As if the fragment were not done with you yet”: A Rhetoric of Allegory in Wallace’s ‘The Soul is Not a Smithy’

David Foster Wallace’s short story ‘The Soul is Not a Smithy’ (2004) exemplifies the author’s self-reflexive use of allegory as both rhetorical trope and representational mode. ‘Smithy’ interrogates the relationships between memory, narration and temporality, primarily through the conflicted discourse of its narrator, who is caught between reconstructing a bizarre childhood trauma and coming to terms with his experiences of adult life. The fundamental sense of disjunction in ‘Smithy’ between a ‘rhetoric of symbol’, exemplified by intense and atemporal imagery, and a ‘rhetoric of allegory’, typified by digressive vignettes and melancholic ruminations, functions to generate a series of conflicting discourses, fragmentary narratives and speculative aporia within the text. These effects are arguably central to ‘Smithy’s cultivation of textual ambiguity, and ultimately to the reader’s identifications with the text.

In ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’ (1981), Paul de Man redefines the relationship between symbol and allegory in anti-romantic terms, and privileges allegory as a discursive mode which “establishes its language in the void of temporal difference”, emphasising and exploiting the gap between figural language and its referent in order to communicate a sense of loss, impossibility and radical negativity with regards to time (p207-208). By contrast, the atemporality of symbol, “the possibility of an identity or identification” inherent to the symbolic mode, is deemed a “defensive strategy” of “tenacious self-mystification” (p207-208). This dialectical correspondence between pained self-knowledge and regressive self-mystification remains a crucial theme within Wallace Studies, particularly insofar as this dialectic is seen to play out in modern and postmodern forms of rhetoric (Boswell, 2003; Kelly, 2011). In investigating this correspondence from a decidedly formal-philosophical perspective, this paper aims at a further understanding of structure, rhetoric and temporality in Wallace’s work.

 David Foster Wallace, “Homme révolté”

 The forthcoming release of Infinite Jest’s translation demands to consider the possible connections between David Foster Wallace’s fiction and French literary culture. Such reflection seems to be not only proper but also important, and to some extent even essential. 

Throughout Wallace’s opera we can detect a peculiar definition of Postmodernism conceived as a literary style and a moral attitude supported by a set of problems that dramatize the issues of subjectivity and modern self-consciousness. According to Wallace, this self-consciousness is an illness, a literary, social and physical dysfunction. Wallace’s research arises as an effective existential inquiry critically tied with the outcomes of European philosophy, particularly Hermeneutics and French Existentialism. It is my opinion that the terms used by Wallace to set his discourse on the value of contemporary literature in opposition to a Postmodern tradition – or what Wallace takes as Postmodern – are the same terms used/shaped by one of the most influential French thinker of the past century on the existential idea of “absurd”: Albert Camus.

Both Wallace and Camus approached the “absurd”. They just call it with different names. They struggled with it and they attempted to live with and in spite of it. Both used the tools of their own intellect, and the full strength of their being to live with the knowledge of the paradox of existing in a world that would not yield its meaning.

Wallace’s Postmodern thinking, as atheism for Camus, is not the endpoint. It may be a tool, but it is not a conclusion. The purpose of my intervention would be to show how Camus’ “discovery of the absurd” is closely linked with the dialogue developed by Wallace with literary tradition and contemporary culture.

 What is a Turdnagel?

 Most critics discuss David Foster Wallace’s interest in philosophy as an early preoccupation. Wallace was influenced by the thought of Jacques Derrida and Ludwig Wittgenstein as an undergraduate at Amherst College, and incorporated their ideas into his first novel, The Broom of the System (1987). It is widely assumed that Wallace subsequently moved away from vigorously engaging with philosophy, as part of his new commitment to humanistic concerns.

My paper challenges this assumption. Wallace continued to wrestle with academic philosophy during his middle and late career, even after he left Harvard’s philosophy Ph.D. program. Drawing on Wallace’s Pale King notebooks at the Harry Ransom Center, which span a ten year period from the completion of Infinite Jest to his 2008 suicide, I will discuss Wallace’s investigation of Thomas Nagel’s The View from Nowhere (1989). Nagel’s thought takes on great importance in these notebooks and shaped Wallace’s final, unfinished novel, The Pale King (2011).

The View from Nowhere is concerned with the human capacity to view the world in a detached way, and argues that analytic philosophy has become too prone to objectification. Wallace dramatized these ideas in Infinite Jest and in early versions The Pale King. I will trace Wallace’s ultimate exploration of Nagel’s ideas to the figure of the “turdnagel,” a category of subterranean worker at the IRS, which appears only in passing references in the published version of The Pale King, but which receives much more attention in the notebooks. 

By comparing the published version of The Pale King to Wallace’s notebooks, I argue for the centrality of Nagel’s thought to Wallace’s post-Broom of the System intellectual trajectory, and for a new critical conception of his lifelong engagement with philosophy.

 The ‘Very Life Blood’ of the Game: Language, Rules and Meaning in Wittgenstein, Wallace and DeLillo

 In our paper we will explore the connections between David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo, in particular their respective novels Infinite Jest and End Zone, by analyzing the similar ways in which both are engaged with the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Specifically, we will use Wittgenstein’s thought on how language use connects meaning and reality to compare the ‘Eschaton’ episode from Infinite Jest with the theme of games and nuclear war in End Zone.

Wallace’s admiration for DeLillo and his indebtedness to DeLillo’s work is well documented, as is his in-depth appreciation of Wittgenstein’s thought. Likewise, DeLillo, who recognized Wallace as a fellow traveller, implicitly and explicitly engages with Wittgenstein’s thought throughout his work.

However, the aim of our paper is not to claim (or deny) a direct influence of Wittgenstein on Wallace and DeLillo. Instead, we want to achieve a better understanding of Wallace’s and DeLillo’s writing, of the connections between them, and thereby of important currents in contemporary American fiction, by viewing Wallace’s and DeLillo’s work – specifically Infinite Jest and End Zone – as occupying a middle ground between postmodern scepticism and romantic metaphysics. Thinking about their work in relation to the philosophy of Wittgenstein will enable us to resist and critique the postmodernist perspectives frequently invoked in DeLillo and Wallace scholarship, but also to avoid recourse to traditionalist conceptions of language and meaning. What Wittgenstein, Wallace and DeLillo can be seen to share is the desire to replace our self-reflective misperceptions and regain our capability to give meaningful expression to the real world. We will analyze these connections between Wittgenstein, Wallace and DeLillo by showing that all three emphasize the importance of changing the way we tend to see things, by demystifying excessive theorizing, emphasizing instead the value of the ‘ordinary’, as the only route towards spiritual fulfilment.

 “The seed of emptiness.” Melancholy of The Pale King

 DFW is as well a theorician of melancholy as one of those great writers who succumbed to this torment. No one else explored sadness with such humor as the author of Infinite Jest. I propose to study the melancholic structure of his last novel on four axes.

1) His efforts to find theoretical explanations and clinical anodynes against his suffering. Nobody before him has explained the idea that dullness could work as an analgesic bandage against the pain of existence (douleur d’exister) which in certain forms of melancholy is felt physically. (In Infinite Jest Don Gately’s unanesthetisized pain during his hospitalization could be the literary transposition of the author’s depressions.) He also linked boredom with courage: « Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is », writes the author, p. 231. To assume this kind of tedium opens the way to the real world.

2) DFW’s relation to his mother is central to his symptom. It is already present in Infinite Jest but we find this relation also scrutinized in The Pale King, for example in chapter 8’s description of Toni Ware and her mother (« The child as mother of the woman ») a relation which evokes Antonin Artaud’s reversed kinship. The mother-son relationship, excluding the father, is at the heart of his late story « Suicide as a sort of present », probably written at the same time as The Pale King. We find in this piece mutual identifications between a mother and her child. The mother has been abused in her childhood by her own father and feels for this reason diminished but she denies her pain. She has great expectations in her son who cannot satisfy her pretentions of perfection. So « the child appeared in a sense to be the mother’s own reflection in a diminished and deeply flawed mirror ». This mirror-relation is a radicalized narcissictic identification which Freud thought to be a main mechanism leading to the incorporation of the lost object in melancholy.

3) Capitalism and melancholy. When we speak of the lost object we should not forget the political dimension of the last novel : DFW was worried about what he felt as being the decline of American power and associated this crisis to the growing debt (chapter 14 -  22). The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) of the United Treasury Department is  « likened to the nations beating heart » with « the lifeblood of this heart: the men and women of today’s IRS »  (p. 103). This venerable institution is confronted with the problem of a growing « tax gap ». During the years of the Reagan-Administration the paper of an ultra-liberal ideologue named Spackmann gave a purely capitalistic turn to the IRS. It should now make a maximum of profit as if it were an ordinary firm. Oriented by this new ideology, it neglected the tax gap. So the nation began to suffer from a haemorrhage of public money, a pathology very close to what the young Freud speaks of a « hole » in the psyche through which sexual excitement is emptied. This hole leads to an  « inner bleeding », a loss of psychic energy, in melancholy (Manuscript G in Briefe an Wilhelm Fliess (Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, p. 102)).

4) DFW complained to his friend, the writer Jonathan Franzen (D. T. Max, 2012, p. 289, 295) about the « missing thing » of The Pale King, as if he could not find the structure for his last novel. We would like to try to answer the following question: what did he mean by this « missing thing » ?

David Foster Wallace, the Literature of Sincerity and the Narratology of Infinite Jest

 The essay “E Unibus Pluram” and the long interview with Larry McCaffery serve as companion pieces in representing David Foster Wallace’s aesthetic, especially his sense of the exhaustion of postmodernism. Wallace argues that the contemporary fiction writer needs to move beyond postmodernism’s dependence on irony, the effects of which include dislocation, disconnection, and stasis. He suggests instead a fiction that, while recognizing postmodernism’s problematization of language, discourse, and representation, nevertheless seeks to assert rather than deconstruct, to connect rather than fragment, to love rather than judge. In short, he makes a case for a literature of sincerity. 

In this paper I plan to analyze the narratology of Infinite Jest, paying special attention to its techniques of narration and its narrative structure, in light of Wallace’s aesthetic. More specifically, I will argue that the novel endorses this aesthetic in its presentation of the AA narratives. In this sequence the narrator, focalized to a certain extent through Don Gately, critiques those sobriety stories that seek to entertain, make excuses, or, inexcusably, use irony—any story that puts the focus on the storyteller at the expense of the listener. The narrator praises those stories that use the storyteller’s experience to form a bond of identification with the listener. I will argue that this key sequence is put into tension with much of the rest of the novel’s narration and structure, which, in its highly stylized narrative voice, its self-reflexive and patience-trying endnotes, and its closure-resistant concluding section, seem at odds with the methods of the best AA stories. This tension allows the novel to dramatize and engage both the exhaustion of postmodernism and the aesthetic of sincerity.

Feeling the Plot: a Sentimental Reading of Infinite Jest and The Pale King

 A rule of thumb in literature studies holds that the critical distance required for an objective analysis of a text is at odds with complete immersion in the textual world. Even though the New Critics’ conception of literature as autonomous and self-contained was supplanted decades ago by the advent of reader-response theory, W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley’s notion of the affective fallacy—the idea that a reader’s report of intense feelings “is neither anything which can be refuted nor anything which it is possible for the objective critic to take into account” (32)—still resonates in the academy. Even today, professional readers generally shy away from studying the preferences of feeling readers (Keen 2007; Keller et al. 2011, 84). Emotional analyses of texts may still be frowned upon, yet a surprisingly large number of academics that set off the work of David Foster Wallace against that of writers from the previous generation do so mainly in affective terms. The consensus among these critics is that the mazelike novels of the postmodernists are overly intellectual and hold the reader in complete disregard. Wallace’s fiction, by contrast, is supposedly marked by a deeper concern for the fiction writer’s obligation towards his or her audience, and by a return to strong feelings. Symptomatic of this position is the claim by Patrick O’Donnell (in Boswell and Burn 2013), himself a Pynchon specialist, that whereas a massive novel like Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) “experiments with language in the hermeneutic mode,” it never achieves the “quality and depth of affect” that draws in readers of Infinite Jest or The Pale King (2-3). One reason why it may seem self-evident that Wallace’s writings herald a return to lifelike emotions is that this is precisely the idea put forward both in his essays and interviews and in his fiction. Drawing on cognitive narratology and studies in narrative comprehension, however, the question I will address is whether these “sentimental” readings are merely intuitive readings, or whether there really is something in the two Wallace novels mentioned above that gives rise to strong(er) feelings.

 Paul Giles has argued that David Foster Wallace is a “sentimental posthumanist” whose work admits to the fact that media, technology, and global networks have irreversibly fractured and complicated one-time notions of human identity, while nonetheless still exploring human affectivity, emotion, and longing as they persist within such techno-environments. As Wallace himself once put it in an interview, “fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.” This paper proposes to explore a new dimension of Wallace’s posthuman paradigm as it can be seen to emerge in the curious and fascinating figure of Drinion in The Pale King. Drinion, who is portrayed as machine-like and, at times, hardly human, nevertheless epitomizes a “good listener” as he pays close attention to Meredith’s fateful story of how she met and married her husband.  There are perhaps forerunners of Drinion to be found in the autistic Lunt of “Little Expressionless Animals” and in the seemingly cold doctor Kate Gompert meets upon entering a hospital in Infinite Jest. In the case of all three characters a supposedly “inhuman” side, one much different than the kind depicted in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, does not entail inhumanity so much as it does Wallace’s complex reassessment of the human. As the most fully developed of these characters, Drinion might be said to constitute a novel conception of the posthuman for Wallace, one that suggests a potentially different and more radical mode of empathic understanding than he entertained in much of his earlier “sentimental posthumanist” work.       

“By Hirsute Author”: Gender &/vs. Communication in the Work of David Foster Wallace

 In one of his first published essays, and one of his few published pieces of literary criticism, David Foster Wallace criticizes a novel whose many praises he has otherwise sung—David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress—for constructing its female narrator through an oppressive and reductive male gaze: “To be an object of desire (by hirsute characters), speculation (by hirsute author), oneself the ‘product’ of male heads & shafts is to be almost Classically feminized, less Eve than Helen, ‘responsible’ without freedom to choose, act, or forebear.” (“The Empty Plenum,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 10.2 (1990): 216-239). His analysis of Kate expresses a set of what were, for him, overlapping anxieties about male assertions of power in heterosexual relationships, the workings of language between readers and writers, and possibilities for empathy in both. Elsewhere I have argued (in A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies) that Brief Interviews with Hideous Men most pointedly explores this anxiety about the intersection of language, power, and desire. This paper will expand that argument by examining Wallace’s examinations of gender—specifically as constructed in heterosexual dynamics—in conjunction with possibilities for communication and empathy across his fiction, essays, and interviews.

It will argue—using The Broom of the System, “Little Expressionless Animals,” “Here and There,” Infinite Jest, Brief Interviews, and The Pale King, along with excerpts from interviews and essays—that his two decades of writing maintain consistent focus on the feminist concerns expressed in his 1990 criticism of Markson’s novel. His emphasis there on Kate’s construction by “hirsute characters” and “hirsute author” defines these defining men in terms of their animality (Though photos of Markson in youth and after reveal him to have been quite a clean-shaven guy), even their “horridness” (Wallace knew his Latin roots), in a precursor to his Hideous Men. But his criticism in “Plenum” goes beyond the dangers of male sexual desire to illuminate a more specific overlapping of male narcissism in writing and in romance (see also his long interview with David Lipsky, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, in which he compares his narcissistic manipulation of the reader with his selfish manipulation of lovers) that becomes characteristic of Wallace’s writing and of the drive for empathy that is, for Wallace, almost without exception more struggle than success: his final fiction features a woman who suffers, with awareness but without escape, the same “hirsute” male gaze as Markson’s Kate (Meredith Rand in The Pale King). In writing, as in life, for Wallace and his characters, the need to use the other to define the self is never more apparent or forceful than in heterosexual relationships marked by desire, making them a most fruitful site for examining the workings and failings of communication and understanding among characters, readers, writer, and text.

Art, Science and the “Group Mind”: David Foster Wallace’s Communal Progress

In 1993, David Foster Wallace told Larry McCaffery that artistic advances in twentieth-century fiction could be understood by analogy with the invention of calculus: the innovators in both arenas were breaking rules in order to achieve something important. But “the analogy breaks down,” Wallace continued, because “math and hard science are pyramidical. They’re like building a cathedral: each generation works off the last one, both its advances and its errors.” Hard science is like a cathedral: at the very moment that Wallace attempts to distinguish between science and art, in other words, he actually finds himself employing a metaphor that unites them, a cathedral being a paradigmatic example of both an artistic and scientific achievement.

In this paper, I will follow a trail in Wallace’s texts that persistently sees him thinking art and science together in this manner. Moreover, I will demonstrate the importance of this twinning of art and science for Wallace’s conception of two major themes: community and progress. Wallace’s concern with loneliness is well documented, and one way he addressed it was to think both science and art as communal endeavours, productive of a “group mind,” a term he takes from Lewis Hyde. But this group mind was also central to his conception of progress in these fields, so that the image of the lonely individual genius – whether in art or science – is replaced by figures such as the generation, the readerly community, and the researchers who make up a field of knowledge.

Drawing on original research in the Wallace archive at the Harry Ransom Centre, this paper will make its argument by considering texts as diverse as Wallace’s interview with McCaffery, his review of two novels about math, the marginalia in his personal copy of Hyde’s The Gift, and his short story “The Soul is Not a Smithy,” from Oblivion. My reading of the latter story will show how Wallace increasingly understood fiction as contributing to the progress we normally associate with science, by providing a more accurate description of the processes of cognitive perception. The paper will conclude by offering a sense of how Wallace’s insights into innovation and progress might offer a way to rethink the contemporary humanities as a collective endeavour, one worthy of society’s time, attention, and its public funding.