David Foster Wallace and the Anxieties of Serious Fiction 

In the 1993 McCaffery interview, David Foster Wallace contrasts commercial fiction with “serious art,” which “force[s] [readers] to work hard to access its pleasures.” This elusive genre depends on a literary difficulty that challenges conventional interpretive strategies. Indeed, recent scholars have argued that Wallace ushered in new critical trends and aesthetic forms that call into question poststructuralist paradigms, but Wallace’s difference from postmodern metafiction would not have been so readily apparent in the mid-1990’s. This paper considers how Wallace’s early fiction and literary manifestos deployed a unique rhetoric of deferral (evident in Wallace’s rhetorical questioning and in Infinite Jest’s textual gaps) that made a new public of readers more attentive to the difference between postmodern fiction and the genre Wallace was pioneering. Though Wallace helped instigate a shift out of postmodernism, it is crucial to recognize how his anxieties about the possibility of novelty made this transition possible. As others have noted, Wallace was not the “anti-rebel” he describes in “E Unibus Pluram,” but a writer whose novelty resides in his efforts to anxiously evade such labelling. His brand of serious fiction, I argue, is a genre of deferral, an anti-genre that simultaneously evokes and disowns identifiable literary styles. This deferred closure is nowhere more evident than in characters’ readings of the samizdat cartridge “Infinite Jest,” which I read against the grain of criticism that has understood the film as the epitome of addictive commercial entertainment. Though what we know of “Infinite Jest”’s plot reads as a parody of banal psychoanalytic platitudes, its uncertain effect on those who view it becomes a talking point among other characters who are anxious to forestall the social destruction the film seems to produce. “Infinite Jest”’s inscrutability forces readers to reflect on their own ability to discern works as “serious” and novel, throwing into relief the challenges Wallace’s work posed to the reading practices of those invested in particular forms of “serious” fiction.

David Foster Wallace and the Function of Criticism

 The ‘opaque abstraction’ of contemporary academic writing ‘so closely resembles political and corporate doublespeak [...] that it’s tempting to think [its] real purpose is concealment and its real motivation fear’. Thus is Foster Wallace’s withering attack on the ‘verbal cancer’ produced by ‘little gray people who take the machines others have built and just turn the crank’.

My paper will examine Wallace’s often-overlooked aversion to literary criticism (the ‘radical-intellectual fad’ of today) in the context of his own growing critical reception by Wallace Studies. Moreover, I will offer a reading of Wallace’s paradoxical self-fashioning as both ‘hardcore theory-wienie’ and ‘everyday civilian’: he is a problematically post-postmodern author who, like Don DeLillo’s Bill Gray, could ‘blend into that great mass’ while simultaneously prescribing ‘the need for an absolute being, a way out of weakness and confusion’.

If the ironized strains of postmodernism are diagnosed by Wallace as a Wittgensteinian word-holiday, a prolonged abstraction which can only be solved by some acquiesence to ‘gooey’ sentimentality, then my paper will judge these claims by examining that most cerebral prop in Infinite Jest: the endnote. How are we to read the note affixed to Rusk’s diagnosis of Hal’s ‘Coatlicue complex’ but which admits ‘No clue’? And what of n304, which, within Struck’s ‘insufferable’ plagiarism of U.S. Academese, contains vital information on A. F. R. – but which is only reachable via a sub-network of endnotes for the first 700 pages?

By tracing the historico-theoretical tensions of a device which has often been read as a ‘trademarked’ signal of Wallace’s genius, my paper will instead show that the endnote takes part in a long-standing controversy – from Coleridge to Nabokov – over just what it is that the critic is supposed to do; and why we ‘little gray people’ can do more than just turn the crank.

 The Emancipated Reader : The Radical Aesthet[h]ics in David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Wallace’s fictional worlds paint a grim picture of a media-saturated society that is pervaded by self-conscious characters, emotional poverty, and culture’s addiction to pleasure and drugs. However, while his work functions as an examination of contemporary America and the values it perpetuates, Wallace finds himself at an impasse: Admiring writers like Dostoevsky for advancing ideologies through their work, yet also acutely aware of the impossibility of a reversal of postmodernism, Wallace is caught in the double bind of the incompatibility between the urge to provide the reader with moral values and culture’s aversion to strong convictions and principles.

Relating my paper to a revised understanding of the nature of aesthetics with reference to Jacques Rancière, I will show how these seemingly oppositional stances are by no means mutually exclusive in Wallace’s work. Rather, his oeuvre signals a new moral purpose of art after the postmodern experiment, based on a notion of aesthetics that is not located in a set of prescriptive rules. I will suggest that Wallace’s work mirrors Rancière’s coupling of a theory of aesthetics that harbors art’s ambiguous play between autonomy and subordination as a principal issue allowing for art to impact real life, and a treatment of reception that strives to do justice to the role of the audience: Wallace’s own aesthetics recognizes the reader, as I will argue, as an active agent in the process of interpretation permitting her to translate the work into her own words. Meanwhile, his writings serve as mediator between the author and his readership. Both Wallace and Rancière thus aim to liberate the audience from passivity by subverting the consciousness of the readership which can be interpreted as the promise of new possibilities and promises in real life.

 Le bon usage : le Français chez David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace revendiquait ses racines dans le Midwest et a mené une vie toute "américaine" où ne figurent que de rares et brefs voyages à l'étranger : en Angleterre puis à Capri, alors qu'il était déjà marié, pour participer à une série de rencontres littéraires, et quelques jours en France, au printemps 2001.

Or, de manière sous-jacente, c'est la culture française qui l'a le plus marqué, dès ses études où il choisit le français comme langue étrangère et s'enthousiasme, dans les années 1980, pour Derrida. Les références abondent, aussi bien dans  le domaine du cinéma (Bresson, Bazin, Desplechin), que de la literature (Perec, Camus qu'il disait lire et admirer peu avant sa mort dans une lettre à Tom Bissell, en février 2008). L'examen de sa bibliothèque, aujourd'hui conservée à Austin, révèle la présence de titres français traduits et en langue originale.

D'autre part, comment ne pas s'interroger devant son utilisation de la langue française dans Infinite Jest? Bien qu'on lui en ait fait remarquer le caractère fautif, Wallace, par ailleurs défenseur de la linguistique prescriptive en anglais, ne fera pas de corrections lors de la réédition en poche de son oeuvre majeure.

Cette étude entend donc analyser les citations, allusions et références à la culture française, et, à partir d'un relevé quantitatif, soutenir une hypothèse sur sa stratégie littéraire (poétique, satire, hybris) concernant son usage du français dans Infinite Jest.

Art is on the way: from the abject opening of Underworld to the shitty ending of Oblivion

 A source-study of a sort, this essay is based on conjecture about reading matters that may have informed some variations on the theme of art and abjection in writings by Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace.

Certain moments in the prologue to DeLillo’s massive novel Underworld—called “The Triumph of Death,” after the painting by Bruegel, but set in the 1951 Brooklyn Dodgers/New York Giants playoff game and organized in terms of the historical synchronicity between Bobby Thomson’s pennant-clinching ninth-inning homerun (called “The Shot Heard ‘Round the World”) and, on the other side of the world, the Soviet Union’s reported test-detonations of atomic bombs in Kazakhstan —suggest DeLillo’s familiarity with “A Theory of Mass Culture,” the 1957 essay in which “Cold War” intellectual Dwight McDonald rails against the “spreading ooze” of  popular culture industrially produced and homogenized for “the masses.” McDonald is particularly repelled by Life, a high-circulation magazine which he thinks fatally erases the boundary between authentic art and popular kitsch by featuring reproductions of seriously regarded paintings nestled among schlocky stories about the latest Hollywood celebs, as if these quantities of culture were all of the same quality. DeLillo dramatizes McDonald’s argument—and particularly his rancor against Life—in a conspicuously abject fashion at the opening to Underworld: at the climactic moment of Thomson’s “shot,” Bruegel’s “Triumph of Death,” as mechanically reproduced in the glossy pages of Life, is ecstatically torn to pieces by a nameless fan and made to let fall as celebratory confetti onto certain historical personages depicted as attending the game: the secretively cross-dressing lawman J. Edgar Hoover, the criminally connected entertainer Frank Sinatra,  and the then profusely vomiting fatso Jackie Gleason (who has eaten one too many ballpark franks). Mixing shreds of falling Bruegel with Gleason’s chunky spew, DeLillo’s prologue suggests his own authorial/intestinal distress about the fate of language in the logic of late capitalism, his anxieties about art, writing, history and commerce as arenas of abjection in which fundamental distinctions between high and low, life and death, law and crime, worth and waste—and, perhaps underlying all of Underworld’s anxieties, male and female—threaten to crumble.

As for Wallace, his story “The Suffering Channel,” the last piece in Oblivion, concerns one Virgil Atwater, a writer for a magazine called Style, who, in July 2001 (the editorial offices of Style are located in one of the doomed towers of the World Trade Center) is assigned to report on a Mr. Brint Molke, a man from the Midwest whose claim to mass-cultural fame involves his ability to produce signature pieces sculpture out of his behind, not first defecating and then manually sculpting these works of art but rather “miraculously” bringing fully-formed Winged Victories of Samothrace and such rectally into the world. Using the “scatontological” mode of analysis first brought forth in my book Male Matters: Masculinity, Anxiety, and the Male Body on the Line—which explores dysgraphic male anxieties about the links between writing, abjection, long forgotten fantasies of cloacal birth, and tense projections of impending death—I here tautologically speculate that Wallace’s “Suffering Channel” is based, if not on his actual reading of Male Matters (I will claim to remember having sent him a copy of the book in 1997), then at least on his perceived anxieties, as articulated at the end of Oblivion, about precisely these dysgraphically scatontological links. Moreover, I argue that my speculation about what Wallace may or may not have been reading is not merely (and self-servingly) tautological (involving the use of my own analysis to argue that Wallace’s fiction is based on his use of my own analysis) but, more precisely, annular (corresponding to the more conspicuously anal dimensions of annulation that Wallace limns in Infinite Jest—the massive production that of course first prodded me to think that Wallace might want to take a look at my Male Matters).

 ‘We recoil from the dull’: David FosterWallace and Don DeLillo’s Digressive Tactics

This paper will trace affinities between Don DeLillo’s The Names (1982) and Underworld (1997) and David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King (2011) by focusing on both writers’ tendency to stem the narrative flow by introducing digressions, whether in the form of excessive detail, lists, tangents, oscillations between different narrators, or endnotes. Seeking to break with readings of both authors as postmodern – or post-postmodern – I will argue that these works are a continuation of the modernist project of representing the everyday. Recent studies such as Liesl Olson’s Modernism and the Ordinary and Bryony Randall’s Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life have asserted the centrality of the everyday to modernist literature, positing that modernist writers’ stylistic innovations arose from a desire to represent ‘everydayness’. In The Pale King, for example, Wallace writes: ‘you will regard features like shifting p.o.v.s, structural fragmentation, willed incongruities & c. as simply the modern literary analogs of “Once upon a time . . . “ or “Far, far away, there once dwelt . . .” or any of the other traditional devices that signaled the reader that what was under way was fiction and should be processed accordingly’ (72). This claim indicates that formal devices associated with modernist writing have lost the ‘shock of the new’ and become naturalised, therefore rendering them more appropriate for representing the everyday and replicating the shifting modes of attention we train upon it. I will suggest that DeLillo and Wallace both curb narrative progression for politically progressive ends: DeLillo’s digressions work to counteract the spectacular narratives of terrorism and democracy building; Wallace’s digressions resist the functionalist logic of the IRS. By redeeming the non-functional, the ‘dull’, both authors force us to retrain our attention on the everyday, and in doing so highlight how overarching power structures pervade everyday life.

The social mass and the solipsistic bead : Oedipa Maas, Lenore Beadsman and the limits of self-revelation

 It has already become commonplace to refer to Thomas Pynchon’s significant influence on David Foster Wallace. To date however there have been few sustained attempts to delineate the nature of this influence beyond vague generalities about the systems novel, and the use of irony and paranoia, that focus almost exclusively on the writers’ magna opera – Gravity’s Rainbow and Infinite Jest. But a careful reading of the writers’ minor works, in this case The Crying of Lot 49 and The Broom of the System, reveals specific and fascinating correlations, on both a philosophical and a literary theoretical level. We argue that the adventures of Oedipa Maas and Lenore Beadsman can be approached through Heidegger’s belief that there is no a priori defined human substance – on the contrary, human beings are what they become in their active participation in life: our being is defined by the world into which we are thrown. Oedipa and Lenore find themselves thrown into worlds not of their own choosing, and their quests for the Tristero and Lenore’s missing grandmother respectively, force both to abandon their middle-class conformity and relative affluence and to seek their being in relation to the complex technological and linguistic networks that surround them. For Oedipa, revelation seems to be prevented by the powerful Foucauldian network of power relations and robust technological signifieds that overwhelm her, while Lenore is allowed to overcome her inability to treat language as a function of relationships between persons though, significantly, not through her own agency. Finally, we argue that, in bringing together worlds logically incompossible with one another, Oedipa and Lenore both function as Lacanian ‘floating signifiers’. Lenore’s struggle, however, articulates Wallace’s early focus on solipsism and Wittgensteinian linguistic theory as opposed to the sociopolitical preoccupations clearly present in Pynchon’s Oedipa’s quest.