with Engdahl’s pejorative assessment, there is a crucial sense in which his own experience in graduate school prompted him to renounce a constrictingly nationalistic idea of fiction, in the attempt to “participate in the big dialogue of literature.” In “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young” (1988), Wallace echoed these sentiments, bemoaning the fact that, for most institutionalized creative writing students, international classics such as those written by “Homer and Milton, Cervantes and Shakespeare, Maupassant and Gogol— to say nothing of the Testaments—have receded into the mists of Straight Lit,” while aspiring young writers labor under the delusion that “Salinger invented the wheel, Updike internal combustion, and Carver, Beattie and Phillips drive what’s worth chasing.”17 (His rancor toward MFA programs was also given expression in his irreverent renaming of the creative writing degree, in 1996, as a “master of flatulent arts,” and in the parodic newsletter Wallace distributed while studying at what he and a friend rechristened as the “University of Aridzona Piety Center.”18) Alluding to T.S. Eliot’s eccentric account of literary progression in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Wallace’s essay goes on to indict the ideological underpinnings of the MFA for its narrowness and ahistoricity, accusing it of promoting a reductive view of literature as limited to a sociocultural “Now.” His primary concern is that [w]e as a generation are in danger of justifying Eliot at his zaniest if via a blend of academic stasis and intellectual disinterest we show to the dissatisfaction of all that culture is either cumulative or is dead, empty on either side of a social Now that admits neither passion about the future nor curiosity about the past. (62)

Quoted in Charles McGrath, “Lost in Translation? A Swede’s Snub of U.S. Lit,” New York Times, October 4, 2008. Online access: nytimes.com/2008/10/05/weekinreview/ 05mcgrath.html. 17 David Foster Wallace, “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young,” in Both Flesh and Not: Essays (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2012), 62. 18 Frank Bruni, “The Grunge American Novel,” New York Times, March 24, 1996; D.T. Max, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (New York: Penguin, 2013), 72. Wallace’s 1998 piece, “The Flexicon” also contains a scathing assessment of “Graduate Creative Writing Departments.” Wallace, “The Flexicon,” Parnassus: Poetry in Review 23, no. 1 (1998): 185. 16

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Wallace’s analysis here preempts a later critique in “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,” which rails against “a generation whose eyes have moved fish-­like to the sides of its head, forward vision usurped by a numb need to survive the now.”19 He thus reprises the recurring postmodern argument about having crossed a historical threshold, though his primary concern is with the impact that this historical broach will have on literature. Wallace thus surely encountered, in this institutional perpetuation of American fiction, the kind of national rigidity that Wai Chee Dimock describes as the reflexivity and “self-­eviden[ce]” of American letters: “nowhere is the adjective American more secure,” Dimock contends, “than when it is offered as American literature; nowhere is it more naturalized, more reflexively affirmed as inviolate.”20 Wallace’s response also aligns with the career-­defining realization of an American figure from an earlier generation, Susan Sontag, who characterized world literature in similar terms, as a necessary antidote to “provincialism” and “inane schooling”: To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck. Literature was the passport to enter a large life; that is, the zone of freedom.21

Shortly after completing his MFA, Wallace’s interviews and journalism took on a correspondingly international dimension: In a 1993 interview, for instance, he claimed to be “the only ’postmodernist’ you’ll ever meet who absolutely worships Leo Tolstoy,” while from 1994 onward, he began conceiving of Fyodor Dostoevsky as a crucial “model” in the attempt to heighten the ethical force of his own fiction.22 It is clear that in the years following his MFA at Arizona, Wallace thus distanced himself from an emphasis—within not only creative writing programs, but also within American literary culture more generally—on twentieth-­century US fiction,

David Foster Wallace, “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,” in Girl with Curious Hair (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1989), 304. 20 Wai Chee Dimock, “Scales of Aggregation: Prenational, Subnational, Transnational,” American Literary History 18, no. 2 (2006): 223. 21 Susan Sontag, “Literature is Freedom,” in At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007), 207. 22 Hugh Kennedy and Geoffrey Polk, “Looking for a Garde of Which to Be Avant: An Interview with David Foster Wallace,” 19; David Foster Wallace, “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky,” in Consider the Lobster, 274. 19

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in the attempt to participate within a more expansive, international literary tradition. Although Wallace’s specific reference is to “the tradition of Western letters,” in reality, his newfound commitment to extramural fiction encompassed many global traditions. There are countless ways in which Wallace engaged with a radically expanded notion of literature after this early moment of realization. He read and taught numerous translated texts, reviewed and wrote on many of these same works, and—as I argue throughout this book— incorporated the ideas, themes, and stylistic devices of numerous international figures within his own fiction. Moreover, from a wide body of evidence— within the archived collection of his personal library, allusions within his fiction, and various interviews—we know that Wallace read and engaged with an enormous amount of world literature. Specifically, he was familiar with a wide range of French writers (including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jacques Roubaud, Jean-Paul Sartre, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Albert Camus, Blaise Pascal, Guy de Maupassant, Stendhal, Francis Picabia, Rabelais, Andre Gide, in addition to theorists such as Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida), as well as a diverse collection of Latin American fiction and poetry (including the work of Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Gabriel García Márquez, Manuel Puig, Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes, José Donoso, Octavio Paz, and Julio Cortázar). He was also particularly taken with German-­language writers (among them Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Bertolt Brecht, Robert Musil, Peter Handke, Hans Robert Jauss, Goethe, Rainer Maria Rilke, Arno Gruen, Günther Grass, Max Frisch, Jürg Federspeil, Siegfried Kracauer, Viktor Frankl, and Alice Miller), various Eastern European figures (Emil Cioran, Jerzy Kosinski, Milan Kundera, Bruno Schulz, Joseph Conrad, Witold Gombrowicz, Zbigniew Herbert, and Henryk Sienkiwicz, among others), and was enamored with a diverse group of nineteenth- and early-­twentieth-­century Russian authors (predominately Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, but also Nikolai Gogol, Anton Chekhov, Ivan Turgenev, Alexander Pushkin, Ivan Goncharov, Daniil Kharms, and other twentieth-­century Russian absurdists). In addition, and perhaps even more unexpectedly, Wallace was familiar with some Italian literature (in 2006, he claimed that Italo Calvino was his “favorite Italian,” adding that he “re-­read Calvino a lot”), Japanese fiction (Wallace read Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen, Yukio Mushima’s The Sailor who fell from Grace with the Sea, Yasunari Kawabata’s Palm-­of-the-Hand Stories, and took a Japanese history course at Amherst titled “History 48—Japan since 1800”), Dutch authors Cees Noteboom and Philibert Schogt, Greek novelist Apostolos Doxiadis, as well as several international authors whose national affiliations encompass multiple territories, such as J.M. Coetzee, Peter Carey, and Christina Stead. Moreover, in his role as Associate Editor for Dalkey Archive’s The Review of Contemporary

Introduction

9

Fiction during his time at Illinois State University, Wallace edited a vast number of international short stories, smoothing English translations and enhancing their readability for an American audience. In this role, he worked on special issues devoted to Danish, Finnish, and Latvian fiction, many of whose stories he annotated extensively. His personal library at the Harry Ransom Center also holds relatively obscure medieval literary titles, such as the middle-English romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the French medieval text Yawain: the Knight and the Lion.23 While this dizzying list includes widely read, hypercanonical figures such as Goethe, Tolstoy, and Borges, it also includes many writers who, in Damrosch’s terms, produce “counter-­canon” and “shadow canon” texts, those texts that comprise “the subaltern and contestatory voices of writers in less-­commonly taught languages and in minor literatures within great-­power languages.”24 Although many other major American authors would doubtless be familiar with a number of figures from this list, what is notable in Wallace’s case is the sheer diversity of his literary engagements, which encompass numerous continents, genres, historical periods, and languages. This extensive collection of authors and texts, along with his profound debts to many of these figures, prompts us to reconsider the prevailing interpretation of Wallace’s work in exclusively American terms, along with the often unconscious aligning of his work within a national framework. What becomes apparent from such a study is the vast range of Wallace’s artistic debts, as well as the sense in which he belongs to a particular strain of avant-­garde, intellectually cosmopolitan fiction. As Daniel Medin has argued with regard to contemporaneous figures such as J.M. Coetzee and W.G. Sebald, my claim is that Wallace belongs to a group of postmodern authors “for whom immersion in others’ fiction has always been crucial to the creation of their own.”25 One possible reason why scholars have not, by and large, made these kinds of artistic connections is that while Wallace was relatively candid about his appropriation of American sources—the colophon in Girl with Curious Hair (1989), for instance, lists Cynthia Ozick’s Bloodshed and Three Novellas,

Arnaldo Greco, “Breve Intervista con un Uomo Meravigioloso,” la Repubblica, December 18 (2010): 98. My translation. Online access: http://periodici.repubblica.it/d/. Though it was published posthumously, the interview took place in 2006. 24 David Damrosch, “World Literature in a Postcanonical, Hypercanonical Age,” in Comparative Literature in the Age of Globalization, ed. Haun Saussy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 45. 25 Daniel L. Medin, Three Sons: Franz Kafka and the Fiction of J.M. Coetzee, Philip Roth, and W.G. Sebald (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 14. 23

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Global Wallace

John Ashbery’s “Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” and John Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse” as key intertexts—he was often less forthcoming about his debts to international authors. Moreover, his references to American figures are often fairly heavy-­handed: The Eschaton scene in Infinite Jest, for instance, bears an obvious resemblance to DeLillo’s End Zone (1972), while Wallace even duplicates a character’s name—Jethro Bodine—from Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). Many of these latter references function primarily in situating the novel in relation to a pre-­existing body of literature, signaling to the reader that Infinite Jest should be read as self-­consciously participating within the tradition of American postmodern fiction. Moreover, Wallace’s intertextual citations became considerably more opaque in the years following the publication of Girl with Curious Hair. D.T. Max notes that editors at Viking Penguin, fearing the possibility of legal ramifications arising from several stories, asked Wallace to come clean on every source and real-­ life referent informing the collection, a demand that Gerry Howard, Wallace’s then editor, described as “the literary equivalent of a strip search . . . ‘Spread ’em.’ ”26 During this process, Wallace revealed several submerged intertexts, admitting that Susan St. James’s 1986 interview with David Letterman was the inspiration for “My Appearance,” that John Updike was being indirectly invoked in “Little Expressionless Animals,” and that Kierkegaard was a crucial presence in “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way.” Despite his cerebral defense, that these hitherto unacknowledged sources constituted a kind of “postmodern prank” (107), Wallace learned an important lesson through the experience, and took care to conceal some of his more obvious artistic debts in later fiction. Moreover, if Tore Rye Anderson’s assertion— that Wallace’s dust-­jackets of novels constitute important paratexts that are a “decisive factor in the reception’s construction of the work”—is correct, then the frequent US-centric comparisons that ensconce Wallace’s texts may also have contributed to the nationalistic interpretive discourse surrounding his work.27 The blurbs used on the cover of The Broom of the System (1987), for instance, list usual suspects such as Barth, Barthelme, Gass, and Gaddis as crucial points of reference, while the blurbs and jacket copy included on the first edition of Infinite Jest invoke John Irving, Tom Robbins, and William Burroughs. Significantly, Little Brown & Co. also included a jacket-­copy description of the book that is framed in explicitly American terms, describing Infinite Jest as “a gargantuan, mind-­altering comedy about the pursuit of

Max, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, 107. Tore Rye Anderson, “Judging by the Cover,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 53, no. 3 (2012): 271.

26 27

Introduction

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happiness in America.”28 Such extratextual material has doubtless played an important role in Wallace’s reception, situating his work within a readily identifiable tradition of American literature, and deflecting both scholarly and public attention away from the complex engagements with global texts that lie beneath so much of Wallace’s fiction and nonfiction. This book sets forth a revisionist account of Wallace’s work, moving the neglected and overlooked global aspects of his fiction into the spotlight. It should be noted, however, that such an analysis does not by any means invalidate the prevailing tendency to read Wallace in localized or nationalist terms. As I have shown, there is ample justification for conceiving of Wallace as a particularly incisive respondent to US culture, and for viewing his project as a response to various American literary and intellectual traditions. Instead, this study demonstrates that a more nuanced account of Wallace’s myriad transnational engagements opens up complementary ways of reading his vast body of work, providing alternate points of entry and generating unexpected interpretations and perspectives. An analogous body of criticism, in this regard, are the recent accounts of such canonical authors as Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, and Virginia Woolf, all of whom have historically been interpreted in rigidly nationalistic terms, but whose work has in recent years been broadened through various comparative and transnational readings.29 This book therefore aligns with a broader scholarly agenda, concerned with critiquing the localized investments that shape the way particular figures are read. Milan Kundera’s distinction, in “Die Weltliteratur,” between the small context and the large context is a simple one, but useful nonetheless. Kundera argues that there “are two basic contexts in which a work of art may be placed: either in the history of its nation (we can call this the small context) or else in the supranational history of its art (the large context).”30 While this book is intended as a disruptive gesture, dislodging Wallace from a particular strain of national, patriotic criticism, and instead, locating his work within the expanded, large context that Kundera has in mind, it is misleading to think of the two frames as a simple binary. This is because an interpretation centered

Infinite Jest first-­edition jacket copy. See, for instance, Anthony Mandal and Brian Southam, eds., The Reception of Jane Austen in Europe (London: Continuum, 2007); Paul Giles,“ ‘The Earth reversed her Hemispheres’: Dickinson’s Antipodality,” in Antipodean America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 189–207; Rebecca L. Walkowitz, “For Translation: Virginia Woolf, J.M. Coetzee and Transnational Comparison,” in David James, ed., The Legacies of Modernism: Historicizing Postwar and Contemporary Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 243–63. 30 Milan Kundera, The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts, trans. Linda Asher (London: Faber & Faber, 2007), 39. 28 29

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Global Wallace

on Wallace and world literature ultimately feeds back into his incisive cultural analyses, refining our understanding of Wallace’s unusual perspective on US culture and politics. As I will argue, the practice of engaging with various translated works gave Wallace—among other things—an estranged position from which to perceive his native culture, a means by which to sidestep his own investment within American systems and structures, and instead, view them from unexpected vantage points. Ultimately, paying close attention to Wallace’s engagement with a more expansive cluster of influences sheds new light on the career-­long engagement with the United States that other scholars have perceived in his work. Part of this broadening project has already begun in the work of other academics. Timothy Jacobs, for instance, has positioned Wallace as self-­ consciously extending the artistic legacy of such diverse writers as Gerard Manley Hopkins, Stendhal, and Dostoevsky; Toon Staes has offered an insightful reading of Wallace’s relation to Franz Kafka; and Paul Giles has shown how Wallace’s work engages with the conceptual space of Australasia, arguing that Wallace’s short story “B.I. #48” deploys a particular notion of Antipodean ontology as a means by which to enact a “severe deconstruction and demystification of the liberal humanist tradition of American romance.”31 Moreover, other scholars have shown that Wallace’s work engages with various British literary figures (such as James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Philip Larkin), while Wallace’s relation to a wide variety of continental philosophers and novelists (Derrida, Nietzsche, Lacan, Berkeley, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus, Bakhtin, Wittgenstein, and Balzac, among others) has also been mapped out. My project therefore fits within a subset of Wallace scholarship that has sought to account for such diverse connections, though it also unifies what are often artificially disparate strands of criticism. Aiming to provide a more comprehensive account of the way that Wallace engaged with global sources, the book provides a rigorous framework with which to explore these and many other influences, synthesizing the comparative work that has already begun in order to make broader claims about the consistent

Paul Giles, Antipodean America: Australasia and the Constitution of U.S. Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 2013), 449. See Timothy Jacobs, “American Touchstone: The Idea of Order in Gerard Manly Hopkins and David Foster Wallace,” Comparative Literature Studies 38, no. 3 (2001): 215–31; Timothy Jacobs,” The Brothers Incandenza: Translating Ideology in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 49, no. 3 (2007): 265–92; Toon Staes, “ ‘Only Artists can Transfigure’: Kafka’s Artists and the Possibility of Redemption in the Novellas of David Foster Wallace,” Orbis Literrarum 65, no. 6 (2010): 459–80.

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presence of global texts within Wallace’s fiction. By emphasizing numerous international artistic influences, many of which have not yet been examined, my aim is to enlarge the critical discussion of Wallace’s artistic precedents. In arguing for Wallace’s significant engagement with the field of world literature, and in accounting for his transposition of world sources, it is also important to register the many complexities that positioning Wallace as a transnational figure entail. It is crucial to note, for instance, that Wallace was a highly unorthodox reader of world literature, invariably engaging with transnational texts in ways that are at odds with contemporary scholars’ accounts of appropriate reading practices. Damrosch’s articulation of two dominant approaches to the study of world literature, “exoticism and assimilation” (13), is productive in understanding Wallace’s reading practice. In What is World Literature? (2003), Damrosch suggests that [f]rom Henry Cabot Lodge and Charles Eliot to the HarperCollins and Norton anthologies, world literature has oscillated between extremes of assimilation and discontinuity: either the earlier and distant works reflect a consciousness just like ours, or they are unutterably alien, curiosities whose foreignness finally tells us nothing and can only reinforce our sense of separate identity.32

It is not difficult to argue that Wallace is invariably located firmly in the former category, with much of his reading based on assumptions of commonality and comparable experience. His engagements with world literature thus tended to reinforce his own cultural and historical perspective, in what Damrosch would deride as “a self-­centered construction of the world” (133). Wallace’s reading of Dostoevsky, for instance, is overwhelmingly concerned with discerning links between nineteenth-­century Russian culture and his own. Here, Wallace equates Russia’s nascent materialism and selfishness with late-­capitalist consumerism, connects the “ideological Nihilists of Dostoevsky’s time” with the postmodern literary nihilists of the 1990s, and suggests that critical theory—and deconstruction in particular— is the modern version of the uncritical devotion to Socialist ideology present in Dostoevsky’s Russia. In a similar vein, Wallace’s account of Borges is obsessed with making connections between Borges’s Argentina and his own understanding of North America. Wallace wrote “much like U.S.” next to a number of Borges quotations, including one on the national character of

David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 133. Damrosch’s emphasis.

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Global Wallace

Argentina, while he also reimagined the short story “The Writing of the God” as a parable of American solipsism.33 In addition, Wallace read Kafka for his relevance to what he perceived as an impoverished understanding of American selfhood, and approached Argentine novelist Manuel Puig almost exclusively in stylistic terms, ignoring many of the cultural and historical particularities within Puig’s work. Thus, while Wallace’s readings avoid falling into exoticist traps, in which foreign texts are assumed to be fundamentally unreachable and unrecognizable in any respect, his readings are often situated in the opposing half of Damrosch’s dialectic, perpetuating a form of cross-­cultural reading based on unjustifiable assumptions of similarity, an interpretive approach that is too eager to draw direct comparisons. Instead of acknowledging the fundamental alterity of such global, culturally dissimilar texts, his reading often “leaps, Superman-­style, over wide geographies and long histories” to find signs of the “reassuring sameness” that Vilashini Cooppan and others critique.34 However, while Wallace’s approach may be out of step with current scholarly models, it also proved highly pragmatic and productive in terms of his own work: his overwhelmingly US-centric strategy gave him the freedom to appropriate from a diverse global canon, allowing him to construct fiction from a radically expanded set of artistic sources. Like Goethe himself, whose shrewd readings of global texts were always motivated by artistic needs, focusing on what he could transpose within his own work, Wallace’s primary focus was always on potential sources of artistic appropriation. In addition to Wallace’s unorthodox encounters with a world canon, there are also several biographical oddities worth mentioning, which likewise render a reading of Wallace as a particularly engaged respondent to world literature more problematic. As previously noted, Wallace’s narratives are located, almost without exception, within specific American locations; his fiction lacks the cosmopolitanism and internationalist scope of other contemporary US writers, such as Robert Stone, Norman Rush, Philip Caputo, and Neal Stephenson. Indeed, his characters rarely if ever move beyond the confines of their own narrow cultural sphere. Moreover, his correspondence to various translators of his work evinces a skepticism toward both the general notion of translation as well as the idea that his work could be culturally transposed at all. Although he was fascinated with the mechanics

David Foster Wallace, Annotations in Edwin Williamson’s Borges: A Life. David Foster Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 34 Vilashini Cooppan,“The Ethics of World Literature: Reading Others, Reading Otherwise,” in David Damrosch (ed.) Teaching World Literature (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2009), 38. 33

Introduction

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of translation, and corresponded with several translators, he evidently considered the process—at least in terms of his own work—a highly dubious one, doubting that his writing could have any relevance to readers from other cultures. Writing in 2006 to Italian translator Adelaide Cioni, Wallace hinted at the impossibility of ever achieving a suitably high-­quality rendering of his work: “I would ask that you do your best to preserve the intended flavor and tone [but] if you can’t you can’t . . . which is why I question why any foreign publisher would want to try to translate my work anyway. The whole thing seems very mysterious to me.”35 Wallace also steadfastly refused to assist Ulrich Blumenbach, the German translator of Infinite Jest, with specific queries, while in a 2006 interview with Italian newspaper La Repubblica, he was even more forceful about his reservations toward translation, claiming “I don’t like translations of my work,” but acknowledging that he was only able to assess French translations: “French is the only other language I can read.”36 Even more emphatic were Wallace’s comments in an email to Martina Testa, another Italian translator who had questions about the short story “Incarnations of Burned Children,” a story that Wallace considered to be essentially untranslatable: I don’t know whether Bonnie passed on to you my limitations re email, or my feelings that “Incarnations . . .,” while short, seems to me almost impossible to translate, mostly because of the large number of non-­ standard and very English-­specific punctuation and syntax devices. Though your skills as a translator are obvious to me, I’d probably still recommend . . . choos[ing] something else in place of this.37

“Incarnations of Burned Children” is indeed an idiomatic, highly vernacular short story—as Wallace’s correspondence points out, it incorporates lyrics from an obscure country song and features a narrator who “imitates rural dialogue rhythms”—but the notion that it resists translation is something of an overstatement. While Wallace’s email dutifully responds to Testa’s specific

David Foster Wallace, Email to Adelaide Cioni (March 29, 2006), Container 1.3, Bonnie Nadell’s David Foster Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 36 Amanda DeMarco, “The Mistake on Page 1,032: On Translating Infinite Jest into German,” Publishing Perspectives, March 4, 2010. Online access: http://publishingperspectives. com/2010/03/the-­mistake-on-­page-1032-on-­translating-infinite-­jest-into-­german/. Arnaldo Greco, “Breve Intervista Con Un Uomo Mereviglioso,” 98. 37 David Foster Wallace, Email to Martina Testa (June 20, 2001), Container 31.8, David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 35

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questions, his tone becomes more and more despondent, with increasing skepticism toward the possibility of successfully rendering the story in Italian. He repeatedly anticipates the complexity and difficulties associated with translating the story’s prose—“I do not envy you the job of this translation. My English is very idiomatic-American, I fear,” he notes—and at one point gloats: “I’m glad I don’t have your job :).” His response ends with a reflection on the grammatical nuances within the final sentence’s reference to “the sun up and down like a yo-­yo”: “I have no idea how one would get these effects in translation,” he says, before signing off with “Desolately, / David Foster Wallace.” This aversion to translation mirrors Roland Barthes’s famous admission of possessing “constant pessimism with regard to translation” and being vexed by particular questions posed by translators of his work. Such translators, Barthes complained, “so often appear to be ignorant of precisely what I regard as the very meaning of the word: the connotation.”38 Wallace’s aversion to international travel might also be viewed as an impediment to the kind of reading for which this book argues. D.T. Max suggests that Wallace “hated travel, and tourism even more” (249) and we know from Max’s biography that Wallace hardly ever ventured beyond North America: he took just three European vacations, a 2002 holiday in Hawaii, and two visits to the Caribbean—the first of which is documented in “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” in which he admits, “I’ve barely been out of the U.S.A. before” (310). In fact, Wallace turned down numerous offers of international lectureships and author visits, including a highly lucrative 2006 invitation to speak at the University of Augsburg, Germany; a journalistic trip to the 2008 Beijing Olympics; and also in 2008, an invitation to deliver a lecture at Oxford University’s Rothermere American Institute.39 Wallace admitted, in a 1998 interview with director Gus Van Sant, that he did not even own a current passport, while more broadly, his nonfiction often exploits a provincial, Midwestern persona, invariably for comic effect. His attitude to travel and the tourist experience is best encapsulated in “Consider the Lobster,” where Wallace suggests that “[t]o be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a late-­date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by

Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard and Adam Philips (1977; repr. New York: Hill & Wang, 2010), 115. 39 Some of Wallace’s reasons for declining the latter are discussed in Paul Giles’s “All Swallowed Up: David Foster Wallace and American Literature” in The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, 3–22. That the narrator of Infinite Jest refers to both Oxford and Cambridge as “nodes of hoary classicality” (996) is perhaps also germane. 38

Introduction

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way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience” (240). Furthermore, although Wallace could read French, and deployed some Spanish and German terms within his fiction, he was ultimately more interested in exploring specific American idioms and technical vocabularies. In addition, he was also unapologetic, and oddly unreflective, about his own racial status: in “Tense Present” he refers to himself as “resoundingly and in all ways white,” while in Signifying Rappers Wallace cheerily foregrounds his “white yuppie” perspective.40 As I show in the final chapter, Wallace had a highly complex, and in many ways problematic, understanding of his own racial identity. But the crucial point to make here is that labeling himself as “resoundingly white” was another way of saying “resoundingly American,” limiting his critical gaze to areas in which he saw himself as having an insider’s perspective. Scholars have seemingly used such biographical observations to limit Wallace’s work within a nationalist framework, a widespread view given expression by Lee Konstantinou, who, in his 2013 essay “The World of David Foster Wallace,” argues that Wallace cannot be awarded any “gold star of genuine worldliness,” since “his writing simply doesn’t fulfill the representational criteria . . . for worldly or cosmopolitan fiction” (27). Ulrich Blumenbach, the German translator of Infinite Jest [Unendlicher Spaß] and The Pale King [Der bleiche König], also positioned Wallace in this way, suggesting that though Wallace was in many respects a “reflective, open-­minded person,” he was also fundamentally “US-centric and sealed off [amerikazentriert und abgeschottet]” from the rest of the world.41 However, as I show, there is undeniable evidence for Wallace’s diverse engagement with world literature, and a strong case to be made that his fiction frequently draws on a global constellation of influences. By teasing out such influences and exploring Wallace’s orientation toward world literature, this book undermines the scholarly narrative that sees his work as anathema to “genuine worldliness.” There is also a strong sense in which Wallace understood postmodern media saturation as erasing traditional distinctions between nations. Noting the ways in which traditional forms of literary realism have served to render the strange familiar, Wallace emphasized the immediacy of global culture, invoking Marshall McLuhan’s “global village” to suggest that the original state

Mark Costello and David Foster Wallace, Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present (New York: The Ecco Press, 1990), 20. 41 Klaus Brinkbäumer, Interview with Ulrich Blumenbach, Der Spiegel, September 8, 2009. Online access: http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/literatur/zehn-­wahrheiten-von-­ ulrich-blumenbach-­ich-musste-­das-falsche-­richtig-falsch-­uebersetzen-a-646947.html. My translation. 40

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of affairs “for today’s reader has been reversed: since the whole global village is now presented as familiar, electronically immediate—satellites, microwaves, intrepid PBS anthropologists, Paul Simon’s Zulu back-­ups.”42 Wallace’s understanding of global simultaneity thus sees late capitalism as having a natural tendency to countenance the wider world. Echoing the above statement in his artistic manifesto “E Unibus Pluram” (1993), Wallace provided a similar image of postmodern cosmopolitanism, sketching a self-­ portrait of “eat[ing] Tex-Mex with chopsticks while listening to reggae and watching a Soviet-­satellite newscast of the Berlin Wall’s fall.”43 Such a spontaneous form of worldliness, on Wallace’s part, aligns with Paul Giles’s assessment of Wallace’s work as being preoccupied with the ways in which “globalization works not just as a distant political theory but something that impacts the hearts and minds of the national community.”44 Similarly apposite is another of Giles’s claims, that for Wallace, “American geographic space” is constructed as “a level playing field where the mass media operate in all zones simultaneously,” a reading that can in fact be extended to encompass Wallace’s notion of global cultures.45 From his various statements, it is clear that Wallace perceived global capitalism as an unprecedentedly homogenizing force, flattening out local particularities and bringing about a blandly undifferentiated form of human experience, an assumption that, as I show throughout this book, has strong implications for the ways in which he approached world literature. Together with this media-­influenced awareness of other cultures, Wallace was also highly attuned to the universal importance of narrative in constructions of individual and cultural identity, pointing out that it’s so true it’s trite that human beings are narrative animals: every culture countenances itself as culture via a story, whether mythopoeic or politico-­economic; every whole person understands his lifetime as an organized, recountable series of events and changes with at least a beginning and middle. We need narrative like we need space-­time; it’s a built-­in thing.46

McCaffery, “An Expanded Interview with David Foster Wallace,” 38. David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram,” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1997), 52. 44 Paul Giles, “Sentimental Posthumanism: David Foster Wallace,” Twentieth-Century Literature 53, no. 3 (2007): 174. 45 Paul Giles, “The MTV Generation: Wallace and Eggers,” in The Global Remapping of American Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2011), 164. 46 David Foster Wallace, “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young,” 52. 42 43

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For Wallace, humans the world over are most usefully defined not in scientific or sociological terms, but as what Mark Currie labels as “homo fabulans—the tellers and interpreters of narrative.”47 In light of such a claim, it is not difficult to account for Wallace’s enormous assortment of world literary touchstones. If fictional narratives are indeed at the heart of every culture within “the global village,” it follows that such narratives are worth taking an interest in. Thus, although any account of Wallace’s interactions with a diverse body of world literature must acknowledge the various difficulties associated with positioning him as an embodiment of a “genuine worldliness,” there is also ample evidence, as I show, to support the kind of interpretation that takes such interactions seriously. Although the extent to which Wallace truly succeeded in “participating in the big dialogue of literature” is debatable, my argument is that his attempts to go beyond the narrow confines of US literature are highly significant, and when studied closely, add an important recalibration to the current scholarly account of Wallace’s work.

“Territorial reconfigurations”: Wallace and world literary space Paying close attention to how Wallace himself conceived of world literary space, the book’s argument is structured around particular global territories, in a design that allows Wallace’s broad engagement with various world literary traditions to come into focus. Following Burn’s suggestion, that a “richer sense of Wallace’s achievements and importance is likely to arise from an approach that puts him back into a larger literary and cultural matrix,” the book thus radically expands the purview of Wallace studies by locating his work in relation to a range of global regions.48 While Burn does not elaborate on the critical strategies by which Wallace might be positioned within such a matrix, the forthcoming chapters are structured around five territorial zones. The first part of each chapter describes the broad range of writers with whom Wallace engaged, before narrowing in on a particularly salient representative of the tradition. In this way, the book builds a cumulative argument around detailed case studies that reveal Wallace’s indebtedness to a particular avatar

Mark Currie, Postmodern Narrative Theory (New York: Palgrave, 1998), 2. In “1458 words,” Wallace reiterated this claim, stating that “[s]omewhere in all of us is a hunger for narrative, to see what we’re up to and about.” David Foster Wallace, “1458 Words,” Speak Magazine 2 (Spring 1996): 42. 48 Stephen J. Burn, Review of David Hering (ed.), Consider David Foster Wallace, Modernism/Modernity 18, no. 2 (2011): 468. 47

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of a world literary tradition. Thus, although each discussion explores connections to a vast array of novelists and poets, the three subsequent chapters focus on Jorge Luis Borges, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Franz Kafka, respectively. The more expansive chapter openings offer surveys of Wallace’s diverse encounters within a particular literary field, demonstrating potential lines of enquiry that might be taken up in future studies, and signaling the rich interpretive possibilities associated with reading his work alongside unexpected world literary figures. While these initial chapters focus on preexisting scholarly fields of enquiry, the final two chapters seek to expand the commonly accepted definition of world literature, focusing on particular American territories that might be broadly conceived as world literary fields. The first of these latter chapters addresses Wallace’s abiding interest in French existentialism, before examining the ways in which such concerns are played out in the Southern, Existentialist fiction of writers such as Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor. The final chapter looks at how Wallace’s fiction engages, at numerous points, with popularizations of anthropology and mythology, as well as examining his study of 1980s hip-­hop, in order to explore Wallace’s often problematic views on racial difference. The book is thus structured around five broadly construed geographic territories—Latin America, Russia, Eastern Europe, France, and Africa—with an overriding emphasis on how engagement with such territories influenced Wallace’s work. In many ways, this approach reflects the global restructuring that Wallace himself imagined in Infinite Jest, where the United States has annexed Canada and Mexico to form the “Organization of North American Nations,” and where the wider world has undergone a similarly dramatic reconfiguration. (“The officially spun term,” the narrator notes, for “making Canada take U.S. terrain and letting us dump pretty much everything we don’t want onto it is Territorial Reconfiguration” [1032].) The Enfield Juniors’ absurdly complex, “atavistic global-­nuclear-conflict game” (327), Eschaton, is played on a map of the world that reflects the radical border redefinitions that have occurred at some unidentified point in the future: “SOVWAR” is used to denote the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact nations, “LIBSYR” for Syria and Libya, “INDPAK” for India and Pakistan, “AMNAT” for the United States of America and its NATO allies, “SOUTHAF” for Southern Africa, and “REDCHI” for China (322), lending an unexpectedly literal meaning to Wallace’s broad artistic intention, “to author things that both restructure worlds and make living people feel stuff.”49 Thus, in a similar way to those postmodern theorists who identify the dissolution and ritual transgression of David Foster Wallace, Letter to Michael Pietsch (June 22, 1992). Quoted in Max, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, 173. My emphasis.

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borders—generic, sexual, metaphysical, and so on—as an integral aspect of postmodernity, through such devices Wallace playfully reimagines national and geographic borders. This extreme reconfiguration of national boundaries fits neatly alongside the expanded sense of global territories that structures this book. My analysis begins with a detailed consideration of world literary theory, before locating a particularly pragmatic strain of world literature scholarship—based largely on the work of David Damrosch, Paul Giles, and Wai Chee Dimock—that is most useful in examining Wallace’s work. It also addresses the particular benefits to be gained from reading Wallace’s fiction and nonfiction alongside world literature theory, and shows how this pairing illuminates his work in new ways. Revealing how Wallace’s own conceptualization of world literary space influenced many of his aesthetic decisions, the introduction sets forth a structure that schematizes Wallace’s various intertextual engagements into the five geographic territories outlined above. It addresses some possible objections to this approach, before clearly showing the interpretive possibilities gained by addressing Wallace’s engagements with various global literary traditions. Ultimately, I situate Wallace as a highly pragmatic reader of global texts, whose overriding concern was with those textual elements he could transpose within his own context. In this respect, Wallace closely resembles Ralph Waldo Emerson, who also interpreted global figures for their particular relevance to the United States. Chapter 2 explores Wallace’s relationship to Latin America, addressing the various ways in which Latin American authors informed both his artistic practice and cultural perspective. The chapter begins by teasing out many of the references, from Wallace’s nonfiction and interviews, to Latin American writers such as Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Gabriel García Márquez, Octavio Paz, Manuel Puig, Carlos Fuentes, Jean Rhys, and Julio Cortázar. This chapter is ultimately focused on a comparative reading of Wallace alongside Jorge Luis Borges, based on Wallace’s review of Edwin Williamson’s Borges: A Life (2004), and the notes and correspondence surrounding this review. Borges’s complex influence on Wallace’s fiction is explored through a case study of “B.I. #59” and “The Writing of the God” that reveals Wallace’s story as a contemporary reimagining of Borges’s earlier tale. Alongside the close reading of Wallace’s story alongside Borges’s, this latter half of the chapter also addresses the numerous other intertexts hidden within “B.I. #59,” making the case that this particular text reveals Wallace’s bricolage-like method of combining high and low cultural sources. Chapter 3 explores Wallace’s engagement with a diverse group of nineteenthand early-­twentieth-century Russian authors, such as Ivan Goncharov, Leo

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Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Nikolai Gogol, along with modern absurdists such as Daniil Kharms. Here, I place particular emphasis on Wallace’s 2004 short story “Good Old Neon,” which uses Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich as a key intertext, as well as “Octet,” which borrows freely from The Brothers Karamazov. Finally, this chapter explores the overwhelmingly parochial nature of Wallace’s reading of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, focusing as it does on making connections between nineteenth-­century Russia and contemporary America. Ultimately, this analysis contends that Wallace’s primary interest lies in using an estranged, Russian perspective to critique US culture. Chapter 4 addresses Wallace’s relation to a broad array of Eastern European writers, exploring his unusual approach to European literary space. As in the previous two chapters, the discussion narrows in its focus to address Wallace’s idiosyncratic reading of Franz Kafka. Basing this section on Wallace’s notes for his 2005 PEN address on Kafka, his annotated copies of Kafka’s texts as well as the numerous references to the Austro-Hungarian author throughout his fiction, I reveal the countless ways in which Wallace refracts Kafka’s themes and ideas within a US context. The chapter centers on an analysis of Wallace’s comic sensibility, and its indebtedness to his eccentric interpretation of Kafka’s fiction. Chapter  5 accounts for the curious afterlife of French existentialist philosophy in the American South. Here, I explore Wallace’s longstanding interest in existential figures such as Camus and Sartre, as well as his fascination with figures such as Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor—the latter of whom Wallace viewed as unlikely avatars of existential ideas. I also examine the Catholicism of these two figures, alongside Wallace’s own complex response to the Christian faith. Beyond Wallace’s interpretation of these Southern writers as aligning with a particular philosophical tradition, I explore his appropriation of Flannery O’Connor at length. Several of his fictional works, I argue, allude in subtle ways to O’Connor’s work, while a handful of his short stories (particularly 2004’s “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,” which Wallace conceived as a retelling of O’Connor’s “Everything that Rises must Converge”), borrow directly from themes and characters from within her fiction. The implicit assertion in this chapter is that, from Wallace’s resolutely Midwestern vantage point, the South constituted what was in effect a foreign territory, a region so alien and estranged that its fiction represented, for Wallace, a kind of pseudo-­world literature. The final chapter focuses on Wallace’s slightly odd perspective on race and ethnicity, by exploring his sorely neglected first nonfiction publication, Signifying Rappers. The analysis of this particular text proposes that 1980s hip-­hop was a veritable world away from the almost exclusively white, postmodern literary tradition that Wallace inherited. It also explores Wallace’s

Introduction

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interpretation of what he saw as a quintessentially African-American art form, examining the rhetorical and linguistic devices he appropriated from hip-­hop within his own work. I also situate Signifying Rappers in relation to his broader career, and examine its problematic representations of white identity. Finally, the chapter looks at a wide sampling of Wallace’s often curious depictions of race, including those within Infinite Jest, The Pale King, and Oblivion. The chapter ultimately argues that Wallace’s close analysis of hip-­hop had significant influence on his later work, particularly on his diagnosis of the state of contemporary American fiction, while it also shaped his understanding of world literature. Such a reappraisal comes at a crucial juncture in Wallace studies, a field that is rapidly gaining momentum. Scores of articles and monographs have been published in the years following Wallace’s untimely death, with many readers—both professional and nonprofessional alike—eager to carry on the conversation about his prodigious body of work. Although Wallace never dominated best-­sellers lists during his lifetime, nor gained more than a cult following of readers, this situation has changed dramatically in recent years. Since 2008, Wallace has slowly crept into the cultural zeitgeist: as well as turning up in the work of other contemporary novelists (in Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, for instance, as well as Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jeffrey Eugenides’s Marriage Plot, and John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars), there are a number of references from popular culture that reveal how far Wallace’s fame has spread.50 The Eschaton scene from Infinite Jest, for instance, has inspired a mainstream music video (The Decemberists’s 2012 “Calamity Song”); many readers have been introduced to his life and work through D.T. Max’s best-­selling biography; and his work has also been referenced on numerous commercial television programs, including Fox’s New Girl, NBC’s Parks and Recreation, FXX’s Man Seeking Woman, HBO’s Sex and the City, Netflix’s Love, ABC’s The Middle, and perhaps most tellingly, on a 2012 episode of The Simpsons, titled “A Supposedly Fun Thing That Bart Will Never Do Again.” In 2015, James Ponsoldt’s film adaptation of David Lipsky’s book-­length interview, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, was released to wide acclaim. The enormous range of posthumous publications, in addition to the increased public awareness of Wallace’s work, makes the timing of this book particularly important. As his work finds its way to new reading communities,

For an analysis of Wallace’s place in recent American fiction, see Stephen J. Burn, “Infinite Jest and the Twentieth Century: David Foster Wallace’s Legacy,” in A Reader’s Guide to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.

50

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it is more important than ever to stress the ways in which Wallace’s fiction and nonfiction is informed by a range of international figures, situating his work within the “big dialogue of literature” that Engdahl’s infamous comments invoke. In my view, there is a danger that the ever-­proliferating scholarly assessments of Wallace’s work will overlook the extent of such engagements, and instead, cloister the reception of his texts within a narrowly American domain of interpretive possibility. Of particular importance in this regard are the many translations of Wallace’s work: Already, his texts have been translated into German, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French, and Italian, with more translations—including Russian, Greek, Polish, and Hungarian—still to come. As a growing array of non-English readers are introduced to translations of his texts, it is both crucial and timely to come to terms with the global dimensions of Wallace’s work.

1

Wallace and World Literature A genealogy of world literature Though literary narratives have always circulated between cultures and across continents, the historical foundations of world literature are usually located in the early years of the nineteenth century, when Johann Wolfgang von Goethe began considering questions of literary translation and circulation, together with what he saw as the dwindling role of aesthetic patriotism. “It is to be hoped that people will soon be convinced that there is no such thing as patriotic art or patriotic science,” he wrote in an 1801 journal entry, suggesting that instead of reflecting particular forms of national or racial superiority, “[b]oth belong . . . to the whole world.”1 Though Goethe theorized at length about the broader implications of texts that migrate across cultural borders, it is his bold pronouncements on a growing body of world literature that most critics take as marking the genesis of the discipline, particularly his 1827 claim that “National literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.”2 In spite of recent criticism concerning the latent Eurocentrism embedded in Goethe’s formulation, his vision is nonetheless a remarkably expansive one. As Sarah Lawall notes, at its heart, Goethe’s account imagines a genuine and “ongoing exchange of perspectives between readers in different countries,” through which the narrow ideologies of individual nations might be overcome.3 Goethe’s vision of Weltliteratur was conceived in response to the changing social and technological culture of the early-­nineteen-century: advances in both printing techniques and transportation were allowing more translated texts to be circulated than ever before, while European colonialism meant that “many literary works from Asia, Africa and Latin America began

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, from the Journal Propyläen, quoted in Fritz Strich, Goethe and World Literature, trans. C.A.M. Sym (London: Routledge, 1949), 35. 2 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann (1823–1832), trans. John Oxenford (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984), 132. 3 Sarah Lawall, “Introduction” to Reading World Literature: Theory, History, Practice (Austin: University of Texas Press. 1994), 2. 1

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to circulate as part of a newly global publishing traffic.”4 Marx and Engels’s account of world literature is indebted to Goethe, though their emphasis on the material conditions of literary circulation is even more prominent. A key section of The Communist Manifesto (1848) imagines a complex global literary economy favoring those texts that could transcend the narrow specificity of particular nation states. Parochial and national literatures would soon be rendered obsolete, Marx and Engels predicted, due to an ever-­ expanding global audience: “The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-­sidedness and narrow-­mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.”5 Although the latter decades of the nineteenth century saw a range of new world literature anthologies—which, for the first time, could be marketed for a mass reading public—the most widespread attempts to promote the circulation of world literary texts to a global audience began in earnest around World War I. Compilations such as Reclam Verlag’s UniversalBibliothek series, which were sold via German vending machines from 1912 onward, took up Goethe’s call to “hasten” the “epoch of world literature” by publishing affordable English, French, Spanish, Italian, and Russian literary texts, as did scholarly works such as Richard Moulton’s World Literature and its Place in the General Culture (1911), which proposed new models for organizing world literary traditions. In the wake of World War II, a “newly urgent sense of the importance of global understanding” together with a slew of world literature anthologies functioned as the catalyst for the institutionalization of world and comparative literary fields.6 Erich Auerbach’s seminal study Mimesis (1946) heralded a new comparative discipline in the United States that brought a radically diverse set of global texts under academic scrutiny, though as Damrosch notes, this 1950s “boomlet” was short-­lived, being quickly “stifled by well-­established forces of national and comparative literature.”7 Self-­consciously conceived as a response to the atrocities of the two World Wars, many of the scholarly analyses carried out in the post-War years now seem fanciful and utopian, animated by ahistorical and essentialist assumptions of global unity. This

Caroline Levine and B. Venkat Man, “What Counts as World Literature?” Modern Language Quarterly 74, no. 2 (2013): 143. 5 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, trans. Samuel Moore (1848; repr. New York: Penguin Classics, 2002), 224. 6 Levine and Man, “What Counts as World Literature?” 143. 7 David Damrosch, “World Literature in a Postliterary Age,” Modern Language Quarterly 74, no. 2 (2013): 152. 4

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paradigm of “Old” world literature also manifested in the “Great Books” courses that entered university programs around the same period, which Levine and Man characterize as perpetuating the idea that such texts function as “a repository of the timeless wisdom of the world, the best representation of the multitude of narrative forms and traditions from antiquity to the present.”8 René Wellek and Austin Warren’s 1948 study Theory of Literature set forth a strident critique of such idealism that still has wide relevance, describing the naïve intentions of such critics as “sentimental cosmopolitanism.”9 Although such assumptions have in theory been overhauled to make way for “New” accounts of world literatures, Lawall points out that in many academic teaching contexts, globally diverse texts are still being taught for their capacity to transmit pancultural wisdom and universal values.10 From the 1950s through the 1990s, more and more world literary texts began to be translated and recirculated (for instance, Heinemann Educational Books’ landmark African Writers Series, beginning in 1957 with Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart), along with several key anthologies and scholarly texts, among them Lawall’s Reading World Literature (1994), Pascale Casanova’s World Republic of Letters (1999), and Damrosch’s What is World Literature? (2003), published around the turn of the twenty-­first century. In response to the accumulating forces of globalization and an increasing body of historical scholarship on cross-­cultural exchange, countless studies of world literature have appeared in the first part of the twenty-­first century. However, alongside the “increasing institutionaliz[ation]” of the field, many scholars acknowledge that the broader purposes, methodologies and reading practices of world literature remain, in the words of Levine and Man, “troublingly divided.”11 This is largely due to differences of opinion concerning disciplinary emphasis. Scholars are at odds over which aspect of the field should be its central focus, and on which assumptions and precepts its claims should be grounded. For instance, while the emphasis of scholars such as Damrosch and Walkowitz is on the material conditions of textual circulation and reception, John Pizer’s primary concern is with the ways in which interpretations of world literature should strive to “sustain textual alterity in

Levine and Man, “What Counts as World Literature?” 144. René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (1949; repr. New York: Penguin, 1976), 41. 10 Sarah Lawall, “Introduction” to Reading World Literature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010). 11 Levine and Man, “What Counts as World Literature?” 144.  8  9

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its discrete particulars and in its plenitude.”12 Meanwhile, Pascale Casanova’s thesis places national literatures within a “literary universe relatively independent of the everyday world and its political divisions” (xii); Moretti’s emphasis is on the ways in which global texts are positioned as either “close” or “distant”; while Spivak’s concerns are with the implications of postcolonial theory and the “epistemic violence” of imperialism that creeps into literary interpretations, an approach that insists on a complex knowledge of “subaltern” narratives and non-European languages.13 Though the differing priorities of such scholars have often found common ground, such diverse perspectives testify to the myriad complexities inherent within such an expansive discipline and to the ways in which the central epistemological questions underpinning literary studies take on added nuance and complexity when considered in a global sense. Translation is also an enormously contested aspect of world literature. Yet although academics differ over the legitimacy and aims of translation, the most commonly held scholarly position is also the most paradoxical: that translation is at once fundamentally flawed and wholly indispensable. The Danish critic Georg Brandes, for instance, famously characterized translation as a “lamentable necessity,” Damrosch claims that “translation is as necessary as it is impossible—an emblem of the utopian striving of human culture at its best,” and Emily Apter simultaneously affirms both that “nothing is translatable” and “everything is translatable.”14 Susan Bassnett rightly points out that, given the intellectual history of the twentieth century, this “curiously schizophrenic” position is somewhat illogical, noting: In an age where Borges has suggested that the concept of the definitive text belongs only to religion or fatigue, and post-­structuralist critics have shown the fallacy of believing in a single, definitive reading, discourse on translation went on talking about “originals” and “accuracy” and continued to make use of a terminology of negativity. Translation, it is suggested, “betrays,” “traduces,” “diminishes,” “reduces,” “loses” parts of See Damrosch’s What is World Literature? and Teaching World Literature; Rebecca L. Walkowitz, “Unimaginable Largeness: Kazuo Ishiguro, Translation and the New World Literature,” Novel 40, no. 3 (2007): 216–39. John Pizer, The Idea of World Literature: History and Pedagogical Practice (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 2006), 20. 13 Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M.B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), xii; Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013), 48; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds (London: Routledge, 2006), 213. 14 Georg Brandes, “World Literature” (1899), reproduced as an appendix to Thomsen’s Mapping World Literature, 144; Damrosch, How to Read World Literature, 65–66; Damrosch, How to Read World Literature, 65–66; Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), xi–xii. 12

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the original, translation is “derivative,” “mechanical,” “secondary,” poetry is lost in translation, certain writers are “untranslatable.”15

Scholarly debates concerning translation will only intensify as texts continue to circulate in foreign markets. However, despite the many problems and complications associated with translation, the aforementioned scholars are correct in stressing its necessity. Indeed, even with the remarkable multilingual proficiency of many world literature scholars, the discipline would be unthinkable in the absence of translation, the “indispensable intermediary”—in Azade Seyhan’s phrasing—of many transnational encounters.16 Damrosch goes as far as listing the ability of a text to “gain in translation” (281) as one of three definitions of a world literary text, suggesting that the circulation of a translated work alongside the original is significantly more meaningful—both artistically and culturally—than the untranslated text. Damrosch’s liberating assertion is that the material reality of a text, the cultural work it performs, is more significant than its so-­called “potential.” As I show, such pragmatism—centered on tangible effects, rather than latent potentiality—sits neatly alongside Wallace’s similarly pragmatic approach. In terms of the mechanics of translation, there are ongoing debates surrounding the appropriate aesthetic nature of transposed literary language. One of the central questions, as Damrosch frames it, is: “should a translation read smoothly and fluently, hardly feeling like a translation at all, or should it preserve some unusual verbal flavor, respecting the original’s foreignness?”17 Damrosch’s position is that translations function properly if they “inspire readers to go and learn the [original] language,” while Spivak’s seemingly impossible injunction is that “the translator must not only make an attempt to grasp the presuppositions of an author but also, and of course, inhabit, even if on loan, the many mansions, and many levels of the host language.”18 Though there is an enormous amount of hand-­wringing and indecision about its role, translation nonetheless remains a crucial component of world literature scholarship, in part because it is metonymic of broader questions concerning interpretive perspectives and cultural exchange. John Pizer recognizes the significance of this overlap when he reinterprets Goethe

Susan Bassnett, Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction (Malden, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), 140. 16 Azade Seyhan, “ ‘World Literatures Reimagined’: Sara Suleri’s Meatless Days and A.H. Tanipinar’s Five Cities,” Modern Language Quarterly 74, no. 2 (2013): 199. 17 Damrosch, How to Read World Literature, 66. 18 Damrosch, How to Read World Literature, 128; Spivak, “Translating into English,” in An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, 258. 15

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as having grasped toward an ethically responsible mode of translation. Pizer suggests that Goethe’s views on the highest form of translation, as “approximat[ing] the rhythmic and grammatical nuances of the original language” are effectively a way of asserting that cross-­cultural reading has “as its highest ideal the movement of the self toward the Other, not a dominion over the Other or a levelling of the Other.”19 This approach is centered on an intentional self-­estrangement, an “embrace of alterity . . . that forces the self to become foreign to itself, serv[ing] the twin causes of intercultural dialogue and respect for the foreign” (28) that is effectively a definition of an ideal global reading practice. As I show, Wallace’s own approach was far from idealistic about the broader aims of reading across cultures: his own concerns and interests in global texts were far more utilitarian than Pizer’s. On the question of translation, for instance, Wallace acknowledged that while he was well aware that he was missing specific literary effects in translated Russian novels, the imperfect translations he had access to nonetheless functioned adequately: “even though I think there are terrible translation problems,” Wallace acknowledged, “and I can tell that Dostoevsky in Russian is probably more beautiful than in English, to me they are probably better than anything in English except maybe certain Henry James.”20 And while he could read French, and perhaps a small amount of Spanish, Wallace relied on countless translations for access to other literary traditions. What is striking from such comments is Wallace’s continual emphasis on the practical, tangible aspects of world literature. Although he was skeptical about translations of his own work, his belief in the possibility of literal, linguistic translation sits neatly alongside his concomitant belief that all narrative and thematic content from a range of world traditions is similarly capable of being translated, of being appropriated within a specifically American context. In this respect, Wallace resembles German novelist Herman Hesse, for whom texts in translation worked as an invaluable “approximation” for extramural readers. As B. Venkat Mani notes, Hesse— like Wallace—steered away from an approach that “fetishiz[es] the original” to see translated texts as being fundamental within a broader exchange of ideas.21 There is a striking sense in which the scholarly domain of world literature—despite the fact that more than two centuries have passed since

Pizer, The Idea of World Literature, 28. David Foster Wallace, Interview with Ostap Karmodi, Radio Svoboda (September 2006). Transcript available online: http://ostap.livejournal.com/799511.html. 21 B. Venkat Mani, “Borrowing Privileges: Libraries and the Institutionalization of World Literature?” Modern Language Quarterly 74, no. 2 (2013): 252. 19 20

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Goethe’s formulation, and despite endless attempts at delineation—is still an inchoate, nascent field. Current definitions are still routinely phrased in the future tense, and as Spivak rightly points out, Goethe’s own prophecy stressed the unknown and “aporetic nature of world literature,” suggesting that under the terms of his theorization, “the category of ‘world literature’ is in the mode of ‘to come.’ ”22 Indeed, Goethe’s various pronouncements on world literature invariably look toward an anticipated coalescence: “I am convinced that a world literature is in a process of formation,” he wrote in an 1827 letter to Adolph Streckfuss.23 But perhaps not even the great German poet could have foreseen that Weltliteratur would still be both “in formation” and such a contested term in the twenty-­first century, with scholars awaiting a future moment of disciplinary epiphany, a final clarification. Such attitudes can be found across the field: the introduction to the 2013 world literature issue of Modern Language Quarterly, for instance, speaks longingly of the as-­yet-unrealized “genuine democratic potential of world literature,” recalling Wai Chee Dimock’s 2007 introduction to Shades of the Planet, in which she suggests that “[w]hat is intimated here is the field as a multilingual and intercontinental domain. Its features are just becoming legible, and we invoke it in that spirit: as a cipher, a cradle, a horizon yet to be realized.”24 Rebecca Walkowitz’s “Close Reading in an Age of Global Writing” (2013) also situates the field in the future tense, suggesting that “[world literature] will require new strategies of analysis, new histories of modernism, and new ways of organizing, editing, anthologizing, and teaching literary history.”25 Such pronouncements reveal the inadequacy of current models of reading and teaching world literature, and instead look toward future certainties. Equally palpable is the sense that, even in its future manifestations, a scholarly field delineated as “world literature” is an impossible dream. Although several critics have pointed toward the latent utopianism and uncritical humanism implicit in several of David Damrosch’s claims, at a deeper level, there is something wishful and utopian about the ways almost all world literary scholars have articulated their cherished hopes for the field. Indeed, there is a strong sense in which the noble ideal of world

Spivak, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, 460–61. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Letter to Adolph Friedrich Carl Streckfuss, quoted in Fritz Strich, Goethe and World Literature, trans. C.A.M. Sym (London: Routledge, 1949), 349. 24 Levine and Man, “What Counts as World Literature?” 148; Wai Chee Dimock, “Introduction: Planet and America, Set and Subset,” in Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature, eds. Dimock and Lawrence Buell (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 13. 25 Rebecca L. Walkowitz, “Close Reading in an Age of Global Writing,” Modern Language Quarterly 74, no. 2 (2013): 193. 22 23

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literature scholarship will always remain illusory. No single scholar will ever know quite enough foreign languages, possess enough information about nonnative cultures, or have sufficient history and literary context to enact the kind of scholarship that is so passionately called for at every turn. Franco Moretti, revealingly, views world literature as a “new problem” that “asks for a new critical method,” while Damrosch himself hints at impossibility when he appropriates a line from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake—which he labels as “perhaps the most global text ever written”—to suggest that the “ideal reader” of world literature is compelled to strive toward “an ideal insomnia,” an endlessly curious and attentive caste of mind that will allow for an appropriately nuanced and complex reading of global texts.26 Spivak is even less optimistic about the possibility of world literature, approaching the field with palpable skepticism and providing a deeply ambivalent account of its possibilities. Death of a Discipline (2003) is effectively a requiem for the old model of comparative literature, which flattens out local linguistic and cultural differences through various forms of translation, and reduces literary criticism to a search for an essentialist, ahistorical global culture. Moreover, Spivak’s 2013 collection An Aesthetic Education in an Era of Globalization is similarly pessimistic about the discipline’s possibilities. Glossing a line from a folk song that she once sung at a scholarly forum, Spivak articulates both the animating hope and the inevitable failure of any world literature methodology: The line that I sing goes: Mon kore uribar torey, bidhi dey na pakha. A careless translation would go: I wish to fly but fate gives me no wings. Carefully and literally, it would go: my mind makes for flying, but—and then the word bidhi, which can mean “law,” “justice,” as well as “fate/ God”—bidhi does not give wings. I sing and read it because it can also describe our own stakes in world literature.27

Vilashini Cooppan, likewise, sets forth a seemingly impossible program of reading world literature, before stating her own hopes for a properly ethical and responsible “reading of others”: Perhaps most important, I tell my students that when they enter the fictional space of the Nights particularly and world literature generally, they should go for the moments that don’t make sense, not the ones that

Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (2000): 55. Spivak, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, 456–57.

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do. Start, I say, with the place that refuses your understanding. Enter that other set of representational conventions, imaginative geographies, literary histories, and cultural ideals, and learn the view from there. Know what you don’t know. Fully cognizant of the limitations of any reading methodology ever to allow us unmediated and total access to other cultures, times, and languages, all of which we may agree remain at least partially forever lost in translation of one sort or another, we may nonetheless hope to enter on the reading of others, otherwise.28

Cooppan’s “hope” is thus centered on the impossible attempt to broach the distance between the self and the Other, attempting to “learn the view” from a location that is, by definition, uninhabitable. Such critics approach any scholarly formulation of world literature with hesitation and skepticism, arguing for the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of a methodology that responsibly interprets and makes connections between texts from disparate global territories. The above examples reveal both the indeterminacy and abstract vacillations within the field, though what I wish to argue is that such debates held little appeal for Wallace, whose own interests—as someone concerned with concrete process of artistic construction—were resoundingly pragmatic. In spite of such critical skepticism about the state of the discipline, there is a particularly pragmatic strain of world literary scholarship that best illuminates Wallace’s engagements. Rather than measuring his work against the more theoretical leanings of world literature, it is far more productive to compare Wallace’s own engagements to the most practical form of scholarship. Wallace himself was highly skeptical of academic theory, particularly when it argued for interpretations of world texts that were at odds with his own. In the notes surrounding his 1996 Dostoevsky review, for instance, he suggests that the theoretical preoccupations of scholars such as Spivak would lead to impoverished critical readings: “One shudders to think what a Terry Eagleton or Gayatri Spivak would make a Dost[oevsky] text into—probably they wouldn’t talk about the text at all.”29 Coming to terms with Wallace’s own readings of global texts thus bears out the truth of Mads Thomsen’s reminder, that “world literature is always balancing between idealism and realism: the idealism of a world of unlimited cultural exchange and diversity with respect for differences, and the harsh realism of what is

Cooppan, “The Ethics of World Literature: Reading Others, Reading Otherwise,” 42. David Foster Wallace, Notebook entry on Dostoevsky, Container 4.12, David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

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actually being translated, sold, read and taught around the world.”30 In a similar vein, Wai Chee Dimock helpfully proposes that US literature is most productively viewed as “a crisscrossing set of pathways, open-­ended and ever multiplying, weaving in and out of other geographies, other languages and cultures,” while Paul Giles also offers a pragmatic way forward, a way out of the endless hand-­wringing at the state of the discipline, when he suggests that [r]ather than being seduced by the impossible chimera of a purely multilingual and interchangeable world culture, a more materialistic version of comparative literature would focus also on those points of friction where national and transnational intersect with each other in uncomfortable ways, and where cross-­border translations either succeed only partially or fail.31

It is precisely those strange and often awkward moments of transnational “friction” within Wallace’s work that the following chapters address, those instances where Wallace’s American investments come into contact with unforeseen global forces. Instead of holding up Wallace’s work to an impossibly high standard of cultural exchange, as envisaged by Spivak and Cooppan, this materialist approach instead views his work on its own terms, registering the tangible impact that a range of unexpected global texts had on Wallace’s fiction. Although I draw at times on the work of various world literary theorists, my approach accounts for Wallace’s own version of world literature, rather than imposing a particular theoretical approach or definition from above. David Damrosch, whom Paulo de Medeiros characterizes as “more pragmatic than programmatic,” is an important figure in this regard. This is because Damrosch’s primary concerns, like Wallace’s, are always with the aesthetic dimensions of cross-­cultural translation (in all its forms), instead of with its cultural or political aspects.32 At its heart, this book prioritizes Damrosch’s second definition of world literature—as the “elliptical refraction of national literatures”—considering Wallace’s work within the terms of this productive theoretical construct. I take this term to encompass the ways in which textual meanings modulate unexpectedly as they move across national boundaries.

Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Mapping World Literature (New York: Continuum, 2008), 10–11. 31 Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 3; Giles, Antipodean America, 20. 32 Paulo de Medeiros, “Blindness, Invisibility, and the Negative Inheritance of World Literature,” Modern Language Quarterly 74, no. 2 (2013): 278. 30

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Damrosch’s reading of Orhan Pamuk is also an important touchstone. Glossing Pamuk’s well-­known essay “Maria Vargas Llosa and Third World Literature” (2007), Damrosch reads Pamuk as engaging in a thinly veiled form of self-­definition, using Llosa to explore what it means to be a writer intensely engaged with transnational sources. His key claim is that “Pamuk’s emphasis here is on the local use to which the writer can put the techniques he imports from outside, opening new paths not forged by national writers before him. In this way, a localized globalism informs the shape of the work as well as the themes within it.”33 With very minor modification, this could easily be a description of the way Wallace himself reads across cultures. As the numerous comparisons within this book demonstrate, his texts frequently perform this precise form of “localized globalism.” Notwithstanding Damrosch’s analysis of Pamuk, there has in recent years has been a regrettable absence of contemporary texts within world literary scholarship. With a few other notable exceptions—Emily Apter’s analysis of contemporary political rhetoric, and Damrosch’s account of mass-­market video games spring to mind—the insights and methodologies of world literature have, by and large, not been applied to contemporary authors and texts.34 More specifically, not enough contemporary US writers have been assessed in such terms, particularly authors of Wallace’s generation, whose work—in line with Dimock’s concerns—has often been read patriotically, in light of its specifically American content. Though the work of some more explicitly internationalist writers has come under consideration (Jhumpa Lahiri, for example, along with Junot Diaz, Teju Cole, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie), many more seemingly US-centric authors have not yet been opened up in this way. This is despite the fact that perhaps now more than ever, scholars are responding to changing global political circumstances, in the attempt to register the broader aesthetic implications of, for instance, Barack Obama’s 2012 Asia “pivot,” and China’s corollary call for the need to imagine a “de-Americanized world.”35 Literary authors are also registering the impacts of globalization and an increasing access to foreign literature. Limiting the field to just Wallace’s contemporaries, Jonathan Franzen has translated the work of German playwright Frank Wedekind (Spring Awakening, 2007) and Austrian journalist Karl Kraus (The Kraus Project, 2013), explicitly

Damrosch, What is World Literature? 281; Damrosch, How to Read World Literature, 116. See Apter’s The Translation Zone and Damrosch’s “World Literature in a Postliterary Age,” Modern Language Quarterly 74, no. 2 (2013): 151–70. 35 Dexter Roberts, “China’s State Press Calls for ‘Building a de-Americanized World,’ ” Bloomberg Businessweek, October 14, 2013. Online access: http://www.businessweek.com/ articles/2013-10-14/chinas-­state-press-­calls-for-­building-a-­de-americanized-­world. 33 34

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drawing attention to the ways in which the latter figure has influenced his own cultural critique; George Saunders has frequently cited his debt to a range of nineteenth-­century Russian authors, particularly Nikolai Gogol, whose short story “The Overcoat” is creatively reworked in Saunders’s 1998 story “Sea Oak”; and Dave Eggers’s 2006 novel What is the What collaboratively narrates the journey of one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, in a text that only one brief article has thus far attempted to position as an instance of “world literature . . . calling out to a global readership.”36 This is not to say that such authors are paragons of world literary practice—probably none of them would satisfy either Engdahl’s criteria of “participat[ing] in the big dialogue of literature” or Konstantinou’s definition of “genuine worldliness”—but the point here is to note that the global dimensions of ostensibly nationalistic contemporary US fiction have gone largely unobserved. In many ways, David Foster Wallace’s fiction constitutes a particularly important case study, since his work—even more so than the three authors listed above—combines intense world literary engagement with an incisive analysis of American culture. A serious blind spot within the scholarly project of world literature has been the omission of literary figures whose work is ostensibly preoccupied with broad, national themes. It is a recurring omission in literary criticism that when authors are claimed by tacitly patriotic scholars with particular national interests, the more expansive, global dimensions of their fiction are suppressed, and become harder to see. If the revisionist, transnational accounts of canonical authors such as Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, and Jane Austen, among many others, have taught us anything, it is that particular forms of scholarship can blind us to the ways in which authors invariably strive to register aspects of various world literatures within their work. If the standard time frame of such revisionist readings are anything to go by, we could probably naturally expect to see similar kinds of readings of Wallace— situating his work within a more expansive matrix of influences and literary traditions—around 2050. But why wait?

Resisting Bloom’s “Influenza”: Influence and intertextuality While this book measures Wallace’s engagement with global texts against the most pragmatic strand of world literary criticism, it also recognizes that the primarily practical, aesthetic concerns of a novelist or short-­story writer

Kevin Brooks, “Dave Eggers’s What is the What as World Literature,” World Literature Today 39 (2010): 40.

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are not the same as the interpretative concerns of world literature scholars. Thus, each subsequent chapter accounts for a specific orientation Wallace adopts in relation to an antecedent author or tradition, exploring the strategic ways in which he engages with texts from other cultures. These sections develop five theories of artistic appropriation, examining how Wallace conceptualized particular kinds of textual relationships in ways that allowed him the maximum imaginative freedom with which to appropriate the work of others. This is because a study of Wallace’s relationship to a variety of global texts is also, inevitably, a study concerned with the complex operations of literary influence. Viewing Wallace’s texts in relation to unexpected sources demands a more precise account of the way he engaged with and appropriated from the work of others. The three-­hundred odd annotated volumes in the Harry Ransom Center—a mere fraction of his working library, much of which was discarded by his estate before realizing its scholarly value—signal that, for Wallace, reading was anything but a passive, unidirectional flow of information: his wide-­ranging annotations foreground the ongoing dialogue with other authors and texts that can be seen throughout his fiction. Among other comments, Wallace wrote ideas for stories in the margins of his books, quibbled with dialogue and lexical choices, as well as writing both his initials and comical verbalizations (“ulp,” “ouch,” and “yikes”) next to particularly penetrating or personally relevant passages. Such marginalia signal a passionate relationship with the written word, as well as testifying to Wallace’s ongoing conversation with “Western letters.” Another observation that should tip us off to Wallace’s career-­long appropriation of other sources is the fact that so many of his own characters are involved in similar kinds of artistic negotiations. Wallace’s fiction contains a myriad of artistic doppelgangers and authorial proxies, who reveal important aspects of his literary agenda. Scholars such as Toon Staes and Marshall Boswell have drawn out other implications from such portrayals, but for my purposes, the most important aspect of such proxies is the fact that so many of them are engaged in literary forms of annexation.37 Keith Jarrett, for instance, in “Girl with Curious Hair” produces a form of jazz based on the improvisational reimagining of “old melodies” (66); James Incandenza’s filmography consists almost entirely of “elaborate parody/homage” (992) to various other directors and films; and Bruce, from “Here and There,” wants to See Toon Staes, “ ‘Only Artists can Transfigure’: Kafka’s Artists and the Possibility of Redemption in the Novellas of David Foster Wallace,” Orbis Literrarum 65, no. 6 (2010): 459–80; Marshall Boswell, Understanding David Foster Wallace (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003).

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be the “first really great poet of technology,” predicting that “art and literature will get progressively more mathematical and technical as time goes by” (155). Moreover, Julie Smith, in “Little Expressionless Animals,” deploys game-­show trivia and pop-­cultural detritus to express herself; and the fecal sculptor Brint Moltke, in “The Suffering Channel,” offers what is perhaps the most extreme literalization of the way influence operates, since his work is the literal product of what he ingests. Even more telling is the profession of an ex-­girlfriend of Ken Erdedy’s in Infinite Jest, whom he describes as an “appropriation artist . . . which seemed to mean that she copied and embellished other art and then sold it through a prestigious Malborough Street gallery” (23). These representations highlight Wallace’s ongoing interest in processes of literary influence, as well as self-­consciously hinting at his own forms of artistic indebtedness. A revealing marginal comment, within an early draft of “Good Old Neon”—“ghost voices talking to us all the time but we think their voices are our own”—also speaks to the controlling, and often overpowering, specters of influence present across Wallace work.38 Thus, alongside the specific, comparative-­based analyses outlined above, this book also sets forth a deeper understanding of the specific ways in which intertexts and antecedent sources are deployed throughout Wallace’s work. Since Wallace’s fiction continually appropriates from, and responds to, such sources, it is crucial to account for the ways in which his attempt to “sing to the next generation” (348) was made possible—at least in part—by recombining narratives and ideas from external literary sources. Wallace seems to have been aware of this ability from the very outset of his career. Speaking to David Lipsky about ghostwriting papers for professors and other students while at Amherst, Wallace noted his strange talent for mimicking other voices and literary styles: And I remember realizing at the time, “Man, I’m really good at this. I’m a weird kind of forger. I mean, I can sound kind of like anybody.” Or I would write papers for professors that would parody the stuff that the professors had said—I mean, that’d sound just like them, only more so.39

This “weird kind of forger[y]” would eventually move beyond such overtly plagiaristic forms and make its way into Wallace’s narratives. The ability to “sound kind of like anybody” was an indispensable technique in producing the kind of fiction that leans heavily on antecedent texts. But Wallace was Quoted in Max, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, 324. David Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (New York: Broadway Books, 2010), 258.

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concerned with theorizing literary influence in ways that go far beyond mere mimicry. In a particularly revealing 1993 letter, Wallace responded to a fellow novelist who accused Wallace of taking plagiaristic liberties with his own work by suggesting that the allegation of “ripping off ” ideas and themes was an exceptionally crude way to think about the artistic process: Your whole idea of “ripping off ” seems a bit extreme and oversensitive, actually. . . . Trust me: there are all sort 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 people’s art—all I can tell you is you’re a very unusual fellow.40

Wallace was being slightly disingenuous in his response—since so much of his fiction is gleaned, borrowed and reconstituted from other sources, and arguably, takes more than just “little snippets”—though his claim also reveals an important truth about contemporary fiction. Since contemporary culture, in Wallace’s view, continually bears out the truth of “the obvious post-­modern complaint [that] We’ve Seen it All Before” (2001), the artist’s role therefore lies, at least in part, in reconstituting pre-­existing ideas and narratives in surprising ways. Thus, running alongside the major comparative readings within each chapter are attempts to get to the heart of Wallace’s complex engagement with antecedent sources, using models based on Wallace’s own comments regarding literary influence. Taken together, these readings set forth a revisionist account of Wallace’s artistic practice, making tangible the influences that underpin so much of his work, and thus demystifying his relation to other writers and texts. Arguably one of the most enduring models of literary influence, and one that still has enormous academic currency, is Harold Bloom’s notion of “the anxiety of influence,” as set forth in his 1973 monograph of the same Quoted in Stephen J. Burn’s “ ‘Web of Nerves Pulsing and Firing’: Infinite Jest and the Science of Mind,” though Burn has stated that he has been sworn to secrecy by the contemporary of Wallace’s who made this allegation and can thus reveal neither the identity of the author nor further details on the particular accusation (email from Burn, August 29, 2013). Intriguingly, Wallace himself used the term “ripping off ” in his annotated copy of Peter Johnson’s Best of the Prose Poem, which Wallace reviewed in 2001. (In the margin next to Jim Johnson’s contribution, “The Things a Man Keeps,” Wallace wrote that the prose poem was a “Rip-­off of [Tim] O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.”) He also used the phrase in his 1998 review of Terminator II, whose “neural net processor” he saw as “a conceit ripped off from Douglas Trumbull’s 1983 Brainstorm.” David Foster Wallace, “The (As It Were) Seminal Importance of Terminator II,” in Both Flesh and Not, 181.

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name. This model proposes that, in their quest for innovation, writers wrestle and clamor with the influence of past literary specters, in a relation centered on polemic opposition and rivalry. Thus, Bloom reads Percy Bysshe Shelley as valiantly striving to reinvent poetic form by contending with the precedent set by Wordsworth and Milton, Wallace Stevens as updating T.S. Eliot’s elevated poetic diction, Hart Crane as attempting to usurp William Blake, and so on. Numerous scholars and critics have used Bloom’s scholarly apparatus to account for Wallace’s appropriation of other texts. For instance, A.O. Scott’s influential New York Times review-­essay makes the case that Wallace wrote in an even more heightened state of anxiety than Bloom’s theory can account for; Boswell suggests that “Westward” “enacts a [Bloomian] clinamen” of Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse”; Charles B. Harris argues that “Wallace’s interest in Bloom seems to inform his own early aesthetic”; Samuel Cohen draws on Bloom to discuss the way that Wallace wrestled with “the anxiety of trying to forge a new place in history”; and finally, Kasia Boddy claims that every story in Girl with Curious Hair “engages in what Harold Bloom calls a ‘strong misreading.’ ”41 However, in my view, Bloom’s theory fails to do justice to the complex ways that Wallace’s texts function, not least because Wallace himself had a serious intellectual disagreement with Bloom. As I show, aside from the important exception of Wallace’s appropriation of the notion of the tessera ratio, which in many ways contains an important deviation away from Bloom’s model, Wallace’s understanding of textual indebtedness was at sharp odds with the conception set forth in The Anxiety of Influence. Wallace was clearly aware of Bloom’s work in general—in a 1990 letter to Steven Moore, Wallace described an early draft of his sprawling Wittgenstein’s Mistress review as “a 70-page screed that’s like Harold Bloom on acid; it’s incoherent”—and his theory of poetic influence in particular, as evidenced by his deployment of Bloom’s taxonomic categories in Infinite Jest, a deployment that, in an oblique and somewhat esoteric manner, serves to advance

Marshall Boswell, Understanding David Foster Wallace, 103; Charles B. Harris, “The Anxiety of Influence: The John Barth/David Foster Wallace Connection,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 55, no. 2 (2014), 104; Samuel Cohen, “To Wish To Try and Sing to the Next Generation: Infinite Jest’s history,” 77; Boddy, “A Fiction of Response: Girl with Curious Hair in Context,” 40. James Rother also touches briefly on Wallace’s supposed anxiety of influence, in “Reading and Writing the Post-Scientific Wave: The Shorter Fiction of David Foster Wallace,” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 13, no. 2 (1993): 216–35, as does James Ryerson, who phrases Wallace’s interpretation of Wittgenstein in Bloomian language, as a “strong misreading of Wittgenstein’s work.” Ryerson, Introduction to Wallace, Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay of Free Will (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 32.

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the narrative.42 In the latter stages of the novel, tennis prodigy and clandestine marijuana-­addict Hal Incandenza is lying on the floor in “Viewing Room 5” (897), watching Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms That Utilize Every Centimeter of Available Space with Mind-Boggling Efficiency, a film of his father’s. At one point, Hal asks Pemulis to cue the film to its final scene, in which the actor Paul Anthony Heaven is delivering a lengthy academic lecture. The narrator reproduces a fragment of the address as follows: For while clinamen and tessera strive to revive or revise the dead ancestor, and while kenosis and daemonization act to repress consciousness and memory of the dead ancestor, it is, finally, artistic askesis which represents the contest proper, the battle-­to-the-­death with the loved dead. (911)

The Greek terms used in this passage are, of course, five of the six ratios of artistic influence that Bloom identifies, and structures his argument around, in The Anxiety of Influence. In fact, the extract is an obvious cribbing of Bloom’s text, lifted from the chapter titled “Askesis or Purgation and Solipsism”: For clinamen and tessera strive to correct or complete the dead, and kenosis and daemonization work to repress memory of the dead, but askesis is the contest proper, the match-­to-the-­death with the dead.43

Although the particular fragment of Bloom’s monograph chosen for Wallace’s plagiarism may at first seem an innocuous choice, the decision to quote a section of the book that includes only five of the six terms Bloom devised for conceptualizing influence is highly significant. Bloom’s sixth and final term, apophrades, is used within The Anxiety of Influence to mean “the return of the dead” (139), and is left off both Wallace’s and the original text’s list. And given that Infinite Jest’s structure relies on James Incandenza’s ethereal return from the grave, this lexical absence can surely be no mere David Foster Wallace, Letter to Steven Moore (c. 1990), Container 1.2–1.3, Steven Moore’s David Foster Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. Moreover, Wallace’s 1996 online chatroom conversation at one point notes that “harold bloom [sic] has a real famous exegesis of Byron—I forget which of Bloom’s books it’s in.” Wallace, “Live with David Foster Wallace, Author of Infinite Jest, May 17, 1996. Online access: http://deadword.com/site1/habit/wallace/dfwtrans.html. 43 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973; repr. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 139. 42

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accident or coincidence. There is thus a complexly metatextual logic at work in Wallace’s citation: Since the return of the dead father is one of the novel’s more obvious allusions to Hamlet, the reference to Bloom’s theory at this precise point in the text signals Wallace’s heightened self-­consciousness at employing a Shakespearean allusion within a late twentieth-century novel. The passage thus contains both a reference to Shakespeare as well as a meta-­ commentary on the intertextual device: The Bloomian insertion indicates that the author is aware of a prominent theory concerning the ways in which authors incorporate Shakespeare’s influence. But convolved metafictional conceits aside, it seems that, at the very least, this abstruse reference to Bloom’s monograph is yet another submerged gesture that points toward crucial events within the novel, suggesting either that the reader should be conscious of the possible reappearance of the dead, or else implying that the cartridge Good-Looking Men should be read as one of a number of veiled, prophetic announcements of Jim’s posthumous return to the tennis academy. Even if we assume that the expanded version of Hal’s name (Harold) is not significant—after all, Hal “consumes libraries” (12) and has scholarly passions for such esoteric topics as Byzantine erotica, Danish theology, and lexicography—a second reference to The Anxiety of Influence occurs in James Incandenza’s filmography. One of Incandenza’s more blatantly auto­ biographical films—about a father “suffering from the delusion that his etymologically precocious son . . . is pretending to be mute” (992–3)—is titled It Was a Great Marvel That He Was in the Father Without Knowing Him, a slightly altered version of the poetic prologue to Bloom’s study, “It Was A Great Marvel That They Were In The Father Without Knowing Him” (3).44 Finally, a third, far less subtle, reference to Bloom’s work occurs in the same section of Infinite Jest from which the first quotation is taken. Directly before the plagiarized excerpt from Heaven’s speech, the lecturer is described as being in the process of “reading stupefyingly turgid sounding shit” (911). An endnote reference within this sentence observes, in an narrative aside, that the lecturer’s monologue sounds “rather suspiciously like Professor H. Bloom’s turgid studies of artistic influenza [sic]” (1077), a pejorative—to say the least—reference, which may well have prompted Bloom himself to make the following claims about Wallace and Infinite Jest in a July 2011 interview: The autobiographical nature of this film is corroborated by the fact that one of the early chapters of the novel reproduces this scene, with James posing as a psychologist in order to converse with Hal. Furthermore, this scene comprised one of the extracts Wallace published from the novel and was given the same title as Incandenza’s film. See: David Foster Wallace, “It Was a Great Marvel That He Was in the Father without Knowing Him (I),” Iowa Review 24, no. 3 (1994): 114–19.

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You know, I don’t want to be offensive. But Infinite Jest is just awful. It seems ridiculous to have to say it. He can’t think, he can’t write. There’s no discernible talent . . . Stephen King is Cervantes compared with David Foster Wallace. We have no standards left. [Wallace] seems to have been a very sincere and troubled person, but that doesn’t mean I have to endure reading him. I even resented the use of the term from Shakespeare, when Hamlet calls the king’s jester Yorick, “a fellow of infinite jest.”45

Bloom’s somewhat curmudgeonly dismissal may well have been predicted by Wallace. Given the Infinite Jest allusions, it seems likely that Wallace considered Bloom’s theory to be overly reductive or simplistic, bearing little relevance to the understanding of influence configurations within both his own work and that of other contemporary writers. In any case, Bloom’s recent decrial, along with Wallace’s churlish reference to The Anxiety of Influence, prompts us to rethink notions of artistic precedence in contemporary fiction, particularly the dominant model so easily dismissed in Infinite Jest. Far from a mere difference of aesthetic opinion, the disagreement between Bloom and Wallace should in fact be seen as a significant intellectual one. What was a stake, at least for Wallace, was the ways in which literary critics conceive of artistic influence, and the implications such conceptions might have for readings of his own work. In spite of the popularity and near-­hegemonic status of Bloom’s model, there are numerous other theories—such as those advanced by Kristeva, Genette, and Deleuze and Guattari, for instance—that have at least some relevance to Wallace’s particular form of appropriation. But in my view, the sheer diversity of his intertexts demands a more scattershot approach. To this end, each chapter explores a different model of literary influence, prompted by a comment or suggestion taken from either a piece of Wallace’s nonfiction or from one of his many interviews. The first theory of influence, addressed in Chapter  2, is structured around the notion of the writer as a software programmer, scrambling and rewriting previous textual codes in order to create a synthetic mesh of diverse influences. This model can be seen most purely in a text such as “B.I. #59.” Although this story is primarily a recontextualized version of Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Writing of the God,” it also contains a multitude of additional intertexts (among them extracts from the war journals of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the short stories of Flannery O’Connor, George W.S. Trow’s 1980 essay “Within the Context of No Context,” and the ABC sitcom Bewitched). The notion of the artist as a

Lorna Koski, “The Full Harold Bloom,” Women’s Wear Daily (April 26, 2011).

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software programmer, meshing together diverse influences, gives us greater precision in accounting for this kind of text. The second influence model, outlined in Chapter  3, appropriates the notion of a literary forebear functioning as “a hologram,” a model that stems from Wallace’s reading of Fyodor Dostoevsky. In his 1996 review of Joseph Frank’s voluminous biography of the Russian author, along with describing Dostoevsky as “a star to steer by” and a “model” with which to attempt “passionately moral, morally passionate fiction,” Wallace also made the intriguing claim that he viewed Dostoevsky as “a hologram.” This idea is explored with reference to the close relationship between The Death of Ivan Ilyich and “Good Old Neon,” making the case that the latter novella works as a transparent overlay, or holographic projection, for Wallace’s text. Chapter 4 advances a notion of literary influence advocated by Wallace in numerous settings, that of the artistic forebear as a kind of “touchstone.” An early letter to Steven Moore labels James Joyce as one important artistic touchstone, but the strongest deployment is contained in the 1993 McCaffery interview, in which Wallace argued that contemporary American fiction was missing any sense of emotional urgency, due to the fact that writers uncritically seek to “break . . . the rules” of traditional, realistic fiction: It’s often useful to dispense with standard formulas, of course, but it’s just as often valuable and brave to see what can be done within a set of rules—which is why formal poetry’s so much more interesting to me than free verse. Maybe our touchstone now should be G.M. Hopkins, who made up his own set of formal constraints and then blew everyone’s footwear off from inside them.46

Although Wallace viewed Gerard Manley Hopkins as a particularly productive “touchstone”—appropriating, as Timothy Jacobs points out, his distinction between “healthy” and “decadent” art forms—my claim is that this same notion also gives us a useful framework with which to account for Wallace’s reading of Franz Kafka. In spite of Wallace’s general antipathy toward Bloom’s model, as outlined earlier, Chapter  5 addresses Wallace’s surprising—and somewhat contradictory—advocacy of one of Bloom’s terms with which to describe influence: tessera. This poetic category, as set forth in The Anxiety of Influence, is conceived in relation to another of Bloom’s terms. While clinamen signifies the process by which an artist attempt at making a “corrective swerve,”

McCaffery, “An Expanded Interview with David Foster Wallace,” 51.

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modifying a precursor’s vision in response to an alleged misstep, tessera is a form of “antithetical completion,” in which a poet retains the categorical language of a precursor, but deploys such language in unexpected ways. In this way, the poet is able “to clear imaginative space” (5) and open up an ostensibly original piece of literary terrain on which to work. We know that Wallace identified with this particular category from an undated letter (circa 1990) sent to literary critic Steven Moore, which discusses Wallace’s aversion to “Brat Pack minimalists” before aligning himself with a more historically informed approach to writing fiction: “I think people who write ‘highbrow’ stuff are just imprisoned in what they love, just like the celebs. Bloom (not Leopold or Allen) convinced me long ago that real reading is misprision anyway—if I can complete someone’s tessara [sic], cool.”47 This notion, of completing another writer’s tessera, is explored in relation to Wallace’s highly idiosyncratic reading of Flannery O’Connor, which in many ways can be thought of as extending O’Connor’s incarnational, Catholic project into a contemporary context. Finally, alongside the analysis of Wallace’s relationship with anthropology, mythology, and race in Chapter  6 is a broader discussion on the idea of Wallace as the literary equivalent a hip-­hop sampler, building bricolage-like narratives from a variety of cultural sources. Wallace’s chapters in Signifying Rappers are obsessed with the notion of hip-­hop plagiarism—detailing ways in which rappers shamelessly steal from one another’s music, harshly critique other artists’ work, and sample cultural products (sitcoms, political speeches, and so on) in ways that appear to fly in the face of established copyright laws—and the implications that such practices might have for novelists. This model allows us to observe both the rationale behind some of Wallace’s most seemingly derivative texts, as well as his habit of burying thinly veiled critiques of other artists within his work (as in both the aforementioned, highly pejorative reference to Harold Bloom in Infinite Jest, and in the parodic rewrites of Wallace’s long-­time bête noire Bret Easton Ellis, within the same novel). This final framework thus stems from a close reading of Signifying Rappers, assessing the degree to which Wallace might be thought of as “sampling” his artistic influences, in the same manner as the hip-­hop artists he revered. Since the process of tracing literary influences can be so enormously complicated, and can encompass such a wide range of techniques, a single theory—even one as comprehensive as Bloom’s—will likely never do justice David Foster Wallace, Letter to Steven Moore (c. 1990), Container 1.2–1.3, Steven Moore’s David Foster Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

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to the myriad ways in which artists engage with previous sources. The book therefore unfolds five complementary models by which to understand the ways in which influence operates throughout Wallace’s work. The advantages and disadvantages of each model are considered at length, though ultimately the book argues that these five conceptions can productively coexist, providing consonant approaches to questions of influence and doing justice to the complexities of Wallace’s engagements with antecedent sources. Furthermore, since each of these models stem directly from Wallace’s own comments on the notion of literary influence (taken from both his essays and various correspondences), they constitute a more organic way of approaching questions relating to artistic precedents, expanding Wallace’s own nascent theorizations into five comprehensive models. Since Wallace’s own appropriations are so diverse, there is no single figure who might be positioned as his most significant influence: an isolated, dominant figure around which to simplify an account of Wallace’s literary and intellectual debts does not exist. (Marshall Boswell, in my view, is mistaken in positioning John Barth as Wallace’s “primary fictional father,” exerting the strongest pull on his fiction.48) Although the influence of various American postmodernists can be readily observed throughout Wallace’s texts, particularly in his early short stories, there are also far more subtle— though equally potent—world influences, as we have already seen, informing Wallace’s work. Since Wallace’s sources are so extraordinarily diverse, encompassing a truly global terrain, addressing his work through the five complementary modes outlined above ultimately gives us a far more accurate picture of his diverse engagements with world literature.

An emersonian pragmatist: Wallace’s global quotations As I have shown, Wallace was highly self-­conscious about literary predecessors, and about the particular strategies by which he incorporated the work of others into his fiction. He was shrewdly strategic about his use of external sources and was also clearly familiar with several theories of influence other than Bloom’s, including T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” as well as Borges’s “Kafka and his Precursors.” Moreover, he was clearly familiar with academic accounts of genre-­straddling texts that incorporate Boswell, Understanding David Foster Wallace, 9. In a similarly overreaching claim, Timothy Jacobs has suggested that Gerard Manley Hopkins “is particularly significant to [Wallace’s] work and creative enterprise.” Jacobs, “The Eschatological Imagination,” 46.

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diverse influences. Indeed, his work often contains subtle jibes at scholarly language and categorical distinctions, as in the comical description of Ms. Soma Richardson-Levy-O’Byrne-Chawaf (her absurdly long surname itself a gesture toward the disparate texts she teaches, Edwin Abbott’s Flatland, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov among them) and her Enfield Tennis Academy course on interdisciplinary literature, a notoriously dull class that the narrator comically refers to as both “Disciplinary Lit.” (282) and as the “Literature of Discipline” (154). Since Wallace’s work seems to foresee so many different kinds of academic engagement—various scholars have noted, for instance, the ways in which his fiction explicitly invites particular theoretical analyses—it is not implausible to claim that his work anticipates the kind of broad, globally comparative reading that this book enacts. Pascale Casanova’s World Republic of Letters (2004) proposes that the overriding concern of writers lies in “inventing their literary freedom,” dissociating themselves from the confines of a particular national tradition and transcending “literary frontiers” in order to write for a global audience.49 While Wallace’s work cannot be said to be addressing the world in quite the same way as Casanova’s theory suggests—and, certainly, his work does not contain the explicit engagements with global politics of a writer such as Doris Lessing, nor the concern with universal languages à la Borges— my argument is that Wallace instead registered the myriad ways in which world literature addressed him on a more personal level. In addition to enabling an incisive critique of contemporary US culture, Wallace’s work is consistently informed by his highly personal, idiosyncratic readings of world literary texts, which led to a properly postmodern engagement with the world. In this respect, Wallace’s approach closely resembles Ralph Waldo Emerson’s views on the “great men” of Western history. Writing on figures such as Shakespeare, Swedenborg, and Goethe, Emerson’s Representative Men catalogues his own intellectual forebears and emphasizes the practical assistance and insight each figure has facilitated.50 For Emerson, such figures should not be conceived of as ends in themselves, to be preserved in dusty tomes, but as figures of endless potential and inspiration, catalyzing and clarifying the ideas of later writers. His pragmatic emphasis throughout is on their practical value, of their ability to “clear our own eyes of egotism, and enable us to see other people in their works” (16). Just as Wallace always read world literature with an eye toward what he could appropriate within his own Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 350, 4. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men: Seven Lectures (1850; repr. New York: Random House, 2004), 3.

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fiction, Emerson’s account of literary antecedents stresses their instrumental value, rather than focusing on the particular historical and cultural contexts that their work originally addressed. Emerson’s conception of influence in Representation Men also accords with Wallace’s understanding. Indeed, Emerson’s very definition of a “great man” assumes a kind of recombinant intellect, appropriating from a wide range of sources: What is a great man, but one of great affinities, who takes up into himself all arts, science, all knowables, as his food? . . . Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors. And this grasping inventor puts all nations under contribution. (25)

Emerson thus perceives influence not as a regrettable reality of artistic creation, but as a crucial tool with which to address the culture. His essay “Quotation and Originality,” in Letters and Social Aims (1876), wonders whether “all literature [is] eavesdropping” and argues that human experience, in its entirety, can be considered in light of a universal principle of imitation and influence: Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our protest or private addition so rare and insignificant—and this commonly on the ground of other reading or hearing—that, in a large sense, one would say there is no pure originality. All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. We quote not only books and proverbs, but arts, sciences, religion, customs, and laws; nay, we quote temples and houses, tables and chairs by imitation.51

For Emerson, this general principle of quotation does not ultimately enforce repetition, since strategically deployed quotations acquire new meanings, speaking to new contexts in surprising and unexpected ways. His essay also emphasizes the belief that the past must always be subordinate to—and in fact be put in complete service of—the present, proclaiming that “[w]e cannot overstate our debt to the Past, but the moment has the supreme claim” (107).

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Quotation and Originality,” Letters and Social Aims (1875; repr. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2010), 93.

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“The past,” argues Emerson, “is for us but the sole terms on which it can become ours are its subordination to the Present” (107). This radically liberating view of antecedent literary texts and authors is precisely the attitude Wallace takes toward both previous texts as well as—crucially—texts from other cultures. Wallace’s primary goal was always to illuminate and critique the present, to simultaneously reveal both “the times’ darkness” and “the possibilities for being human and alive in it.”52 Thus, he viewed all extraneous texts—in all senses of the word—as “subordinate” to the present. What this book ultimately reveals are the numerous intellectual and artistic affinities throughout Wallace’s work as well as the unmistakably global quotations animating his texts. This project thus complicates the dominant scholarly account of Wallace as a quintessentially American figure, by bringing a range of unexpected influences and ancestor texts into view.

McCaffery, “An Expanded Interview with David Foster Wallace,” 26.

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Wallace and Latin America

“The wacko Latins”: Manuel Puig and the lure of Latin-American experimentalists It is striking to observe the way that Wallace’s literary influences changed so dramatically across his career. At various junctures, he was in thrall to such diverse figures as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Walker Percy, Leo Tolstoy, John Barth, and Cormac McCarthy, among many others. Wallace himself hinted at this multitude of artistic forbears in a 1997 interview with Zachary Chouteau. Asked about the single writer who had most strongly influenced his work, Wallace gave a characteristically expansive answer: [t]here’ve been so many different ones during different stages of my life. In college, Donald Barthelme had a big impact on me. More recently Cormac McCarthy—who did All the Pretty Horses—has sent shivers up and down my spine. Manuel Puig is another writer that I really admire.1

Likewise, in a 1993 interview, responding to a similar question about “writers now living that really knock you out,” Wallace listed a handful of canonical American authors before noting that “[t]here are lots of Latinists too: Puig and Cortázar, both recently dead.”2 Although Manuel Puig’s influence can be seen across Wallace’s career, his interest stems from his time at Amherst College, where one of Wallace’s English professors recommended that he read Puig’s fiction.3 Puig made a strong impression, appealing to Wallace’s evolving postmodern sensibility and addressing many of the themes— solipsism, mass media, psychoanalysis, and pop-­art—that obsessed his early fiction. Indeed, in numerous later interviews, Wallace was eager to foreground

Zachary Chouteau, “Words with the Singular David Foster Wallace,” American Booksellers Association Bookweb, 1997. Online access: http://www.badgerinternet.com/~bobkat/aba. html. 2 Hugh Kennedy and Geoffrey Polk, “Looking for a Garde of Which to Be Avant: An Interview with David Foster Wallace,” 20. 3 Burn, A Reader’s Guide to Infinite Jest, xix. 1

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the importance of Puig to his own work, signaling a complex intellectual debt to the Argentine experimentalist. Wallace again cited Puig’s influence in his 1991 interview with Larry McCaffery: After appropriating Yeats’s notion, that a finished poem “comes right with a click like a closing box,” to talk about particularly affecting works of literature, Wallace explained that he could well and truly “hear the click . . . in Puig,” adding that the Argentine’s prose “clicks like a fucking Geiger counter.”4 In fact, Wallace’s admiration for Puig seems to have been so intense that he quickly exhausted the writer’s considerable body of work, writing to fellow novelist David Markson in 1990 that he had “read and reread every word of Pynchon, Barth, DeLillo, Puig, Cortázar and Jean Rhys—my own little Olympus.”5 The equal weighting between the three elder statesmen of US postmodernism—Pynchon, Barth, and DeLillo—and three prominent Latin American authors indicates that, by 1990, Wallace’s literary interests were spread equally across both American continents, an important hint that his own texts are evenly indebted to both traditions. In fact, as I show throughout the course of this chapter, Wallace viewed experimental Latin American authors as a kind of shadow canon to the more institutionally powerful cluster of US writers, capable of throwing the particular thematic concerns of US writers into sharp relief. However, aside from a few glancing references and asides, scholars have not yet registered Puig’s influence on Wallace.6 After surveying a variety of Wallace’s Latin American engagements, this chapter addresses some of the more salient examples of Puig’s influence, tracing several important stylistic devices gleaned from Puig’s fiction, before revealing Wallace’s complex debt to Jorge Luis Borges. It is important to note that Wallace’s interest in Latin American literature extended far beyond both Puig and Borges: from various sources, we know that he also read Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Alejo Carpentier, Reinaldo Arenas, Gabriel García Márquez, Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, Jamaica Kincaid, as well as Jean Rhys and Julio Cortázar. His extensive collection of annotated novels at the Harry Ransom Center contains copies of Infante’s Three Trapped Tigers (1967), Márquez’s Of Love and Other Demons (1995), as well as a range of annotated Borges texts, including Labyrinths (1962) and Edwin Williamson’s biography Borges: A Life W.B. Yeats, Letters on Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press), letter 24; McCaffery, “An Expanded Interview with David Foster Wallace,” 35. 5 David Foster Wallace, Letter to David Markson (1990), Container 1.1, Steven Moore’s David Foster Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 6 There are fleeting references to Puig in Ira B. Nadel’s essay “Consider the Footnote,” in The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, which suggests that Wallace’s reliance on footnotes may have a precedent in Puig’s The Kiss of the Spiderwoman (238), and in Stephen J. Burn’s David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: A Reader’s Guide, 30. 4

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(2004). The material surrounding the review of this latter biography indicates that Wallace had a broader interest in Latin American history and culture, having read James Alazraki’s scholarly collection, Critical Essays on Jorge Luis Borges (1987), Emir Rodríguez Monegal’s Jorge Luis Borges: A Literary Biography (1988), as well as Williamson’s earlier study, A Penguin History of Latin America (1992), which Wallace praised unreservedly, as a “masterpiece of lucidity and triage.” The archives also contain a copy of Cortázar’s All Fires the Fire (1988), a writer whom Wallace saw as an avatar of “INTERPRETME fiction,” having produced novels that “not only cry out for critical interpretations but actually try to direct them,” and whose 1963 novel Hopscotch Wallace viewed as “succeed[ing] exactly to the extent one ignores the invitation to hop around in it.” Although he admitted to “having no Spanish” in a letter to Steven Moore, Wallace does seem to have had at least some familiarity with the language: there are many Spanish words scattered throughout Infinite Jest: “cojones” [genitals] (402), “¿Que?” [what?] (405), “pases” [the flourish of the matador’s cape in a bullfight] (13), and “compadre” [friend] (875).7 The narrator of Infinite Jest also notes that “[t]he chilling Hispanic term for whatever interior disorder drives the addict back again and again to the enslaving Substance is tecato gusano, which apparently connotes some kind of interior psychic worm that cannot be sated or killed” (200), while—significantly, for this book’s focus—he also uses the term “olla podrida” (791) to denote a combination of diverse sources. As I show in Chapter 6, just as Wallace faithfully recorded the dialectical nuances of other racial minorities, he also had an interest in the transcription of Latin American dialect, as shown in the idiomatic speech of Ennet House resident Alfonso Parais-Carbo, the “totally ununderstandable Cuban” (887) from Infinite Jest—“I am drug addict, powerless. I am knowing powerlessness since the period of Castro” (178)—as well as in the novel’s opening scene, when Hal anticipates being questioned by a Cuban nurse, speaking Spanish-­ inflected English: It will be someone blue-­collar and unlicensed, though, inevitable—a nurse’s aide with quick-­bit nails, a hospital security guy, a tired Cuban orderly who addresses me as jou—who will, looking down in the middle of some kind of bustled task, catch what he sees as my eye and ask So yo then man what’s your story? (17) David Foster Wallace, Letter to Steven Moore (October 26, 1990), Container 1.2–1.3. Steven Moore’s David Foster Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

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There is also evidence that Wallace intended a similar exploration in The Pale King: His character notes on the novel list Chris Acquistipace—a minor character in the published version of the novel—as a “fat, blue-­eyed Latino.”8 He also titled an early short story—the first Wardine extract from Infinite Jest (37–38)—as “Las Meninas,” presumably a dark joke on the famous Velazquez painting, highlighting the disjuncture between Wardine and Clenette’s squalid circumstances and that particular artwork’s eponymous “Maids of Honor.” Although it appears that Wallace read most Latin American fiction in translation, he had what is at the very least a passing familiarity with the Spanish language. In addition, the Spanish-­speaking world has responded favorably to Wallace’s work, with almost all of his major works, including La broma infinita [Infinite Jest] (2012) and Extinción [Oblivion] (2012), now being available in translation, signaling a clear market for his fiction. Moreover, the lavish remembrance written by Argentinian novelist Rodrigo Fresán further testifies to Wallace’s reception within the Latin American literary world.9 Of similar importance to Wallace’s ever-­expanding Latin-American audience have been the many Brazilian Portuguese renderings of Wallace’s texts, among them Breves Entrevistas Com Homens Hediondos [Brief Interviews with Hideous Men] (2005) and a compilation of Wallace’s most popular essays, published under the title Ficando Longe do Fato de Ja Estar Meio Que Longe D [Getting Away from Pretty Much Being Away from it All] (2012). Wallace was also familiar with several Latin American poets. His 1991 review of The Best of the Prose Poem lists Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda in a lengthy catalogue of “particularly well-­known or eminent contributors to the anthology,” before making the cryptic pronouncement that only three of the fourteen writers listed have produced prose poems “that seem like they’re anywhere even remotely close to their . . . best work.”10 Moreover, “E Unibus Pluram” (1993) appropriates Octavio Paz’s idea of “Meta-­irony” to discuss the way that “Low-­cultural images” (42) function in contemporary fiction. A later footnote indicates that Wallace gleaned this notion of Meta-­irony from Paz’s 1974 essay collection, The Children of Men. In this section of “E Unibus Pluram,” Wallace’s objective is to show how the use of such images and references in contemporary fiction is at odds with their use in“postmodernism’s artistic ancestors” (42). He reads, for instance, the ostensible postmodernism of James Joyce’s fiction and the “ur-Dadaism” of Duchamp’s Fountain as

David Foster Wallace, Notebook related to The Pale King, Container 36.1–41.9, David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.  9 Rodrigo Fresán, “Caerse y callarse (A propósito de la muerte de David Foster Wallace),” Renacimiento 61/62 (2008): 6–9. 10 David Foster Wallace, “The Best of the Prose Poem,” Both Flesh and Not, 248.  8

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examples of the Meta-­irony theorized by Paz. For Wallace, this was because such early instances of low-­cultural appropriation were expressly intended to serve abstract, theoretical ends: They were “an attempt to reveal that categories we divide into superior/arty and inferior/vulgar are in fact so interdependent as to be coextensive” (42). By contrast, the use of popular culture in contemporary fiction, according to Wallace, serves a more realistic function, and is “meant (1) to help create a mood of irony and irreverence, (2) to make us uneasy and so ‘comment’ on the vapidity of U.S. culture, and (3) most important, these days, to be just plain realistic” (42–43). Paz’s reading of Meta-­irony is thus highly significant to Wallace’s thesis, revealing an important instance of a postmodern threshold. Ultimately, the awareness of such a threshold prompts Wallace’s impassioned plea—in the essay’s conclusion—for a kind of contemporary fiction that treats “plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction” (81). One strong indication that Wallace viewed Latin America as a coherent literary territory is the frequency with which he clustered South American authors from very different parts of the continent. Whether due to his observation of similar themes, or because he discovered them at similar times, he repeatedly grouped diverse authors under a single, Latin-American umbrella. This categorization can be seen in the aforementioned “Puig, Cortázar and Rhys” formulation, and in Wallace’s consistent grouping of Puig and Cortázar (and occasionally Márquez) in interviews, as in a 1996 conversation with David Lipsky, where he spoke about the tendency for radically avant-­garde artists to become less experimental in their later years: “For somebody who comes out of a more theoretical and avant-­ garde tradition, I think the aging process is a thawing process. . . . Manuel Puig, Márquez, Cortázar, all of them thawed.11 Since Wallace routinely characterized his own artistic evolution as moving from linguistic “stunt pilotry” in early texts such as The Broom of the System—which Wallace characterized as “an essentially shitty first book” that was “way too clever”— to an ethically rigorous form of writing in texts such as The Pale King, it appears that he saw himself as embodying a very similar artistic trajectory to the Latin American authors he admired.12 (Incidentally, Latin America for Wallace included the Caribbean, as his inclusion of both Dominican novelist Jean Rhys and Antiguan-American writer Jamaica Kincaid in this category makes clear.) Wallace also invoked a coherent geographic territory in his review of Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert’s Mr. Cogito, where he noted that

Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, 141. Ibid., 232, 22, 35.

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“[i]t seems significant that only writers from Eastern Europe and Latin America have succeeded in marrying the stuff of spirit and human feeling to the parodic detachment the postmodern experience seems to require.”13 As I show over the course of this chapter, Wallace perceived the Latin American literary tradition as being capable of expressing “the stuff of spirit and human feeling” within a postmodern aesthetic. There is a particularly revealing section in Wallace’s 1991 review of The Doorman, a novel by Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas. Wallace begins the review by sketching out the tragic arc of Arenas’s biography, calling him “probably the best Cuban-­born writer since Alejo Carpentier.”14 However, what ultimately interested Wallace most about The Doorman was its dense symbolism, the way that it deploys an outsider’s perspective on American culture in order to construct “a dark parable on the very possibility of community.” In one section, Wallace compares the protagonist’s estranged relation to the United States with Franz Kafka’s Amerika, noting a crucial similarity between both texts’ explorations of American freedom. Wallace noted that the symbolic caricatures throughout the novel make the first half of The Doorman seem like a slighter version of Kafka’s Amerika—another dark picaresque with a tortured foreign ingénue adrift amid all the nation’s bright promise and sad reality, Juan as a Karl Rossman defined by questions of freedom and relationship instead of guilt and penance.15

For Wallace, it was the prominent distinction between America’s “bright promise and sad reality” that constituted a central part of international authors’ appeal: the unusual angle from which such writers approached US culture gave their critiques a level of penetration that Wallace himself tried to emulate at various points throughout his career. Wallace’s review is highly attuned to the texts’ cross-­cultural perspective, at one point arguing that [m]uch of The Doorman’s weird moral force concerns Arenas’s idea of America as a false door, presenting itself as a utopia for huddled masses who, once they arrive, find either brutal exploitation, or the “freedom” to start doing their own exploiting . . . which of course is still slavery.16

David Foster Wallace, “Mr. Cogito,” 122. David Foster Wallace, “Tragic Cuban Émigré and a Tale of ‘The Door to Happiness,’ ” Philadelphia Inquirer (1991). 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 13 14

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It is precisely this ability to evaluate a culture from a position of estrangement that Wallace’s review emphasizes, and which his own fiction often attempted to replicate. Wallace also experienced the complex cultural interplay between North and South America on his 1993 cruise vacation, documented in “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.” Instructed by the editors of Harper’s Magazine to “plough the Caribbean in style” (257), one section of Wallace’s travelogue describes being docked at “primitive and incredibly poor Cozumel” (309), just off the eastern coast of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. Wallace description of the trip emphasizes confusion and geographic dislocation, noting that even the moon over the Caribbean seems foreign, “look[ing] more like a sort of obscenely large and dangling lemon than the good old stony US moon I’m used to” (256). While in dock, Wallace chooses to stay on the boat, rather than exploring the island with his fellow cruisers, grimly pointing out that “[l]ooking down from a great height at your countrymen waddling in expensive sandals into poverty-­stricken ports is not one of the funner moments of a 7NC Luxury Cruise” (310). Though the experience accentuates Wallace’s sense of racial and national self-­consciousness—“I can’t help imagining us as we appear to them, the impassive Jamaicans and Mexicans” (310)—his initial attempts to distance himself from the holidaying “bovine masses” are ultimately eclipsed by the realization that his own “Americanness” (311) is inescapable. In fact, Wallace claims that this irksome awareness of national belonging constitutes part of the cruise’s essential horror: Part of the overall despair of this Luxury Cruise is that no matter what I do I cannot escape my own essential and newly unpleasant Americanness. This despair reaches its peak in port, at the rail, looking down at what I can’t help being one of. Whether up here or down there, I am an American tourist, and am thus ex officio large, fleshy, red, loud, coarse, condescending, self-­absorbed, spoiled, appearance-­conscious, ashamed, despairing, and greedy: the world’s only known species of bovine carnivore. (311)

This description reflects Wallace’s orientation to world literature as much as it describes his tourist status. Just as his own sense of national and class affiliation could not be transcended, neither was he able to transcend the prejudices and ingrained assumptions of his own cultural background in his encounters with Latin American literature. Such descriptions also have an obvious postcolonial dimension that Wallace does not articulate, but of which he must surely have been highly conscious. Having read a wide swathe of Latin American fiction, and “every word” of Dominican novelist Jean Rhys

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(including, presumably, her 1966 postcolonial staple Wide Sargasso Sea), he would have been all too aware of the history of slavery and colonial tyranny throughout the Caribbean.17 His darkly comic depiction of Cozumelenian poverty—where “the U.S. dollar is treated like a UFO: ‘They worship it when it lands’ ” (309)—obliquely acknowledges the latest iteration of imperial oppression, where Caribbean Islanders are imprisoned no longer through literal slavery, but through the equally tyrannical forces of global capitalism. As always, though, Wallace’s response to such poverty was a complicated one. In a draft scene from Infinite Jest, he invoked Caribbean scarcity for laughs, in his description of “professional stem-­art” Gordon W. Eagan, “a three-­decade heroin addict who claimed without bravado to have raised and fed into his right arm sums equal to the yearly GNP of most small Caribbean nations.”18 Moreover, the novel also imagines a future version of Mexico as being among the recipients of the US’s toxic waste, being too poor to stand up to the Organization of North American Nations: “Some of the Barges of Land’s waste would be vectored into the Sonora region of Mexico,” Marathe notes at one point, “but much would be shipped north for displacement-­launch into the Convexity” (428). Moreover, President Gentle goes as far as suggesting that Latin America might fulfill his nation’s structural need for a “cohesion-­ renewing other,” promising “to eat light and sleep very little until he finds them—in the Ukraine, or the Teutons, or the wacko Latins” (384). Infinite Jest contains numerous mentions of Latin American musical and dance forms, including the “limbo” (824), the “cha-­cha” (229), “mariachi band” (284) music, as well as a subversively comical adaptation of mambo dancing, the “Minimal Mambo, this autumn’s East Coast anticraze,” which features “dancers appearing to be just this side of standing still, the subtlest possible hints of fingers snapping under right-­angled elbows” (229). Equally loaded, from a postcolonial perspective, is Wallace’s description of “join[ing] a conga line” (256) in “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.” Since the conga has its origins in Cuban street dance, where it has overt political connotations—indeed, during the years of the Machado dictatorships, the dance was banned in an attempt to discourage political agitators—Wallace’s multiple reference to conga lines take on an added cultural significance. The cruise ship’s journey around the Cayman Islands and the Cuban coastline gives the scene a particularly postmodern inflection, where the implicit awareness of “authentic” cultural proximity is in tension with the ersatz exoticism of cruise ship frivolity. And though his essay Wallace also referenced Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight in Infinite Jest, including the novel in Madame Psychosis’s “Downer-Lit hour,” in which she “reads depressing book after depressing book” (191). 18 Steven Moore, “The First Draft of Infinite Jest.” 17

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does not directly acknowledge the proximity, the irony of a “bovine herd” (331) of wealthy, white American tourists dancing a drunken conga in the Caribbean Sea would surely not have escaped Wallace’s withering gaze.

Depoliticizing Manuel Puig and Jamaica Kincaid Although Wallace was attracted to the thematic content of such writers, gravitating toward the oblique, postmodern forces within their work, he was particularly taken with the experimental stylistic devices used throughout their fiction. Numerous scholars have pointed out that first-­wave “Latin Boom” novelists such as Borges, Cortázar, Fuentes, and García Márquez had a significant hand in shaping both postmodern literature and the discourse of postmodern theory more generally. Douwe Fokkema, for instance, goes as far as arguing that the fiction and theoretical texts of such authors were instrumental in establishing the critical term “postmodernism” on an institutional level.19 In a similar manner, Wallace also seems to have connected Latin American postmodernists with their North American counterparts, looking to Latin American fiction for those particular technical devices that gave expression to what Fredric Jameson labels as “the emergence of a new type of social life and a new economic order.”20 There are five key stylistic tropes, highly important to Wallace’s work, that I wish to discuss here, all of which were lifted from Manuel Puig. As we have already seen, Wallace was clearly enamored with Puig’s fiction. And although Wallace never published any reviews or essays on Puig’s work, in October 1990 he wrote to Steven Moore asking whether he might be interested in a long piece on the Argentine experimentalist for inclusion in a forthcoming edition of The Review of Contemporary Fiction: “I hear you’re going to do an issue on the late lamented Puig. True? Could I try something? You’d have to give me a concrete assignment: I have no Spanish, and am such a starstruck fan of Puig’s first three books that I have nothing like a critical posture w/r/t him.”21 Although the assignment never came to fruition, it is clear that Wallace was a passionate reader and interpreter of Puig’s fiction. Paying close attention to the particular stylistic devices Wallace appropriated from Puig allows us to see the various ways in which his influence plays out across Wallace’s work. Douwe W. Fokkema, Literary History, Modernism, and Postmodernism (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1984). 20 Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998 (London: Verso, 1998), 18. 21 David Foster Wallace, Letter to Steven Moore (October 26, 1990), Container 1.2–1.3. Steven Moore’s David Foster Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 19

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The first, most obvious stylistic appropriation is Wallace’s use of ellipses to communicate emotionally freighted silences, gestures, and expressions, a recurring technique that spans the length of his career. Though Stephen J. Burn suggests that Wallace’s “treatment of dialogue . . . owes much to Manuel Puig,” he argues that this particular technique can be traced back to Wallace’s reading of William Gaddis’s The Recognitions (1955). And while Burn notes that Wallace, à la Gaddis, uses such markings to “indicate the intrusion of something non-­verbal . . . into the verbal exchange,” my claim is that Wallace saw himself as following Puig’s, rather than Gaddis’s, lead.22 As Burn himself notes, there is strong evidence to suggest that Wallace came to Gaddis’s fiction at a relatively late stage in his career, circa 1993. And since Wallace had already read “every word of . . . Puig” by 1990, it is far more likely that he appropriated this particular stylistic device from Puig, rather than from the éminence grise of American postmodernism.23 Indeed, the early short story “Say Never,” which was later included in Girl with Curious Hair and which Wallace submitted to Bonnie Nadell in December 1985, contains an early example of such ellipses, roughly eight years before Wallace encountered Gaddis.24 Wallace used this particular form of punctuation to great effect in his first novel, The Broom of the System, though in later texts ellipses constitute one of his stylistic trademarks, appearing in almost all works from Infinite Jest through to The Pale King. And though the representation of such pauses resonates on some level with the way that Wittgenstein used ellipses— indeed, an early reviewer once scolded Wallace for relying on such “pseudoWittgensteinian” techniques—it was clearly a homage to the Argentine author, with Wallace himself admitting in 1987 that “if the technique is a rip-­ off of anyone it’s of Manuel Puig.”25 In a 1999 letter to Sergio Perroni, the Stephen J. Burn, “Problems in David Foster Wallace’s Poetics,” A Reader’s Guide to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, 29–30. 23 For a more detailed account of when Wallace started reading Gaddis, see the summary of a personal correspondence between Brian McHale and Stephen J. Burn, in McHale, “The Pale King, or The White Visitation,” in A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, eds. Marshall Boswell and Stephen J. Burn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 209. Following Burn, Adam Kelly also makes the claim that Wallace is following Gaddis’s lead in his use of “unattributed dialogue, where a lack of contextual description forces the reader to imaginatively intervene in constructing a scene.” Kelly, “Development Through Dialogue: David Foster Wallace and the Novel of Ideas,” Studies in the Novel 44, no. 3 (2012): 269. 24 David Foster Wallace, Letter to Bonnie Nadell (December 1985), Container 1.1, Bonnie Nadell’s David Foster Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 25 Max, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, 81. Wallace also confirmed this debt in a 1996 interview with Chris Lydon, candidly admitting that “parts of [The Broom of the System] were a rip-­off of Manuel Puig . . . most of his stuff is entirely in dialogue.” David Foster Wallace, Interview with Chris Lydon, February 1996. Online access: http://radioopensource.org/david-­foster-wallace-­chris-lydon. 22

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Italian translator of The Broom of the System, Wallace stated that the technique was designed, in part, to “designate silence from the person whose turn it is to speak,” but deferred to the translator’s observation of an inconsistency in the number of periods used: There should be four ellipses in each line meant to designate silence from the person whose turn it is to speak—“. . . .” and not “. . .” I wince at the sloppiness shown by me and the book’s original editor here, and I thank you for noticing the inconsistency.26

Wallace’s display of embarrassment here is misplaced, and it is possible that he was misremembering his earlier novel, since The Broom of the System already used four periods to indicate speechlessness. It was, in fact, his later practice that changed: Texts from Infinite Jest onward follow Puig’s lead in deploying three periods to denote conversational silence, in contrast to his earlier fiction.27 Wallace’s strategically positioned ellipses serve a similar function as Puig’s, highlighting an emotionally charged exchange of meaningful looks or silences. Compare, for instance, this passage, from Puig’s Eternal Curse on the Reader of these Pages (1982): —A lie? —Yeah, a lie. I was never abroad. —. . . —A complete fabrication, totally untrue.28

with a similarly significant, theological exchange between Hal and Mario in Infinite Jest: —“This again?” —“. . .” —“Really don’t think midnight in a totally dark room with me so tired my hair hurts and drills in six short hours is the time and place to get into this, Mario.”

David Foster Wallace, Letter to Sergio Claudio Perroni (September 19, 1999), Container 1.5, Bonnie Nadell’s David Foster Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 27 See pages 473, 478 and 520 of The Pale King for examples. 28 Manuel Puig, Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages (1980; repr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 57. 26

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Puig also uses double ellipses to denote a bilaterally significant lapse in dialogue, as this exchange, also from Eternal Curse shows: —My only interest is to do this job with as little hassle as possible. —. . . —. . . —I guess this morning you couldn’t go jogging, what with the rain. (25)

Wallace’s work uses double ellipses in the same way, as in this conversation between Rick and Lenore: —“Lenore, stop it. Not even remotely funny.” —“. . . .” —“. . . .” —“Except how did you know so much about it?” (27)

Such techniques speak to broader themes and preoccupations within Wallace’s fiction. As Burn notes, these devices can be read as recurring metafictional gestures, pointing toward the physical reality of readers making their way through the text, responding with their own facial gestures—“grimaces, puzzled looks, or smiles.”29 Though Burn’s argument is that such devices therefore “strive to acknowledge and dramatize the role of the silent partner” (31), it is possible to extend this idea even further, to encompass a more central aspect of Wallace’s art. More than merely arch, metafictional gestures, such extratextual devices also remind the reader of various omissions and redactions, suggestively implying what is beyond the narrative’s analytic reach. While Wallace’s texts often appear to be linguistically exhaustive, detailing every possible statement that can be said about a subject, in reality, his work goes to elaborate lengths to invoke—rather than exhaustively describe—its central emotions and themes. Michael Dunne’s claim is that Puig’s own use of such techniques can be viewed as representations of “philosophical

Burn, “Problems in David Foster Wallace’s Poetics,” 31.

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dialogism.”30 But in my view, Wallace’s appropriations are more productively viewed in light of Marshall Boswell’s insight on the way that Wallace exploits textual lacunae: If, as Wallace concedes, there is no way from the text to the world outside the text—that is, if the literary text is always already an alienated, self-­ referencing artefact—then what is required is a narrative method that will invoke certain cherished emotions—kindness, empathy, wonder, love—in such a way that they remain in the world, rather than in the text itself.31

This particular technique can therefore be read as a stylistic corollary to Wallace’s broader, reader-­response inflected account of his own fiction, as an attempt to allow language to “live not just in but ‘through’ the reader.”32 The second technical device that Wallace appropriated from Puig concerns the absurdly long, pedantically detailed chapter titles that have come to be viewed as a trademark of both writers. Puig’s novels frequently incorporate ostensibly “found” texts, such as news snippets, technical reports and mini-­essays, as in the chapter titled “ANNUAL LITERARY ESSAY COMPETITION FREE SUBJECT: ‘The Movie I Like Best’ By Jose L. Casals, SOPHOMORE, SECTION B” in Betrayed by Rita Hayworth (1968).33 This heading finds an eerie replication, and characteristic expansion, in Hal’s garrulously titled cinematic essay that is reproduced in the early stages of Infinite Jest: HAL INCANDENZA’S FIRST EXTANT WRITTEN COMMENT ON ANYTHING EVEN REMOTELY FILMIC, SUBMITTED IN MR. OGILVIE’S SEVENTH-GRADE ‘INTRODUCTION TO ENTERTAINMENT STUDIES’ (2 TERMS, REQUIRED), ENFIELD TENNIS ACADEMY, 21 FEBRUARY IN THE YEAR OF THE PERDUE WONDERCHICKEN, @ FOUR YEARS AFTER THE DEMISE OF BROADCAST TELEVISION, ONE YEAR AFTER DR. JAMES O. INCANDENZA PASSED FROM THIS LIFE, A SUBMISSION RECEIVING JUST A B/B+, DESPITE OVERALL Michael Dunne, “Dialogism in Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman,” South Atlantic Review 60, no. 5 (1995): 122. Marshall Boswell, “A Gesture Toward Understanding David Foster Wallace,” Modernism/ Modernity 16, no. 1 (2009): 8. 32 McCaffery, “An Extended Conversation with David Foster Wallace,” 40. 33 Manuel Puig, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, trans. Suzanne Jill Levine (1968; rep. New York: Avon, Bard, 1979), 182. 30

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Global Wallace POSITIVE FEEDBACK, MOSTLY BECAUSE ITS CONCLUDING ¶ WAS NEITHER SET UP BY THE ESSAY’S BODY NOR SUPPORTED, OGILVIE POINTED OUT, BY ANYTHING MORE THAN SUBJECTIVE INTUITION AND RHETORICAL FLOURISH. (140)34

Both writers also rely heavily on transcribed speech and eschew traditional forms of authorial orientation. (Puig’s novel Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages, for instance, consists solely of dialogue.) Wallace’s texts, from The Broom of the System through to The Pale King, often abruptly drop readers into unknown conversations, with no speaker attributions and with little guide as to the broader conversational context. Wallace also appropriated Puig’s lengthy, contextless internal monologues, which run on for pages and often include embedded forms of rhetorical address. The following extract from Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, in which a child named “Toto” questions a textually absent listener, reveals this technique particularly clearly: They were dressed up in the same costumes in the Charity Show at P.S. 3, the biggest kids dressed like the dolls for the gavotte, the best dance at P.S. 3 Mommy! why didn’t you come? with Daddy, because Mommy on duty at the drugstore missed all the dances the kids did at P.S. 3. It was a little boy doll and a little girl doll, and a little tree and a little house, all ending with toothpicks stuck on top of the nutcake, right? Or was it a custard cake? (24)

The Broom of the System contains many analogous forms of embedded apostrophe, as does Infinite Jest, for instance, in the chapter consisting of James Incandenza Sr.’s rambling monologue: My thumb’s wrinkled at the joint, Jim, some might say gnarled. Have a look at this thumb right here. But I still treat it as my own. I give it its due. You want a drink of this, son? I think you’re ready for a drink of this. No? Nein? (160)

Such devices enable the external invocations that Boswell’s analysis points to, though they also relate to Wallace’s mimesis of certain cultural realities of late The Broom of the System, likewise, uses numerous Puig-­esque “found” text titles, such as “EXCERPT FROM DUTY LOG OF DR. DANIEL JOY, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR FOR EMERGENCY SERVICES, CHICAGO DEPARTMENT OF MENTAL HEALTH, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, FRIDAY, 3 SEPTEMBER 1990” (197).

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capitalism, particularly his attempt to “mimic the information-­flood and data-­triage” that he saw as a central aspect of American culture.35 Yet another important technique Wallace took from Puig was his use of the redacted question-­and-response narrative format, which Wallace used consistently from Infinite Jest onward. Although many other postmodern novels deploy question-­and-answer fragments within their fiction—Stephen King’s Carrie (1974), for instance, and Donald Barthelme’s Snow White (1967)—Puig used the format in a highly idiosyncratic manner, within various novels. Heartbreak Tango (1969), for instance, omits a Priest’s interrogations in a memorable confessional scene, through the incorporation of blank spaces on the page: Father, I have many sins to confess   Yes, over two years, I couldn’t get up the courage to come   Because I’m going to receive the sacrament of marriage, that was what helped me to come   Yes, help me, Father . . .36

Betrayed by Rita Hayworth also excises an interlocutor’s questions, in a long chapter titled “Choli’s Conversation with Mita, 1941”: — —About ten years younger, because I take care of myself. — —You’re right, that’s not why. He never thought he was going to die so soon. — —He’d sure be mad, I make up my eyes now and wear my hair down. They all stink. (37)

Wallace modified this particular technique by using the journalistic signifier “Q.” to indicate a statement or question made by an unspoken converser, a device that is used most extensively in the title stories of the collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, but also in Infinite Jest and The Pale King:

David Foster Wallace, Letter to Michael Pietsch (April 1994), Container 1.10, Little, Brown & Co. David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 36 Manuel Puig, Heartbreak Tango, trans. Suzanne Jill Levine (1969; repr. Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 2010), 187. 35

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Global Wallace Q. It wouldn’t be so embarrassing if it wasn’t so totally fucking weird. If I had any clue about what it was about. You know? Q. . . . God, know I’m embarrassed as hell. Q. But all there is is the once.37

It is clear that Wallace appropriated a number of specific stylistic devices from Manuel Puig, many of which have since come to be seen as particular trademarks or, less charitably, as tics. Since scholars have made so much of Wallace’s stylistic borrowings from American writers, the omission of Puig from such a discussion is particularly curious, considering that the five representational strategies lifted from Puig are so evident throughout his fiction, from The Broom of the System to The Pale King. However, it is also important to emphasize how unexpectedly depoliticized Wallace’s reading of Puig really is. From all available evidence, Wallace completely ignored the cultural, historical, and political singularities within the fiction of Puig and other Latin American authors, instead focusing on ways in which such figures might resolve particular stylistic problems within his own texts. Wallace was clearly drawn to the way that Latin Boom writers such as Infante, Puig, Cortázar, and Márquez all saw their work as deconstructing assumptions of high/low cultural separation and undermining modernist depth-­models of meaning. But as Lois Zamora notes, such writers deliberately attempted to “bridge the gulf between literary and mass culture, . . . indicting the system upon which cultural inequalities have traditionally been based in Latin America.”38 For these Latin American figures, postmodernist stylistic and thematic concerns had clear political implications: their particular form of cultural critique used “the artifacts of disparate cultures to deconstruct the disparities, and to propose a shared Latin American reality” (186). Cortázar’s work, in particular, was concerned with using postmodern rhetorical strategies to engage with oppressive political conditions: Santiago JuanNavarro argues that his texts are fundamentally “interested in communicating politically with his audience, without having to minimize his aesthetic aspirations.”39 However, for Wallace—whom Max claims was “politically fairly

Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, 15. Lois Parkinson Zamora, Writing the Apocalypse: Historical Vision in Contemporary U.S. and Latin American Fiction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 186. 39 Santiago Juan-Navarro, “Postmodernist Collage and Montage in A Manual for Manuel, in Critical Essays on Julio Cortázar (New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1999), 186. 37 38

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conservative”—his appropriation of such writers in many ways emptied out their political force, appropriating their stylistic techniques for very different ends.40 But rather than seeing his literary engagements as “fairly conservative,” it might be more accurate to see Wallace’s stance resembling the worldview of Infinite Jest’s Hal Incandenza, who sees “himself at his innermost core apolitical” (310). While Wallace ignored the overt political references within Puig’s work, he also appropriated the above five techniques in ways that contrast Puig’s own use. As Leonard Cheever rightly points out, many of Puig’s narrative techniques—including his embedded apostrophes and redacted questions—are intended to serve expressly political ends: “to emphasize not only the surrealistic nature of Argentine politics, but also the nature of the lunatic world that might be produced if . . . ‘leftist Peronists’ manage to have their way.”41 Wallace’s reading of such texts as Betrayed by Rita Hayworth and Heartbreak Tango effectively hollow out all political content to instead focus on representational techniques that offered a slightly unusual response to postmodern textual concerns. His response to Puig thus mirrors John Barth’s similar orientation to Latin American novelists, such as Borges and García Márquez, whom he wrote about in emphatically aesthetic and largely apolitical terms. Barth’s 1979 essay “The Literature of Replenishment” pointedly singles out the work of García Márquez, particularly One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), as a paragon of “literary replenishment,” offering an instructive combination of “realism and magic and myth, political passion and non-­political artistry, characterization and caricature, humor and terror.”42 Similar comments within other parts of the essay—such as the effusive abstraction “[p]raise be to the Spanish language and imagination!” (205), in addition to Barth’s focus on the particular representational strategies that might be used to overcome the “felt ultimacies” of narrative fiction that he diagnosed in his earlier manifesto—signal that his aesthetic focus, like Wallace’s, leans far more heavily on the “non-­political artistry” of Latin American writers, rather than engaging with their “political passion.” Placing a similar emphasis on such “non-­political artistry,” Wallace also appropriated the stylistic techniques of the Antiguan-American writer Jamaica Kincaid in precisely the same way as he borrowed Puig’s. The “this is how” section of Infinite Jest (172–76), in which Hal narrates Mario’s puppet film Tennis and the Feral Prodigy, owes an obvious debt to Jamaica Kincaid’s Max, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, 259. Leonard A. Cheever, “Lacan, Argentine Politics, and Science Fiction in Manuel Puig’s Pubis Angelical,” South Central Review 5, no. 1 (1988): 69. 42 John Barth, “The Literature of Replenishment: Postmodernist Fiction,” in The Friday Book: Essays and Other Non-Fiction (London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 204. 40 41

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much anthologized short story “Girl,” and indeed can be read as a white middle-­class retelling of Kincaid’s text. Wallace taught “Girl” in one of his undergraduate fiction classes, and the archives contain a heavily annotated copy of the story, with marginalia such as “rep.,” pointing out various stylistic repetitions, “instructions” around the mother’s advice, and “judgment.”43 Kincaid’s text takes a highly innovative form: a single, instructional sentence, in which a lovingly reproachful mother gives her daughter advice on how to live her life, with just two italicized interjections from the daughter. The mother’s expansive advice ranges from the correct way to perform domestic duties (“wash the color clothes on Tuesday,” and “soak your little cloths right after you take them off ”) to interactions with men (“this is how a man bullies you; this is how to love a man”).44 Along with direct imperatives, the latter phrase, “this is how,” provides much of the story’s structure, and is repeated thirty-­one times. Wallace’s appropriation lifts these structuring devices from “Girl” and retains the tenderly instructional tone, but with important gender and class modifications: In his version, Hal dispenses advice to male E.T.A. juniors, listing the practical and emotional survival tips needed to endure the demands of tennis academy life. As in the Kincaid text, his exhortations range from practical and domestic advice—“Here is how to wrap your torn ankle” (172) and “Here is how to don red and grey E.T.A. sweats and squad jog a weekly 40 km. up and down Commonwealth Avenue” (173)—to more abstract guidance: “Please learn the pragmatics of expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express really invoke” (175) and “Nets and fences can be mirrors” (176). Although Wallace amplifies Kincaid’s innovative structure to produce a text that is roughly ten times as long as “Girl,” his rewriting mimics the number of direct exhortations. In a reproduction that seems far too unlikely to be sheer coincidence, Wallace’s narration contains an identical thirty-­one instances of the phrase “this is how,” and its minor variation, “here is how.” Wallace also replicates the antagonistic family dynamics within Kincaid’s story—the mother in “Girl” thrice refers to her daughter as a “slut” (4)—in Hal’s moving references to his dead father’s expectations, as well as his caustic, final piece of advice, on how to take “extracurriculars for your folks, who just wanted to make sure you didn’t miss anything they got” (176). (In an email correspondence, Jamaica Kincaid revealed that she was surprised to learn of Wallace’s homage to her story.45) The important point here is to David Foster Wallace, Annotations to Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl,” in X.J. Kennedy’s Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama, David Foster Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 44 Jamaica Kincaid, At the Bottom of the River (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1978), 3, 5. 45 Jamaica Kincaid, Email to Author (July 20, 2014). 43

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note that, as with his stylistic appropriation of Manuel Puig, Wallace jettisoned all political and racial content from Kincaid’s story, focusing on the technical innovations that might be transposed into a radically different context. Seemingly, Wallace had little interest in the postcolonial dimension of Kincaid’s work: His project here is one of straightforward domestication, bypassing the thematic content of the text in order to rework its stylistic and structural innovations. In addition to the stylistic devices he took from Puig and Kincaid, there is also evidence that the cyclical structure of Infinite Jest, which Wallace intended to “kind of hum and project” the elliptical narrative, ending “somewhere beyond the right frame,” is based on Julio Cortázar’s experimentations with narrative conclusions. Cortázar’s short story “Moëbius Strip,” in We Love Glenda So Much (1980) uses its titular mathematical structure to project the narrative beyond the physical boundaries of the text, while A Manual for Manuel (1973) requires the reader to return to the novel’s beginning, in much the same way that Infinite Jest sends the reader back to its opening chapters.46 However, while Cortázar’s fictional techniques have both political and aesthetic purposes, Wallace’s focus is once again on their literary applications. This thoroughly depoliticized and dehistoricized mode of reading, which we see over and over again throughout the book, is in many ways indicative of Wallace’s broader orientation to world literature. It can also be seen as a global extension of Andrew Hoberek’s observation on the way that Wallace focused on formal techniques, “invit[ing] 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.”47 In precisely the same manner, Wallace’s wide reading of twentieth-­century Latin American fiction always emphasized formal techniques, rather than the underlying cultural and political conditions with which such techniques were originally intended to engage. Curiously, this reading style is structurally analogous to the Alcoholics Anonymous injunction to “listen for the similarities” (347) in other alcoholics’ testimonies, focusing on the common elements within all addiction cycles and seeing oneself as intimately connected to other addicts. Many passages within Infinite Jest dramatize the lengths that AA participants go to in order to “Identify” (345) with others, erasing superficial distinctions in order to see

Anne Marie Donahue, “Exhibitionism in Private,” Boston Phoenix (March 21–28, 1996). Online access: http://www.bostonphoenix.com/alt1/archive/books/reviews/03-96/DAVID _FOSTER_WALLACE.html. 47 Andrew Hoberek, “The Novel after David Foster Wallace,” A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, 224. 46

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the deeper truth of shared pain: “Everybody in the audience is aiming for total empathy with the speaker; that way they’ll be able to receive the message he’s here to carry. Empathy, in Boston AA, is called Identification” (345). The narrator summarizes this interpretive strategy as the attempt to learn to Identify instead of Compare. Identifying, unless you’ve got a stake in Comparing, isn’t very hard to do, here. Because if you sit up front and listen hard, all the speakers’ stories of decline and fall and surrender are basically alike, and like your own: fun with the Substance, then very gradually less fun, then significantly less fun. (345)

The injunction also registered at a more personal level: In the wake of his AA recovery, Wallace was always keen to stress what he characterized as his “regular-­guyness,” his essential similarity to others.48 In fact, he even gave the insight a life-­or-death significance, telling Lipsky in 1996 that learning to recognize such commonalities had saved his life: “The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever almost made me die” (217). There are countless examples from Wallace’s fiction that reflect this belief, including Gately’s revelation that “[p]eople turned out so identical in certain root domestic particulars it made [him] feel strange sometimes” (57) and J.D. Steelritter’s conviction that “[s]olipsism binds us together” (309). What is important for my purposes is that the distinction between “Identifying” and “Comparing” mirrors David Damrosch’s exhortation to approach world literary texts with an ever-­present awareness of the “perils of exoticism and assimilation,” seeking to avoid both the fallacy that foreign works are intractably mysterious, “naïve and illogical,” as well as the mistaken belief that global authors and their original audience are “just like us, playing by the same rules and [with the same] cultural assumptions.”49 Wallace had no interest in keeping such “perils” in permanent tension, nor was he concerned with the kind of reading that, in John Pizer’s formulation, attempts to “sustain textual alterity” by preserving a sense of distance and otherness.50 Wallace’s orientation toward the substance-­abuse narratives of other addicts thus mirrors his idiosyncratic approach to Latin American literature, which often erases or looks beyond historical particularities in order to see a deeper sense of commonality, proposing that seemingly disparate addicts, and ultimately, other cultural identities are “just like us.” Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, 42. Damrosch, How to Read World Literature, 13. Damrosch’s emphasis. 50 Pizer, The Idea of World Literature, 20. 48 49

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Wallace’s reading of Puig thus functions as a representative case study, revealing Wallace’s reading of world literature as being at odds with what one might expect. His strategically shrewd readings of Puig’s fiction challenge widely held assumptions about how transnational exchange operates, and complicate conventional accounts of global cross-­pollination. This is because Wallace was not concerned with excavating timeless truths about Latin American cultural experience: He thus avoided perpetuating what Swaralipi Nandi labels as the widespread assumption that a text “stand[s] as a testimony for a whole culture.”51 Instead, Wallace’s focus was on the literary and formal features of Puig’s texts. His appropriation follows a strictly artistic logic, rather than a more intuitive logic of transnational political and cultural exchange, aligning with Pascale Casanova’s notion of the “law of literature,” as outlined in The World Republic of Letters, where she argues that “[t]he spread of freedom through world literary space occurred through the autonomization of its constituent spaces, with the result that literary struggles, freed from political constraints, were now bound to obey no other law than the law of literature.”52 Thus, while Wallace’s reading is, from a scholarly perspective, an arguably problematic one, focusing solely on “the law of literature” gave him the freedom to extract particular stylistic devices from a wide range of sources. His work is indicative of a quintessentially postmodern, pragmatist approach to world literature: Wallace’s engagement with Puig, Kincaid, Cortázar, Paz, and others takes a resoundingly pragmatic interpretive form, centered not—as one might expect—on the socio-­cultural particularities of Latin America, but on the particular representational techniques that might be incorporated into his own artistic project.

Code-­scrambling Borges One of Wallace’s most significant Latin American literary debts was to Jorge Luis Borges. Though Wallace was clearly drawn to a diverse range of South American figures, his fiction also reveals a profound engagement with the writer whom John Updike—along with numerous scholars—have positioned as a “giant of world literature.”53 Examining Wallace’s short story “B.I. #59” as a creative reimagining of Borges’s “La escritura del Dios,” this section suggests

Swaralipi Nandi, “Reading the ‘Other’ in World Literature: Toward a Discourse of Unfamiliarity,” in Critical Pedagogy and Global Literature: World Teaching, eds. Masood Raja, Hillary Stringer and Zach Vandezande (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 90. 52 Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 37. 53 John Updike, “The Author as Librarian,” New Yorker (October 30, 1965): 223–45. 51

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that such an analysis functions as an illustrative case study in conceptualizing influence within Wallace’s work more broadly. Taking Harold Bloom’s theory of poetic influence as a point of departure, this subchapter enacts a comparative reading of “B.I. #59” alongside “The Writing of the God” that explores some of the tensions and theoretical divergences between ideas of artistic precedence in Bloom and Wallace.54 Ultimately, my argument is that Wallace implicitly advances an alternative theory to Bloom’s, positioning the writer as the literary equivalent of a software engineer, rewriting and reassembling previous textual codes in the attempt to communicate with a contemporary audience. One of the odd aspects of this particular analysis is that Wallace himself had strong opinions on the way that Borges’s influence plays out in writers of a later generation. The meta-­critical aspect of this study is in part due to Wallace’s engagement with Jaime Alzaraki’s edited collection Critical Essays on Jorge Luis Borges, a collection that includes many enduring works of Borges scholarship, with pieces by Paul de Man, John Ashbery, and John Updike, among others. This collection also contains John Barth’s galvanizing 1967 manifesto “The Literature of Exhaustion,” an aesthetic call-­to-arms disguised within a discussion of how Borges’s fiction operates in an interstitial space between modernism and postmodernism, lending yet another layer of self-­awareness to Wallace’s own appropriation. Moreover, in his 1991 review of J.G. Ballard’s short-­story collection War Fever (1990), Wallace drew an explicit connection between the British “experimentalist”—whom Wallace saw as “not a great fiction writer, but . . . an important one”—and Borges, arguing that the collection’s final story, “Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown,” is a “Borgesian marvel of involution.”55 Wallace also invoked Borges in his 1996 review of Joseph Frank’s biography on Dostoevsky, when he claimed that the attempt to write “morally passionate,” Dostoevsky-­inspired fiction in “La escritura del Dios” has been translated into English as both “The God’s Script” (in L.A. Murillo’s rendering) and “The Writing of the God” (in Andrew Hurley’s more recent translation). Archival letters reveal that Wallace quibbled with the New York Times copy-­ editor over which translation to use, with Wallace insisting that he refer to Hurley’s version, since “I’m using it for my own translations/reading in the review (plus, of course, I want to distance myself as much as possible from Williamson’s reading of the story).” Wallace conceded that if the copy-­editor “really want[ed] to use Williamson’s version of the story’s title” he would acquiesce to the changes, though his concern was that attentive readers would be confused by this decision: “I can imagine sharp readers wondering why I’m using his title when there are alternate titles and I reject Williamson’s reading.” Following Wallace’s own preference, this chapter uses Hurley’s translation, and refers to the translated version as “The Writing of the God.” David Foster Wallace, Letter to Dwight Garner (December 24, 2004), Container 29.12, David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 55 David Foster Wallace, “Exploring Inner Space,” Washington Post, April 28, 1991. 54

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contemporary America would be at least somewhat absurd: “[t]he project would be like [Pierre] Menard’s Quixote” (274)—a delusional and anachronistic attempt to revive the unrevivable. And Wallace’s relationship to Borges becomes even more self-­conscious when we take into account a short story that used a Borges line as an epigraph, explicitly directing the interpretation of the story in light of the Argentine author. Though it was later removed, the initial publication of the story “Good Old Neon,” in Conjunctions, contained an epigraph from Borges’s well-­known text “Avatars of the Tortoise,” which Wallace reproduced in the original Spanish, as “Hay un concepto que us el corruptor y el desatinador de los otros” [“There is a concept that corrupts and upsets all others”].56 The story’s overwhelming focus on solipsism implies that the corrupting “concept” Wallace had in mind was self-­awareness, which ultimately infects one’s entire identity. Although this intertextual marker was removed in the story’s Oblivion incarnation, it nonetheless indicates Wallace’s own awareness of “Borgesian” themes and preoccupations within his own work, and demonstrates Borges’s importance to Wallace’s late-­career fiction. As I show, such examples add an extra layer of complexity to his appropriation of Borges, thwarting standard scholarly models by which to understand literary indebtedness. The most comprehensive account of Wallace’s engagement with Borges is his impassioned 2004 New York Times review of Edwin Williamson’s Borges: A Life, as well as the corresponding drafts and annotations surrounding the review. Though there are also other passing references to the Argentine author within Wallace’s fiction, interviews, and journalism, this document clearly outlines Wallace’s interpretive approach. However, in spite of the prominent position Borges occupies within Wallace’s work, to date, there have been no sustained academic enquiries on this particular topic. The sole reference to Borges in Wallace criticism occurs in Stephen J. Burn’s A Reader’s Guide to Infinite Jest, in which he suggests that the Eschaton chapter bears certain similarities to Borges’s famous parable “Of Exactitude in Science.”57 The participants’ confusion between a map and its real-­world referent does suggest a conceivable affinity with this text, although the more palpable reference point in this particular chapter is with Don DeLillo’s End Zone, an See David Foster Wallace, “Good Old Neon,” Conjunctions 37 (November 2010). In the archived drafts of this story, Wallace’s own citation to the epigraph provides the following reference, given in both Spanish and English: “ ‘Avitares de la Tortuga’ from the Argentinian book Discusion. 1932—reprinted in ubras Completes de J.L.B., v. 1, p. 129 and in English Labyrinths, p.  202.” David Foster Wallace, Typed Draft of “Good Old Neon,” Container 24.2–4, David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 57 Burn, A Reader’s Guide to Infinite Jest, 24. 56

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influence that Wallace himself acknowledged. Burn’s introduction to Infinite Jest provides brief mentions of several potential influences, so it is not unusual that this particular observation is not given further analysis, though the notion that Wallace’s fiction might bear more palpable traces of Borges’s influence seems logical when we consider the aforementioned 2004 review of Edwin Williamson’s biography, Borges: A Life. Wallace’s scathing review of Borges: A Life centers on a critique of Williamson’s psychoanalytic interpretation of Borges, which Wallace took as having perpetuated the intentional fallacy at every turn. For Wallace, Williamson was not merely an “atrocious reader of Borges’s work,” offering analyses that were “shallow, forced, and distorted,” his interpretive stance ultimately “amount[ed] to a simplistic, dishonest kind of psychological criticism.”58 Wallace took umbrage with the biographer’s crude project of superimposing events from Borges’s life onto his fiction (and vice versa), a mapping that suppresses the philosophical and intellectual content of Borges’s texts. This blithe perpetuation of the intentional fallacy was, for Wallace, an absurdly reductive way of approaching Borges’s fiction. His essay explains that the primary deficiency of such an approach is that it cannot contend with the fact that Borges’s stories are “designed primarily as metaphysical arguments; they are dense, self-­enclosed, with their own deviant logics. Above all, they are meant to be impersonal, to transcend individual consciousness” (288). Wallace proceeds to detail how “irksome” it is to see Williamson read stories such as “The Immortal” and “The Writing of the God” as “respective products of Borges’s ‘many-­layered distress’ . . . after various idealized girlfriends dump him,” arguing that this kind of interpretation “misses the whole point.” Williamson’s reading of the latter story—which he interprets exclusively in light of Borges’s relationship with Estela Cantos, as a dramatization of “a lack of [romantic] courage”—must have been particularly galling to Wallace.59 Thus, in direct opposition to Williamson’s approach, Wallace argues for a hermeneutics that emphasizes the metaphysical, ahistorical, and “impersonal” nature of Borges’s fiction. Like Paul de Man, who linked Borges to the European tradition of the conte philosophique, Wallace stressed the persistently philosophical nature of Borges’s texts. In this respect, Wallace was also taking issue with “The Literature of Exhaustion,” since his philosophical emphasis differs substantially from Barth’s interpretation of Borges as an endlessly playful aesthetician who boldly confronts various “intellectual dead end[s]” in order

Wallace, “Borges on the Couch,” 287, 289, 287. Edwin Williamson, Borges: A Life (New York: Penguin, 2004), 308.

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“to accomplish new work.”60 Because Barth constituted such a problematic source of influence over Wallace and because, as Zamora notes, Barth’s essay constitutes “perhaps the first important acknowledgement of the influence of contemporary Latin American fiction on U.S. fiction,” Wallace’s essay should be read as an oblique rejoinder to Barth’s reading of Borges as an exemplar of postmodern aesthetics.61 In many ways, Borges’s fiction—like Kafka’s, as I show in a later chapter— forms what for Wallace was an ideal body of world literature. This is because Borges’s cultural context enters his work in relatively oblique forms, and it is entirely possible to read his fiction without any knowledge of the particular cultural and political circumstances within which he wrote. Since Wallace’s reading prioritizes the abstract, metaphysical themes over historical particularity, he could bypass the difficult work of contextualizing Borges’s stories, absolving himself of the need to examine Borges’s surrounding culture or intended audience. Even David Damrosch suggests that Borges’s fiction is inherently independent of its context, arguing that his stories “could really be set anywhere” and connecting this quality with Borges’s origins in Buenos Aires, a “peripheral” city.62 Perhaps this is the true reason why Wallace was so vexed by Edwin Williamson’s form of scholarship: Together with an entirely spurious form of psychoanalytic interpretation, which Wallace rightly critiques, Williamson’s study also tried to show how Borges’s fiction relates to particular historical circumstances. As he pointed out in a response to Wallace’s article, published in the New York Times letters section on December 5, 2004, Williamson’s intention was primarily to “rescue Borges from the postmodernists’ embrace and restore him to history, to the trials and tribulations of living in this world, for only then can we get a truer measure of his achievement.”63 Williamson went on to characterize Wallace’s “retro reading” as relying on a “tired postmodernism,” invoking a criticism of American postmodernists’ engagement with Borges that has been leveled by numerous other Latin Americanists.64 Conceivably, Wallace’s review could have articulated a more temperate position, recognizing the value in Williamson’s historicizing approach. However, Wallace’s vitriol indicates the

John Barth, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” The Friday Book: Essays and Other NonFiction (London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 69–70. 61 Zamora, Writing the Apocalypse: Historical Vision in Contemporary U.S. and Latin American Fiction, 98. 62 Damrosch, What is World Literature? 108. 63 Edwin Williamson, “Borges and the 60s Groove,” New York Times. Online access: http:// query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9905E5DB103EF936A35751C1A9629C8B63. 64 Ibid. 60

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substantial investment he had in an extracting all political and cultural content from Borges’s texts in order to emphasize their abstract, philosophical qualities. His review singles out “The Immortal” and “The Writing of the God” as exemplars of this kind of philosophical narrative, describing them as “two of the greatest, most scalp-­crinkling mystical stories ever, next to which the epiphanies of Joyce or redemptions of O’Connor seem pallid and crude” (294).65 Wallace’s creative reworking and recontextualization of the latter story forms the main analysis of this chapter, though there are first a number of other significant references to Borges that are worth exploring. The first of these references occurs within “Octet,” an earlier story in the Brief Interviews collection. This dazzlingly metatextual story is structured around several “pop quizzes,” in which the narrator poses various ethical problems to the reader, and contains a veiled reference to Borges’s “A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain,” a partial conspectus of a fictional author’s oeuvre. The narrator of Wallace’s text states that he is attempting an “eight-­ part cycle” of stories, an “octet or octocycle, though best of British luck explaining to anyone why” (110). A later section elaborates on the story’s structure: You were betting that the queer emergent urgency of the organically unified whole of the octet’s two-­times-two-­times-two pieces (which you’d envisioned as a Manichean duality raised to the triune power of a sort of Hegelian synthesis w/r/t issues which both characters and readers were required to “decide”). (127–28)

In this aside, Wallace attempts to move beyond a potentially reductive response to the moral quagmires within the story on the part of the reader, allowing the narrative structure to reflect the complexity of the pop quizzes therein, a strategy that bears similarities to Herbert Quain’s novel April March, which—Borges informs us—also experiments with “triune” and “binary” narrative patterns. Like Wallace’s narrator, the fictitious writer Quain conceived a wildly abstract and experimental structure, only to doubt its efficacy: “After April March was published, Quain had second thoughts about the triune order of the book and predicted that the mortals who imitated it would opt for a binary scheme” (110). Moreover, Borges admits that several of the stories within April March are failures, claiming that “one and another In the inside dust-­jacket to his copy of Williamson’s biography, Wallace echoed this position, singling out “The Writing of the God” as “one of the great modern fables of mystical nominalism.”

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of the nine tales is unworthy of Quain” while “others are marred by pallid jokes and instances of pointless pseudoexactitude” (110). Wallace’s second-­ person narrator, likewise, despairingly admits: “you’re not at all sure how the four pieces the octet ended up with ‘fit together’ or ‘have in common,’ i.e. how they add up to a bona fide unified ‘cycle’ whose urgency transcends the sum-­ urgency of the discrete parts it comprises” (129). Thus, in both structure and authorial anxiety, Wallace’s “Octet” echoes Borges’s short story. Recognizing the structural connection between “Octet” and “A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain” primes the reader of Brief Interviews to perceive a more complex debt to Borges in the later story “B. I. #59.” This story forms one of eighteen colloquies and overheard conversations recorded by an unknown female interviewer, effaced from the text and represented only by the journalistic signifier “Q.” These eighteen transcripts are contained within four chapters, each given the title “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,” and are clearly meant to be read as a cycle of stories with overlapping thematic concerns. But isolating “B.I. #59,” found within the third chapter of transcripts and one of the longer interviews in the collection, allows for a more detailed analysis of both surface similarities and broader thematic affinities with “The Writing of the God.” Borges’s “The Writing of the God” centers on the figure of Tzinicán, a “priest of the Pyramid of Qaholom” (250) languishing in captivity after his mortal enemy, Pedro de Alvarado, burned his sacred temple and imprisoned him in a subterranean, hemispheric cell. Sharing Tzinicán’s enclosure, and separated by a dividing wall, is a tiger. The only contact with the outside world is via a small door high above, from which a jailer lowers food once a day. Racked with boredom and deprived of any stimuli, Tzinicán spends his time recollecting, in great detail, objects, and sights he once knew, a remembrance that eventually leads him to recall the knowledge that, somewhere within the world, his god had written a “magical phrase” (251) that confers immortality on whoever utters it. Tzinicán remembers that the writing of the god is inscribed on the tiger’s skin, a realization that leads to a mystical communion with the deity. The story’s startling conclusion is that although the pronunciation of the god’s script would make the stone prison disappear, restore the pyramid, and allow Tzinicán to rule the lands of Moctezuma, the narrator states that he will never speak those words, because after experiencing union with the divine, he no longer possesses a distinct self. Wallace’s “B.I. #59” is a lengthy monologue, punctuated by unknown questions, concerning an adolescent masturbation fantasy. The eccentric fantasy is based on Elizabeth Montgomery’s character in Bewitched, in particular her character’s ability to freeze time, suspending the motion of every person in the vicinity except for herself. The interviewee’s fantasized

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narrative tableau consists of an army gym facility, in which the narrator locks eyes, “in a gaze of strong erotic attraction,” with a “sensual, but vigorous and athletic” (183) woman. Once this erotically charged eye contact takes place, the adolescent magically freezes time with a circular gesture of his hand, such that everyone exercising in the gym—apart from himself and the desired woman— are rendered motionless and insensate, “frozen” in time. At this point, the couple engage in “copulation in varied indistinct positions” (184). Eventually, the protagonist becomes concerned with what he perceives to be several logical inconsistencies within the fantasy, realizing that the entire universe must come to a halt to allow the imagined copulation to occur. Such reflections soon spiral out of control, and eventually, pages of convoluted mathematical equations—concerning the earth’s rotational spin, galactic- and lunar shifts and so on—are needed to sustain the narrative premise. Finally, the seventeen-­ year-old boy, claiming to have had the possibility of becoming a god, renounces the fantasy, choosing instead to become a “celibate of all eternity” (191). The first similarity between the stories lies in the two epiphanies, in which both characters renounce divine status. Tzinicán, through his decoding of the god’s writing, need only utter the words to gain immortality; however, he relinquishes this status because, by “no longer remember[ing] Tzinicán,” he has already transcended his mortality, no longer concerned with the fate of any single human. Writing on “The Wait” in the Williamson review, Wallace highlighted Borges’s “distant interrogative ending” (290), suggesting that it functions as “an inquisition into dreams, reality, guilt, augury and mortal terror” (290) and was “a Borges trademark” (290). “The Writing of the God” has a very similar conclusion. In the final lines of the story, Tzinicán rhetorically addresses the reader in order to explain his spiritual epiphany: He who has glimpsed the universe, he who has glimpsed the burning designs of the universe, can have no thought for a man, for a man’s trivial joys or calamities, though he himself be that man. He was that man, who no longer matters to him. What does he care about the fate of that other man, what does he care about the other man’s nation, when now he is no one? That is why I do not speak the formula, that is why, lying in darkness, I allow the days to forget me. (253–54)

Wallace’s ending structurally mimics Borges’s, as the unnamed protagonist details the realization that led to his own renunciation of divine status: how many other men have felt the power to become a God, then renounced it all? That is the theme of my power you say you wished to

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hear of: renunciation. How many know the true meaning of it? . . . What do they know of love? I, who am by my choosing a celibate of all eternity, have alone seen love in all its horror and unbounded power. I alone have any rights to speak of it. All the rest is merely noise, radiations of a background which is even now retreating always further. It cannot be stopped. (191)66

Both men thus choose to fade into obscurity rather than grasp divine standing, and both pose rhetorical questions to the reader, but while Borges’s narrator seems almost beatifically detached, the tone of Wallace’s narrator is openly belligerent, complicating the ostensibly redemptive nature of his epiphany. A second point of comparison concerns the two stories’ thematic treatments of solipsism. For Wallace, solipsism and loneliness were oft-­ recurring themes: His reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein, for instance, is centered on the Austrian philosopher’s treatment of solipsistic thought; while Wallace also claimed, in a 1999 interview on Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, that “everything that I write ends up being about loneliness.”67 More specifically, masturbation often figures within Wallace’s work as a synecdoche of emotional isolation and solipsism. The renamed “Organization of North American Nations (ONAN)” in Infinite Jest, for instance, is clearly meant to invoke the Genesis story of the seed-­spilling Hebrew Onan, signaling the masturbatory self-­centeredness of a nation that foists its waste products onto neighboring countries and emphasizes internal hygiene over foreign policy. This renaming of the United States also has political implications: David H. Evans notes that US citizens are themselves implicated in this solipsistic construction of identity, as “ONAN-ist[s].”68 The trope occurs again in the depiction of Terry Schmidt—the protagonist of “Mister Squishy”—who in his lonely, self-­loathing state, masturbates regularly “to thoughts of having moist slapping intercourse with Darlene Lilley on one of the ponderous “The Depressed Person,” from the same short-­story collection, also features the “distant interrogative ending” that Wallace associated with Borges’s fiction. The story ends with two troubling questions: “. . . and therefore urged her terminally ill friend to go on, to not hold back, to let her have it: 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?” (58) 67 David Foster Wallace, KCRW Bookworm Interview (1999). 68 David H. Evans, “ ‘The Chains of Not Choosing’: Free Will and Faith in William James and David Foster Wallace,” in A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, 179. 66

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laminate conference tables of the firms they conducted statistical market research for” (16). Moreover, Schmidt tortures himself with depressing predictions about the spiritual emptiness of his future life: at one point he imagines that the best he can hope for is somehow to gain promotion and so “be able to afford a nicer and better-­appointed condominium to masturbate himself to sleep in” (47). More pointedly, Mark Nechtr, the central character in “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way”—and one of Wallace’s more obvious fictional doppelgangers—connects metafiction with solipsistic love by acerbically claiming that “Metafiction is untrue, as a lover. . . . Itself is its only object. . . . Its lovers not being lovers. . . . Fucking themselves. True, there are some gifted old contortionists out there. Ambrose [John Barth] and Robbe-Grillet and McElroy and Barthelme can fuck themselves awfully well” (332). In 1998’s “The Nature of the Fun,” Wallace extends the metaphor even further, applying it to certain tendencies within his own early fiction writing, particularly the feeling that his early work had a certain “onanistic motive,” characterizing it as “writing almost wholly to get [himself] off.”69 The essay goes on to explain how the attempt at “writing for other people” moved Wallace’s fiction away from this tendency, noting that, ultimately, “any kind of masturbation is lonely and hollow” (144). The Pale King also reflects on this particular form of loneliness, with one IRS agent asking another character: “Speaking of which, what do you think of when you masturbate?” suggesting that such thoughts have broader implications, “reveal[ing] a lot about you: what you dream of when you yourself choose and control what you dream” (25–26). Autoeroticism, in Wallace’s work, thus functions as a recurring trope, consistently linked to such negative states as loneliness, ennui, artistic self-­ indulgence, self-­serving metafiction, political avarice, and—perhaps most importantly—solipsism. Aside from emphasizing the philosophical content of Borges’s stories, Wallace’s interpretation of Borges stressed the self-­reflexive, “inbent and hermetic” nature of his fiction, arguing that Borges’s stories were the product of a “mind turned . . . wholly in on itself ” (293). Wallace read such recurring Borgesian topoi as labyrinths, mirrors, dreams, and doubles as “symbols of the psyche turned inward,” arguing that Borges’s fiction demonstrates that the “line between monism and solipsism is thin and porous” (294). Indeed, the philosophical monism that Wallace finds in so many of Borges’s tales frequently borders on extreme self-­isolation: “The Writing of the God” is notable for its protagonist’s utter vanquishing of the self, and for his spiritual

David Foster Wallace, “The Nature of the Fun,” Fiction Writer Magazine (September 1998): 143, 144.

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awareness of the insignificance of the human self in relation to the divine. One of the crucial points of divergence between the two short stories is Borges’s protagonist’s transcending of the self via communion with the divine, valuing the abstract over the particular, and at one point stating “I no longer remember Tzinicán” (253). By contrast, Wallace’s narrator is completely self-­absorbed and lonely, imagining scenes of sexual intimacy rather than relating to actual people. Indeed, the fantasy’s reliance on everyone in the entire universe being rendered frozen and unconscious—aside from the adolescent and the erotic “target”—is a clear analogy for universal solipsism, making the story a kind of philosophical negative of Borges’s tale. That the coupling takes place with an imagined female does nothing to abate the protagonist’s lonely isolation; the “target” is described as a “bewitched, overpowered woman,” bereft of agency following the adolescent’s compellingly erotic gaze. This aspect of the fantasy dovetails neatly with Slavoj Žižek’s cynical interpretation of contemporary sexual relationships. Žižek’s claim, in The Parallax View, is that in the majority of sexual encounters, the Other is reduced to a mere “masturbatory prop,” a blank erotic slate onto which all kinds of narcissistic fantasies are projected.70 Thus, via the virtual world of sexual fantasy, Wallace’s protagonist is preparing for what Žižek would label the “virtual” nature of real-­life sexuality, making the first movements toward an even more intensified loneliness, a form of solipsism that many of the other “Brief Interviews” within the collection explore. The frozen bystanders present during the imagined copulation are linked to a singularly televisual, two-­dimensional portrayal of character. In connecting the frozen exercisers with the similarly motionless extras on Bewitched, the story implies that those in the gymnasium have ontologically mutated into a television spectacle. Daniel Grassian diagnoses this act as a “media inspired perversion,” claiming that “the hideous man learns from his prodigious television watching to treat women more like two-­dimensional objects,” transferring the lessons from an innocuous television program onto the real world.71 However, we can extend the argument even further if we recognize that the codified expressions of gender within Bewitched, taken to

Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (London: MIT Press, 2009), 191. Daniel Grassian, Hybrid Fictions: American Literature and Generation X (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Press, 2003), 96, 96–97. Intriguingly, George W.S. Trow’s 1980 essay “Within the Context of No Context”—an important precursor to the analysis of television and irony in “E Unibus Pluram” and an essay that Wallace referred to in a 2000 Bookworm interview—at one point refers to television’s power as “bewitching,” claiming that “[n]o good has come of it.” Wallace’s choice to situate the fantasy in relation to the program Bewitched thus takes on additional significance. George W.S. Trow, Within the Context of No Context (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997), 64.

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their extreme end, are not all that far from the reduction of women to mere “masturbatory props.” The long-­running sitcom, in its uncritical affirmation of traditional gender roles, symbolically enacts the stifling and domestication of female agency, sexuality, and creativity via Samantha’s suburban descent from a nebulous immortal realm. Wallace presents us with a character who has absorbed, far too strongly, the program’s latent chauvinist subtext, a figure doomed to embody such an ideology in increasingly perverse forms. As an explanation for the origins of the fantasy, we are told that “as a child” (181), the Eastern European narrator “watched a great deal of American television” (181), his favorite program being Bewitched.72 The sense of loneliness is further intensified through a telling lexical slip, toward the end of the story. In describing the decision to relinquish the all-­ consuming fantasy, the narrator explains: “I abdicated . . . in a bloom of renunciation that commenced at our bed and opened swiftly out to include all known bodies in motion” (191). The reference to “our bed” here is significant. Although the adolescent is completely alone, surrounded by only mathematical equations and textbooks, his fantasy has conjured the presence of the “vigorous and athletic” (183) woman so strongly that he mistakenly refers to his bed as being occupied by another person. The narrator’s Eastern European cultural background—he tells the interviewer that the real-­world gym that inspired the fantasy was located in “a bleak, Siberian defense outpost” (187)—explains a number of solecisms throughout the conversation. Another revealing error concerns the name of Samantha’s husband, Darrin, on the program Bewitched. Just as Samantha’s mother, Endora, repeatedly forgets Darrin’s name, referring to him as “Darwin,” “Dum-Dum” and “Darwood,” among other misnomers, Wallace’s narrator repeatedly refers to him as “Darion.” The error seems trivial enough, but since Endora is continually displaying contempt for mortals and reveling in her occult powers, it appears that Wallace is linking his narrator to this particular character in order to foreshadow his attempts at “becom[ing] a God” (191), and hence, achieve immortality. These two instances of misremembering are particularly telling, subtly pointing to the story’s larger thematic concerns.

Infinite Jest contains two references to Bewitched. In the first, the hospitalized Don Gately describes the wraith’s visitations as being “slightly reminiscent of “Bewitched” reruns from Gately’s toddlerhood” (831). In the second, the narrator notes the way that Gately “can still summon great verbatim chunks not only of drug-­addicted adolescence’s ‘Seinfeld’ and ‘Ren and Stimpy’ and ‘OO is ’E When ’E’s at ’Ome’ and ‘Exposed Northerners’ but also the syndicated ‘Bewitched’ and ‘Hazel’ and ubiquitous ‘M*A*S*H’ he grew to monstrous childhood size in front of ” (834).

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The characters’ speech characteristics differ markedly between the two stories. Whereas Borges’s narrator is chillingly detached, alternating between abstract, mystical language—“infinite concatenation of events” (252), “the mystery writ upon the jaguars” (253), and so on—and precise, quasi-­scientific terminology and phrasings—for example, “confirmation of my conjecture” (251), “proximity” (251) and “proposition” (252)—Wallace’s narrator’s monomaniacal personality is revealed via laborious fastidiousness. Aside from confirming the correct pronunciation of “masturbation” with the interlocutor, he also provides the precise age at which he relinquished his fantasy: “seventeen years and four months and 8.40344 days” (191). Moreover, the narrator’s pedantic referencing of esoteric astrological knowledge—he refers to both the “3C295” Galaxy and “the troublesome NGC253 Galaxy” (190)—further confirms the extent of his obsession.73 But this painstaking attention to linguistic and scientific detail is merely a pale shadow of the all-­consuming passion that led to the frenzied calculations, and is one of several humorous elements of the story. In fact, the narrator’s need to sustain an onanistic fantasy via elaborate mathematical calculations seems a refracted parody of Wittgenstein’s account of his war-­time sexual fantasies: while masturbating as a soldier during World War I, Wittgenstein claimed to have been simultaneously puzzling over dense mathematical problems.74 And since Wallace’s review of David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress both quotes Wittgenstein’s characterization of philosophy as “a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language” and also paraphrases this fragment—pointing out that “late Wittgenstein is full of great examples of how persons are constantly succumbing to the metaphysical ‘bewitchment’ of ordinary language”—the story is also in conversation with Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.75 Another obvious comic element in the story concerns the narrator’s slavish devotion to his erotic imagination. The image of a sickly, nervous youth spending entire days holed up in his room, madly carrying out baroque calculations for the sole purpose of crafting a logically coherent sexual fantasy is clearly meant to be humorous. Indeed, the comical premise of “B.I. #59” recalls the description, in Infinite Jest, of James Incandenza’s film Möbius

The “troublesome NGC 253 galaxy” referred to in this passage is commonly known as the “Sculptor Galaxy,” a sidelong gesture to the difficulties involved in “sculpting”—again referring to divine manipulation, as in the Genesis account of God forming Adam out of clay—the convoluted erotic fantasy. 74 Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1999), 183. 75 David Foster Wallace, “The Empty Plenum: David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress,” in Both Flesh and Not, 110, 111. 73

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Strips, which centers on “a theoretical physicist . . . who can only achieve creative mathematical insight during coitus” (990). Wallace’s pun on the word hand exploits the comic elements of “B.I. #59”: The interviewee, in another revealingly misremembered detail, recalls Samantha’s character as freezing time with a circular motion of her hand. In actual fact, in the television program, Samantha stops time most frequently with a surreptitious wiggling of her nose; the narrator is clearly conflating his own masturbatory hand movements with an actress’s portrayal of character. Likewise, the very gesture of renunciation—“reaching up high with now both of my hands to make the reverse gesture of linked circles which set all of it free” (191)—further exploits the double-­entendre. In its coupling of humor and existential loneliness, “Brief Interview #59” also reveals Wallace’s attempt to blend comedy and pathos, a strategy founded on an idiosyncratic reading of Franz Kafka. As I show in Chapter 4, Wallace’s interpretation of Kafka was centered on the notion that “Kafka’s funniness depends on some kind of radical literalization of truths we tend to treat as metaphorical,” as well as the idea that grotesquery and comedy are inseparable in Kafka’s fiction.76 This particular account of humor is given expression in “Octet,” in the section where Wallace-qua-narrator metatextually details the reasons for a particular vignette’s affective failure: the whole mise en scène is too cartoonish, such that it looks as if it’s trying to be just grotesquely funny instead of both grotesquely funny and grotesquely serious at the same time, such that any human urgency in the Quiz’s scenario and palpations is obscured by what appears to be just more of the cynical, amusing-­ourselves-to-­death-type commercial comedy that’s already sucked so much felt urgency out of contemporary life in the first place. (127)

The contrast between cynical commercial comedy and a Kafkaesque ideal is an important one since Wallace saw humor as a vehicle of existential interrogation, not merely an escapist relief from banal, everyday experience. “B.I. #59” ’s narrator is an obvious example of this ideal. The grotesque interviewee, in his tireless devotion to sustaining a convoluted sexual fantasy, seems gelastic and absurd, as well as profoundly emblematic—in his loneliness and lack of meaningful self-­awareness—of a particularly late-­ twentieth-­century form of solipsism. David Foster Wallace, “Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness from which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed,” in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, 63.

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Programming literary influence The sheer diversity of influences revealed in “B.I. #59” is indicative of a broader artistic strategy throughout Wallace’s fiction. Indeed, Wallace frequently staged artistic encounters with antecedent sources, combining diverse intertexts in a variety of different ways. In this sense, Wallace’s practice resembles that of a software engineer: a highly specialized expert who builds on previous codes and structures to create ingenious software programs that will meet the needs of contemporaneous users. Extending the metaphor, it would be inconceivable for such an engineer to ignore the technical and structural achievements of previous code-­writers—such an attitude would imply both needless repetition and inefficiency—and, likewise, equally absurd to be constricted to a single programming influence, as Bloom’s model of the “strong poet” (5) wrestling with an isolated, overpowering forefather proposes. In the same way that software innovations often arise from technical advances in neighboring fields, so Wallace’s texts are innovative in their complex amalgamation of diverse philosophical, cultural, and literary influences. Wallace’s nonfiction and interviews, which frequently signal influential texts and authors, clearly invite such an interpretive stance. In his 1996 essay on Dostoevsky, for instance, Wallace looked to the nineteenth-­ century Russian novelist as a literary “model” (274); in “David Lynch Keeps His Head,” he enthused over Lynch’s cinematic genius, claiming that “Lynch’s movie’s deconstruction of this weird irony of the banal has affected the way I see and organize the world” (162); and in a 1993 interview, made no secret of his admiration for Leo Tolstoy.77 As I have shown, this latter interview also contains a revealing statement that shows Wallace pivoting away from twentieth-century American writers toward a far broader literary tradition. Although Wallace’s texts certainly do engage with recent literary movements and cultural figures, time and again, they reveal themselves to be part of a dialogue with a more expansive constellation of influences, synthesizing and incorporating texts from across the “tradition of Western letters” and beyond. Though Harold Bloom would surely be sympathetic to Wallace’s emphasis on a Western literary tradition, the crucial point of divergence between the two lies in the fact that Bloom’s conception of influence, as set forth in The Anxiety of Influence, cannot properly account for the presence of multiple and overlapping artistic influences. Furthermore, while Bloom’s model positions writers’ relationships to previous specters of Wallace, “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky,” 274; Wallace, “David Lynch Keeps His Head,” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, 162; Hugh Kennedy and Geoffrey Polk, “Looking for a Garde of Which to Be Avant: An Interview with David Foster Wallace,” 19.

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influences as neurotically combative and oppositional, Wallace’s model is based on a far more playful recontextualization of sources, rather than taking place within what Louis Renza has characterized as Bloom’s “ceaselessly volatile . . . zone of psychic warfare.”78 Wallace’s characteristically postmodern blending of high and low culture—as in the central coupling of Bewitched and “The Writing of the God”—betokens an attitude to Western literary “masters” founded not on excessive reverence or fearful devotion, but rather one of playful reconfiguration, viewing previous writers as endlessly moldable and reimaginable figures. His particular mode of influence thus implicitly deconstructs the hierarchical, high-Art model that Bloom and other critics propose. Instead of privileging a received literary canon, Wallace’s work—in true postmodern fashion—borrows equally from all spheres of cultural expression. A reference within The Pale King, for instance, to the CBS soap opera As the World Turns follows a mention of Camus’s The Fall, and in fact contains more narrative weight than the gesture toward the Camus novel. Similarly, an esoterically comical scene from Infinite Jest features a grad student, who goes by the moniker “Miss Diagnosis,” reading Adorno and Horkheimer over the radio, against the sonic background of dialogue snippets from The Partridge Family,“slowed down to a narcotized slur” (450). Although such intermingling of traditional categories no longer carries the transgressive force it held in the 1960s, Wallace’s indifference toward perpetuating an academy-­enshrined, linear—and inherently conservative, as Renza points out—trajectory of Western literature stands in stark opposition to Bloom’s theory of oedipal combat with strong poets. Instead, Wallace’s method positions literary and cultural products as existing on the same textual plane, conceiving of them as endlessly manipulable data packets, capable of being retransmitted and recirculated in order to suit diverse artistic ends. Comparative interpretations of his fiction reveal that unlike both Bloom’s model of influence (whereby present texts are assembled from previous works) and Borges’s (in which texts descend, proleptically, from an anticipated, future text), Wallace’s fiction also borrows from the cultural present, in all its varied forms. His encyclopedic knowledge of contemporary and historical fiction, critical theory, film, television, and philosophy allowed him to produce complexly indebted narratives in which multiple influences simultaneously exert their force. In this way, Wallace reproduces—or internalizes—the simultaneity and contiguity of technological structures, in a process that lends a somewhat impersonal dimension to the notion of textual influence. It is not the case that Wallace deferentially seeks to imitate the texts of literary Louis Renza, “Influence,” in Critical Terms for Literary Study, eds. Frank Lentrichhia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), 192.

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masters, but instead disguises and abstracts their influence in much the same manner that his fiction consistently appropriates the sterile, abstracted diction of various technical discourses. The peculiar ways in which Wallace’s texts deploy lines of influence thus resembles the way that information itself, through both traditional and virtual channels, proliferates via networks of recirculation and retransmission. His texts, understood as vast webs of influence, thus reconfigure the notion of influence for the digital era, updating what one might call the analogue simplicity of Bloom’s model with a properly postmodern, digital programming model of textual interconnectivity. In light of this opposition, I disagree with A.O. Scott’s claim in his 2000 New York Review of Books essay “The Panic of Influence,” that Wallace’s work can be viewed as exhibiting a “bad case” of Bloomian anxiety.79 Scott’s suggestion, that Wallace displays “classic symptoms of what Bloom has called the anxiety of influence” (40), may be a useful shorthand for coming to terms with Wallace’s deeply ambivalent relationship with his postmodernist forebears (particularly in early texts such as The Broom of the System and “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way”). But the implicit model of influence present within Wallace’s engagements with antecedent texts, as we have observed in “B.I. #59,” sets forth a model of literary influence that differs markedly from Bloom’s conception. The programming metaphor also works as a way of describing Wallace’s relation to world literature. This is because Wallace’s readings thoroughly domesticate any cultural or political content within the texts he chose to appropriate. His artistic method is thus premised on an abstracted form of recombination, in which pre-­existing codes are rearranged and the sociocultural specifics of global texts are ignored, reducing texts to their purely linguistic elements. Wallace had little or no interest in the particular cultural context within which Borges’s work was written, since his overriding concern is with the broader thematic, metaphysical content of Borges’s stories, and on the ways in which these larger themes might be reworked within an American context. Such an expansive form of reading certainly violates the injunction to “sustain textual alterity in its discrete particulars and in its plenitude” (20) that John Pizer and many other contemporary world literature scholars call for, though it highlights Wallace’s ever-­pragmatic literary practice, as creating a more fertile means by which to incorporate global influence into his texts. It is striking to observe the diverse range of intertexts present in “B.I. #59,” a brief, eleven-­page story. Despite the references noted above—to Wittgenstein,

A.O. Scott, “The Panic of Influence,” New York Review of Books 47 (February 10, 2000): 40.

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Trow, Bewitched, and of course, Borges—Wallace was also likely invoking the well-­known American sculptor Robert Engman, as well as the aforementioned J.G. Ballard. Engman’s artworks are subtly alluded to by the “Harold R. and Phyllis N. Engman Institute for Continuing Care” where the protagonist is being interviewed, implying that the sculptor’s complex interpretations of geometric forms can be seen as a visual analogue to the narrator’s mathematical manipulations. In addition, Ballard’s short story “The Index,” which Wallace described as a “concrete poem” in his review of War Fever, also features an elusive protagonist who both proclaims “himself as a new divinity” and is ultimately incarcerated in a similar institutional care facility.80 In short, Bloom’s unipolar theory of influence is at odds with the intricate ways in which Wallace combined, transposed, reimagined, reconfigured and code-­ scrambled antecedent texts. Bloom’s model, I argue, cannot countenance the fact that Wallace’s short story “B.I. #59”—as well as drawing from Bewitched and the war-­diaries of Wittgenstein—simultaneously reimagines Borges’s narrator as a contemporary subject, deploys a particularly Kafkaesque mode of grotesque humor, and draws on the cultural criticism of George W.S. Trow. In doing so, Wallace’s story clearly frustrates the kind of unipolar influence reading advocated by traditional accounts of literary influence. It appears, then, that although the mutual antagonism between Bloom and Wallace quoted at the beginning of the chapter seems to have been founded on an aesthetic difference of opinion, in reality the disagreement was an intellectual one. What was at stake, at least for Wallace, was the ways in which literary critics conceive of artistic influence. In his persistent reconfiguration of philosophical, literary and cultural texts, Wallace thus prompts us to reconsider traditional models of influence in accounting for his own strategy in crafting complexly intertextual fiction, a strategy best captured by the metaphor of the artist as the literary equivalent of a software engineer.

J.G. Ballard, “The Index,” in War Fever (1990; repr. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999), 171.

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Wallace and Russia In his 1891 essay collection Criticism and Fiction, William Dean Howells famously claimed that the influx of recently translated Russian novels beginning to circulate in the United States were “too gloomy for an American audience,” suggesting that instead of the high melodrama of writers such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, American audiences were always looking for consolation: “what the American public wants,” he claimed, “is a tragedy with a happy ending.”1 Howells’s deeper assertion was that Russian novelists would never be widely read within the United States since their dark, complex vision of humanity was at odds with the natural cheeriness of Americans, whom he took to have a fundamental preference for “the more smiling aspects of life.”2 His essay points to intractable cultural, economic, and geographic differences between Russia and the United States, which render Russian novels alien to the American experience: Whatever their deserts, very few American novelists have been led out to be shot, or finally exiled to the rigors of a winter at Duluth; and in a land where journeymen, carpenters and plumbers strike for four dollars a day the sum of hunger and cold is comparatively small, the wrong from class to class has been almost inappreciable. . . . Our novelists, therefore, concern themselves with the more smiling aspects of life, which are the more American, and seek the universal in the individual rather than the social interests.

In spite of such gloomy predictions, Russian novelists have come to assume an influential, if little-­studied, place in American letters, with many prominent American twentieth- and twenty-­first-century novelists—among them Flannery O’Connor, Saul Bellow, Raymond Carver, and George Saunders—claiming an affinity with a broadly defined school of Russian fiction. In fact, it was only

William Dean Howells, “Dostoevsky and the More Smiling Aspects of Life,” Harper’s 73 (1886): 641; Howells, Letter to Edith Wharton, on the failure of The House of Mirth. Ibid.

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thirty odd years after Howells’s prophecy that Europeans began noticing the way that US writers had begun to draw heavily on canonical, nineteenth-­century Russian fiction. Thomas Mann’s 1922 “National and International Art” address, for instance, refers to novelists who had “brought about the synthesis of Dostoevski and America.”3 This chapter argues that David Foster Wallace can be situated within this long line of US authors who have synthesized and refracted the thematic preoccupations of a wide range of Russian authors within an American context. Just as Wallace engaged with a surprisingly diverse array of Latin American poets and novelists, he was also strongly influenced by a number of Russian writers. As I have shown in earlier chapters, during his tenure at the University of Arizona, Wallace began shifting away from the American writers with whom he was most familiar toward a more expansive interest in world literature. Evidently, Russian literature constituted a significant portion of Wallace’s exploration of a broader tradition. In addition to his reverence for Dostoevsky, on which this chapter is centered, Wallace also read Alexander Pushkin, Anton Chekhov, Vladimir Nabokov, Mikhail Lermontov, Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Goncharov, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and Nikolai Gogol as well as Tolstoy.4 Moreover, in a 2006 interview with Russian journalist Ostap Karmodi, Wallace revealed that he was familiar with the work of contemporary novelist Viktor Pelevin and had taught undergraduate classes on the Soviet-­ era surrealist Daniil Kharms as well as having read several obscure 1920s Russian absurdists in the volume OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism (2006). And though the project seems never to have come to fruition, in a letter to Steven Moore, Wallace alluded to his recent reading being dominated by “a bunch of Serbian fiction (atrociously translated),” which he was reading and editing in preparation for a special issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction.5 There are also numerous allusions to Russian literature and culture buried within Wallace’s fiction. In addition to referencing the work of Russian filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein and Andrei Tarkovsky, Infinite Jest also cites obscure geographical locations—“Irkutsk,” “Sakhalin,” “Volgograd,” and the “Dzughdzhur Range,” in Eastern Siberia—and includes an irreverent nod

Thomas Mann, “National and International Art,” in Essays of Three Decades, trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter (1929; repr. London: Secker & Warburg, 1947), 71. Kennedy and Polk, “Looking for a Garde of Which to Be Avant: An Interview with David Foster Wallace,” 19. 5 David Foster Wallace, Letter to Steven Moore (October 16, 1997), Container 1.2–1.3, Steven Moore’s David Foster Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 3

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to former Soviet statesman Mikhail Gorbachev, “SOVWAR’s bald and port-­ wine-stained premier” (325). As well as using the Russian word samizdat to refer to the elusive master copy of Infinite Jest, ETA students study Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov (1859) in Ms. R.L.O. Chawaf ’s “Disciplinary Lit.” (282) class. Furthermore, one section of Infinite Jest integrates the syllogistic revelation—“The creeping inevitability. Caius is mortal. Math is not mortal.” (1071)—from Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886); and The Pale King’s Chris Fogle audits a “Russian Existentialist and Absurdist Literature Class” (339).6 Wallace’s nonfiction also invokes Russian culture. A darkly comic aside in Wallace’s 1993 essay on Michael Joyce compares the “power-­baseline [tennis] game” to footage “of the old Soviet Union putting down a rebellion. It’s awesome, but brutally so, with a grinding, faceless quality” (231). Moreover, Wallace compared Roger Federer’s “sensuous physicality” to Russian ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, and references A.R. Luria in “Greatly Exaggerated,” whom Stephen J. Burn claims is an important reference point for Wallace’s portrayal of Hal Incandenza in Infinite Jest.7 There is also some evidence that Wallace intended Russia to play a larger role in Infinite Jest. Wallace’s copy of Denis Johnson’s Angels (1983), for instance, which he read while writing Infinite Jest, contains numerous marginal- and flap-­scribblings related to the novel-­in-progress, including “Eschaton” and “Pemulis,” among others. However, they also contain a number of Russian references, including the word Russia itself, underlined and placed inside a large box. The front flap also includes a reference to the 1920 Rapallo treaty, a historic accord between Germany and Russia, which may also have been intended as another historical reference point for the novel. In the absence of further details about these possible inclusions, we can only speculate about their projected role within Infinite Jest, though it seems plausible that Wallace was perhaps toying with the idea of having Russian characters articulate the novel’s lengthy critiques of US culture, rather than Québécois terrorists. Irrespective of nationality, however, what mattered most for Wallace in these scenes was the construction of various estranged, non-US perspectives, through which he could engage in partially disguised forms of cultural critique. A second reference to The Death of Ivan Ilyich in Infinite Jest occurs in a section where the narrator discuss the ETA juniors’ mistaken beliefs about achievement: “The idea that achievement doesn’t automatically confer interior worth is, to them, still, at this age, an abstraction, rather like the prospect of their own death—‘Caius Is Mortal’ and so on” (693). 7 “David Foster Wallace’s Federer Moment,” NPR interview with Robert Siegel (August 19, 2006); Wallace, “Greatly Exaggerated,” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, 144; Burn, A Reader’s Guide to Infinite Jest, 110–11. 6

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Although Wallace could neither speak nor read Russian—he once told a journalist that the only Russian phrase he knew was the lewd “eto koshka,” while one character in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men comically refers to the complicated instructions on a do-­it-yourself baby crib as being “practically Cyrillic” (226)—he did make an attempt to learn the language while studying at Amherst College, taking an introductory class before discovering that he “had no talent for it.”8 He was highly envious of bilingual ability, however, and even made a point of asking Roger Federer how he moved so easily between languages: His notes on the interview include the questions “Is your English so good because it was spoken in your home?” and “What is your primary language?” Wallace’s own difficulty in acquiring a basic sense of the Russian language appears to have been a genuine source of frustration, though he seemingly never made another attempt to learn the language. As in the aforementioned assessment of the Serbian literary translations he was forced to endure, Wallace also railed against the “excruciating Victorianish translations of Ms. Constance Garnett,” a prominent English language translator of many Russian texts, but acknowledged that there are “terrible translation problems” involved in rendering nineteenth-­century Russian prose into English.9 (Tellingly, an early draft of Infinite Jest also pokes fun at the imperfectly rendered “opening independent clause of the Louise and Aylmer Maude translation of Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina—‘All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ ”10) And as in Wallace’s engagements with other world literary territories, he also had an interest in scholarly perspectives on Russian fiction. In the Joseph Frank review, he mentions the “wicked fun of watching Frank pull down other scholars,” and praises Frank’s own literary criticism on Dostoevsky’s novels as being “shrewdly insightful.” Wallace was also familiar with Mikhail Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929), and read a wide array of other secondary material on Dostoevsky—including scholarly articles by Lionel Abel, Paul Roazen, and Donald Fanger.11 Since Wallace clearly had a Wallace, Interview with Ostap Karmodi. The Joseph Frank review also indicates that he was knowledgeable about the structure of Russian syntax, pointing out that it “is an inflected language—it uses cases and declensions instead of word order” (262). 9 Wallace, Interview with Ostap Karmodi. 10 Steven Moore, “The First Draft of Infinite Jest.” 11 Wallace’s archive contains annotated copies of several articles and reviews concerning Dostoevsky, including the three mentioned above: Lionel Abel, “A Taste for Dostoevsky,” Commentary Magazine (November 1984): 36–41; Paul Roazen,“Dostoevsky’s Journalism,” Virginia Quarterly Review (Summer 1987): 539–43; Donald Fanger, “Turning Point: Review of Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860–1865,” The New Republic (April 27, 1987): 40–42. David Foster Wallace, Materials related to “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky,” Container 4.12, David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 8

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deep and longstanding engagement with Russian literature, it should come as no surprise that many of his texts articulate sophisticated responses to antecedent Russian works.

Wallace’s Dostoevsky obsession Wallace’s most intense period of admiration for Dostoevsky began while he was working on a review of Joseph Frank’s expansive biographical series, which Wallace started reading in early 1995. The biography prompted him to return to many of the Dostoevsky novels he had read as a teenager, as well as to fill in gaps in his knowledge, catching up on those texts—such as The Idiot (1869)—that he had never read. What is striking about Wallace’s notes and correspondence from this period is not merely his admiration for Dostoevsky’s artistic achievements, but also his spiritual and moral stature. In a later interview, Wallace listed Dostoevsky, alongside Rousseau, Camus, and St. Paul as writers uniquely capable of “render[ing] so fully, passionately, the spiritual urgencies they felt and saw as reality,” an ability that instilled in Wallace “an awe that is almost despair: To be able to be such a person! But what are envied and coveted here seem to me to be qualities of human beings—capacities of spirit—rather than technical abilities or special talents.”12 For Wallace, Dostoevsky was a model of artistic integrity who, despite his many faults—at various points in Frank’s biography, Wallace’s marginalia contains comments such as “VAIN” and “D is manipulative”—created a form of fiction that drew on his own shortcomings in order to speak to the particular moral and spiritual deformities of his culture. Wallace’s abiding belief was that his own generation needed precisely this kind of writer. One section of his notebook catalogues the most toxic aspects of contemporary American culture and ends with a plea for a Dostoevsky-­like figure to transfigure the culture via artistic expression: The selfishness, loneliness, purposelessness—the fear, the loss of belief, the materialism . . . would that the 90s had a Dostoevski to confront all this, wrestle, transfigure it—to humble us . . . Ellis, Leyner, Leavitt, Franzen, Powers . . . their fictions reduce to complaints and self-­pity. Dostoevski has balls.13 Didier Jacob, “Interview with David Foster Wallace,” in Conversations with David Foster Wallace, 157. In an early draft of the Joseph Frank review, Wallace echoed this position, noting that “[t]he big thing for me is that Dostoevsky wasn’t just a genius; he was, finally, brave.” Wallace’s emphasis. 13 David Foster Wallace, Materials related to “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky,” Container 4.12, David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 12

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Aside from expressing the need for a similarly transformative figure to redeem the culture, such statements also indicate that Wallace saw Dostoevsky in unmistakably gendered terms: The gnomic, and slightly lewd, declaration that “Dostoevski has balls” invokes a masculine, paternal literary precedent. (Moreover, the writers disparagingly compared to Dostoevsky—Bret Easton Ellis, Mark Leyner, David Leavitt, Jonathan Franzen, and Richard Powers— are all male, reinforcing the notion of a masculine paragon.) Against the backdrop of Wallace’s career-­long fixation on patricide, it appears that Dostoevsky provided a genuinely enabling model for writing fiction, a male precedent who could be admired in a relatively unproblematic way. But the logic here is also premised on a particular kind of cultural exoticization, with Wallace looking to Dostoevsky in order to locate the authentic masculinity he felt had been stripped from his own American context. Significantly, the above quotation also highlights Wallace’s perception of a one-­to-one correspondence between Dostoevsky’s cultural context and his own, drawing attention to precisely the same symptoms of malaise in both cultures and calling for a contemporary, Dostoevskian figure to redeem and transfigure them. This correspondence, which emphasizes numerous similarities between the intellectual and cultural milieu of mid-­nineteenth-­ century Russia and that of late-­twentieth-­century America, is crucial in understanding Wallace’s fascination with Dostoevsky. To Wallace, Dostoevsky was not a dusty historical relic, wholly irrelevant to the psychological and spiritual needs of contemporary America, but an all-­too-pertinent figure, capable of revealing an escape route from the postmodern funhouse of “selfishness, loneliness, [and] purposelessness.” Intriguingly, his insistence that contemporary fiction is dwarfed by Dostoevsky mirrors a range of similar interpretations by twentieth-­century authors. Virginia Woolf, for instance, claimed that since “the soul is the chief character of Russian fiction,” it outstrips the ambition and moral range of English novelists, for whom “the ‘soul’ is alien”; J.M. Coetzee, in The Master of Petersburg (1994), uses Dostoevsky’s fiction to lend moral gravity to refracted events from his own life; and Charles Bukowski claimed that contemporary fiction in the 1950s was “a comfortable contrivance, a very slick and careful Word-Culture,” and that “[o]ne had to go back the pre-Revolution writers of Russia to find any gamble, any passion.”14 In fact, Virginia Woolf ’s insistence anticipates Wallace’s later fascination with Russian novelists, when she argues that Russian fiction exposes the insincerity and inauthenticity of her own culture: Virginia Woolf, “The Russian Point of View,” in The Common Reader (1925; repr. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1953), 182; Charles Bukowski, Introduction to John Fante’s Ask the Dust (1939; repr. New York: Harper Perennial, 2002), 5.

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We cannot say “Brother” with simple conviction. There is a story by Mr. Galsworthy in which one of the characters so addresses another (they are both in the depths of misfortune). Immediately everything becomes strained and affected. The English equivalent for “Brother” is “Mate”—a very different word, with something sardonic in it, an indefinable suggestion of humour. Met though they are in the depths of misfortune the two Englishmen who thus accost each other will, we are sure, find a job, make their fortunes, spend the last years of their lives in luxury, calling each other “Brother” on the embankment. (179)

Wallace’s obsession thus fits within a long tradition of twentieth-­century novelists who have perceived in Dostoevsky’s life and fiction a possible antidote to the excesses of their own cultures. But Wallace ultimately offers a more extreme version of such culturally opportunistic interpretations of Dostoevsky, engaging in the precise form of cultural “assimilation” by which intractably distant texts and contexts are conceived of as “just like our own” that Damrosch warns is a common interpretative error in reading world literature.15 Time and again, Wallace drew overly familiar connections between mid-­nineteenth-­century Russia and the United States, flattening out historical particularities in order to find broad cultural affinities. At one point, he discerned a “link to 1990s P.C. [political correctness]” in Dostoevsky’s account of a particular form of 1840s moral failure; he drew an arrow and wrote “same conflict today—decadence vs. poetry” next to a passage on Russian “modish” nihilism; while he also suggested that “Dostoevsky’s argument against radical, humanist, utilitarian ethics—’Russian Nihilism’—is apposite to today’s culture war between liberal utilitarians + deontological conservatives.”16 Intriguingly, several of these parallels were clarified with reference to Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), which Wallace was reading concurrently. For instance, one of Wallace’s notes on the back flap of volume one of Frank’s biography suggests that “As Europe late 1880s ‘lost sight of any ideal except that of meshing the ideal of the shopkeeper and the petty bourgeoisie,’ U.S. seems to have lost all but pleasure . . . our capacity for providing pleasure has outstripped our moral sense of probity, judiciousness,” including a reference to Postman’s

Damrosch, How to Read World Literature, 13. David Foster Wallace, Annotations in Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865–1871, David Foster Wallace Archive, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

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book.17 Beyond the marginalia surrounding his reading of Frank’s biography, Wallace’s published review is similarly concerned with comparing aspects of nineteenth-­century Russian culture to his own. For instance, he equates Russian materialism and selfishness with late-­capitalist consumerism; connects the “ideological Nihilists of Dostoevsky’s time” with the postmodern literary nihilists of the 1990s; as well as suggesting that critical theory—and deconstruction in particular—is the modern version of an uncritical devotion to Socialist ideology present in Dostoevsky’s context. In a similar maneuver, an early draft refers to Dostoevsky as the “[Jay] McInerney of his era,” for his political involvement and activism. In fact, Wallace perceived countless points of connection between mid-­ nineteenth-­century Russia and contemporary US culture, eagerly reading Dostoevsky’s work as having special relevance and application to his own context. Next to a quotation in which Dostoevsky rails against the decline of religious belief, for instance, Wallace pointed out that the lines were a “striking quote on civilization’s entailment of loss of spontaneity and faith in God” that constituted yet another “striking parallel with present.” Immediately after this section, he expressed just how indebted he was to Frank’s study of the Russian author, writing on how “Frank helps me see none of 1990s is new. The selfishness, loneliness, purposelessness—the fear, the loss of belief, the materialism.”18 Even more pointed is a list titled “Relevant to Today,” which catalogues some of the ways in which Dostoevsky’s work has a particular resonance within American culture: “1) Christianity and Spirituality / 2) How to avoid both nihilism and smug, narrow fanaticism / 3) Engagement of Culture.” The latter point of correspondence was particularly liberating for Wallace, licensing a wide participation with all aspects of American cultural life, rather than writing coolly detached critiques from a distance: at one point he admires Dostoevsky for being “intimately engaged with the cultural life and warfare of the time,” noting “lesson for today” next to this observation. Wallace saw such connections as a crucial strategy by which to structure his review, admitting in an early draft of the essay that “[i]t seems hard to me to expect much credibility in recommending Frank’s biography unless I can give some sort of argument for why Dostoevsky’s fiction ought to be

Incidentally, Postman’s thesis, that television has significant impacts on all forms of cultural discourse, was an important source-­text for not only Wallace’s “E Unibus Pluram,” but also his later forms of cultural criticism. Neal Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985; repr. London: Methuen, 1987). 18 David Foster Wallace, Materials related to “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky,” Container 4.12, David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 17

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important to us as individual readers in 1996 America.” These persistent attempts to perceive links between Dostoevsky’s cultural context and his own were enhanced by reading and crafting his review of Joseph Frank’s biography while cruising the Gulf of Mexico on assignment for Harper’s Magazine. We can discern this from the many brief, impressionistic descriptions on the inside cover of Frank’s Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865–1871, some of which were included, in slightly altered form, in the published Harper’s essay—for instance, observations about the ship being “over-­airconditioned,” several women “w/ hair the color of blood,” and “thick Dutch glass in windows, portholes”—as well as marginal comments such as “Cruise” and “Reading on Ship” next to particularly relevant passages.19 One such inscription is placed next to a heavily underlined and circled passage in which Frank describes Raskolnikov—the dithering anti-­hero of Crime and Punishment (1866)—as possessing “a proud and idealistic egoism that became perverted into a contemptuous disdain for the submissive herd,” a not-­so-subtle reflection on Wallace’s attitude to his fellow cruise ship passengers.20 As I show later on in this chapter, Wallace conceived as Dostoevsky as an important “hologram” for his own work: in this particular setting, he was clearly interpreting his cruise ship experience through Dostoevsky, with the Russian novelist’s work acting as a kind of ever-­present, superimposed backdrop against which to organize and understand his experiences. Indeed, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” bears numerous marks of having been produced alongside a reading of Dostoevsky’s biography. Many of the broader themes of the essay—materialism, the nature of worship, existential angst, and so on—are duplicated in the Frank review. Being so deeply immersed in Dostoevsky gives the travelogue a particular kind of outsider’s inflection, and provides an early glimpse into the ways in which Wallace’s work would register Dostoevsky’s influence. Beyond the broad range of cultural similarities Wallace discerned between Dostoevsky’s context and his own, Wallace also viewed Dostoevsky’s fiction as being particularly applicable to his own character, illuminating aspects of himself that would otherwise have been inaccessible. Jonathan Franzen picks up on Wallace’s identification when he suggests that the “intensity of self-­ scrutiny” in Wallace’s fiction has an important precedent in Dostoevsky, arguing that Wallace

David Foster Wallace, Annotations in Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865–1871, David Foster Wallace Archive, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 20 Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865–1871 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 101. 19

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Wallace himself, along with those around him—D.T. Max notes that one of Wallace’s University of Arizona classmates referred to him as “Dostoevsky’s Underground Man” (103)—clearly perceived such an affinity. At one point in his review of Frank’s biography, Wallace refers to Pavel Smerdyakov from The Brothers Karamazov as an “unbelievably repellent” character, a “living engine of slimy resentment in whom I personally see parts of myself I can barely stand to look at” (265). He also recognized a strong resemblance to the narrator of Notes from Underground, writing “DFW” in large letters next to the following section of Joseph Frank’s analysis of this particular self-­ deceiving and manipulative figure: The underground man’s vanity convinces him of his own superiority and he despises everyone; but since he desires such superiority to be recognized by others, he hates the world for its indifference and falls into self-­loathing at his own humiliating dependence.22

Moreover, Wallace felt that Dostoevsky’s work gave artistic expression to many of the truths he had discovered in Alcoholics Anonymous. In one section of the biography, for instance, Wallace underlined a passage and wrote “Control—like right out of a 12-step basic text” (196) in the margin, while a few pages later he singled out another section for the same reason, making the note “Use—Reads like 12-step basic text” (205). Even more tellingly, Wallace interpreted his halfway-­house rehabilitation in light of Dostoevsky’s Siberian exile, writing to Dale Peterson that the move from Harvard to Granada House was like “House of the Dead . . . with my weeks in drug treatment composing the staged execution and last minute reprieve from same.”23 In the same manner as J.M. Coetzee, whose novel The Master of Petersburg conflates events from his own life—such as the tragic death of his son—with Dostoevsky’s own experiences, Wallace found direct parallels to Dostoevsky’s biography. In fact, his overwhelming need to connect his own

Jonathan Franzen, “Farther Away,” in Farther Away: Essays (New York: Picador, 2013), 39. Frank, Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 334. Max, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, 141.

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experience to the culture and fiction of Dostoevsky points to a profound psychological imperative. Despite its flaws, Wallace’s reading strategy ultimately generated a more powerful interpretation of his own culture, and allowed him to position himself as an agent of artistic transformation. Reinterpreting 1990s-­era America as a peculiar replication of mid-­nineteenth-­century Russian culture gave Wallace the opportunity to attempt precisely the same intervention that Dostoevsky’s fiction had enacted. Although world literary theorists would doubtless argue that such a reading is shallowly narcissistic—a “self-­centered construction of the world” and an assimilation based on misguided assumptions of cultural similarity—in this case, it is far more productive to view such an interpretive orientation in light of the particular artistic license it granted.24 My claim here is that Wallace was engaging in a kind of imaginative ground-­clearing, making room for his own fiction and corralling Dostoevsky’s project into his own artistic agenda. Indeed, Wallace’s own comments often overtly signal that such an interpretative maneuver is being made, as in his yearning for a writer with a comparable moral vision to speak to modern America: “[w]ould that the 90s had a Dostoevski to confront all this, wrestle it, transform it—to humble us.” Clearly, Wallace was setting himself such a task. His review asserts a powerful precedent for the spiritual and moral decay that he perceived within his own culture, as well as a productive example of how to craft an appropriate artistic response. D.T. Max rightly observes that while Wallace’s earlier artistic manifestos “E Unibus Pluram” and “Fictional Futures for the Conspicuously Young” had “mostly diagnosed disease,” his article on Dostoevsky was in many ways an attempt at providing “a model for the cure” (209). (Tellingly, an early draft of the review labeled Dostoevsky as a “model” in constructing socially engaged fiction.) But this approach was complicated by Wallace’s belief that the actual process of writing such fiction was endlessly difficult, if not impossible. “You could not have characters say this stuff today,” he notes in the margin to one character’s passionate theological avowal. In fact, Wallace thought that Dostoevsky was the last writer who could explore high religious and moral themes. In a 1996 interview, he argued that the AA sections of Infinite Jest were an attempt to circumvent precisely this literary taboo: a lot of the AA stuff in the book was mostly an excuse, was to try and have—it’s very hard to talk about people’s relationship with any kind of God, in any book later than like Dostoevsky. I mean the culture, it’s all

Damrosch, How to Read World Literature, 133.

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wrong for it now. . . . Plausibly realistic characters don’t sit around talking about this stuff.25

Once again, Wallace exhibits the typically postmodern tendency to invoke a historical threshold, an artistic Rubicon beyond which certain kinds of fiction are culturally inadmissible. Thus, at the same time that Wallace was trying to replicate aspects of Dostoevsky’s “passionately moral” fictional agenda, his work is also informed by an ongoing tension between the desire to appropriate Dostoevsky’s “urgency” and a feeling of historical belatedness. Timothy Jacobs’s incisive 2001 study of Infinite Jest alongside The Brothers Karamazov—the only other comparative study of Wallace and Dostoevsky— is a hugely important piece of criticism, which served to open the field of Wallace studies to a broader tradition of Western literature. But though Jacobs’s essay notes many points of convergence between the two novels, he ultimately takes these congruencies in a particular direction, structuring an argument around eschatology and political ideology, and proposing that both novels are “aesthetic allegories” concerned with transmitting “ideological messages.”26 And while Jacobs enumerates many points of connection between the two novels, his study also misses many. He is thus able to demonstrate the ways in which Wallace’s novel is “a transposition of The Brothers Karamazov into the specific ideological environment of contemporary America” (266, Jacobs’s emphasis), but the essay overlooks the numerous, specific intertextual allusions that Infinite Jest makes to The Brothers Karamazov. Moreover, Jacobs’s essay arguably participates in precisely the same kind of cultural assimilation as Wallace, eliding significant historical differences in order to make the Wallace-­like claim that Dostoevsky is “precisely the writer needed for our times,” and suggesting that “if we compare Dostoevsky’s time with our own, and substitute ‘belief ’ and ‘ironic skepticism’ for Dostoevsky’s ‘faith’ and ‘atheism,’ then perhaps there is more congruence between Dostoevsky’s fiction and our time than we are aware” (267). What I wish to suggest is that there are different forces at work in Wallace’s transposition of Dostoevsky’s texts. My own analysis reveals that Wallace looked toward the Russian novelist in order to appropriate a specific sense of existential redemption, an argument that extends Jacobs’s fleeting reference to one of the “ideological messages” of the novel being a concern with “a type of redemption via language” (284). Though Jacobs leaves this

Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, 82. Jacobs, “The Brothers Incandenza: Translating Ideology in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest,” 284.

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notion underdeveloped, it is important to explore precisely what it meant for Wallace’s fiction to be concerned with linguistic forms of redemption. There is a remarkable amount of material appropriated from The Brothers Karamazov within Infinite Jest. Although some of these references are unmistakable—as when the narrator describes a conversation between Barry Loach and his “spiritually despondent” brother as being “not that much unlike Alyosha and Ivan’s conversations in the good old Brothers K., though not nearly as erudite and literary” (969)—many others are concealed within the narrative. For instance, both novels have a thematic concern with different forms of individual worship, particularly the idea that Americans are “virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away” (53) to a larger structure, religion or ethical ideal. Alyosha’s contention, that the Russian peasant’s “greatest need and comfort . . . is to find someone or something holy to fall down before and worship” is echoed in Marathe’s claim that “[o]ur attachments are our temple, what we worship, no?”27 Moreover, both novels are concerned with the ways in which communities work together to decide what to worship: Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor claims that “[the] craving for community of worship is the chief misery of every man individually and of all humanity from the beginning of time,” while Wallace’s novel discusses countless competing forms of communal worship, including various AA “spiritual communit[ies]” (603).28 Wallace also took specific plot-­points from The Brothers Karamazov, including the scene in which Ivan places his forehead against a frozen window pane (echoed in Teddy Schacht gluing his head to an ETA window in the final stages of the novel), as well as the schoolboy Ilyusha murdering a dog by feeding it a piece of meat laced with glass shards (mirrored in Orin and Marlon accidentally dragging Avril’s beloved Samuel Johnson behind a car). In addition, Kolya Krasotkin is involved in a highly dangerous children’s railroad game that surely formed the inspiration for “Le Jeu du Prochain Train [The Next Train Game]” (732) in Infinite Jest. Similarly, while Jacobs has shown that the three Incandenza brothers can be productively connected to their Karamazov counterparts, Don Gately also closely resembles Ivan Karamazov—both characters converse with ghostly specters and both experience the highly unusual “ghostwords” phenomenon—and Avril Incandenza has clear similarities to Kolya’s neurotic, overbearing mother. In addition, both texts also invoke Hamlet at significant points; both narrators tell their respective stories with acute self-­consciousness and metatextual asides; and both novels conclude with similarly cast-­gathering graveyard Fyodor Dostoesvky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett (1880; repr. London: Foursquare Books, 1958), 107. Ibid., 226.

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scenes. In noting such overlaps, it becomes clear that Wallace’s relationship with Dostoevsky was anything but a simple literary infatuation. At every turn, Wallace’s chief concern was with how to appropriate particular aspects of Dostoevsky’s narratives, and with translating the Russian writer’s characters and thematic preoccupations into a contemporary American idiom. Jacobs also picks up on Infinite Jest’s important intertextual allusion to The Brothers Karamazov in the backstory of ETA coach Barry Loach. In this particular scene, the two Loach brothers agree on a complicated theological wager, in which the elder, “spiritually necrotic” (968) brother promises to return to the Catholic church if Barry Loach can persuade a member of the public to make any form of physical contact with him while looking “homeless and disreputable and louse-­ridden and clearly in need of basic human charity” (969). As Jacobs points out, this section of the narrative is a direct extension of Ivan Karamazov’s admission that he has “never . . . understood how it is possible to love one’s neighbours,” along with his brief anecdote about a saint ministering to a destitute man: I read sometime, somewhere about “John the Merciful” (some saint) that when a hungry and frozen passerby came to him and asked to be made warm, he lay down with him in bed, embraced him, and began breathing into his mouth, which was foul and festering with some terrible disease.29

Jacobs’s interpretation emphasizes that it is Mario who ultimately “touches” Barry, thus renewing Loach’s faith in “indwelling human goodness” (970), which he takes as a signal from Wallace that there is a “complex intertextual twist” at play in this scene. Since other passages in the novel link Mario to Alyosha, Jacobs argues that Barry Loach therefore maps onto the “frozen passerby” in Ivan’s vignette, while the elder “Jesuitical” (968) brother’s unknown narrative status reflects Ivan’s similarly uncertain position at the end of Dostoevsky’s novel. As previously noted, while allusions to Dostoevsky within Wallace’s fiction are invariably more subtle, this scene contains a clear reference to the source: After one of the Loach brothers’ theological conversations, the narrator likens them to the speculative theological exchanges in The Brothers Karamazov, but notes that none of the antitheological arguments put forward by the elder brother approach the “carcinogenic acerbity” (969) of the Grand Inquisitor chapter.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (1880; repr. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990), 236–37.

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Extending Jacobs’s reading, it is also important to note that Ivan’s brief anecdote is itself an intertextual appropriation, taken—as Richard Pevear observes in the endnotes to his translation of The Brothers Karamazov—from Gustave Flaubert’s “La Legende de Saint-Julien-­l’Hospitalier” [“The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller”] (1876), an imaginative retelling of the hagiography of a Roman Catholic saint.30 Although Ivan’s own version retains some of Flaubert’s lurid details, “La Legende de Saint-Julien-­l’Hospitalier” is even more disturbing, ending with a bleeding, filthy leper pleading for warmth and a far more intimate form of contact: Julian “stretch[es] himself out upon the leper,” whose skin is “as cold as a snake and as rough as a file,” joining “lips to lips, chest to chest” and “clasp[ing] him to his breast.”31 Pevear points out that what is significant about Ivan’s retelling is his substitution of “the name John (Ioann, in Russian, i.e. Ivan) for Julian” (785). Since Saint Julian has a complex series of curses placed on him, fating him to murder his parents—a fate he narrowly avoids by escaping home to a life of itinerancy— Dostoevsky is subtly linking Julian’s parricidal narrative to Ivan, who is entangled in similar circumstances. Ivan’s cynical aside, that the saint embraced the beggar “with the strain of a lie . . . out of self-­imposed penance” (237) is perceptive, since Julian does indeed seek atonement for his filial neglect and ascends into heaven directly after his extreme act of Christian compassion. Wallace was surely also aware of the appropriation, since he read multiple translations of the novel, though even if he did not read Pevear’s commentary or translation, the source is mentioned in the fifth volume of Joseph Frank’s biography, Dostoevsky: The Mantel of the Prophet, 1871–1881, with Frank noting that Ivan’s “extreme and rather repulsive” anecdote is lifted directly from Flaubert’s short story.32 Given Infinite Jest’s obsession with patricide, it appears that Wallace was attracted to the narrative fragment—at least in part—because it could be used as yet another subtle hint toward the patricidal elements of the novel, elliptically invoking broader themes of familial discord. It may well have been Dostoevsky’s own appropriation of the anecdote that granted Wallace tacit permission to do the same. What is perhaps more surprising is that Wallace included another oblique retelling of the Dostoevsky/Flaubert vignette in the later short story “Octet,” from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. The “Pop Quiz” that begins the story is a clear reworking of the same material, and is reproduced here in full:

Richard Pevear, “Notes” to The Brothers Karamazov, 785. Gustave Flaubert, “The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitaler,” in Three Tales, trans. Roger Whitehouse (1877; repr. London: Penguin, 2005), 69. 32 Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantel of the Prophet, 1871–1881 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 604. 30 31

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POP QUIZ 4 Two late-­stage terminal drug addicts sat up against an alley’s wall with nothing to inject and no means and nowhere to go or be. Only one had a coat. It was cold, and one of the terminal addicts’ teeth chattered and he sweated and shook with fever. He seemed gravely ill. He smelled very bad. He sat up against the wall with his head on his knees. This took place in Cambridge MA in an alley behind the Commonwealth Aluminum Can Redemption Center on Massachusetts Avenue in the early hours of 12 January 1993. The terminal drug addict with the coat took off the coat and scooted over up close to the gravely ill terminal drug addict and took and spread the coat as far as it would go over the both of them and then scooted over some more and got himself pressed right up against him and put his arm around him and let him be sick on his arm, and they stayed like that up against the wall together all through the night. Q: Which one lived. (111)

Significantly, the “Cambridge MA” narrative setting of the “POP QUIZ” is within a few miles of the Barry Loach narrative setting, which takes place “in front of the Park Street T-station on the edge of Boston Common” (969), a further hint that the two stories are connected.33 Wallace reproduces and amplifies many details from Ivan’s retelling: the supplicant’s “foul and festering breath” (237) becomes the “very bad” smell of a “gravely ill terminal drug addict,” and “hungry and frozen” (236) is updated as being substanceless in the teeth-­chattering cold. Wallace’s uncharacteristically short sentences mirror the characters’ material deprivation, while the numerous repetitions— the three consecutive truncated sentences all beginning with the word He, for instance, and the fourfold repetition of some variation on the phrase “terminal drug addict”—hint at the monotonous pain the two addicts are enduring. Revealingly, the reference to the “Commonwealth Aluminum Can Redemption Center” explicitly gestures toward the redemptive dimension of the quiz: In effect, the final question asks the reader whether redemptive self-­ sacrifice and altruism (literally, the sharing of a “common wealth”) is possible in such desperate circumstances. Wallace here asks whether the same forms

Both the setting and the freezing, near-­death condition of the two men reprises an early (and gruesome) narrative in Infinite Jest, in which Ennet House resident Burt F.S. had been “mugged and beaten half to death in Cambridge on Xmas Eve of last year, and left there to like freeze there, in an alley, in a storm, and ended up losing his hands and feet” (275).

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of spiritual and moral redemption that Dostoevsky wrote about in the latter half of the nineteenth century are possible in vastly different circumstances, specifically “in the early hours of 12 January 1993.” If the compassionate, coat-­sharing addict is the one who does not live, then perhaps he, like St. Julian, will be spirited away to heaven; though if the coatless, gravely ill addict dies, then the compassion and intimacy has in some sense been for nothing, perhaps lessening the discomfort of a dying man but ultimately a futile gesture. And since the sketch is taken directly from a section of The Brothers Karamazov that pits Alyosha’s optimistic view of humanity—the belief that “there is still much love in mankind, almost like Christ’s love” (237)—against Ivan’s endlessly cynical, jaded Weltanschauung, Wallace appropriates this tension to interrogate the reader’s perspective on precisely the same question. The story thus dramatizes the tension between “cynicism and naïveté” that Marshall Boswell and others have picked up on, asking whether a seemingly paradoxical, cynically naïve answer to the story’s central question is possible, an answer that does not shy away from the bleak tragedy of the sufferers, but that also holds out a possibility of some form of redemption. Although some of Wallace’s other influences waned over the years, there is strong evidence that Dostoevsky informed Wallace’s fiction across the course of his career. Although his most intense period of engagement with the Russian writer was during the period in which he was working on the review of Frank’s biography (1993), the aforementioned reference to “spiritual capacities,” taken from one of Wallace’s final interviews, implies that Dostoevsky still loomed large in relation to his later texts. Significantly, one early draft of The Pale King includes an important reference to Dostoevsky. In a chapter outlining Toni Ware’s backstory, Wallace lists the many books she reads as a child, traveling across the Midwest with her indifferent mother: She had library cards from five different cities. She read a coverless Dostoevski and thought the men stilted and vain and their prostitutes fools for letting themselves be shaped so plainly to suit the story’s needs. She could not tell whether they took their men’s handwringing seriously or whether it was part of the arrangement but knew them for fools either way.34

Ware’s dismissal reprises Wallace’s own admission, in his review of Frank’s biography, that Dostoevsky’s characters frequently inhabit “soppy-­seeming David Foster Wallace, Materials related to The Pale King, Container 36.1–41.9, David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

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formalit[ies] of the 19th-century culture,” an aspect that often works to “alienate” modern readers. But the reference to Dostoevsky also adds to the portrait of Toni Ware. Ware’s criticism of the “stilted and vain” men and foolish prostitutes that populate Dostoevsky’s novels is another oblique gesture toward her fierce independence and self-­determination. Ware is clearly determined to avoid becoming like her flimsy, semi-­conscious mother and refuses to let herself be shaped by the “needs” and demands—narrative or otherwise—of others. The reference is also important in highlighting Ware’s nascent sense of self-­hatred, and her deeply ambivalent feelings toward her own gender. The next sentence tells us that “[h]er contempt for her gender [was] so deep it transcended awareness as the allcomprehending ball of the eye cannot discern itself.” For unknown reasons, these two sentences were cut by editor Michael Pietsch, though a condensed version of the larger paragraph was included in the published edition. Curiously, Pietsch decided to excise this section of the novel, but left in a similar sentence following the above—in which Ware describes reading a Stephen Crane novel, a “coverless Red Badge [of Courage]”—despite Wallace bracketing this latter sentence for possible excision, drawing a “delete” glyph with a question mark next to it.35 Such seemingly arbitrary editorial decisions reinforce the need for greater transparency on Pietsch’s behalf. Although the 2011 edition of the novel includes a brief “Editor’s Note” that explains some of these decisions, ideally there needs to be a far more comprehensive account from Pietsch that outlines his editorial method in compiling what Jeffrey R. Di Leo rightly calls a “creative projection of the final manuscript.”36

Retelling The Death of Ivan Ilyich in “Good Old Neon” Together with the numerous debts to Dostoevsky scattered throughout Wallace’s fiction, the short story “Good Old Neon” has important affinities with Tolstoy’s 1886 novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Although Wallace admired a great deal of Tolstoy’s work, he was particularly fond of this particular text. Infinite Jest contains a glancing reference to Anna Karenina, in

David Foster Wallace, Materials related to The Pale King, Container 36.1–41.9, David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin; Wallace, The Pale King, 58. 36 Jeffrey R. Di Leo, “The Executor’s Dilemma,” American Book Review 32, no. 3 (2011): 2. For a more detailed discussion of Pietsch’s editing of The Pale King, see Di Leo, “Sovereignty of the Dead: Authors, Editors, and the Aesthetic Text,” The Comparativist 36 (2012): 123–36. 35

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Hal and Jim Troeltsch’s brief exchange on an ETA exam that contained a question related to the novel—an exchange in which Hal ignores the novel’s relevance to his own singularly unhappy family to emphasize the syntactical structure of Tolstoy’s opening sentence: “The exam was talking about the syntax of Tolstoy’s sentence, not about real unhappy families” (95)—but Wallace’s most significant engagement with Tolstoy’s fiction is with The Death of Ivan Ilyich.37 Indeed, the collection of Wallace’s personal books in the Harry Ransom Center contains two different copies of the text, which are both heavily annotated and feature markings in multiple colors. As well as incorporating the famous “Caius is mortal” syllogism twice within Infinite Jest—which is itself an intertextual device, taken from Johann Gottfried Kiesewetter’s Logic (1797)—Wallace was intimately familiar with Tolstoy’s novella. The marginal note “Ilych,” for instance—in his copy of Susan Sontag’s essay “Spiritual Style in the films of Robert Bresson,” in Against Interpretation (1966)—suggests that he saw a similarity between Tolstoy’s narrative and the underlined death scene in Bresson’s Le Journal d’un Cure de Campagne [Diary of a Country Priest] (1951). Moreover, a parenthetical aside in an early draft of Wallace’s review of John Updike’s Toward the End of Time notes that though Updike’s protagonist Ben Turnbull fails to elicit sympathy, it is “not [the case] that a loathsome character’s death can’t be moving—see Death of Ivan Ilyich.” Wallace also referenced Tolstoy’s story in the 1993 McCaffery interview, as an example of his theory that “one of the things really great fiction writers do . . . is to give the reader something” (50). Oddly enough, however, Wallace’s essay on Dostoevsky contains a pejorative aside on Tolstoy’s novella, in a footnote wherein Wallace discusses Dostoevsky’s ability to resist “making goodness” or “redemption” seem simpler than they really are. For Wallace, the moral complexity of Dostoevsky’s texts overshadowed Tolstoy’s: “You need only compare the protagonists’ final conversions in Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych and FMD’s Crime and Punishment,” he argues, “in order to appreciate Dostoevsky’s ability to be moral without being moralistic” (269). The only other Tolstoy text that Wallace mentioned with similar frequency was his 1897 aesthetics essay What is Art?, which had a clear influence on Wallace’s early understanding of his own fiction, shaping the views expressed in important early essays such as “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously

Wallace’s allusion to Anna Karenina is reinforced by Joelle van Dyne’s later pronouncement that the Incandenza’s “were the second-­saddest family [she had] ever seen” (737). And in a more personal reference to Tolstoy’s 1873 novel, several of Wallace’s letters to Mary Karr refer to her as “Saint Nitouche” [the saint who cannot be touched], an obscure reference to Varenka, from Anna Karenina, Karr’s favorite novel. D.T. Max, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, 147.

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Young” (1988) and “E Unibus Pluram” (1996). For Wallace, there were numerous links between What is Art? and John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction (1978): He wrote “Tolstoy, ‘What is Art’ ” in his annotated edition of Gardner’s text, and compared the two monographs in a 1993 interview, where he argued that “both of them are right” to the extent that they advance a theory of art that is based on “affect[ing] somebody, mak[ing] somebody feel a certain way,” as well as “allow[ing] them to enter into relationships with ideas and with characters that are not permitted within the cinctures of . . . ordinary verbal intercourse.”38 In this interview, Wallace also noted the various ways in which Gardner was “parroting Tolstoy” (55), while in his 2007 Best American Essays Introduction, Wallace again invoked What is Art?, posing several rhetorical questions about the nature of “the connections between literary aesthetics and moral value,” before wondering: “[d]oes anyone even read Tolstoy’s ‘What is Art?’ anymore?”39 Wallace’s archived copy of What is Art? is full of marginal annotations and underlining. For instance, Wallace emphatically underlined the following passage, which has a clear overlap with his own artistic emphases: Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-­up energy; it is not the expression of man’s emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-­being of individuals and of humanity.40

Such passages speak to Wallace’s analogous renunciation of what he perceived as the self-­indulgence of postmodern artistic agendas, as well as his insistence on fiction’s power to overcome solipsism and loneliness. As with his reading of Dostoevsky, Wallace’s What is Art? annotations go to enormous lengths to locate connections between his own cultural context and Tolstoy’s. Next to a passage on “people of upper classes” losing their “faith in Kennedy and Polk, “Looking for a Garde of Which to Be Avant: An Interview with David Foster Wallace,” 18. Wallace also claimed that his exclusion from experimentalist circles was due to his sympathy with Gardner’s argument in On Moral Fiction: “One reason why I’m not really popular with the avant-­garde crowd anymore is that I think I buy more of Gardner’s premise than a lot of other people do.” Benjamin Weissman, “A Sleek and Brilliant Monster: David Foster Wallace Comes Clean,” L.A. Weekly, April 28, 1999. Online access: http://www.laweekly.com/1999-05-06/calendar/a-­sleek-and-­brilliant-monster/. 39 David Foster Wallace, “Deciderization 2007—A Special Report,” in Both Flesh and Not, 311. 40 David Foster Wallace, Annotations in Tolstoy’s What is Art?, David Foster Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 38

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the church teaching,” for instance, Wallace wrote “1980s upperclass Nihilism.” And alongside a passage in which Tolstoy notes a widespread return to classical artworks, he wrote both “Neat” and “eerie applications,” noting that “[t]oday it’s not church Christianity but Science as Meaning that’s been debunked—and we’ve nothing to replace it.”41 Once again, Wallace was eager to view his own historical moment through the lens of nineteenth-century Russian culture, searching for an oblique, unexpected way of engaging with contemporary America. But as I show, his dual engagement with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky was ultimately an act of literary conflation, treating two canonical Russian authors in identical ways. As Mads Thomsen points out, “[t]he novels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy are still regarded as the zenith of Russian literature in the international perspective,” suggesting that only the work of Gustave Flaubert approaches their lofty position in nineteenth-century European letters.42 The comparable treatment of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky throughout his work is yet another instance of Wallace’s recombinant aesthetic, reworking different narratives and ideas to create hybrid fictions. Neal’s admission of self-­fraudulence, in “Good Old Neon,” relates in clear ways to Ivan Ilyich’s growing awareness of his distance from others, and the various ways in which his life has involved a string of self-­deceptions. Wallace’s annotations pick up on this shared quality: as well as underlining the brief scene in which Ivan admits to wanting “someone to feel sorry for him just as if he were a sick child,” Wallace also wrote “FALSITY” in large letters. In fact, Ivan’s desperate attempts to cure his vague and mysterious affliction, through visits to various “celebrated specialists” and doctors, mirrors Neal’s increasingly desperate attempts to cure his own existential despair.43 And as in Wallace’s text, Tolstoy’s novella also makes repeated use of what Barthes calls the referential code—“the knowledge or wisdom to which the text continually refers”—as in the following passage, where the unnamed narrator invokes a common form of theatrical dialogue: Praskovya Fiodorvna mentioned some roles in which Sarah Bernhardt was particularly good. Her daughter disagreed. A discussion began about the grace and naturalness of her acting—the sort of conversation that springs up repeatedly and is always the same. (150)44

Ibid. Thomsen, Mapping World Literature, 37. 43 Leo Tolstoy, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” in The Cossacks and Other Stories, trans. Rosemary Edmonds (1886; repr. London: Penguin, 1983), 144, 148. 44 Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (1970; repr. New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 18. 41 42

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Beyond these broad affinities, Wallace also appropriated several other specific elements from Tolstoy’s narrative, including the inscribed “silver pocketwatch” that disturbs and upsets Neal. Ivan Ilyich wears a medallion “hung on his watch-­chain” that has a telling inscription: Having taken his degree and qualified for the tenth rank of the Civil Service, and receiving from his father a sum of money for his outfit, Ivan Ilyich ordered clothes for himself at Scharmer’s, hung on his watch-­ chain a medallion inscribed Respice finem. . . . (111)

Meanwhile, Neal’s timepiece is given the following, corresponding inscription in “Good Old Neon”: Another of my stepmother’s treasured antiques was a sliver pocketwatch of her maternal grandfather’s with the Latin RESPICE FINEM [“LOOK TO THE END”] inscribed on the inside of the case. It wasn’t until after she passed away and my stepfather said she’d wanted me to have it that I bother to look up the term, after which I’d gotten the same sort of crawly feeling as with Master Gurpreet’s certificate. (161)

While the matching epigrams gesture to the transcendent final hours of both protagonists, and hint at a death-­bed (in the case of Ivan Ilyich) or post-­death (for Neal) redemption, the provenance of Neal’s watch, which he inherited from his stepmother’s “maternal grandfather” suggests a cryptic acknowledgment, on Wallace’s behalf, that Neal is a direct descendent of Ivan Ilyich himself. The conclusion of Neal’s narration—which closes with the phrase “. . . –THE END” (179)—reinforces the significance of the Latin inscription, perhaps in an attempt to bring the long line of Ilyich descendants to an end. Another significant overlap lies in the temporal distortions present in both texts. The vast majority of “Good Old Neon” takes place in the few microseconds in which the embedded character David Wallace sees Neal’s yearbook photo and wonders about the circumstances that led to his suicide, while Neal also theorizes at length about the nature of time, wondering aloud about “How are you supposed to measure the rate at which time moves? One second per second? It makes no sense” (179). Similarly, in The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Ivan’s profoundly moving, death-­bed epiphany and sudden awareness of his own fraudulence centers on a strange temporal distortion. (In a marginal note to this scene, Wallace suggested that Ivan’s redemption consisted primarily in having the awareness to begin “caring about others,

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their feelings, their welfare.”) Tolstoy’s narrator tells us that though “all this happened in a single instant, and the meaning of that instant suffered no change thereafter,” for “those present his agony lasted another two hours” (161). In one copy of The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Wallace wrote “in place of death there was light” and “either spiritual or religious” next to this scene, yet another hint that the final redemptive sequence of “Good Old Neon” owes a complex debt to Tolstoy’s text. Though Brian Philips has suggested that the relationship between Wallace and Tolstoy is a relatively straightforward one, with Wallace being “one of Tolstoy’s opposites,” the relationship was in reality far more nuanced.45 A close reading of The Death of Ivan Ilyich alongside “Good Old Neon” reveals the subtle ways that Wallace’s text deploys Tolstoy’s famous novella as a key intertext that gestures to several broader themes.

Holographic influence A productive means by which to understand Wallace’s relation to Dostoevsky—and by extension the entire cluster of nineteenth-century Russian writers Wallace engaged with—is through the metaphor of an artistic “hologram.” Wallace invoked this particular metaphor in an early draft of the Joseph Frank review, when he wondered how “a piece of passionately serious ideological contemporary fiction” could simultaneously be “ingenious and radiantly transcendent fiction”: But how to make it that?—how even, for a writer today, even a very talented writer today, to get up the guts to even try? There are no formulae, nor are there guarantees. But there are models. Stars to steer by. Frank’s books present a hologram of one of them.46

Although later drafts changed the word hologram—first to cosmology, then to cosmogony, before the final version’s altered closing sentence, “Frank’s books make one of them concrete and alive and terribly instructive” (274)—this early inclusion is nonetheless highly revealing, more so than either the reference to Dostoevsky as a “star to steer by” or as a “model.” My claim is that conceiving of Dostoevsky’s corpus as a kind of hologram is a productive

Brian Phillips, “The Negative Style of David Foster Wallace,” The Hudson Review 57, no. 4 (2005): 676. 46 David Foster Wallace, Materials related to “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky,” Container 4.12, David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 45

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way of understanding the way Wallace engaged with Dostoevsky’s work. The metaphor works because Wallace saw so many aspects of contemporary US culture against the virtual backdrop of Dostoevsky’s life and work. Wallace’s account of his 1995 cruise ship experience is clearly influenced by his simultaneous reading of Dostoevsky, while the fictional agenda he set forth in texts such as “E Unibus Pluram” and “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young” are likewise influenced by both his account of Dostoevsky’s aesthetics and Tolstoy’s What is Art? The notion of a hologram is also useful because—as the analysis of “Octet” and Infinite Jest reveals—while Wallace’s appropriations replicate many small details and character traits, they are far more than slavish imitations of Dostoevsky. Instead, such texts seem almost overlaid onto Dostoevsky’s work, superimposed images that rework the original material and find new thematic inflections. As Wallace’s conclusion to the essay demonstrates, Dostoevsky’s novels constituted an important “model” for writing ideologically engaged fiction. In one sense, this holographic mode of influence bears similarities to scholars such as Gérard Genette who have used the notion of textual palimpsests to theorize influence, arguing that it is “transtextuality” that defines literary texts, defined as “all that sets the text in a relationship, whether obvious or concealed, with other texts.”47 But it also differs in important ways: in the holographic mode of influence, a writer is not inscribing over another set of words, erasing them with her own, but is instead sustaining a bifurcated, multilevel image that allows two texts to coexist. Wallace had a general interest in holographic technologies. As Iannis Goerlandt points out, Wallace clearly read Michael Talbot’s The Holographic Universe (1991), a pop-­science bestseller from which, bizarrely, he gleaned many of the stigmata “facts” cited in The Pale King.48 Since Talbot’s study explores recent scientific advances in holography, using such explorations to make inferences about various metaphysical questions, it is possible that Wallace had The Holographic Universe in mind while working on his

Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 1. Goerlandt notes that Wallace uses exactly the same examples of stigmata as those mentioned in The Holographic Universe, and describes them in very similar ways. For instance, Wallace modified and creatively expanded Talbot’s description of Giovanna Solimani, “Venerable Giovanna Maria Solimani, an eighteenth-­century Italian stigmatist, had wounds in her hands deep enough to stick a key into” (110), to the following: “The eighteenth-­century holy woman Giovanna Solimani permitted pilgrims to insert special keys into her hands’ wounds and to turn them, reportedly facilitating those clients’ own recovery from rationalist despair” (399).

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Dostoevsky review. After all, holograms turn up with surprising frequency throughout Infinite Jest, with one character theorizing that James Incandenza’s eponymous film may itself be “a really sophisticated piece of holography” that would allow for “the neural density of an actual stage play without losing the selective realism of the viewer-­screen” (490). Wallace spoke about literary influence in a similar way in his interview with Bryan Garner, explaining a writing exercise in which he attempted to conjure the ghostly, holographic presence of a text: Exercises as boneheaded as you take a book you really like, you read a page of it three, four times, put it down, and then try to imitate it word for word so that you can feel your own muscles trying to achieve some of the effects that the page of text you like did. If you’re like me, it will be in your failure to be able to duplicate it that you’ll actually learn what’s going on.49

The holographic metaphor also speaks to Wallace’s psychological affinities with Dostoevsky. Although in one sense there was something potentially straightforward, and certainly nonpatricidal, about Wallace’s admiration for the Russian writer, there was also a palpable sense of despondency about ever equaling the literary precedent he had set. Such feelings are hinted at in Wallace’s comment that beyond being “a genius,” Dostoevsky “was, finally, brave,” possessing precisely the kind of spiritual and moral poise that Wallace saw as being out of reach in the twenty-­first century.50 Indeed, there was something deeply haunted and vexed about Wallace’s orientation toward Dostoevsky. In the same way that Wallace noted how Smerdyakov, from The Brothers Karamazov, revealed “parts of myself I can barely stand to look at” (265), so Dostoevsky’s own moral stature exposed the inadequacy of Wallace’s own convictions and beliefs. One particularly telling note, written in the margins of the drafts of “Good Old Neon,” invokes the haunted quality of the relationship, with Wallace remarking on the presence of lingering specters of influence: “Ghost voices talking to us all the time but we think their voices are

Bryan Garner, Quack this Way: David Foster Wallace & Bryan Garner Talk Language and Writing (Dallas, TX: RosePen Books, 2013), 27. 50 Didier Jacob, “Interview with David Foster Wallace,” in Conversations with David Foster Wallace, 157. In an early draft of the Joseph Frank review, Wallace echoed this position, noting that “[t]he big thing for me is that Dostoevsky wasn’t just a genius; he was, finally, brave.” Wallace’s emphasis. David Foster Wallace, Materials related to “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky,” Container 4.12, David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 49

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our own.”51 The placement of this sentence, on the draft of a short story that so explicitly appropriates from The Death of Ivan Ilyich makes it highly likely that Wallace was referring to the ways that the holographic, spectral presence of Tolstoy was rising unbidden to his own consciousness, shaping the story via the whisperings of “ghost voices.” Wallace’s quasi-­mystical account of literary influence aligns neatly with the hospital scenes in Infinite Jest, in which a wounded Don Gately experiences the Dostoevsky-­inspired “ghostwords” (884) phenomena, in which words such as “SINISTRAL and LIEBESTOD” (884) are placed inside Gately’s brain by an “invasive-­ wraith” (922). Such spectral themes abound throughout Wallace’s work. Marshall Boswell suggests that the multitude of ghosts and wraiths within Wallace’s texts function as “concrete analogue[s] for Wallace’s trace presence in his own texts,” but it is also important to emphasize that their recurrence is a telling reminder of the way that external voices so often shape Wallace’s narratives.52 Even Wallace’s earliest texts—1987’s Broom of the System, for instance, which stages a novelistic “conversation between Derrida and Wittgenstein”— conceive of external, controlling voices in this way.53 In Wallace’s highly revealing film treatment of the novel, which has not yet been published, Wallace foregrounds the novel’s obsession with Lenore Sr.’s haunting and “perpetual presence-­in-absence,” which defines Lenore Jr.’s very existence: [Lenore Jr.’s] decision to remain on her own at film’s end illustrates a thesis: all love involves control. The film, besides aiming to be funny, should finally resolve itself around the central theme of the inevitability of control versus the inevitability of the drive toward independence, selfcontrol. The grandmother’s perpetual presence-­in-absence, as well as the train of followers Lenore’s departing taxi attracts, are meant to invite audiences into questions about the very idea of self-­sufficiency: what it is to be “free” of those who inform our fundamental choices?54

David Foster Wallace, Materials related to “Good Old Neon,” Container 24.2, David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. This idea is also given expression in Infinite Jest, when Jim Incandenza-qua-wraith tells Don Gately that “Gately’s best thoughts were really communiques from the patient and Abiding dead” (923). 52 Boswell, “A Gesture Toward Understanding David Foster Wallace,” 8. 53 Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, 35. 54 David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System: Theatrical Movie, Sample Outline, Container 1.2, Bonnie Nadell’s David Foster Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 51

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The notion of literary holograms thus countenances such sinister machinations, speaking to both the bifurcated, split-­image quality of Wallace’s appropriations, and his account of the haunting nature of literary influence. A recurring emphasis throughout this book has been on the ways in which Wallace engaged with and oriented himself toward antecedent sources. While all his intertextual engagements reveal important aspects of his work, Wallace’s relation to Dostoevsky has a particular potency. This is because the intertextual referencing of Dostoevsky’s work was itself a highly ambivalent textual strategy for Wallace, since—as his review of Frank’s biography makes clear—such references were a relatively easy way of rendering a modern narrative less “thematically shallow and lightweight” (271). In one section of the review, Wallace notes the ways in which intertextual quotation and other “formal trick[s]” allow for comparatively vacuous responses to the same “desperate questions” posed by Dostoevsky’s fiction: Frank’s bio prompts us to ask ourselves why we seem to require of our art an ironic distance from deep conviction or desperate questions, so that contemporary writers have to either make jokes of them or else try to work them in under cover of some formal trick like intertextual quotation or incongruous juxtaposition, sticking the really urgent stuff inside asterisks as part of some multivalent defamiliarization flourish or some such shit. (271)

While the latter half of the sentence refers to the performative insertions within the review, the reference to “formal trick[s] like intertextual quotation” invites direct comparison with the way in which Wallace integrated Dostoevsky’s texts within his own fiction. For Wallace, the complex use of intertexts was a means of deepening the moral and metaphysical dimensions of his texts, but it was also fundamentally an aesthetic compromise. Such deployments were part of a pragmatic negotiation, between the moral and ideological fiction that he deeply desired to write and the kind of fiction he felt came more easily. Indeed, the drafts of “Good Old Neon” reveal Wallace wrestling with his own authorial self-­image, as indicated by numerous references to A.O. Scott’s influential New York Times review-­essay “The Panic of Influence” (2000), which Wallace thought had been a disconcertingly perceptive response to his work. “AO Scott saw into my character,” he wrote at one point on the manuscript, as well as jotting down several half-­ remembered quotations from the article, including “Far too arch for its own good” and “Like a precocious child at a dinner party—the final aim is to show

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off.” Such drafts are indicative of the paradoxical struggle that Wallace was engaged in. On the one hand, he was attempting to write sincere, ethically engaged fiction that could stand alongside novels by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, while on the other, he feared that his own limitations as a novelist, along with the inherent narcissism and shallowness of the culture within which he was embedded, rendered such a task impossible.

4

Wallace and Eastern Europe: Kafka and Others

High art precedents: Wallace and the European literary tradition As the previous two chapters have shown, Wallace had a broad, heuristic understanding of both Russia and Latin America as discrete literary territories. In Chapter  2, I showed how Wallace grouped diverse Latin American novelists and poets—even incorporating Caribbean writers such as Jean Rhys and Jamaica Kincaid, who are not usually thought of as Latin American figures—under the same umbrella, while his numerous pronouncements on nineteenth-century Russian fiction explored in Chapter  3 also reveal this generalizing impulse. Wallace had a similarly expansive understanding of Europe, perceiving it heuristically, as a discrete territory. Many of Wallace’s texts exhibit this broad, territorial categorization: The college radio segment “Those Were The Legends That Formerly Were” in Infinite Jest, for instance, has several “rather more exotic patricidal formats for Asian, Latin, Arab, and European students on select weekend evenings” (182); a draft of the novel contains a reference to an “abundantly leathered . . . Euro-­ punk”; and Hal imagines himself “strolling down the Appian Way in bright Eurosunlight” (807, my emphasis).1 In fact, in the geographically reconfigured world of Infinite Jest, Europe has militarily merged with the United States, under the aegis of “AMNAT” (American and its NATO Allies), further hinting at the conglomerated abstraction that Europe has become. The novel adheres to this characterization throughout. Individual European countries are rarely isolated, but are frequently conflated within a broader, continental category. Gerhardt Schtitt, for instance, has a penchant for “excruciatingly loud European opera” (756), while at another point the narrator tells us that “like most Europeans of his generation,” Schtitt finds the United States simultaneously “hilarious and frightening” (82). Europe is invoked in similar ways throughout The Pale King: David Cusk, for instance, imagines a Steven Moore, “The First Draft of Infinite Jest.”

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“heart-­stoppingly pretty girl” with “an almost European hauteur about her” (332), and a Jesuit taxation lecturer wears a “stylish” hat that is described as “European-­looking” (235). Wallace’s journalism, likewise, often invokes Europe as an undifferentiated continent. “Consider the Lobster” notes that live crustacean dismemberment “is big in Europe” (250), while “The String Theory” refers to the partners of professional tennis players as “sloppily beautiful European girls” (216) and describes a particular genre of tennis footwear as “very white European shoes” (223). Though Wallace was at times slightly more specific about inter-European distinctions—in 2005, he described a tennis match between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal as a symbolic contest between “the passionate machismo of southern Europe versus the intricate clinical artistry of the north,” and in the aforementioned Michael Joyce essay, characterized Dutch tennis player Richard Krajicek as possessing characteristically “phlegmatic Low Country cheer” (220)—his work frequently positions continental Europe as a homogeneous territory.2 Following Wallace’s lead, this chapter thus starts from the idea of Europe as a discrete literary zone, revealing some of Wallace’s encounters with European fiction and poetry, before focusing on his more nuanced account of an Eastern European literary tradition. Pascale Casanova’s widely influential study The World Republic of Letters sets forth a compelling reimagining of the literary globe, in an attempt “to rediscover a lost transnational dimension of literature that for two hundred years has been reduced to the political and linguistic boundaries of nations.”3 However, my sense is that it is often just as productive to try to determine the personal geographical schema that influence a particular writer’s understanding of world literary space. Wallace’s own account of Europe sits neatly alongside his impulse to characterize Latin America in generalized terms, as I showed in Chapter 2, and this, in turn, is similar to the clustering of nineteenth- and twentieth-­century Russian literature in Chapter 3. In fact, Wallace conceived of other geographic regions in similarly expansive terms: his 1998 essay “The Nature of the Fun,” for instance, invokes a vague, undifferentiated notion of Asian culture in its retelling of a “strange little story” that “takes place in China or Korea or someplace like that.”4 Similarly, in The Pale King, the character David Wallace speculates in vague terms about the “exotic-­looking female” Ms. F. Chahla Neti-Neti, whom he

Wallace, “Federer: Both Flesh and Not,” in Both Flesh and Not, 10. Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, xi. 4 A similarly imprecise characterization occurs later on in the retelling, when Wallace refers to the “Imperial Sino-Korean Army or something like that.” Wallace, “The Nature of the Fun,” Both Flesh and Not, 195, 196. 2 3

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guesses to be either “upper-­caste Indian or Pakistani” but who “turned out to be what she called Persian” (287). In one sense, this categorizing impulse, in which adjacent nations are grouped together—and multiple texts are read for what they might reveal about the broader literary tradition they reflect—is encouraged by world literature theorists. David Damrosch, for instance, suggests that a productive way of approaching a distant literary tradition is to “triangulate among a variety of works, reading across several eras and cultures at once as we try to find different works that relate to different aspects of a text.”5 Arguably, Wallace was engaging in precisely this form of triangulation, searching for the common thematic elements, technical approaches, and other features that he might then be able to transpose within his own work. This kind of reading enabled Wallace to see how comparable artistic impulses arose from different parts of the globe and also to cluster similar artists together, abstracting out many of their individual differences in order to find the unifying characteristics of a particular tradition. Although Damrosch would suggest that this latter maneuver oversteps the restrained, cautious approach needed to engage with world literature—he points out that two particularly salient dangers are that this approach may not be aware that “the writer may assume a familiarity with dynasties and divinities we have never heard of ” and that the texts are “probably in dialogue with a range of previous writers we haven’t read”—it gave Wallace the freedom to appropriate from a radically expanded set of artistic sources.6 This strategic form of reading ultimately allowed Wallace to incorporate what he understood as the insights and artistic devices of a broadly defined literary zone into his own fiction. The United Kingdom, however, appears to have occupied an entirely distinct literary territory for Wallace, separate from continental Europe. English authors never appear in his lists or characterizations of European writing, nor does his work invoke a corresponding version of “Britishness.” However, it is clear that Wallace read countless British authors, often emphasizing innovations in poetry over fiction. As Paul Giles points out, “Wallace was markedly more enthusiastic about British poets than British novelists, with the metaphysical propensities and innovative language of Donne, Hopkins, and Larkin speaking to his interests more clearly than the ossified emphasis on social class and hierarchy in traditional English novels.”7 This enthusiasm arose in part from the classes in modern British poetry Wallace took while at Amherst. The copyright page for Oblivion also indicates an interest in Jonathan Swift’s poetry, citing Swift: Poetical Works (1968), Damrosch, How to Read World Literature, 62. Ibid., 46. 7 Giles, “All Swallowed Up: David Foster Wallace and American Literature,” 15. 5 6

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though the specific reference to the British satirist in “The Suffering Channel” is a pejorative one, to say the least: Laurel Manderley talks about “those ghastly pieces of Swift’s in Post Liz Lit where he went on and on about women taking a crap” (265) and quotes from Swift’s poem “The Lady’s Dressing Room.” Stephen J. Burn’s account of Wallace’s fascination with Philip Larkin—a poet whom Wallace claimed “rung [his] cherries . . . more than anyone else”—also supports this view, as does Jacobs’s extended reading of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s complex influence on Wallace.8 But alongside the emphasis on class and social status, Wallace also found the unexamined sentimentality of British fiction particularly irksome: He once characterized E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End (1910), for instance, as “humanistic syrup,” encapsulating a simplistic humanist ideology that, in Forster’s terms, placed personal relationships above systems of all kinds.9 Along with a quotation from A Passage to India in “Authority and American Usage,” there is also an oblique allusion to Forster’s defense of humanism and democracy, Two Cheers for Democracy (1938), in the title of James Incandenza’s film “(At Least) Three Cheers for Cause and Effect” (991), suggesting that Wallace may have had a wider knowledge of Forster’s work, perhaps viewing the British author as a particularly salient representative of humanist thought. Wallace was also apparently uninterested in the broader tradition of the English novel. In 2004, he declined a lucrative offer of contributing a short essay to a forthcoming Jane Austen collection, admitting that he had never read any of her novels—“Austen is another node of ignorance for me.”10 One exception to Wallace’s emphasis on British poetry is, of course, Shakespeare—whom Wallace said he enjoyed reading “every once in a while . . . although not all that often”—and also Laurence Sterne (whose Tristram Shandy is invoked in Infinite Jest), a writer with whom Wallace has, as Christopher Thomas puts it, “obvious cosmetic and tonal similarities.”11 Another important exception lies Laura Miller, “The Salon Interview: David Foster Wallace,” 62–63. See Burn, Readers Guide to Infinite Jest; Timothy Jacobs, “American Touchstone: The Idea of Order in Gerard Manly Hopkins and David Foster Wallace,” 215–31. 9 Wallace, “The Empty Plenum: David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress,” in Both Flesh and Not, 89. While teaching at the University of Illinois in 1997, Wallace also taught Hopkins, Keats, Wilfred Owen, and Larkin as part of his “U123 INTRO TO LITERATURE” course. 10 David Foster Wallace, Email to Bonnie Nadell (undated), Container 1.3, Bonnie Nadell’s David Foster Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. Wallace was, in fact, overstating the case in this letter. He had, in fact, read Pride and Prejudice while at Amherst: The archives contain a 1980 undergraduate essay on this novel. 11 Christopher Thomas, “Infinite Jests: David Foster Wallace and Laurence Sterne,” in Consider David Foster Wallace, ed. David Hering (Austin, TX: Sideshow Media Group Press, 2010), 123. 8

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in Wallace’s engagement with Irish literature: Joyce and Beckett are clear examples, but Wallace also greatly admired both short-­story writer Frank O’Connor and novelist Brian Moore, whose 1972 novel Catholics he revered. Zadie Smith claims that Moore’s novel was “the most impassioned book recommendation” Wallace had ever given her, noting the significance, as well as the potential oddness, of the recommendation by pointing out that “anyone who thinks Dave primarily an ironist should note that choice.”12 Wallace also admired Scottish novelist Irvine Welsh, providing a blurb for his 1994 short-­ story collection The Acid House, writing that “Irvine Welsh is the real thing—a marvelous admixture of nihilism and heart-­break, pinpoint realism (especially in dialect and tone) and almost archetypal universality.”13 As is also the case in the particular examples of Eastern European literature that Wallace drew on, the recurring focus in his reading of British fiction was on problematic, outsider figures, who destabilize dominant ideologies. Wallace engaged with an enormously diverse amount of European literature. Although French was the only other language that Wallace could read—Clare Hayes-Brady has shown that Wallace “read [Albert] Camus in the original,” while Wallace also owned a French-­language essay collection on mathematician Georg Cantor, Infini et inconscient: essai sur Georg Cantor (1994)—his inability to read original texts in no way dissuaded him from engaging with an expansive array of works and traditions.14 Along with Camus—whom he described as being “very clear, as a thinker, and tough . . . it makes my soul clean to read him”—he was familiar with a wide range of French writers.15 Wallace read Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jacques Roubaud, Jean-Paul Sartre, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Albert Camus, Antonin Artaud, Blaise Pascal, Guy de Maupassant, Stendhal, Francis Picabia, Rabelais, Andre Gide, and others, either in the original French or in translation. In addition, and perhaps even more unexpectedly, he was familiar with some Italian literature, Dutch authors Cees Noteboom and Philibert Schogt, as well as Greek novelist Apostolos Doxiadis.16 But the particular artistic region of Europe that most appealed to Wallace was Eastern Europe, which—as with the other literary territories outlined above—he viewed in generalized, heuristic terms. In fact, his definition of Eastern Europe harks back to the Cold War, with the territory Zadie Smith, Memorial Address. Originally given at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, New York University, October 2008. Reproduced in Five Dials 10 (2010). Online access: http://fivedials.com/files/fivedials_no10.pdf. 13 Irvine Welsh, The Acid House (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994). 14 Hayes-Brady. “ ‘. . .’: Language, Gender, and Modes of Power in the Work of David Foster Wallace,” 149. 15 Max, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, 298. 16 Greco, “Breve Intervista con un Uomo Meravigioloso.” 12

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defined in its Eastern bloc configuration as including communist Germany and its Eastern neighbors, though, as I have shown, Wallace viewed Russia as a distinct subterritory again. The dystopian world depicted in Infinite Jest even imagines that the Cold War divisions and tensions resurface at the beginning of the twentieth century: At one point in the novel, a news outlet reports that President Gentle’s actions have “effectively dismantl[ed] the Western bloc’s fifty-­five-year-­old defensive alliance” (391), implying the existence of a still-­viable Eastern bloc counterpart. In a similar vein, The Broom of the System invokes an undifferentiated, nebulous Eastern European zone. One of Rick Vigorous’s manipulative narratives concerns a woman from “an unspecified area in Eastern Europe, in which area the people have always stood in really ambiguous relations to the world outside them,” and in which “the area’s families were internally fiercely loyal, and their members were intimately and thoroughly connected with one another.”17 Likewise, Wallace’s description of Czech tennis player Jacob Hlasek in a 1993 essay is geographically vague, but comically describes Hlasek as the embodiment of every Hollywood stereotype concerning Eastern Europeans: Jacob Hlasek is 6′2″ and built like a halfback, his blond hair in a short square East European cut, with icy eyes and cheekbones out to here: he looks like either a Nazi male model or a lifeguard in hell and seems in general just way too scary ever to try to talk to.18

In the same essay, Wallace uses similarly disparaging stereotypes of Eastern Europeans, describing Croatian tennis player Goran Ivanisevic as “large and tan and surprisingly good-­looking—at least for a Croat; I always imagine Croats looking ravaged and katexic and like somebody out of a Munch lithograph” (252). And in a similar vein, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” describes Tibor, Wallace’s “beloved and extremely cool Hungarian waiter,” as having a mien that “expressed a combination of mortification and dignity that seem[ed] somehow to sum up the whole plight of postwar Eastern Europe” (296). Together with a sense of geographical vagueness, Wallace’s passion for Eastern European literature finds expression in numerous settings. In his brief SPIN Magazine review of Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert’s Mr. Cogito, for instance, which he labeled his “favorite book” of 1994, Wallace’s praised the collection for its “bravely earnest” central character, who is depicted as being Wallace, The Broom of the System, 189. Wallace, “Tennis Player Michael Joyce . . .,” 223.

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somehow “both intellectual and not too bright” as he “grapples with the ‘Big Questions’ of human existence.”19 Revealingly, Wallace saw American poetry as paling in the comparative light of Herbert’s innovations and thematic explorations: Compared to Mr. Cogito, the whole spectrum of American poetry, from the retrograde quaintness of the Neo-­formalists and New Yorkerbackyard-­garden-meditative lyrics to the sterile abstraction of the Language Poets, looks sick.20

Even more forceful is his later assertion that the Eastern European literary tradition had already succeeded in producing the kind of ethically rigorous work he aspired toward, noting that “only writers from Eastern Europe and Latin America have succeeded in marrying the stuff of spirit and human feeling to the parodic detachment the postmodern experience seems to require.”21 For Wallace, Eastern European literature thus functioned as a corrective to American literature, exposing the aesthetic poverty of US writing, but also as the quotation implies, functioning as a potential tool of reinvigoration. Wallace’s brief piece goes on to suggest optimistically that such a marriage is also possible in US literature, given the right set of political circumstances: He proposes that “[m]aybe as political conditions get more oppressive here, we Americans’ll get good at it too” (122). Again, the characterization of a pan-Eastern European landscape of political oppression hints at yet another broad geographical abstraction, though, in reality, the political reality that might encourage such fiction was of secondary importance. (Wallace’s perspective here reprises Hal Incandenza’s take on Quebecois politics, which he claims are “impervious to U.S. parsing” [311].) Over the course of his career, Wallace’s work moved closer and closer to reaching the artistic benchmark that he believed was set by Eastern European poets and novelists. But while he was unambiguous in his admiration for writers such as Zbigniew Herbert and Emil Cioran—whose Lacrimi si Sfinti [Tears and Saints] (1937) is directly cited in The Pale King—his interpretation of some Eastern European figures is far more ambivalent than the above endorsement might suggest. Czech novelist Milan Kundera, for instance, is an important antagonist in Wallace’s distinction between metafictional manipulation and genuine communication between author and reader: The short story “Octet” cites Kundera as a “perfect example of a belletrist whose Wallace, “Mr. Cogito,” 122. Ibid., 121. David Foster Wallace, “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky,” 274; Wallace, “Mr Cogito,” 122.

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intermural honesty is both formally unimpeachable and wholly self-­serving: a classic postmodern rhetorician.”22 Moreover, Wallace’s archive contains a copy of Kundera’s 1967 novel The Joke—a novel whose extreme self-­reflexivity Wallace parodied in the filmography entry for James Incandenza’s The Joke, which has a Kundera-­esque “involuted ‘antinarrative’ flow” (989)—while one of the Pale King notebooks refers to “Kundera’s Slowness.”23 Stepping off from the view expressed in “Mr. Cogito,” this chapter examines some of the particular texts that helped Wallace in his goal of melding a rigorously intellectual, postmodern detachment with “the stuff of spirit and human feeling.” Intriguingly, Wallace also saw numerous figures from German literary history as embodying precisely this literary aesthetic, indicating that his generalized notion of “writers from Eastern Europe” was capacious enough to incorporate German literature. Perhaps inspired by interstitial figures such as Franz Kafka, who bridges Eastern Europe and Germany—the majority of Kafka’s life was spent in Prague, though he saw “German as my mother-­ tongue and therefore more natural to me,” and understood himself as working out of a German literary heritage—Wallace himself conflated these two regions.24 In fact, fiction by German novelists (and German-­language fiction more generally) occupied a particularly important place for Wallace. Despite being unable to speak German—in an early draft of “Laughing with Kafka,” Wallace candidly admitted “to having next to no German,” though the published version of the article softens this admission to “. . . very little German” (62)—and acknowledging that he was “at the mercy of translators” when it came to German fiction, this dependence did not deter him from reading a wide range of German literary texts.25 Wallace read a vast number of authors in translation, including Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Bertolt Brecht, Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Musil, Peter Handke, Hans Robert Jauss, Goethe, Arno Gruen, Bruno Schulz, Georg Büchner, Günther Grass, Max Frisch, Jurg Federspeil, Siegfried Kracauer, Viktor Frankl, Max Nordau, and Alice Miller. In a letter to Jesse Cohen, Wallace again clarified his reliance on translations—“Did you know I can’t read German?”—while Infinite Jest spells some German words incorrectly, in a way that seems unlikely to have been Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, 125. Wallace, Materials related to The Pale King, Container 36.1–41.9, David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 24 Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena, trans. Willy Haas (1935; repr. New York: Vintage, 1999), 26. 25 Wallace, Interview with Ostap Karmodi. Incidentally, Wallace was intending on studying “intro german” [sic] during his PhD at Harvard, but it is unclear whether he actually enrolled in the course. In any case, his time at Harvard only lasted a few months. Max, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, 127. 22 23

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intentional.26 At one point, for instance, Hal says “Javol” (103) instead of the correct “Jawohl,” while the narrator also refers to the “Brockengespense” (88) rather than the accurate “Brockengenspenst” phenomenon.” However, Wallace was knowledgeable about the grammatical structure of the German language: At one point in Infinite Jest, Hal notes that “Modern German is better equipped for combining gerundives and prepositions” than English, “its mongrel cousin” (900). He also knew enough German to see the risible double-­meaning in John F. Kennedy’s famous 1963 “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech: a graduate student in Infinite Jest notes that “[f]ew foreigners realize that the German term Berliner is also the vulgate idiom for a common jelly doughnut, and thus that Kennedy’s seminal ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ was greeted by the Teutonic crowds with a delight only apparently political” (231–32).27 For Wallace, the inability to read literary texts in German did not constitute a serious impediment, since he was convinced that the essential elements of such texts were translatable, transcending the confines of their original linguistic expression. His essay on Kafka, for instance, facetiously forestalls translation objections by claiming that the aspects of Kafka’s fiction he reveres are clearly visible in even Edwin and Willa Muir’s much-­maligned translation, stressing that “the Kafka I know and teach is Mr. and Mrs. Muir’s Kafka, and though Lord knows how much more I’m missing, the funniness I’m talking about is right there in the good old Muirs’ English version.”28 As I showed in Chapter 3, a similar assumption underlies Wallace’s reading of Dostoevsky. Despite acknowledging that the likelihood of “terrible translation problems,” Wallace claimed that the English translations of Dostoevsky were “probably better than anything in English,” with the possible exception of Henry James. Once again, Wallace’s sense of linguistic pragmatism finds a crucial precedent in Emerson, whose commitment to Americanizing disparate ideas and texts was concomitant with a strong belief in not just the viability, but also the desirability, of translations. Emerson notes that while Italians “have a fling at Wallace, Letter to Jesse Cohen (September 7, 2000), Container 14.3, David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 27 This student’s observation is an almost exact reproduction of a false epigraph that Wallace used for his early story “/Solomon Silverfish/,” which he attributes to the fictitious W. Deldrick Sperber’s Brand-New Perspectives on Cross-Cultural Semantics. He also knew enough German to understand the subtle difference between the nouns Spassig and Komisch: An early draft of the Kafka address contains the former, which was then changed to “Das ist komisch” in the final version. David Foster Wallace, Draft of “/Solomon Silverfish/,” Container 1.10, Bonnie Nadell’s David Foster Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. David Foster Wallace, Material relating to “Laughing with Kafka,” Container 28.9, David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 28 David Foster Wallace, “Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness from which Probably Not Enough has been Removed,” in Consider the Lobster, 62. 26

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translators,” with the expression “I traduttori traditore [translator; traitor],” he instead “thank[s] them”: I never read any Latin, Greek, German, Italian, scarcely any French book in the original, which I can procure in an English translation. I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven. I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals, when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue.29

Wallace’s reading evinces a similar commitment to translation—highlighting those aspects of a text that can productively cross geographic and linguistic borders—in a manner that is at odds with contemporary world literature theory. Gayatri Spivak, for instance, laments the ways in which literary translations are compromised by economic pressures, and Emily Apter’s work is highly attuned to the way that particular political interests are furthered via translation networks.30 Like Emerson, however, Wallace bypasses such scruples to emphasize translation’s pragmatic ability to circulate unexpected ideas and approaches within new contexts, an approach that is always concerned with transposing particular aspects of world literary texts into an American idiom. In this sense, part of Wallace’s patriotic sympathy, as with Emerson, involves the ways he seeks to understand world literature as an adjunct to his domestic domain.

Posthumanizing Kafka Wallace encountered Kafka’s fiction for the first time as a high school student, during the period of his adolescence when he first started experiencing the crippling anxiety and panic that would transmogrify into lifelong clinical depression. D.T. Max’s biography describes this juncture as a “crucial moment for Wallace’s mental life and one he would never forget” (12), suggesting that the looping panic attacks he experienced as a teenager both foreshadowed a more systemic mental illness and were an early revelation of “the danger of a mind unhinged, of . . . thinking responsive only to itself ” (12). It was around this time that Wallace’s mental state found a refracted form of representation Emerson, The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Society and Solitude, Vol. 7, 103. See Gayatri Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); and Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (New York: Verso, 2013).

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in Kafka’s novels and short stories: Next to the glossy pictures of tennis stars that adorned his bedroom walls, he added a magazine-­clipping photograph of the Czech author, with the caption “The Malady was Life Itself.”31 Although references and allusions to Kafka are scattered throughout Wallace’s fiction and nonfiction, by far the clearest indication of literary influence is found in “Laughing with Kafka,” an address given by Wallace in March 1998 at “Metamorphosis: A New Kafka”—an event sponsored by PEN America to celebrate the publication of the Mark Harman translation of The Castle—that was published by Harper’s in July of the same year. Even though he self-­ deprecatingly refers to the essay as “the text of a very quick speech” (62), Wallace’s reflections set forth a highly idiosyncratic reading of Kafka’s work that reveals not only the depth of Wallace’s admiration, but also indirectly signals the various ways in which his own fiction registered Kafka’s influence. Wallace opens the essay by reproducing, in its entirety, Kafka’s “A Little Fable” before framing the discussion of the story’s peculiar use of humor with reference to the linguistic theory of “exformation,” a term used to denote communicative acts wherein “a certain quantity of vital information [is] removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient” (61, Wallace’s emphasis).32 It is not difficult to see the appeal that such a rhetorical strategy would have had for Wallace. After all, The Broom of the System ends mid-­sentence, and the endlessly baroque plot trajectories of Infinite Jest are supposed to “hum and project,” ultimately resolving for the reader outside of the written narrative, a device that Wallace elsewhere referred to as an As the author of literary blog “The Glance Reveals” has noted, this phrase is not, in fact, Kafka’s. It is instead the headline of Stefan Kanfer’s 1983 Time Magazine review of Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories (July 18, 1983). See “The Malady Was Life Itself: The Origin of a David Foster Wallace Anecdote,” December 11, 2012. Online access: www. theglancereveals.tumblr.com/post/37721538215/the-­malady-was-­life-itself-­the-origin-­ of-a-­david. 32 Toon Staes notes that Wallace’s use of this term comes directly from his reading of Danish science writer Tor Nørretrander’s The User Illusion (1991). See Staes, “Work in Process: A Genesis for The Pale King,” English Studies 95, no. 1 (2014): 70–84. Wallace also offers an autobiographical gloss on “A Little Fable” in “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” which repeats the essential structure and darkly morbid comedy of Kafka’s parable: “I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful” (267–68). 31

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“exfoliating curve-­line plot.”33 Wallace proceeds to discuss the “almost subarchetypal” nature of Kafka’s fiction, insisting that the presence of universal, unconscious evocations render “even his weirdest stories nightmarish rather than surreal” (62). He also addresses the irresolvable complexity of Kafka’s villains—“Kafka’s authority figures are never just hollow buffoons to be ridiculed, but are always absurd and scary and sad all at once” (63)—before articulating the essay’s central thesis, concerning Kafka’s eccentric deployment of humor. In Wallace’s reading, Kafka’s comedy is always dependent on a technique by which abstractions are given physical form. This interpretation argues that Kafka’s fiction operates through the construction of real-­world manifestations of cultural proverbs and expressions. Via imaginative literalization, such figures of speech are pushed to extreme and grotesque— though, in a deeper sense, also strangely logical—ends. Wallace summarizes the pedagogical approach that is premised on this insight: With respect to The Metamorphosis, then, I might invite students to consider what is really being expressed when we refer to someone as “creepy” or “gross” or say that somebody was forced to “eat shit” in his job. Or to reread “In the Penal Colony” in light of expressions like “tonguelashing” or “She sure tore me a new asshole” or the gnomic “By a certain age, everybody has the face he deserves.” Or to approach “A Hunger Artist” in terms of tropes like “starved for attention” or “love-­ starved” or the double entendre in the term “self-­denial,” or even as innocent a factoid as that the etymological root of “anorexia” happens to be the Greek word for longing. (63)

These illustrations all support the argument that Kafka’s fiction functions via literalization, exposing the subtext that makes these texts so profoundly disturbing. However, while these examples clearly reinforce Wallace point, it is curious that he omits the single most significant piece of evidence supporting his reading, the fact that—as Theodor Adorno pointed out in “Notes on Kafka”— the entire conceit of The Metamorphosis is based on the literalization of a popular German expression that compares traveling salesman to vermin.34 Adorno’s observation is reinforced by the fact that, throughout his diaries, Anne Marie Donahue, “David Foster Wallace Winces at The Suggestion That His Book is Sloppy in Any Sense,” in Conversations with David Foster Wallace, 72; Wallace, Letter to Michael Pietsch (April 1994), Quoted in Max, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, 196. 34 Theodor Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Boston: MIT Press, 1983), 255. 33

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Kafka himself often uses verminous imagery both as an expression of self-­ loathing and in his descriptions of fin-­de-siècle anti-Semitic rhetoric, which frequently compared European Jews to cockroaches. Whether Wallace was unaware of this crucial fact, or chose instead to bring forth other examples in support of his thesis is difficult to determine, though it does seem odd for Wallace not to have adduced this particular piece of evidence. Although Wallace’s argument is a persuasive one, he immediately undercuts his central claim in a self-­reflexive move that seems to preempt scholarly objections. He notes that there is something deeply unsatisfactory about his previous thesis, since the “comedy-­as-literalization-­of-metaphor tactic doesn’t begin to countenance the deeper alchemy by which Kafka’s comedy is always also tragedy, and this tragedy always also an immense and reverent joy” (63). The coexistence of comedy and tragedy was, for Wallace, a central aspect of Kafka’s fiction, along with the theological nature of Kafka’s texts: “Kafka’s humor . . . is, finally, a religious humor,” he noted, “but religious in the manner of Kierkegaard and Rilke and the Psalms, a harrowing spirituality against which even Ms. [Flannery] O’Connor’s bloody grace seems a little bit easy, the souls at stake pre-­made” (64). Presumably, Wallace’s allusion here is to the anguished and rigorously self-­conscious spirituality present in Kierkegaard, Rilke and sections of the Psalms. On the latter biblical allusion, D.T. Max notes that during Wallace’s short-­lived doctoral candidature at Harvard, he would “pass through the portal of Emerson Hall above which was a quotation from Psalm 8: ‘What is Man That Thou Art Mindful of Him?’,” a verse that speaks to Kafka’s sense of utter human insignificance and which Wallace may well have had in mind.35 Wallace’s essay ends with a mystical parable that provides a memorable narrative illustration of the interpretive demands made by Kafka’s fiction: You can . . . imagine his art as a kind of door. To envision us readers coming up and pounding on this door, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it, we don’t know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and pushing and kicking, etc. That finally, the door opens . . . and it opens outward: we’ve been inside what we wanted all along. (65)

This description elegantly captures the often painful frustration involved in reading Kafka: As readers, our deep desire for the semantic drift of language D.T. Max, Interview with The Believer Magazine, September 11, 2012. Online access: http://logger.believermag.com/post/31345087174/dtmax.

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to find a final resting point, for the text to offer up a final clue that will unlock its mysteries, is continually frustrated. However, Wallace’s solution to such interpretive frustration is to remind us that this irresolvable and polyvalent position is, paradoxically, the state that we truly crave, both while reading Kafka’s fiction and in our lives more generally, since “our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home” (64). The imagery here is clearly inspired by Kafka’s most famous parable, “Before the Law,” a densely parabolic story that is glossed at length in The Trial (1925). Significantly, the final thesis in “Laughing with Kafka”—that Kafka’s nightmarish vision of humanity speaks to the core of our existence—also recalls Wallace’s oft-­stated views on mimetic, Realist art. For Wallace, traditional forms of literary realism were wholly inadequate as tools for representing contemporary, late-­ capitalist culture, a realization he attributed to watching David Lynch’s Blue Velvet while in graduate school, when he suddenly understood that “being a surrealist, or being a weird writer didn’t exempt you from certain responsibilities, it upped them.”36 This surrealist insight relates in clear ways to Kafka’s fiction, as does Wallace’s revealing blurb for Arthur Bradford’s short-­story collection Dogwalker (2002), which he describes as “[a] book that’s like being able to have lunch with the part of you that dreams at night. . . . Stories that are sweet, haunting, resonant, generous, and true the way only the very strange is true.”37 Wallace could easily have described Kafka’s fiction in the same terms: The blurb sits neatly alongside the characterization of Kafka’s short stories as “heroically sane” (64), in spite of their grotesquery and dreamy oddness. As compelling as Wallace’s narrative illustration of reading Kafka is, his metaphor is a direct appropriation of a line from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Culture and Value (1977): “A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.”38 Though this isolated sentence comes from a collection of posthumously collected fragments and is not elaborated on, doors are a recurring symbol in Wittgenstein’s thought. Several aphorisms from Culture and Value invoke thresholds, while Philosophical Investigations (1953) uses a narrative fragment involving an open door as a way of discussing the logical possibility of error: “I can easily imagine someone always doubting before he opened his front door whether an abyss did not yawn behind it and making

Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, 170. David Foster Wallace, Blurb for Arthur Bradford’s Dogwalker: Stories (New York: Vintage, 2002). 38 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (1977; repr. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 42e. Wallace’s emphasis. 36 37

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sure about it before he went through the door (and he might on some occasion prove to be right)—but that does not make me doubt in the same case.”39 Though Kafka and Wittgenstein neither met nor knew each other’s work, the fact that both were loosely contemporaneous, German-­speaking European Jews has prompted many scholars to search for connections between the two writers’ work. From the perhaps unconscious appropriation of Wittgenstein’s parabolic fragment at the conclusion of his address on Kafka, it appears that Wallace himself may have perceived important connections between the two. Wallace’s 2005 review of Edwin Williamson’s Borges: A Life contains another important reference to Kafka. In this review, Wallace provides a lengthy critique of critics who perpetuate what Wimsatt and Beardsley labeled the “intentional fallacy,” the belief that biographical details of an author’s life provide the interpretive keys needed to unlock her work.40 However, in the midst of the essay’s dismantling of Williamson’s argument, Wallace noted a caveat, claiming that the biographical approach has validity when applied to a particular kind of writer. The form of writing that, to Wallace, constituted an exception was expressionist fiction, wherein the author’s mental states are artistically interrogated and projected onto the page. For Wallace, Kafka’s fiction fit squarely within this definition: It works well on Kafka—Borges’s only modern equal as an allegorist, with whom he’s often compared—because Kafka’s fictions are expressionistic, projective, and personal; they make sense only as manifestations of Kafka’s psyche. But Borges’s stories are very different. They are designed primarily as metaphysical arguments; they are dense, self-­enclosed, with their own deviant logics. Above all, they are meant to be impersonal, to transcend individual consciousness. (288, my emphasis)

Wallace’s archival copy of Borges’s Labyrinths and Other Stories also repeats this distinction. He wrote the marginal note “B vs. Kafka” in a section of the introduction that detailed the differing treatments of autobiography between the two writers, as well as noting that “B’s fiction is autobiographical” on the same page.41 In the same vein, Wallace thought that Kafka’s short story Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte (New York: Wiley Blackwell, 2009), 84. William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” Sewanee Review 54 (1946): 468–88. 41 David Foster Wallace, Annotations in Jorge Luis Borges’s Labyrinths, David Foster Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 39

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“Investigations of a Dog” was anathema to his intention for The Broom of the System, since he clustered Kafka’s tale within a strain of self-­indulgent, expressionist texts that, in D.T. Max’s paraphrasing, “gave pleasure only to their authors.”42 Wallace’s notes to his 1996 essay on David Lynch also characterize Kafka as an expressionist, though they make the somewhat contradictory claim that “Lit-­wise, good expressionism is epitomized by Kafka, bad expressionism by the average grad-­workshop story.”43 Despite this apparent inconsistency, the notion that Kafka’s fiction can only be understood as “manifestations of [his] psyche” is an extraordinary one, implying that Kafka’s narratives are primarily expressions of his own fractured, neurotic state of mind.44 While most Kafka scholars would agree that his texts can be meaningfully interpreted with reference to European expressionism, the claim that they function primarily as a form of oblique autobiography is somewhat reductive. If the history of Kafka scholarship teaches us anything, it is that his fiction invites seemingly endless interpretations, including those that extend far beyond narrow biographical readings. Indeed, Kafka’s narratives have been claimed to be the exemplary texts of psychoanalytic, Marxist, existential, poststructuralist, formalist, and posthumanist theory, among others. It is no coincidence that, according to the directors of the Princeton University Kafka Network, “more secondary literature is published on Kafka worldwide than on any other writer except Shakespeare.”45 The reasons underlying Wallace’s positioning of Kafka within a strictly psychological frame are curious to consider, though the rationale for this reading becomes clearer when we consider the broader argument Wallace is making in the Borges review. As I showed in Chapter  2, Wallace’s central claim is that Williamson’s biographico-­psychoanalytic approach is deeply flawed, since Borges’s fiction—in its attempt to render all questions of Max, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, 70. David Foster Wallace, Materials related to “David Lynch Keeps His Head,” Container 1.2, David Foster Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. The published version of the essay modifies this claim, suggesting that “in terms of literature, richly communicative expressionism is epitomized by Kafka, bad and onanistic expressionism by the average Writing Program avant-­garde story” (200). 44 In the inside flap to his heavily annotated copy of Williamson’s biography, Wallace contradicts this position somewhat, suggesting that both Borges and Kafka are primarily interesting in the metaphysical ramifications of their narratives: “B[orges], like Kafka, writes what appear to be allusions, but instead of universal referents and themes they end up ramifying endlessly, metaphysically. Modern fables, about everything, especially what’s real and how a person is to decide what’s real.” David Foster Wallace, Annotations in Edwin Williamson’s Borges: A Life, David Foster Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 45 The Princeton Kafka Network Proposal. Online access: http://www.princeton.edu/ international/doc/Kafka_PR.pdf. 42 43

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subjectivity and historical specificity meaningless—“transcend[s] individual consciousness” (288). Somewhat underhandedly, Wallace treats a line from Borges’s essay on H.G. Wells as if Borges was describing his own fictional project. In a short piece on Wells’s “atrocious miracles,” Borges claims that the British writer’s primary novels “will be incorporated, like the fables of Theseus or Ahasuerus, into the general memory of the species and even transcend the fame of their creator of the extinction of the language in which they were written.”46 Wallace took this line as a direct avowal of Borges’s own desire to write stories so radically dehistoricized and mythic in scope as to eclipse the individual self, and contrasted this ambition with Kafka’s expressionist project. Kafka is thus the necessary foil in Wallace’s argument, crucial in reinforcing the polemical stance of Wallace’s essay against the numerous critics who read Borges’s work in light of supposed intention, positioning the two figures in opposition in order to reinforce his essay’s central claim on the strangely abstracted quality of Borges’s stories. Beyond these two texts, Wallace’s fiction contains numerous references and allusions to Kafka. The Pale King, for instance, likens Peoria’s Regional Exam Center to “some kind of ur-­bureaucratic version of Kafka’s castle” (261), linking the inscrutable machinations of the IRS to the mysterious social-­ structure present in The Castle (1926). Moreover, The Broom of the System alludes to an explicit rewriting of The Metamorphosis, in a conversation between Rick and Lenore. Rifling through a pile of short-­story manuscripts, Lenore reads out a variety of submission titles to Rick: “ ‘Dance of the Insecure’? ‘To the Mall’? ‘Threnody Jones and the Goat from Below’? ‘The Enema Bandit and the Cosmic Buzzer’? ‘Love’?” and, significantly, “ ‘A Metamorphosis for the Eighties,” a literal “updating” of Kafka’s text that Rick suggests is a “rather interesting . . . Kafka parody, though sensitively done.”47 Rick Vigorous goes on to describe the story as a “Collegiate” homage that is nonetheless “interesting” as a “self-­loathing-in-­the-midst-­of-adulation piece,” after which Lenore reads aloud the story’s opening lines: “ ‘As Greg Sampson awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he discovered that he had been transformed into a rock star. He gazed down at his red, as it were leather-­clad, chest, the top of which was sprinkled with sequins and covered with a Fender guitar strapped tightly across his leather shoulders. It was no dream.’ ” (308)

Borges, Collected Fiction, 88. Wallace, The Broom of the System, 308.

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This opening reworks the famous first lines of Kafka’s text: When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself changed into a monstrous cockroach in his bed. He lay on his tough, armoured back, and, raising his head a little, managed to see— sectioned off by little crescent-­shaped ridges into segments—the expanse of his arched, brown belly, atop which the coverlet perched, forever on the point of slipping off entirely. . . . It was no dream.48

As well as lampooning the culture of MFA writing assignments, the fragment also speaks to Wallace’s own artistic project of updating Kafka’s vision within late-­capitalist America. And since “The Enema Bandit and the Cosmic Buzzer” is indeed a real story of Wallace’s, a copy of which is held in the Harry Ransom Center archives, it is not impossible that “A Metamorphosis for the Eighties” refers to a genuine piece of fiction that is either yet to emerge, or that Wallace discarded. Similarly, another narrative summary in The Broom of the System that may well refer to an external text is given in an earlier section of the novel, which reproduces Rick’s “Ideas for Monroe Fieldbinder Story Collection” (158). This brief vignette describes the social pressures attached to “the phenomenon of modern party-­dance,” in which the inept, inebriated dancing is itself “ridiculous, and yet absolutely everyone does it, so that it is the person who does not want to do the ridiculous thing who feels out of place and uncomfortable and self-­conscious . . . in a word, ridiculous” (158). Vigorous realizes that the narrative premise is Right out of Kafka: the person who does not want to do the ridiculous thing is the person who is ridiculous. (Idea: Kafka at an Amherst/Mt. Holyoke mixer, never referred to by name, only as “F.K.,” only one not dancing . . .) Modern party-­dance an evil thing. (158)

Wallace’s sketch imagines a version of Kafka that has been updated for a contemporary American audience, laying the groundwork for later appropriations. Such gestures operate in precisely the same manner as another recent adaptation of Kafka’s work, “The Franz Kafka Videogame,” which offers players the chance to “experience an atmosphere of absurdity,

Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis, trans. Michael Hoffman (1913; repr. New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 1.

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surrealism, and total uncertainty,” reworking numerous Kafka texts within an entirely new medium and cultural context.49 There is also an odd, though revealing, narrative fragment in Wallace’s archives that appears to be a sketch for yet another rewriting of The Metamorphosis. In his notes for an undated class on entomology, Wallace jotted the following story idea among diagrams of insects and lengthy descriptions of biological processes: IDEA: A cockroach mutant is born who perceives himself as a human does, as “the center” of the world. Like ARPA computer—each terminal thinks it’s the computer—way more intelligent, but also way more painful, since Nature continues to work on the level of species-survival, species-importance.50

The sketch is included on a page that contains Wallace’s notes on the literal biological process of “Metamorphosis—development of pupae,” which surely prompted the projected homage to Kafka. The idea also arose partly from the classroom realization that evolution centers on the “propagation of species, not individual,” which Wallace also wrote on the same page. Though this brief sketch was apparently never expanded on, Wallace’s “IDEA” hints at a complex, posthumanist reversal of Kafka’s novella, upending the descent from human to insect to explore ways in which evolutionary biology obviates the possibility of an individual perspective. Indeed, the sketch’s gesture toward such a subject coheres with Neil Badmington’s definition of posthumanist thought, as destabilizing “the sovereignty of the traditional subject of humanism.”51 The inclusion of the “ARPA computer” comparison—a reference to the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the US Department of Defense, responsible in part for technological developments in computer networking—is thus characteristic of Wallace’s career-­long focus on the intersection of biological processes within an abstracted, technological sphere. Another Kafka-­inspired, posthumanist narrative sketch occurs in Everything and More (2003), which at one point uses an early childhood experience to illustrate a metaphysical argument about causality:

“The Franz Kafka Videogame” Press release. Game developed by Denis Galanin, due for release in 2014. Online access: kafkagame.blogspot.com.au. 50 David Foster Wallace, Entomology Notes, Container 32.3, David Foster Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 51 Neil Badmington, Alien Chic: Posthumanism and the Other Within (London: Routledge, 2004), 31. 49

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There were four chickens in a wire coop off the garage, the brightest of whom was called Mr. Chicken. Every morning, the farm’s hired man’s appearance in the coop area with a certain burlap sack caused Mr. Chicken to get excited and start doing warmup-­pecks at the ground, because he knew it was feeding time. It was always around the same time t every morning, and Mr. Chicken had figured out that t (man + sack) = food, and thus was confidently doing his warmup-­pecks on that last Sunday morning when the hired man suddenly reached out and grabbed Mr. Chicken and in one smooth motion wrung his neck and put him in the burlap sack and bore him off to the kitchen. Memories like this tend to remain quite vivid, if you have any. But with the thrust, lying here, being that Mr. Chicken appears now actually to have been correct— according to the Principle of Induction—in expecting nothing but breakfast from that (n + 1)th appearance of man + sack at t. Something about the fact that Mr. Chicken not only didn’t suspect a thing but appears to have been wholly justified in not suspecting a thing—this seems concretely creepy and upsetting. Finding some higher-­level justification for your confidence in the P.I. seems much more urgent when you realize that, without this justification, our own situation is basically indistinguishable from that of Mr. Chicken.52

The fragment erases the distinction between humans and chickens in a posthumanist maneuver that sees the situations of each as “basically indistinguishable,” foreshadowing the ethical concern for animals that would find its clearest expression in 2004’s “Consider the Lobster.”53 In the same vein, Paul Giles reads another of Wallace’s animal narratives, also involving chickens, as working to erase such distinctions: Giles’s argument is that the Wallace, Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003), 15. Wallace’s emphasis. 53 Though, once again, the intertextuality here is complicated, since the allegedly autobiographical vignette is a thinly disguised reworking of a passage of Bertrand Russell’s, from the “Induction” chapter to his landmark 1912 study, The Problems of Philosophy. Here, Russell discusses the apparent irrationality of inductive reasoning, making the point that animals are also inveterate inductive reasoners: “And this kind of association is not confined to men; in animals it is very strong. . . . The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views about the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken. But in spite of the misleadingness of such expectations, they nonetheless exist. The mere fact that something has happened a certain number of times causes animals and men to expect that it will happen again. Thus our instincts certainly cause us to believe that the sun will rise tomorrow, but we may be in no better a position than the chicken which unexpectedly has its neck wrung.” Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (1912; repr. New York: Simon & Brown Press, 2000), 44. 52

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“chicken-­sexing” short story “B.I. #48” works to collapse “supposedly natural mating rituals” (448) into a “quasi-­scientific mode of seduction” (449).54 As with “B.I. #48,” the Everything and More fragment enacts a radical identification with an animal that is usually kept entirely separate from human concerns, in the same way that Kafka’s fables are focalized through such Hebraically unclean animals as dogs, mice, and insects. Importantly, Mr. Chicken’s violently abrupt end echoes the grim death of the mouse in “A Little Fable”: the “one smooth motion” by which the farmer “wrung [Mr. Chicken’s] neck” seems comical and absurd in the same way as the cat’s matter-­of-fact suggestion that “You only need to change your direction” before he “ate it up.” Infinite Jest also includes multiple references to Kafka. Indeed, Infinite Jest uses the adjective “Kafkaesque” or the equivalent “Kafkan” three times throughout the novel. The first instance occurs in Hal’s description of his institutionally mandated “grief-­therapy” following the death of his father, which he characterizes as consisting of lengthy, “Kafkaesque interfaces . . . day after day, week after week” (254); in the second, Avril’s attempt to obtain “O.N.A.N.T.A. accreditation” for the Enfield Tennis Academy involves a “Kafkan application” (288) process; while Kafka is also invoked in the narrator’s summary of the endlessly complex, “Kafkaesque rules” (432) that govern O.N.A.N.T.A.’s unregistered tennis players. These three instances cover the most common ways in which the adjective “Kafkaesque” can be used, referring in the first case to the elliptical, dreamlike conversational exchanges between characters in Kafka’s fiction, and in the latter cases, to impenetrable bureaucratic systems. (In addition, a later Wallace story deploys the adjective to denote psychological inscrutability, when a dying man describes what happened when his father’s “will was thwarted”: “It was Kafkan—you were punished for protecting him from himself,” while Wallace’s 1993 essay on Michael Joyce alludes to the “Kafkanly complex rules” governing ATP tournaments.55) Significantly, Infinite Jest also cites Kafka in an interchange between Marathe and Steeply, when Marathe runs through a list of star-­crossed lovers: “Narcissus and Echo. Kierkegaard and Regina. Kafka and that poor girl afraid to go to the postbox for mail” (105). The “poor girl” in question here is Felice Bauer, one of Kafka’s lovers. Though Kafka and Felice are hardly a well-­known example of “star-­crossed love,” the reference here hints at the A.F.R.’s particular terrorism method of disseminating Paul Giles, Antipodean America, 448, 449. David Foster Wallace, “On His Deathbed, Holding Your Hand, the Acclaimed New Young Off-Broadway Playwright’s Father Begs a Boon,” Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (London: Abacus, 2001), 221; Wallace, “Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Limitation, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness,” 218.

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interlace cartridges via mail, a correspondence that Steeply picks up on immediately: “Interesting choice of example here, the mailbox” (105). Infinite Jest also contains a more subtle allusion to Kafka’s Amerika (a heavily annotated copy of which is held in Wallace’s archives) in the modified Statue of Liberty that in Kafka’s novel raises a sword, “as if newly stretched aloft.”56 Kafka’s imaginative amendment to the Statue raises the specter of violent death and American brutality, foreshadowing Karl Rossmann’s later death at the hands of the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, but Wallace’s own modifications are equally revealing. Early on in Infinite Jest, a Saudi medical attaché refers to the Statue of Liberty as the “West’s most famous and self-­congratulating idol,” which in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment wears “some type of enormous adult-­design diaper” (33). In the newly reconfigured Organization of North America, the Statue changes to reflect that year’s particular corporate sponsor of subsidized time. In a later section, the narrator informs us that “NNYC’s harbor’s Liberty Island’s gigantic lady has the sun for a crown and holds what looks like a huge photo album under one arm, and the other arm holds aloft a product. The product is changed each 1 Jan. by brave men with pitons and cranes” (367). Though the description of the diapered Statue is highly comical—as is the newspaper headline from the Year of the Whopper that reads “FREAK STATUE OF LIBERTY ACCIDENT KILLS FED ENGINEER . . . BRAVE MAN ON CRANE CRUSHED BY 5 TON CAST IRON BURGER” (398)—it owes an obvious debt to Kafka’s Amerika and works as a deliberately unsubtle symbol for the perversion of once-­ cherished American ideals by commercial interests. Kafka’s Amerika was clearly an important text for Wallace: Aside from speaking at the PEN evening celebrating Mark Harmon’s new translation of the novel and including the aforementioned intertextual gesture within Infinite Jest, Wallace also reproduced word-­for-word a line from the novel— “He will be given only a small job to begin with, and it will be his business to work his way up by diligence and attentiveness”—in The Pale King, a direct insertion that is highly revealing of Wallace’s attitude toward intertextuality.57 Toon Staes folds this quotation into a discussion of Wallace’s use of “exformation,” but the plagiarism is also revealing for its sheer brazenness. Contra Bloom’s model of the “strong poet” wrestling with an isolated forefather, Wallace here engages in a style of deliberate self-­effacement, capitulating to Kafka’s influence instead of trying to resist it. And since the borrowed sentence is not given a citation, Wallace here engages in a practice Franz Kafka, Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared, trans. Michael Hofmann (New York: New Directions, 2002), 3. 57 Kafka, Amerika, 88. 56

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that Hal Incandenza, from Infinite Jest, characterizes as “kleptomaniacal thrillseeking” (1061), a deliberately risky mode of artistic theft that is at odds with Bloom’s conception. Moreover, in a review of Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas’s The Doorman, Wallace suggested that the novel worked as a “slighter version of Kafka’s Amerika—another dark picaresque with a tortured foreign ingénue adrift amid all the nation’s bright promise and sad reality, Juan as a Karl Rossman defined by questions of freedom and relationship instead of guilt and penance.”58 In another section of the review, Wallace suggests that Arenas’s thesis is that America is a “false door, presenting itself as a Utopia,” which is certainly Karl Rossman’s initial perception: He is lured to America by the promise of free-­market enterprise and the possibility of sending money back to his family in Germany, but discovers a nation of swindlers and indifferent cruelty. As with the countless other world literary texts that Wallace revered, here he enacts a comparative mode of reading that links Amerika to The Doorman for its articulation of a novel vantage point from which to view the culture—an external, outsider’s perspective that exposes American excess. Wallace may well have also had Kafka’s novel in mind when he characterized The Doorman as “a dark parable on the very possibility of community.”59 Like The Doorman, the relentlessly bleak perspective of Amerika seems to preclude the possibility of ever finding the values that Wallace wanted his fiction to explore: “stuff about heartbreak and people you loved dying and U.S. woe, stuff that was real.”60 There are many other glancing references to Kafka throughout Wallace’s work. His 1996 essay on Michael Joyce, for instance, describes Austrian tennis player Julian Knowle as “a tall and cadaverous guy with point Kafkan ears,” and he also wrote “Kafka ‘Conversation with a Supplicant’ ” on the inside cover of his copy of R.D. Laing’s The Divided Self, perceiving a link between the supplicant’s psychotic style of prayer—which involves “clutch[ing] his skull with all his strength and, moaning loudly, beat[ing] it in the palms of his hands on the stone floor”—in Kafka’s early story and Laing’s study of fracture and self-­alienation.61 Wallace also referenced Kafka in numerous interviews, as in a 2004 conversation with Steve Paulson, where he suggested that although his short story “The Soul is Not a Smithy” initially began as a “weird story” that “started out really surreal,” the narrative ultimately veered toward David Foster Wallace, “Tragic Cuban Émigré and a tale of ‘The Door to Happiness,’ ” Philadelphia Inquirer (July 14, 1991). Wallace, “Tragic Cuban Émigré and a tale of ‘The Door to Happiness.’ ” 60 Wallace, Infinite Jest, 592. 61 Wallace, “Tennis Player Michael Joyce . . .,” 238; Kafka, “Description of a Struggle,” in The Collected Stories, trans. Edwin and Willa Muir (1971; repr. 1971. New York: Schocken Books, 1995), 29. 58

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an “everyday realistic” form, such that “it kind of ended up like inverted Kafka.”62 Wallace again invoked Kafka’s use of comedy in a 2003 German television interview, and also referred to Kafka in a 2006 interview with Michael Silverblatt, where he made an important distinction between two modes of self-­awareness: a “toxic, raped-­by-psychic-Bedouins self-­ consciousness” and an enabling, “Kafkaesque form of self-­consciousness.”63 Furthermore, in a 1997 interview, Wallace gave a revealing interpretation of Kafka in response to a question on the extent to which avant-­garde writers such as Kafka and Bruno Schulz, if they were still living, would be writing about popular culture: Well, possibly. But Kafka and Schulz would be writing about the family in an atmosphere in which from Oprah and Montel we now have this thing called the dysfunctional family. We have a series of clichés we can banter around ironically, and they would have to take account of that, because they don’t want to simply thoughtlessly recycle it and look like pap. You know what I mean? Kafka would not have to sit down and channel-­surf in order to write about what it’s like to live in a televisual culture, because it’s oxygen. It’s the atmosphere. My guess is that, given Kafka’s struggles with the idea of the human being as loathsome and the human being as repulsive and worthless, that a culture very much defined by these superstars who are way prettier than any of the rest of us are—and smoother and suaver and whatever—would have an enormous effect on him.64

It was precisely this belief—that contemporary culture would have “an enormous effect on [Kafka]”—that allowed Wallace to pick up where Kafka left off, appropriating idiosyncratic literary techniques for his own artistic project and transposing Kafka’s themes into an American cultural context. One contemporary writer whom Wallace saw as engaging in this very project was Polish-American novelist Jerzy Kosinksi, whose 1968 novel Steps Wallace included in his Salon list of “Five Direly Underappreciated U.S. Novels >1960.” Wallace’s contention was that Steps was “a collection of unbelievably creepy little allegorical tableaux done in a terse elegant voice that’s like nothing else anywhere ever,” suggesting that “[o]nly Kafka’s fragments get anywhere close

Steve Paulson, “To the Best of Our Knowledge: Interview with David Foster Wallace,” in Conversations with David Foster Wallace, 128. My emphasis. 63 Wallace, Interview with Michael Silverblatt, KCRW’s Bookworm (1999). 64 Wallace, Interview with David Wiley, Minnesota Daily (February 27, 1997). Online access: http://www.badgerinternet.com/~bobkat/jestwiley2.html. 62

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to where Kosinski goes in this book.”65 The structure and truncated form of Kosinski’s narrative tableaux do indeed resemble the terseness of Kafka’s fragments, but for my purposes the crucial overlap concerns the way Kosinski deploys morbidly dark humor, in a way that maps onto Wallace’s reading of Kafkaesque comedy. The relentlessly dark comic sensibility of Steps finds expression in numerous places, as in this disturbing description of genocide: “You could look at it from many points of view: in a maternity hospital, for instance, more people leave than arrive; in a concentration camp the reverse is true. Its main purpose is hygiene.”66 Or in this instance of a particularly Kafkaesque boundary erasure, in which humans have the same ontological status as vermin: “That’s why in the concentration camps my friend designed, the victims never remained individuals; they became as identical as rats. They existed only to be killed.”67 Even though their respective deployments of comedy differ in important ways, Kosinski provided Wallace with another reference point that demonstrated how Kafka’s fiction might be reworked in an American setting. Finally, Wallace’s interest in teaching Kafka is revealed in his annotated copy of Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865–1871, which has a reminder in the inside flap to look up what Wallace remembered as either Lionel Trilling’s “ ‘Sincerity & Authenticity’ or ‘Authenticity & Sincerity’ ” as well as another prompt to take another look at “Lionel Trilling[’s] essay on teaching Dostoevski + Kafka.”68 Wallace noted that this latter essay concerned Trilling’s experiences with “teaching modern literature” and “Dealing w/ generation not interior enough to get it.” Such an argument has clear overlaps with Wallace’s critique of his own generation’s disenchantment and anomie— Trilling’s “On the Teaching of Modern Literature” describes students as treating literature and ideas “with a happy vagueness, a delightful glibness, a joyous sense of power in the use of received or receivable generalizations”— but it also reinforces Wallace’s suspicion that Kafka’s relevance to a modern audience had waned considerably, that “Kafka’s wit [is] inaccessible to children whom our culture has trained to see jokes as entertainment and entertainment as reassurance” (64).69 Even more specifically, Wallace felt that Wallace, “Overlooked: Five Direly Underappreciated U.S. Novels>1960,” in Both Flesh and Not, 203. 66 Jerzy Kosinki, Steps (London: The Bodley Head, 1968), 70. 67 Ibid., 71. 68 David Foster Wallace, Annotations in Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865–1871, David Foster Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 69 Lionel Trilling, “On the Teaching of Modern Literature,” in The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent: Selected Essays, ed. Leon Wieseltier (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 386. 65

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Kafka’s increasing irrelevance and difficulty was a specifically American phenomenon: At one point, he suggests that “the particular sort of funniness Kafka deploys is deeply alien to kids whose neural resonances are American,” since Kafka’s humor does not align with the “forms and codes of contemporary U.S. amusement” (62). Ultimately, Wallace’s perception of Kafka’s cultural obsolescence prompted him to revive and recontextualize Kafka’s work— particularly his eccentric use of comedy—for a contemporary audience.

Wallace’s Kafkaesque comic sensibility Toon Staes is the only other scholar to have addressed the relationship between Wallace and Kafka: His central argument in “ ‘Only Artists can Transfigure’: Kafka’s Artists and the Possibility of Redemption in the Novellas of David Foster Wallace” is that Wallace took a general notion of artistic practice from Kafka, one that emphasized Kafka’s ability to “defamiliarize the delusive immediacy of modern society.”70 Staes discerns some subtle overlaps in support of this thesis, but as I have shown, there are many more overt appropriations within Wallace’s writing that deliberately and self-­consciously engage with Kafka’s legacy. One of the key ways in which Wallace’s fiction registers the influence of Kafka lies in its persistent use of what Wallace termed comic literalization, wherein abstractions, clichés, and codified expressions are given physical form. Wallace gives a wide range of examples of this technique from across Kafka’s corpus, using texts such as “A Hunger Artist,” The Metamorphosis, and “The Penal Colony.” (On this last text, Wallace’s address contains a buried trope that functions as a gloss on “The Penal Colony”: His deliberate reference to Kafka’s “harrowing spirituality” invokes the literal harrow used as a ritualistic torture device in this story.) Wallace’s central claim is that this technique is both comic and deeply unsettling, allowing for the narrative exploration of “what’s true and deep” beneath the surface of codified wisdom, hinting at submerged truths that could not be reached by any other means.71 Wallace’s interpretation can be read as modifying a particularly European reading of Kafka that originates with Walter Benjamin, whose interpretations sidestepped the theological, sentimental analyses of Kafka’s friend and literary executor Max Brod to focus instead on the textual surface. Reda Bensmaïa points out the novelty of Benjamin’s approach in his introduction to Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, noting that Toon Staes,“ ‘Only Artists can Transfigure’: Kafka’s Artists and the Possibility of Redemption in the Novellas of David Foster Wallace,” Orbis Literrarum, 65, no. 6 (2010): 461. 71 Wallace, Infinite Jest, 271. 70

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Benjamin was one of the first “readers” of Kafka’s work to see and then try to show—demonstrate—that Kafka’s work was, from a certain point of view, to be taken literally: in a word, that it functioned on the surface of its signs and that the issue was not—at least, not only—to try and interpret it but, above all, to practice it as an experimental machine, a machine for effects, as in physics.72

Following Benjamin’s example, Deleuze and Guattari themselves resist the temptation to “inject mythical meanings into Kafka’s work,” extending Benjamin’s approach to argue that Kafka’s fiction demands another category entirely—being an example of a “minor literature,” beyond merely “literature”—in order to comprehend its strange effects.73 Slavoj Žižek, likewise, participates in this reading when he suggests that reading Kafka involves “unlearning the standard interpretive references” in order to “open up to the raw force of Kafka’s writing.”74 His approach stresses a similarly literal, surface reading, arguing that “the first (naïve) reading is often the most adequate one, and the second reading is the one which tries to ‘sublate’ the first reading’s raw impact by forcing him into the frame of a given interpretation” (114). As I have shown, Wallace has a similar insistence on the literal dimension of Kafka’s fiction. But he differs from these European intellectuals by nonetheless wanting to retain the unconventional chain of signification rippling out from the literal textual surface, an associative chain that is multivalent and triggers numerous associations, but which nonetheless signifies. In this regard, Wallace uses Kafka in order to rehearse the familiar postmodern critique of an obsolete, humanist depth model of meaning, as another vindication of the postmodernist dictum that contemporary truths invariably hide on the surface. Wallace’s novels and short stories contain numerous narrative illustrations of this very dictum: In Infinite Jest, for instance, the maternally sinister Avril Incandenza wears a witch’s hat at the Reda Bensmaïa, “Foreword: The Kafka Effect,” trans. Terry Cochran, in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minnesota: The University of Minnesota Press, 1986), xi. 73 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minnesota: The University of Minnesota Press, 1986). Incidentally, it is not all beyond the realm of possibility that Wallace read Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka. Molly Notkin, in Infinite Jest, gives a brief description of an invented text, “M. Gilles Deleuze’s posthumous Incest and the Life of Death in Capitalist Entertainment” (792), while both “E Unibus Pluram” and “David Lynch Keeps His Head” reference Deleuze and Guattari. Furthermore, annotations on a student’s essay (Shawn Miklaucic’s paper on Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree) indicate that Wallace was familiar with Anti-Oedipus (1972). Online access: http://www.scribd. com/doc/28153758/Shawn-Miklaucic-Rnslish-487-r-Rru-David-Foster. 74 Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 114. Zizek’s emphasis. 72

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Interdependence lunch, and Hal and Gately both have disturbing but painfully obvious, readily interpretable dreams. At times, Wallace drives home the point even more forcefully: The narrator tells us that Troeltsch’s “Tenuate 75-mg. capsules,” stolen from Mike Pemulis, have been “stashed . . . in bold plain sight in a bedside pill bottle where the Peemster would never think to check” (60); and Lenz’s shrewd flight from the law involves “never sleeping, ever moving, [and] hiding in bright-­lit and public plain sight, the last place They would think to find him” (717). The point here is that Wallace’s appropriation of Kafka’s technique of imaginative literalization is an attempt at having his hermeneutic cake and eating it too. Wallace wanted to affirm both the proto-­postmodern surface play and what Deleuze and Guattari characterize as the “mechanical effects” of Kafka’s texts, while also claiming that such an emphasis on the literal nature of his narratives paradoxically leads to deeper, “sub-archetypal” truths.75 Wallace’s emphasis on Kafka’s comic literalizations thus differs sharply from the way that earlier American novelists approached Kafka’s work. Philip Roth, for instance—whom Peter Demetz argues is the American writer who has read and understood Kafka in more depth than any of his contemporaries—was drawn in part to Kafka’s oblique representations of Jewish identity.76 A large part of Roth’s identification is thus based on a sense of cultural affinity, predicated on seeing Kafka as having recognizably Jewish features, a highly personalized mode of reading that even extended to the physical presence of Kafka. In “Looking at Kafka,” Roth suggested that the author’s famous 1924 photograph highlights “the familiar Jewish flare in the bridge of the nose,” which resembles “the nose of half the Jewish boys who were my friends in high school.”77 Unlike Wallace, who seemingly had little interest in the ethnic or religious dimensions of Kafka’s work, Roth’s reading balances a personal sense of cultural identification with an adjacent impulse to read Kafka’s fiction in light of World War II atrocities: As Daniel Medin points out, Roth’s Kafka was thus “an adamantly postwar Kafka,” in a way that Wallace’s Kafka was not.78 And while Roth’s reading also stressed the comic aspects of Kafka’s “morbid preoccupation with punishment and guilt”— suggesting that such a preoccupation was often “hideous, but funny”—his own appropriations and intertextual quotations, in novels such as Portnoy’s Complaint, are invariably concerned with emulating what he takes to be the Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 62. Peter Demetz, “Mit Franz Kafka in den Straβen von Newark,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (March 23, 2002). Quoted in Daniel Medin’s Three Sons, 41. 77 Philip Roth, “Looking at Kafka,” in Reading Myself and Others (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975), 248. 78 Medin, Three Sons, 39. 75 76

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general spirit and themes of Kafka’s work, rather than on the Wallace-­like obsession with particular literary and comic devices.79 Wallace’s use of Kafkaesque literalization actually comprises two separate forms. The first is the purely comic, lighthearted literalizations, designed to generate the kind of laughter that Wallace found throughout Kafka’s fiction. Narratives in this category include the videophone section of Infinite Jest, which can be read as an extended comic riff on the phrase “to project a certain image of oneself,” as well as Lateral Alice Moore’s implausible, post-­ accident “neurological condition” that leaves her “able to move only from side to side” (510), a character who embodies Wallace’s oft-­repeated assertion of his own generation’s vapid preoccupation with the “social Now,” a narcissistic absence of historical awareness that means that makes it impossible to look either forward or backward, instead being restricted to an endless, “lateral” present.80 Likewise, younger tennis academy students actually stop to “smell flowers along the E.T.A. paths” (693), while Avril Incandenza’s literally “smothering” maternal love assumes physical form in Orin’s unsettling nightmare, in which “the Moms’s disconnected head attached face to face to his own fine head, strapped tight to his face somehow” (46). Another particularly risible narrative fragment concerns a literalization of the AA phrase “hitting bottom,” in the backstory of Ennet House resident Dave K.: Dave K.’s bottom was he drank half a liter of Cuerva at some ATHSCME Interdependence Day office part and everything like that and got in some insane drunken limbo-­dance challenge with a rival executive and tried to like limbo under a desk or a chair or something insanely low and got his spine all fucked up in a limbo-­lock, maybe permanently: so the newest new guy scuttles around the Ennet House living room like a crab, his scalp brushing the floor and his knees trembling with effort. (824)

The pitiable Dave K. is still living with the repercussions of literally “hitting bottom” and must ascend, with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous, to a higher spiritual and physical level of being. In a similar vein are Roy Tony’s theft of a handbag-­enclosed “Jarvik IV Exterior Artificial Heart” (142), which produces darkly humorous cries of “Stop her! She stole my heart!” (143); the

Philip Roth, “On Portnoy’s Complaint,” in Reading Myself and Others, 22. In “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,” Wallace also railed against “a generation whose eyes have moved fish-­like to the sides of its head, forward vision usurped by a numb need to survive the now” (304). Wallace, “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young,” 62.

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fecal artist Brint Moltke, in “The Suffering Channel,” who literalizes commonplaces surrounding artistic influence, his sculptures being the literal product of whatever he consumes; along with the retired Unit #4 Air Force nurse in Infinite Jest, who “does nothing but scream ‘Help’ for hours at a time” (196), making manifest the AA doctrine of “Asking for Help.” In fact, the narrator explicitly emphasizes this latter congruence, parenthetically observing that “[s]ince the Ennet House residents are drilled in a Boston-AA recovery program that places great emphasis on ‘Asking for Help,’ the retired shrieking Air Force nurse is the object of a certain grim amusement, sometimes” (196). In precisely the same manner, the narrator flags this technique of comic literalization at several other points in the novel: The narrator informs us that the psychotic and suicidal Eric Clipperton “lent the cliché ‘Win or Die in the Attempt’ grotesquely literal new levels of sense” (408), and also points out that E.T.A.’s improbable fitness guru “lives off the sweat of others. Literally. The fluids and salts and fatty acids” (128). Such jokes appropriate Kafka’s central technical device in a fairly straightforward manner, though they also prime the reader to notice the more subtle—and more thematically significant—literalizations that occur in other parts of Wallace’s work. The second form of literalization aligns with a slightly different comic sensibility. While the previous examples are all fairly obvious gags—asides and vignettes that the narrator often self-­consciously flags as literal embodiments of clichés and expressions—this second kind of literalization attempts a more nuanced kind of comedy. Wallace uses such literalizations to reach behind the wall of cliché and idiom to recover the often forgotten truths that such expressions conceal: As the narrator observes in Infinite Jest, “the vapider the AA cliché, the sharper the canines of the real truth it covers” (446). Such a project can be traced right through Wallace’s career. As Stephen J. Burn notes, a crucial aspect of Wallace’s art lies in “resuscitating” clichés and proverbial expressions, searching for ways to dramatize or give narrative expression to truths whose over-­familiarity renders them impotent.81 Charles B. Harris goes so far as suggesting that this broader project enacts a crucial movement away from the anti-­humanist strain in postmodernism that Wallace so forcefully indicts. His claim is that such a project “recuperates the priorities and beliefs of humanism without retreating to prestructuralist notions of essentialism and universalism,” using “language to communicate meaning and sustain human relationships without abandoning poststructuralist theories about language

Stephen J. Burn, “Toward a General Theory of Vision in Wallace’s Fiction,” 90.

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and postmodern advances in narrative techniques.”82 Harris’s thesis is a nuanced restatement of a common claim made by Wallace critics; however, by and large, scholars have not yet explored the particular technical devices with which Wallace accomplished such a “resuscitat[ion].”83 Moreover, while many reviewers have noted the importance of comedy to Wallace’s fiction—Greg Burkman, for instance, describes Infinite Jest as “wickedly comic,” Sven Birkerts describes the novel as “darky witty,” and the Little, Brown & Co. jacket copy characterizes Infinite Jest as both a “gargantuan, mind-­altering comedy” and a “screwball comedy”—critics have rarely interrogated Wallace’s complex use of humor.84 This omission seems even stranger in light of Wallace’s numerous pronouncements on the subject. In a draft of his Kenyon College Commencement address, for example, he pointed to the deeper significance of comedy, noting that “the two greatest vectors of meaning in daily life are jokes and clichés,” since “[n]either involve thinking. Or else both are vectors of spirit rather than intellect.”85 Moreover, in a 2003 interview with Miriam Böttger, Wallace invoked Wittgenstein’s belief that “the most serious and profound problems and questions and issues could be discussed only in the form of jokes,” as well as drawing an important distinction between two quintessentially American forms of humor: In the US, there’s a strange situation where in some respects humor and irony are political responses and they’re redemptive, and in another sense, particularly in popular commercial entertainment, irony and a kind of dark humor can become a way of . . . pretending to protest when it really isn’t.86

Wallace further differentiated between comedy that functions as “a wakeup call” and that which operates as a kind of “anaesthetic.” My claim is that the many of Wallace’s more slapstick-­type gags and wisecracks—such as Pemulis’s “Urine trouble? Urine luck?” (152) quip, the “Phoneless Cord” (638) one-­ liner, and many of the aforementioned literalizations—function as jokes that self-­consciously epitomize what Wallace argued is the latter category of US Charles B. Harris, “The Anxiety of Influence: The John Barth/David Foster Wallace Connection,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 55, no. 2 (2014): 116. 83 This technique deploys the linguistic form of “exformation” that Wallace’s review of Kafka invokes, refracting common tropes and expressions in a way that “cause[s] a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient” (61). 84 Infinite Jest jacket copy. 85 David Foster Wallace, “My Commencement Speech,” handwritten and typescript drafts (2005), Container 28.10–11, David Foster Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 86 Wallace, Interview with Miriam Böttger. 82

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comedy, a lighter and more frivolous form of humor that is essentially “an anaesthetic.” This form of humor is also clearly present throughout Sabrina, the Amherst student magazine Wallace edited with Mark Costello, which evinces an unmistakably undergraduate comedic sensibility that reemerges at certain points in his later work.87 Even more pointed are Wallace’s ironic uses of particularly postmodern forms of slapstick humor—the “Pynchonian slapstick,” “[Philip] Rothish Satyriasis,” “[John] Barthish metaparody,” and “Woody-Allenish kvetching” (63), all cited in the Kafka address—in Infinite Jest’s description of both “Saprogenic Greetings, Inc.” (663) and the “ACME Family of Gags ’N Notions” (1047) company, the latter of which sells such novelty products as the “Jolly Jolt Hand Buzzer” and “entomological icecubes and artificial dandruff ” (579), as well as the lethal toy-­snake-concealing canister of nuts that kills Bruce Green’s mother. Wallace’s short story “Octet” also provides an indirect articulation of his own comic ideal, which stands in stark opposition to the forms characterized in the above list, in the indictment of “Pop Quiz #9” ’s “cartoonish” nature, which looks as if it’s trying to be just grotesquely funny instead of both grotesquely funny and grotesquely serious at the same time, such that any human urgency in the Quiz’s scenario and palpations is obscured by what appears to be just more of the cynical, amusing-­ourselves-to-­deathtype commercial comedy that’s already sucked so much felt urgency out of contemporary life in the first place. (127)

The desire to produce a piece of fiction that is “both grotesquely funny and grotesquely serious” reprises Wallace’s central argument in “Laughing with Kafka,” while the sketch’s “Eastern European immigrants” (127)—who are rechristened with insulting appellations by a sadistic Passport Processing Official—also connects the story to the Czechoslovakian setting of many of Kafka’s stories. Moreover, the narrative plays with the very form of literalization that Wallace’s address details, with the characters debating whether “avenging their ridiculous names by torturing/killing an incapacitated old person would transform the immigrants into living embodiments of the very indignity and disgust their English names connoted” (128). This rechristening can also be read as a subtle homage to another Eastern European who migrates to the United States, Amerika’s Karl Rossmann, whose employers give him the mordantly derisive nickname, “Negro.”88 Copies of Sabrina can be found at the Harry Ransom Center. Kafka, Amerika, 210.

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Ultimately, Wallace wanted Infinite Jest to eschew an “amusing-­ourselvesto-­death-type commercial comedy” (127) in order to produce the kind of humor that “transfigures pain.”89 In interviews, Wallace often expressed his dismay that the novel was frequently read as a straight comedy, ignoring the profound generational and national sadness he had intended it to convey. Along with such statements, there are also a number of subtle, metatextual hints throughout Infinite Jest that indicate the particular way that the novel’s humor should be read, including the narrator’s revealing aside that in mental health contexts, comedy is always interpreted carefully: jokes and sarcasm were here usually too pregnant and fertile with clinical significance not to be taken seriously: sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressive sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them. (71)

When seen in a metafictional light, such inclusions suggest that Wallace also wanted the reader to perform this extra step, seeing the novel’s jokes and gags not merely as entertaining diversions, but as concealing a deeper sadness and thereby gesturing to the novel’s broader themes. According to Steven Moore, Wallace originally made this point more explicitly, by including what Moore characterized as a “throat-­clearing” opening to Infinite Jest, containing a revealing epigraph from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “Sorrow brings forth.”90 (A similar indication is present in Wallace’s original subtitle for the novel, “A Failed Entertainment,” which he removed at the behest of Michael Pietsch.) An important intellectual precedent for Wallace’s belief in the power of a particular kind of Kafkaesque comedy to “transfigure pain” is found in Walker Percy’s essay collection The Message in The Bottle, a text that is referenced at numerous points throughout Wallace’s drafts for The Pale King, and which Burn suggests is a “comparatively overlooked influence on Wallace’s work.”91 Percy’s influence on Wallace is analyzed in more detail in Chapter  5’s discussion of American existentialism, but for now it is important to note a key similarity in both writers’ approaches to Kafka. While Burn reads The Pale King for its “marked affinities” (378) to Percy’s “The Man on the Train,” And of course, the plot of Infinite Jest revolves around the location of a piece of entertainment that is a literal embodiment of the phrase “amusing-­ourselves-to-­deathtype-­commercial-comedy.” 90 Steven Moore, “The First Draft of Infinite Jest.” 91 Stephen J. Burn, “ ‘A Paradigm for the Life of Consciousness’: Closing Time in The Pale King,” Studies in the Novel 44, no.4 (2013): 378. 89

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which argues that alienation can be transcended via imaginative identification, Percy’s essay also contains several sections on Kafka’s fiction that bear a strong resemblance to Wallace’s own interpretation. Contrasting a bookless, alienated commuter with an identical commuter who reads a literary exploration of disaffection, Percy claims that the reading commuter performs “an aesthetic reversal of alienation,” using the anecdote about Kafka laughing while reading his work aloud to friends to suggest that “neither Kafka nor his reader is alienated in the movement of art, for each achieves a reversal through its re-­presenting. To picture a truly alienated man, picture a Kafka to whom it had never occurred to write a word.”92 In Lost in the Cosmos—which Wallace read closely and which is discussed in Chapter 5—Percy elaborates this thesis, suggesting that Kafka’s genius was his ability to see that “[t]hrough art, the predicament of the self becomes not only speakable but laughable.”93 For Percy—and, similarly, for Wallace—Kafka’s fiction liberates through the very act of descriptive accuracy: “Kafka’s pointing at and naming alienation has already reversed it, healing the very wound it re-­presents.”94 But where Wallace and Percy overlap most closely is in their shared conviction that Kafka’s particular mode of existential comedy has profound implications. This is the essence of the second form of comic literalization, which operates as what Wallace described as “a wakeup call,” invoking deeper themes than the purely humorous examples outlined above. Some fleeting instances of this second form of literalization include the description of Kate Gompert’s “black bangs,” which “lay like a cell’s glossy bars across the visible half of the forehead”—a visual instantiation of the “self-­ imprisonment” and “cage” tropes used by Alcoholics Anonymous—as well as the populist rhetoric of Johnny Gentle’s political campaign, which promises “literally clean streets” (418). Indeed, Gentle’s obsession with national hygiene, in which his personal neuroses are expanded on a continental scale, is a clear example of Wallace’s attempt to deploy “humor and irony” as viable “political responses.” Another important example, also from Infinite Jest, is Rémy Marathe’s extended account of “the great gift” (778) of meeting his wife. Marathe relates how he first saw his severely incapacitated, “cerebro-­spinally incontinent” (779) wife marooned on the middle of a rural Swiss road, seconds from being run over by “one of the many logging trucks of Switzerland” (778), before thoughtlessly plunging down the hill on his wheelchair to save her: Walker Percy, “The Man on The Train,” The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1954), 83. 93 Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (London: Arena Books, 1984), 121. 94 Ibid., 97. 92

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“. . . I do not think of me. I do not know this woman or love her, but without thinking I release my brake and I am careening down the downhill, almost wipe-­outing numerous places on the bumps and rocks of the hill’s slope, and as we say in Switzerland I schüssch at enough speed to reach my wife and sweep her up into the chair and roll across the Provincial Autoroute into the embanking ahead just ahead of the nose of the truck, which had not slowed.” (778)95

Marathe’s description of “sweep[ing] her up into the chair” signals that the vignette is intended to be read as an extended, literalizing riff on the expression “to sweep a woman off her feet,” which is reinforced in Kate Gompert’s comically mistaken suggestion that Marathe is indirectly attempting to seduce her: “I’ve got to tell you, saying I remind you of her isn’t exactly the way to sweep my feet off, you know what I’m saying here?” (781). Another humorous exchange toward the beginning of the conversation implies that the exchange is meant to be read for its complex deployment of literalizations: When Gompert invokes the AA phrase expressing the lowest point of addiction, “Hitting Bottom,” Marathe misunderstands the idiom, replying that “[m]y people, we do not hit the bottoms of women” (776). The lengthy conversation that details Marathe and Gertraude’s love is explicitly staged as a dramatization of national ideologies. Wallace sets up Kate Gompert as the representative of a self-­obsessed, romantically idealistic American perspective, while Marathe gives voice to an austere, Québécois ideology in which redemption is found in the act of “giv[ing] yourself away” (781). Marathe’s contention is that “the love you of this country speak of yields none of the pleasure you seek in love,” implying that Kate’s insistence on the emotional sentiment that accompanies her notion of real love— claiming that she “will know when it’s love because of the way it’ll feel” (780) and repeatedly interrupting Marathe’s narrative to try and hurry him along to the part where the two of them fall “madly in love” (779)—is shallow and misguided, since genuine love transcends mere physical or sentimental attraction. For Marathe, adult love exists outside of utilitarian decision-­ making, the kind based on Kate Gompert’s criteria of sentiment and attraction, to constitute a spiritual union that involves “no possible choosing” (779). Marathe’s later description of his wedding day, in which he publicly Although the narrative actually takes places in Québec, Marathe fabricates a Swiss setting—“at the top of Switzerland’s Mont Papineau” (788), an invented location based on “Québec’s Papineau regions” (88), where Gertraude Marathe is convalescing—in order to conceal his identity from his interlocutor, an inebriated Kate Gompert.

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affirms his decision to love Gertraude in response to a revealingly framed question—“The cleric asked did I choose this woman” (780, my emphasis)— emphasizes his anecdote’s central point. Gompert’s outrage toward the end of Marathe’s account, when she realizes that the story has not fulfilled any of her romantic expectations, reveals her own surface investment in such maudlin sentiments as being “swept off one’s feet”: She snippily informs Marathe that his relationship with his wife is “not love” but merely “low self-­esteem and self-­abuse and Settling For Less, choosing a coma over your comrades” (781). The technique with which Wallace oscillates between opposing perspectives speaks strongly to Adam Kelly’s notion of Bakhtinian dialogism throughout Wallace’s work, in which irresolvable dialogue allows for a complex “negotiation with ideas,” but the central point to emphasize here is the way in which Wallace both expands and gives physical form to a common cliché, in a “creative literalization” that hews closely to Kafka’s interrogations of culturally codified truths.96 Marathe’s parting offer of allowing Gompert to watch the fatal Infinite Jest cartridge links the lengthy exchange with the novel’s overarching themes of choice and entertainment, again indicating how Wallace’s Kafkaesque version of comedy enabled complex thematic explorations. Beyond the description of Marathe’s wife, there are many other similarly meaningful literalizations throughout Infinite Jest. For instance, Joelle ruminates on both the literal and metaphorical “significance of [James Incandenza’s] moniker, ‘Himself ’ ” (740); the narrator describes Hal as being “chill[ed] to the root” by Aubrey de Lint’s insistence that he never really “occurred out there” (686, my emphasis) on the tennis court; and Don Gately realizes that it is “no accident” that “AA’s real gift” is referred to as “The Present” (860). Yet another key example involves the opening description of Ken Erdedy, an increasingly irrational and excruciatingly self-­conscious character who is waiting for his “one last final” (18) delivery of marijuana. Though the entire scene takes place in Erdedy’s living room, the narrator places repeated emphasis on “an insect on one of the steel shelves that held his audio equipment” that “kept going in and out of one of the holes on the girders that the shelf fit into” (17). Steven Moore suggests that Wallace followed William Burroughs’s lead in deploying “insect imagery to heighten the repugnance of addiction and detoxification,” but this particular scene is also implicitly invoking Kafka.97 Wallace primes the reader to see the deeper significance of insects and bugs via Hal’s admissions narrative just pages before, in which Kelly, “Development through Dialogue: David Foster Wallace and the Novel of Ideas,” 271. 97 Moore, “The First Draft of Infinite Jest.” 96

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Hal descends the evolutionary tree toward something “only marginally mammalian” (15), a state the academic heads describe as “subanimalistic” (14). This description is a clear reference to Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, whose opening scene also features a character who undergoes a biological descent into a “monstrous verminous bug” before similarly hostile authority figures. In fact, one of the administrators even describes the sounds Hal makes as being “[l]ike some sort of animal with something in its mouth” (14), a glancing reference to the chief clerk’s observation of Gregor Samsa—“that was the voice of an animal”—in The Metamorphosis.98 The narrator tells us that Erdedy “felt similar to the insect . . . but was not sure just how he was similar” (19): like so many of Wallace’s characters, he is in the presence of a potentially revealing symbol but is not able to interpret it. There is therefore a looming dramatic irony in this scene, since the reader can see all too clearly the similarities between Erdedy’s spiritually impoverished state—the way his life is consumed by the sole goal of obtaining marijuana—and the endlessly repetitive movements of the insect, who keeps cycling through its disappearance/reappearance routine. And in case the reader has not already registered the entomological symbolism, Wallace links Erdedy’s similarly unconscious need to be entertained to the repetitions via the “insectile click and whir” (25) of the film cartridges he scans through, and includes another description of Erdedy’s grasping attempts at finding a larger meaning to their shared predicament: It occurred to him that he would disappear into a hole in a girder inside him that supported something else inside him. He was unsure of what the thing inside him was and was unprepared to commit himself to the course of action that would be required to answer the question. (20)

Although there is no single expression or cliché being literalized in this extended scene, such insistent linkages between humans and insects are clearly interrogating common phrases that link repetition and unconscious desires to the animal and insectile world. The vignette indirectly invokes pejorative epithets like “nitwit,”“vermin,” and phrases like “to squash someone like a bug.” And in one particularly memorable section, Wallace enacts a

Kafka, The Metamorphosis, 1, 15. Gregor, like Hal, is linguistically marooned and unable to understand why he cannot be understood: “It appeared his words were no longer comprehensible, though to his own hearing they seemed clear enough” (16).

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postmodern updating of Plato’s Cave, one again linking Ken Erdedy to a process of biological devolution, in which he descends to a prehistoric and finally to an invertebrate state: The disk drive and TP viewer were still on in his bedroom and he could see through the angle of the bedroom’s doorway the lights from the high-­definition screen blink and shift from one primary color to another in the dim room, and for a while he killed time casually by trying to imagine what entertaining scenes on the unwatched viewer the colors and intensities might signify. (26)

In the section’s highly comical closing scene, the devolution reaches its logical conclusion and Erdedy is turned into a bug: . . . because at this precise time his telephone and his intercom to the front door’s buzzer both sounded at the same time, both loud and tortured and so abrupt they sounded yanked through a very small hole into the great balloon of colored silence he sat in, waiting, and he moved first toward the telephone console, then over toward his intercom module, then convulsively back toward the sounding phone, and then tried somehow to move toward both at one, finally, so that he stood splay-­legged, arms wildly out as if something’s been flung, splayed, entombed between the two sounds, without a thought in his head. (27)

The “very small” sonic “hole” harks back to the earlier small opening through which the insect moves, while the visual suggestion that accompanies the final adjectives is that Erdedy is being splatted or squashed like a small bug, bereft of the interior thought processes that separate humans from animals. Moreover, the description of the “splayed” Erdedy is reprised in Hugh Steeply’s later description of his father’s “M*A*S*H” obsession, in which he describes his television viewing posture as seeming “Stuck. Fixed. Held. Trapped. As in trapped in some sort of middle. Between two things. Pulled apart in different directions” (647). Once again, Wallace here provides a narrative literalization of an interior state, in which Steeply’s father—who can no longer distinguish between the real world and “M*A*S*H” ’s fictional world—is trapped in an interstitial no-­man’s-­land between fiction and reality.

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A literary “touchstone”: Transposing Kafka In the previous two chapters, I revealed how Wallace’s engagements with both Latin American and Russian literature were oddly devoid of cultural context, in the materialist sense of engaging with localized social and political circumstances. Wallace had little interest in excavating timeless truths about either of these cultures, or even in trying to convince himself that he was staging a rigorous cross-­cultural exchange with either territory. Instead, what he was focused on was the ways in which particular literary devices and thematic concerns could transcend national borders and be appropriated for use within an American context. That is, his persistent emphasis was on repurposing Latin American and Russian narrative techniques, modifying what he perceived as their signature thematic preoccupations to suit a particularly American cultural context. In a similar way, Wallace looked beyond the sociopolitical dimension of Kafka’s texts to focus on their more abstract, metaphysical qualities. Although his discussion of Kafka’s comedy could have, for instance, focused on the culturally subversive and often self-­ deprecating aspects of Kafka’s fiction—perhaps exploring Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of Kafka as a geographically “deterritorialized” figure— Wallace instead emphasized the spiritual and philosophical implications of Kafka’s humor, suggesting in the final paragraph of his essay that Kafka’s work expresses such quasi-­mystical revelations as the truth that “the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle” (64). Wallace’s reading is thus aligned with a de-­historicized, allegorical interpretation of Kafka’s fiction, a reading that Pascale Casanova characterizes as belonging to the earliest phase of English-­language Kafka scholarship. Casanova points out that in the years following World War II, when Kafka was positioned as one of the central figures of literary modernism, his work “lost all of his national and cultural characteristics,” which were “obscured by the process of universalization.”99 What has happened in recent decades, however, is an increasingly sophisticated sense of how Kafka’s seemingly atemporal texts are in fact rooted in social and historical circumstances, engaging in oblique ways with the racial and political ideologies of their day. In Damrosch’s phrasing, scholars have “shift[ed] from a universal Kafka to an ethnic Kafka” within a broader academic trend that has seen “archetypal modernist masters” such as Kafka “being invited home again.”100 As Casanova notes, such a turn has enabled a more nuanced approach to Kafka’s work: “[b]y historicizing his Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 353. Damrosch, What is World Literature, 189, 187.

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position and purpose . . . it becomes possible to show that he was in fact a writer from a dominated country, that he believed himself to be one, and that he lived as one” (353). Casanova goes on to suggest that this awareness leads to the realization that Kafka’s writing was a “ceaseless investigation of a problematic identity” (353), an interpretation that novelists such as Philip Roth have emphasized. However, as I have shown so far, Wallace’s engagements rarely align with the scholarly concerns of world literature theorists. For the ever-­pragmatic Wallace, such scholarly insights were of little assistance to a writer trying to produce the kind of fiction that interrogated American culture. Though he understood the territory as a discrete entity, Wallace had little interest in trying to capture some essential truth of German or Eastern European culture: His representation of Gerhardt Schtitt as a kind of grotesque German caricature, for instance, should be read as a deliberate self-­ parody, signaling a conventionally American understanding of European culture, as source material for narratives of regeneration. Wallace’s approach reworked European literary figures for particular US purposes, and in this sense, reproducing Hollywood- and mass-­media stereotypes of European culture did not trouble him unduly. As I have shown time and again throughout this chapter, Wallace’s continual emphasis is on the Emersonian problem of assessing the value and worth of foreign texts and ideas for an American context: His reading of Kafka is always concerned with the specific devices and concerns he can pluck from Kafka’s texts and rework into his own. Instead of the careful cultural reading which Casanova and others argue that Kafka demands, Wallace’s focus is fundamentally pragmatic, looking to the Czech writer’s work in order to glean specific literary strategies and ideas. This recurring impulse of Wallace’s is akin to Thomas Jefferson’s heavily edited version of the New Testament, which jettisoned miraculous events, genealogies, and extraneous narratives to place Jesus’s moral teachings in sharper focus. The Jefferson Bible was literally cut and pasted into a form that more accurately reflected Jefferson’s particular moral and political concerns. Wallace’s reading of Kafka functions as a contemporary analogue to the Jefferson Bible— erasing or ignoring those elements of Kafka’s fiction that lay outside Wallace’s intellectual interests, or that are not amenable to American transposition, and retaining whatever is left over. Like Emerson, who claimed that “[w]hat is really best in any book is translatable,” Wallace isolated the textual features he has access to—or those that most appealed to him—and discarded the remainder.101 David Shields, writing on the Jeffersonian Bible, notes that such an act is far from a neutral appropriation, claiming that it is instead “bound Emerson, The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Society and Solitude, Vol. 7, 103.

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to reflect something of the individual doing the editing: a plaster cast of an aesthetic—not the actual thing, but the imprint of it.”102 Wallace’s appropriation is in some ways a faithful continuation of Kafka’s project, but it also enacts an important domestication, repurposing those aspects of Kafka’s texts that have the most relevance to an American context. What, then, was left after Wallace sidestepped the cultural, political, and historical content of Kafka’s fiction? And what did he glean from Kafka that he could not have found in the work of American novelists, such as Thomas Pynchon or John Barth? This chapter has argued that one important element Wallace took from Kafka was a posthumanist emphasis, in which the borders between animals and humans are either problematized or dissolved. We can see this appropriation in the explicit reworking of The Metamorphosis in The Broom of the System, and in the archival narrative fragment that sets forth yet another variation on this famous Kafka novella. The appropriation is also present in the chicken-­sexing story “B.I. #48,” the aviary anecdote in Everything and More, as well as in the rigorously philosophical examination of animal consciousness set forth in Wallace’s 2004 essay “Consider the Lobster.” Wallace’s exploration of posthumanist concerns also finds expression in the Ken Erdedy narrative in Infinite Jest, in which Wallace plays with the idea that Erdedy’s addiction has initiated a downward evolutionary spiral, the endpoint of which is an unthinking, insect-­like transformation. A close examination of Kafka and Wallace thus affirms Paul Giles’s claim that the posthumanist dimension of Wallace’s work functions, in part, in enacting “a severe deconstruction and demystification of the liberal humanist tradition of American romance,” undermining what Wallace saw as the sentimental excesses of his US predecessors.103 Following Kafka’s example in order to destabilize the cultural boundary between the animal and the human, Wallace was able to critique what he saw as particularly American concerns and cultural assumptions. By complicating such distinctions, his narratives pull the rug out from beneath those texts—such as E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End— that he took to embody sentimentally romantic and humanist ideologies.104 It is also striking to observe the role that even ostensibly superficial, glancing references to European literature play in Wallace’s work. His numerous allusions to European writers—many of which seem almost offhanded inclusions—function in a similar way to Wallace’s appropriation of Russian and Latin American fiction. By invoking High Art European texts, Wallace was self-­consciously trying to position his own fiction in relation to David Shields, Reality Hunger (2010; repr. New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 350. Giles, Antipodean America, 449. Wallace, “The Empty Plenum: David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress,” 89.

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this elite cadre of writers. After all, when Wallace was just beginning to seriously consider the prospect of writing fiction for a living, he told Mark Costello that he wanted to produce the kind of fiction that would still be read “100 years from now.”105 But Wallace was also attempting to reinvigorate what he perceived as an exhausted American postmodern inheritance. Time and again,Wallace understood world literary texts as exposing the impoverishment and staleness of US literature. His interpretation of Zbigniew Herbert’s Mr. Cogito, cited at the start of the chapter, is a case in point: Wallace valued the collection for its “bravely earnest” central character, who is depicted as being somehow “both intellectual and not too bright” as he “grapples with the ‘Big Questions’ of human existence.”106 Crucially, Wallace thought that American poetry “look[ed] sick” in comparison to Herbert’s innovations and thematic vigor.107 In a context in which most US writers believed that “Salinger invented the wheel, Updike internal combustion, and Carver, Beattie and Phillips drive what’s worth chasing,” engaging with a broader literary tradition was one clear way that Wallace could differentiate his work from others.108 Reading so widely, and viewing all texts as equally malleable and transposable, revived Wallace’s own fiction, allowing him to refract specific devices and techniques taken from world literary texts within an American context. Wallace also took a highly idiosyncratic comic sensibility from his reading of Kafka. For Wallace, this comedy-­by-literalization was a quintessentially American form of humor, which views “jokes as entertainment and entertainment as reassurance” (64). While Wallace’s texts do indeed make use of this “anaesthetic” humor, they also frequently attempt a deeper, more provocative form of comedy that delves below the shallow, habitualized surface of clichés and idioms to exhume the “canines of truth” (446) they contain. This tactic sits neatly alongside Wallace’s career-­long interest in rehabilitating proverbial and codified expressions, and is a way by which such truths can be kept “up front in daily consciousness.”109 Constructing memorable narrative illustrations of clichés and platitudes was a way of reinforcing them in surprising and indirect ways, via a strategy of defamiliarization intended to recover their intellectual force. Once again, Wallace here enacted a fundamentally Emersonian maneuver, homing in on those particular aspects of Kafka’s work that are most useful when

Max, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, 23. David Foster Wallace, “Mr. Cogito,” 121. 107 Ibid., 121–22. 108 Wallace, “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young,” 62. 109 Wallace, This is Water, 108. 105 106

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appropriated within an American context. The numerous suggestions of reworking and modernizing Kafka throughout Wallace’s early work—the most salient of which is the summary of the short story “A Metamorphosis for the Eighties” (308) in The Broom of the System—signal that Wallace’s texts should be read as updating Kafka’s work, recontextualizing Kafka’s thematic obsessions and literary devices for a postmodern audience. While previous chapters have set forth nuanced theorizations of literary influence, arguing that such frameworks provide far more productive means by which to discuss Wallace’s intertexts than the widespread reliance on Harold Bloom’s theories of artistic influence, his relationship to Kafka needs to be conceptualized in broader terms. My claim is that the most apposite way of describing this relationship is with the notion of an artistic forbear as a kind of literary “touchstone.” An early letter to Steven Moore explicitly labels James Joyce as one important artistic touchstone, but Wallace’s strongest deployment of the term is within the 1993 McCaffery interview, in which Wallace argued that contemporary American fiction was bereft of emotional urgency, due to a vacuous, American emphasis on “break[ing] . . . the rules of traditional, realistic fiction.”110 While such an impulse can be a valuable strategy by which to breathe new life into old forms, Wallace bemoaned the inability of his own generation to “ask very seriously where literary art’s true relation to its limits should be” (51). His critique also notes that while it’s “often useful to dispense with standard formulas,” it is also just as often valuable and brave to see what can be done within a set of rules-­which is why formal poetry’s so much more interesting to me than free verse. Maybe our touchstone now should be G.M. Hopkins, who made up his own set of formal constraints and then blew everyone’s footwear off from inside them. (51–52)

The same notion also provides a useful framework with which to account for Wallace’s reading of Franz Kafka.111 This is because, despite the various overt references to Kafka’s fiction throughout his work—the various allusions to “Kafkaesque” situations or exchanges, for instance, or Infinite Jest’s allusions

Wallace, “An Expanded Interview with David Foster Wallace,” Conversations with David Foster Wallace, 51; Wallace, Letter to Steven Moore (undated), Container 1.3, Steven Moore’s David Foster Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 111 See Timothy Jacobs, “American Touchstone: The Idea of Order in Gerard Manly Hopkins and David Foster Wallace,” Comparative Literature Studies 38, no. 3 (2001): 215–31. 110

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to Amerika and the buried quotation from the same novel in The Pale King—Wallace’s appropriations of Kafka are often more tonal, permeating his work in subtle ways and thereby aligning closely with his metaphor of an artistic touchstone, invoking a tool by which to assay the value of precious metal alloys, as a way of determining the worth of a particular substance. In the same vein, Kafka functioned for Wallace as a kind of ever-­present point of reference, a comparative figure against whom he could assess the value and success of his own work. In many of the more elaborate examples of comic literalization outlined in this chapter, Kafka seems to have been lurking in the back of Wallace’s writerly mind, informing his characterizations and narratives even if he was not explicitly invoked. In a similar way, Wallace’s distinction between a toxic, “raped-­by-psychic-Bedouins form of self-­consciousness” and an enabling, productive “Kafkaesque form of self-­ consciousness” speaks to the general sense of Kafka’s work that shaped his own writing.112 For all of the reasons outlined in this chapter, Kafka’s fiction is of enormous importance in understanding Wallace’s work and is deserving of more scholarly attention.

Wallace, Interview with Michael Silverblatt, KCRW Bookworm (May 15, 1997).

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French Existentialism’s Afterlives: Wallace and the Fiction of the US South

“Ooohhh, the big, sexy like philosophical term”: Wallace and French existentialism Although critics have traced Wallace’s philosophical interests in great detail, examining his relation to analytic philosophy, ethics, modal logic and the philosophy of language, Wallace’s engagement with existential thought has been comparatively overlooked. Allard den Dulk has argued that Wallace’s attitude to existential irony self-­consciously responds to Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript, and Kasia Boddy has explored the “commitment to a kind of existential authenticity” that animates Wallace’s early fiction, but no other critical interpretations on this aspect of his work have been carried out.1 Yet Wallace’s work frequently draws on an existential literary and philosophical tradition. One indication of Wallace’s indebtedness to this particular tradition lies in the many glancing references to existentialism within his nonfiction: In his review of Jürg Federspiel’s Laura’s Skin, for instance, Wallace interprets the novel in light of its “existential confusion”; in “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young,” he catalogues some of the ways that “popular entertainment affects the existential predicaments” of viewers; “E Unibus Pluram” analyzes the “existentiovoyeuristic conundra” associated with commercial television; and a memorable witticism in “Democracy and Commerce at the U.S. Open” describes Australian tennis player Mark Philippoussis as possessing an “existentially affronted facial

Allard Den Dulk, “Beyond Endless ‘Aesthetic’ Irony: A Comparison of the Irony Critique of Søren Kierkegaard and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest,” Studies in the Novel 44, no. 3 (2012): 325–45; Kasia Boddy, “A Fiction of Response: Girl with Curious Hair in Context,” in A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, 37. Den Dulk’s Existential Engagement in Wallace, Eggers and Foer carries out a more expansive reading, revealing Wallace’s debts to a variety of existential thinkers, as does his essay “Good Faith and Sincerity: Sartrean Virtues of Self-Becoming in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest,” in Gesturing Toward Reality, 199–220.

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expression.”2 Wallace also routinely alluded to existential ideas in interviews: In 1999, he told Laura Miller about his goal of using fiction to countenance “existential loneliness,” and in 1996, spoke with David Lipsky about Quentin Tarantino’s True Romance (1993), which Wallace saw as “really this incredible existentialist thing.”3 Similar references to existential philosophy are scattered throughout Wallace’s work, though there are also more sustained treatments of existentialism. Den Dulk’s work excavates many of the broad existential themes that animate Wallace’s later fiction, but there are also many explicit references from the earlier stages of his career. The Broom of the System, for instance, enacts an existential interpretation of popular culture that would become a Wallace trademark. In one of Rick Vigorous’s lengthy narratives, Monroe Fieldbinder theorizes that the children’s cartoon show The Road Runner can “aptly [be] termed an existential program,” claiming that it “present[s] us with a protagonist, a coyote, functioning within a system interestingly characterized as a malevolent Nature, a protagonist who endlessly, tirelessly, disastrously pursues a thing, a telos—the bird in the title role—a thing and goal far, far less valuable than the effort and resources the protagonist puts into its pursuit. . . . The thing pursued—a skinny meatless bird—is far less valuable than the energy and attention and economic resources expended by the coyote on the process of pursuit. Just as an attachment radiating from the Self outward is worth far less than the price the establishment of such an attachment inevitably exacts.”4

Interpreting popular culture in existential terms is precisely what the aforementioned essays, “Fictional Futures” and “E Unibus Pluram,” also engage in. In fact, Wallace’s earliest attempts at writing fiction seem also to have been motivated by this impulse: In 1982, he wrote a story called “The Clang Birds,” in which “God ran an existential game show where contestants were asked impossible or paradoxical questions.”5 Such readings connect with many of Wallace’s later narratives, which mine seemingly insipid commercial products for their broader existential resonance. Epiphanies such as Chris Fogle’s, in The Pale King, which hinges on a literal reading of the theme song

David Foster Wallace, “The Million Dollar Tattoo (review of Jurg Federspel’s Laura’s Skin)”; Wallace, “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young,” 50; Wallace, “Democracy and Commerce at the U.S. Open,” 132. 3 Miller, “The Salon Interview: David Foster Wallace,” 62; Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, 200. 4 Wallace, The Broom of the System, 352. 5 Max, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, 23. 2

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of 1970s soap opera As The World Turns, as well as Neal’s revelation while watching Cheers! in “Good Old Neon,” function in precisely this way. Similarly, Infinite Jest contains many references to existentialism: Idris Arslanian, for instance, discusses alienation and “Existential individuality” (113) with Hal, while the suicidal Eric Clipperton at one point undergoes “some sort of psycho-­existential CPR-session” (432) with James Incandenza. There is also an important exchange between Mario and Avril in the latter stages of the novel that frames Hal’s spiritual decline with reference to existential philosophy: “There are, apparently, persons who are deeply afraid of their own emotions, particularly the painful ones. Grief, regret, sadness. Sadness, especially, perhaps. Dolores describes these persons as afraid of obliteration, emotional engulfment. As if something truly and thoroughly felt would have no end or bottom. . . . Such persons usually have a very fragile sense of themselves as persons. As existing at all. This interpretation is ‘existential,’ Mario, which means vague and slightly flaky. But I think it may hold true in certain cases. . . .” (765)

Avril’s scare quotes around the term thwart a straightforward interpretation of this passage, but it is nonetheless clear that existential ideas inform many of the broader themes and individual characterizations within the novel. The Pale King is even more direct in its flagging of existential themes: As discussed in Chapter 3, Chris Fogle audits a “Russian existential and Absurdist Literature class” (337), while the novel also alludes to “existential theologist E.M. Cioran” (399). More revealing still is Nichols’s long defense of existentialism as a viable response to particularly American problems, which he concludes by proposing: “Maybe it’s not metaphysics. Maybe it’s existential. I’m talking about the individual US citizen’s deep fear, the same basic fear that you and I have and that everybody has except nobody ever talks about it except existentialists in convoluted French prose. Or Pascal. Our smallness, our insignificance and mortality.” (143)

Such passages, along with countless references to existential writers and philosophers, clearly indicate that an existential animus is at work throughout Wallace’s texts. A recurring, though often implicit, thesis of Wallace’s was that American postmodernism authorizes a diminished sense of personal responsibility and

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freedom. In a revealing exchange between D.L. and Mark Nechtr in “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,” D.L. points out, “I’m bad at will, I’ve decided,” before connecting her personal shortcoming to a wider cultural phenomenon: “Postmodernism doesn’t stress the efficacy of will, as you know.”6 For this very reason, Wallace was enamored with the work of Albert Camus, whom he described as being “very clear, as a thinker, and tough,” suggesting that Camus’s ideas had a purifying quality: “It makes my soul clean to read him.”7 Wallace saw Camus as a particularly relevant figure in late capitalist America, demonstrating ways in which his fellow Americans might become “responsible, decent, spiritual human beings,” and suggesting that “the remedy” for American selfishness and moral malaise was “some very, very mild form of Camus-­like existential engagement.”8 This particular form of “existential engagement” is surely what Wallace had in mind when he included Camus alongside St. Paul, Rousseau, Dostoevsky and St. Paul in a 2005 list of writers who were able “to render so fully, passionately, the spiritual urgencies they felt and saw as reality.”9 Revealingly, Camus is one of the first artistic figures named in Infinite Jest—Hal opines that “the influence of Kierkegaard on Camus is underestimated” (12)—while his 1942 novel The Stranger is included in a list of texts that Wallace characterized as “INTERPRET-ME fiction,” works that “not only cry out for critical interpretation but actually try to direct them.”10 The Pale King also contains several important references to Camus, including a somewhat veiled allusion to The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) in Lane Dean’s free indirect discourse about his first experience of working for the IRS: “The night after his first day he’d dreamed of a stick that kept breaking over and over but never got smaller. That Frenchman pushing that uphill stone throughout eternity” (384). This reference to The Myth of Sisyphus—an investigation that asks “whether life has meaning” by “meet[ing] the problem of suicide face to face”—takes on increased meaning in light of the novel’s many suicidal characters, as well as in the later reference to Émile Durkheim’s sociological study Suicide (1897).11 Moreover, The Pale King also invokes Camus’s fiction. At one point during his lengthy monologue, Chris Fogle tells us that he “remember[s] not getting

Wallace, “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,” 249. Wallace, Letter to Tom Bissell (February 2008), quoted in Max, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, 298. 8 Max, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, 298; Wallace, Interview with Ostap Karmodi. 9 Didier Jacob, “Interview with David Foster Wallace,” 157. 10 Wallace, “The Empty Plenum: David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress,” Both Flesh and Not, 75. 11 Albert Camus, “Preface,” The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage, 1991), v. 6 7

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Camus’s The Fall read in time, for instance, and having to totally bullshit my way through the Literature of Alienation midterm” (188–89). The dramatic irony looming over this scene is that an attentive reading of The Fall may well have produced the very same revelation—concerning responsibility and personal commitment—that Fogle later has at the Jesuit’s lecture. This particular scene again positions Camus as an important model in the attempt to become a “decent, spiritual human being.” Jean-Paul Sartre was another important existential figure for Wallace, with Zadie Smith noting that the French philosopher was one of Wallace’s “great favourites.”12 Sartre’s Nausea also features on Wallace’s list of “INTERPRETME fiction,” a genre that leaves the reader in no doubt as to its artistic ambitions, belonging to a group of texts that “shout their genius.”13 Wallace also invoked the French philosopher in his review of Siri Hustvedt’s The Blindfold (1992), attributing “existentialism’s . . . idea that the really significant ontological insecurity is that of the self about itself ” to Heidegger, Sartre, and Laing.14 James Ryerson picks up on Wallace’s debt to Sartre in the introduction to Fate, Time, and Language, positioning Sartre as an important precedent in Wallace’s attempt to craft philosophical narratives. It also seems likely that Wallace read What is Literature? (1947), Sartre’s famous aesthetic manifesto: The text’s insistence on moral “commitment” and the avoidance of emotional manipulation, along with Sartre’s views on the paradoxical separation and connection of writer and reader through language—“[language] is our antennae; it protects us against others and informs us about them; it is a prolongation of our senses, a third eye which is going to look into our neighbour’s heart”—all dovetail neatly with Wallace’s own aesthetic agenda as outlined in “E Unibus Pluram” and “Fictional Futures.”15 In fact, many of Wallace’s other pronouncements cohere with Sartre’s understanding of existentially provocative art. In a 2000 interview with Michael Silverblatt, for instance, Wallace stated that a central aim of his fiction was the attempt to generate “existential affect,” and in 1999, he spoke about using the communicative intimacy of fiction as a way of transcending “existential loneliness.”16 Such intentions are also evident in Wallace’s reflections on his

Zadie Smith, “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: The Difficult Gifts of David Foster Wallace,” in Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2009), 264. 13 Wallace, “The Empty Plenum: David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress,” 75. 14 Wallace, “Iris’s Story: An Inversion of Philosophical Skepticism (review of Siri Hustvedt’s The Blindfold),” Philadelphia Inquirer (May 24, 1992). 15 Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature? trans. Bernard Frechtman (Northampton: Methuen & Co., 1967), 11. 16 Miller, “The Salon Interview: David Foster Wallace,” 62. 12

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short story “Forever Overhead,” whose protagonist he described as encountering horrifying “existential conundra” at a local swimming pool, and in the highly revealing film treatment Wallace wrote for his 1987 novel The Broom of the System.17 This archived treatment highlights many of the existential themes within the novel: Wallace suggests that a major theme of the work is its emphasis on freedom and choice—“what is it to be ‘free’ of those who inform our fundamental choices?”—and claims that the work eschews closure in order to provoke the reader/viewer into truly countenancing such themes, which are presented as “less a linear zig-­zag of reversal toward resolution than a system of circles that comprise and define the very question implicit in the problem.”18 Such examples speak to Wallace’s abiding interest in French existentialism, but he also read many other texts from a broadly construed existential tradition. As earlier chapters have demonstrated, Wallace’s interpretation of both Kafka and Dostoevsky was frequently aligned with existential thought, as were his interpretations of films such as the aforementioned True Romance and John Huston’s 1948 film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre—the final scene of which, where “the two guys are laughing existentially,” epitomized for Wallace a healthy distance from the self.19 (Wallace extended a similar interpretation to noir crime fiction, whose protagonists, he suggested, exemplified the isolated, “existential hero.”20) He also engaged with the work of Søren Kierkegaard: In a 2006 letter to Allard den Dulk, he situated the Danish philosopher’s work as a powerful precedent for understanding contemporary culture, suggesting that “most of the problems of what might be called ‘the tyranny of irony’ in today’s West can be explained almost perfectly in terms of Kierkegaard’s distinction between the aesthetic and the ethical life.”21 Moreover, Wallace revered Herman Hesse’s sprawling existential comedy, The Glass Bead Game, seeing the novel as yet another example of “INTERPRET-ME fiction,” and perceived William James as another important existential figure. As I showed in the previous chapter, James’s Varieties of Religious Experience informs the characterization of Infinite Jest’s

Wallace, “Contributors’ Notes,” in Best American Short Stories 1992, ed. Robert Stone (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 375. 18 David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System: Theatrical Movie, Sample Outline, Container 1.2, Bonnie Nadell’s David Foster Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 19 Max, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, 263. 20 Wallace, “Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama,” in Both Flesh and Not, 212. 21 David Foster Wallace, Letter to Allard den Dulk, quoted in Den Dulk, “Beyond Endless ‘Aesthetic’ Irony: A Comparison of the Irony Critique of Søren Kierkegaard and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest,” Studies in the Novel 44, no. 3 (2012): 325. 17

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Randy Lenz, while scholars such as David H. Evans have explored Wallace’s interest in James’s “fully pragmatic conception of truth.”22 Wallace thus fits within a scholarly tradition that views James as a particularly salient American incarnation of (proto-)existential ideas, whose most widely known theories on God and faith were, in George Cotkin’s phrasing, “essentially existential, less a means of escape from the clutches of dread than impassioned pushes through regions of darkness.”23 However, for all of Wallace’s allusions to existential philosophy, along with his enthusiasm for figures such as Camus and Sartre, there is something deeply ambivalent about his relationship with existential thought. Although Wallace made frequent allusions to the tradition, his remarks were often tinctured with self-­consciousness and embarrassment. Nowhere is this more evident than in Wallace’s 2003 interview with Miriam Böttger, in which he explains a peculiarly American embarrassment with existential thought: and this is something else about being like an American, when I hear the word “existential,” now like half of me rolls my eyes: Ooohhh, the big, sexy like philosophical term and it becomes hard to speak seriously about it because all I can hear is being made fun of for how serious and boring and dull I’m being.24

The same sense of discomfort and ironic distance is present in the aforementioned, comical description of Mark Philippoussis’s “existentially affronted” mien, and in The Pale King’s humorous account of a lazy undergraduate’s thwarted attempt to pay another student to ghost-­write his philosophy paper as precipitating “his own very special sort of existential dilemma” (337), as well as in “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” ’s description of “a kind of existential-­level sewage treatment” (305). George Cotkin suggests that existentialism occupies a highly unusual place in American culture, with the very term existentialism now functioning as a kind of “undead” signifier within American cultural discourse, enjoying a protracted and inconclusive death at the hands of mass media. Tracing its deployment in recent advertisements, news articles, and sitcoms, Cotkin argues that the term has enough cultural currency to ensure that it is recognized, but that it has been emptied of any philosophical or intellectual

David H. Evans, “ ‘The Chains of Not Choosing’: Free Will and Faith in William James and David Foster Wallace,” in A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, 182. 23 George Cotkin, Existential America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 21. 24 Wallace, Interview with Miriam Böttger. 22

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allure, implying that Wallace’s personal embarrassment and detachment reflects a wider cultural sense of obsolescence. In fact, existentialism has always had a problematic reception in the United States. Sartre himself suggested that his philosophy would never win the hearts and minds of Americans, since its central tenets were at odds with a national disposition: “In general, evil is not an American concept. There is no pessimism in America regarding human nature and social organisation.”25 Simone de Beauvoir, likewise, believed that a particularly American absence of “feeling for sin and for remorse” would severely hinder existentialism’s reception, and Camus pointed to the pervasive materialism and cheery optimism of Americans as a barrier to any real engagement with his unsettling philosophy.26 But an even more significant problem for the American reception of existentialism can be traced back to the arrival of Frankfurt School intellectuals in New York during the late 1950s. Cotkin’s thesis is that much of what is vexed and conflicted in America’s response to existential thought arose from the perceived gap between high and low culture tensions among these post-­war intellectuals. Since the initial “dissemination of French existentialism . . . occurred simultaneously at the levels of both popular and elite culture” (91), many scholars felt reluctant to embrace what had gained the status of an intellectual fashion. Furthermore, widespread cultural associations between existential thought and vapid bohemian affectation also provoked many academics to distance themselves from the allegedly “popular, ephemeral” (94) nature of existentialism. (Revealingly, while Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvoir were in the country, American fashion magazines such as Vogue emphasized the eccentric couture worn by the French visitors.) Wallace’s acknowledgment of American indifference toward existential thought is precisely the same problem that Walker Percy, and other American novelists of this earlier generation, had wrestled with: In 1984, Percy claimed that his novels had the difficult task of rehabilitating existential ideas, since for US readers, “existentialism has gotten to be a bad word . . . [being] used so loosely now that it means almost nothing.”27 Wallace’s hesitation to fully embrace the existential tradition should thus be seen in light of a broader history of American trepidation. Yet despite his Jean-Paul Sartre, “A European Declaration of Independence,” Commentary (January 1950): 411. 26 Simone de Beauvoir, “An Existentialist Looks at Americans,” New York Times Magazine (May 25, 1947): 52; Camus quoted in Herbert Lottman, Albert Camus: A Biography (Garden City: Doubleday, 1979), 391. 27 Walker Percy, Interview with Elzbieta Oleksy, More Conversations with Walker Percy, ed. Lewis A. Lawson and Victor A. Kramer (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993), 73. 25

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ambivalence, Wallace—like Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Walker Percy, and others before him—saw certain aspects of existential thought as being particularly pertinent to US circumstances. The insistence on a “mild form of Camus-­like existential engagement” as a way out of American political narcissism is one manifestation of this belief, as is The Pale King’s suggestion that existentialism offers a powerful antidote to other degradations of American culture. Furthermore, Wallace saw numerous contemporary American novels as engaging with existential thought, such as Kathy Acker’s Portrait of an Eye: Three Novels (1998), which for Wallace gave narrative form to the idea “that to be female in a phallocentric Society is to be existentially vivisected, bodi- and voice-­less, with all the rage and anxiety and free-­floating Continental guilt attendant on that state.”28 Likewise, Wallace read Siri Hustvedt’s The Blindfold (1992) as portraying a particular kind of self-­ division, arguing that the novel’s protagonist is “split not only existentially but emotionally.”29 He also gave enthusiastic praise to an undergraduate student who submitted a term paper on Cormac McCarthy and existentialism, the annotations to which—like “Heavy/Existential tidbit” next to a quotation from Suttree and clarifications on Camus’s philosophy—suggest that Wallace himself interpreted McCarthy’s fiction in light of existential thought.30 As mentioned previously, Wallace interpreted several American films in existential terms, including Tarantino’s True Romance and Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, as well as early-­twentieth-­century film noir. He also told Rolling Stone journalist David Lipsky that he thought it was possible to view “shitty country music” as apostrophes to an absent God, claiming that this interpretive maneuver allowed the listener to see that “in a weird way . . . they’re incredibly existentialist songs” (198). Moreover, he also understood the animating impulse behind the American vacation in existential terms: In “Getting Away . . .,” he describes “[t]he East Coast existential treat” as a secluded holiday that was fundamentally an “escape from confines and stimuli,” while in “Consider the Lobster” he characterized the contemporary “mass tourist” as being “economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.”31 Significantly, Wallace also saw instances of

David Foster Wallace, Review of Kathy Acker’s Portrait of an Eye: Three Novels Review of Portrait of an Eye: Three Novels by Kathy Acker, Harvard Review 1 (Spring 1992): 155. My emphasis. 29 Wallace, “Iris’s Story: An Inversion of Philosophical Skepticism.” 30 The essay, by Wallace’s student Shawn Miklaucic, was submitted on May 9, 1997, in a class titled “English 487” and is titled “Appropriating the Postmodern: McCarthy’s External Narration and Spatialized Time in Suttree.” Online access: http://www.scribd.com/ doc/28153758/Shawn-Miklaucic-Rnslish-487-r-Rru-David-Foster. 31 Wallace, “Getting Away,” 108; Wallace, “Consider the Lobster,” 240. 28

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contemporary American novels that invoked existentialism in superficial, insidious ways, as his review of John Updike’s Toward the End of Time makes clear. For all the accusations of narcissism and tendentiousness Wallace levels at the novel, one of his chief indictments concerns the text’s misuse of existential angst: he is indignant about Updike’s assumption that the reader will “empathize . . . with the textbookish existential dread that hits Turnbull at 30” and acquiesce to “the bizarre, adolescent belief that getting to have sex with whomever one wants to is a cure for human despair.”32 The point here is that Wallace saw both the productive uses that existential thought could be put to use within a US context, as well as the ever-­present dangers of a sanitized, superficial American response. Along with the productive dialogue with existentialism that Wallace found in Portrait of an Eye and The Blindfold, he was also conscious of a particularly powerful version of American existentialism being played out in Southern, Catholic literature. To Wallace, authors such as Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor had Americanized existential philosophy, demonstrating how continental philosophy might be transposed into a US setting and providing useful templates with which to craft his own existential texts. In order to understand his attempts at incorporating existential thought within his fiction, it is crucial to examine Wallace’s attentive reading of Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor, as well as the various ways in which he self-­ consciously appropriated their work.

Walker Percy and “ontological insecurity” In the spring of 1991, when Wallace was recovering from surgery on a torn ankle ligament, he wrote to novelist David Markson about the reading opportunities that the convalescence had afforded him. Along with Thomas McGuane, James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, and Thomas Pynchon, Wallace also started reading Walker Percy, whose fiction, he reported, gave him “the creeps.”33 But Percy’s fiction clearly touched a nerve: Wallace was still reading Percy while working on The Pale King, suggesting that his interest in the Southern author endured across his career. Another indication that Wallace took Percy seriously, even if he did find his work “creepy,” is found in the archived copy of Percy’s 1961 novel, The Moviegoer. Wallace’s annotations and markings within the pages of this novel are extensive. His notes are written David Foster Wallace, “Certainly the End of Something or Other One Would Sort of Have to Think,” in Consider the Lobster, 58, 59. 33 Max, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, 152. 32

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in many different colors, indicating both multiple rereadings and a highly engaged, dialogical interpretation of the text. Wallace had a strong interest in the novel’s metaphysical leanings (noting that Binx Bolling’s overwhelming angst was premised on what Wallace labeled “ontological insecurity”), its discussion of celebrity culture (underlining passages on “Celebrity reactions” and noting that there is “[n]o way to be ‘real’ in presence of celebrity”), as well as its treatment of Catholicism (writing “Catholic” next to numerous passages and “Catholic lingo” next to the description of Lonnie’s use of what Percy calls “the peculiar idiom of the catechism in ordinary speech”).34 In fact, Infinite Jest contains a refracted homage to Binx Bolling’s notion of ontological “confirmation,” the idea that celebrities have a “peculiar reality” that allows ordinary citizens who come into their presence to win “title to [their] own existence” (16–17). Don Gately’s reflections on being in the presence of cult radio personality Madame Psychosis mirror Binx’s, when he notes that the fact that she’s a public personage makes him feel somehow physically actuated, like more there-feeling, conscious of the way he’s holding his face, hesitant to make his barnyard sounds, even breathing through his nose so she won’t smell his unbrushed teeth. (855, Wallace’s emphasis)

In addition, the “This is Water” joke that is related at two separate points in Infinite Jest and which forms the substrate to Wallace’s 2004 Kenyon College commencement address was also lifted from The Moviegoer.35 Wallace underlined the following scene, in which Binx wonders whether Harry’s pathological glibness is enviable, before deciding: I do not envy him. I would not change places with him if he discovered the cause and cure of cancer. For he is no more aware of the mystery which surrounds him than a fish is aware of the water it swims in. He could do research for a thousand years and never have an inkling of it. (52)

As I showed in Chapter 4, a recurring impulse throughout Wallace’s work was to turn such lofty, symbolically dense sentiments into jokes. This is precisely what he does in the Infinite Jest reworking, when he appropriates Percy’s Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (1961; repr. New York: Vintage, 1998), 163. At one point in the novel, Alcoholics Anonymous member Bob Death relates the joke to Gately and Glenn K. (445), with Gately later recalling “[t]he fish asking about what’s water” (891) while recovering in hospital.

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metaphor as the basis of a comic vignette, involving a “wise old whiskery fish” and “three young fish” (445).36 Wallace repeats the comic anecdote in This is Water, where he gives it a slightly different inflection, riffing on the joke’s encapsulation of a larger existential truth: the freedom to “choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.”37 This appropriation is, in many respects, a natural extension of Wallace’s reading of The Moviegoer, which he interpreted in explicitly existential terms. In one particularly important section of the novel, Wallace wrote “Bigtime Existential” next to a description of one of Binx’s epiphanies, noting that the passage dramatizes the fact that humans are essentially “Free” and that it is therefore possible to “do whatever you want” (115). He also picked up on the novel’s examination of the ways in which individuals frequently deny their own existential freedom, writing “All living by ideas given by others” next to an underlined sentence in which Binx reflects on how Kierkegaardian despair that has infected modern consciousness: “At such times it seems that the conversation is spoken by automatons who have no choice in what they say” (100). In fact, Wallace was so intrigued by the way that the novel gave physical form to abstract, Kierkegaardian philosophy that he circled the novel’s epigraph, taken from The Sickness Unto Death—“. . . the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair”—and wrote a note reminding himself to “[d]o Kierkegaard—epigraph” and “[l]ook up ‘despair.’ ” But what is even more significant about Wallace’s heavily annotated copy of The Moviegoer are the jottings of plot ideas, character names, and narrative fragments within its pages, revealing Wallace in the process of simultaneously working on his own fiction while reading Percy’s novel. Wallace’s marginalia provide a profoundly revealing glimpse into the way that his work so often enacts a sophisticated response to an earlier text: Throughout the novel, Wallace was literally writing his own fiction between the lines of Percy’s. One of the texts being rehearsed between the covers of The Moviegoer was the short story “The Suffering Channel,” included in Wallace’s 2004 collection, Oblivion. The notes Wallace wrote on the book’s inside flap contain numerous mentions of “[Skip] Atwater”—the protagonist of “The Suffering Channel”— and include an early reference to the story’s grotesque fecal sculptures: “Sloat Though Wallace may also have in mind a similar passage from James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956), which Wallace taught at Pomona, in a course titled “Eclectic/Obscure Fictions for Writers,” and which is referenced in Infinite Jest, in the description of Madame Psychosis’s “Downer Lit-Hour” (191). “I don’t believe in this nonsense about time. Time is just common, it’s like water for a fish. Everybody’s in this water, nobody gets out of it, or if he does the same thing happens to him that happens to the fish, he dies.” James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (1956; repr. London: Penguin Books, 1990), 37. 37 Wallace, This is Water, 54. 36

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shits representation of Atwater + his wife—fucking? or of Atwater? That’s the shit he finds outside door?” Wallace also mined Percy’s novel for particular descriptions that could be gerrymandered into his own story. For instance, Binx’s memorable account of his elders’ self-­contentment (“The elder Bollings—and Alex—are serene in their identities. Each one coincides with himself. . . .” [25]) prompted Wallace to consider using similar terms to describe Skip Atwater: Wallace wrote “Atwater—a feeling he didn’t coincide with himself ” on the novel’s inside flap. This particular note did not ultimately make its way into the published version of the story, though a peculiar description of Binx’s mother, who “rubs her nose vigorously with her three middle fingers held straight up” (137) was reproduced in “The Suffering Channel.” Wallace wrote “Atwater rubs his nose w/ three fingers held straight up” inside the front cover, though he later amended this to “Atwater rubbed his nose vertically with two fingers” (245) in the final version of the story.38 In addition, Wallace’s marginal observation, “Death in Life,” next to Percy’s description of cemeteries resembling cities was also transposed within “The Suffering Channel”: Brint Moltke is characterized as possessing a “lack of personal verve that almost approached death in life” (327). Even more thematically significant is Wallace’s underlining and marginal annotation, “Needing to shit,” next to Binx’s vulgar declaration that “[a] rumble has commenced in my descending bowel, heralding a tremendous defecation” (101). Perhaps more than any other, this note speaks to Wallace’s underlying fascination with The Moviegoer, as well as his oblique artistic response to the novel. Such passages seemingly prompted Wallace to conceive of human waste as a kind of existential remainder. Since Binx’s defecation is set up as a resoundingly visceral reaction to existential angst, as the material flipside to the abstract “malaise” that has metastasized throughout his being, it operates as a materialist corollary to abstract speculation. (This same interpretation is also at work, in an even more tangible way, in Wallace’s description of the MV Nadir’s “existential-­level sewage treatment,” in which “your waste seems less removed than hurled from you, and hurled with a velocity that lets you feel as though the waste is going to end up someplace so far away from you that it will become an abstraction.”39) Wallace’s intention in “The Suffering Channel” was thus to stage an existential confrontation with this very form of human waste, an aspect of life we tend to overlook, in much the same way that The Pale King mines boredom and inattention for their broader philosophical implications. Though scholars such as Lee Konstantinou and Thomas Tracey have explored “The Suffering Channel” as both a manifestation of Wallace’s Wallace, “The Suffering Channel,” 345. Wallace, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” 305.

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impossible “longing for the international” and in light of its strategy of obliquely invoked public trauma, the demonstrable links to The Moviegoer imply that the story needs to be read in light of Percy’s novel.40 The Pale King demands a similar reinterpretation, since Wallace’s copy of The Moviegoer also reveals specific sketches and allusions to this posthumous novel. The most obvious reference is to the two-­page opening section of The Pale King, the premise of which Wallace sketched out on the back sleeve of Percy’s novel—scribbling “’Read These’ Story in rural country/title = ‘Reply to Theory’ ”—and in a nearby space noting some relevant extracts from The Moviegoer, such as “In summer X gives off a bitter cotton smell” and “A mare’s tail of cirrus hangs in the sky,” which he presumably considered incorporating into this story.41 What appealed to Wallace about such descriptions was their pastoral, earthy lyricism, and although he did not ultimately incorporate these particular lines into the story, lyrical descriptions such as “whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow” (5) and “[a]n arrow of starlings fired from windbreak’s thatch” (5) clearly echo the tonal quality of the sentences that he isolated. Even more revealing is Wallace’s underlining of a passage from the opening of The Moviegoer, in which Binx Bolling finds himself lying on the ground under a “chindolea bush” watching “a dung beetle scratching around under the leaves” (10–11). It is the beetle’s industry that inspires Binx’s own restless quest for meaning: “As I watched, there awoke in me an immense curiosity. I was onto something. I vowed that if I ever got out of this fix, I would pursue the search” (11). Wallace’s own opening creatively expands this passage, describing a similarly significant insectile moment but replacing the dung beetle with the circular movement of worms in cow “patties”: 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 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. (6)

Once again, Wallace here lifts an excremental scene from Percy’s novel in a manner that reprises the description of the fecal artist in “The Suffering

Konstantinou, “The World of David Foster Wallace,” 67; Thomas Tracey, “Representations of Trauma in David Foster Wallace’s ‘Oblivion,’ ” in Consider David Foster Wallace, 172–86. 41 In fact, Wallace’s annotations in The Moviegoer include several other references to a character called X, who later appears as a character in The Pale King. 40

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Channel,” dramatizing how much significance resides in overlooked or seemingly unimportant things. As with “The Suffering Channel,” Wallace enacts an even more intensely materialist reworking of Percy’s description, giving The Moviegoer’s notion of an all-­encompassing “search” a concrete form and thus anchoring its lofty existential resonance within physical forms. But the specific meaning of The Pale King’s opening resides in its poetically dense, parabolic expression of self-­consciousness. Although §1’s brief vignette was not given a separate title, Wallace’s early indication that the sketch would be titled “Reply to Theory” provides an important clue as to its meaning. My claim is that the vignette’s final image—of the elliptically curled shapes left by worms in the cow dung that “do not close because head never quite touches tail”—functions as the novel’s guiding metaphor in the “Search” for a more productive, enabling form of self-­consciousness. The image is an emphatically realistic reworking of the Ouroboros, the Ancient Egyptian symbol of self-­ reflexivity and circularity—a serpent eating its tail. Wallace experimented with similar symbols of destructive self-­consciousness across his career, as in his early, unpublished story “The Clang Birds,” whose central character is a “fictional bird that flies in ever decreasing circles until it disappears up its own ass.”42 Wallace reprised this metaphor in his discussion of minimalist and metafictional movements in contemporary fiction in his 1988 essay “Fictional Futures,” where he suggests that both “forms strike me as simply engines of self-­reference . . . they are primitive, crude, and seem already to have reached the Clang-Bird-­esque horizon of their own possibility.”43 It is precisely this interpretation that is dramatized in the opening of The Pale King: The exhortation “Read these” reminds both reader and writer that literary self-­consciousness can never be an end in itself, but must always leave an opening that leads back out into the world. Instead of the hyper-­self-­ awareness that had featured so prominently in his earlier texts, Wallace was exhorting himself to find productive ways to use self-­consciousness, to avoid relying on what he called the “old tricks” of his earlier work.44 The Moviegoer thus showed Wallace that it was possible to be as intensely self-aware as Binx Bolling while still carrying out a genuine “Search” (33) for larger meaning. Wallace also had substantial investments in Percy’s nonfiction. Noting several references to Percy’s essay collection The Message in the Bottle (1975),

Max, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, 23. Wallace, “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young,” 65. 44 Wallace’s widow, Karen Green, described the final stages of Wallace’s life as involving attempts to move beyond “the old tricks people expected of him.” Quoted in D.T. Max, “The Unfinished: David Foster Wallace’s struggle to surpass Infinite Jest,” New Yorker, March 9, 2009. 42 43

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Stephen J. Burn makes the case that Wallace’s work shows signs of being indebted to Percy’s nonfiction.45 Burn’s specific focus is on the overlaps between Wallace’s “belief in fiction’s power to invert loneliness” and the novelistic agenda that Percy articulates in “The Man on the Train.” And though Burn acknowledges that there are “other connections” (379) between The Pale King and Percy’s essay, his interpretation ultimately sees C.S. Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism as a more powerful reference point. Burn is right to note the many references to Walker Percy scattered throughout the notebooks and research material for The Pale King: One particularly important notebook indicates that Wallace read several essays, as well as Percy’s relatively obscure, 1971 novel Love in the Ruins—“ ‘Man on the Train’ + ‘Notes for Novel about End of World’/Love in the Ruins.”46 But Burn’s analysis overlooks the most significant point of connection between “The Man on the Train” and The Pale King—their mutual insistence that boredom should be interpreted in existential terms, as a powerful provocation for reassessing value. The narrative that structures Percy’s essay concerns two ordinary, “alienated” commuters: One commuter reads a novel that has particular relevance to his own spiritual state, while the other experiences no form of artistic communion whatsoever.47 Percy suggests that this latter figure is either bored or in a state of abject despair: “To say the least, he is bored; to say the most, he is in pure anxiety.”48 Wallace’s novel operates from this very premise, proposing that even seemingly innocuous forms of boredom have broader existential implications, a point that is made in part via a Kierkegaard quotation—“Strange that boredom, in itself so staid and solid, should have such power to set in motion” (385)—placed in a section of the novel that traces the etymology of the word boredom. Wallace’s annotations in The Moviegoer reveal a strong interest in both Percy’s Kierkegaardian epigraph—which Wallace reminded himself to “[l]ook up”—and on the ways in which Percy’s novel dramatizes Kierkegaard’s ideas. Revealingly, Wallace’s notes throughout The Moviegoer show glimpses of a subtle modulation in emphasis, shifting the terms of Percy’s novel from a nebulously philosophical “Search” to a more specific examination of boredom. In one section, Wallace underlined the following sentence—“The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life”—and wrote “Search + Paying Attention” in the margin. At the bottom

Stephen J. Burn, “Closing Time in The Pale King,” 378. David Foster Wallace, Materials related to The Pale King, Container 26.4, David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 47 Percy, “The Man on the Train,” 84. 48 Ibid., 84. 45 46

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of the same page, he reiterated the point, noting that the “Search” was the antithesis of being “sunk in everydayness,” while in a different passage Wallace enacted another strategic rephrasing of Percy’s terms, noting that the “Malaise” Binx suffers is in fact caused by a “failure to connect, failure to be authentic” (121). The Pale King is thus centered on a creative reinterpretation of Binx’s quest, which Wallace saw as having focused attention as its crucial element. Wallace’s implicit contention is that, for his own audience, the technological structures that distract us from paying proper attention—the novel cites the insidious way that “Walkmen, iPods, [and] BlackBerries,” among other forms of technology “distract people from some other, deeper type of pain” (87)—are more pertinent than the trappings of 1960s film and celebrity culture that both vex and offer redemptive possibilities for Binx Bolling. As with so many of his other appropriations, Wallace’s reworking of Walker Percy is thus motivated by the desire to update his guiding themes, reformulating the existential content of Percy’s text in order to address a contemporary audience. Wallace’s reference to Percy’s essay “Notes for a Novel about the End of the World” is similarly revealing. One of Percy’s central exhortations in this essay is that the contemporary American novel must dramatize the specific ways in which abstract metaphysical and spiritual questions play out within postmodern culture, amid all of its perversity and vulgarity. Rather than retreating into a simpler, pre-­industrial past, Percy’s contention is that contemporary writers need to creatively address “the sequalae” of canonical US fiction, asking questions such as What happens to Dodsworth after he lives happily ever after in Capri? What happens to the thousand Midwesterners who settle on the Riviera? What happens to the Okie who succeeds in Pomona and now spends his time watching Art Linkletter? Is all well with them or are they in deeper trouble than they were on Main Street and in the dust bowl? If so, what is the nature of the trouble?49

Wallace’s fiction repeatedly took up Percy’s call to stage encounters between modern culture and ancient religious longings. His version of “the Okie” who now watches “Art Linkletter” is depicted in many forms: Hugh Steeply’s father in Infinite Jest, for instance, experiences an alarming slippage between reality and representation that manifests in his obsession with M*A*S*H, the narrator of “B.I. #59” reaches a level of spiritual transcendence as a result of watching Bewitched, and “Good Old Neon” mines the sitcom Cheers! for its

Percy, “Notes for a Novel about the End of the World,” in The Message in the Bottle, 103.

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hidden philosophical resonances. Such examples all align with the particular aesthetic program articulated in Percy’s manifesto, though the most significant instance of this technique is found in “Irrelevant” Chris Fogle’s monologue in The Pale King, which engages directly with another of Percy’s texts, Lost in the Cosmos. One memorable section in Lost in the Cosmos theorizes that “everyone remembers where he was and what he was doing when he heard the news of the Kennedy assassination—or, if he is old enough, Pearl Harbor,” which, to Percy, implies that such cataclysmic historical events tend, by comparison, to cast everyday reality in a strange light. Percy summarizes a conversation with someone who “was watching the soap opera As the World Turns” when the program was interrupted with news of the Kennedy assassination: A bulletin was flashed on the screen. Bulletin: Shots have been fired into the Presidential motorcade in Dallas. As the bulletin came on, Grandpa was saying to Chris Hughes something like: “Now let’s don’t be too hasty, Chris. I don’t believe Ellen would do such a thing.” I can remember thinking how unimportant the soap opera seemed compared with the events in Dallas. Question:  But before that, the soap opera seemed more interesting than the events in Dallas? Yes. Question:  And since? Have you resumed watching As the World Turns? Yes.50

The intrusion of historical reality in this anecdote functions as a kind of existential slap, jolting the viewer from an escapist fantasy back into the world. Percy’s anecdote is a clear precedent for Chris Fogle’s similar epiphany, provoked by As the World Turns, in The Pale King. Fogle’s viewing of the same CBS drama is interrupted not by a presidential assassination, but by a revelation concerning “the bare reality of the statement” that is used as a transition between commercial breaks: “ ‘You’re watching As the World Turns’ ” (224). In a near-­religious moment of awakening, Fogle claims that it “was as if the CBS announcer were speaking directly to me,” later interpreting the phrase’s “obvious double entendre” as an “almost terrifying pun about the passive waste of time sitting there watching something” (224). A subsequent reference to a lecture in “American Political Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (London: Arena Books, 1984), 57–58.

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Thought,” together with an allusion to Jimmy Carter’s 1979 “Crisis of Confidence” speech, foregrounds the political implications of Fogle’s epiphany and provide a further link to Percy’s source text. In the same way that Percy dramatizes a violent intrusion of reality that disrupts a passive relationship with commercial entertainment, Wallace’s text once again provides a concrete narrative illustration of an American cultural product provoking a radical existential reconfiguration. Fogle’s newfound awareness ripples out to encompass precisely this kind of reexamination of meaning: Immediately afterward, he realizes that “I was, in a way, too free, or that this kind of freedom wasn’t actually real . . . I had somehow chosen to have nothing matter” (225). Such appropriations indicate what for Wallace was the most productive aspect of Percy’s approach to fiction: His ability to provide the reader with profound narrative precedents of redemptive transformation. For Percy, postmodernism had a unique capacity for either unmitigated destruction or complete renewal. In “Notes for a Novel,” he claimed that “the postmodern consciousness [contains] unlimited possibilities for both destruction and liberation, for an absolute loneliness or a rediscovery of community and reconciliation” (112). Percy’s essay describes the kind of narratives that can express the latter values, suggesting that the particular Sartrean dramatizations he has in mind are fundamentally at odds with the way American novelists of an earlier generation—he cites “[Ernest] Hemingway” and “[Sinclair] Lewis” (109) as examples—conceived of literary realism. As I showed in Chapter 3, an analogous impulse to craft the kinds of narratives that “aggravate [a] sense of entrapment and loneliness and death in people, to move people to countenance it,” is present across Wallace’s career.51 The Pale King alone contains countless redemptive narratives: Both Meredith Rand and Chris Fogle, for instance, deliver lengthy accounts of their spiritual and emotional awakenings, while almost every other IRS worker in the novel has a dramatic, vivid backstory detailing their trajectory from a “wastoid” (162), narcissistic or apolitical form of consciousness, to recognizing their duties as citizens and seeing themselves in the context of a larger community. The previously unpublished material included in the 2012 paperback edition of the novel suggests that such narratives also featured prominently throughout Wallace’s drafts and planning for the novel. In one of these fragments, a character’s glimpsed reflection in a bookshop window catalyzes a deeper form of self-­consciousness; and in the final fragment, a character named Singh describes a similar trajectory to Chris Fogle’s, moving from being a “wastoid at school” (19) to finding an unexpected form of moral regeneration within the IRS. Although similar narratives occur across Wallace’s body of work, The Pale King dramatizes countless existential McCaffery, “An Extended Interview with David Foster Wallace,” 32.

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epiphanies and self-­revelations. Following Percy’s lead, Wallace’s response to postmodernism’s spiritual deracination was to imagine the kinds of catalysts that might provoke a deeper existential reckoning, implying that what in another setting he referred to as “the horrific struggle to establish a human self” involved choices made with “probity and care” as well as remaining vigilantly attentive to the experiences that might prompt such reexamination.52

Flannery O’Connor’s “bloody grace” Wallace’s interviews and nonfiction make many references to Flannery O’Connor, though he often pitted her work against that of others. O’Connor comes off second-­best to Jorge Luis Borges, for instance, in Wallace’s review of Edwin Williamson’s biography. In the draft material surrounding this review, Wallace again invoked O’Connor as a reference point, claiming that “The Writing of the God” is “one of the great modern fables of mystical illumination ever—better than O’Connor’s ‘Revelation’ ” because Borges’s text “sends chills down [the] reader’s spine.”53 The same comparative devaluing occurs in Wallace’s address on Franz Kafka, in which he suggests that next to the “harrowing spirituality” of Kafka’s fiction, “even Ms. O’Connor’s bloody grace seems a little bit easy, the souls at stake pre-­made” (64). But while such examples might imply an antipathy toward O’Connor, these comparisons are actually profoundly misleading since Wallace had an enduring fascination with O’Connor’s narratives of “bloody grace,” even—as I show—going so far as to write an updated version of her short story “Everything that Rises must Converge.”54 The seemingly pejorative references listed above show how useful it was for Wallace to set up contrasting foils that would cast the particular writer he was discussing in a singular light. Because Wallace set out to stress the eccentric singularity of both Borges and Kafka, he needed to counterbalance such claims against a slightly less innovative, realist figure, reaching for Flannery O’Connor as a comparatively conventional writer who would highlight their literary achievements. Yet when asked to list his favorite writers in interview settings, Wallace routinely included O’Connor. His 1996 interview with Laura Miller, for instance, enthuses over O’Connor’s fiction, as does his lengthy conversation with Larry McCaffery. This latter interview

Wallace, “Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness,” 64; Wallace, The Pale King, 230. David Foster Wallace, Materials related to “Borges on the Couch,” Container 29.12, David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 54 David Foster Wallace, Letter to Michael Pietsch (October 10, 2004), Container 23.8, David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 52 53

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even situates O’Connor—alongside writers such as Tolstoy and Chekhov—as a paragon of literary depth, suggesting that such “really great fiction-­writers” are able to “give the reader something. The reader walks away from real art heavier than she came to it. Fuller.”55 Wallace also taught O’Connor’s fiction across his academic career. He assigned both the short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and O’Connor’s 1952 novel Wise Blood in “U123 INTRO TO LITERATURE” while teaching at the University of Illinois, and used “Good Country People” in a fiction writing class at Arizona.56 Wallace even told David Lipsky that Flannery O’Connor’s fiction spoke directly to one of Infinite Jest’s central themes—“[that] we’re just dying to give ourselves away to something. To run, to escape, somehow”—noting that there are “some kinds of escape [that] in a sort of Flannery O’Connorish way,” eschew escapist pleasure to provoke self-­examination, “making you confront yourself more” (81). Wallace was also a perceptive reader of O’Connor’s fiction. The archives contain a wealth of material that testifies to a particularly attentive mode of reading, including Wallace’s heavily annotated editions of O’Connor’s texts, including The Collected Stories of Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood, the Library of America edition of Flannery O’Connor: The Collected Works, as well as numerous American short-­story compilations that anthologize O’Connor’s fiction. The significance of such holdings is difficult to overstate: Across the collection, the archives contain Wallace’s annotations on almost every piece of fiction O’Connor ever published. Such annotations reveal Wallace as a remarkably acute reader of O’Connor’s work. In the margins of “The Lame Shall Enter First,” for instance, Wallace noted how O’Connor’s description of Johnson’s misshapen foot was a shrewd illustration of “[p]eople who worship their own deformity,” while his reading of “The Displaced” wonders whether “Christ” is the figure referred to in the story’s title, or whether “Everyone is the Displaced Person.”57 Wallace’s marginalia within Wise Blood contain similarly perceptive asides, such as the description of Hazel Motes as “a deviant atheist” whose ostensible skepticism evinces a deep spiritual yearning. Motes, Wallace notes, is “fascinated by belief ” as well as being simultaneously repulsed by and enamored with theology: “Why so adamant about not believing in anything?” Wallace wonders at one point.58 Wallace was also highly attuned to points of connection and overlap between O’Connor’s narratives, with his copy of

McCaffery, “An Extended Interview with David Foster Wallace,” 50. David Foster Wallace, Class Syllabi, 1992–2008, Container 32.6, 32.8, David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 57 Wallace’s annotated copy of The Collected Stories of Flannery O’Connor (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971), 459, 226. 58 Wallace’s annotated copy of Wise Blood, 12, 17. 55 56

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“Good Country People,” for instance, containing marginal annotations that note particular connections to “The Comforts of Home,” “The Displaced Person,” and Wise Blood. He was also attentive to veiled autobiographical details, writing “O’C ?” next to a description of Mrs. Hopewell in “Good Country People,” who has a “weak heart” and may only live to “see forty-­ five.”59 And as with his reading of Walker Percy, Wallace was conceptualizing his own fiction while reading O’Connor. The inside flap in his copy of the Collected Stories contains a cryptic, briefly sketched idea for a “Story of terrible dread = spiritual resurrection to {illegible} all in terrible swift terse expo. 5pp max.” It is difficult to know whether this brief aside refers to a particular story, though a reference to “Victor Frankl[’s], Man’s Search for Meaning” on the same page suggests that this idea may have found expression in Wallace’s 1999 collection, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, the final story of which directly references Frankl’s text. Aside from reading Flannery O’Connor’s fiction as vivid narratives of “bloody grace” and “spiritual resurrection,” her fiction also made Wallace aware of a persistent, American religious impulse. In his interview with David Lipsky, for instance,Wallace attributed his realization about the “incredibly existentialist songs” played on country radio stations to O’Connor, suggesting that “if you live immersed in this stuff, it’s very Flannery O’Connorish” (198). Wallace followed O’Connor’s lead in discerning the deeper, spiritual motivations beneath seemingly innocuous, commercial art forms, pointing out that [e]very once in a while you realize that it’s all the same, and it’s all about the really profound shit. And that it’s adjusted in various ways to talk to various demographic groups for commercial reasons. But that if you cock your ear and listen real close, it’s—that it’s deep, you know? (198)

For Wallace, O’Connor’s work demonstrated that close attention could reveal underlying metaphysical or “incredibly existentialist” content. Like Percy himself, who saw Sartre and O’Connor as two sides of the same coin, having “an explicit and ultimate concern with the nature of man and the nature of reality where man finds himself,” Wallace located O’Connor’s fiction within a broad tradition of American existentialism.60 His annotations also reveal this connection: Wallace wrote “Husserl—phenomenology” next to a scene in “Good Country People” in which Mrs. Hopewell reads aloud from her

Wallace’s annotated copy of The Collected Stories of Flannery O’Connor. Percy, “Notes for a Novel about the End of the World,” 102.

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daughter’s copy of Heidegger’s Existence and Being, perceiving the affinity between existentialism and phenomenology; and his marginal comments show that he understood that God is rarely, if ever, a comforting paternal presence in O’Connor’s fictional world, noting “God as monster” in his copy of Wise Blood. Likewise, Wallace’s annotated copy of a letter that O’Connor wrote to novelist John Hawkes underlines a particularly existential expression of O’Connor’s: “Cutting yourself off from Grace is a very decided matter, requiring a real choice, act of will, and affecting the very ground of the soul.”61 Learning to “cock your ear” to the spiritual and metaphysical dimensions of everyday life in a “Flannery O’Connorish” manner animates much of Wallace’s fiction. Indeed, O’Connor’s recurring narrative conceit, that humans seek God and reenact Christian rituals in increasingly distorted and grotesque ways, is echoed in Wallace’s claim that drug and alcohol addiction was “an obvious distortion of the religious impulse.”62 Wallace again reworded this notion in an essay draft written in 1992, in which he briefly extolled the virtues of the Boston Alcoholics Anonymous community, suggesting that “[f] or anybody who’s interested in any kind of genuine religious imperative at work in modern U.S. life, AA seems like a must-­see. It costs at most a voluntary buck, and some of the proceedings I saw were clearly the best show in town.”63 The same logic is present in Wallace’s 1993 characterization of professional athletes as in many ways our culture’s holy men: they give themselves over to a pursuit, endure great privation and pain to actualize themselves at it, and enjoy a relationship to perfection that we admire and reward (the monk’s begging bowl, the RBI-guru’s eight-­figure contract) and love to watch even though we have no inclination to walk that road ourselves. In other words they do it “for” us, sacrifice themselves for our (we imagine) redemption. (237)

Likewise, the central insight structuring Wallace’s commencement address, that “there is actually no such thing as atheism. . . . Everybody worships,” also Flannery O’Connor, Letter to John Hawkes (April 14, 1960). Revealingly, this letter is the only piece of annotated correspondence in Wallace’s Library of America edition of O’Connor’s work (1125). 62 David Foster Wallace, Interview with Michael Silverblatt, Bookworm, KCRW (April 11, 1996). 63 David Foster Wallace, Letter to Brad Morrow (December 1992), Container, 3.1, Little, Brown & Co. David Foster Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. This piece, eventually published in substantially modified form as “The Nature of the Fun” in a 1998 issue of Fiction Writer, was originally intended for Conjunctions. The quoted section on AA was ultimately edited out of “The Nature of the Fun.” 61

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rephrases the same notion.64 Wallace thus gleaned a very particular cultural insight from O’Connor’s work, realizing that—despite appearances and against all odds—there was a “genuine religious imperative” persisting in US culture. This insight coheres with the longstanding interest in Catholicism that Wallace shared with both Percy and O’Connor. Although he never officially joined the Church, Wallace made several attempts to convert to Catholicism and seems to have attended Mass at various points throughout his life: A facetious aside in “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” details both the difficulties of “genuflecting at sea” and the M.V. Nadir’s upscale communion wafers, which were “unusually yummy, biscuitier than your normal host” (323).65 (Ever-­ecumenical, Wallace also describes attending a “joyless, humorless . . . Pentecostal Sunday Service” at the Illinois State Fair’s “Twilight Ballroom” in “Getting Away . . .,” noting that unlike traditional Catholic Mass, the service had “no little interval where you get to go around shaking people’s hands and wishing them Peace.”)66 In my view, D.T. Max, and many other readers, have been too hasty in collapsing Wallace’s references to religion and “church” onto his AA involvement. Such a conflation is highly reductive: While Wallace’s account of his Bloomington church “congregation” in “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s” was—as Max points out—a thinly veiled concealment of “his recovery group circle” (263), there are many other indications, such as the aforementioned comparison of communion wafers, of Wallace’s religious participation. The one piece of archival evidence that most emphatically contradicts Max’s conflation is a list, titled “What Balance Would Look Like,” within one of the Pale King notebooks, which contains items such as “Daily Exercise,” “Up at 8–9,” “5 [AA recovery] meetings per week,” and finally, “Church.” Surely, this final term would have been an unnecessary inclusion if Wallace’s AA community was always disguised as a form of religious participation. The archived collection of Wallace’s books also reveals an abiding interest in spirituality and religion, with titles such as Anthony de Mello’s Awareness, Paramananda’s A Practical Guide to Buddhist Meditation, Richard Rohr’s Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer and John Shea’s Stories of Faith. More specifically, Wallace’s interest in Wallace, This is Water, 98–100. In an interview with Patrick Arden, Wallace explained that though he had “gone through RCIA [Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults] a couple of times,” he had “always flunk[ed] the period of inquiry,” adding—with a tinge of bitterness—that “they don’t really want inquiries. They really just want you to learn responses. I’m a failure—I couldn’t get in.” Patrick Arden, “David Foster Wallace Warms Up,” in Conversations with David Foster Wallace, 99. 66 Wallace, “Getting Away From Already Being Pretty Much Away From It All,” 112–13. 64 65

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Catholicism finds expression in many places, including within his fiction: Infinite Jest alone mentions specific Catholic orders, in the description of the “dewimpled Carmelite who works the kitchen day-­shift” (437) at E.T.A., makes multiple references to the Catholic fraternity “The Knights of Columbus” (64), and describes James Incandenza’s Blood Sister: One Tough Nun as having an “ironic anti-Catholic subthesis” (706). Moreover, Infinite Jest records a conversation between Jim and Joelle about “neo-Thomist Realism” and its influence on “French Catholic intellectuals” (745) such as André Bazin, as well as referring to the devout Jesuit beliefs held by the Loach family. Perhaps inspired by his 1997 stay at White House Jesuit Retreat Center in St. Louis, Missouri, a Jesuit art lecturer (whom Day describes as a “withered priest” [173]) is a central character in Wallace’s short story “Church Not Made With Hands.” This latter story’s theologically resonant title and comical references to Catholic ritual—“. . . and I those who have swimmed against me” and “Bless me father for there can be no awareness of sin without awareness of transgression without awareness of limit” (167)—also link the story to Flannery O’Connor. Finally, Infinite Jest also references The Interior Castle, by Teresa of Avila—“One long timer describes it as he has a whole new unique interior spiritual castle, now, to live in” (365)—and includes several mentions of Bernini’s seventeenth-­century sculpture The Ecstasy of St. Teresa in the Incandenza filmography. The Jesuit branch of Catholicism also plays a large role in The Pale King, while yet another indication of Wallace’s theological interest can be found in his admiration for Brian Moore’s 1972 novel Catholics, about a high-­ranking Vatican Priest tasked with rebuking traditional Irish Catholics for their outdated rituals. The particular ritual explored in Moore’s novel is referenced in The Pale King, in the narrator’s description of the REC’s strange geographic orientation as seeming “both craven and arrogant, like pre-­modern priests who faced away from the communicants during Catholic mass” (280), while the final scene in Wallace’s short story “Think”—about a married man being seduced by “the younger sister of his wife’s college roommate” (72)—reworks the elliptically theological conclusion of Catholics. The narrator of this particular story goes to great lengths to emphasize the media-­inspired artificiality of the young woman’s movements. Her expression strikes the husband as being “from page 18 of the Victoria’s Secret catalogue,” while the gesture with which she languidly closes the bedroom door makes him realize “that she’s replaying a scene from some movie she loves” (72). In the middle of her undressing, the man unexpectedly finds himself kneeling and then “clasp[ing] his hands in front of his chest” indicating that “he is kneeling to pray” (73). In the husband’s internal monologue, he is pleading for the woman to try and understand what his innermost thoughts are, to empathize

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with his feelings about betraying his wife: “She could try, for just a moment, to imagine what is happening in his head. A bathroom scale barely peeking out from below the foot of the bed, beneath the gauzy hem of the comforter. Even for an instant, to try putting herself in his place” (73). The final image reprises the ambiguous, closing scene of Catholics, in which Father Walter— who is losing his faith and has not prayed for years—kneels down and leads the monks in liturgical prayer. In fact, Wallace returned to this same image in the drafts of the short story “All That,” in a note about how his character is “Starting to feel horrible when he prays (in seminary?). Not pain: yearning, hunger. (End of Moore’s Catholics, when abbot cannot pray because it kills his truth.)”67 The point here is that D.T. Max’s glib dismissal of Wallace’s various spiritual and religious investigations—“Wallace’s real religion was always language” (166), he claims at one point in the biography—obscures his significant investment in Catholic theology. While Wallace could not ultimately follow Percy and O’Connor in subscribing wholeheartedly to Catholicism, his long engagement with many aspects of the Catholic tradition made him highly attuned to the theological content of their fiction. One of Wallace’s most explicit appropriations of O’Connor’s work occurs in his short story “Philosophy and Mirror of Nature,” first published as “Yet Another Example of the Porousness of the Certain Borders (VIII)” in a 1998 issue of McSweeney’s. Correspondence between Wallace and Pietsch indicates that Wallace considered including this story in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, which contains three other stories titled “Yet Another Example . . .,” though he ultimately chose to position it within his 2004 collection, Oblivion.68 (Early versions of the Table of Contents for Brief Interviews also list a story titled “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” seemingly an alternate title of “Suicide as a Sort of Present.”) The dominant scholarly reading of this text is centered on the story’s eponymous reference to Richard Rorty’s 1980 book of the same name. Clare Hayes-Brady, for instance, sees the text as a pointed rejoinder to Rorty’s central thesis, demonstrating that, against Rorty’s pragmatism, language often works to disclose psychological “truths we do not wish to share . . . despite our best efforts” to conceal them.69 Paul Giles pursues

David Foster Wallace, The Pale King, Container 38.6, David Foster Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 68 David Foster Wallace, Materials related to Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Container 2.4–3.3, David Foster Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. The story was also included in The Best of McSweeney’s Volume 1, ed. Dave Eggers (New York: Hamish Hamilton, 2004). 69 Clare Hayes-Brady, “The Book, The Broom and The Ladder: Philosophical Groundings in the Work of David Foster Wallace,” 33. 67

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a similar line of enquiry, suggesting that Wallace’s narrative dramatizes the negative consequences associated with the “erasure of stable signifiers” that Rorty’s thesis enacts, pointing out that “Wallace’s characters find themselves cast adrift” in precisely the “fallen world of false appearances” posited by Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.70 And finally, Marshall Boswell sees the story as part of a broader linguistic interrogation that runs through Wallace’s fiction, as an example of how his characters are invariably “at the mercy of their own minds.”71 But alongside the explicit conversation with Rorty’s philosophy, the story also articulates a highly idiosyncratic response to one of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories. In a letter to Michael Pietsch, Wallace emphasized how heavily indebted the story was to O’Connor: “I had this whole thing in my head about it being a complicated parody/homage to O’Connor’s ‘Everything That Rises Must Converge’—was any of that agenda discernable to you?”72 The “homage” element of Wallace’s appropriation is relatively transparent. Wallace’s appropriation clearly updates O’Connor’s story for the postmodern era, shifting the narrative setting from the mid-­century South to contemporary Los Angeles and modernizing the psychological afflictions of O’Connor’s characters. Both stories are focalized through middle-­aged sons who chaperone their mothers into town, with much of the narrative taking place on public buses. In fact, Wallace even has his two characters sit in precisely the same section of the bus, placing them on “one of the two longer seat areas which are aligned sideways instead of frontally” (183), a reproduction that self-­consciously superimposes his own characters onto O’Connor’s fictional world. Furthermore, the mothers in both stories experience comparable physiological disruptions: Julian’s mother, in “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” “crumple[s]” onto the pavement—and may even die—after being excoriated by a black woman, while the narrator’s mother in “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” is the victim of “botched” cosmetic surgery that results in her face being “a chronic mask of insane terror” (182). The mother’s horrifying countenance is another

Giles, “All Swallowed Up: David Foster Wallace and American Literature,” 14. Marshall Boswell, “ ‘The Constant Monologue Inside Your Head’: Oblivion and the Nightmare of Consciousness,” in A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, 152. In a letter to Michael Pietsch, Wallace revealed that he was unhappy with the story’s title, implying that he did not want the engagement with Rorty’s philosophy to be quite so explicit. David Foster Wallace, Letter to Michael Pietsch (October 7, 2003), Container 1.10, Little, Brown & Co. David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 72 David Foster Wallace, Letter to Michael Pietsch (October 10, 2004), Container 1.10, Little, Brown & Co. David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 70 71

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deliberate homage to O’Connor’s Mrs. Chestny, whose own face becomes “fiercely distorted” in the wake of her shock: “One eye, large and staring, moved slightly to the left as if it had become unmoored. The other remained fixed on him, raked his face again, found nothing and closed.”73 Wallace’s description of his character’s “mask of crazed suffering” and “frightened eyes” further emphasizes such similarities, implying that his own character is living in the permanent state of petrified shock that may have killed Mrs. Chestny. And while O’Connor’s story generates narrative momentum through the underlying racial tensions present on the bus, Wallace’s narrator instead worries about possible reactions from fellow travelers—“punks or hostile organisms” (189)—to his mother’s “horror stricken” (188) face. The story’s parodic element is less evident, and relies on yet another intertext: Gordon Grice’s The Red Hourglass: The Lives of Predators. Though Wallace mentions this source in Oblivion’s colophon, perfunctorily acknowledging that “one or two tiny parts of ‘Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature’ make uncited use” of Grice’s text, his admission is somewhat disingenuous. Almost all of the technical, scientific terms in the story come from Grice, as do the details concerning particular venomous spiders. In addition, Wallace lifted a particular physician’s assessment quoted in The Red Hourglass—“I do not recall having seen more abject pain manifested in any other medical or surgical condition”—though he obscured the source ever so slightly, by changing the date from the original 1933 to “1935.”74 Downplaying the story’s indebtedness to just “one or two tiny parts” also conceals the extent to which the protagonist of Wallace’s story resembles the journalistic persona in Grice’s collection of essays. Both figures have an obsessive interest in poisonous spiders, and both house and study specimens in backyard sheds: Indeed, the shed whose roof collapses under the weight of an inquisitive child, resulting in deadly black widow bites, reworks Grice’s description of his own garden shed, in which he runs informal scientific experiments on thousands of live, deadly spiders. Reading the two texts side by side provides yet another example of Wallace’s intertextual practice, revealing the ways in which he so often transformed raw material into complex literary art. The linguistic styles of the two texts are also comparable, as are the scientifically informed worldviews of both Grice and Wallace’s narrator, which are a natural extension of their interest in poisonous spiders: At one point, Wallace’s character describes himself as legal “prey” (186), with his briefcase constituting Flannery O’Connor, The Collected Stories of Flannery O’Connor (1971; repr. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000), 420. 74 Gordon Grice, The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators (New York: Delta Books, 1998), 52; Wallace, “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,” 185. 73

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“sematic accessory to warn off potential predators” (184). In fact, it was the idiosyncratic worldview stemming from arachnology that most interested Wallace. In the wildly lyrical, freewheeling conclusion to The Red Hourglass’s chapter on black widows, Grice suggests that the absence of a “clear evolutionary advantage” in the widow’s unnecessarily potent venom has disturbing theological implications: We want the world to be an ordered room, but in a corner of that room there hangs an untidy web. Here the analytical mind finds an irreducible mystery, a motiveless evil in nature. . . . No idea of the cosmos as elegant design accounts for the widow. No idea of a benevolent God can be completely comfortable in a widow’s world. She hangs in her web, that marvel of design, and defies teleology. (58–59)

References to spiders occur with surprising frequency throughout Wallace’s work—particularly in Infinite Jest, where alcoholism is referred to as “The Spider” (357), Gately attempts to transcend his own “spider-­bit will” (360), Avril is frequently associated with black widows, and Jim’s father is described as being “crippled by obsessions with death by spider bite” (63)— but here, their presence works to destabilize the Catholic convictions animating O’Connor fiction. By centering the story on an animal whose existences defies the notion of a “benevolent God,” Wallace pulls the theological rug out from beneath “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” When read in light of Grice’s analysis, Wallace’s contrast between Mrs. Chestny’s violent religious rebuke—Julian’s accusation, “You aren’t who you think you are” has a particularly Catholic resonance—and a Godless universe in which vanity drives the commerce of cosmetic surgery and an inquisitive child dies a painful, meaningless death becomes clear. In Wallace’s story, the linguistically obscured fact of the child’s death has no meaning beyond its legal implications for the narrator, while his characterization of the mother is similarly deconsecrated, stripped of all theological meaning. Though her mangled features give her the permanent countenance of Mrs. Chestny after her excoriation, unlike O’Connor’s character, her fragile self-­esteem and narcissism go unchallenged and thus unredeemed. Wallace pointedly denies her the kind of redemption available within O’Connor’s fictional universe—a forceful encounter that might prompt her to theologically realign her worldview—as in the case of both Mrs. Chestny and also Mrs. Turpin, from “Revelation,” a story that Wallace compared unfavorably to the work of Borges, and which is included in the same collection. Wallace thus divests the story of its Catholic underpinnings and gives it a destabilizing existential

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twist, situating the narrative against the backdrop of a “motiveless[ly] evil” venomous spider, whose very existence “defies [the] teleology” implicit in O’Connor’s fiction. “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,” like many of Wallace’s other texts, is populated with characters who are unable to communicate sincerely with others, let alone seek religious solace, because of their disabling levels of self-­ awareness. The narrator’s speech is full of irritating verbal tics, mobilizes a dizzying array of linguistic discourses, and uses frequent italicized insertions as a way of scare-­quoting external perspectives. His narration is also maddeningly digressive, circling around and around the occluded details of the hapless child’s death at the story’s core, and distractedly shifting between different periods of time in a manner that foreshadows the endless detours of “Irrelevant” Chris Fogle in The Pale King. The short story employs numerous metaphors for this form of recursion, including the post-­operative mother’s duplicative horror at her own features, which is itself mirrored in the narrator’s tortured syntax: Looking into a mirror, she “could not herself ascertain at first if the look of insane terror was the response or the stimulus and if it was a response then a response to what in the mirror if the response itself was the expression” (185). Moreover, the story’s setting in Van Nuys, Los Angeles is only a short distance from the Hollywood studios that produced the films referred to by the narrator, such as Psycho and The Bride of Frankenstein, while the narrator’s physical features—his “goggles,” “imposing size” (188), and “distinctive mark” (189)—duplicate the appearance of a large, threatening spider. The story’s second lacunae concerns the convoluted lawsuit with the pest control company “R--d©” (185). The mother’s “original liability” resulted from spraying her own face with Raid insect repellent after a “worker at the assembly plant . . . glued a can’s nozzle on facing backwards” (188), yet another synecdoche for the debilitating self-­awareness that plagues Wallace’s characters. Through such repetitions, Wallace’s narrative implies that certain aspects of postmodern culture function in obstructing the visceral encounters with divine grace that O’Connor’s characters routinely experience.

Americanizing existentialism Though Wallace read many other American writers who had successfully transposed existential themes into an American context—including Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, William Faulkner, and William James, all of whom Cotkin sees as important avatars of American existentialism—he was ultimately most enamored with Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor. To Wallace, these older writers had succeeded in imaginatively translating the

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European philosophy into an American idiom, a form of translation that was enormously useful to his own artistic project of advocating “Camus-­like existential engagement.” Nichols’s assertion, in The Pale King, is that “nobody ever talks about” the “individual US citizen’s deep fear” of mortality “except existentialists in convoluted French prose” (143), yet Wallace himself was able to locate several important American precedents whose work was committed to exploring precisely this form of “deep fear.” Along with the many expressions of existentialism Wallace perceived within the wider culture, he was also aware that Percy and O’Connor had found productive ways of translating the “convoluted French prose” that the original ideas were expressed in, so that existential philosophy could speak directly to American readers. As with the various other global engagements explored in earlier chapters, Wallace was not particularly concerned with cultural fidelity. Although he read existentialists such as Camus and Sartre at the source, and in the original French, as well as having an expansive knowledge of Søren Kierkegaard, he was ultimately more interested in finding precedents that showed how such ideas could be played out within an American context. (Tellingly, there is no evidence that he read the particular existential thinkers—such as Gabriel Marcel, Jacques Maritain, and Karl Rahner—who were so important to Walker Percy, suggesting that his appropriation of Percy’s sources came well and truly second-­hand.) The complex responses to Percy and O’Connor traced in this chapter are far from being plagiaristic or derivative, but this particular aspect of his fiction finds expression in Infinite Jest, where Hal suggests that “[i]t usually seems like plagiarists aren’t so lazy so much as kind of navigationally insecure. They have trouble navigating without a detailed map’s assurance that somebody has been this way before them” (1061). In the same way that many other artists eased some of Wallace’s navigational insecurities, Percy and O’Connor’s fiction provided him with a crucial kind of literary map. It is worth noting that Jean-Paul Sartre himself made several attempts to pave the way for a particularly American version of existentialism. In his 1946 Atlantic Monthly essay “American Novelists in French Eyes,” Sartre argued that the work of American writers such as Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Caldwell, and Dos Passos constituted an important counter-­canon to French existentialism. But though he revered this group of novelists, suggesting that translations of their work represented “[t]he greatest literary development in France between 1929 and 1939,” his thesis was ultimately that this particular tradition of realist American fiction required a French intervention in order to release its full philosophical potential. Camus, he argued, had adapted Hemingway’s “short, disjointed sentences” in order to “express his philosophical experience of the absurdity of the world,” while de Beauvoir

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used Faulkner’s technique of “jumping about in disordered leaps” in a more deliberate, self-­conscious manner to Faulkner himself, using such devices to “plac[e] her characters and action in better relief.”75 Sartre predicted that French writers would continue to take such technical innovations from across the Atlantic and give them a continental inflection: “We shall return them digested, intellectualized, less effective, and less brutal—consciously adapted to French taste.” In fact, the dominant stream of influence ran the opposite way that Sartre anticipated, since it was ultimately the American novelists of the post-­war period who perceived the literary possibilities inherent in existentialism. Philosopher Hazel Barnes, the first English translator of Being and Nothingness, argued in the mid-1950s that the allegedly existential interventions that Sartre described were unnecessary, since America already had a rich tradition of this very form of literature and philosophical thought. As Cotkin points out, Barnes retrospectively located an American existential tradition, arguing that American philosophers such as William James had important overlaps with their European counterparts and contending that “American thinkers were existential long before the doctrine received full explication and fame in the hands of Sartre” (134). Like Barnes, Wallace also saw existential ideas as profoundly relevant to American culture. And due largely to Barnes’s popularization of existentialism for an American audience, by the time that Wallace was searching for crucial existential precedents in the latter stages of the twentieth century, he only had to look back as far as the 1960s, to the fiction of Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor. Wallace’s artistic response to Walker Percy drew on a range of texts, including The Moviegoer, Lost in the Cosmos, Love in the Ruins, and several essays from The Message in the Bottle. Although Wallace reworked numerous narratives, ideas, and fragments from Percy’s body of work, this chapter demonstrates that he was ultimately most taken with Percy’s ability to meld popular culture with philosophical and religious abstractions. Percy modeled a way of teasing out the existential content from postmodern cultural products—as in the anecdote about attention and choice against the backdrop of As the World Turns, which Wallace reworked in The Pale King—that could be appropriated in order to speak to the kind of culture that, in Wallace’s view, “doesn’t stress the efficacy of will” (249). His acute reading of Flannery O’Connor was similarly concerned with finding American manifestations of existential philosophy, as well as locating the unmistakably Catholic amendment that her fiction gave to existentialism. Wallace’s nuanced response to the short story “Everything that Rises Must Converge” shows just Jean-Paul Sartre, “American Novelists in French Eyes,” trans. Evelyn de Solis, Atlantic Monthly (August 1946).

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how deeply he engaged with O’Connor’s fiction. Wallace found both productive points of similarity as well as crucial disagreements that allowed him to produce a profoundly indebted piece of fiction, which functions as both “parody [and] homage.” But while both figures were enormously important in showing how existentialism could be made relevant for an American readership, Wallace’s texts reveal his belief that a further recalibration needed to be made. While O’Connor and Percy had been able to update existentialism’s central tenets for a mid-­twentieth-century audience, Wallace saw the necessity of modernizing this very transposition, in order that his fiction might transfigure the intrinsic “existential loneliness” within late-­capitalist American culture.76 While Paul Giles has argued that the work of Percy and O’Connor reveals a “typically postmodernist understanding of the arbitrary and discontinuous nature of any type of system,” Wallace’s intervention was premised on the belief that neither writer had gone far enough in testing their deeply held theological convictions against postmodern American culture.77 In fact, Wallace’s project involved measuring existential claims against particular forms of American postmodernism. As Hans Bertens notes, “In France, postmodernism took shape partly in reaction to existentialism, but preserved much of its seriousness, while in the United States in its earlier stages postmodernism tended to be playful and exuberant,” an opposition that Wallace sought to dissolve.78 Thus, while Sartre attempted to reconcile existentialism with Marxism and left-­wing radicalism, and Percy tried to reconcile it with Catholic theology, Wallace tried to reconcile existentialism with postmodernism. It is worth noting that, unlike many other American respondents, Wallace was not particularly interested in the political implications of French existentialism. In mid-­twentieth-century America, when existentialism was finding a larger audience, many American writers and intellectuals emphasized its political content. While such readings were rarely as explicit as President Roosevelt’s reading of Kierkegaard—in 1944, Roosevelt claimed that reading Kierkegaard gave him a deeper “understanding of what it is in man that makes it possible for these Germans to be so evil”—many early respondents perceived existentialism’s relevance to American politics.79 Richard Wright Miller, “The Salon Interview: David Foster Wallace,” 62. Paul Giles, American Catholic Arts and Fictions: Culture, Ideology, Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 392. 78 Hans Bertens, “World Literature and Postmodernity,” in The Routledge Companion to World Literature, eds. Theo D’haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir (New York: Routledge, 2012), 209. 79 Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew (1946; repr. New York: Penguin Classics, 2011), 141. 76 77

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and Ralph Ellison both picked up on its implications for African-American political engagement, as did Saul Bellow, whose reading of Sartre insisted that, in Cotkin’s phrasing, the “American writer had to be concerned with absurdity and alienation, as well as politics” (125). By contrast, Wallace’s emphasis was on an individual, rather than collective, response to existential thought. The “mild[ness]” of Wallace’s “Camus-­like” “remedy” for American narcissism was framed in vague and resolutely individualist terms, with Wallace suggesting that “it is our job as responsible, decent spiritual human beings to arrive at sets of principles to guide our conduct, in order to keep us from hurting ourselves and other people.”80 Cotkin argues that Walker Percy’s fiction implicitly makes the same point, suggesting that Percy’s texts enact a “philosophical retreat from politics into the larger, more enduring questions of existence and the nature of truth” (87), an interpretive redistribution that surely appealed to Wallace. As with his encounters with other global traditions, Wallace was not interested in faithfully reproducing the work of European writers such as Sartre and Camus—both of whom were intensely politically active—but was instead concerned with the broader, metaphysical questions posed by existential thinkers that could be given concrete narrative expression. His strategic interpretation thus elides much of the political content of European existentialism, in order to focus on narrative instantiations of its metaphysical and theological implications. For this reason, Percy and O’Connor—who, as Giles rightly notes, “were not interested in political activity in any shape or form” (391)—provided particularly useful models for Wallace. Being able to position the work of Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy as enacting precisely this kind of appropriation ultimately gave Wallace license to engage in similar reimaginings. Despite the problems associated with Harold Bloom’s theory of influence that previous chapters have explored, Wallace’s complex reworking of Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor is best captured by the notion of tessera. As I showed in Chapter 2, Wallace’s relationship with Bloom was highly vexed. But Wallace also found aspects of Bloom’s work to admire. He mentioned that “harold bloom [sic] has a real famous exegesis of Byron” in a 1996 online chatroom conversation, and acknowledged that he found Bloom’s notion of strategic “misreading” compelling—“I believe in Harold Bloom’s theory of misprision,” he told David Lipsky in 1996.81 Even more revealing is an aside

Wallace, Ostap Karmodi Interview. “Live with David Foster Wallace, Author of Infinite Jest”; Lipsky, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, 127. The “Byron exegesis” Wallace alludes to is presumably Bloom’s chapter on Byron in The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry (1971).

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within a 1990 letter to Steven Moore, in which Wallace admonished the naiveté of “Brat Pack” minimalism before aligning himself with a more historically informed approach to writing fiction: I think people who write “highbrow” stuff are just imprisoned in what they love, just like the celebs. Bloom (not Leopold or Allen) convinced me long ago that real reading is misprision anyway—if I can complete someone’s tessara [sic], cool.82

Bloom theorized the tessera ratio in terms of artistic “completion,” in which “[a] poet antithetically ‘completes’ his precursor, by so reading the parent poem as to retain its terms but to mean them in another sense, as though the precursor had failed to go far enough.”83 But while Bloom frames such a relationship as neurotically antagonistic, with the “strong poet” (73) anxiously seeking to supersede an earlier influence, Wallace emptied the anxiety out of the term tessera. The offhanded way in which he invoked Bloom’s conceptualization—“if I can complete someone else’s tessara, cool”— testifies to the radical demystification of literary influence that Wallace’s work routinely enacts and which has been traced across this book. Contra Bloom, Wallace’s project of tessera-completion was neither shameful nor subservient. Extending the artistic agenda set forth by an earlier artist was a highly productive means by which to conceive of his own fiction, as the intertextual engagements within this chapter have shown. Wallace’s reading of Percy picked up on glimpses of a connection between existentialism and boredom, which were later expanded within his own fiction, as well as on Percy’s account of the intersection of popular culture and personal transformation, which Wallace used repeatedly throughout his own work, often pushing Percy’s method to extreme ends. Through such instances of tessera-like completion, Wallace was both extending the metaphysical premises animating Percy’s fiction, and trying to determine whether they still had purchase in contemporary American culture. Similarly, though Wallace took the central premise of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction—which he echoed in his beliefs about the “persistence of the religious impulse”—he also put historical pressure on her convictions, dramatizing how much more complicated this “impulse” had become by the turn of the twenty-­first century. As I showed in the comparative reading of “Philosophy and Mirror of Nature” alongside

David Foster Wallace, Letter to Steven Moore (1990), Container 1.2–1.3, Steven Moore’s David Foster Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 14.

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“Everything that Rises Must Converge,” Wallace also picked up on O’Connor’s treatment of atheism, pushing her characters’ secular depravity even further, into a world where the senseless death of a child occurs in the complete absence of a religious frame of reference. Through such appropriations, Wallace’s fiction thus “retains [the] terms” of earlier writers such as Percy and O’Connor, but modifies their projects in order to respond to contemporary cultural concerns.

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African-American Appropriations: Race, Hip-Hop, and Popular Anthropology The “erasure of difference”: Wallace and race There is a comical and highly revealing exchange in Wallace’s 2000 interview with Buffalo News journalist Mark Schechner. Replying to a question about his “surprising” and unexpected admiration for the work of Cynthia Ozick, Wallace joked about their essential similarities: “[W]e’re both politically active Jewish females. I don’t see the problem.”1 He went on to explain the paradoxical appeal of Ozick’s fiction, stressing that despite being “about the goyist gentile anybody’s ever met,” Wallace could “feel in [his] nerve endings the kind of stuff she is writing about” (109). This was because, for Wallace, her fiction—unlike the work of some other writers from unfamiliar racial or ethnic backgrounds—transcended cultural differences: “In reading her I feel an utter erasure of difference, which does not happen to me with a lot of other writers from different cultural backgrounds. I can appreciate the peering across the chasm at another culture, but with Ozick that chasm just vanishes” (109). Wallace’s admiration for such an “erasure of difference” encapsulates the orientation to world literature that previous chapters have explored. Again, he perceives specific cultural content as a mere surface-­level dissimilarity that should not distract from a text’s instantiation of universal truths and themes. Here as elsewhere, Wallace’s emphasis is on a literary work’s resonance for American audiences, an interpretive stance at odds with contemporary world literature theory’s “insist[ence] on textual alterity” and its attempt to preserve the often unsettling Otherness of global texts.2 As previous chapters have argued, such a stance is a logical extension of Wallace’s involvement in Alcoholics Anonymous, which encourages members to see past trivial differences in order to find broader and more significant commonalities. The narrator of Infinite Jest points out that one of AA’s central Mark Schechner, “Behind the Watchful Eyes of Author David Foster Wallace,” in Conversations with David Foster Wallace, 108. Pizer, The Idea of World Literature, 20.

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exhortations is to “try to Identify instead of Compare” (345), since “Compar[ing]” ultimately reinforces the toxic self-­involvement and exceptionalism that can rationalize substance abuse. Another section of Infinite Jest frames this same principle in light of the “Boston AA jargon . . . Y.E.T.,” an apt acronym for the expression “You’re Eligible Too,” a denial-­buster for those who compare others’ ghastly consequences to their own so far, the point being to get you to see the street-­guy with socks for gloves drinking Listerine at 0700h. as just slightly farther down the same road you’re on, when you Come In. Or something close to that. (1062)

In the same way that Wallace elided other forms of cultural difference, he preserved the essential structure of this AA insight in his conceptualization of race. While acknowledging that being “about the goyist gentile anybody’s ever met” might make his admiration for writers such as Cynthia Ozick seem counterintuitive, he was adamant that certain kinds of fiction could make the cultural “chasm” of separation simply “vanish.” Wallace believed that the literary conjuring tricks that could enact this disappearance were present in Ozick’s fiction, but he also read many other authors in precisely this way. His reading of nineteenth-­century Russian literature, for instance, looks beyond the “distractions” of culture to see its deeper ideological overlaps with contemporary America, while his review of Borges: A Life suggests that the specific cultural and biographical content of Borges’s fiction also “vanish[es]” in light of his technical brilliance: “the stories so completely transcend their motive cause that the biographical facts become, in the deepest and most literal way, irrelevant” (294). For Wallace, the ideal way of experiencing world literature involved looking beyond superficial cultural and ethnic differences, in order to locate deeper commonalities. His comments on Ozick thus reveal an enduring tension within his own relationship to globally diverse texts: While Wallace was deeply invested in world literature, he had little interest in ethnic identity, in voyeuristically “peering across the chasm” to see an unknown culture. This chapter analyses Wallace’s strange depictions of race and ethnicity, exploring the ways in which his reading of world literature was shaped by various underlying cultural assumptions. It focuses on the structural similarities between Wallace negotiations with African-American culture and his engagements with other global regions, showing how he reimagined the alien qualities of Africa in relation to the commodifying cycles of American popular culture, fusing a popular anthropological discourse with a strategic mode of artistic appropriation.

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Although Wallace’s fiction and nonfiction contain numerous reflections on racial identity, there have been surprisingly few scholarly investigations into this aspect of his work. Samuel Cohen has written on Wallace and race, and Kathleen Fitzpatrick, in The Anxiety of Obsolescence, discusses Wallace’s approach to race in formulating the provocative thesis that “[c]anonical postmodernist fiction works to . . . retreat into the purity of universal white masculinity.”3 Emily Russell’s 2010 article “Some Assembly Required: The Embodied Politics of Infinite Jest” makes passing reference to the ways in which “the discourses of medicine, entertainment, religion, race, gender, and sexuality operate in a network to construct how we understand bodies,” though it ultimately focuses on Infinite Jest’s description of athletic bodies rather than its representations of race.4 Yet Wallace was acutely self-­ consciousness about his own racial identity: “I . . . am resoundingly and in all ways white,” he declares in “Authority and American Usage,” while in “A Supposedly Fun Thing,” he describes the way that overseas travel would invariably make him “newly and unpleasantly conscious of being an America, the same way I’m always suddenly conscious of being white every time I’m around non-­white people.”5 Along with such self-­consciousness, there are also several highly curious racial comments and portrayals through his work. Wallace was sentimentally proud of his Welsh/Scottish ancestry (in 1989 he sent a postcard to David Markson that featured the Wallace clan tartan, while he also admitted to having wept patriotically at the end of Mel Gibson’s Braveheart), he was concerned that he would be perceived “as anti-Semitic” because he didn’t approve of the narrative arc of Schindler’s List, and in graduate school, wrote “a long novella . . . about a wasp who passes himself off as Jewish.”6 Furthermore, Jonathan Franzen’s infamous 1996 essay “Perchance

Samuel Cohen, “The Whiteness of David Foster Wallace,” in Postmodern Literature and Race, eds. Len Platt and Sara Upstone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015): 228–43; Kathleen Fitzpatrick, The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006), 218. For a sustained analysis of Wallace and whiteness, see Tara Morrissey and Lucas Thompson, “ ‘The Rare White at the Window’: A Reappraisal of Mark Costello and David Foster Wallace’s Signifying Rappers,” Journal of American Studies 49, no. 1 (2015): 77–97. 4 Emily Russell, “Some Assembly Required: The Embodied Politics of Infinite Jest,” Arizona Quarterly 66, no. 2 (2010): 155. 5 David Foster Wallace, “Authority and American Usage,” 102; Wallace, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” 310. 6 Wallace, “Authority and American Usage,” Consider the Lobster, 102; Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, 168, 173. Wallace also wore a scarf in the Wallace-­ family tartan, and owned a painting of a Scottish battle scene, a gift from his father. Max, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, 164, 318. There are also many Yiddish words and phrases—such as “nudnik,” “schlemiel,” “kvetch,” “schmuck,” and “kismet”—throughout Wallace’s work. 3

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to Dream” includes a piece of correspondence from Wallace that laments the ways in which mainstream culture has “alienated” white males, a sentiment that inflects many of Wallace’s opinions on race.7 Wallace’s letter argues that while “tribal writers can feel the loneliness and anger and identify themselves with their subculture,” the fact that “[w]hite males are the mainstream culture” means that they operate from a far more isolated cultural position: “So why shouldn’t we be angry, confused, lonely white males who write at and against the culture?” (51, Wallace’s emphasis). Wallace’s troubling thesis here is that while writers such as Cynthia Ozick have the advantage of aligning themselves with a distinct identity position, “[w]hite males” face the more challenging predicament of needing to critique the culture from within. In addition, Wallace’s 1996 Premiere essay on David Lynch asks “Why are Lynch’s movies all so white?” before suggesting that “[t]he likely answer involves the fact that Lynch’s movies are essentially apolitical,” while his 2001 essay on American usage discusses both his classroom explanation of the differences between “Black English and White English”—an explanation, he notes, that resulted in “more than one colleague profess[ing] to find my spiel ‘racially insensitive’ ”— and the “official complaint” lodged by one “black undergraduate” who was offended by Wallace’s account of such usage differences.8 Although Wallace’s essay goes to great lengths to mount what is, for the most part, a convincing justification for such a “spiel,” his classroom speech is nevertheless clumsily phrased, and as he later admits, “rhetorically naïve” about the complex investment of identity within politically marginalized usage.9 The politics embedded within black American usage would surely have been explored in greater detail in the journalistic assignment Wallace explored in the months leading up to his death. In the spring of 2008, GQ offered Wallace the chance to write a piece on Barack Obama and political rhetoric, which Wallace seriously considered, despite his precarious mental state. In a letter to Bonnie Nadell, he indicated that if he did end up taking the assignment, he would need “close, candid access to a couple of Obama’s junior speech guys for a couple days BEFORE they start serious work on whatever

Jonathan Franzen, “Perchance to Dream: In the Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels,” Harper’s Magazine (April 1996), 35–54, 51. Revealingly, Franzen excised this part of Wallace’s letter when he reprinted the essay, as “Why Bother?” in How to Be Alone. 8 Wallace, “David Lynch Keeps His Head,” 189 (Wallace’s emphasis); Wallace, “Authority and American Usage,” 110, 109, 116. 9 Ibid., 279. While at Amherst, Wallace had a similar complaint lodged against him. D.T. Max reports that one of Wallace’s Sabrina parodies, “about cossetted students at Antebellum Amherst arriving with their slaves drew a protest from the Black Student Union.” Max, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, 312. 7

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speeches O is going to give at the convention.”10 Wallace’s article on John McCain, for Rolling Stone, explored some of the linguistic complexities surrounding American political discourse, but this particular assignment would surely have given Wallace the chance to address in more depth his thesis that “Standard Written English”—which in “Authority and American Usage” Wallace acknowledged may as well be called “Standard White English”—is “the dialect our nation uses to talk to itself ” (108–9). Presumably, Wallace’s article would also have drawn on his extensive knowledge of what he labeled “Standard Black English” and its dialectical variants, as well as scholarly perspectives on black usage. Wallace was clearly familiar with this scholarship: In the same essay, he recalls telling a student that “there are great books by scholars of Black English, and I’ll help you find some and talk about them with you if you want” (109). In fact, Wallace’s essay goes on to reference a number of prominent black intellectuals, including John Edgar Wideman, Henry Louis Gates, and Cornel West, all of whose “books are full of totally ass-­kicking SWE” (109). Wallace’s article on American usage also points out that SWE is strategically deployed by “many African-Americans who’ve become successful and important in US culture . . . that’s why [Martin Luther] King’s and [Malcolm] X’s and [Jesse] Jackson’s speeches are in SWE” and “why [Toni] Morrison’s and [Maya] Angelou’s and [James] Baldwin’s” novels also use the formal dialect, which again would likely have been a prominent theme in his profile of Barack Obama. Beyond his interest in Black American usage, there are many strange racial asides and portrayals within his work. Wallace was seemingly unafraid of exploiting racial stereotypes for comic purposes. Infinite Jest, for instance, contains several primitivist caricatures of “bug-­eyed natives,” as in Orin’s theory that the paraphernalia surrounding American football—“the high-­tech padding and garish Lycra and complex play-­terminology”—masks deeper primal fears, “[b]ecause the bug-­eyed native’s lurking just under the surface, we know. The bug-­eyed spear-­rattling grass-­skirted primitive, feeding virgins to Popogatapec and afraid of planes” (243).11 The narrator again comically

David Foster Wallace, Email to Bonnie Nadell (June 10, 2008), Container 1.3, Bonnie Nadell’s David Foster Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 11 The “Popogatapec” mentioned in this section most likely refers to “Popocatépetl,” a mountain in Central Mexico that is widely believed to have been the site of Aztec ritual virgin sacrifices, but it is unclear whether the mistake here is Wallace’s or Orin’s. Incidentally, the same Aztec practice is alluded to in “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky,” where Wallace wonders whether there is “really any difference between what we call faith and some primitive tribe’s sacrificing virgins to volcanoes because they believe it’ll produce good weather” (259–60). 10

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invokes primitivist clichés in his claim that “newer Boston AAs” tend to wear “an expression like that of bug-­eyed natives confronted suddenly with a Zippo lighter” (350), shocked at the efficacy of the recovery program. Indeed, the very notion of cross-­cultural interaction is mined for its comic potential at several points within the novel, as in Jim Struck and Keith Freer’s lecherous prediction “that the Quebecois Jr. Wightman girls were normally sequestered and saw very few coed venues and would be available for broadening intercultural relations of all kinds” (853). But while the aforementioned references to “grass-­skirted primitive[s]” are left intentionally vague, Wallace invokes a more specific cultural reference point in the narrator’s description of a heavily one-­sided E.T.A. tennis exhibition match against a visiting Mozambican team, noting that “there’d been an ugly xeno-­racist mood among some of the spectators and patrons, a couple of whom cheerily compared the meet to Mussolini’s tanks rolling over Ethiopian spearchuckers” (853). The comparison is clearly intended as a dark joke, but unlike the previous examples, here Wallace distances himself from charges of cultural insensitivity by putting the remark in the mouths of unnamed “spectators and patrons.” In fact, the same distancing device is used frequently in Infinite Jest, which records both subtle and overt forms of racism: There are numerous occasions in which individual characters use racist epithets, such as “nigger” (857), “Orientoid tongues” (767), “ragheads” (886), “bugeyed fucking spic” (533), and “Orientals” (467). Almost all these examples are taken from passages in which Wallace uses free indirect discourse, and thus are clearly distinct from the narrator’s voice; in fact, after one such instance of the word “nigger” (857), Wallace further emphasizes this distance by directing the reader to an endnote that simply reads “Sic.” (1026).12 Wallace also preserves a sense of distance through a revealing description of Joelle’s habit of noticing black American mannerisms and expressions. In addition to observing that “Holmes” (708) is “[a]pparently the current colored word for other coloreds”—here Wallace is careful to point out that Joelle’s “verbal attitudes toward black people are dated and unconsciously derisive”—the narrator reports that “[i]t’s a Boston-­colored thing on Commitments to make all speech a protracted apostrophe to some absent ‘Jim,’ Joelle’s observed in a neutral sociologic way” (1054). Though many of Wallace’s observations on race and culture in Infinite Jest might charitably be seen as “neutral sociologic” observations, one particular

The short story “Oblivion,” from Wallace’s 2004 collection of the same name, also touches on racist perspectives via free indirect discourse. At one point, the (ostensibly male) narrator describes how an unwed mother has become “a kind of cautionary tale” to his daughter and her friends, “one of her children being plainly interracial.” Wallace, “Oblivion,” in Oblivion, 193.

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section of the novel seems more directly autobiographical. In this section, the narrator—who is in many ways a proxy for Wallace himself—details some of the “exotic new facts” (200) he has acquired during his time at a halfway house. One of these discoveries is “[t]hat black and Hispanic people can be as big or bigger racists than white people, and can get even more hostile and unpleasant when this realization seems to surprise you” (200). This aside contains a similarly comic element, conjuring an image of the hapless narrator being violently introduced to this particular cultural truth, as does a later vignette involving Ken Erdedy and Roy Tony, which is charged with unspoken racial tensions. This latter scene comically exploits such tensions by dramatizing Erdedy’s discomfort at the AA instruction to hug a black man who is twice his size: But then a tall heavy African-American fellow with a gold incisor and perfect vertical cylinder of African-American hairstyle peeled away from a sort of group-­hug nearby, he’d spotted Erdedy, and the fellow came over and established himself right in front of Erdedy, spreading the arms of his fatigue jacket for a hug, stooping slightly and leaning in toward Erdedy’s personal trunk-­region . . . . “What it is,” Roy said. The big fellow now had his handshake-­hand behind his neck and was pretending to feel the back of his neck, which Erdedy didn’t know was a blatant dis. (505)

Wallace draws comedy from Erdedy’s racial discomfort: The scene’s humor arises from both the sedulous, free-­indirect replication of Erdedy’s carefully chosen descriptors (such as the reference to Tony’s “AfricanAmerican hairstyle”) and his later concession to engage in “one of those intricate multiple-­handed ethnic handshakes if you’ll bear with my inexperience with that sort of handshake” (505). The scene ends with a confrontation that replicates the conclusion of Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” discussed in Chapter  5. Roy Tony exposes Erdedy’s racial insensitivity by reversing the terms of the encounter— “Don’t even try and tell me I’m coming over feeling comfortable about trying to hug on your James-River-Traders-­wearing-Calvin-Klein-­aftershavesmelling-­goofy-ass motherfucking ass” (506)—after which Erdedy finally hugs Tony so enthusiastically that “it looked like [he] was trying to climb him” (507). A similar sense of racial provocation is present in Infinite Jest’s Wardine chapter. This violent narrative of domestic abuse, set in the Brighton Projects and rendered in faux-­ebonics, dates back to 1986 and according to Stephen J. Burn’s chronology, was the first chapter of the novel that Wallace

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wrote.13 Wallace was extraordinarily proud of this extract (which he titled “Las Meninas”), and in 1989, he asked agent Bonnie Nadell to send it out to various literary magazines, including, “for a joke,” to The New Yorker, implying that the magazine’s upper-­middle-class, mostly white audience would be horrified by the story’s graphic depiction of black poverty.14 A similarly provocative sentiment is present in Marlon Bain’s comments, in Infinite Jest, on the racially motivated violence that renders organized sport irrelevant. Bain instructs Helen Steeply to pay no attention to Orin’s defense of football as a ritualized substitute for armed conflict. Armed conflict is plenty ritualized on its own, and since we have real armed conflict (take a spin through Boston’s Roxbury and Mattapan districts some evening) there is no need or purpose for a substitute. (1047)

Such examples reveal a more incendiary dimension to Wallace’s treatment of race, in its attempt at exposing an unconscious privileging of white experience in contemporary American culture. As with Wallace’s characterization of Gerhardt Schtitt as a grotesquely stereotypical, Hollywood-­fascist German, the comic aspect of such representations rely on particular audience assumptions. Wallace routinely told interviewers that his imagined reader was “basically a person pretty much like myself,” telling David Lipsky that his projected readership were in all likelihood “mostly white, upper middle class or upper class, [and] obscenely well educated.”15 (Of course, a further, deeply ingrained assumption was that Wallace’s imagined audience was fundamentally American.) There is an important sense in which positing such an audience gave Wallace the freedom to include the kind of culturally problematic representations outlined above. Writing for an American, “mostly white” imagined audience seemingly meant that his work did not have to obsess over what Wallace’s essay “Authority and American Usage” called “the tyranny of Political Correctness” (332), a form of discourse that he elsewhere labeled “increasingly absurd and dogmatic.”16

Burn, A Reader’s Guide to Infinite Jest, xii. David Foster Wallace, Letter to Bonnie Nadell (1989), Container 1.1, Bonnie Nadell’s David Foster Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 15 Lipsky, Although of Course, 82. Wallace’s emphasis. 16 Wallace, “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky,” 273. Wallace also included a pointed gibe at political correctness in his essay on John McCain, lampooning the “Young Voters” demographic that includes “the sensitive men and angry womyn of the PC Left” (188). 13 14

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Instead, sharply drawn racial stereotypes that were risible to Wallace would also make sense to his readers. The various representations of non-Americans that have been explored in previous chapters—from the absurd caricatures of Germanness in Infinite Jest to the representations of Latin Americans and continental Europeans throughout his fiction—only make sense when read in light of Wallace’s projected audience. Indeed, it frequently seems as if Wallace is parodying American’s ignorance about other cultures either by self-­consciously reproducing Hollywood tropes or offering blithe racial generalizations, as in Infinite Jest’s description of Kenyan prorector Tony Nwangi, whose laugh has “the slight teakettle-­wheeze to it of the laughs of large black men the world over” (1075). Of course, the irreverent posture Wallace assumes on racial questions, along with his seeming indifference to causing offense, meshes with the various forms of postmodern irreverence and playfulness that runs throughout his work. But my argument in this chapter is that such problematic representations of race and culture speak to a deeper strain of American insularity underlying Wallace’s writing, a reading that becomes clear in light of a close analysis of three key texts: the short story “Another Pioneer,” the representation of Iranian IRS agent Sheila NetiNeti in The Pale King and Wallace’s sorely overlooked 1989 study Signifying Rappers. Analyzing these three texts reveals the broader implications of such racial representation for Wallace’s orientation toward other cultures, and highlights the assumptions underlying his reading of world literature.

“Another Pioneer” and popular anthropology In late 2001, while working on the short stories that would eventually comprise Oblivion (2004), Wallace told editor Michael Pietsch that the draft version of “Another Pioneer” was his favorite piece of fiction in the projected collection: “In my own small opinion,” he wrote, “ ‘Another P.’ is actually the best of the lot.”17 It may be that Wallace had deeply personal reasons for choosing this particular text—in a 2001 interview, he selected “Little Expressionless Animals,” from Girl with Curious Hair as his favorite ever published story, an equally unexpected choice—but it is nonetheless worth considering why Wallace found this story so appealing. My claim is that “Another Pioneer” encapsulates a particular kind of reading of race and

David Foster Wallace, Letter to Michael Pietsch (December 6, 2001), Container 3.5, Little, Brown & Co. David Foster Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

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culture that is implicitly present throughout Wallace’s work. By reading the text alongside his fascination with Joseph Campbell’s version of comparative mythology, my analysis clarifies Wallace’s broader orientation in relation to questions of race and culture. “Another Pioneer” is an extended faux-­anthropological parable, an origin myth that attempts to locate the source of postmodern self-­awareness. The story’s complicated framing device reproduces a popular nineteenth-­century novelistic structure: The narrator of Wallace’s story received the parable from a friend’s retelling, who himself overheard it being discussed by two strangers. At the heart of “Another Pioneer” is an “extremely primitive” (119) tribal village of unknown location that discovers in its midst an all-­knowing “überchild” (128), capable of answering any conceivable question. Thanks to the child’s knowledge, the village experiences a rapid “metastatic evolution that would normally have taken thousands of years and countless paleolithic generations to attention” (124). But after a catastrophic revelation—which in the dominant “epitatic variant” (126) comes from a mysterious conversation with a neighboring tribe’s shaman—the child becomes cripplingly self-­ conscious and can no longer give straightforward answers to the villagers’ questions. (One of the story’s chief ironies, of course, is that the narrator himself is a perfect example of the intractable self-­awareness that Wallace saw as endemic to the postmodern condition.) Instead of possessing what Wallace characterized in “Getting Away . . .” as a child’s natural “regally innocent solipsism of like Bishop Berkeley’s God,” the village boy is plunged into disabling self-­doubt.18 Fearful of the child’s power to destroy the village, “and perhaps even the entire universe (the two being scarcely distinguished in the paleolithic mind)” (137), the tribe ultimately destroy both the village and the boy in a “great rapacious fire” (140). In the story’s final image, the flames that fan out to encompass the entire village—and, by extension, all subsequent cultures—represent the endlessly recursive forms of self-­ consciousness that in the early-­twenty-first century are all but inescapable. The closing sentence characterizes self-­consciousness as a rapidly spreading fire that cannot be outrun: one keen-­eyed child, hanging extrorse in its sling on its mother’s back, saw blue hanging smoke in the dense fronds behind them, and low-­caste stragglers, turning round at the long column’s rear, could make out the red lace of a fire seen through many layers of trees’ moving leaves, a great

Wallace, “Getting Away from Already Pretty Much Being Away From it All,” 89.

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rapacious fire that grew and gained ground no matter how hard the high castes drove them. (140)

Animating Wallace’s faux-­mythic narrative is a strangely generalized sense of Otherness, in which elements from various global cultures are conflated into a single “primitive” abstraction. The narrator’s confused blending of cultures and time periods is often farcical: The storyteller cannot decide whether the narrative takes place in “paleolithic or perhaps Mesolithic” prehistory, but assures us that its events took place “terrifically long ago” (119). The prehistoric setting shrouds the story in mystery, as do the frequent reminders that the “exemplum” (117) is being relayed third- or even fourth-­ hand. The narrative is also geographically ambiguous, taking place in what is vaguely described as a “jungle or rainforest region of the world, perhaps Asia or South America” (118), mirroring Neal’s similar cultural incertitude in “Good Old Neon,” from the same collection, when he notices “the little African or Indian drum things and little figurines with (sometimes) exaggerated sex characteristics on the [psychologist’s] shelf ” (162). The odd jumble of cultural reference points in “Another Pioneer” adds further ambiguity: The narrator uses a shamanic term from Eskimo culture (“malefic angekok” [128]), makes multiple references to Eastern spiritualism (“in the precise spot corresponding to the ajna or sixth Hindic chakra” [129]) and invokes the “cranial obeah” (129) of West African folklore. Furthermore, while references to “dik-­dik” (120) and “temperamental Yam Gods” seem to imply a Southern African cultural setting, later allusions to “ethical fatwa” (122), “clitoridectomy” (132), an “ampoule of blow-­dart phytotoxin” (122), and the use of the term “Thane” (121)—a medieval, English servant— complicate this reading, adding to the confusion of cultures present in the story. In part, Wallace uses the narrator’s esoteric and diverse reference points to parody postmodern cosmopolitanism, in the same way that “E Unibus Pluram” flattens out cultural distinctions to imagine a single plane of experience. But Wallace’s deeper motivation here was to use such confusion in order to construct a pancultural stereotype of primitivism that could then be comically exploited. One instance of such comic exploitation occurs in a mordant image that rivals even the most grotesque Hollywood representations of “primitive” culture. A particularly macabre witch doctor is described as spending most of his time conducting private necromantic rituals that involve playing crude musical arrangements with human tibias and femurs on

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rows of differently sized human skulls like sort of ghastly paleolithic marimbas, as well as apparently using skulls for both his personal stew pot and his commode. (125–26)

The story’s multiple references to a Paleolithic “consultant caste,” who are paid to advise villagers on how to maximize the efficacy of their questions, is similarly humorous. This particular caste foreshadow the field of contemporary financial and legal consultancy, and in the wake of the “überchild” ’s transformation Wallace expands on their role in the “village’s economy” (131), describing some “especially costly elite-­caste seminars in which the consultants theorize about just what fatal question the dissimilated magus or jeune fille doree might have whispered” (135). As with the descriptions of “bug-­eyed natives” throughout Infinite Jest, here Wallace plays with primitivist stereotypes for their comic potential. Wallace’s odd representations of culture throughout “Another Pioneer” are grounded in the popularizations of comparative mythology written by Joseph Campbell. Marshall Boswell glancingly acknowledges that Wallace’s story is “couched in the scholarly jargon of archetypal hero cycles popularized by Joseph Campbell and others,” but it is worth noting just how much Wallace’s narrative methodology owes to Campbell’s work.19 Wallace had an abiding interest in myth and cultural archetypes, which strongly influenced his understanding of race. Two of Wallace’s earlier short-­story collections also include faux-­mythic narratives (“John Billy” in Girl with Curious Hair, and “Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko” in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men), while Wallace also had an interest in Jungian archetypes, claiming to have regularly “fenc[ed]” with his psychiatrist “over the finer points of Jungian theory” in his Granada House testimonial, and citing the “broad archetypes & mythopoeia inherited from Jung” in “The Empty Plenum.” Moreover, an unidentified speaker at Wallace’s 2008 memorial service confirmed this interest, describing Wallace’s admiration for a Jung quotation—“Bidden or not, God is present”—and pointing out that Jung is an important figure in the history of Alcoholics Anonymous.20 (Karen Green has also highlighted Marshall Boswell, “ ‘The Constant Monologue Inside Your Head’: Oblivion and the Nightmare of Consciousness,” in A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, 160. Boswell’s treatment in this essay is the only current scholarly analysis of “Another Pioneer.” 20 Wallace, “A Resident’s Story”; Various, “Memories of Wallace,” transcript of a memorial service held for David Foster Wallace on October 26, 2008, at Underwood Park, Normal, IL. Online access: lascauzreview.com/2013/09/memories-­of-dfw/; Wallace, “The Empty Plenum,” 106. 19

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Wallace’s personal connection to Jung, noting that near the end of his life, Wallace was anticipating “a Jungian rebirth.”21) Revealing Wallace’s more general interest in myth, “Getting Away . . .” contains a memorable description of draft horses in motion, which Wallace claimed “look mythic when they run” (115), while “A Supposedly Fun Thing” conceives of the sea as a frightening mythic presence: “a primordial nada, bottomless, [with] depths inhabited by cackling tooth-­studded things rising toward you at the rate a feather falls” (262). But Wallace was particularly interested in using mythic archetypes to explain contemporary phenomena. He described Wittgenstein’s shifting perspective on language as constituting “a real Book-­of-Genesis-­type tragic fall”; emphasized the “generic-­myth structure” of Tracy Austin’s memoir; and in the aforementioned story “Tri-Stan,” used various Greek myths as counterpoints to Entertainment industry narcissism.22 Moreover, his 2000 review-­essay “Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama” situates Philibert Schogt’s The Wild Numbers (1999) and Apostolos Doxiadis’s Uncle Petros & Goldbach’s Conjecture (1992) as belonging to a pop-­science genre whose “allegorical template” is “classically Tragic, its hero a kind of Prometheus-Icarus figure whose high-­altitude genius is also hubris and Fatal Flaw.”23 Wallace’s review argues that this genre should be understood as self-­consciously updating mythic archetypes, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to Aesop’s Fables. He saw Uncle Petros as being particularly ambitious in its modernizing of mythic structures, at one point characterizing the novel as “a cross between the Myth of Icarus and Goethe’s Werther” (226). More specifically, Wallace argued that Doxiadis’s novel’s “allegorical touchstone” was the Greek myth of Minos, using Joseph Campbell’s gloss on the myth to uncover the “certain kind of alienated selfishness” (234) present in the figure of Petros. Revealingly, Wallace quotes a lengthy extract from Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces in support of his own interpretation of Petros’s underlying motivations: The return of the bull should have symbolized Minos’ selfless submission to the function of his role. By the sacrilege of the refusal of the rite [of Quoted in Max, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, 298. McCaffery, “An Expanded Interview with David Foster Wallace,” 44; Wallace, “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart,” in Consider the Lobster, 146. Wallace also invoked Genesis in “Authority and American Usage,” noting that language is “what separates us from animals; Genesis 11:7–10 and so on” (70), while his discussion of mathematics history in Everything and More is couched in similar language: “The Mentally Ill Mathematician seems now in some ways to be what the Knight Errant, Mortified Saint, Tortured Artist, and Mad Scientist have been for other eras: sort of our Prometheus, the one who goes to forbidden places and returns with gifts we can all use but he alone pays for.” Wallace, Everything and More, 6–7. 23 Wallace, “Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama,” in Both Flesh and Not, 212. 21 22

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sacrifice], however, the individual cuts himself as a unit off from the larger whole of the community. . . . He is the hoarder of the general benefit. He is the monster avid for the greedy rights of “my and mine.”24

In the same way that Campbell used the Minos narrative to embody a particular kind of universal self-­centeredness, Wallace uses the same mythic structure as a vehicle of literary interpretation, demonstrating how a contemporary novel had creatively amplified and updated an ancient myth. In fact, Wallace had a highly nuanced understanding of the way mythic structures can inform artistic texts, describing “the exformative associations” animating Kafka’s fiction as relying on “the primordial little-­kid stuff from which myths derive” (62) and praising David Lynch’s filmography for drawing on the “phylogenic myth and psychoanalytic schema and pop-­ cultural iconography” (199) that surround us. In his 1990 review of David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress, Wallace even went as far as claiming that contemporary American fiction needed to meld mythic structures with historical circumstance: I’m coming to accept that it’s the petrifiedly standard critical line w/r/t fiction these U.S. days: readers want stories about very particular persons with very particular qualities in very particular circumstances whose genesis must on some level be personally-­historic & psychological as well as “merely” intellectual or political or spiritual, pan-­human. The successful story “transcends its thoroughgoing individuality/idiosyncrasy via subsuming the peculiarities of character & circumstance to certain broad archetypes & mythopoeia inherited from Jung or Shakespeare or Homer or Freud or Skinner or Testament. (106)

For Wallace, Markson’s novel had come tantalizingly close to “transfiguring, dramatizing, mythologizing” (108, Wallace’s emphasis) the late-­capitalist predicament, which Wallace conceived of as an enduringly “primitive” culture with modern trappings, in which “guiltily passive solipsists & skeptics try to warm soft hands at the computer-­enhanced fire of data in an Information Age where received image & enforced eros replace active countenance or sacral mystery as ends, value, meaning” (108). Narrative itself was a crucial means of revealing this truth, with Wallace noting in “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young” that Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949; repr. Novato, CA: The New World Library, 2008), 11. Quoted by Wallace, 234.

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it’s so true it’s trite that human beings are narrative animals: every culture countenances itself as culture via a story, whether mythopoeic or politico-­economic; every whole person understands his lifetime as an organized, recountable series of events and changes with at least a beginning and middle. We need narrative like we need space-­time; it’s a built-­in thing.25

For Wallace, crafting narratives that explored the tension between “myth-­ making & myth-­worship” on the one hand, and “history & data” on the other was a productive way of engaging with postmodern culture. “Only in that opposition,” Wallace claimed, “can story enrich & transfigure & transcend explanation” (108). Though “The Empty Plenum” does not explicitly cite Joseph Campbell, Wallace’s reading of Campbell’s work underpins such grandiose claims. Wallace clearly found Campbell’s popularization of comparative mythology— which had enormous cultural currency in late-­twentieth-century America— enormously compelling. Robert Ellwood points out that Campbell “was probably the best known of all interpreters of myth to late twentieth-century Americans,” with bestsellers such as The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1949) and Myths to Live By (1972), as well as the widely viewed, posthumous PBS series, The Power of Myth, which first screened in 1988. Presumably, Wallace was attracted in part to what Ellwood labels as Campbell’s “deinstitutionalization of religion,” which he replaced with a more expansive, global perspective on spirituality. Campbell’s unconventional brand of spiritual awareness followed Freud’s lead in attempting to “uncover some of the truths disguised for us under the figures of religion and mythology by bringing together a multitude of not-­too-difficult examples and letting the ancient meaning become apparent of itself,” an approach that meshes with Wallace’s own profoundly ecumenical approach to spirituality.26 While previous chapters have examined Wallace’s significant engagements with Christian—and more specifically, Catholic—theology, he also had substantial investments in Eastern forms of spirituality and mysticism. The archives contain annotated books such as Paramananda’s A Practical Guide to Buddhist Meditation (1996) and Anthony de Mello’s Awareness (1990), and fellow writer George Saunders has described Wallace as “a great American Buddhist

Wallace, “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young,” 52. Robert Ellwood, The Politics of Myth: A Study of C.G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 135; Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, xii.

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writer, in the lineage of Whitman and Ginsberg.”27 (In 2000, Wallace told a friend that in Bloomington he enjoyed meditating “with weird cultish Sikh and Buddhist groups, most of whom are very crazy in a very attractive way.”28) Wallace’s collection also includes countless other vaguely spiritual titles, such as Neil A. Fiore’s The Now Habit (1989), Andrew Weil’s The Higher Mind: An Investigation of Drugs and the Higher Consciousness (1986), Timothy D. Wilson’s Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious (2002), Harold Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen to Good People (1983), and M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth (1978), among others. Wallace’s ecumenicalism closely aligns with Campbell’s approach, which drew on an endlessly diverse set of spiritual and cultural traditions for what they might offer the Western subject, without being unduly troubled by questions of cultural fidelity or anthropological veracity. Ellwood rightly points out that Campbell’s approach is an oddly “disembodied” one, attempting to uncover an entirely dehistoricized, “timeless story of eternal significance” (130). Just as Campbell’s work implicitly regarded “all myths [as] equal and interchangeable” (130), Wallace sought the broadest possible perspective on questions of religion, spirituality, and culture, looking for essential commonalities and “universal” spiritual truths, often at the expense of historical detail. Such an approach led naturally into a similarly “disembodied” perspective on racial difference. Though “peering across the chasm” was for Wallace an understandable reaction to racial difference, he was ultimately more inclined to look beyond superficial racial variance to find the Campbell-­like vantage point from which all races are essentially interchangeable actors in a “timeless story of eternal significance.” Campbell’s approach derived from French anthropologist Claude LeviStrauss (who, in turn, arrived at his ideas by way of Ferdinand de Saussure), particularly Levi-Strauss’s search for structural similarities between cultures. In Alan Barnard’s phrasing, this structuralist approach is “in its widest sense all about pattern: how things which at first glance appear to be unrelated actually form part of a system of interrelating parts.”29 Included in the archives is Wallace’s annotated edition of Campbell’s widely read 1972 monograph Myths to Live By, which, like many of the other texts explored within this book, Wallace read in part to source ideas for his own work. Wallace wrote several character names throughout the book that would later

Saunders, “Informal Remarks from the David Foster Wallace Memorial Service,” 54. David Foster Wallace, Letter to Rich C. (August 24, 2000). Quoted in Max, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, 257. 29 Alan Barnard, History and Theory in Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 127. 27 28

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be used in The Pale King—including “Fogle w/sub?” and “Harriet Candelaria vs. Shane Drinion”—and even, as late as 2006, considered “Net of Gems” as a possible title for the same novel. This latter phrase comes from Campbell’s discussion of Japanese mythology, where he defines the word “ji-­mu-ge” as “ ‘thing and thing: no division’: no separation between things,” noting that “[t] he analogy suggested is of a net of gems: the universe as a great spread-­out net with at every joint a gem, and each gem not only reflecting all the others but reflected in all.”30 While Wallace did not ultimately use “Net of Gems” as a title, this vivid image of interdependency relates in clear ways to many of the themes within The Pale King. Campbell’s dubious methodology and cultural assumptions strongly inform “Another Pioneer.” The narrator opens by suggesting that, within the terms of Campbell’s theory, the story is an outlier, having no real precedent and thereby possessing the power to speak to modern consciousness in a unique way: He points out that “the variant” does not “contain any formal Annunciation, Trickster Figures, archetypal Resurrection, nor any of certain other recognized elements of the cycle” (117). All of these terms are taken from Campbell’s work—as is the later term, “Threshold Experience” (119)— but though the narrator here insists on the unprecedented nature of the narrative, in reality, his précis jadedly invokes numerous underlying patterns or models, common to many myths. In fact, his approach is identical to Campbell’s in its structuralist search for cultural parallels: The dizzying array of cultural reference points mentioned above situate the retelling of the “mythopoeic cycle” (122) within a wider discourse of mythic storytelling. In one particularly giddy survey of human history, for instance, the narrator likens a character’s role to “the function which oracles, sorcerers, Attic choruses, Gaelic coronach, Senecan dumbshows, Plautian prologues and chatty Victorian narrators perform in various later cycles’ exempla” (129). He also describes the child’s “monstrous” transformation as “resonat[ing] with malignant-­self-­consciousness themes in everything from Genesis 3:7 to the self-­devouring Kirttimukha of the Skanda Purana to the Medousa’s reflective demise to Gödelian metalogic” (136), again positioning the narrative in light of an array of other myths. (Campbell himself asked a very similar question in Myths to Live By, wondering just “when and how” the human race turned from an “Oriental” to an “Occidental view of the relationship of the individual to his universe” [74].) The point here is that Wallace’s short story both parodies and perpetuates the kind of analysis present in Myths to Live By. This is because Campbell’s study is fundamentally concerned with making

Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By (New York: The Viking Press, 1972), 144. HRC, 36.3.

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connections across vastly different cultures and historical periods, a methodology that is now the object of ridicule and derision from contemporary anthropologists. Campbell viewed mythology as a timeless repository of universal wisdom, “everywhere the same, beneath its varieties of costume,” but critics point out that such wide-­ranging studies invariably gloss over the idiosyncrasies inherent within all forms of ritual.31 In fact, Campbell’s structuralist conceptualization of anthropology shares many similarities with the “Great Books” approach that is now widely shunned by world literature theorists: Both methodologies blithely erase cultural particularities in the hope of finding broader commonalities and shared themes. Likewise, Thomas Erikson’s characterization of anthropologists’ need to “to strike a balance between similarities and differences”—along with his suggestion that the “theoretical questions” of anthropological enquiry have “often revolved around the issue of universality versus relativism” (5)—mirrors an important principle of contemporary world literature scholarship. As Vilashini Cooppan urges, “[w]hat is needed in the field of world literature is a practice of reading that seeks difference as much as sameness,” an interpretive orientation that “preserves the distinct historical formation and trajectory, sometimes forbidding opacity and alienness” of global texts.32 A similarly comparativist approach is taken by pop-­anthropological texts such as Huston Smith’s The World’s Religions (1959) and Morris Berman’s Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West (1989), both of which Wallace read. It was surely such studies that Wallace had in mind when he comically phrased his journalistic report on the 1993 Illinois State Fair in light of popularizations of anthropological research. Wallace described his article as a piece of “pith-­helmeted anthropological reporting” (83), at one point drolly noting that “[n]o anthropologist worth his helmet would be without the shrewd counsel of a colorful local, and I’ve brought a Native Companion here for the day” (90). Both Coming to Our Senses and The World’s Religions deploy the long-­outdated, structuralist approach on which Campbell’s Myths to Live By is premised. A passing reference in The Pale King, to the “World Cultures” (93) course taken by David Cusk gives oblique expression to this particular reading interest of Wallace’s. His longstanding fascination with mythic structures and popular anthropology can also be detected in his notes on William Gass’s essay “Culture, Self, and Style,” collected in Habitations of the Word: Essays (1985)— Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 2. Thomas Hylland Erikson, Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology (Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2001), 5; Vilashini Cooppan, “The Ethics of World Literature: Reading Others, Reading Otherwise,” 38.

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Wallace highlighted many sections of Plato’s interpretation of myth from this essay and wrote “Myth in P” next to such chapters—as well as in the marginalia within his edition of Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (1983).33 Wallace’s admiration for this latter text is plain to see: His archived edition contains an enormous amount of underlining and annotations, revealing a Campbell-­esque obsession with discerning overlaps between AA doctrine and various cultural rituals and practices. Moreover, several pages compare Hyde’s ethnographic insights to Alcoholics Anonymous, as well as to specific characters from Infinite Jest. Wallace even went as far as contributing a blurb for the book’s 2007 reissue, gushing that “[n]o one who is invested in any kind of art can read The Gift and remain unchanged.” He also used a line from another of Hyde’s books—on irony as “the song of a bird who has grown to love its cage”—in “E Unibus Pluram” and numerous interview settings, as well as appropriating the analogy within Infinite Jest.34 Finally, he also included a lengthy quotation from The Gift in “Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama” to support a claim about artistic and scientific communities, suggesting that “most Science readers can already probably affirm and appreciate what Lewis Hyde’s The Gift” asserts about the presence of a “group mind” within such communities.35 My sense is that what most appealed to Wallace about such studies was their explanation of contemporary phenomena via reference to “world” culture, locating postmodern cultural symptoms within a broader temporal frame, in light of ancient expressions of myth and ritual. This impulse is present in surprising places throughout Wallace’s writing. An important annotation in Wallace’s copy of Thomas de Zengotita’s Mediated (2005), for instance, enthusiastically picks up on the author’s explanation of celebrity culture within a broad span of human history, with Wallace noting “Fame—in small tribe, everyone is famous,” while a key exchange between Marathe and Steeply in Infinite Jest situates contemporary entertainment in light of “multicultural Oriental myths” (528) and “francophone myth” (529).36 At its heart, “Another Pioneer” The Pale King also contains an important reference to French anthropologist Émile Durkheim’s landmark study, Suicide (1897). 34 Lewis Hyde, Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking (Dallas, TX: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture Press, 1986). Furthermore, one of Wallace’s asides in “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” is clearly influenced by his reading of Hyde. Wallace theorizes that “the reason why even a really beautiful, ingenious, powerful ad (of which there are a lot) can never be any kind of real art” is because “an ad has no status as a gift, i.e. it’s never really for the person it’s directed at” (289). 35 Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World (1979; repr. New York: Vintage Books, 2007), 104. Quoted by Wallace, 235. 36 David Foster Wallace, Annotations in Thomas de Zengotita’s Mediated, David Foster Wallace Archive, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 33

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attempted precisely this kind of anthropologically inspired explanation for the problem of excessive self-­consciousness. The story’s attempt at imagining a powerful myth-­of-origins, locating the genesis of modern self-­consciousness, was surely the reason why Wallace described it as a particular favorite.

Ms. Chahla Neti-Neti and Joseph Campbell The Pale King contains another important section that is indebted to Wallace’s enthusiasm for Joseph Campbell. In addition to considering “Net of Gems” as the novel’s title, Wallace also included an odd vignette concerning the improbably named IRS agent “Ms. F. Chahla Neti-Neti” (287), whose surname is lifted from a section of Myths to Live By that discusses the eighth-­century BCE Chandogya Upanishad. Campbell’s claim is that the advice given by “the gentle Brahmin Aruni to his son . . . ‘You, my dear Shvetaketu, you are It,’ ” encapsulates a realization common to numerous cultures: “that the mystery transcendent of all categories, names and forms, sentiments and thought, is to be realized as the ground of one’s own very being” (93). His interpretation hinges on the Sanskrit term Neti neti, which Campbell translates as “not that, not that” (93) and interprets as a key definition of the self. Wallace was clearly attracted to this idea, underlining this section and writing “Neti Neti” in the margin. Campbell’s dizzying survey of “The Confrontation of East and West” in this particular chapter is mirrored in David Wallace’s first impressions of Neti-Neti: he initially “guess[es]” that she “was upper-­caste Indian or Pakistani,” though it eventually emerges that Neti-Neti “turned out to be what she called Persian” (287). Along with her Sanskrit surname, this characterization furthers the sense of vague, Oriental Otherness—as with the similarly vague description of Asian culture in a retelling of a “strange little story” that “takes place in China or Korea or someplace like that” in “The Nature of the Fun”—that is repeatedly invoked throughout Wallace’s work and that is indicative of a broader indifference to the specifics of non-American cultures.37 This strategy also reproduces Joseph Campbell’s omnivorous approach to global culture, which cherry-­picks aspects of “primitive” mythology and religion that conform to certain pre-­existing assumptions about human culture. Several notes within the draft material surrounding the novel indicate that Wallace may have been interested in exploring notions of hybrid cultural identity: One list of character names refers to “Levin Acquistipace,” whose A similarly comical level of imprecision occurs later on in the retelling, when Wallace refers to the “Imperial Sino-Korean Army or something like that.” Wallace, “The Nature of the Fun,” Both Flesh and Not, 195, 196.

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surreal confluence of identities is hinted at in Wallace’s brief description of Acquistipace as “a blond Filipino Jew,” while other character names listed include “Bithia” (which Wallace notes is “Egyptian, it’s in the Bible”) and “Uriel (Spanish—angel).”38 But it is the characterization of Chahla Neti-Neti that is ultimately the most problematic racial representation in The Pale King.39 As Brian McHale notes, the scene involving David Wallace and Neti-Neti is “thoroughly politically incorrect” in its seemingly unconscious deployment of offensive tropes surrounding Middle Eastern culture.40 To begin with, NetiNeti is given “the sobriquet ‘Iranian Crisis’ ” (287), an early indication of the low-­esteem in which she is held by her fellow IRS agents and yet another indication of the comic impulse underlying many of Wallace’s strange racial portrayals. Furthermore, Wallace’s physical description of “the ethnic lady” (290) conforms with pejorative, pop-­culture representations—Neti-Neti has “a creamily dark Persian woman’s complexion” that appears “dark grey” in her IRS badge photo, which “exaggerated the wide-­setness of her eyes to that in the ID photo she looked almost like a puma or some other strange kind of feline predator” (288–89)—as does the characterization of Neti-Neti’s subservient stance toward Western males: Wallace describes her “initial greeting” as “verbally effusive and deferential” (289). Wallace also had no qualms about invoking Iranian “gender codes, which I knew were especially rigid in the Middle East,” or with portraying her as sexually promiscuous, noting that “she seemed to emerge from a different wiggler’s housing unit almost every morning during the month of August 1985” (296). Wallace’s portrayal thus perpetuates various Orientalist tropes, participating in what Edward Said calls the “remarkably persistent . . . association between the Orient and sex.”41 Indeed, the characterization of Neti-Neti reveals the ongoing relevance of Said’s observation about pop-­culture representations of “the Arab,” as being “associated either with lechery or bloodthirsty dishonesty” (286). A similar preoccupation with sexuality and the Middle East is present in Wallace’s 1990 review of David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress. Though Wallace was clearly enamored with the novel—in another setting he described Wittgenstein’s Mistress as “pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country”—he was flummoxed by the strange portrayal of its central David Foster Wallace, Materials related to The Pale King, Container 26.4, David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 39 Wallace’s drafts indicate that he also considered the names “Parviz Neti-Neti” and “Vina Neti-Neti.” 40 Brian McHale, “The Pale King, or The White Visitation,” in A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, 198. 41 Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Routledge, 1978), 309. 38

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character, Kate.42 For Wallace, part of this strangeness had to do with Kate’s precarious ontological status: Her “existence itself,” Wallace argued, “is that of an atomic fact, her loneliness metaphysically ultimate.”43 But equally troubling was the way that Markson used Kate as a way of interrogating various theories and constructions of gender, a strategy that Wallace claims is best understood with reference to mythic archetypes. His review is full of references to various myths—Wallace invokes such precedents as “Clytemnestra & Agamemnon” (90), “Helen of Troy/Hisarlik” (97), “Achilles” (94) and the Genesis account of the Fall—and is entirely self-conscious about “the comparative stock rubrics” (105) with which he and Markson are approaching questions of gender. Alongside his interpretation of Kate in light of “Attic & Christian reductions of women” (103), Wallace also located an ethnic precedent for the novel’s representation of women: Apparently Shiite women walk swaddled & veiled in deference to their responsibility to be invisible & so keep poor barely-­keeping-it-­together males from being maddened by exposure to fair sexuality. I find in WM the same complex & scary blend of Hellenic & Evian misogyny—Helen essentially guilt as object & Eve guilty as subject, temptress. (104)

Even more so than the allusions to mythic structures, the Middle Eastern precedent invoked here reveals Wallace’s complex response to Markson’s novel. For Wallace, Kate’s gender identity was so transgressive and so far removed from contemporary American culture as to have more in common with an ethnic culture that is allegedly structured on mythical, Manichean tropes: Her “complex & scary” gender identity was only interpretable with reference to Oriental alterity. Ultimately, it is the sexual description of Neti-Neti in The Pale King that constitutes Wallace’s most troubling representation of Middle Eastern identity, an inclusion that McHale rightly labels as problematic. A footnote at the very end of the chapter details the “rapid, almost woodpeckerishly intensive round of fellatio” (310) that Neti-Neti performs on David Wallace, whom she has taken for a high-­ranking IRS agent, and whose willingness to perform sexual favors is explained with reference to Iranian politics: [Neti-Neti]’d come of economic age in the sybaritic but highly etiquetteand-euphemism-­intensive culture of pre-Revolutionary Iran . . . and had, Wallace, “The Empty Plenum: David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress,” 89–90. Wallace, “Overlooked: Five Direly Underappreciated U.S. Novels >1960,” in Both Flesh and Not, 204.

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like many other nubile younger Iranian women with familial connections to the existing government, had to basically “trade” or “barter” sexual activities with high-­level functionaries in order to get herself and two or three other members of her family out of Iran. (310)

In fact, in a revealing archived draft passage, which editor Michael Pietsch wisely chose not to include in the “Notes and Asides” appendix to The Pale King, Wallace expands on Neti-Neti’s Middle Eastern understanding of “Western-­style sexual favors”: [Possible? Turns out, DW later admits, Neti-Neti had taken him into a deserted electrical junction closet and traded him a blow job for the remains of his lunch, which was a bit-­sized Snickers bar and a Granny Smith apple? Neti-Neti had to trade Western-­style sexual favors to a whole large number of Shah-­regime functionaries in order to get her and her mother and brother out—once the Ayatollah’s militant muslims came in, sexual favors would no longer be viable currency, and in fact Neti-Neti would have to wear a burka. Neti-Neti engages in this behavior through trauma—economics of sex. Or DW says this to wigglers, such that he’s either lying to them or else he’s implicitly lied to the reader when he fails to mention any of this.]44

This note’s reference to the “economics of sex” offers some explanation for the highly strange portrayal, yet Wallace’s narrative is nonetheless comically exploiting cultural difference in a manner that harks back to similar characterizations in earlier texts. At one point, for instance, David Wallace wryly describes Neti-Neti “administer[ing] what would, according to former president W.J. Clinton, not properly be considered ‘sex’ ” (310). McHale’s analysis attempts to absolve Wallace of racial insensitivity by reading the scene as a reimagined “displacement” of an encounter in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (198), but it is worth registering just how deeply offensive Wallace’s portrayal—in its perpetuating of Middle Eastern stereotypes and cross-­cultural comedy—is to contemporary sensibilities. And in a post-9/11 political climate in which the pejorative representation of Middle Eastern, Islamic characters by a white American novelist clearly takes on even more significance, Wallace’s depiction makes him appear oblivious of geopolitical

David Foster Wallace, Materials related to The Pale King, Container 36.1–2, David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

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realities.45 This particular characterization once again highlights both the ethnic insularity of Wallace’s imagined readership as well as his unexpectedly close engagement with the work of Joseph Campbell.

Signifying Rappers: Wallace’s racial ethnography Signifying Rappers is another text that reveals Wallace’s odd perspective on race and culture, though it has remained an overwhelmingly neglected work. There are currently no sustained literary analyses of Signifying Rappers, and even monograph-­length enquiries into Wallace’s writing tend to gloss over it. Tellingly, The Legacy of David Foster Wallace (2012) includes Signifying Rappers in a list of Wallace’s publications but contains no other references to the text, signaling its virtually nonexistent scholarly legacy. One possible explanation for the lack of interest in Signifying Rappers is the fact that literary collaborations are notoriously difficult to account for. And since the book was cowritten with Wallace’s friend and fellow Amherst classmate Mark Costello, further muddying the hermeneutic waters of intention and purpose, scholars have seemingly been reluctant to include the book alongside other Wallace texts. Part of the explanation behind such reluctance is surely an attachment— whether conscious or otherwise—to the persistent myth of the Romantic, impassioned author, whose writing gushes forth from the depths of her soul, unsullied by any form of mediation or compromise. Stone and Thompson, in their 2006 edited collection Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborations, and the Construction of Authorship, label this phenomenon as the prevailing “solitary author model.”46 (Or, as Wallace himself described it, as the Wordsworthian notion of “the text as the creative instantiation of the writer’s very self.”47) A great deal of popular writing on Wallace has sought to position Wallace in just this way—as a sui generis, anomalous figure, who emerged without artistic precedent—as has, occasionally, some academic criticism. Although early critics writing on Wallace perceived Infinite Jest’s engagement with an American postmodern tradition, it is striking that it took until 2001, with the publication of Timothy Jacobs’s “American Touchstone: The Idea of For discussions of Wallace’s fiction in relation to 9/11, see Annie McLanahan, “Future’s Shock: Plausibility, Preemption, and the Fiction of 9/11,” Symploke 17, no. 1–2 (2009): 41–62; and Lee Konstantinou “The World of David Foster Wallace,” boundary 2 40, no. 3 (2013): 59–86. 46 Marjorie Stone and Judith Thompson, eds., Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 7. 47 Wallace, “Greatly Exaggerated,” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, 138–46, 139. 45

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Order in Gerard Manley Hopkins and David Foster Wallace,” before a detailed comparative analysis was carried out on the novel, despite Wallace’s writing being replete with intertextual references and allusions, and many of his nonfictional texts and interviews demonstrating an engagement with a diverse range of prior literary figures. Dave Eggers contributed to this discourse of artistic exceptionalism in the gushing preface to the tenth-­ anniversary edition of Infinite Jest, where he claimed that the novel bears little resemblance to anything before it, and comparisons to anything since are desperate and hollow. It appeared in 1996, sui generis, very different than virtually anything before it. It defied categorization, and thwarted efforts to take it apart and explain it.48

While there is a shred of truth in Eggers’s effusions, the claim that Infinite Jest is wholly without precedent is profoundly misleading. As this book has repeatedly shown, Wallace’s novel owes substantial artistic debts to a diverse range of fictional and theoretical texts, taken from a dizzying array of world literary traditions. Thus, even before acknowledging the explicitly collaborative influences on his work, the notion of Wallace as an unprecedentedly original, sui generis figure is clearly untenable. Furthermore, in spite of the scholarly reluctance to tease out the murky strands within co-­authored texts, Signifying Rappers presents a relatively straightforward intellectual partnership. Although Wallace and Costello no doubt revised and offered suggestions for each other’s work, each section of the text is labeled as either “M.” or “D.,” clearly differentiating between the two writers’ contributions. The text is thus less collaborative than would initially appear, and it is possible to focus solely on Wallace’s share of the work, diminishing a large part of the critical hesitancy surrounding the collaboration. Given Wallace’s cultural significance, it is difficult not to relegate Costello’s role to the “Sancho Panza” or “Alice-Toklas-­esque” (25) DJ position Wallace refers to in his distinction between the “MC/rapper and his record-­scratching, sound-­mixing . . . DJ” (24).49 Although Costello is a successful author in his

Dave Eggers, Foreword to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (New York: Back Bay Books, 10th Anniversary Edition, 2006), xi. 49 Furthering this relegation is Costello’s admission, in the new preface to the 2013 edition, that he had self-­consciously impersonated Wallace’s style, writing some of his arguments “in Dave’s mode—internalized discourse, the drama of the head,” along with the publisher’s reverse-­alphabetical listing of Wallace’s name ahead of Costello’s, on the covers of both the American and British imprints of the reissue. Mark Costello and David Foster Wallace, Signifying Rappers (1990; repr. New York: Back Bay Books, 2013), xvi. 48

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own right, having published the acclaimed novels The Bag Men (1997) and Big If (2003), this chapter limits itself to a discussion of the book in relation to Wallace’s career. Hence, all quotations are from Wallace’s sections of Signifying Rappers, except where noted. A further impediment to the book’s academic reception has been that, aside from a handful of brief mentions in the 1993 McCaffery interview, Wallace rarely, if ever, mentioned Signifying Rappers in other contexts. It is peculiar, for instance, that David Lipsky’s 1996 interview, conducted on behalf of Rolling Stone and later republished as Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (2010), asks only one, fairly innocuous, question about Signifying Rappers. In response to the query, Wallace stated that the book allowed him to feel productive during a period in which he was both “terrified to write fiction” and “desperate to feel like a writer.”50 Working in a collaborative manner gave Wallace a concrete literary project while he waited until he could return to narrative: He told Lipsky that whenever he attempted fiction, “it was just an incoherent mess” (213). In addition to rarely mentioning the book in interview contexts, he never returned in his writing to either music criticism in general or to hip-­hop in particular, despite claiming, in other contexts, both that music is an art form “that is jacked pretty much directly into people’s emotions” and that “God has particular languages, and one of them is music.”51 But even this silence can be misleading, for although Wallace repeatedly distanced himself from his first two publications of fiction—1987’s The Broom of the System and, to a lesser extent, 1989’s The Girl with Curious Hair—he never publicly disavowed his expedition into music writing. Presumably, critics have used Wallace’s silence as reason for neglecting the work, as they may well also use D.T. Max’s glib dismissal in Every Love Story is a Ghost Story. Max’s biography quickly glosses over Signifying Rappers, arguing that Wallace’s interest in hip-­hop was, ultimately, merely “theoretical, verbal, abstract,” that it never “touched him” in the way other musical forms

Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, 213. David Foster Wallace, “Presley as Paradigm: DEAD ELVIS: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession, by Greil Marcus,” Los Angeles Times (November 24, 1991). Online access: http://www.articles.latimes.com/1991-11-24/books/bk-326_1_elvis-­presley; Caleb Crain, “Approaching Infinity,” Boston Globe (October 26, 2003). Wallace did occasionally use musical metaphors to great effect, as in his memorable claim, in 2004’s “Federer as Religious Experience,” that the Swiss master’s playing style—in its combination of finesse and raw strength—was “Mozart and Metallica at the same time.” Furthermore, some of the material from Signifying Rappers found its way into 1996’s Infinite Jest: At one point the narrator uses the term “sound-­carpet” (61) to refer to ambient tennis noise, while the faux-­ebonics sections of the novel, set in part in the Brighton Projects, share numerous features with Wallace’s descriptions of poor, black urban culture. Wallace, “Federer Both Flesh and Not,” 32.

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did: “His interest had the quality of a very smart kid slumming it.”52 It may be true that Wallace’s musical tastes encompassed other genres, but it seems odd to suggest that Signifying Rappers, a rigorously researched study, could be produced by a writer wholly detached from hip-­hop’s affective content. Although Wallace’s motives for writing the collaborative text were somewhat pragmatic, at the time, he was clearly enamored with the genre: In the Lipsky interview, Wallace said that during this period he and Costello were “obsessed with listening to . . . serious black political rap” (213, Wallace’s emphasis). Indeed, the effusive and borderline evangelical tone used throughout much of the book calls into question Max’s assessment. In light of the critical silence surrounding Signifying Rappers, Max’s appraisal seems to provide yet another reason for ignoring or dispensing with the text. Perhaps understandably, Max’s overriding interest in the sections of the biography that discuss the book is with contextualizing the work in relation to Wallace’s life, though his dismissal of Signifying Rappers has the potential to further marginalize the text within Wallace studies. Though almost twenty-­four years have passed since the first publication of Signifying Rappers—Wallace points out early on that “[i]f you’re reading this in print it’s already dated” (71)—the monograph has numerous virtues that prevent it from being a mere period piece. To begin with, despite early reviewers’ accusations that it is overly cerebral, the book has an infectiously exuberant quality: There is a joyousness in the writing that is expressed through playful experimentation with language.53 One example of this kind of experimentation is in Wallace’s use of compound conjunctions to open sentences (“And but you can feel . . .” [43], “But so the point is . . .” [47], and “Well, but except . . .” [94]), a technique that would become a hallmark of his later writing, and which gives the prose an idiomatic, spoken quality. Passages that open with such phrases have a frenetic, breathless tone, as though Wallace can’t possibly spare the time to form conventional transitions between sections and is racing to get the next idea down on the page before it escapes him. The frequent use of ellipses throughout the text also contributes to this feeling, creating an impression that the text is more spontaneous and unedited than it surely is. This is a canny rhetorical gesture, since it makes the pronouncements within the book—many of which offer provocative reflections on race and class, and are thus culturally sensitive—seem slightly

Max, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, 122. Several early reviewers objected to the intellectualizing quality of the book, such as music critic Robert Christgau, whose review refers, with palpable condescension, to Wallace as “a philosophy grad student and writer of highbrow pomo ‘fictions.’ ” Christgau, “But Seriously, Folks,” Village Voice, 1990.

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more preliminary, as if the author is rehearsing a particular line of reasoning or argumentation, instead of being wholly wedded to the opinions expressed. In this way, Wallace’s heightened self-­consciousness, as a “white yuppie” (20) writing on “music of, and for, blacks” (21) is mirrored on an orthographic level. His ellipses frequently indicate either a new—though tangentially connected—idea or else interrupt or fracture a line of reasoning, as in the following section, in which Wallace claims that the self-­consciousness that’s now so thoroughly an emblem of the pop culture rap needs and dismisses, presenting DrugsViolenceGreedDespair as an artistic choice that is itself a synecdoche of decisions about how to live . . . yes not only relentless and self-­consciously presents but glorifies the themes. . . . (44)

Here, the interruption works as a kind of epiphany: Wallace dramatizes the way in which a particular line of reasoning can lead to an unexpected conclusion. This mimetic representation of thought is one of Wallace’s most significant contributions to literary nonfiction, creating a kind of overheard, performed interiority. Intriguingly, Wallace also uses such pauses to transition between paragraphs, in a manner that suggests a stronger-­ than-usual connection between paragraphed ideas and again adds to the performative quality of the text. Continuing from the passage quoted above, Wallace links together two separate paragraphs via double ellipses: . . . exhorts its audience to understand, respond to, maybe even embody certain worst of those themes . . . . . . So a conservative twist on the old violent-TV-begets-­real-violence argument, here. (44)

This representation of thought-­in-motion is both a means through which Costello and Wallace can explore sensitive political and racial content, as well as being a key factor in the book’s literary virtue. The linguistic experimentation throughout Signifying Rappers has since come to define Wallace’s distinctive prose style, and includes capitalized nouns, used to great effect in flagging key demographic abstractions— such as “the rhetorical relation of Part to Whole” (38), “Great White Male” (24), and “Yuppie America” (63)—that have enormous potency in political discourse. At times such capitalizations are even portmanteaued into abstract noun clusters, denoting a string of commonly joined buzzwords, as in the aforementioned quotation, in which Wallace discusses the way rap

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artists present “DrugsViolenceGreedDespair as an artistic choice” (44). Foreshadowing the abbreviated language of electronic communication are Wallace’s many truncations, among them “thru” (33),“w/o” (102),“mothafucka” (98), “stats” (100), “ ‘scope” (40) for telescope, “dissed” (96), “music biz.” (71), “Yr.” (126), “vocab” (100), “w/r/t” (84), the exclamatory “. . . WHA?” (45), “more $” (71), “rep.” (30) for representative, and “AKs” (27) for AK-47 assault rifles. Neologisms also abound: Wallace consistently uses such eccentric constructions as “yuppiness” (20), “trochee’d rhymes” (20), “multiple-­ earring’d” (101), “kaboom” (70), “pre-Ph.D.’s” (27), “the media-We” (39), “defness” (123), “huge-­afro’d funk” (70), “malschooled” (99), “untalent” (114), “probably appropriater yet” (84), and “avant-­avant-gardists” (128). Some of these neologisms are more successful than others, though his prose is full of comical and innovative wordplay, as in the line “. . . an attitude we all pretended was so-­very-phisticated” (124) and the reference to “Public Enemy’s be-­ clocked Flavor Flav” (101). And though the book’s vocal reproductions are not strictly neologisms, Wallace also finds novel ways to represent spoken American English in both the repeated—and surely, in 1990, stylistically unusual—use of “like” as a vocalized pause, as in sentence fragments such as “Do those of you in like Chicago or NYC . . .” (69) and “since like around Homer” (99) as well as in his frequent use of colloquialisms, among them “so freaking long” (95), “godawful” (114), “dicklessness” (118), “tight-­ass” (114), “well pardonnez-­moi but . . .” (118), and the resigned “it’ll be hard to fucking care” (121).54 In the same vein, Wallace’s reliance on contractions— “it’s” (69), “what’s” (69), “you’re” (71), and so on—also contributes to the text’s aforementioned oral quality.55 In fact, the book’s oral quality cannot be emphasized enough. All of the usage decisions outlined above create the effect of the book being a kind of transcribed address, as though two intelligent, impassioned hip-­hop fans— both brimming with opinions and esoteric theories—are sitting down with the reader to discuss the music they revere. In this way, the book fits neatly alongside Wallace’s intention for his fiction, as being “like a late-­night conversation with really good friends, when the bullshit stops and the masks

In a 1997 interview with Michael Silverblatt, Wallace pointed out his frustration at authors who insert parenthetical commas around the word “like”—that is, “since, like, around Homer”—which, for Wallace, didn’t do justice to the pauseless way it functions in actual speech. Wallace, Interview, Bookworm, KCRW (May 15, 1997). 55 A telling influence on such aspects of Wallace’s literary project is the seminal pop critic Lester Bangs, to whom Signifying Rappers is dedicated, and whose posthumous collection Psychotic Reactions and the Carburetor Dung (1988) Wallace and Costello describe as “a book about rap that never mentions rap” (136). 54

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come off.”56 As previously mentioned, the authors’ extreme self-­awareness of writing on rap from an extramural perspective is to some extent lessened by the spontaneous, first-­draft quality that such techniques create. It is surely no accident that the text contains so many colloquialisms, contractions, interjections, and ellipses: Such techniques, along with the dialogic interplay of Costello and Wallace’s alternating arguments, signal that Signifying Rappers is clearly meant to be received with the expectations of speech, rather than text. A later correspondence sheds light on this curious textual quality. Writing to Harper’s editor Joel Lovell on the inclusion of his PEN/Faulkner address on Kafka (titled “Laughing with Kafka”) in a forthcoming issue of the magazine, Wallace stressed that he wanted all “[i]diosyncracies [sic] of ital, punctuation, and syntax” left unchanged, explaining that “A big reason for this is that I want to preserve an oralish, out-­loud feel to the remarks so as to protect me from people’s ire at stuff that isn’t expanded on more.”57 Clearly, a similar impulse is at work in Signifying Rappers: Wallace’s extreme self-­ awareness of his outsider status and corresponding fear of public “ire” is at least partially obviated by the text’s “out-­loud feel.” Incidentally, there is something deeply counterintuitive about Wallace’s frequent insistence on the spoken quality of his prose. For an overeducated “pre-Ph.D” (27) student schooled, as Max’s biography reminds us, on Derrida and de Man, Wallace would have been intimately familiar with the poststructuralist critique of phonocentrism. Indeed, there is a seeming disjuncture between Wallace’s commitment to constructing prose with an “oralish, out-­loud feel” and Derrida’s critique of an unacknowledged Western “metaphysics of presence.”58 In his 1991 review of H.L. Hix’s Morte D’Author: An Autopsy, Wallace revealed a comprehensive knowledge of structural/poststructural theory, and appeared tacitly sympathetic to the poststructuralist position on phonocentrism, pointing out that for Barthes, Derrida and Foucault, writing is a better animal than speech because it is iterable; it is iterable because it is abstract; it is abstract because it is a function not of presence but of absence: the reader’s absent when the writer’s writing, and the writer’s absent when the reader’s reading.59

Anne Marie Donahue, “Exhibitionism in Private,” Boston Phoenix (March 21–28, 1996). David Foster Wallace, Letter to Joel Lovell (1998), Container 28.9, David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 58 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 22. 59 Wallace, “Greatly Exaggerated,” 140. 56 57

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Wallace’s summary speaks to one of the central tensions animating his own work, particularly in the years following his death: the contrast between an intimate sense of authorial presence and an alarming awareness of utter absence. Signifying Rappers’s dazzling level of linguistic experimentation seems primarily borne out of a mimetic impulse, the desire to have the book’s language reproduce and engage in some way with the wildly inventive genre under discussion. As SPIN magazine’s Brandon Soderberg points out, the absence of rules governing hip-­hop criticism in the late 1980s “gives the book an unfettered freedom that couldn’t exist at any other moment in hip-­hop history.”60 Though Wallace’s writing before this point was still stylistically unique, writing on rap gave him license to use all kinds of linguistic inventions, appropriating the energy and freneticism of hip-­hop to create a deeply idiosyncratic writing style. Far from producing what one early reviewer uncharitably described as “choppy, awkward and confusing . . . literary prose,” Wallace’s sections of the book display all the linguistic virtuosity that would later earn him critical acclaim.61 Indeed, one of the aspects that attracted magazine editors such as Colin Harrison (from Harper’s Magazine) to Wallace was the book’s outlandishly experimental and comic prose style. As Marshall Boswell notes, it was “on the strength of Signifying Rappers” that “Harper’s began sending [Wallace] out on unconventional journalistic assignments,” further testifying to the argument that Wallace’s literary nonfiction prestige can be traced back this text.62 Perhaps most importantly, Signifying Rappers also functions as an oblique primer on many of the themes and preoccupations of Wallace’s subsequent career. His sections of the book implicitly install hip-­hop as the creative epitome of postmodern art, arguing that its complex poetic innovations, representational verisimilitude, and distillation of Reagan-­era economic logic justify its exemplar status. But while Wallace’s enthusiasm for the genre is clearly evident, many passages also express misgivings about certain aspects of hip-­hop, prophesying its logical endpoint and exposing its thematic lacunae in a manner that closely resembles Wallace’s critique of postmodern fiction. His deep ambivalence thus validates Imani Perry’s observation that “[p]art of the seduction of rap for mainstream America, particularly white young people, lies in its iconoclasm in relation to white American culture

Brandon Soderberg, “David Foster Wallace Once Wrote a Very Strange Rap Book,” Spin Online, September 18, 2012. Online access: http://www.spin.com/blogs/david-­fosterwallace-­once-wrote-­a-very-­strange-rap-­book. 61 Venise T. Berry, Review of Signifying Rappers, Notes, Second Series, 48, no. 4 (1992): 1305–6, 1305. 62 Boswell, Understanding David Foster Wallace, 7. 60

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norms. It is Other, it is hard, and it is deviant.”63 While hip-­hop’s deviance and iconoclasm certainly appealed to Wallace’s aesthetic sensibility, he also had serious misgivings about its racial seclusion—at one point, he notes that rap “seems to revile whites as a group or Establishment and simply to ignore their possibility as distinct individuals” (23–24)—and the ways in which this tension might reflect broader conflicts within other forms of postmodern art. In fact, throughout much of the book, Wallace rehearses many of the arguments that later came to define his approach to fiction. Crucially, he even searches for a signifier to denote whatever will follow postmodernism, in his claim that “Serious rap’s the first music to begin creative work on the new, (post-)postmodern face the threat of economic inequality to American ideals is wearing” (121). This tentative, parenthetical attempt at definition reveals Wallace trying to foresee whatever lies beyond the coordinates of postmodernism, a recurring impulse in both his fiction and nonfiction.64 Furthermore, his key preoccupation—returned to at numerous points throughout the text—with the ways in which subversive black music had been co-­opted by white media and corporate record labels mirrors his later thesis on the countless ways in which advertisers and commercial artists appropriated, and thus eviscerated, the formal techniques associated with postmodern fiction. Moreover, his recurring emphasis on rap’s myriad “sources” (12) reveals Wallace working through the implications and meaning of artistic influence. His frequent attacks on contemporary US poetry’s insularity—together with his uneasy feeling about hip-­hop’s audience: “What if cutting-­edge rap really is a closed music?” (45)—also relate in clear ways to the closed nature of much experimental literary fiction, which only a small coterie of initiates can appreciate or understand. In similar way, Wallace’s thesis on the cyclical, eternally self-­replicating nature of American music thesis mimics the “crank-­turn[ing]” theory of contemporary fiction he spoke of at length in his 1993 interview with Larry McCaffery.65 Perhaps most Imani Perry, Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 136. 64 Stephen J. Burn positions Wallace, Franzen, and Richard Powers as “post-­postmodernists,” noting that Wallace also used the term post-­postmodernism in “E Unibus Pluram,” Girl with Curious Hair, and Infinite Jest. Burn, Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 2008), 17. 65 Beyond his concerns with literary fiction, Wallace also worried at length about contemporary American poetry’s “insular[ity],” claiming that poetry “has today become so inbred and (against its professed wishes) inaccessible that it just doesn’t get to share its creative products with more than a couple thousand fanatical, sandal-­shod readers, doesn’t get to move or inform more than a fraction of that readership (most of the moved being poets themselves)” (100). Such statements, likewise, clearly reflect Wallace’s misgivings about experimental fiction’s closed, self-­segregated status, a status that his own fiction would attempt to address. 63

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significantly, Wallace’s concerns with hip-­hop’s overriding cynicism and lack of a positive program—the fact that it has “no vision of anything beyond present discontent” (127)—is a refracted version of his later critique of “postmodern lit,” in its tendency to endlessly ironize and debunk cultural assumptions without proposing any positive content in its place. An attentive reading of Signifying Rappers thus reveals the ways in which Wallace was rehearsing, in an indirect and veiled manner, the artistic agenda he was about to set forth.

Wallace’s emphasis on hip-­hop’s linguistic innovations is highly idiosyncratic. Although he includes a number of discussions of its cultural and racial context, his analysis is overwhelmingly concerned with language and discourse, and—implicitly—with the ways in which such linguistic experimentation might be incorporated within his own work. His critique thus reproduces the orientation to world literature that I have revealed in previous chapters. Here, as elsewhere, eliding cultural nuances and social contexts gave Wallace free reign to appropriate particular linguistic devices and techniques. This interpretive stance is especially obvious throughout Signifying Rappers, since the analysis frequently glosses over the obvious racial dimension of late-80s hip-­hop. Though his observation that rap exists within a “hermetic racial context” (24) provokes several incisive reflections on hip-­hop’s inherent racial provocations, he was ultimately far more interested in its status as an unexpected paragon of postmodern art, along with the older models of linguistic expression and authenticity it called into question. Although D.T. Max’s dismissal of the book’s relevance to Wallace’s broader literary career is highly questionable, there is some truth to his assertion that Wallace’s interest in hip-­hop was ultimately “theoretical, verbal, abstract” (122). Wallace was indeed overwhelmingly concerned with hip-­hop’s verbal experimentation, though this focus was neither coolly “theoretical” nor “abstract”: His approach was, in fact, wholly pragmatic, concerned with finding particular devices that could be assimilated into his own artistic practice. It was also a pragmatic decision in light of Wallace’s problematic assertion that rap is “Black music, of and for blacks” (21), with the two authors cast in the role of the “rare whites at the window” (30)—as curious, but fundamentally excluded voyeurs. Their mutual focus on rhythmic appreciation—“[f]or outsiders, rap’s easy to move to, hard to dissect” (23)—is one implication of this approach, though for both writers, its linguistic content was even more readily accessible. Signifying Rappers’s emphasis on linguistic experimentation over racial representation was surely part of the reason why contemporary hip-­hop and

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African-American academics gave the book such a cool reception. Revealingly, Wallace and Costello’s study did not warrant a single mention in Tricia Rose’s landmark monograph, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (1994), even though Wallace had previously appeared alongside Rose, Greg Tate, and Felipe Luciano on a panel title “No Jokin’: Rap, Rappers, and the Literary Arts” at the New York Society for Ethical Culture on May 16, 1991. Similarly, Signifying Rappers is also noticeably absent from both Greg Tate’s Flyboy in the Buttermilk (1992)—another early and influential hip-­hop study—and Gail Hilson Woldu’s 2010 survey, “The Kaleidoscope of Writing on Hip-Hop Culture.”66 And though Wallace’s analysis of the relationship between hip-­hop and Reagan-­era economics is one of the book’s most compelling arguments, it is noticeably absent from both Michael W. Clune’s “ ‘You can’t see me’: rap, money, and the first person” and Jennifer Lena’s “Social Context and Musical Content of Rap Music, 1979– 1995.”67 (Wallace and Costello’s book did, however, receive a handful of mentions in a 1992 article by Judith McDonnell that examined the political power of hip-­hop, as part of her survey of writings on rap.68) Signifying Rappers was not widely reviewed on its initial printing, but the remarks of prominent African-American Studies scholar Venise T. Berry are in all likelihood symptomatic of the book’s reaction from black critics. Although Berry’s 1992 review pointed out numerous shortcomings, her most damning piece of criticism concerns Wallace and Costello’s racial “obstinance and insensitivity,” claiming that their book “fail[s] to understand or relate to urban black American culture.”69 Berry saw the authors as cultural interlopers, entirely unself-­conscious about their own positionality: “it is obvious,” she chides at one point, “that they have no real understanding of the struggle for self-­worth in the inner city experience that has shaped the lives of many popular black rappers” (1305). For Berry, Wallace’s decision to emphasize linguistic experimentation over lived black experience—“the struggle for self-­worth”—made the study highly objectionable.

Greg Tate, Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992); Gail Hilson Woldu, “The Kaleidoscope of Writing on Hip-Hop Culture,” Notes 67, no. 1 (2010): 9–38. 67 Michael W. Clune, “ ‘You can’t see me’: Rap, Money, and the First Person,” in American Literature and the Free Market, 1945–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 147–64; Jennifer Lena, “Social Context and Musical Content of Rap Music, 1979– 1995,” Social Forces 85, no. 1 (2006): 479–95. 68 Judith McDonnell, “Rap music: Its role as an agent of change,” Popular Music and Society 16, no. 3 (1992): 89–107. 69 Venise T. Berry, “Review of Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present, by Mark Costello and David Foster Wallace,” Notes, Second Series 48, no. 4 (1992): 1305. 66

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But in spite of this initially frosty reception, many black intellectuals and critics have in recent years cited the study with approbation, suggesting that the passage of time has made it easier to perceive Signifying Rappers’s redeeming qualities, and to see the book’s prejudices and shortcomings as emblematic of a particular historical and cultural juncture. Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois, for instance, describe the study as “an offbeat but visionary book” in their introduction to The Anthology of Rap (2010), a somewhat measured piece of praise, though their caveat is clearly a far cry from Berry’s withering critique. Meanwhile, in The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (2013), poet and cultural critic Kevin Young quotes a lengthy passage of Wallace’s as “an interesting riff,” though he points out that book is “often over-­the-top.”70 Glancing mentions are also included in Eric Perkins’s introduction to Droppin’ Science: Critical Essays on Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture (1996), and in important recent essays by Robin D.G. Kelley and Andrew Bartlett.71 Far less ambivalent is the endorsement of Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, an influential cultural critic who recently described the book as “one of the finest essays ever written about rap music.”72 Clearly, such recent critics take a far more charitable, historicized view of the book, looking beyond the culturally- and racially-­problematic issues identified by early readers such as Venise T. Berry. Though its frequently problematic reflections on race mean that Signifying Rappers is still omitted from many scholarly studies, the recent public interest and various endorsements prompted by its republication suggest that the study will have a more prominent role in hip-­ hop scholarship in years to come.73

Kevin Young, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2012), 333. 71 William Eric Perkins, Droppin’ Science: Critical Essays on Rap Music and Hip Hop Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 7; Robin D.G. Kelley, “Lookin’ for the ‘Real’ Nigga: Social Scientists Construct the Ghetto,” in That’s the Joint: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, 2nd Edition, eds. Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal (New York: Routledge, 2012), 134–52; Andrew Bartlett, “Airshafts, Loudspeakers, and the Hip-Hop Sample,” in That’s the Joint: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, 2nd Edition, eds. Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal (New York: Routledge, 2012), 564–78. 72 Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, “When The Lights Shut Off: Kendrick Lamar and the Decline of the Black Blues Narrative,” Los Angeles Review of Books (January 31, 2013). Online access: http://www.lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=1363&fulltext=1. 73 Gail Hilson Woldu, “The Kaleidoscope of Writing on Hip-Hop Culture,” Notes 67, no. 1 (2010): 9–38; Michael W. Clune, “ ‘You can’t see me’: Rap, Money, and the First Person,” in American Literature and the Free Market, 1945–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 147–64; Jennifer Lena, “Social Context and Musical Content of Rap Music, 1979–1995,” Social Forces 85, no 1 (2006): 479–95. Woldu’s essay includes Signifying Rappers in her list of “SELECTED BOOKS ON HIP-HOP CULTURE,” but does not mention the book in the analysis. 70

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Wallace as intertextual “sampler” Part of what attracted Wallace to late-80s hip-­hop was its emphasis on intertextuality. Wallace was clearly drawn to this particularly transgressive aspect of the genre, with his chapters of Signifying Rappers frequently musing on the way rap undermines traditional accounts of artistic indebtedness. For Wallace, hip-­hop was not just an unusually “sample-­heavy” (95) art form, it staged inherently violent confrontations with previous texts: At one point, he characterizes such a practice as “the musical mugging of classic precursors” (117). Even more strongly, Wallace suggests that beyond being simply a surface aspect of hip-­hop production, intertextuality is instead intrinsic to the genre since it disrupts traditional understanding of artistic originality. “[S]erious 80s rap,” he proposes, “is the first ‘music’ composed entirely of notes created and performed, copyrighted and peddled, by precursors” (85). This disruption intrigued Wallace to such an extent that he asked readers of Signifying Rappers to write in with their own thoughts on rap’s “myriad sources” (12), asking them to explain the difference between “pirating a piece of music and its attendant pavlovs for artistic reasons; and (2) doing so . . . as part of a cold, calculated effort to increase sales of a product,” promising that any reader who can do so will be invited over to Somerbridge for a rousing game of MTV with D. and M. Simply send your articulated distinctions, in let’s say 20 pages or fewer, to: DISTINCTION BETWEEN ARTISTS RIPPING OFF OTHER ARTISTS AND ADS DOING SO   D. Wallace & M. Costello    c/o   Ocean Records   134 Warren Street Roxbury, MA 02154 (94–5)

Such an invitation has clear overlaps with Wallace’s own artistic practice, which appropriates and transposes from countless sources in a way that is unparalleled in contemporary American fiction. The reference to “ripping off other artists” presages Wallace’s own response to a contemporary novelist who accused him of plagiarism (a concept that Wallace claimed not to understand), but it also indicates Wallace’s idiosyncratic code of honor when it came to appropriating the work of others within his own fiction. The

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distinction between an artistic homage and a crassly commercial deployment granted Wallace tacit license to appropriate from a range of authors and texts, as long as the primary purpose of such appropriations was never—as in the example of Ford’s cynical use of a Bette Middler song in an advertisement— motivated by commercial ends. In fact, it is easy to see Wallace working through the implications and meaning of artistic influence for his own work in such sections of the Signifying Rappers. His analysis is obsessed with hip-­hop’s complicated tension between originality and plagiarism—detailing the ways in which rappers shamelessly steal from one another’s music, harshly critique other artists’ work and sample countless cultural products (sitcoms, political speeches, advertising jingles, and so on) in ways that appear to fly in the face of copyright law—as well as the consequences that such practices might have for other art forms. And while he goes to great lengths to locate what is “indisputably original” (95) within hip-­hop, Wallace clearly revels in its self-­ licensed freedom to appropriate from a virtually endless supply of sources: At one point he notes that such collaborative possibilities have caused rap to “Explod[e] into subspecies . . . faster than you can track” (71). Wallace proceeds to list a dizzying array of subgenres, many of which synthesize different cultural and ethnic artistic traditions in a manner that preempts his own insistently multicultural reading of postmodernism: There’s now Dub’s mix of rap and reggae, House’s mix of rap and 70’s, huge-­ afro’d funk, Acid House’s psychedelic hip-­hop. There is black rap for white mass-­consumption (Tone Loc, Run-DMC), black rap for local set and house consumption (countless local stars and wannabes in every large city), ultrablack rap superstars for the whole marginal Nation inside (Heavy D, Public Enemy, Big Daddy Kane), white rap for white masses (the execrable Beastie Boys). There is Hispanic, Salsa-­influenced rap out of different West Coast barrios, rap fused with West Indian or Islamic traditional music in Digital Underground, Eric B. and Rakim, and others, or fused with oh-­sodanceable R&B in the “new jack swing” offshoot (Bobby Brown, MC Hammer); even gay and bohemian young urban B-boys have their trendsetters in Teddy Riley and Guy, De La Soul, Kwabe. Etc. (71)

Wallace’s dizzying survey of artistic cross-­pollination mirrors his memorable description of living in the “global village” of postmodernity, in which the forces of global capitalism enable a bewildering collision of cultures. For Wallace, these globalizing forces worked to minimize cultural and geographical distinctions, such that the “chasm” of racial and cultural

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difference became far less significant. This assumption also underscores the logic to Wallace’s emphasis on the linguistic dimension of hip-­hop. By extension, since culture and race are so fluid and dynamic—“Explod[ing] into subspecies . . . faster than you can track” (71)—it was far more productive to pay attention to the purely aesthetic elements of the genre. Signifying Rappers’s emphasis on artistic influence prompts one final metaphor with which to understand Wallace’s commitment to intertextuality. Conceiving of Wallace as the literary equivalent a hip-­hop sampler—building bricolage-like narratives from a variety of cultural sources—is a productive way of thinking about his own complexly indebted narratives. Such a model allows us to observe the rationale behind some of Wallace’s most overtly derivative texts, as well as his habit of burying thinly veiled critiques of other artists within his work (as in the aforementioned disparaging references to Harold Bloom in Infinite Jest, along with the cruel parodies of Bret Easton Ellis). This latter technique reflects what Wallace characterizes as rap’s perpetual “dissing and self-­satisfaction (‘I’m ten times deffer than the guy who claims he’s ten times deffer than me’)” (75), giving a slightly different inflection to such embedded—and often overlooked—critiques. More importantly, the metaphor also speaks to the drastically underestimated set of sources animating Wallace’s fiction. As this book has revealed, Wallace’s work draws on television sitcoms, obscure films, continental philosophy, literary theory, a sprawling array of world literature and a wide variety of technical discourses in a way that is not captured by traditional theories of literary influence. Conceiving of Wallace as an intertextual “sampler” thus allows us to countenance both the endlessly proliferating source material that constitutes the veritable “sound carpet” (97) of his fiction and the provocative ways in which such an approach complicates the very notion of what is creatively unique and “indisputably original” (95). Such a metaphor is also productive in discussions of Wallace’s slightly odd relationship to questions of race and culture. As I have shown, Wallace was deeply attracted to the structuralist, pop-­anthropological approach to culture embodied in the work of Joseph Campbell and others. Such an approach ultimately gave Wallace the freedom to sample from an even wider set of cultural reference points, without being overly concerned with accurate presentation, or with the kind of cultural trepidation or sensitivity that other writers might have emphasized. This stance mobilized yet another radically expanded set of “global quotations” from which to construct his own fiction. Wallace’s frequent reworkings of mythic narrative—in texts such as “John Billy,” “Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko,” and “Another Pioneer”—along with his texts’ numerous anthropological references dramatically widen the range of his fiction, situating contemporary American experience within an

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expanded set of cultural coordinates. Though Wallace claimed that “peering across the chasm” at non-Western cultures was ultimately an unsatisfying endeavor, his texts routinely incorporate crosscultural details in ways that both preserve their essential Otherness and attempt to determine their relevance within an American context. Wallace’s approach ultimately cannibalized narratives and tropes from other cultures, implying that such texts could be rewritten in such a way as to alleviate particularly postmodern form of malaise. Once again, Wallace’s focus here is on domesticating and Americanizing global texts and ideas. My reading of “Another Pioneer” reveals this same maneuver, showing that, like Campbell, Wallace believed that both “hidden” mythic structures and an increased awareness of the endlessly diverse expressions of humanity could be used to relieve modern anxieties. Importantly, such an orientation also dramatically narrowed his potential readership. Wallace obsessed over precisely who he was writing for—and admitted to being “terrified to write fiction” at various points throughout his career—but by positing a racially homogeneous readership, which shared his underlying assumptions and reference points, he could assuage such fears. Whether justifiably or not, Wallace assumed that his imagined readership were “mostly white” and mostly American: The often problematic representations of race and non-Western cultures—as the analyses of Sheila Neti-Neti, Tony Nwangi, and other characters have shown—betoken a deeper American insularity lurking within his work. As the Introduction revealed, the same form of cultural insularity also finds expression in Wallace’s frequent reluctance to engage with translators of his own work. Such reluctance stemmed from both indifference toward non-American readers and the assumption that no one outside the United States would have any interest in his fiction. The irony is that in spite of such insularity, Wallace’s work does indeed speak to an international audience, as the proliferation of translations indicates. Although there is some truth in German translator Ulrich Blumenbach’s claim that Wallace was fundamentally “US-centric and sealed off ” from the rest of the world, what should not be underestimated is the extent to which international readers have gravitated toward Wallace’s work. And of course, the accumulating translation industry around Wallace’s fiction and nonfiction will ultimately introduce an even more diverse readership to what is ostensibly a body of work written for a “mostly white, upper middle class or upper class, . . . well educated,” American audience.74 Together with the undeniable evidence of Wallace’s diverse engagements with world literature, this chapter’s interrogation of his frequently problematic engagements with questions of race and culture reveals Wallace’s curious orientation to the wider world. Klaus Brinkbäumer, Interview with Ulrich Blumenbach.

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Conclusion. “It’s a Small Continent After All”? Wallace and the World

This segues into an entr’acte, with continent squeezed in for world in “It’s a Small World After All,” which enjambment doesn’t do the rhythm section of doo-­wopping cabinet girls a bit of good, but does usher in the start of a whole new era. —Infinite Jest

In his 1930 Nobel Prize Acceptance speech, Sinclair Lewis articulated a vision of US literature that was vehemently at odds with what he characterized as the “dull provincialism” of the nineteenth century.1 Highly conscious of his own status as the first American author to receive the prize, Lewis’s speech prophesied a future in which US writers would write expansive, ambitious fiction that engaged with global literary traditions. In opposition to those American novelists whose work was premised on the tacit assumption that “America has gone through the revolutionary change from rustic colony to world empire without having in the least altered the bucolic and Puritanic simplicity of Uncle Sam,” Lewis announced a burgeoning, cosmopolitan strain of US fiction: I have, for the future of American literature, every hope and every eager belief. We are coming out, I believe, of the stuffiness of safe, sane, and incredibly dull provincialism. There are young Americans today who are doing such passionate and authentic work that it makes me sick to see that I am a little too old to be one of them.2

As I have shown, Wallace also moved away from the kind of provincialism that manifests in the narrowness of “Writing-Program” fiction—over which, according to Wallace, “pre- and proscriptions loom with the enclosing force of horizons”—to a kind of fiction that emphasized the necessity of “learning Sinclair Lewis, “Nobel Prize Award Ceremony Speech,” December 10, 1930. Online access: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1930/press.html. 2 Ibid. 1

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to take part in the tradition of Western letters.”3 Although Wallace’s statement has an ostensibly European focus, in reality his reading encompassed a far broader literary sphere, encompassing texts from countless world literary traditions. In my view, Wallace’s extraordinarily wide-­ranging engagements with world literature qualify him as one of many turn-­of-the-­twenty-first-­ century American novelists whose work fulfills Lewis’s optimistic prediction. The specific, comparative readings within this book demonstrate that interpreting Wallace’s work within the limited coordinates of US literature— with sole reference to the “small continent” (386) of North America—is no longer a tenable project: the myriad world literary sources animating his fiction, along with his endlessly complex global engagements, make such readings impossible. Franco Moretti’s provocative essay “Conjectures on World Literature” is a useful precedent here, since it calls for critics to undermine the various manifestations of national literature by any means necessary. His argument is that comparative literature should function as “a thorn in the side, a permanent intellectual challenge to national literatures,” and as a tool for dislodging literary texts from domestic frames.4 While I agree with Moretti’s contention that comparative analyses should at times work to disrupt and undermine excessively narrow, parochial interpretations, in Wallace’s case, such antagonism would be misplaced. In part, this is because many aspects of Wallace’s work and biography problematize the attempt to position him as a paragon of what Lee Konstantinou labels “genuine worldliness.”5 Wallace declined numerous international travel opportunities, for instance, set his narratives in settings that became increasingly UScentric, and was highly ambivalent about—and at times even hostile to— translations of his work. Yet while Wallace cannot straightforwardly be considered an exemplar of world literature, it is also impossible to relegate his work to “national literature,” concerned exclusively with his inherited, US literary tradition and with national themes, as numerous scholars have done. In reality, his work is strongly informed by what Damrosch calls a “localized globalism,” which stresses “the local use to which the writer can put the techniques he imports from outside.”6 Situating Wallace’s work in this interstitial zone between national and world literature ultimately allows for a more nuanced perspective with which to view his recurring focus on US cultural concerns. By paying close attention to Wallace’s participation amid a more expansive cluster of global influences, this book thus offers a more 5 6 3 4

Wallace, “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young,” 40. Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (2000): 67. Konstantinou, “The World of David Foster Wallace,” 27. Damrosch, How to Read World Literature, 116.

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productive means by which to address the career-­long engagement with US culture that other scholars have perceived within his work. Wallace’s encounters with world literature were resoundingly pragmatic, in the sense that they were focused on specific literary effects. While contemporary scholars would doubtless indict his approach for simultaneously perpetuating “exoticism and assimilation”—which Damrosch suggests are the two most widespread errors in reading world literature—Wallace’s strategy gave him the freedom to appropriate from a diverse global canon, allowing him to construct his own fiction from a vastly expanded set of artistic sources.7 Just as Goethe himself responded “most of all to what he [could] appropriate in anything he read,” Wallace always focused on those textual aspects that could be appropriated within an American context, glossing over cultural dissimilarities and moments of uncertainty to locate broader commonalities.8 As I have shown, this Americanizing, domesticating mode of reading closely resembles Emerson’s stance toward global texts, which viewed the “great men” of Western history—Shakespeare, Swedenborg, Goethe and others—almost exclusively for their relevance to American culture. Together with this American emphasis, Emerson also had a radically liberal approach to intertextuality, which he saw as the conduit of a wider mode of circulation and dissemination. His essay “Quotation and Originality” articulates a general theory of quotation, proposing that strategically deployed quotations acquire new meanings, speaking to new contexts in surprising and unexpected ways. He also emphasizes that the past must always be subordinate to—and be put in complete service of—the present, suggesting that “[w]e cannot overstate our debt to the Past, but the moment has the supreme claim” (14). Emerson’s startling relation to antecedent literary texts and authors is precisely the attitude Wallace took toward both antecedent texts, as well as—crucially—to texts from other cultures. Since Wallace’s primary goal was always to illuminate and critique the present, to simultaneously reveal both “the times’ darkness” and “the possibilities for being human and alive in it,” he saw all extraneous texts—in every sense of the word—as “subordinate” to the present.9 In this way, Wallace granted himself license to draw on a vast array of global texts throughout his work. In many ways, Wallace’s Emersonian approach to world literature and textual appropriation stemmed from his idiosyncratic reading of postmodern culture. Wallace understood postmodern media saturation as having virtually erased classical distinctions between nations, suggesting that instead of being Ibid., 13. Damrosch, What is World Literature? 12. 9 McCaffery, “An Expanded Interview with David Foster Wallace,” 26. 7 8

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presented as exotic and distantly unfamiliar, “the whole global village is now presented as familiar, electronically immediate—satellites, microwaves, intrepid PBS anthropologists, Paul Simon’s Zulu back-­ups.”10 Wallace’s understanding of global simultaneity thus saw late-­capitalist America as having an inbuilt tendency to countenance the wider world, with his essay “E Unibus Pluram” suggesting that all US citizens live in a McLuhan-­esque global village. In my view, it is therefore possible to extend Paul Giles’s claim, that Wallace conceived of “American geographic space” as “a level playing field where the mass media operate in all zones simultaneously,” to encompass Wallace’s broader understanding of global cultures.11 Mimicking the cannibalizing forces of globalization, Wallace felt free to liberally appropriate a wide array of global sources. In fact, Wallace viewed numerous global texts as having the ability to reinvigorate the American postmodern literary tradition, exposing its staleness and thematic impoverishment. Revealingly, Wallace’s 1994 review of Zbigniew Herbert’s Mr. Cogito points out that “[c] ompared to Mr. Cogito, the whole spectrum of American poetry—from the retrograde quaintness of the Neo-­formalists and New Yorker-backyard-­ garden-meditative lyrics to the sterile abstraction of the Language Poets— looks sick.”12 Part of Wallace’s pragmatic approach to world literature thus involved engaging with non-US sources as a means of reviving American fiction. My interpretations of Wallace’s fiction and nonfiction throughout this book have been strongly informed by world literature scholarship, in a critical conjunction that reveals new dimensions of his work. But in addition to reading particular texts in light of theoretical perspectives on world literature, my analysis has also been alert to Wallace’s own understanding of geography and global literary traditions, construing his work in light of a more capacious vision of American literature, as “a crisscrossing set of pathways, open-­ended and ever multiplying, weaving in and out of other geographies, other languages and cultures.”13 Specific readings have explored ways in which Wallace’s artistic strategies coincide with scholarly accounts of international exchange, but they have also emphasized Wallace’s systematic pragmatism, which is often at odds with contemporary world literature theory. By measuring such artistic strategies against a similarly pragmatic strain of world literature scholarship, this book reveals the myriad intersections of national and transnational investments within Wallace’s body of work, those 12 13 10 11

McCaffery, “An Expanded Interview with David Foster Wallace,” 38. Paul Giles, “The MTV Generation: Wallace and Eggers,” 164. Wallace, “Mr. Cogito,” 121–22. Dimock, Through Other Continents, 3.

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moments in which his considerable American investments come into contact with unexpected global texts and perspectives. In this way, the book traces the tangible impacts that a range of global texts had on Wallace’s work. Since Wallace’s engagements with global literary traditions were invariably concerned with strategies of appropriation, I have also theorized five complementary models with which to understand his complex use of antecedent sources. And while these models might be adapted or taken up by other scholars, future studies might also address the persistent doubling and repetition across Wallace’s own corpus, a form of reflexive intertextuality that effectively constitutes a kind of self-­plagiarism. On a technical level, there are many recurring stylistic devices across Wallace’s body of work, including the redacted questions, pause-­signifying ellipses and unattributed dialogue— lifted directly from Manuel Puig, as I showed in Chapter 2—that are put to slightly different uses at different points in his career. (According to Karen Green, Wallace’s final years were spent trying to move away from “the old tricks people expected of him,” even though “he had no idea what the new tricks would be.”14) There are many other repetitions across Wallace’s work. For instance, the aggressively driven, Jesus fish-­decaled “Light-­blue Pacer” (541) that annoys the narrator of The Pale King reprises the “huge, heavy SUV” from This is Water; both “Little Expressionless Animals” and “The Suffering Channel” end with spectator–performer confrontations; while there are numerous overlaps in the redemption narratives of The Pale King’s Chris Fogle and Neal, the protagonist of “Good Old Neon.” Stephen J. Burn’s sensible explanation for such repetitions is that Wallace was working on the same material for lengthy periods, “with parallel projects bleeding into each other,” leading to considerable overlap.15 But there is an important sense in which ideas and literary techniques were deliberately recycled throughout Wallace’s career, assuming different forms and serving different purposes, in much the same way that he appropriated the work of others. A fruitful area of enquiry would thus be to determine the extent to which Wallace appropriated himself, reworking previous characters and themes in slightly different ways, creating a body of work that is profoundly self-­ referential. Marshall Boswell hints at such an analysis in his 2014 article “Author Here: The Legal Fiction of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King,” in which he suggests that although working on The Pale King was in many ways a continuation of Wallace’s negotiation “with his postmodern forefathers,”

D.T. Max, “The Unfinished,” New Yorker (March 9, 2009). Online access: http://www. newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/09/090309fa_fact_max?currentPage=all. Burn, “Closing Time in The Pale King,” 373.

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he also “began reckoning with his own aggravating influence, himself the object of his own resentment.”16 Furthermore, while this book attempts to trace as many intertextual connections as possible, with reference to multiple geographic territories, it is clear that the process of uncovering Wallace’s relation to a startlingly diverse set of antecedent texts is by no means finished. In part, this is because many of Wallace’s artistic sources are deliberately obscured, recalling Jim Incandenza’s tendency to bury “certain oblique visual gestures” within his films, gestures “that paid the sort of deep-­insider’s elegiac tribute no audience could be expected to notice” (65). This description speaks to many of the artfully submerged references that have been explored in previous chapters, but it also hints at the subtle allusions and veiled appropriations that may well go wholly undetected by readers of Wallace’s work. Some obvious possibilities for future searches lie in exploring Wallace’s relation to other geographical zones: Although Stephen J. Burn and Timothy Jacobs have traced some of Wallace’s engagement with British poetry, for instance, more research is required to understand the full extent of his transatlantic artistic connections. And while Paul Giles has demonstrated how Wallace’s work engages with the conceptual space of Australasia, future studies might elaborate on the extent of this particular relationship. Similarly, Wallace’s relation to Asia has not yet been explored, even though he was familiar with some Japanese fiction— having read Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen, Yukio Mushima’s The Sailor who fell from Grace with the Sea, and Yasunari Kawabata’s Palm-­of-the-Hand Stories— and inserted occasional references to Asian culture and geography throughout his work. As I have shown, Wallace also followed the example of Emerson and other nineteenth-­century transcendentalists in exploring various forms of Eastern religion and spirituality, particularly Buddhism. Intriguingly, while Wallace’s essays sometimes invoked a comically vague, undifferentiated conception of Asia—as in “The Nature of the Fun,” for instance, in which he includes a “strange little story” that “takes place in China or Korea or someplace like that”—he also seems to have conflated what he called “the Islamic world” with Asian nations.17 The character David Wallace in The Pale King speculates that Neti-Neti is either “upper-­caste Indian or Pakistani,” though it turns out that she is actually “Persian” (287), and Everything and More discusses mathematical history with reference to the strange clustering “Asia and the Islamic world.”18 Moreover, the territorial engagements mapped Marshall Boswell, “Author Here: The Legal Fiction of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King,” 95, no.1 (2014): 28. 17 Wallace, “The Nature of the Fun,” Both Flesh and Not, 195, 196. 18 Wallace, Everything and More, 91. 16

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out within the preceding chapters are themselves far from exhaustive. There are many other writers from each geographical zone that demand separate studies, as well as numerous other film and visual art traditions that have not yet been explored by scholars. Yet another means by which to defuse the exceptionalist claims surrounding Wallace’s work would be to extend the analysis of Wallace’s collaboration with Mark Costello—with whom he co-­ wrote Signifying Rappers and planned to collaborate on a second nonfiction project—as well as exploring Wallace’s relationship with his long-­time editor Michael Pietsch. Aside from a range of complaints about the seemingly heavy-­handed editorial decisions made by Pietsch in posthumously assembling The Pale King, no serious analyses of Wallace and Pietsch’s unusually close working relationship have yet been carried out. In the years following his death, David Foster Wallace has assumed an increasingly prominent cultural position. Many readers have been introduced to his life and work through D.T. Max’s bestselling biography Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, while Wallace’s work routinely pops up in mainstream television series. Moreover, James Ponsoldt’s The End of the Tour has proved popular with a variety of different audiences, while numerous reissues and posthumous publications have also contributed to Wallace’s cultural presence. At the same time, the countless translations of Wallace’s texts will ensure that he does not remain an exclusively American figure, mired within a constrictive form of national literary interpretation, centered solely on his relation to a handful of postmodern precursors. As his work finds its way to new reading communities, it is crucial to emphasize Wallace’s international artistic indebtedness, disrupting parochial interpretations in order to position his work in relation to a diverse range of world literary traditions. In my view, there is a danger that the ever-­proliferating body of scholarly work on Wallace will overlook the extent of such engagements, and instead cloister the reception of his texts within a narrowly American domain of interpretive possibility. My hope is that the account of Wallace’s relation to numerous world literary traditions set forth within this book will further our collective understanding of the global dimensions of his work.

Acknowledgments I would first like to thank Stephen J. Burn, for his shrewd editorial assistance in guiding this book toward publication, together with many years of generous scholarly advice and encouragement. I am also indebted to Paul Giles, at the University of Sydney, for his extraordinary intellectual example and his ever-­attentive engagement with my work. Numerous friends and colleagues at the University of Sydney listened indulgently to half-­formed ideas and freewheeling theories about David Foster Wallace, or else read chapters and fragments of the manuscript-­in-progress: I am particularly grateful to Daniel Dixon, Jedidiah Evans, Sarah Gleeson-White, David Large, Tara Colley (Morrissey), Samuel Reese, and Macintosh Stewart. Thanks also to the countless devoted Wallace scholars and readers worldwide who have shaped my ideas, both from afar—online and in the pages of journals and books—and in person: You know who you are. I am also grateful to the entire team at Bloomsbury, but particularly to my editor, Haaris Naqvi, and his editorial assistant, Mary Al-Sayed, who were both a pleasure to work with. I would also like to thank the University of Sydney, which supported my research with numerous travel grants and research support schemes, as well as the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Parts of Chapters 2 and 6 were first published in Texas Studies in Literature and Language and Journal of American Studies, respectively. I am grateful to the editors of both journals for their help in sharpening my ideas, and for allowing me to republish these pieces in book form. Finally, my heartfelt thanks to my family: my sister, Emily, and parents, Greg and Sally, who have given loving support across my academic career and far beyond. This book is dedicated to my wife, Catherine, with untellable affection and gratitude.

Bibliography I.  Works by David Foster Wallace Wallace, David Foster. “1458 Words.” Speak Magazine 2 (Spring 1996): 41–42. ——. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1997. ——. “An Ex-Resident’s Story.” Granada House Website. http://www. granadahouse.org/people/letters_from_our_alum.html. ——. “Borges on the Couch.” New York Times Book Review (November 7, 2004): 10–12. ——. Both Flesh and Not: Essays. New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2012. ——. “Brief Interview with a Five Draft Man.” Interview with Stacey Schmeidel. Amherst Magazine (Spring 1999). https://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/ magazine/extra/node/66410. ——. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1999. ——. The Broom of the System. New York: Penguin, 1987. ——. The Broom of the System: Theatrical Movie, Sample Outline. Container 1.2. Bonnie Nadell’s David Foster Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. ——. Class Syllabi, 1992–2008. Container 32.6, 32.8. David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. ——. Consider the Lobster. New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2005. ——. “Contributors’ Notes.” In Best American Short Stories 1992, ed. Robert Stone. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1992, 374–76. ——. “David Foster Wallace’s Federer Moment.” NPR. Interview by Robert Siegel (August 19, 2006). ——. Draft of “/Solomon Silverfish/.” Container 1.10. Bonnie Nadell’s David Foster Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. ——. “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 13, no. 2 (1993): 151–94. ——. Email to Adelaide Cioni (March 29, 2006). Container 1.3. Bonnie Nadell’s David Foster Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. ——. Email to Bonnie Nadell (undated). Container 1.1. Bonnie Nadell’s David Foster Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. ——. Email to Bonnie Nadell (June 10, 2008). Container 1.3. Bonnie Nadell’s David Foster Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

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——. Letter to David Markson (1990). Container 1.1. Steven Moore’s David Foster Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. ——. Letter to Dwight Garner (December 24, 2004). Container 29.12. Little, Brown & Co. David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. ——. Letter to Jesse Cohen (September 7, 2000). Container 14.3. David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. ——. Letter to Joel Lovell (1998). Container 28.9. David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. ——. Letter to Michael Pietsch (April 1994). Container 1.10. Little, Brown & Co. David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. ——. Letter to Michael Pietsch (October 7, 2003). Container 1.10. Little, Brown & Co. David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. ——. Letter to Michael Pietsch (October 10, 2004). Container 1.10. Little, Brown & Co. David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. ——. Letter to Sergio Claudio Perroni (September 19, 1999). Container 1.5. Bonnie Nadell’s David Foster Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. ——. Letter to Steven Moore (October 26, 1990). Container 1.2–1.3. Steven Moore’s David Foster Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. ——. Letter to Steven Moore (1990). Container 1.2–1.3. Steven Moore’s David Foster Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. ——. Letter to Steven Moore (October 16, 1997). Container 1.2–1.3. Steven Moore’s David Foster Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. ——. Letter to Steven Moore (undated). Container 1.2–1.3. Steven Moore’s David Foster Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. ——. “Live with David Foster Wallace, Author of Infinite Jest.” Word E-Zine. Online Chatroom Interview (May 17, 1996). http://deadword.com/site1/ habit/wallace/dfwtrans.html. ——. Materials related to “Borges on the Couch.” Container 29.12. David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. ——. Materials related to “David Lynch Keeps His Head.” Container 1.2. David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. ——. Materials related to “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky.” Container 4.12. David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. ——. Materials related to “Laughing with Kafka.” Container 28.9. David Foster Wallace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

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263

Index Abbott, Edwin 47 Acker, Kathy 169 addiction 53, 69, 71, 104–5, 151, 152, 157, 183 Adorno, Theodor 86, 128–9, 168 affect 84, 108, 165–6, 223 Africa 20, 25–6, 27, 198, 205, 207 Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) 69–70, 98, 99, 101, 145, 146, 150–2, 183, 183 n.63, 197–8, 202, 203, 208, 215 alterity 14, 27–8, 30, 33, 70, 81, 87, 197, 218 Amherst College 4, 8, 38, 51, 92, 119, 120 n.10, 134, 148, 200 n.9, 220 anthropology 18, 20, 45, 198, 205–16, 234, 240 Arenas, Reinaldo 52, 56–7, 139 Arizona, The University of 5, 6, 7–8, 90, 98, 181, 199 artistic proxies 37, 80, 203 Ashbery, John 10, 72 Austen, Jane 11, 36, 120, 120 n.10 avant-­garde fiction 9, 52, 55, 59, 69, 108 n.38, 132 n.43, 72, 76, 140, 217, 228, 228 n.65 Bakhtin, Mikhail 12, 92, 152 Baldwin, James 170, 172 n.36, 201 Ballard, J.G. 72, 88 Barnes, Hazel 192 Barth, John 10, 40, 46, 51, 52, 67, 72, 74–5, 80, 148, 157, 226 Barthelme, Donald 10, 51, 65, 80 Barthes, Roland 8, 16, 109, 226 Beckett, Samuel 12, 121 Bellow, Saul 89, 169, 190, 194 Benjamin, Walter 142–3 Berkeley, George 12, 206

Bewitched 43, 77, 81–2, 81 n.71, 82 n.72, 86, 88, 177–8 Bloom, Harold 39–46, 72, 88, 139–40, 159, 234 The Anxiety of Influence 39–46, 85–6, 194–6 Blumenbach, Ulrich 15, 17, 235 Blurbs and Jacket Copy 10–11, 147 written by Wallace 121, 130, 215 Borges, Jorge Luis 8, 9, 13–14, 21, 28, 43, 46, 47, 52–3, 59, 67, 71–88, 131–3, 180, 189, 198 Boswell, Marshall 37, 40, 46, 63, 64–5, 105, 114, 187, 208, 227, 241 British Poetry 40, 44, 119–20, 194, 194 n.81, 242 Buddhism 184, 211–12, 242 Burn, Stephen J. 3, 4, 19, 23 n.50, 39 n.40, 60, 60 n.23, 62, 73–4, 91, 120, 146, 149, 175–6, 203–4, 228 n.64, 241, 242 Burroughs, William 10, 152 Calvino, Italo 8 Campbell, Joseph 205–20, 234, 235 Camus, Albert 8, 12, 22, 86, 93, 121, 164–5, 167–9, 191–2, 194 Carpentier, Alejo 52, 56 Carver, Raymond 6, 89, 158 Casanova, Pascale 27, 28, 47, 71, 118, 155–6 Chekov, Anton 8, 90, 180–1 Christianity 22, 96, 103, 108–9, 183, 211, 218 Catholicism 22, 45, 102, 103, 121, 170, 171, 183–6, 184 n.65, 189–90, 192, 193, 211 Church 109, 184–5, 184 n.65 Cioran, Emil 8, 123, 163 Coetzee, J.M. 8, 9, 94, 98

266 community 56, 101, 139, 179, 183–4, 209–10 contemporary US literature 4, 7, 14, 19, 23, 35, 36, 39, 43, 44, 54–5, 86, 94, 111, 115, 123, 140, 158, 159, 177, 232 and existentialism 169–70 Wallace’s views on 175, 228 Cortázar, Julio 8, 21, 51, 52–3, 55, 59, 66–7, 69, 71 Costello, Mark 148, 158, 220, 221–2, 223, 224, 226, 230, 232, 243 Crane, Stephen 106 creative writing programs (MFAs) 5, 6, 7, 134 Dalkey Archive Press 8–9 Damrosch, David 5, 9, 13–14, 21, 26–32, 34–5, 70, 75, 95, 119, 155, 238, 239 deconstruction 12, 13, 28, 66, 85, 86, 96, 132, 146–7, 157, 226–7 Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari 43, 142–3, 143 n.73, 144, 155 DeLillo, Don 3, 10, 52, 73–4 De Man, Paul 72, 74, 229 Den Dulk, Allard 161, 162, 166 depoliticization of literature 59–71 depression 58 n.17, 79 n.66, 126–7, 149 Derrida, Jacques 8, 12, 114, 226–7 deterritorialization 155 Dimock, Wai Chee 7, 21, 31, 34, 35 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 7, 8, 12, 13, 20, 21–2, 30, 33, 44, 51, 72–3, 85, 89–106, 107, 109, 111–16 The Brothers Karamazov 22, 98, 100–5, 113 Crime and Punishment 97, 107 House of the Dead 98–9 The Idiot 93 Notes from Underground 98 Doxiadis, Apostolos 8, 121, 209–10 Durkheim, Émile 164, 215 n.33

Index Egan, Jennifer 23 Eggers, Dave 36, 221 Eliot, T.S. 6, 40, 46 Ellis, Bret Easton 45, 93–4, 234 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 21, 46–9, 125–6, 156, 158, 239–40, 242 Engdahl, Horace 5–6, 24, 36 ethics 76, 93–6, 99–100, 101, 104–5, 107–8, 108 n.30, 113, 136, 161, 166, 207 of fiction 7, 44, 55, 76, 115–16, 123, 164, 165, 179 and world literature 29–30, 32–3, 123 Eugenides, Jeffrey 23 existentialism 20, 22, 84, 91, 97, 100–1, 109, 161–70 and America 190–6 and comedy 150–4 and Southern fiction 170–90 exoticism 118, 203, 239–40 “exoticism” as literary approach 13–14, 58, 70, 94, 239 expressionism 131–3, 132 n.43 Faulkner, William 190, 191–2 Federspel, Jürg 8, 124, 162 film 37, 41, 42, 42 n.44, 63–4, 67–8, 83–4, 85, 86, 90, 107, 113, 114, 120, 124, 153, 166, 169, 177, 185, 190, 200, 210, 234, 242, 243 Flaubert, Gustave 103–5, 109 Forster, E.M. 120, 157 Foucault, Michel 8, 226 Frank, Joseph 44, 72–3, 92, 93–8, 103, 105–6, 111–12, 141 Frankl, Viktor 8, 124, 182 Franzen, Jonathan 23, 35–6, 93–4, 97, 199–200, 200 n.7, 228 n.64 French Literature 8, 9, 15, 121, 126, 163–6, 191–2 Fuentes, Carlos 8, 21, 52, 59 Gaddis, William 10, 60, 60 n.23 Gardner, John 108, 108 n.38

Index Garner, Bryan A. 113 Gass, William H. 10, 214–15 gender 68, 81–2, 94, 106, 199, 217–18 Gennete, Gérard 43, 112 Giles, Paul 12, 16 n.39, 18, 21, 34, 119, 136–7, 157, 186–7, 193, 194, 240, 242 globalization 18, 27 and postmodernism 18, 35–6, 233–4, 240 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von 8, 9, 14, 25–6, 29–31, 47, 124, 209, 239 Gogol, Nikolai 6, 8, 22, 36, 90 Goncharov, Ivan 8, 21–2, 47, 90, 91 Granada House 98, 203, 208 Green, Karen 174 n.44, 208–9, 241 Grice, Gordon 188–90 Harper’s Magazine 57, 97, 127, 226, 227 Harris, Charles B. 40, 146–7 Harry Ransom Center 8, 9, 11, 37, 52, 53, 68, 92 n.11, 107, 108, 120 n.10, 124, 134, 135, 138, 166, 170, 181, 184, 211, 212, 215, 219 Herbert, Zbigniew 8, 55–6, 122–3, 158, 240 Hesse, Herman 30, 166 Hinduism 216 hip-­hop 20, 22–3, 45, 220–35 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 12, 44, 46 n.48, 120, 159 Howard, Gerry 10 Howells, William Dean 2–3, 89–90 Hustvedt, Siri 165, 169 Hyde, Lewis 215, 215 n.34 identification (and literature) 69–70, 137, 149–50, 197–8 Illinois State University 4, 8–9, 120 n.9, 181 Infante, Guillermo Cabrera 8, 21, 52, 66 intimacy 69, 81, 103, 105, 165–6, 227

267

irony 54–5, 58–9, 81 n.71, 85, 147, 150, 161, 166, 215 Islam 219–20, 233, 242 Jacobs, Timothy 12, 44, 46 n.48, 100–3, 120, 220–1, 242 James, Henry 30, 125 James, William 166–7, 190, 192 journalism 1, 4, 7, 11, 16, 22, 23–4, 43, 73, 85, 91, 118, 127, 161, 180, 199, 221, 224, 227, 228, 240, 243 Joyce, James 12, 32, 44, 54–5, 76, 120–1, 159 Judaism 129, 131, 144, 197, 199, 216–17 Kafka, Franz 1, 8, 12, 14, 20, 22, 44, 46, 56, 75, 84, 88, 97–8, 124, 125, 125 n.27, 126–60 Amerika 56, 138, 139, 148, 159–60 The Castle 127, 133 The Metamorphosis 128–9, 133–4, 135, 142, 153, 153 n.98, 157, 159 short stories of 127, 127 n.32, 128, 130, 131–2, 137, 142 The Trial 130 Karr, Mary 107 n.37 Kawabata, Yasunari 8, 242 Kharms, Daniil 8, 21–2, 90 Kierkegaard, Søren 10, 12, 97–8, 129, 137, 161, 164, 166, 172, 176, 191, 193 Kincaid, Jamaica 52, 55, 67–9, 71, 117 King, Stephen 43, 65 Konstantinou, Lee 4, 17, 36, 173–4, 238 Kosinski, Jerzy 8, 140–1 Kracauer, Siegried 8, 124 Kundera, Milan 8, 11–12, 123–4 Lacan, Jacques 8, 12 Laing, R.D. 139, 165 Larkin, Philip 12, 119, 120, 120 n.9 Latin-American literature 51–88 Lewis, C.S. 176

268

Index

Lewis, Sinclair 179, 237–8 Leyner, Mark 93–4 Lipsky, David 23, 38, 55, 70, 162, 169, 181, 182, 194, 204, 222, 223 literalization 38, 84, 128–9, 142–54, 158, 160 literary domestication 69, 87, 156–7, 235, 238, 239 literary influence 12–13, 17, 36–46, 51, 85–8, 111–16, 127, 155–60, 194–6, 232–6 and borderline plagiarism 38–9, 41–2, 45, 138, 191, 232–3, 241 as hip-­hop sampling 45, 232–6 as holograph 44, 111–16 as software programming 43–4, 85–8 as tessera completion 44–5, 194–6 as touchstone 19, 44, 155–60 (see also Bloom, Harold) literary minimalism 45, 175, 194–5 literary style 3–4, 21, 34, 36–7, 38, 69, 108, 188, 221 n.41, 224, 227 literary techniques 8, 20–1, 35, 38, 191–2, 202, 206, 223, 226, 228, 234, 238 Wallace took from other writers 22–3, 52, 59–71, 119, 127–8, 140, 142–54, 155–6, 158–9, 178, 229, 238, 241 “localized globalism” 34–5, 238 Lynch, David 85, 130, 132, 132 n.43, 143 n.73, 200, 210

Max, D.T. 3, 10, 16, 66–7, 98, 99, 129, 184, 200 n.9 McCaffery, Larry 44, 52, 107, 159, 180–1, 222, 228 McCain, John 1, 201, 204 n.16 McCarthy, Cormac 51, 143 n.73, 169 McGurl, Mark 5 McLuhan, Marshall 17–18, 240 metafiction 41–2, 62, 76, 80, 84, 101–2, 123–4, 149, 175 modernism 31, 72, 155 Moore, Brian 185–6, 120–1 Moore, Steven 3, 40, 44, 45, 53, 59, 90, 152, 159, 195 Moretti, Franco 28, 32, 238 mythology 18, 20, 45, 67, 133, 143, 206–16, 218, 234–5

Mailer, Norman 168–9, 170, 190 manipulation 83 n.73, 93, 98, 165 literary forms of 122, 123–4, 165 Mann, Thomas 8, 90, 124 Markson, David 52, 83, 170, 199, 210, 217–18 Márquez, Gabriel García 8, 21, 52, 55, 59, 66, 67 mathematics 37–8, 69, 78, 82, 83–4, 88, 91, 121, 209, 209 n.22, 215, 242

Pascal, Blaise 8, 121 patricide 94, 103, 113, 117 Patriotism 10, 11, 25, 35 in literary criticism 10, 11–12, 17, 35–6 Wallace’s 126, 199–200 Paz, Octavio 8, 21, 52, 54–5, 71 Percy, Walker 11, 20, 22, 51, 149–50, 168–80, 182, 184, 186, 190–6 Lost in the Cosmos 150, 178–9, 192

Nadell, Bonnie 60, 200–1, 204 New Yorker, the 123, 203–4, 240 Noteboom, Cees 8, 121 Obama, Barack 35, 200–1 O’Connor, Flannery 20, 22, 43, 45, 76, 89, 129, 170, 180–96, 203 “Everything that Rises Must Converge” 22, 180, 186, 187–90, 192–3, 195–6, 203 “Good Country People” 181–3 Wise Blood 181–2, 183 orientalism 202, 213, 215, 216, 217–18 Ozick, Cynthia 9–10, 197–8, 200

Index The Message in the Bottle 149, 175–6, 192 The Moviegoer 170–7, 192 philosophy 12, 22, 62–3, 74–6, 79, 80–1, 83, 85, 88, 130–1, 136 n.53, 155, 157, 161–96, 223 n.53, 234 Pietsch, Michael 106, 149, 186, 187, 187 n.71, 205, 219, 243 plagiarism 38–9, 41–2, 45, 138–9, 191, 232–3, 241 Plato 153–4, 214–15 poetry 3, 8, 20, 28–9, 37–8, 40, 44–5, 54, 55–6, 90, 95, 118, 119–20, 122–3, 139, 158, 159, 227, 228, 228 n.65, 231, 240, 242 politics 1, 18, 34, 35, 45 in literature 28, 47, 75, 118, 123, 126 Wallace and 1, 3, 4, 11–12, 18, 34, 58–9, 59–71, 75–6, 79, 87, 96, 100, 123, 125, 147, 150, 155–7, 169, 178–9, 193–4, 197, 200–1, 210–11, 218–20, 223–4, 230 Pomona College 4, 172 n.36 pop-­science writing 112, 127 n.32, 215, 20 post-­postmodernism 228 n.64 postcolonialism 28, 57–8, 69 posthumanism 126–42, 157 Postman, Neil 95–6, 96 n.17 postmodernism 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 17–18, 20–1, 58, 71, 72, 86, 100, 108, 143–4, 146–7, 148, 153–4, 158, 163–4, 177, 179–80, 190, 192, 205, 206, 207–8, 215, 227–8, 233–4 postmodern literature 3, 4, 13, 22, 46, 47, 51–2, 54–6, 59–60, 65–7, 75–6, 86, 87, 96, 108, 123–4, 158–9, 187, 193, 199, 199 n.3, 211, 220, 229, 235, 239–40, 240, 241, 243 poststructuralism 12, 13, 28, 66, 85, 86, 96, 132, 146–7, 157, 226–7 Powers, Richard 93–4, 228 n.64

269

pragmatism 14, 167, 186–7 Emersonian 33–4, 46–8, 125–6 Wallace’s 14, 29, 33, 71, 81, 115, 125–6, 156, 229, 239–40, 240–1 in world literature theory 21–2, 29, 33–4, 36, 71, 240–1 psychoanalytic theory 51, 74–5, 132–3, 210 Puig, Manuel 8, 14, 21, 51–70, 71, 241 Pynchon, Thomas 10, 52, 148, 157, 170, 219 race and ethnicity 22–3, 45, 197–236 racism 201–3, 202 n.12, 207, 219 realism, literary 17–18, 44, 55, 67, 69, 99–100, 113, 121, 130, 139–40, 159, 175, 179, 180, 191–2 Rhys, Jean 21, 52, 55, 57–8, 58 n.17, 117 Rilke, Rainer Maria 8, 124, 129 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 8, 80, 121 Rorty, Richard 186–7, 187 n.71 Roth, Philip 144–5, 148, 156 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 8, 93, 121, 164 Russian literature 8, 13, 21–2, 26, 30, 35–6, 89–116, 157, 163, 198 Absurdist Fiction 8, 21–2, 90, 91, 163 Russell, Bertrand 136 n.53 Ryerson, James 40 n.41, 165 Salinger, J.D. 6, 158 Sartre, Jean-Paul 8, 12, 22, 121, 165–8, 179, 182, 191–4 Saunders, George 35–6, 89, 211–12 Schulz, Bruno 8, 124, 140 Scott, A.O. 40, 87, 115–16 Shakespeare, William 6, 42–3, 47, 120, 132, 210, 239 Silverblatt, Michael 140, 165, 225 n.54 sincerity 94–5, 116, 141, 190 Smith, Zadie 121, 165 solipsism 2, 13–14, 51, 73, 79–81, 84, 108, 206, 210

270

Index

Sontag, Susan 7, 107 Southern Fiction 20, 22, 161–79 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 28, 29, 31, 32–4, 126 St. Paul 93, 164 Stendhal 8, 12, 121 Sterne, Laurence 120 suicide 110, 146, 163, 164, 186, 215 n.33 Swift, Jonathan 119–20 Tarantino, Quentin 162, 169 television 63 Wallace’s appearance in 23, 140, 243 Wallace’s views on 81–2, 81 n.71, 84, 86, 96 n.17, 140, 154, 161, 234 tennis 1, 57–8, 91, 118, 122, 127, 139, 161–2, 202, 183 theory, literary 13, 21, 25–36, 43, 47, 59, 86, 96, 108, 126, 127, 132, 234, 174–5, 197, 226–7, 234, 240 Tolstoy, Leo 7, 8, 9, 21–2, 47, 51, 85, 89, 90, 91, 106–11, 112, 114, 116, 180–1 Anna Karenina 47, 92, 106–7, 107 n.37 The Death of Ivan Ilyich 22, 44, 91, 91 n.6, 106–11, 114 What is Art? 112 translation 16, 25, 27, 28–30, 32–3, 35, 54, 89, 124, 126, 191–2 theories of 28–30, 32–3, 33–4, 126 Wallace’s approach to 8–9, 12, 14–16, 17, 54, 54 n.72, 90, 92, 103, 121, 124–6, 127, 138, 156–7, 190–1, 235, 238, 243 transnationalism 11, 13, 29, 34–6, 71, 118, 240–1 Trow, George W.S. 43, 81 n.71, 87–8 Turgenev, Ivan 8, 90 Updike, John 2, 6, 10, 72, 107, 158, 169–70

visual art 38, 54, 122, 199 n.6, 243 Wallace, David Foster, “Another Pioneer” 201–15 “Authority and American Usage” 120, 199, 200, 201, 204, 209 n.22 Both Flesh and Not 6, 39 n.40, 54, 83, 108, 118 “Brief Interview #59” 71–88 Brief Interviews with Hideous Men 1, 54, 65–6, 71–88, 92, 103–4, 124, 137, 182, 186, 208 The Broom of the System 10, 55, 60–1, 60 n.25, 64, 66, 114, 122, 127, 131–2, 133–4, 157, 159, 162, 166, 222 “Consider the Lobster” 16, 118, 125, 136, 157, 169 “David Lynch Keeps His Head” 85, 130, 132, 132 n.43, 143 n.73, 200, 210 “Deciderization 2007” 108 “The Empty Plenum” 83, 120, 157, 164, 165, 208, 211, 218 Everything and More 135–7, 136 n.53, 157, 209 n.22, 242 Fate, Time and Language 40 n.41, 165 “Federer Both Flesh and Not” 91, 92, 118, 222 n.51 and foreign languages 17, 30, 121, 92 “Forever Overhead” 165–6 “Getting Away From Already Being Pretty Much Away From It All” 54, 169, 184, 206, 209 Girl with Curious Hair 7, 9–10, 17, 37, 40, 60, 208, 222, 228 n.64 “Good Old Neon” 106–10, 22, 38, 44, 73, 73 n.56, 113, 114 n.51, 115, 162–3, 177–8, 207, 241 “Greatly Exaggerated” 91, 220, 226 “Here and There” 37–8

Index Infinite Jest 1, 2, 3, 10–11, 15, 16 n.39, 17, 20, 23, 38, 40–1, 42–3, 45, 53, 54, 58, 58 n.17, 60, 61, 63, 64, 65, 67–9, 73–4, 79, 82 n.72, 83–4, 86, 90–1, 92, 99–100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 106, 107, 112, 113, 114, 117, 120, 122, 124–5, 127, 137–9, 143–50, 152, 157, 159–60, 163, 164, 166–7, 171, 172 n.36, 177, 181, 184–5, 189, 191, 194, 197–8, 198, 199, 201–5, 208, 215, 220, 221–2, 228, 234, 237 and international travel 16, 57, 97, 199, 238 “Laughing with Kafka” 124, 125 n.27, 127, 130, 148, 226 “Little Expressionless Animals” 10, 38, 205, 241 “Mister Squishy” 79 and music 197–236, 222 n.51 Oblivion 23, 54, 73, 119–20, 172, 186, 188, 202 n.12, 205 “Oblivion” 202 n.12 “Octet” 22, 76–7, 84, 103–4, 112, 123–4, 148 The Pale King 1, 2, 4, 17, 23, 54, 55, 60, 61 n.27, 64, 65–6, 80, 86, 91, 105, 112, 117, 118, 123, 124, 133, 138, 149–50, 159–60, 162, 163, 164–5, 167, 169, 170, 173, 174–7, 178, 179, 180, 184–6, 190–2, 205, 213, 214, 215 n.33, 216–19, 241, 242, 243 “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” 22, 186, 187–90, 195

271

and poetry 44, 95, 119–20, 123, 158, 159, 228, 228 n.65, 240, 242 Signifying Rappers 17, 22–3, 45, 205, 220–36 “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” 16, 23, 57, 58, 97, 122, 127 n.32, 167, 173, 184, 199, 201–15, 215 n.34 This is Water 147, 158, 171–2, 183–4, 241 “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s” 184 “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” 7, 10, 40, 80, 87, 145 n.80, 164 Welsh, Irvine 121 Williamson, Edwin 21, 52–3, 72 n.54, 73–6, 131, 132–3, 180 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 12, 40, 40 n.41, 43, 60–1, 79, 83, 87–8, 114, 130–1, 147, 209 Woolf, Virginia 11, 36, 94–5 world literature 19–20, 21, 25–50, 57, 69, 75, 87, 90, 95, 198, 205, 221, 234, 238–43 and contemporary US fiction 35–6, 118, 158 genealogy of 25–35 theory 21, 25–35, 36, 70, 71, 87, 95, 99, 119, 126, 156, 197, 214 Translation and 28–30, 32–3, 33–4, 128 Yoshimoto, Banana 8, 242 Žižek, Slavoj 81, 143