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BIG BOOKS: ADDICTION AND RECOVERY
IN THE NOVELS OF DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
By
ROBERT W. SHORT
A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT
OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA
2017
© 2017 Robert W. Short
To Caroline, without whom none of this would have been possible
4
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to these people, all of whom contributed to this project’s completion: my
parents, Gordon and Aleta Short, who set the example and never wavered; my wife, Caroline,
who never once asked me to stop talking about David Foster Wallace; Trysh Travis, who showed
me how to say what I needed to say; Marsha Bryant, who steered this project where it needed to
go; Matt Bucher, whose generosity and encyclopedic knowledge of Wallace remain invaluable;
and—finally—to Slug and Walrus, though perhaps the latter more than the former. I hope you all
like it. I made it with my own two hands.
5
TABLE OF CONTENTS
page
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...............................................................................................................4
LIST OF FIGURES .........................................................................................................................7
ABSTRACT .....................................................................................................................................8
CHAPTER
1 INTRODUCTION: NARRATIVES OF ADDICTION AND LITERATURES OF
RECOVERY ...........................................................................................................................10
Wallace Studies ......................................................................................................................10
Recovering Theory Addicts ....................................................................................................20
Infinite Jest: Wallace as Wake-Up Call ..................................................................................25
Theory Addiction ....................................................................................................................31
Chapter Outline .......................................................................................................................36
2 THEORY BINGE: THE BROOM OF THE SYSTEM AS BENDER .....................................40
“I’d Grown Up Inside Vectors, Lines” ...................................................................................40
From Philosophy to Fiction ....................................................................................................56
Lost in Translation: The Broom Of The System’s Failures of Theory ....................................61
Chasing the “Click”: DFW’s Other Drug of Choice ..............................................................75
3 WALLACE’S ETHICAL TURN: WITTGENSTEIN’S MISTRESS AS HITTING
BOTTOM ...............................................................................................................................81
The Inter-Novel Period: From Tucson to Normal ..................................................................81
Wallace in Tucson ..................................................................................................................83
Overloads and Collapses: Wallace Hits Bottom .....................................................................92
Thinking Out Loud: Wallace’s Inter-Novel Criticism as a Progression Toward His
Mature Fictional Ethic ......................................................................................................106
Toward Infinite Jest ..............................................................................................................117
4 BIG BOOKS: INFINITE JEST AND THE LITERATURE OF RECOVERY ....................121
The “Normal Wallace” .........................................................................................................121
William James as Recovery Theorist....................................................................................128
The Influence of William James in Infinite Jest ...................................................................134
Infinite Jest’s Pragmatic Revisions to The Broom of the System..........................................137
Westward the Course of Wallace Takes His Way ................................................................149
5 AFTERWORD: DAVID FOSTER WALLACE’S TRANSFORMATIVE GIFTS AND
THE LABOR OF GRATITUDE ..........................................................................................159
6
Labors of Gratitude, Gift Economies, and Wallace Communities .......................................159
Lewis Hyde and The Gift Economy .....................................................................................159
Wallace’s Kenyon Commencement as Labor of Gratitude ..................................................163
Labors of Gratitude and Wallace Communities ...................................................................171
“Offline” Wallace Communities and Personal Gratitude .....................................................181
LIST OF REFERENCES .............................................................................................................190
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................................194
7
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure page
4-1 Photograph of David Foster Wallace’s AA Meeting Notes, page 1 ................................157
4-2 Photograph of David Foster Wallace’s AA Meeting Notes, page 2 ................................158
5-1 Photograph of David Foster Wallace’s annotations in The Gift ......................................186
5-2 Series of photographs of annotations ...............................................................................187
5-3 Series of photographs of Norman Rockwell’s “Golden Rule” ........................................188
5-4 Photograph of David Foster Wallace’s annotations in The World’s Religions ...............189
8
Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School
of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
BIG BOOKS: ADDICTION AND RECOVERY
IN THE NOVELS OF DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
By
Robert W. Short
May 2017
Chair: Marsha Bryant
Cochair: Trysh Travis
Major: English
My dissertation frames the evolution of David Foster Wallace’s writing ethic as a
function of addiction recovery. Wallace completed only two novels—the first of which is
generally dismissed as the work of a young author enamored of his talent, the second of which is
not uncommonly hailed as “the voice of a generation.” Between these novels, he weaned himself
off an addiction to the conspicuous narrative foregrounding of poststructuralist theory,
progressing into a writer capable of bringing theory to life through narrative engagement with its
application. This reformed Wallace repurposed these sterile, theoretical paradoxes as models for
understanding not just the crises of individual experience, but also of American culture more
broadly.
Wallace’s life and work invite us to use the institutional language of addiction and the
inherent narrative structure of twelve-step programs to read his novels as a progression toward an
open-ended and always-contingent recovery from literary theory. Wallace was a chronic
substance abuser during his teens and twenties and became a devoted member of twelve-step
groups in the second half of his life. I use the three-part narrative schema of recovery—“what we
were like, what happened, and what we are like now”— to account for the differences between
9
Wallace’s two novels. Wallace understood himself as an addict; failure to read him as one means
neglecting the crucial ways 12-step recovery informs his larger fictional project.
Yet Wallace’s writing complicates a purely twelve-step notion of theory recovery by
rejecting certain edicts of Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous. Whereas Wallace’s substance-
abuse recovery depended on adhering to twelve-step doctrine, his theory addiction required
fashioning his own hermeneutic recovery process: a pragmatic appraisal of theory’s narrative
value for his readers. The result of this process is a writing style that foregrounds the mental
route Wallace took to arrive at his conclusions. By importing the classic math teacher injunction
to “show your work,” Wallace imbued his writing with a sense of sincerity that rendered it
capable of meaningful engagement with readers.
10
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION: NARRATIVES OF ADDICTION AND LITERATURES OF RECOVERY
All of David’s loves, I would argue, follow the model of addiction.
—D. T. Max
“Angels of Death”
1
Wallace Studies
David Foster Wallace’s work is more important than anything I can say about it. But the
experience of reading Wallace feels more like having a conversation, so instead of compelling
my deferential silence, it rather compels me to speak. And I’m not the only one. When he died
on September 12, 2008, Wallace was forty-six years old. Despite the fact that Wallace produced
only two novels during the relatively short span of his working years, the industry that has
recently sprung up around Wallace is approaching the level of more long-established figures in
the American literary tradition and continues to pick up speed.
Since my first semester in the University of Florida’s graduate English program, there
have been upwards of 165 scholarly articles published in anthologies or journals and at least
twenty monographs devoted solely to Wallace’s work, including the first book in Bloomsbury’s
new David Foster Wallace Studies series.
2
,
3
In 2009, the University of Texas acquired
1
Chapter 1’s epigraph is drawn from Max, D. T. "Angels of Death: David Foster Wallace and the Battle against
Irony, Letterman and Leyner?" MIT Comparative Media Studies Colloquium Podcast, 11 Mar. 2013, 00:31:55–
00:32:02.
2
For an online listing of most of these articles, I suggest the excellent “Bibliography of Secondary Criticism” by the
Glasgow David Foster Wallace Research Group, found at https://davidfosterwallaceresearch.wordpress.com/.
3
The monographs include: Stephen J. Burn’s David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: A Reader’s Guide (2003),
William Dowling and Robert Bell’s A Reader’s Companion to Infinite Jest (2005), Greg Carlisle’s Elegant
Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (2007), Stefan Hirt's The Iron Bars of Freedom, David
Foster Wallace and the Postmodern Self (2008), David Hering’s Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays
(2010), Steven M. Cahn and Maureen Eckert's Fate, Time, and Language (2011), Stephen J. Burn’s David Foster
Wallace’s Infinite Jest: A Reader’s Guide. Expanded 2nd ed. (2012), Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou’s The
Legacy of David Foster Wallace (2012), Marshall Boswell and Stephen J. Burn’s A Companion to David Foster
Wallace Studies (2013), Greg Carlisle’s Nature’s Nightmare: Analyzing David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion (2013),
Robert K. Bolger and Scott Korb’s Gesturing Toward Reality: David Foster Wallace and Philosophy (2014),
Marshall Boswell’s David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing”: New Essays on the Novels (2014), Steven M.
11
Wallace’s archive, which was opened to the public for research at the Harry Ransom Center in
Austin the following year.
4
Ten Wallace conferences have been held since 2009, all of them
organized by graduate students and held at institutions like the University of Liverpool, CUNY,
the University of Antwerp, and the University of Paris. This year marks the appearance of panels
on Wallace’s work at both MLA and ALA, the fourth consecutive year of the Annual
International David Foster Wallace Conference at Illinois State University, and the first Wallace
conference in Australia, OzWallace, which will take place in Melbourne this September.
5
Within this voluminous body of work, there are identifiable stages in the evolution of
Wallace Studies criticism. Adam Kelly, in his 2010 essay “David Foster Wallace: the Death of
the Author and the Birth of a Discipline” (later republished and updated to include sources
published between 2010 and 2014 in Philip Coleman’s Critical Insights: David Foster Wallace
as “David Foster Wallace: The Critical Reception”) identifies three such distinct critical modes.
In the first, the earliest Wallace critics “understood Wallace’s fiction primarily in terms of its
emphasis on science and information system and its intersections with American
postmodernism” (Kelly 47). This approach is exemplified in the first responses to Wallace’s
work between 1993 and 1999 by N. Katherine Hayles (“The Illusion of Autonomy and the Fact
Cahn and Maureen Eckert’s Freedom and the Self: Essays on the Philosophy of David Foster Wallace (2015),
Philip Coleman’s Critical Insights: David Foster Wallace (2015), Allard den Dulk’s Existentialist Engagement in
Wallace, Eggers, and Foer (2015), Clare Hayes-Brady’s The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace:
Language, Identity, and Resistance (2016), David Hering’s David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form (2016), Lucas
Thompson’s Global Wallace: David Foster Wallace and World Literature (2016), Adam S. Miller's The Gospel
According to David Foster Wallace: Boredom and Addiction in an Age of Distraction (2016), and Jeffrey
Severs’s David Foster Wallace’s Balancing Books: Fictions of Value (2017).
4
http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/
5
For information on the earliest of these, visit the “Conferences” section of Nick Maniatis’s website at
http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/dfw/conferences; for the 2017 MLA panel, go to
https://apps.mla.org/conv_listings_detail?prog_id=444&year=2017; for the 2017 ALA panel, see
https://www.dfwsociety.org/2017/02/07/1718/; for the 2017 ISU DFW Conference, refer to
http://www.wallaceconference.com; and for OzWallace, consult https://www.facebook.com/OzWallace2017/.
12
of Recursivity: Virtual Ecologies, Entertainment, and Infinite Jest”) and James Rother (“Reading
and Riding the Post-Scientific Wave: The Shorter Fiction of David Foster Wallace”).
The second phase of critical response to Wallace’s work runs from roughly 2000 to 2009
and is dominated by Wallace’s own articulation of his fiction’s goals as he outlined them in a
pair of publications that Kelly refers to as “the essay-interview nexus”: Wallace’s essay “E
Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” and an interview with Wallace by Larry
McCaffery, both of which originally appeared in a 1993 issue of The Review of Contemporary
Fiction.. Broadly stated, those goals have to do with manipulating his form to more fully engage
his readers. By crafting self-reflexive fiction that requires participation from its readers—either
by ultimately directing us to something outside the text or by constructing recursive narrative
loops that we must imaginatively complete ourselves—Wallace attempted to foster in his
audience a self-awareness similar to his own. Critical appraisals in this second period are
primarily conducted along two thematic lines: the “role of irony” and of “metafictional self-
reflexivity in contemporary writing” (Kelly 47). This now-shopworn approach to framing
Wallace’s project received its most complete treatment in pieces like A. O. Scott’s “The Panic of
Influence,” published in 2000 in The New York Review of Books, and in Mary K. Holland’s
“‘The Art’s Heart’s Purpose’: Braving the Narcissistic Loop of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite
Jest,” published in Critique in 2006.
The third wave of Wallace criticism, one that my own project engages with, was
inaugurated with the publication of Jon Basin’s “Death is Not the End: David Foster Wallace:
His Legacy and his Critics,” which was published in 2010 in the first issue of The Point.
Characterized by Kelly as focusing on the ethical dimension of Wallace’s writing, this third
wave of criticism reads Wallace’s later work as not simply content to diagnose cultural
13
problems, but as fulfilling ethical fiction’s obligation to point to some sort of solution. While the
majority of this later criticism also emphasizes Wallace’s concern for the writer-reader
relationship and the ways it highlights sameness rather than difference, there is finally, in some
of the most recent critical efforts by Clare Hayes-Brady, Tara Morrissey, and Lucas Thompson,
an attempt to examine Wallace’s problematic status in discourses of gender and critical race
theory.
6
Though my project has thematic affinities with second and third-wave Wallace criticism,
my approach differentiates itself in a couple of ways. My analysis extends an account of
Wallace’s substance abuse—one pieced together by D. T. Max while researching his biography
of Wallace, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story—by projecting its narrative arc of addiction and
recovery onto the span of Wallace’s novelistic output. Max’s skill as a biographer cannot be
overstated, and this project would not exist without the foundation laid by his work, but as a
biography, its principal business lies in accounting for the Wallace who was as an actual living
person rather than Wallace-as-writer, however closely intertwined the two may have been. And
while Max provides a detailed chronology of the conditions surrounding the creation of
Wallace’s work, performing a sustained literary-critical analysis of that work is necessarily
beyond his scope.
For his biographer, understanding that from 19 Wallace identified chiefly as a recovering
addict was crucial for making sense of certain choices and events in Wallace’s personal life that
would otherwise seem unrelated or coincidental. For me, understanding that from November
6
Hayes-Brady, Clare. The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace: Language, Identity,
and Resistance. Bloomsbury, 2017. Morrissey, Tara 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, vol. 49, no. 1, February 2015, pp. 77-97.
14
1989 onward Wallace saw himself primarily as a recovering addict is essential to the way of
reading of Wallace I find the most productive. This reading is also a uniquely useful way to
account for the differences between his only two novels—a difference that is one of the current
project’s central concerns.
The presence of Alcoholics Anonymous in Infinite Jest has not gone critically unnoticed.
But given the many long stretches of the novel that are set in Boston AA meetings, the amount of
secondary literature that reads Wallace through AA is scant, especially since Max’s biography
has made obvious the overlaps between the 12-step programs in Wallace’s personal history and
his fiction. Though a handful of critics have published shorter pieces
7
considering addiction or
recovery in Wallace’s writing, there exists no monograph-length study of the enormous
importance of 12-step recovery across the larger body of his work, nor any sustained study of the
way that Wallace’s religious attendance of AA meetings or his rigid adherence to its 12-step
program informs his larger fictional project. Wallace considered himself an addict; failure to read
him as one is to miss the forest for the trees.
Among the aforementioned handful of Wallace critics, Timothy Aubry, the author of
“Selfless Cravings: Addiction and Recovery in Wallace’s Infinite Jest” comes closest to my
approach. My project, however, avails itself of a crucial advantage that was unavailable when
Aubry’s piece went to print: the publication of Wallace’s first biography. Its narrative of
Wallace’s personal substance abuse and recovery, repurposed as a frame for my project, allows
me to broaden my scope beyond Aubry’s to examine the influence of 12-step recovery on
7
These include Robert K. Bolger’s “‘A Less “Bullshitty’ Way to Live: The Pragmatic Spirituality of David Foster
Wallace” (2014), Elizabeth Freudenthal’s “Anti-Interiority: Compulsiveness, Objectification, and Identity in Infinite
Jest” (2010), Casey Michael Henry’s “‘Sudden Awakening to the Fact That the Mischief Is Irretrievably Done’”:
Epiphanic Structure in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest” (2015), Emily Spalding’s “The Addiction Spectrum: An
Analysis of the Three Branches of Addiction in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest” (2016), and Petrus van Ewijk’s
“‘I’ and the ‘Other’: The Relevance of Wittgenstein, Buber and Levinas for an Understanding of AA’s Recovery
Program in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest” (2009).
15
Wallace’s writing in a broader context—that is, to look thematically at addiction and recovery
across Wallace’s larger body of work. Like the patterns Max identified and arranged into
Wallace’s personal narrative, familiarity with Wallace’s experiences as a member of 12-step
programs allows me to make sense of the otherwise inexplicable formal and narrative differences
between Wallace’s two novels. In “Selfless Cravings,” AA’s chief function is to provide a
narrative counterweight to a dispassionate aesthetic prevailing in American literature at that time;
Aubry sees AA as a kind of Trojan horse by which Wallace smuggled his more sentimental
tendencies into the novel. I contend rather that Wallace’s adoption and internalization of 12-step
doctrine is what made Infinite Jest possible at all.
My adoption of a literary-critical approach informed by a biographical interpretation of
Wallace’s recovery, owes a significant scholarly debt to Trysh Travis and her book The
Language of the Heart.
8
Without Travis’s example and encouragement, this project would not
have been allowed to proceed. (I retain, however, sole responsibility for any omissions, errors of
logic, and general shortcomings herein.) I am also indebted to a line of critical thought about the
rhetoric of addiction and recovery that can be traced back to a 2001 text by Sidonie Smith and
Julia Watson, titled Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. But
whereas Smith and Watson use autobiographical narratives and the rhetoric of addiction to
explain high-theoretical concepts, I read Wallace’s biographical narrative to explain his eventual
devaluation or sublimation of theory to more important narrative concerns.
My project also contributes to newer critical discussions concerning the ethical turn in
Wallace’s mature fiction by locating the genesis of this turn in Wallace’s nonfiction—
8
I should also acknowledge Travis’s keen observation that in a world in which sincerity has been coopted by
corporations and is performed in insincere ways, the only choice is to be self-aware that one’s own sincerity is a
performance, and so in many ways, “sincerity” is a spoiled category—the best one can do is acknowledge her
process. This insight helped me navigate some of this project’s particularly troublesome logical fallacies.
16
specifically, in his literary criticism published during the inter-novel period when Wallace begins
his substance-abuse recovery process in AA. My reading of Wallace’s work as an application or
internalization of AA’s principles is far from an original analytical move; it borrows from
concepts developed in Robyn Warhol-Down’s early work on life writing—although my reading
of Wallace has perhaps more in common with her more recent “Academics Anonymous: A
Meditation on Anonymity, Power, and Powerlessness,” and its analysis of how AA’s policy of
anonymity constitutes a “challenge [to] American individualism” that flattens power distinctions
and builds communities (53).
My particular application of AA’s 12-step doctrine involves plotting Wallace’s two
novels as points on a fictional curve that corresponds with Wallace’s biological trajectory of
addiction and recovery, identifying Wallace’s participation in twelve-step programs as the locus
of both his recovery from alcohol and substance abuse as well as his fiction’s recovery from its
addiction to an over-reliance on literary theory.
Here and throughout, my shorthand use of “theory” should be understood as containing a
subset of mid-20th-century French and continental philosophers and critical theorists, namely the
poststructuralist writers Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault.
For an account of how “literary criticism” became “literary theory” and then simply “theory,”
see Vincent B. Leitch’s American Literary Criticism Since the 1930s, esp. pp. 152-156,
“Continental Philosophy in America, the first and second waves,” and Jonathan Culler’s 1997
Oxford UP work, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction.
When I discuss theory as Wallace used it, the aforementioned list of French theorists also
includes one important addition: the ordinary-language philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, a
thinker who contributed much to the “linguistic turn” in philosophy that so influenced the
17
structuralists and their conclusions about the relationship between language and reality—and
which the aforementioned poststructuralists reacted to in their own work. For the intersections of
Wittgenstein and literary theory, see John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer’s The Literary
Wittgenstein (Routledge, 2004). Wallace became interested in Wittgenstein while pursuing his
undergraduate philosophy degree, and for him, the boundary between language-philosophy and
poststructuralism or deconstruction is a highly permeable one. His interest in theory was first and
foremost about trying to understand the nature of language’s relationship with reality. But in his
mature writing, Wallace began to see a danger in the tendency of poststructuralist theory’s logic
to bend back inward, toward itself, creating the sorts of aporias that deconstruction delights in,
but which tend to run in circles or dead end at an undecidability. While intellectually engaging in
some ways, Wallace ultimately found this tendency counterproductive to his ethical fiction’s
mission of attempting to engage readers more self-critically.
Wallace’s mature writing offers an antidote to the numbness and complacency induced
by our immersion in a culture of unceasing distraction—a condition he referred to as “total
noise” (“Deciderization” xiii). He was acutely aware of fiction’s unique ability to allow us access
to another’s consciousness in ways that deepen our capacity for identification and empathy, that
focus our attention on similarity rather than difference. But insofar as Wallace’s fiction affords
us a vantage point outside our own, it provides escape in order to demand engagement. By
working to bridge the reader’s isolated consciousness with another’s, it models the imaginative
process of finding common ground, something Wallace felt was imperative in what he
understood as an increasingly polarized political landscape. Wallace was a keen observer of
culture, and this acuity gives his writing an uncanny prescience—especially now. Infinite Jest in
particular anticipates an America Wallace would never live to experience, one in which the
18
political divisiveness he saw on the horizon twenty years ago has made landfall at hurricane
strength.
To wit: In Infinite Jest’s fictional near-future, the president of the United States is Johnny
Gentle, a dark horse candidate who, thanks to “a surreal union of both Rush L.- and Hillary R.C.-
disillusioned fringes that drew mainstream-media guffaws,” was elected on his promise of a
“tighter, tidier nation… that looked out for [Numero] Uno, of a one-time World Policeman that
was now going to retire” (382-383). When Gentle attempts to make good on his campaign pledge
by literally exporting the country’s garbage, his halfcocked policy causes an international
diplomatic crisis. Gentle’s administration responds with an “experialist reconfiguration”—
redrawing the borders around a large swath of land in the northeastern United States, effectively
“donating” it to Canada, and then building a wall along the new border, over which enormous
garbage launchers catapult the USA’s trash (411). Wallace’s vision of a disastrously shortsighted
nation obsessed with entertainment at any cost has, in the two decades since its publication,
revealed itself as less satirical than prophetic.
The earliest Wallace fan communities were formed on the (pre-broadband) internet, and
some of the oldest of these—like the Wallace-l email listserv and the original Wallace fan-site,
thehowlingfantods.com/dfw/—remain active. Recent years have seen a steady increase in the
number of internet-based Wallace communities, including several months-long, guided group-
readings of Infinite Jest on various social media platforms and a bi-weekly podcast, The Great
Concavity, devoted to discussing Wallace and his work. There is at present a kind of
consolidation of these Wallace-related groups, one that I feel impossibly fortunate to have been
asked to participate in. On January 2, 2017, The International David Foster Wallace Society was
launched. The website opens with a mission statement:
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The International David Foster Wallace Society was founded to promote and
sustain the long-term scholarly and independent study of David Foster Wallace’s
writing. To these ends, the Society welcomes diverse, peer-reviewed scholarship
and seeks to expand the critical boundaries of Wallace studies. We recognize and
champion the visual, the alternative, and the literary: the presence of minds at work.
The Society showcases a variety of projects—at conferences, on panels, in our print
publication, The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies, and through other non-
traditional modes of scholarly expression. (“Mission Statement”)
As a member of the board for both the Wallace Society and The Journal of David Foster
Wallace Studies, I have observed firsthand what seems to be a new canonization model
emerging, one in which the university no longer functions as the gatekeeping arbiter of an
author’s suitability for serious study. In this model, the usual transmission vector is reversed:
traditional academics must apprise themselves of the history and current directions in critical
discourse of multiple generations of Wallace scholarship begun not in English departments, but
in independent, online scholarly communities. Similar to the way that Wallace reformed his use
of theory by jettisoning those ideas that proved harmful or counterproductive to his writing while
holding firm to what still worked, it is the stated aim of both the Wallace Society and its journal
to promote academic scholarship without repeating the mistakes of the academy’s past.
There is palpable undercurrent of humility in Wallace Studies, a collective sense of
gratitude for Wallace’s work. For these critics, Wallace’s texts are more than a matter of
professional curiosity or academic interest—they are objects of individual significance. Many of
them share a common experience as readers—one that rarely obtains between other authors and
their respective academic counterparts; Infinite Jest, for example, matters to Wallace Studies in a
way that Ulysses does not for all but the most evangelical Joyceans.
Though the academic apparatus that now attends Wallace's work appears similar to those
of authors like James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, or Don DeLillo, the scholarly community that has
coalesced into Wallace Studies is marked by a fundamental difference. The distinction that sets it
20
apart concerns how Wallace’s mature sense of his fiction’s purpose led him to manipulate his
form so that it might better engage with readers. The relationship between Wallace and his
readers was one that he went to great lengths to cultivate. Why Wallace came to see this
relationship as valuable and the ways he endeavored to cultivate it with his fiction are the subject
of this dissertation.
Recovering Theory Addicts
David Foster Wallace was once described as a “recovering smart aleck,” but I propose
instead to consider him as a recovering theory-addict, or rather to consider one a function of the
other (Miller). Between his first two novels, he weaned himself off a reliance on a conspicuous
narrative foregrounding of poststructuralist theory, progressing into a writer capable of bringing
that theory to life through a deeper, more honest narrative engagement with its application to
everyday human relationships as well as to the bond between artist and audience. This reformed
Wallace took the sterile, abstract paradoxes and double-binds that obsess theoretical writers and
repurposed them as models for understanding not just the crises of individual experience, but
also of American culture more broadly.
Over the course of his literary career, Wallace completed only two novels—The Broom of
the System (1987), which is generally dismissed as the work of a young author enamored of his
own talent, and Infinite Jest (1996), which is not uncommonly hailed as “the voice of a
generation.” My dissertation examines the radical changes in Wallace’s use of theory between
these two novels and ultimately claims that Wallace’s revised approach was successful in
producing fiction that is both sincere in its concern for the reader and “serious” in that it
countenanced poststructuralist claims about the nature of texts and authors.
I nest this literary analysis in Wallace’s biography. David Foster Wallace was an addict.
His freshman year of high school, he started self-medicating the anxiety and phobias of a mental
21
illness that began when he was ten years old by drinking alcohol and smoking large amounts of
marijuana. Over the next fifteen years, what began as coping mechanisms grew into dependency,
and at 28, Wallace’s excessive substance abuse and a concomitant mental health crisis landed
him in a series of hospitals, state-run mental health facilities, and a halfway house for recovering
addicts. As a recovering addict, Wallace joined twelve-step programs for both narcotics and
alcohol, maintaining his sobriety with regular attendance at Narcotics Anonymous and
Alcoholics Anonymous meetings until his death in 2008.
My project tells a different kind of recovery story. Because of its uncanny resonances
with Wallace’s biographical history and with the recurrent themes spanning his entire literary
output, I read his texts through the institutional language of addiction and the inherent narrative
structure of twelve-step recovery programs. This approach, which understands Wallace’s first
two novels as a progression toward an open-ended and always-contingent recovery through the
conscious practice of mindfulness, is one that both Wallace’s life and work seem to invite. The
three-part narrative schema of twelve-step recovery programs—“what we were like, what
happened, and what we are like now” (Alcoholics Anonymous 58)—is, in the 12-step world, a
way of accounting for one’s addiction and recovery by conferring order on past experience and
affirming sobriety as integral to identity. Overlaying it on Wallace’s two novels directs attention
to the second part of this schema, suggesting the ten-year, inter-novel period as a space in which
to start answering the question that occasioned my project: Compared to Wallace’s first novel,
what is it about Infinite Jest that continues to resonate with an increasing number of
contemporary readers?
Wallace was the son of two teachers. His mother taught community college courses in
English, and his father was a tenured Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois in
22
Champaign-Urbana. Sally Wallace, an eccentric prescriptive grammarian whose zeal for correct
usage at times bordered on the extreme, imprinted her exacting habits and need for order on her
son from a young age. His father was of a similar cast of mind. The author of several books on
ethical philosophy, James Wallace’s own work required stable, a priori notions of truth and
meaning. The picture of the world Wallace grew up with—its rationalist ethical imperatives and
linguistic absolutes—left a deep and lasting impression. Later, as an undergraduate at Amherst
college, when Wallace first encountered thinkers like Richard Taylor, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and
Jacques Derrida who complicated or contradicted his rigid epistemological models, he found
them deeply unsettling.
This sort of early cognitive indoctrination predisposes one’s understanding of the world
in subtle but fundamental ways. When the value of “order” is presented as fact, enlightenment
notions of linear progress appear to be but necessary consequences that reaffirm an underlying
natural order. It is a type of thinking that makes, for example, Thomas Kuhn’s explanation of
how the history of ideas proceeds in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions seem inevitable and
universal: “Once it has achieved the status of paradigm, a scientific theory is declared invalid
only if an alternate candidate is available to take its place…. The decision to reject one paradigm
is always simultaneously the decision to accept another, and the judgment leading to that
decision involves the comparison of both paradigms with nature and with each other” (77). Said
another way: When an existing paradigm is supplanted by a newer one, the new one isn’t just
different, it’s better. But outside the sciences, works of art, or philosophy, and literature have a
genuine interest in what the existence of undecidable conflicts reveals about our basic
assumptions regarding the nature and limits of truth, or meaning, or of knowledge itself.
23
For Wallace, the idea that there were contradictions in his understanding of the
fundamental nature of language and its relation to truth was extremely destabilizing. But in his
first novel, he abandoned his stable worldview in order to embrace the instability of
poststructuralist theory and linguistic philosophy. The result was The Broom of the System, a
book of word games and mind games that critics like Caryn James described as “flawed
extravaganza” in its attempts impress readers (9). Wallace’s reaction in this instance is one that
seems less severe to me than it probably should. I recognize in it the jettisoning of my own long-
held, unexamined notions of authors, texts, and meaning during a graduate-level survey of
twentieth-century literary theory and criticism.
In my theory seminar, I was confronted with a century’s worth of competing—yet often
equally plausible—explanations about how things like meaning and language worked. Such a
multiplicity of authority seemed to fly in the face of everything I’d learned about the accretive
nature of knowledge, which was that big ideas with unassailable logic operated with the force of
fact because they were the latest and therefore best explanations available. Trying to reconcile
these competing notions was only made worse by what I understood then as the particularly
disastrous implications of poststructuralist theory: if meaning wasn’t stable but rather infinitely
deferred and the whole of Western epistemology was shot through with the contradictions of its
own deconstruction, then nothing finally meant anything. Logic perpetuated the lie of its own
internal coherence, and human reason itself was complicit. Since “truth” was never universal but
only conditional, categories I had heretofore considered stable became contingent. Authors went
suddenly extinct. Texts lost their lease on meaning, but everything was now a text. The reasons
why I loved literature—and why I had decided to go to graduate school—were exposed, one by
one, as either incoherent or puerile. To accept this thinking felt like betraying myself, except that
24
I was also learning that betraying myself was impossible, given that any concept of “self” I had
was merely a construction hiding the fact that, at bottom, there was no “self” to betray. It all
seemed awful to me, but given the number of adherents with tenured positions in the department,
it also seemed to be the current (and therefore best) explanation about how to study literature
available to those in the know. Overwhelmed and unable to muster an argument, I adopted these
new theoretical positions uncritically.
My graduate-school conversion was debasing because it required disavowing so much of
what convinced me to pursue graduate studies in the first place. My love of literature had landed
me in a critical theory seminar that revealed my relationship with writers and their fiction as
fraudulent or naïve. I found myself too ready to parrot as gospel truth the ideas of theorists I’d
only recently read, even though their arguments felt wrong. The most destabilizing of
poststructuralism’s conclusions was the impossibility of the human, or at least the notion that
there was a stable, unproblematic category called “the human.” Taken literally, the idea that
there is nothing that properly belongs only to the domain of the human had rather unsettling
existential consequences; to say I was “fixated” on them would not be a mischaracterization.
9
This is evident when I look back at my writing from the period; it even shows up my application
to the English Graduate program at Florida, in which my Statement of Purpose claims I intend to
“contribute to the rehabilitation of a critical Enlightenment humanism…that was abandoned
before its insight and utility had been exhausted” (1-2).
9
I refer here to the usual suspects: Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”
and Of Grammatology, Foucault’s “What Is an Author?” and History of Sexuality, de Man’s “Semiology and
Rhetoric,” Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” and “From Work to Text,” and Lacan’s “The Mirror Stage as
Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience”—all of which were conveniently
anthologized in a 2,075-page page-turner ominously titled The Critical Tradition.
25
Like me, Wallace struggled with poststructuralist claims about language and meaning,
which clashed, in his case, with his prescriptivist upbringing. A double major in philosophy and
creative writing, he wanted to write witty, ironic, contemporary fiction. And what excited him
about literature came from his courses in critical theory, not writing workshops. Unconcerned
with character or narrative development, which he saw as outmoded elements of fiction, Wallace
instead chose to foreground his theoretical concerns. His decision to do so, like my own early-
grad school theory conversion, was to have long-lasting consequences.
Infinite Jest: Wallace as Wake-Up Call
I first encountered the name David Foster Wallace via his New York Times obituary, two
days after his suicide on September 12th of 2008. It was the first of several memorials I would
read in the days and weeks that followed. Among the online commemorations that appeared
spontaneously as the news of Wallace’s death spread, one, hosted by McSweeney’s and simply
titled “Memories of David Foster Wallace,” stands out in my recollection for both the breadth of
its contributors and the depth of feeling they professed. The list of remembrances grew daily,
with stories posted by people ranging from Wallace’s former students to the editor of The Paris
Review, who wrote that “David Foster Wallace changed the way we write and read.” Dave
Eggers called his writing “world-changing.” Zadie Smith wrote that the David Wallace she’d met
had, in person, “a great purity,” that spilled over into his fiction: “It was the exact same purity
one finds in the books: If we must say something, let’s at least only say true things. The principle
of his fiction, as I understand it. It’s what made his books so beautiful to me, and so essential. He
was an actual genius, which is as rare in literature as being kind—and he was that, too. He was
my favourite, my literary hero” (“Memories” 49). I had never seen such uniformly high praise
for a contemporary author, and haven’t since.
26
If my Amazon order history is a credible witness, I received a copy of Infinite Jest on
October 2nd of 2008—less than a month after Wallace took his life. But that fall was unusually
hectic; it was the second semester of my MA, and the aggregate effect of my seminars, teaching,
GRE prep, and PhD applications was that I ended up with both walking- and garden-variety
pneumonia. And so my copy of Infinite Jest sat on my nightstand, bookmarked at around page
60, because shelving it would have meant admitting defeat.
Almost three years later, 450 miles south of where I’d stopped reading it, Wallace’s big
novel was still on my nightstand when I joined a UF graduate student group-read of Infinite Jest.
The goal was to get through all 1,100 pages over the course of the 2011 summer semester.
Nearly all of us had started the novel before. No one had finished it. We imposed the usual
reading-group requirements in an attempt to keep everyone honest and on schedule.
Before the first group-email deadline arrived, Wallace’s novel exposed my usual reading
habits as deficient. My customary scanning of uninteresting sections without comprehension was
replaced by a note-taking habit that approached the compulsive. Dictionaries were bought, found
lacking, and returned for heavier editions. By the end of the summer, I had filled two
composition notebooks with definitions and character schemas to help me keep track of the
book’s narrative shifts. Obscure references were hunted down: Norse mythology, cosmology, the
history of optics, auteur theory. I brushed up on enough calculus to make sense of Wallace’s
math metaphors. Fear of missing some reference, some connection, driven by an unexpected
engagement with the novel, I started to keep weird hours, eventually wrecking my sleep cycle
because of the ideal reading conditions during early AM sessions when distractions were
minimal and I could really dig in.
27
At times, reading Wallace’s prose in my head-voice felt frustratingly familiar, like
recognizing a face whose name remains just beyond recollection. I eventually realized that what
it most sounded like was the voice I talked to myself with—only a much smarter, much more
considerate version of it. And it turns out I wasn’t the only one whose inner monologue got
hijacked. In his McSweeney’s remembrance, Timothy Krieder wrote: “[Wallace’s authorial
voice] is always in my head like a conscience, reminding me when I forfeit fairness for humor or
compromise my intellectual integrity for a good punch line. Now that he’s gone, I feel like I have
to try harder” (“Memories” 5). Michael Pietsch, Wallace’s last editor, said that Wallace had
“delineated the inside of the skull, the convoluted self-talk we all carry on constantly, in a way
that no writer ever has” (Five Dials 11). Wallace’s own personal brain-voice intrudes into his
narratives with a consistency that has definite effects on readers. One of those effects is that it
imbues his writing with a sense of sincerity.
In Wallace, I had found an author who seemed to be able to countenance theory and still
write resonant, serious fiction. His writing showed me that it was possible to think through the
paradoxes of theory that felt gut-level wrong. In Infinite Jest, I saw that those dire proclamations
of poststructuralism about authorial demise that I’d parroted through gritted teeth weren’t
unassailable: here was a writer—though he was undeniably dead—whose authorial presence was
nonetheless palpably more real than anyone I’d ever read.
In the growing secondary literature on David Foster Wallace and his contemporaries,
critics often consider Wallace the inaugural figure in a trend in American fiction after modernism
collectively referred to as “The New Sincerity.”
10
But Kelly, in an essay that surveys trends in
10
A term first applied to Wallace’s work by Adam Kelly in his essay “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity
in American Fiction” (2010), though others quickly took the appellation and ran with it. A hardly exhaustive list
would include at least: Adam Kirsch’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” in New Republic 242.12 (2011): 20-26,
Allard Den Dulk’s Existentialist Engagement in Wallace, Eggers and Foer (2014), Iain Williams’s “(New) Sincerity
28
sincerity from Lionel Trilling to Wallace, points out that any current wave of sincerity in
American fiction would be better described as resurgent than new. Kelly also points out a crucial
caveat concerning contemporary claims of sincerity, one made by Erst van Alphen and Mieke
Bal in The Rhetoric of Sincerity: that in a post-theory epoch, “the issue of sincerity is no longer
one of ‘being’ sincere but ‘doing’ sincerity” (qtd. in “Dialectic”). The paradox of post
poststructuralist fiction that is both authentic and other-directed is perhaps what unifies writers
like Michael Chabon, Dave Eggers, Junot Díaz, Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan
Safran Foer, and Zadie Smith under the “New Sincerity” banner. Writing sincere, non-winking,
genuinely-trying-to-connect-with-the-reader-in-meaningful-ways fiction for an audience who
understands writers as “author figures” presents its own challenges. Additional complications
necessarily arise from trying to write fiction that critically engages readers in an American
moment when the default mode of communication tends toward the ironic: Irony modulates our
judgements of sincerity because irony’s basic essence is that what is said is not what is meant.
How is a reader to know which authors are “being sincere” and which are “doing sincerity”? Is
there a difference? Whatever formal characteristics these “New Sincerity” writers share, they all
wrestle with questions of narrative sincerity.
The most comprehensive critical treatment of the “New Sincerity” is found in Adam
Kelly’s work, and his essay “Dialectic of Sincerity: Lionel Trilling and David Foster Wallace”
situates Wallace within a tradition of literary sincerity in American fiction that stretches back to
the 1950s. Kelly draws on Lionel Trilling’s argument in Sincerity and Authenticity (1971), the
in David Foster Wallace's ‘Octet’” in Critique 56.3 (2015): 299-314, Lucas Thompson’s “‘Sincerity with a Motive’:
Literary Manipulation in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest” in Critique 57.4(2016): 359-373, Thomas
Winningham’s “‘Author Here’: David Foster Wallace and the Post-metafictional Paradox” in Critique 56.6 (2015):
467-479, and the forthcoming Postirony: The Nonfictional Literature of David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers by
Lukas Hoffman.
29
central claim of which was that (at the time it appeared) late twentieth-century identity existed in
a paradoxical state: as a private authenticity that can only express itself through self-conscious
public displays of sincerity. Kelly’s “Dialectic of Sincerity” names the discursive relationship
between inner and outer selves to the truth. He agrees with Trilling that “authenticity” names the
concept of being true to a pre-existing self, then proceeds to bring Trilling’s historical account of
sincerity and authenticity up to date in order to see if Trilling’s definitions still apply. Kelly’s
method is to “present Trilling and Wallace as exemplifying two moments in…the dialectic of
sincerity [and] that by tracking the historical movement from one writer to the other we can
observe a shift in the cultural meaning of this concept” (“Dialectic”). But Kelly’s real
contribution here is pointing out that because sincerity doesn’t have to presuppose any unified
notion of the self, it gets around the objections raised about the kind of pre-existing self that
“authenticity” is premised on: “Sincerity exposes the self by asking for a response from the
other—unlike authenticity, it does not imply the autonomy of the self” (“Dialectic”).
Said another way, sincerity is inherently social: it requires an other, whereas authenticity
does not. One can be “authentic” in isolation, but we would not speak of being sincere in the
same fashion. Being sincere also involves an ethical or moral dimension in that “sincerity” tends
to connote a well-intentioned actor. Conversely, we characterize the discovery of someone’s
selfish or hurtful motivations as revealing her “authentic” rather than her “sincere” character.
But whereas for Trilling, sincerity meant a simple “congruence between avowal and
actual feeling,” for Wallace and those writers he influenced, achieving this type of sincerity in
readers’ minds proved more difficult (Trilling 2). Inundated with corporate advertising designed
to elicit trust, any contemporary writer attempting a sincere connection with the reader must
necessarily overcome our natural skepticism. To achieve this kind of sincerity, readers must feel
30
they’ve been given access to a part of the writer’s self that she would rather remain hidden or
that she has unwittingly revealed. This, Kelly states, is a kind of sincerity that “dissimulates a
more basic complexity.… This is a theory of language entirely other to the one that
undergirds…Trilling’s understanding of sincerity, and it implies that language can betray the self
rather than enable its expression (“Dialectic” 35).
Even when we don’t completely agree with Wallace’s conclusions, his sincerity is never
in doubt because he reproduces his mental route to those conclusions in such detail. It is
analogous to the credit earned by students who heed the math-teacher directive “show your
work.” In the classroom, an incorrect proof has no value; but the record of how a student arrived
at an incorrect answer counts for something. The reason for this is not so much the gratification
of an instructor’s vanity or reinforcement of teacherly authority so much as making sure that the
lesson has been understood. For a teacher, the real classroom value of “showing your work” is
what it affords them as teachers: the ability to point out for students exactly where in the process
of solving a problem their thinking went wrong.
Infinite Jest was the teacher I needed. My progress toward completing a dissertation was
in danger of stalling. Struggling to find a subject that could be sustained for the required length
and on the verge of abandoning my own stated reasons for applying to the program, I was all but
convinced that my only recourse was to attempt a boilerplate, theoretical-angle-plus-text
approach to my writing project—whatever my level of (dis)interest.
In Wallace’s writing, I had found the literary evidence to articulate a response to the
poststructuralist claims I had been unable to rebut since my first graduate-level theory seminar.
Again, a large part of why Infinite Jest resonated with me so deeply has to do with the fidelity
with which it reproduces its author’s thought processes and his self-conscious doubts over
31
sharing that process with the reader. Wallace’s narrative chips away at our conditioned
skepticism for almost 1,100 pages, and by the time it concludes, we feel like a participant in a
dialogue rather than the object of a sermon; the overall impression is not that Wallace is trying to
impress or convince but that he’s trying to help. This genuine concern is the kernel of Infinite
Jest’s unimpeachable sincerity: it is an attempt to create a space for dialogue between reader and
writer in an irony-saturated culture of detachment and apathy. Wallace makes an argument
against the death of the author not by devoting any narrative space to explicating theory, but by
making the author undeniably present—and alive—for the reader. It reclaims textual meaning
not through tedious theoretical convolutions, but by asking the reader to participate.
After I finished Infinite Jest, I immediately sought out Wallace’s other novels, only to
find that he had only published one—his first novel, The Broom of the System. What I didn’t
know was that Infinite Jest was a reworking of what Wallace had come to understand as his first
novel’s failures. Chief among these failures was a narrative reliance on outside authority, and in
The Broom of the System, this outside authority manifests itself by sandbagging the novel’s
frenzied formal shifts with overlong narrative rehearsals of theoretical and philosophical
arguments lifted from Derrida and Wittgenstein.
Theory Addiction
As with addictions to alcohol, drugs, sex, gambling, or other behaviors commonly
addressed by 12-step programs, “theory” is not, in itself, an inherent vice. As an analytical lens,
theory has proven itself a useful tool in the hands of careful practitioners. But like other habit-
forming vices, when indulged to excess, theory often distorts rather than clarifies. As noted in the
literature available at 12-Step meetings or by the recovering addicts who share their stories
during them will attest, the trouble begins at the point that “use of” becomes “reliance on.”
Reliance here can be used interchangeably with “need,” meaning “an inability to go without,”
32
and those parts of an addict’s life that are marginalized by or prioritized below her addiction are
its cost.
At best, the unskilled application of critical theory leads to unsound reasoning and
unwarranted conclusions. At worst, the theory-addicted critic ends up locked into a bad faith
feedback loop of abstraction and jargon, losing sight of the original object of study altogether. In
this case, the critic’s final contribution to the matter in question is to make it not more but less
clear—though for the critic who is unconcerned with how his theory’s actual praxis affects
others, clarity seems to matter very little. Theory addiction imposes similar costs on the fiction
writer, and Wallace’s first theory-addicted novel sacrifices its formal and thematic cohesion—
and more importantly any consideration of its readers—for theoretical sermonizing in hopes that
what its author lacked in traditional fictional craft could be made up for by substituting
impenetrable jargon.
In “The Nature of the Fun” (2007), Wallace writes about what I’ve termed the “binge”
stage of his writing: “In the beginning, when you first start out trying to write fiction, the whole
endeavor’s about fun. You don’t expect anybody else to read it. You’re writing almost wholly to
get yourself off. To enable your own fantasies and deviant logics and to escape or transform
parts of yourself you don’t like. And it works—and it’s terrific fun” (196-197).
Wallace complicates my notion of the theory addict by rejecting certain edicts of the
twelve-step programs he used to recover from his substance addictions, instead fashioning his
own synthetic or hermeneutic process. Wallace explains that as a writer, he had to work
backward to the original impulse of his writing: the “fun.” But in working back to it, he found
that the “fun” had been transformed: it was now a disciplined fun, hard-won by experience. And
it far outstripped the selfish, onanistic, or seductive fun that marked his earlier period, in which
33
Wallace writes “about 90+ percent of the stuff you’re writing is motivated and informed by an
overwhelming need to be liked” (197-198).
Wallace’s recovery from the addictive and unhealthy habit of “writing to be liked” was
accomplished by pragmatic elimination: Instead of trying to write without theory, he instituted
strict limits on the use of theory based on his evaluation of its narrative use. In this way,
Wallace’s theory recovery excised the harmful parts of his addictive behavior without having to
hold the useful parts of his established writing habits under erasure because of their association
with theory.
To offer an explanation for the vast differences between Wallace’s first and second
novels, my project’s examines two recurring figures in Wallace’s fiction: Ludwig Wittgenstein
and William James, whose work I argue helped Wallace overcome his theory-addicted writing
habits. Wittgenstein’s influence on Wallace is well documented in the secondary literature,
though generally only with regard to The Broom of the System. But references to William James
are rare, and an account of how James’s pragmatic approach to philosophy and his influence on
the doctrine of Alcoholics Anonymous—in which program Wallace would begin his deeper
engagement with James’s ideas—shaped Wallace’s mature fiction remains unaccounted for.
Common to Wittgenstein and James is their assertion—contrary to established
disciplinary practice—that works of philosophy necessarily admit something of the character of
their authors, and that those admissions have worth as evaluative criteria. This is because
philosophy, for these two thinkers, did not principally belong to the realm of the theoretical. For
Wittgenstein as for James, the work of a philosopher was not just theory but praxis. As
Wittgenstein puts it: “What is the use of philosophy…if it does not improve your thinking about
the important questions of everyday life?” (Perloff 1).
34
Wittgenstein and James both understand their philosophical writing as corrective texts
meant to resolve longstanding paradoxes of thought that had for too long left philosophers’
thinking paralyzed, unable to move the discipline forward. Wittgenstein’s method for unraveling
a paradox was to recast unanswerable questions as problems of language. Specifically,
Wittgenstein felt the problem was that philosophers asked questions before completely
understanding the meaning of the words they employed in asking. Wittgenstein’s corrective idea
is that careful examination of those questions in philosophy that lead to paradoxes will
eventually reveal an error in the questions’ language that, once resolved, removes the impasse.
James discusses his pragmatic method for resolving the paradoxical in several of his
texts, but, not surprisingly, it finds its most thorough exposition in Pragmatism. For James, the
pragmatic way to judge between what appear to be equally viable alternatives is by evaluating
their consequences. If we can discern no difference between the possible outcomes, then
functionally, there is no practical difference, and therefore there is no point in further discussion
of the matter.
Central to both thinkers, then, is this notion of “use value” as it relates to meaning. In
Pragmatism, James explains that the pragmatic method first suggested itself when a group of his
friends asked him to settle a dispute by casting the deciding vote. In this argument, everything
came down to what was meant by the preposition “around”—or, more specifically, what was
meant by that particular use of “around.” Both sides interpreted “around” to mean something
different, but neither side’s use of “around” was technically incorrect; given that both uses were
sound, James’s solutions was to cast his vote based on the consequences of taking each side’s
interpretation to its logical conclusion: “The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret
each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences.”
35
Much of Wallace’s mature writing is about the difficulty of choosing in the absence of
criteria by which to determine a correct decision. He was famously obsessed with double-bind
situations in which the consequences of either choice are equally undesirable. More
fundamentally, the engine of nearly all of his work is the figure of the paradox. And for Wallace,
there was no more difficult paradox than having to decide between competing truths. He saw his
historical moment as a writer as plagued by such a paradox: how to write serious literature that
attempted a sincere conversation between writer and reader after what postmodernism had
revealed about the incoherent natures of “authors” and “selves.”
Toward the end of his career, Wallace explicitly addresses the difficulty of choosing
between equally-viable alternatives when he writes that “not all paradoxes have to be
paralyzing” (“Nature” 198). Wallace knew that dwelling in the paradox or getting lost in his own
abstract thinking led to inaction. Having hit bottom in his personal history of his substance
abuse, Wallace knows that inaction when a choice is required can mean death. Ironically, what
ended up helping him break the cycle of paralytic, addicted thinking was another paradox, one he
discovered in recovery. “Keep coming back; it works it you work it” is the closing benediction at
AA meetings. Stated as an English sentence, it is infuriatingly vague and contradictory. But its
profound usefulness for Wallace was not found in its linguistic expression, but rather in the
routinized praxis of application. In recovery, Wallace initially chafed at what he felt were clichés
of recovery-speak. But he was also confronted with the undeniable fact that though recovery’s
clichés were logically incoherent, if he focused on following their advice rather than picking it
apart, the clichés kept him sober. It is this realization that informs Wallace’s mature work ethic.
Wallace found that with his writing as with his recovery from substance abuse, the trick was to
keep coming back, to keep grinding at the unglamorous routine.
36
In a little-known 1996 interview, just after the publication of Infinite Jest, Wallace
described how his writing approach had evolved since Broom: “Now, ten years later, I
understand that people read for intellectual reasons and emotions. I’m interested in a marriage of
the two. Before, I wanted to throw out the emotional in favor of the technical. Now, I would get
rid of the technique to save the emotion.”
11
But Wallace doesn’t end up sacrificing one for the
other; he manages both. And he does this by creating characters who are clearly representations
of competing ideas—yet who are alive enough to engage the reader well beyond the end of the
text.
Compared to The Broom of the System, Infinite Jest’s diffuse and subtle use of theory
represents an order-of-magnitude jump in sophistication. Broom’s diegetic world distills the
consequences of Wittgenstein and Derrida’s writing into an absurd joke with a glib punchline:
“The truth is that there’s no difference between a life and a story” (Broom 120). The latter novel
moves beyond simple theorist-ventriloquizing into a maximalist narrative that dramatizes the
logical consequences of theory in terms of real human cost: isolation, loneliness, depression,
addiction. This is a novel written by a veteran sponsor, not by someone still working the
intermediate steps—and accordingly, it offers sound advice on how to make difficult choices by
example.
Chapter Outline
Chapter 2, “Theory Binge: The Broom of the System as Bender,” examines Wallace’s first
attempt at a novelistic treatment of the themes that obsessed his previous work in philosophy: the
isolation of solipsism inherent in the “problem of other minds” and determinism’s negation of
free will. I proceed by considering the theoretical underpinnings of Wallace’s first novel, a
11
Speak Magazine Spring 1996: pp. 41–42
37
framework that pits two thinkers—Derrida and Wittgenstein—against one another, but which
fails to declare a winner. I propose that the reason for the novel’s theoretical stalemate and
critics’ dismissive consensus of it have a common root. Equally concerned with demonstrating
his intellectual ability and masking his shallow engagement with critical theory, Wallace
depends on formal cleverness and verbal dexterity to divert the reader’s attention from his
superficial rehearsals of other thinkers’ complex thought. Consequently, the novel’s characters
function primarily as mouthpieces for the theorists they stand in for. As a stage in the recovery
narrative, Broom corresponds to the beginning of the theory-addict’s trajectory. In the vernacular
of twelve-step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous, Broom is a novel written before the addict
admits he has a problem. Hobbled by its bloodless engagement with complex ideas, Broom
sacrifices the possibility of sincere dialogue with its readers, content instead to distract its
audience with a sort of theoretical and formal sleight-of-hand.
Chapter 3, “Wallace’s Ethical Turn: Wittgenstein’s Mistress as Hitting Bottom,” looks at
the inter-novel period between The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest as the theory-addict’s
experience of hitting bottom. It is the absolute nadir of the addict’s narrative, the “what
happened,” during which the addict “hits bottom.” In twelve-step culture, bottoming out is
marked by a dual distinction: It is the bleakest point on the timeline—the point at which the
inevitable spiral of an unsustainable addiction finally culminates in a catastrophic event in the
addict’s life—but it also marks a new beginning. The mental plasticity that results from the
vulnerability and hopelessness brought on by profound loss is the necessary condition for an
addict’s epiphanic identification of self-as-addict, the departure point at which help is finally
sought and recovery can begin.
38
In the wake of Broom, Wallace found himself at the intersection of his increasingly
disruptive substance abuse, mental health-related hospitalizations, and the embarrassment of
reading David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress. By November of 1989, he was living at
Granada House, a supervised facility for recovering addicts. It is during this period that
Wallace’s writing approach underwent a sort of value-epiphany, shifting from a reliance on
outside theoretical authority and formal showmanship to an other-focused attempt at meaningful
human connection.
Through my biographical reading of Wallace’s correspondence, interviews, and criticism,
together with a close reading of his essay on Markson’s novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress, which
claims that novel serves as a template for his fiction from that point on, I outline the genesis of
Wallace’s mature ethic by identifying sources from which he transposed the paradoxical maxims
of recovery culture into his writing, fashioning an ethic of transparent self-awareness and
routinized discipline. As Wallace emerged from this transformative second period, his writing
progressed from that of a brilliant student eager to showcase his abilities into a mature author
who could focus those abilities to faithfully render and diagnose difficult parts of American
culture.
Chapter 4, “Big Books: Infinite Jest and the Literature of Recovery,” leverages Wallace’s
glowing critical appraisal of Markson’s novel—he once punched a housemate in the nose for
criticizing it—as a list of formal requirements for his own writing moving forward, building on
Chapter 3’s examination of Broom’s failure to meaningfully engage with Wittgenstein and
Derrida’s ideas. The close readings in Chapter 4 explore how, instead of abandoning it
completely, Wallace chose to rework this content in his second novel and offers an explanation
as to why the result was so vastly different.
39
Chapter 5, “Afterword: David Foster Wallace’s Transformative Gifts and the Labor of
Gratitude,” is intended as a coda to my larger study of the evolving ethical dimensions of
Wallace’s writing. In it, I make use of Lewis Hyde’s figuration of “gift economies” to read
Wallace’s 2006 Kenyon College commencement address, foregrounding the intersections
between Hyde, Wallace, and Alcoholics Anonymous.
12
I then turn to a final account of my
experience with specific Wallace communities and the ways that they function as what Hyde
calls “labors of gratitude.”
12
Chapter 5 makes use of Hyde’s interpretive framework as outlined in his text The Gift: How the Creative Spirit
Transforms the World (1983).
40
CHAPTER 2
THEORY BINGE: THE BROOM OF THE SYSTEM AS BENDER
If anyone is unwilling to descend into himself, because this is too painful, he will remain
superficial in his writing.… If I perform to myself, then it’s this that the style expresses.
And then the style cannot be my own. If you are unwilling to know what you are, your
writing is a form of deceit.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Recollections of Wittgenstein
1
“I’d Grown Up Inside Vectors, Lines”
Chapter 2 examines the origins of David Foster Wallace’s theory- and substance
addictions to better understand why The Broom of the System fails to foster the kind of
relationship with readers that characterizes Wallace’s later work. I proceed by identifying a set of
values and behavioral habits that shape Wallace’s experience during his early childhood in
suburban Illinois. I then trace these related biographical elements’ influence on Wallace’s
fiction—specifically on the development of Wallace’s first novel—from its inception as a fiction
thesis at Amherst. This early novel attempts to engage with theoretical questions about the
degree to which experience is constituted by language. The novel’s principal, Lenore, is
convinced rather literally by her grandmother, a former student of the philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein, that her life amounts to nothing more than what can be said about it. Lenore’s
unease over the possibility that her life is merely a linguistic construct is the primary engine
driving what little plotting the novel includes, and ends up serving as a rather long-winded setup
to the joke Wallace is driving at (she’s a literal character in a literal novel, so of course she’s
only constituted only by others’ language). Ultimately, this first attempt at long form fiction
1
Chapter 2’s epigraph is drawn from Rhees, Rush. “Postscript.” Recollections of Wittgenstein,
edited by Rush Rhees, Oxford UP, 1984, p. 174.
41
served to showcase Wallace’s verbal and stylistic skills, but also represents the kind of shallow
engagement with the philosophical and theoretical questions he would later revisit in earnest.
David Foster Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, on 21 February, 1962. Sally Foster,
David’s mother, is an alumna of Mount Holyoke and the first in her family to earn a college
degree. James D. Wallace had done his undergraduate work at Amherst and was still a graduate
student in philosophy at Cornell when his son was born. After James finished his PhD the
following year, he joined the philosophy faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign as an assistant professor, and the young Wallace family moved from New York to
Illinois. David’s sister, Amy, was born a year later.
The Wallace home was one of prescribed stability, and its order was enforced by
regimentation. Household responsibilities were assigned to parents and children alike. Rules
were important; both Sally and James instilled the value of structured habits from an early age.
Schedules were set and enforced for nearly everything: after school was over, David and Amy
completed their homework before dinner commenced at 5:45 p.m. Following the evening meal,
James read to the children, after which they were allowed “fifteen minutes each in their beds to
talk to Sally about anything that was on their minds” (Max 2). 8:30 p.m. meant bedtime for
David and Amy, though the parents’ routines weren’t concluded until after the 10:00 news
broadcast when “Jim would turn the lights out at 10:30 p.m. exactly.” The stricture was
something that David Foster Wallace naturally enjoyed. To him, “the household was a perfect,
smoothly running machine” (2).
Wallace’s biographer, D. T. Max, characterizes his subject’s childhood as “happy and
ordinary,” noting that Wallace “thought of himself as normal—and was normal. But he was also
identifiably from a talented family, one in love, not unlike Salinger’s Glass family, with the
42
ability to impose their notional world on the real one” (4). It is an apt comparison; like J. D.
Salinger’s fictional Glass family, the Wallaces had their own eccentrics and troubled characters:
academics (both MFAs and PhDs), writers, poets, narcissists—not to mention suicides; both
Sally Wallace’s uncle and her sister had ended their own lives. And as with the Glass children,
David Wallace’s emotional and psychological problems stemmed at least in part from the
overeducation of his naturally cerebral, abstract mind. The youngest sibling in the Glass family,
Franny, suffers an existential breakdown at college and is forced to suspend her studies while she
recuperates in her childhood home. Like Franny, David Foster Wallace’s time at college was
interrupted by mental health crises that sent him back to the house he’d grown up in. Another of
Salinger’s fictional children, Seymour Glass, survives an attempt to kill himself
2
in one story,
only to commit suicide in another.
3
David Foster Wallace’s life was likewise punctuated by
suicide attempts, several of which required hospitalization.
Though his father set the schedule, David Wallace’s mother, with whom he had a closer
relationship, imposed her own kind of order through her enthusiasm for language. As the first
member of her family to attend college, David’s mother’s insistence on grammatical precision
was perhaps an outward marker of the differentiation she felt her education afforded her. An
English teacher and author of the textbook Practically Painless English, Sally Foster Wallace
enforced strict linguistic rules in a rather idiosyncratic fashion. As Wallace would later recall in
an essay for Harper’s:
Family suppers often involved a game: if one of us children made a usage error,
Mom would pretend to have a coughing fit that would go on and on until the
relevant child had identified the relevant error and corrected it. It was all very self-
ironic and lighthearted; but still, looking back, it seems a bit excessive to pretend
2
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, published in The New Yorker, November 19, 1955
3
“A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” published in The New Yorker, January 31, 1948
43
that your small child is actually denying you oxygen by speaking incorrectly.
(“Authority” 71)
But as a child, if Wallace saw his mother’s habits as excessive, they also endeared her to him.
They were further evidence of their bond: “The intimation that so much was at stake in each
utterance thrilled David, and added to the excitement of having a gifted mother” (Max 3).
However, the young David Wallace was learning something beyond the importance of
promptness or English grammar from his adherence to these early rules and routines: he was also
discovering how to make his parents proud, something that meant a great deal emotionally to
him. Sally Wallace’s approval was especially important: “For David, his mother was the center
of the universe” (2). Gifted student that he was, Wallace discovered early that his academic
success was a reliable method for eliciting his mother’s praise.
As a young student at Yankee Ridge elementary, David Foster Wallace was both
competitive and precocious. He won academic awards but frequently infuriated his teachers with
his questioning. He spent a lot of his time reading, a habit his mother encouraged. Wallace got
his picture in the local paper twice in the sixth grade, once for his performance in a regional
knowledge bowl, and again for a poem that had won him a $50 prize. Wallace tried out for little
league baseball and flag football; he made both teams.
It was around this point—at nine or ten years old—that Wallace would later say he began
to experience the first symptoms of the mental illness that would reoccur sporadically for the rest
of his life. Though Wallace says he experienced the onset of “depressive, clinically anxious
feelings” and developed irrational fears of things like insects, neither his parents nor his sister
noticed that Wallace was ill at this time. Either way, Wallace didn’t tell his family about his
symptoms, which Max reasons was a function of his crippling insecurity and feelings of
44
inadequacy coupled with the perceived expectations of his accomplished parents—especially his
mother.
On more than one occasion, Sally Wallace’s unexpected and sudden absence from the
Wallace home corresponds with the onset of her son’s psychological problems. Wallace located
this first onset of symptoms to the summer of either 1971 or 1972, the latter of which would have
been the year Max says Sally Wallace “began teaching English full-time at Parkland Community
college” (5). Abrupt changes to Wallace’s established routines was not something he tolerated
well. Max makes several references to this need for structure, noting that “the young man may
also have been responding to the environment he had grown up in, to the wide-open spaces and
unstructured world of late-1970s midwestern America. If he was furtive or anxious, perhaps it
was in part because he had a hard time figuring out what the rules were” (13), that “Wallace
found he was happier…He had his routines down” (20), and that Wallace “was happiest when
things were predictable, when his work was under control and the people around him
familiar…he quickly developed routines” (16). By his freshman year of high school, Wallace
had found coping mechanisms to deal with his recurrent anxiety: “Wallace made two important
discoveries in his early teen years: tennis and marijuana. These were the twin helpers that carried
him through high school” (8). Wallace found that the pot helped not only with his anxiety, but
his studies: he found it easier to concentrate on his schoolwork. This discovery, that he “liked to
study high,” marks the beginning of Wallace’s self-medication (Max 18). And the increased
absence of his mother—whose insistence on structure and rules he had internalized as a way to
help cope with his anxiety and impose order on his own life—threatened the security of
Wallace’s most fundamental structure.
45
The caliber of Wallace’s intellect would become apparent to his friends, family and,
teachers during the next four years, but the increase in mental horsepower came with a cost: as
his thinking grew more sophisticated, so did his mental health problems. By Wallace’s junior
year, Sally Wallace says that the symptoms of her son’s mental illness were beginning to
emerge; the nausea that stemmed from his anxiety often caused him to skip class, though not
enough to harm his grades or land him in trouble with school administration (12). Toward the
end of his senior year, the problems that Wallace had managed to conceal had grown into
something he could no longer keep hidden: “the anxiety that had been shimmering just below the
surface of his life grew into full-blown panic attacks. He was not sure what set them off, but he
saw that they quickly became endless loops, where he worried that people would notice he was
panicking, and that in turn would make him panic more” (Max 12). As the attacks increased,
Wallace smoked more pot to calm his symptoms. His increased use was something that his
parents tolerated; he could smoke at home without having to hide his habit.
Wallace didn’t talk to his parents about what he was feeling, and though she could tell
something was wrong, his mother recalls of this period that “neither she nor her husband knew
what to do about it, beyond letting their son stay home from school when he had to,” and that
“perhaps the problem would go away when he went to college” (13). This part of Sally
Wallace’s narrative raises some parental red flags, especially since both her sister and uncle had
problems with mental illness that eventually led to suicide. It is also, however, a representative
example of how literally James and Sally Wallace practiced the kind of coldly-academic
liberalism they preached with regard to the importance of personal autonomy and individual
responsibility. In highly-structured families like the Wallaces, this kind of autonomy often
involves a unspoken prohibition against disrupting established routines or schedules by
46
demanding special attention, especially if you can address or resolve the problem on your own.
That Wallace continued to function at a high academic level— he was a member of the debate
team, earned marks that put him close to the top of his class, and won Urbana High School’s
prize that year for “best student writing”— may also have contributed to Sally and James
Wallace’s reticence to broach the subject with their son.
As graduation arrived, Wallace had established a cycle. Because acknowledging his
mental health problems would disrupt the established order of family life at home—his most
fundamental structure—he self-medicated to calm his anxiety and help him study, which
studying in turn brought him both intellectual satisfaction and a level of academic achievement
sufficient to evoke his parents’ pride in him. And as a bonus, the coping system he’d worked out
made Wallace to feel he contributed to the solidity of the family structure. But around this time,
the problems in Sally and James’s marriage—which had up to this point been understandably
kept from David and Amy—began to show, and as their partnership broke down, Wallace’s
anxiety increased. He compensated for the trouble at home the only way he knew how: by setting
ever more difficult academic goals.
One of the first academic hurdles Wallace set up for himself was admission to a top
school. Wallace had decided that “going to a prestigious private college was one of the ways the
Wallaces differed from some of their midwestern peers,” an idea inherited from his mother, who
considered her status as the first of her family to go to college an integral part of her identity—a
personal achievement she felt distinguished her from others. Since the naturally-competitive
Wallace wanted to top his mother’s achievement, he “told friends he was expected to follow in
his father’s footsteps at Amherst, inventing a layer of pressure he hardly needed” (13) But James
Wallace’s remembers that “he thought Oberlin College might be a good match for his son” (13).
47
And in fact, Wallace went for a visit to Oberlin, but afterwards, he got so anxious that he threw
up when he got back to the hotel (14). When he found out he could go to Amherst if he chose,
(because his father had gone to school there), the younger Wallace decided to not only attend
James’s alma mater but also to declare his father’s major as his own.
Wallace arrived at Amherst in the fall of 1980. It was an unfamiliar and disorienting
place: he was a thousand miles from his family at an academically and economically-elite New
England college with a student body comprised almost entirely of other male
4
students, all of
whom Wallace felt looked the part in ways that he did not. His first semester at Amherst was a
lonely one. The two pre-med students assigned as his roommates, Desai and Javit, both
remember Wallace as a solitary person—unlike them, he had no visits from his family, and if he
had made other friends, they never saw Wallace with them. Even his studying was antisocial:
Wallace spent most of his time in the library rather than in their two-room dormitory in Stearns
Hall (though the tarantula that Wallace’s roommate Desai brought with him might have had
something to do with Wallace’s decision). Initially, Wallace made an effort to engage with them
socially by going with them to the Amherst JV tennis team’s open practices, but as Javit and
Desai met other pre-med students, they separated themselves from Wallace. Feeling anxious
among confident students who seemed to belong at Amherst, Wallace applied himself harder to
his academics than he had previously: “Getting straight As, as he would later tell Amherst
magazine, was “a way to hide from people,” (Schmeidel). But apart from helping with his
anxiety by occupying his mind or fulfilling the responsibilities he felt his family expected of him,
Wallace also derived a good deal of personal satisfaction from his studies and from the respect
his intellect commanded in the classroom—both from fellow students and professors. However,
4
Amherst’s first co-ed class had not yet graduated by the time Wallace got there (Max 16).
48
Wallace’s habit of getting high to help him study, which followed him to college, meant that as
his academic effort increased, so must his drug use. Luckily, Wallace was able to “reestablish
[his] routine at Amherst with the two young men who lived down the hall from him” (18).
During that first semester, Wallace “dug into introductory courses in English, history, and
political science,” along with an elective course titled “Evolution and Revolution” (18). Toward
the end of his first semester, Wallace got to know a student who spent as much time in the library
as he did—another freshman named Mark Costello. Through Costello, Wallace made a few more
friends, but the closest of these during his time at Amherst, and the one he came to rely on for
support, was Costello. The group established rigorous study hours together, before which
Wallace would frontload the caffeine content of his tea by doubling-up on teabags. When their
group-study time ended, the freshmen would get together for shots of scotch to help them sleep,
and so by the end of his freshman year, Wallace began to grow dependent on alcohol as part of
his chemically-enhanced study regimen. As his first semester at Amherst concluded, Wallace
earned three As and an A- in his courses and had expanded his circle of friends; things were
going well for him both academically and socially (21). Coming back after Christmas break to
begin his second freshman semester, Wallace had signed up for courses on twentieth-century
British poetry, Shakespeare, and Gothic literature. His roommate Desai was in the same
Shakespeare course and remembers the moment when he first had a realization about Wallace’s
intellect after seeing him write a paper that received an A+ in under an hour: “I thought I was
smarter. … Now I was getting a glimpse of how much he could accomplish” (19). Wallace
capped off his first year at of college in the spring of 1981 by winning the prize Amherst
awarded to the freshman with the highest GPA (19).
49
Wallace’s time at college alternated between peaks of academic achievement and long
breaks spent away from college. His progress was interrupted twice by mental-health
breakdowns, causing him to take the spring semester of 1982 and the fall semester of 1983 off.
Both times, Mark Costello—who beginning sophomore year was Wallace’s roommate and
closest friend at Amherst—drove Wallace to catch his flight back home to Illinois. But apart
from this pair of semesters, Wallace’s academic record at Amherst was nearly immaculate. In
addition to the freshman GPA prize, won awards throughout college, including a scholarship for
being Amherst’s “most promising philosophy student” (33), the award for the highest cumulative
three-year GPA, and when Wallace graduated, he “received several more academic prizes, bring-
ing his total awards to ten, likely an Amherst record” (50-51).
Beginning in his second year, Wallace began to take courses in his major, philosophy—
courses in which he was particularly dominant, and in which he would earn a solid string of “A”
marks. David Wallace enrolled in not only his father’s alma mater, but took coursework in the
very same philosophy-department classrooms where his James D. Wallace had studied before
earning his PhD at Cornell “under the direction of Normal Malcolm, a close friend and disciple
of [the philosopher Ludwig] Wittgenstein” and then accepting a position at the University of
Illinois Champagne-Urbana, where he would become a full professor in the philosophy
department (Ryerson 4). The younger Wallace’s preternatural capacity for sustained abstract
thought was apparent from the beginning to his philosophy professors. It gave him an edge in the
more complex courses in his major; in epistemology, a survey of various theories of knowledge
taught by Willem DeVries, his professor later said of Wallace’s raw mental horsepower: “I don’t
want to say he was scary but he made me work harder than any other student I’ve ever had”
(Max 19).
50
During the first semester of his sophomore year, in the fall of 1981, Wallace took classes
in both his parents’ disciplines: course in English (earning and A) and an introduction to
philosophy course (A+). But his attempts to elicit parental praise fizzled over the Christmas
break when something happened at home that, when asked about—even by Mark Costello—
made Wallace cagey; he would only describe the circumstances back in Illinois as “bad” (22).
Costello worried about the changes he saw in Wallace during the early part of the following
spring semester; he was constantly enervated and said he thought about killing himself (22).
William Kennick, the professor of philosophy at Amherst who had been James Wallace’s mentor
(and was familiar with depression in his own family), noticed the shape David Wallace was in
and took him to see a therapist. Shortly after Wallace finished the session, Costello returned to
their suite to find his roommate with his bags packed. Asked why he was leaving, Wallace told
him simply, “I don’t know. Something’s wrong with me” (22). Worried, Costello drove him to
the bus station; from there, Wallace took a bus to the airport and flew home to Illinois. Back in
Urbana and living with his parents again, Wallace withdrew from his spring courses.
It was during this period away from Amherst—from early spring of 1982 through the end
of summer break that year—that David Foster Wallace started writing fiction (23). But Wallace
first needed time to decompress. While he recuperated in his old upstairs bedroom, clearly ill,
His parents continued to practice their laissez faire method of parental concern. Sally gives a
peculiar description of what happened during this precarious period of her son’s mental health,
saying that they “let Wallace come and go as he pleased,” and that she and James “didn’t press
him,” because “we figured if he wanted to talk about it he’d talk about it.” (22) But Wallace did
in fact need to talk to someone. He began to confide in his sister, Amy, who says her brother told
her “how frightened and uncomfortable the world felt to him and how nothing seemed
51
meaningful anymore,” adding that he didn’t know who he was. One possible explanation for
Wallace’s parents’ unconcern for their son’s wellbeing is that their marriage had been
deteriorating for some time. This tension in the Wallace family is likely the “bad” thing that
happened over the previous Christmas break, and that Wallace refused to talk about with
Costello. Later, in early summer, Sally Wallace told her daughter she was moving out, asking her
to serve as a proxy for relaying the news to her brother. His mother’s decision to leave without
talking to him and her method of delivering the news of her departure both crushed and
infuriated her son, and he “refused to visit her in her new home” (23). As the duration of Sally’s
absence from the house grew, so did Wallace’s certainty that his parents’ marriage wasn’t likely
to be repaired. He had taken for granted the stability and order that his mother’s routines and rule
systems provided, and Wallace was forced to countenance the fact that structures around which
he ordered his life—all of his coping systems, straight-A reward structures, and studious self-
worth—had always been contingent on his relationship with his family, and especially with his
mother. The destabilizing realization that his family had disintegrated was compounded by
Wallace’s inability to restore it no matter what amount of effort he put in. The cognitive
dissonance produced by Wallace’s presence in the family house while also experiencing the
absence of his family is reflected in the fiction he started writing around this time.
Wallace had written a few short, comedic stories when he was in high school, but had not
tried his hand at it since, and this new impulse to write in the spring of 1982 seemed to come out
of nowhere. When Wallace sent a letter to Costello informing him he intended to get serious
about writing, Costello remembers that he “was impressed—he had no inkling either that his
roommate wanted to write or could write fiction” (23). Wallace channeled the spiraling
instability at home into a story about a “fictional bird that flies in ever-decreasing circles until it
52
disappears up its own ass” called “The Clang Birds” (23). In another, the betrayal he felt over his
parents’ divorce surfaces as a narrative about an “existential gameshow” run by God, wherein
God—holding the only buzzer— asks contestants to answer impossible or paradoxical questions.
No one can win, and the game’s duration is infinite.
When Wallace came back to school in the fall of 1982, he and Costello revived Sabrina,
Amherst’s humor magazine, and started writing comedy together. Wallace’s mental health
continued to improve. Wallace was taking three philosophy courses: the first part of William
Kennick’s three-semester-long survey of philosophy that covered the ancient to medieval
periods, a Christian ethics seminar, and a course on logic. The logic course was where Wallace
began to differentiate himself from his father as a philosophy student. His father’s work in
philosophy dealt primarily with ethical and moral questions, and “thought little of the discipline”
Wallace had chosen. But Wallace was interested in the “special sort of buzz” that he got from
logic. He characterized the buzz as one that came on while filling “half a notebook with gnarly
attempted solutions” for a problem, and eventually stumbling onto the sudden realization of the
correct, “gorgeously simple solution”—which when it hit, Wallace said—he “almost heard a
‘click’” (25). The difference between Wallace’s philosophy and his father’s, he said, was that
“my areas of interest were mathematical logic and semantics and stuff, which my dad thinks is
kind of gibberish, so it's very weird. In a certain way, I'm following in Dad's footsteps, but I'm
also doing the required, you know, thumbing the nose at the father thing. And the stuff—the stuff
that I was doing was really more math than it was philosophy” (Rose). Given Wallace’s
preference for well-defined criteria by which to excel, it should come as no surprise that his path
in philosophy was one that tended toward logic.
53
As he progressed in junior year coursework in the spring semester of 1983, Costello and
Wallace were “becoming well known on campus because of the magazine” (27). The
psychological and emotional symptoms that had sent Wallace home for a second time had once
again improved. With Wallace’s new popularity came new friends, one of whom was Charlie
McLagan, who introduced Wallace to mushrooms, acid, and postmodern literature when he
loaned him his copy of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Wallace saw in this kind of
writing a world that he recognized as his own: brainy, ironic, and littered with pop culture
references, plus Lot 49 was funny—which dovetailed with the sort of lampoons he’d been
writing for the magazine.
David Wallace came home for Amherst’s summer break in 1983 to find the family home
in bad shape. His mother still gone, Wallace found that his father had “spent the year alone,
keeping the radio on for company” (28). The Wallaces were now seeing a marriage therapist, and
wanted their children to attend therapy sessions with them (28-29). Despite these efforts, Sally
and James shortly informed their children of their plans to divorce. But Amy Wallace remembers
that about a month after the divorce announcement, in a strange about-face, her mother moved
back into the house. The Wallace children didn’t ask for an explanation, and neither of their
parents offered one. Wallace spent that summer taking in as much postmodern fiction as he could
get his hands on. He read Donald Barthleme’s “The Balloon” for the first time (29). By now,
Wallace had no doubt begun to see in the fragmented narratives of postmodern fiction a reality
that more closely approximated his own experience, and he saw connections between the way
the Barthleme’s story exposed its underpinnings with the technical way that his logic course had
exposed the language behind philosophical questions worked.
54
By the end of summer 1983, Wallace had started seeing a doctor for his anxiety who
prescribed the trycyclic antidepressant Tofranil to help with Wallace’s anxiety (32). Back at
Amherst for the fall 1983 semester, Wallace found the structures and routines he’d built there
had taken a hit as well. With Costello gone, Wallace lost his claim on his old room, and in place
of his familiar suite is assigned a bed in an eight-room dormitory. Having lost his support
structure of his friends and living in uncomfortable, cramped quarters with strangers, Wallace’s
anxiety once again morphed into a spiraling depression. Wallace contemplated suicide, but
instead withdrew from school again and saw a psychiatrist (33). Away from college once again,
Wallace’s new doctor took him off Tofranil and prescribed “a different antidepressant” (34). The
new medication was better at alleviating his symptoms and didn’t induce the apathy he
experienced on the Tofranil. Thanks to his new medication, Wallace was feeling better than he
had in a long time, and he readied himself for a return to Amherst and the conclusion of his
studies there.
By the start of his senior year at Amherst in the spring of 1984, Wallace had already
finished his philosophy thesis. Costello had just graduated double summa (he had completed two
different honors theses: a study of the New Deal and a novel), and Wallace began diverting all
his efforts into writing fiction. Besides being Wallace’s best friend and main emotional support,
Costello was also his relentless competitor, and each tried constantly to one-up the other’s
academic efforts. It’s also not unlikely that Wallace’s competition with Costello served as a
surrogate form of the achievement-based attempts to elicit praise from his family, whether the
stand-in for his family was a professor on whose class assignments Wallace worked hard to best
his roommate—or Costello himself. However, Wallace had additional reasons for attempting a
fiction thesis besides breaking Costello’s record: the distraction it provided for his high-idling
55
mind, which Wallace knew that when left to its own devices tended to spin itself into anxious
loops. With fiction, when Wallace finished a piece that satisfied him intellectually and creatively,
it produced the “click” he used to get from working through problems in his logic courses, and
when he was working at long stretches chasing fiction’s click, Wallace described the experience
as produced an almost disembodying high in which “couldn’t feel [his] ass in the chair” (167).
And since writing a fiction thesis in addition to his modal logic thesis on Taylor’s fatalism was
required to match—though not exceed—Mark Costello’s achievement of completing of not one
but two honors theses (which hadn’t been done at Amherst in the forty years before Costello did
it)—if Wallace couldn’t manage it, not only would he not beat Costello or tie him for first place.
He would come in second.
That semester, Wallace published “The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the
Bad Thing” in The Amherst Review.
5
Though it is David Foster Wallace’s first piece of published
fiction, any reader of Wallace’s work would recognize it as unmistakably his. It is the origin
point of his recurring fictional treatments of depression, and in this early form is an intensely
autobiographical account, including his mother’s characterization of his particular combination
of depression and anxiety as a black hole with teeth (29). Stylistically, the early form of what
would become his characteristic voice is recognizable for its intimate, spoken rhythm and long,
subordinating-clause heavy sentences (though without violating the rules of grammatical syntax).
He was also taking his first creative writing course, taught by Alan Lelchuk, as well as a course
in literary theory where he discovered, among other poststructuralist writers, Jacques Derrida. He
found in Derrida a philosopher who cared about literature like he did; it is this ability to bridge
the two disciplines that fascinated Wallace and made Derrida’s abstract arguments concerning
5
Volume XII, Spring 1984
56
the inherent contradictions of dyadic thinking, especially with regard to “presence vs. absence”
and “self vs. other,” so important to him.
From Philosophy to Fiction
As I noted earlier, when David Foster Wallace began his coursework at Amherst in 1980,
he pursued studies in philosophy, and this section examines the themes from his philosophy
thesis in closer detail in order to draw attention to those themes when they appear later in his
English thesis. Wallace’s coursework included the standard surveys of philosophical thinkers’
systems taught by Kennick, but also other standard elements of a philosophy like epistemology,
metaphysics, and ethics. But the philosophy course that most excited Wallace, as I remarked
earlier, was logic. Logical philosophy is analogous to a kind of close reading in that it breaks
philosophical arguments down into their assertions in order to examine exactly how the steps of
the argument progress or to identify by such close scrutiny any problems in its reasoning.
The entirety of Wallace’s philosophy thesis is spent refuting an earlier argument by a
philosopher named Richard Taylor. As James Ryerson explains in his introduction to Wallace’s
undergraduate thesis, recently published under the title Fate, Time, & Language:
Wallace became troubled by a well-known paper called “Fatalism,” first published
in 1962, in which the philosopher Richard Taylor advances a modern-day argument
for an age-old metaphysical doctrine by that name. The fatalist contends, quite
radically, that human actions and decisions have no influence on the future. Instead,
in a seemingly backward way, the fatalist says it is how things are in the future that
uniquely constrains what happens right now. (Ryerson 5-6)
The way Taylor arrived at these conclusions without violating any of the disciplinary rules of the
modal logic it is written in is akin to the way that Zeno’s paradox operates without violating any
rules of propositional logic (the kind of if-X-then-Y logic that a basic syllogism like “All men
are mortal; Socrates is a man; Socrates will die” relies on): starting at point (A), in order to reach
point (B), one must first reach point (C), located mid-way between points (A) and (B). But in
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order to reach the mid-point (C), one must first reach point (D) located mid-way between points
(A) and (C). Because it takes a given amount of time to travel any given distance, and because
there are always infinitely many points between a starting point and an endpoint, reaching the
endpoint will necessarily take an infinite amount of time. While demonstrably false in praxis, the
argument of Zeno’s paradox remains, on paper, in the language of propositional logic,
unassailable. In modal logic, a “modal” is a word, like “often” in the phrase “Rob is often late for
his writing deadline,” that qualifies the statement. Taylor’s argument, though easily refuted by
common-sense measures, violates none of modal logic’s rules. Modal logic as a discipline is
tasked with judgements of truth or falsity of specific types of modals: generally, those of
possibility, necessity, and impossibility. Taylor’s argument is a special kind of modal dealing
with qualifiers of time, temporal modalities. The implications of Taylor’s conclusions, that future
events somehow determined the present, struck a chord with Wallace; as Ryerson notes, “There
was a kind of anguish for Wallace in the prospect of a world so out of whack” (7). Taylor’s
deductions disturbed him because they seemed to deny Wallace the agency to define and judge
himself according to how well he satisfied pre-existing rules and criteria. It also presented a
unique challenge that his competitive mind could not ignore: he could not merely advance a
commonsensical argument to counter Taylor’s logic. To successfully counter a modal-logic
argument, he had to abide by the constraints on which mathematical symbols were allowed to
follow the rules particular to modal logic, those of testing the truth or falsity of claims about
necessity or possibility.
Taylor and his adherents, with a stake in the continued solidity of modal logic as a
workable and useful system of inquiry, wouldn’t accept an intuitive answer to the fatalist
problem; appeals to common sense merely rejected the problem’s argument without disproving
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its claims regarding free will. Wallace knew that a refutation would have to disprove Taylor’s
argument on its own terms—and in its native idiom of modal logic. Enlisting help from other
graduate students and his professors, Wallace devoted one of his two undergraduate honors
theses to that very task and won the Amherst philosophy department’s top prize in the process.
About this accomplishment, James Ryerson offers the insight that, besides the satisfaction of
having equaled his father’s earlier accomplishment (James Wallace won the same prize in 1959),
that “The real accomplishment of Wallace’s thesis, however, was not technical or argumentative
but more like a moral victory” (13). And in his introduction to Wallace’s Fate, Time, and
Language: An Essay on Free Will, Ryerson again touches on the Wallace father-son dynamic:
“As Wallace would later admit, his intellectual leanings in those years [at Amherst] may have
been influenced by a wish to differentiate himself from his father”—whereas James Wallace was
interested in philosophical inquiries into moral and ethical questions of value, his son specialized
in mathematical logic and the philosophy of language.
6
But in the end, their writing shares a
common obsession with the same problems—the difficulties of determining value and the
question of sincerity—which are always palpable in David Foster Wallace’s fiction.
But as Wallace finished his refutation of fatalism, he became increasingly worried about
another philosopher’s writing that elicited the same sense of gut-level unease he felt on first
reading Taylor’s argument (Ryerson 20). The source of Wallace’s post-Taylor anxiety was
Ludwig Wittgenstein, a philosopher whose thematic focus on language’s ability to foreclose
possibility has obvious resonances with Taylor’s fatalism. Specifically, the problem in
Wittgenstein that concerned Wallace, and which would become a recurrent theme in Wallace’s
writing, occurs in Wittgenstein’s posthumous work, the Philosophical Investigations. The
6
His “Pleasure as an End of Action,” published in a 1966 issue of American Philosophical Quarterly, has eerie
resonances with the filmic “entertainment” in Infinite Jest.
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Investigations, along with his earlier work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, comprise the
only two sustained philosophical treatments that Wittgenstein wrote and which bookend his
entire output. In a similar way that David Foster Wallace’s second novel, Infinite Jest, revises his
first, The Broom of the System, the language-philosophy of Wittgenstein’s later Investigations
refutes many of the analytic arguments in his Tractatus and makes the bold claim that most of
the problems that are difficult or impossible to solve in philosophy are the result of a
misunderstanding about the nature of language use dating back to Aristotle, namely that
problems in philosophy stem from philosophers’ incorrect understanding of the meanings of key
words in their arguments. To resolve these misunderstandings, they need to examine how a word
is actually used, rather than relying on an outdated definition. It is the second of these two texts
Wallace was concerned with, specifically what Wittgenstein had to say about the notion of
“private language,” or the notion that certain words can mean things to a speaker privately that
they don’t mean publicly. Similar to the way that poststructuralism critiques structuralist notions
of meaning, Wittgenstein writes that wrongheaded conclusions about the possibility of a private
language that can result from treating human language as a system of formal logic, which the
Tractatus does. By the Investigations, Wittgenstein has given up on the systematization of
language, feeling that its nature is too complex to be fully captured.
One section of the Investigations was of particular interest to Wallace, which was
Wittgenstein’s treatment of this possibility of the existence of a “private language.” Wittgenstein
explains how such a private language, wherein the meaning of a word (like “pain”) is known
fully and in all its dimensions only by the person uttering the word, is impossible because of the
inherently social nature of meaning: meaning is something that happens collectively between
people using a common language; it is impossible to conceive of meaning in a vacuum. What
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bothered Wallace about this argument was a conclusion that necessarily followed: if meaning
only happens socially between people using a shared language then that language could never
reflect the “true” or objective nature of reality—only the reality shared by those who used the
language. On these grounds, the notion that there could exist some desolate individual alone in
the depths of a pain no one else could fully know is one that Wittgenstein’s Investigations,
though not his Tractatus, rejects.
Though Wittgenstein’s second text reversed many of his first’s disconcerting
conclusions, Wallace felt that “Wittgenstein had left us, again, without the possibility of contact
with the outside world” (Ryerson 30). Describing the situation elsewhere, Wallace told Larry
McCaffery that Wittgenstein’s final text “eliminated [the individual isolation of] solipsism but
not the horror” (45). Ryerson does an excellent job of explaining Wallace’s lingering dread:
“The only difference between this new predicament [in the Investigations] and that of the
Tractatus was that rather than being trapped alone in our private thoughts, we were trapped
together, with other people, in the institution of language” (30-31). If the only world we can
“know” is both constituted and constrained by language, then the problem of knowing if
another’s words are sincere becomes a central one. Any “truth” would necessarily take the form
of “true language,” but, as Wallace explains, the status of this truth would be impossible to
determine: “If I were separate from language, if I could somehow detach from it and climb up
and look down on it[,] I could study it ‘objectively,’ take it apart, deconstruct it[.] But that’s not
how things are. I’m in it. We’re in language. … Wittgenstein’s conclusions seem completely
sound to me, always have” (McCaffery 45). In another passage, Wallace sums it up by saying:
“Unfortunately we’re still stuck with the idea that there’s this world of referents out there that we
can never really join or know because we’re stuck in here, in language, even if we’re at least all
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in here together” (31). According to the logic of the Investigations, “the question of whether any
language game accurately represents reality can be asked only within some other language game,
which operates according to its own set of nonevaluable conventions” (30). Said another way:
even if Wittgenstein had reversed his pronouncements on the private, solipsistic nature of
language and reality— that “the limits of my language are the limits of my world”—it was only
to revise “my” to “our.” Wallace began to address this linguistic estrangement in his other thesis,
a text that would eventually become his first novel, The Broom of the System.
Wallace’s fiction thesis was thematically, a kind of extension of his philosophy thesis.
The intersection of the two projects is primarily one of language’s relation to the world of lived
experience: “Wallace’s fictional manuscript and the philosophy thesis were also of a piece: both
asked whether language depicted the world or in some deeper way defined it and even altered it”
(Max 45). Ryerson is right when he asserts that “The defeat of solipsism was half of what
Wallace sought to capture in Broom. But while Wittgenstein may have ‘solved’ solipsism for
Wallace, there was a catch[,] which Wallace also wanted to convey” (30). The “catch” is
precisely this broader sense of language as a collective prison that separates humanity from
reality. Unlike Taylor’s fatalism essays, Wittgenstein’s philosophy was not written in the
disciplinary vernacular of modal logic, and its refutation required a different kind of language in
order to allay the “horror” Wallace felt after finishing Wittgenstein’s posthumously-published
treatise (30).
Lost in Translation: The Broom Of The System’s Failures of Theory
That The Broom of the System is the work of a hyperintelligent grad student is clear. But
some of the ways it flattens complexities and contradictions in Wittgenstein’s language-
philosophy for comic effect or writerly formal showmanship prevent it from exploring
Wittgenstein’s themes with any real depth. Even Wallace’s summation of the novel in the
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previous quote from the Lipsky interview dismisses the one of the few sustained aspects of the
text’s engagement with theory that isn’t played entirely for laughs, which is the question of the
degree to which our experience is constituted by language. The novel’s principal, Lenore, is
convinced rather literally by her grandmother that “All that really exists of my life is what can be
said about it” (Broom 119). Realizing that her life is “circumscribed by language, Lenore feels
not quite in control of her own existence” (James 4). While yes, Lenore feels her life is
“constituted by language,” the joke Wallace’s is driving at here (she’s a literal character in a
literal novel, so of course she’s only constituted only by others’ language), represents Wallace’s
usual depth of engagement with the philosophical and theoretical questions he chose to treat in
the novel’s narrative.
This next section looks at Wallace’s Amherst fiction thesis in further detail, with an eye
toward identifying those thinkers and ideas that were carried over from Wallace’s philosophy
thesis, as well as from his readings for his philosophy and critical theory coursework as an
undergraduate student. The competing truth claims that Wallace attempts to reconcile in his
fiction thesis are primarily those of Wittgenstein and Derrida, specifically, their differing
accounts of the relation between meaning and language. Derrida’s emphasis on the function of
différance in the production of textual meaning entails a privileging of absence over presence, a
privileging of writing over speech: it is in part the author’s absence that allows for a space in
which the reader can make meaning from a text. Différance also foregrounds the negative nature
by which words come to mean anything—that is, words mean different things because of the
ways they differ from each other, not because they refer to concrete, unchanging referents or
corresponding objects in reality. The context in which words are used in a text, combined with
the differences between readers’ interpretative strategies—to name only a couple of constantly
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changing variables that must be taken into account—have an effect on what a text “means.”
Derrida’s central point here is that textual meaning is never fixed, never stable, but always in
flux, and that the reader determines a text’s meaning at the cost of the meaning its author may (or
may not) have intended. Carried to its conclusion, this model of meaning considers everything as
fair game for this kind of textual analysis: literature, art, even the reader herself—meaning is
always contingent and ultimately deferred through the movement of différance. Even if the
reader could define her own meaning at a particular instant, the only surety is that this meaning is
only temporary and not fully under her control.
At odds with this theory of meaning is the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, a systematized
picture-theory of meaning in which the meaning of a word corresponds to concrete objects in
reality in a literal sense. In this early writing, Wittgenstein goes so far as to say that abstract
thought isn’t possible because to think at all is to think in language, and if thinking requires
words, those words derive their meaning from concrete referents in lived reality; to speak of
“abstraction” would be meaningless because all words are stand-ins for actual things. One
corollary of this theory of meaning is that because we can only think in language, a second-order
sign system, language will always separate us from objective reality; and from this Wittgenstein
arrives at the conclusion that all we can really know with absolute certainty is our own
thoughts—we are forever separated not only from true knowledge of the objects in the world, but
from other people as well.
The narrative of The Broom of the System primarily concerns a character named Lenore
Beadsman, and its premise, as Wallace explained it to his editor, began “with a chance comment
from a girlfriend. She had told him that she would rather be a character in a novel than a real
person,” which had prompted Wallace to think about what the difference was (44). The novel
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was set in the then-future year of 1990, and is primarily a narrative treatment of the sorts of
questions he had pursued in his philosophy thesis about determinism and the problem of free
will.
Lenore, Broom’s principal, is an Oberlin college student, who worries that she may not
be real: “She simply felt [that] she had no real existence, except for what she said and did and
perceived and et cetera, and that these were, it seemed…not really under her control” (Broom
67). Lenore’s source for this line of thinking comes from Wittgenstein by way of her great-
grandmother (her namesake—also named Lenore Beadsman). The elder Lenore had studied
philosophy “under a mad crackpot genius named Wittgenstein, who believed that everything was
words. Really. If your car would not start, it was apparently to be understood as a language
problem. If you were unable to love, you were lost in language. Being constipated equaled being
clogged with linguistic sediment. [A] belief that the world is words” (73-74).
Fictionalizing Derrida’s ideas about the metaphysics of absence, Gramma Lenore has
recently disappeared from her nursing home, absconding with several other residents. Gramma
Lenore has left behind clues for her great-granddaughter, which the younger Lenore follows
throughout the novel. She is ultimately unsuccessful in locating her namesake; Gramma Lenore
in fact never appears, and the main action of the novel (and various other sub-plots) remains
unresolved at the narrative’s end.
However, Wallace is too preoccupied with the comedic possibilities he sees in Derrida
and Wittgenstein, and the cost of this preoccupation is his fiction’s fidelity to their ideas—the
ones that purportedly motivate Broom’s principal, Lenore.
7
The function of Gramma Lenore’s
disappearance is to make room for the younger Lenore to define herself in her great
7
In a letter written during the summer of 1989, Wallace told his Review of Contemporary Fiction editor, Steven
Moore, “I don’t know early Wittgenstein well enough to pretend anything like authority over it.”
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grandmother’s absence. This absence ostensibly allows Lenore to define her own meaning,
which she eventually does after her brother LaVache spells out Wittgenstein’s thinking for her.
Oversimplifying Derrida’s complex and sometimes contradictory metaphysics of absence makes
it easier for Wallace to write slapstick set pieces and pull off running gags, but this insistence on
comedy forecloses deeper engagement with and meaning for The Broom of the System’s readers.
Because in a novel that is at such pains to showcase its intelligence by making overt reference to
philosophy and critical theory, any reader familiar with those allusive ideas will recognize
Broom’s characters and its theoretical understanding for what they are: caricatures. And if
readers realize an author has dumbed down the ideas which purportedly drive a work’s central
narrative concerns, that author runs the risk of insulting readers’ intelligence. Not to mention
their trust: few things are more off-putting to careful readers than feeling that an author doesn’t
trust them to untangle the narrative’s nuanced complexities. The joys of engagement with
another mind’s complexity is a large portion of what careful readers come to literary fiction for
in the first place. In the two passages that follow, Wallace kneecaps Wittgenstein’s theories in
exactly this fashion, and in so doing eschews engaging with the reader for providing the easy
laugh.
In the following passage, Stonecipher Beadsman III, the father of Lenore Stonecipher
Beadsman, Jr. (whose name is identical to her great-grandmother, who studied under
Wittgenstein) recalls having the elder Lenore lecture him about philosophy:
Has she done the thing with the broom with you? … What she did with me … was
to sit me down in the kitchen and take a straw broom and start furiously sweeping
the floor, and she asked me which part of the broom was more elemental, more
fundamental, in my opinion, the bristles or the handle. The bristles or the handle.
And I hemmed and hawed, and she swept more and more violently, and I got
nervous, and finally when I said I supposed the bristles, because you could after a
fashion sweep without the handle, by just holding on to the bristles, but couldn’t
sweep with just the handle, she tackled me, and knocked me out of my chair, and
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yelled into my ear something like, “Aha, that’s because you want to sweep with the
broom, isn’t it? It’s because of what you want the broom for, isn’t it?” Et cetera.
And that if what we wanted a broom for was to break windows, then the handle
was clearly the fundamental essence of the broom, and she illustrated with the
kitchen window … but that if we wanted the broom to sweep with, see for example
the broken glass … the bristles were the thing’s essence.… Meaning as
fundamentalness. Fundamentalness as use. Meaning as use. Meaning as use. (149-
500)
While this breathless, one-sided dialogue is admittedly funny in a slapstick sense, and consistent
at first glance with the idea that “meaning is use,” the novelty of its rapid-fire style grows
exhausting after repeated deployment.
The use of theory in The Broom of the System also fails at least in part because of its
inability to keep its metaphors consistent. In order for a metaphor to work—to enrich meaning
through the inventiveness of its comparison—the objects of its comparison must be sufficiently
real to us as readers. Metaphor succeeds by an imaginative overlapping or palimpsesting
whereby we are made aware of something incisive we had not been aware of before. It enhances
or sharpens detail; it makes the familiar not just new again, but different. We are apprised of new
information. Things are made more real.
Broom’s metaphors fail because we haven’t been given reason to care about its
characters. We don’t see ourselves in them, and we cannot make that imaginative leap from our
own heads to theirs. The theory which is supposed to enrich our understanding of these
characters and the relationships between them has—because of Wallace’s reductionist tendency
to eschew exploring theoretical complexity for superficial, slapstick engagement—been deprived
of sufficient force.
Beyond these breakdowns for readers, Broom’s theorizing sometimes doesn’t even hold
water for the novel’s characters. This is especially the case when one character expects another
to find a metaphor to be a revelatory experience: At one point during a therapy transcript, Dr. Jay
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literally puts on a gas mask during their session and offers one to his patient, Lenore, as well,
anticipating that they’ll both be overwhelmed by the literal “smell of breakthrough” when her
figurative? literal? “membrane” is punctured by his figurative insights. Lenore declines the
offer, and it’s no surprise—there’s no literal smell because the metaphor doesn’t work: neither
the character nor the reader can even keep straight what’s supposed to be literal and what’s not.
But Wallace was adamant that the scenes with Dr. Jay and his theories not be cut more
than absolutely necessary. He wrote to Broom’s editor, Gerry Howard, that the discussions of the
“membrane theory” had serious theoretical antecedents:
While potentially disgusting [they are] deeply important to what I perceive as a big
subplot of the book, which is essentially a dialogue between Hegel and
Wittgenstein on one hand and Heidegger and a contemporary French thinker-duo
named Paul DeMan and Jacques Derrida on the other, said debate having its root in
an essential self-other distinction that is perceived by both camps as less
ontological/metaphysical than essentially (for Hegel and Witt) historical and
cultural or (for Heidegger and DeMan and Derrida) linguistic, literary, aesthetic,
and fundamentally super or metacultural. (Max 69)
But I would argue that the combination of Wallace’s certainty that “serious” literature
needed to be seen making overt gestures to its awareness of literary theory, his insecurity
concerning his incomplete mastery of these ideas, and his habit of writing to be liked all have
their place in Wallace’s gestalt rationalization for taking the easy way out. Wallace will also
successfully revise the therapist as a trope in Infinite Jest, a revision I discuss in the “professional
conversationalist” section of Chapter 3. Even if we’re supposed to read Dr. Jay as a stooge of
Gramma Lenore and therefore understand his use of theory as ironic, if the characters are
unmoved by the force of these failed metaphors, we as readers cannot be faulted for our
empathic deficit toward them.
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This lopsided inconsistency happens over and over with slight variations.
8
So, for
example, When Norman Bombardini informs Rick Vigorous and Lenore that in order to fill the
void of the Other he feels after his wife leaves him because he can’t control his weight, he
explains his plan to fill that emotional void by proposing to expand his physical self to an infinite
size by consuming (literally eating) everything he can get his hands on, he expects he will simply
compensate any “lack” he feels over an absent Other by filling it—spatially? emotionally?—with
his infinitely-expanded, actual, corporeal body.
When the literalizing of a metaphor works, as it does in Kafka or Barthelme, it’s because
the literal instantiation of a metaphor’s figurative language has some kind of emotional
resonance. The fact of Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis is an unsettling enough thought exercise,
but it is Kafka’s realization of the emotional consequences of this transplantation of Gregor’s
human consciousness into a non-human form that ratchets up our discomfort to the level of the
uncanny.
The novel’s governing theoretical tropes—the structures of self/other, sign/signified,
reference/referent, absence/presence—don’t work because (at best) they’re hamfisted caricatures
of themselves played for laughs. Other times, they’re detached from the objects they’re meant to
give meaning to. Sometimes they’re expected to operate simultaneously on both the literal and
figurative level, as in Norman Bombardini’s plan to literally consume food until he stops feeling
a figurative lack of an absent other, or when Dr. Jay tells Rick Vigorous that he’s anxious
because he can’t physically penetrate Lenore’s (metaphorical? figurative?) membrane due to his
8
And no matter how metaphor is understood—the old-fashioned, Aristotelian “similarity” version, I. A. Richards’s
“interaction-model,” the “pragmatic schemas” proffered by Davidson in the 1970s, or more recent “cognitive”
theories: as narrative or rhetorical devices, they simply break down at levels that they shouldn’t. Worse yet: most of
the time, they don’t even make for good jokes, given the excruciating explanations about what concept is standing in
for whom in the various and lengthy transcript sessions that appear throughout the novel.
69
physical genital inadequacy—Rick’s solution to this, since he can’t penetrate Lenore, is to invert
this desire and instead endeavor to have Lenore inside him. And Rick, understandably confused,
replies: “Shall I simply eat her? That’s what Norman Bombardini apparently proposes to do.
Shall I consume her? Then the Other will certainly become Self” (348). (Those hand-waving
allegory-caps are in the original.) Dr. Jay’s response to this absurd question in the novel is “Dr.
Jay Pauses” (348). And no wonder. How could he answer? Having confused the metaphorical
dimension for the literal in his analysis of Rick, Dr. Jay finds himself confronted with the
consequences of his own error. He is forced to adopt an appropriately Wittgensteinian approach:
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” (Tractatus 108).
But perhaps the best example of Wallace either dumbing down Wittgenstein’s theoretical
complexity for laughs (or worse—fundamentally misunderstanding the theory’s complexity
himself) occurs in a conversation that Lenore has with her brother LaVache in his room at a
fictionalized Amherst, where he is a student:
“You told Dad you didn’t have a phone, Dad told me.”
“I don’t have a phone. This isn’t a phone, this is a lymph node,” LaVache said,
gesturing at a phone next to the television. “I call this a lymph node, not a phone.
So when Dad asks me do I have a phone, I can in all good conscience say no. I do,
however, have a lymph node.”
“You’re horrible,” said Lenore. (Broom 215)
The crux of the theoretical error in this scene is one that Wallace also commits in the previous,
long excerpt of “meaning as use” dialogue above, in which Lenore’s father talks about the
broom. The problem with both of these examples—of Gramma Lenore’s meaning of “broom” in
her use of it and in LaVache’s meaning of “lymph node” by his use of it—is that they both
completely ignore what Wittgenstein was ultimately getting at when he said that a word’s
meaning was determined by its use. “Use,” in Wittgenstein’s mature, final revision in the
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Philosophical Investigations, means social use. It is a use that is decided by consensus, by the
community of speakers who rely on that word’s collectively-decided—and decidedly fixed—
meaning to refer to the same object or concept. To purposely refer to his phone using a name
other than “phone,” which is the word that has been decided by consensus that the object will be
properly called, is to miss the point of the social nature of meaning’s construction. LaVache’s
antinomian use of “Lymph Node”—a term that his father doesn’t understand—amounts to the
kind of wrongheaded thinking that Wittgenstein describes when he critiques the notion of
“private meaning” as an impossibility.
The Broom of the System notoriously ends mid-sentence, leaving the major plot arcs
unresolved—formal and narrative choices that both Wallace’s editor, Gerry Howard, and his
agent, Bonnie Nadell, had advised him against: “Nadell had raised the issue even before she sold
the book to Viking Penguin. The story, she felt, just seemed to stop. She suggested Wallace think
about a more traditional last scene. Wallace had dug in—The Crying of Lot 49 famously ends in
mid-scene” (Max 69).
Howard also thought the narrative needed some sort of resolution. He urged Wallace to
keep in mind “the physics of reading,” a phrase that Wallace came to understand as “a whole set
of readers’ values and tolerances and capacities and patience-levels to take into account when the
gritty business of writing stuff for others to read is undertaken” (Max 68). In other words, a
reader who got through a long novel like Broom deserved to know what had happened. “You
cheat yourself as well of the opportunity to write a brilliantly theatrical close to the book,” (70)
Howard wrote to Wallace.
Even so, Wallace informed his editor that he would not revise Broom’s ending in a
decidedly sorry-not-sorry justification:
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“I admit to a potentially irritating penchant for anti-climax, one that may come out
of Pynchon, but a dictum of his that I buy all the way is that, if a book in which the
reader is supposed to be put, in some sort of metaphysical-literary way, in
something like the predicament of the character, ends without a satisfactory
resolution for the character, then it’s not only unfair but deeply inappropriate to
expect the book itself to give the reader the sort of satisfaction-at-end the character
is denied—the clear example is Lot 49.” … What he meant was he knew reality to
be fragmented, oblique, unbalanced, and his book had to capture that fragmentation
if that experience was to count for anything—that was why he wrote the way he
did. In the end, he insisted on keeping the ending he had written, breaking the novel
off in midsentence, with Rick Vigorous, Lenore’s ex-boyfriend, [saying] “I’m a
man of my”—the missing word being, elegantly and self-referentially, the word
“word.” (Max 69-71)
The question of how one ought to “end” a novel informed by postmodernism and therefore
revealed itself constantly as a mediated text was one that Wallace would revisit and revise
successfully via an incredibly inventive sort of recursion, as I argue in Chapter 3.
Wallace would eventually come to see the “click” as a distraction from his work—and
not as its goal: “I used to think the click came from, ‘Holy shit, have I ever just done something
good.’ Now it seems more like the real click’s more like, ‘Here’s something good, and on one
side I don’t much matter, and on the other side the individual reader maybe doesn’t much matter,
but the thing’s good because there’s extractable value here for both me and the reader. Maybe
it’s as simple as trying to make the writing more generous and less ego-driven” (51). Instead,
Wallace’s approach has shifted dramatically: “I’ve found the really tricky discipline to writing is
trying to play without getting overcome by insecurity or vanity or ego[.] You’ve got to discipline
yourself to talk out of the part of you that loves the thing, loves what you’re working on. Maybe
that just plain loves” (50). This discipline is one that Wallace had to consciously practice:
I’m not saying I’m able to work consistently out of the premise, but it seems like
the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies somewhere in the art’s
heart’s purpose, the agenda of the consciousness behind the text. It’s got something
to do with love. With having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that
can love instead of the part that just wants to be loved. I know this doesn’t sound
hip at all. I don’t know. But it seems like one of the things really great fiction
writers do … is give the reader something. (50)
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That Broom can’t manage this gift is largely because a novel written to impress—written to be
liked—is, at bottom, a book whose relationship to the reader is not one of giving but rather of
needing.
It is finally the way—the protean narrative forms—that Broom uses to translate
philosophical problems into fictional ones that leaves its impression on the reader, which is not
unlike the one left by heavy-cocaine-usage era Robin Williams: he’s working with good
material, but what the routine lacks in sustained engagement of a single topic isn’t quite made up
for by the frenetic pace with which he blows through his various impressions. The novel fails to
address the philosophical questions themselves in detail, never mind what the human
consequences of those problems might entail. Caryn James similarly sums up the novel’s
strengths and weaknesses in her review:
The heart of the novel, though, is its verbal extravagance and formal variations,
reflecting Lenore's belief that language creates and imprisons her[.] What's the
difference, Mr. Wallace seems to ask, between the real Lenore and the … version
in [these] stories? And, by extension, what's the difference between the real-life
reader and Lenore in The Broom of the System? Wallace aims to create his own
language game, a fictional system in which ''something's meaning is nothing more
or less than its function.'' The philosophical underpinnings of his novel are too
weak to support this, though. There is too much flat-footed satire of Self and Other,
too much reliance on Philosophy 101. (8)
One is left feeling that the author of The Broom of the System wasn’t so much writing to an
imagined audience but rather performing in front of a mirror. At the end of the day, Broom’s
diegetic world distills Wittgenstein’s philosophy into a comically absurd joke with a glib
punchline: “the truth is that there’s no difference between a life and a story” (Broom 120). When
Wittgenstein’s theory appears in The Broom of the System, it becomes quickly obvious that the
chief conclusion from the Investigations Wallace found productive was Wittgenstein’s notion
that in a socially-constructed language (which all languages necessarily are), a word’s meaning is
determined by its use.
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But it is also Wallace thumbing his nose at the idea that we don’t ultimately decide who
we are; because Rick Vigorous is a character in a novel, he is literally defined by Wallace’s
words. But in omitting the final word, “word,” from the novel’s last sentence, Wallace withholds
his words’ final foreclosure of Rick Vigorous’s self-determination. By choosing not to have the
last word, Wallace sides with Derrida and the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus: meaning is made
possible through absence, and our inner selves are finally something that we alone decide—not
others—because all we can really know with certainty are our own thoughts.
Immediately after the 1996 release of Infinite Jest, in a little-cited interview published on
the last two pages of issue #2 of the San Francisco-based Speak Magazine, Wallace again told an
interviewer why he was unsatisfied with the formal gimmickry of his previous approach:
If you don’t make fun of me, I’ll tell you what I was trying to do. I was very
interested in technical semantics, which is the relationship between form and
context. That paragraph at the end [of Broom] is missing the word ‘word,’ so I
thought I would bridge both the formal and the reference. Instead, I missed on both
counts…Now, ten years later, I understand that people read for intellectual reasons
and emotions. And that the ending [of Broom] I wrote is almost off-putting, like
giving the finger to the reader. I’m interested in a marriage of the two. (“1458
Words” 40)
Wallace’s ongoing preoccupation with the problems he’d encountered in philosophy, his
unsuccessful attempt at their fictional treatment in The Broom of the System, and his well-
documented competitive streak—Max’s biography’s index lists ten separate entries under
“Wallace, David Foster: competitiveness of” (354)—all factor into the motivational gestalt that
fueled the last novel Wallace would see published.
Later in his career, in a 1998 essay, a more mature David Foster Wallace than the one
who wrote The Broom of the System wrote that he had figured out that “not all paradoxes have to
be paralyzing” (“Nature of the Fun” 198). But at the beginning of his writing career, it is
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precisely the fear of certain paradoxes—linguistic, philosophical, fatalistic—that paralyze his
writing for readers.
He was especially susceptible to challenges that imposed limits on language’s ability to
make meaning, especially when those challenges came in the form of paradoxical language.
Upon encountering these types of arguments, whether in the form of paradoxical conclusions in
the modal logic of Taylor’s “Fatalism,” Wittgenstein’s notion of a complex and unsystematizable
language of socially constructed meaning that paradoxically kept its users from speaking any real
truth about their world, or Derrida’s conclusions about the ways that the usual thinking about
language and meaning contained their own paradoxical undoing, Wallace felt a level of unease
that motivated him to challenge those arguments in his own writing.
What seems to be at the heart of all the arguments by writers who obsessed Wallace early
on is the issue of choice, or, rather, those authors’ conclusions about the limits of choice. It
seems especially important to Wallace that the human ability to make choices—especially
existential choices—remain open. It is not unlike a familiar claim of addicts: “I can quit
whenever I want,” a claim which relies on a future choice that must remain open in order to
justify the behavior of their current choice. It was at least important enough that Wallace, when
presented with an argument whose conclusions made unreasonable or unwarranted restrictions
on this choice, would learn to speak fluently in whatever form of technical vernacular it took
(modal logic, language philosophy, poststructuralist critical theory) in order to refute it on its
own terms.
And it was this protean ability to adapt his thinking to languages of specialization that he
would harness to connect with readers in Infinite Jest. But in the period following the success of
The Broom of the System, Wallace’s addictions would begin to impinge on the choices available
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to him in his own lived experience. And in an attempt to engage with certain agents of a
medicalized recovery culture in order to refute their conclusions, he would once again immerse
himself in a new technical vocabulary—one that permeates all 1,100 pages of his last novel.
Chasing the “Click”: DFW’s Other Drug of Choice
In a 1993 interview with Larry McCaffery, then a comparative literature professor at San
Diego State University, Wallace says:
For most of my college career I was a hard-core syntax wienie, a philosophy major
with a specialization in math and logic.… Wienieish or not, I was actually chasing
a special sort of buzz, a special moment that comes sometimes. One teacher called
these moments “mathematic experiences.” What I didn’t know then was that a
mathematical experience was aesthetic in nature, an epiphany in Joyce’s original
sense. These moments appeared in proof-completions, or maybe algorithms. Or like
a gorgeously simple solution to a problem you suddenly see after filling half a
notebook with gnarly attempted solutions. It was really an experience of what I
think Yeats called “the click of a well-made box.” Something like that. The word I
always think of it as is “click.”… It was real lucky that just when I stopped being
able to get the click from math logic I started to be able to get it from fiction.
(McCaffery 32-33)
Wallace makes it sound here as if he abandoned philosophy for fiction, but it seems more
accurate to describe his change in academic focus as one of methodology rather than content. To
borrow a math metaphor, the essential problems and paradoxes that intrigued Wallace in
philosophy were transposed into the domain of fiction writing. But neither discipline was finally
the point as such. They were interchangeable; what mattered was the “buzz,” the need for the
continued experience of the “click.”
Wallace sought to narrativize the consequences of life in a world governed by
Wittgenstein’s philosophical-linguistic axioms in the fashion that Sartre’s play No Exit
dramatizes the tenets of existentialism. And in his English Department seminars, Wallace found
another literary thinker who was similarly preoccupied with these problems of language and
meaning.
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The historical prevalence of theory in the American academy has obvious implications
for Wallace’s work. By the time Wallace began to seriously consider fiction writing at Amherst,
poststructuralism was an established and dominant critical mode. (It remained much the same
when I started graduate school twenty years later.) In his later interviews, Wallace was always
careful to note the conclusions of poststructuralist theory he found useful, especially its exposure
of the ways fiction writers had avoided talking openly about fundamental parts of the
relationship between writers and readers, an omission he made much of in his own work. But in
all of Wallace’s published characterizations of poststructuralism, he generally tends to focus on
the negative aspects that obtained in an academic environment where poststructuralist theory was
de rigueur. As Wallace told Larry McCaffery: “the demise of Structuralism has changed the
world’s outlook on language, art, and literary discourse; and the contemporary artist can simply
no longer afford to regard the work of critics or theorists or philosophers—no matter how
stratospheric—as divorced from his own concerns” (McCaffery 13). In a different interview, he
addresses the influence of poststructuralist theory on American fiction:
What’s interesting to me about the ‘60s and ‘70s generation was that they changed
the ball game. The avant-garde debunked the myths but didn’t have the foresight to
follow it up with anything. So we grew up in the rubble. Something has to build
something else. That helps explain why serious art is important. Somewhere in all
of us is a hunger for narrative, to see what we’re up to and about. We have to
substitute the hedonism and spiritual naïveté that left us with nothing with
something. Except we don’t know what it is. (“1458 Words”)
When Wallace says that the theory-inflected fiction of the ‘60s and ‘70s left later writers
standing in the “rubble,” this rubble is what’s left of the traditional ideas that had been
dynamited: long-held, comfortable (and comforting) notions of how language worked—that we
could use it to make sense of the world—or that it was at least stable enough to use as a tool for
making sense of our lives and experience. But starting from the rubble is like being faced with
the task of constructing meaning, only all the tools have been taken away.
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In the waning years of the twentieth century, as American culture began to subsume
poststructuralist theory’s conclusions, communicated as they were understood by writers who
had graduated from theory-heavy university programs, some of the disturbing conclusions of
poststructuralist theory took on an almost axiomatic status, something like an episteme of
scrutiny and suspicion, a cultural current of irony. And this is the moment in which Wallace
finds himself writing.
On April 5, 2011, after a visit to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas,
which had acquired Wallace’s archive, Maria Bustillos published a piece on the marginalia in
some of Wallace’s books that the HRC made available to researchers. Titled “Inside David
Foster Wallace’s Private Self-Help Library,” Bustillos’s findings proved revealing enough that
Wallace’s estate had over twenty books, including the ones cited in her piece, pulled from the
archive. Later, on August 30th, Bustillos posted an update that read:
It appears that all the books referenced in that piece have since been removed from
the Ransom Center’s collection of Wallace’s papers. The collection, which used to
contain 320-odd books, now contains 299.
It never occurred to me that Wallace’s estate would be in a position to rescind part
of the sale of his documents to the Ransom Center; I wrote what I did under the
assumption that these books would remain available to anyone who was interested
in seeing them. I was very sorry—or rather, entirely freaked out—to learn that that
will no longer be the case.
D. T. Max’s estate-sanctioned biography, which contains many of the same conclusions as
Bustillos’s piece about the Wallace family’s dysfunctional relationships, had not yet been
published. At the time, some thought that what had incensed the Wallace Literary Trust was
Bustillos’s outing of an anonymous “testimonial” by the former resident of a halfway house in
Boston—called Granada House—as having been penned by Wallace. It contains more than a few
unadorned and straightforward admissions, such as “The diagnosis of my family, friends, and
teachers was that I was bright and talented but had ‘emotional problems.’ I alone knew how
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deeply these problems were connected to alcohol and drugs, which I’d been using heavily since
age fifteen” (Bustillos 25). Along with this attribution of the testimonial to David Foster
Wallace, the article also made clear that Wallace had been in AA and NA, organizations that
insist on anonymity (an anonymity that Wallace had always publically maintained).
As its title suggests, Bustillos’s article also featured a large number of transcriptions of
Wallace’s marginalia she found in his self-help books, marginalia concerning his mother, Sally
Wallace—who is a member of the Wallace Literary Trust, and who retains a degree of say over
what the Ransom Center makes available for public research. Bustillos’s article is not an unkind
one; quite the contrary. She writes at one point: “Wallace loathed himself in error. He had a real
value that others could see, but he could not. And another bad thing: he identified so closely with
his mom, it’s as if she got caught in the crosshairs of his self-loathing.” Bustillos’s essay is if
nothing else kinder to both Wallace and his mother than Wallace’s own marginalia.
Of particular interest to my current claims are the places that Bustillos discovered
marginalia that confirm some of my earlier speculations in Chapter 2, particularly those about
Wallace’s deep psychological need to perform academically to please his parents. Among these
annotations in Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child are: “Amherst 80-85,” which
appears in the margin of this paragraph: “Such a person is usually able to ward off threatening
depression with increased displays of brilliance, thereby deceiving both himself and those around
him,” Another annotated paragraph’s text reads:
But how can you love something you do not know, something that has never been
loved? So it is that many a gifted person lives without any true notion of his or her
true self. Such people are enamored of an idealized, conforming, false self. They
will shun their hidden and lost true self, unless depression makes them aware of its
loss or psychosis confronts them harshly with that true self.
And next to it, another handwritten note from Wallace: “Becoming what narcissistically-
deprived Mom wants you to be – performer. It is worse if the parent is smart—she knows what it
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looks like to be a good, healthy parent.” Other marginalia concerns Wallace’s judgement on his
family in those places that Max’s bio must skim over for lack of information: “Shame begets
shame to compulsive/addictive behavior,” “DFW comes home broken in ’82-not a ‘perfect
family.’ Mom’s lie here breaks down,” and “DFW the ‘troubled one in family-angry, anxious,
depressed-acting out, instantiating family’s sickness (Why I see myself as ‘fucked up’?)” One
could understand why Sally Wallace, not to mention James Wallace or David’s sister Amy,
wanting to have these books removed from the public’s access.
In the end, Bustillos reasons that perhaps therapy—a place where one sits alone with a
doctor who is primarily supposed to listen to your inner thoughts—wasn’t the best thing for
Wallace. Given that he spent so much time locked in his head, it is questionable just how much
good was achieved by Wallace’s ruminations, both in therapy and in the margins of his self-help
books, since, as Max’s bio and many other sources will attest, Wallace had always spent much of
his time preoccupied with these dark thoughts.
In addition to Wallace’s marginalia in the now-removed books at the HRC, there is
another archival object that testifies to his psychological pressure to perform and the deleterious
effects that this had on his conception of self. In October of 2008, Amherst held a memorial
service for David Foster Wallace, a recording of which was later made publicly available on their
website. After hearing from Wallace’s friends from his time at Amherst, his colleagues from
Pomona College, his students, and his Amherst teachers and the director of his English thesis,
those in attendance persuade Mark Costello to say a few words in closing, which he resists,
saying he hadn’t planned to say anything. But he relents, and he tells those assembled:
Coming east was a big deal for him, and he made it a bigger deal in his head,
because he needed hurdles. He needed to create these fictional hurdles, which is
something depressed people do. It’s something very smart people do. It may be one
part of the way in which death eventually cornered him and killed him. … It’s
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important to come away with a sense of how painful his day-to-day life was, and
how a powerful and compelling depression [was] linked to his personality.… He
said ‘I hear this chatter in my head and I can’t get it to shut up and it’s…it hates
me, this chatter, and it just chatters things about me: “you’re a fraud, you’re selfish,
you don’t treat people right … fraud, fraud, fraud, fraud. (Costello)
In these remarks from his Amherst roommate about Wallace’s invented “hurdles,” one hears
echoes of the marginalia from the self-help books (“Such a person is usually able to ward off
threatening depression with increased displays of brilliance”), and in the accusations of
Wallace’s “chatter” is a version of the self-help claim that “many a gifted person lives without
any true notion of his or her true self.”
But Costello also said that Wallace’s mind could, at times, pull itself out of the chatter’s
noise: “the way to get it to shut up was to create a focal point outside yourself which would be
this other voice which was the musical voice of the prose.” If Wallace felt truly as the records of
David Lipsky, D. T. Max, Mario Bustillos, and Mark Costello attest—that his “self” really was,
at bottom, a performance—then Broom’s theoretical failings take on an intensely tragic
character. Without a sense of an authentic self—whether one understands it to be a construction
or not—if one feels only absence where others feel they exist, deep down as conscious beings,
how can we reasonably expect such a person to deeply engage with theories of self vs. other or
presence vs. absence? In that nightmarish scenario, understanding there to be only absence where
one’s presence should be, there is no self to speak of.
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CHAPTER 3
WALLACE’S ETHICAL TURN: WITTGENSTEIN’S MISTRESS AS HITTING BOTTOM
I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier’s
second Essais and see no reason why his definition of free will—“the sustaining of a
thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts”—need be the definition
of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present—until next year—that it is no
illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.
—William James
The Letters of William James
The Inter-Novel Period: From Tucson to Normal
In Chapter 3, I resume the biographical examination from Chapter 2 and extend it to
cover David Foster Wallace’s inter-novel period, which begins in 1985 as he enters Arizona’s
MFA program and runs to 1993 when Wallace accepts a position in the English department at
Illinois State University. Corresponding with the second phase of my three-part recovery
schema, this inter-novel phase is the crucial midpoint in both Wallace’s theory- and substance
recovery narratives. The central event in this liminal stage, bottoming out, represents a necessary
crisis. It is a literally epiphanic
1
event, a low point that finally reveals addiction’s raw cost with
sufficient force to make recovery more attractive than continuing to use.
2
As twelve-step
literature attests, most addicts are unable to fully commit to recovery without first hitting
bottom.
3
It satisfies the only requirement for joining twelve-step programs, which is a sincere
and honest desire to quit (Alcoholics Anonymous iv, 562). Between September 1988 and
1
This “epiphany” (334) is referred to variously in the text of Alcoholics Anonymous as a “spiritual awakening” (60),
a “thunderbolt” (56), and a “revelation” (56).
2
“One definition of a bottom is the point when the last thing you lost or the next thing you are about to lose is more
important to you than booze. That point is different for everyone, and some of us die before we get there”
(Alcoholics Anonymous 425).
3
“Unless this person can experience an entire psychic change, there is very little hope of his recovery” (Alcoholics
Anonymous xxix).
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September 1991, Wallace’s substance-abuse problems landed him in two different psychiatric
units, a supervised detox facility, a halfway house, and a sober house for recovering addicts.
But this three-year span was also the period when Wallace came to recognize value in the
discipline and order required by twelve-step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous. In the daily
routines imposed by supervised recovery, he learned to practice the habits of mindfulness that
informed the rest of his writing. But how exactly did Wallace go from being the author who
wrote The Broom of the System, an experimental, theory-heavy novel that nearly sinks under the
weight of its own ironic prose and digressive pedantry, to the writer who in less than three years’
time publicly disavowed that novel, going so far as to publish critical essays cataloguing its
failures?
Weaning himself off theory was a process that played out publicly during this inter-novel
period. In Chapter 3’s final two sections, I read a selection of Wallace’s literary-critical
appraisals of other writers as texts that telegraph future shifts in his own fiction’s use of theory.
Kicking his theory habit did not come easily. Wallace’s dependence on others’ ideas was deeply
ingrained, and at first, he tried to have things both ways by turning theory on itself in an attempt
to short-circuit metafiction’s inherent feedback loop of self-consciousness. The culmination of
these half-measures was the spectacularly involuted (and seldom-read) novella “Westward the
Course of Empire Takes its Way,” a piece that Wallace would eventually regard as an
unfortunate but necessary exercise.
As with his entry into substance-abuse recovery, kicking the theory habit required a
similarly epiphanic literary event—which for David Foster Wallace came in the form of David
Markson’s novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress. Reading Markson’s novel marked the beginning of
Wallace’s sincere and honest desire to connect with readers rather than impress them, and this
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new goal is apparent in all his fiction that followed. This ethical shift—away from theory-driven
narratives and toward fiction that attempted to communicate with readers—was one that Wallace
would not have committed to without getting sober. As sobriety improved his mental health and
personal relationships, Wallace began applying the lessons of twelve-step recovery to his
writing, a change that ultimately helped him formulate a mature writing- and work ethic that
made possible the landmark novel that established his place in the tradition of American letters,
Infinite Jest.
Wallace in Tucson
After his Amherst graduation in the spring of 1985, David Foster Wallace again moved
back to his parents’ house in Illinois. Early that summer, Wallace drove from Urbana to Amherst
to pick up his friend and former roommate Corey Washington. But two days after they returned
to Illinois, David Foster Wallace had to be admitted to the psychiatric unit of Carle Hospital for
severe depression, and Washington found himself on a bus back to Amherst. Wallace was
diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a constellation of symptoms then called “manic depression.”
But for reasons that remain unclear, Wallace’s doctor prescribed Nardil, an “MAO inhibitor
often used to treat atypical depression,” which is characterized by “unusual sensitivity to social
rejection and a quick return to mental health when circumstances improve” (Max 52). Either
way, Wallace’s mental condition improved drastically, so much so that Wallace was “out of the
hospital and on a kind of high” before the end of the summer (52).
That August, Wallace arrived in Tucson to begin his MFA studies at the University of
Arizona. Despite the coursework required by three graduate seminars and a writing workshop
during his first semester, it only took him about a month to prepare a draft of his undergraduate
fiction thesis for submission to prospective publishers (65). Wallace sent the manuscript out to
more than fifteen prospective agents; only one replied. That agent, Bonnie Nadell, was the first
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and only literary agent of Wallace’s career. In December, Nadell shopped the manuscript around
to editors, one of whom was Viking Penguin’s Gerry Howard, who offered a $20,000 advance
for the book. One semester into his graduate studies, Wallace had his first editor.
That Wallace’s writing professors at Arizona were proponents of Realism and were
uniformly uninterested in producing writers of experimental fiction came as a surprise to him. In
the acceptance letter from Mary Carter, the MFA program’s director, Wallace had been told he
would be encouraged to find his own voice; that “instead of the ‘guru’ system (which tends to
foster a ‘school’ of writing, and a tendency of the student to write for or like one master), we
encourage diversity” (50). The reality of the program was quite different. The Arizona faculty
“were not fans of postmodernism, which they associated with a different era and condition and a
preciousness that stories in the true American grain should not possess” (60). But because of
Wallace’s acceptance to other MFA programs (all more prestigious than Arizona but which
didn’t offer financial aid) along with his success in securing an agent to promote his first novel
of experimental fiction, Wallace felt confident enough to defy the edicts of his new professors
when he thought they were holding him back—a defiance that sometimes bordered on the
combative.
As he began his MFA work, Wallace’s writing still relied on foregrounding other
thinkers’ ideas. D. T. Max provides an illustrative anecdote:
[W]hen another participant [in his literary theory seminar] called Derrida a waste of
time, Wallace got so mad that everyone thought there would be a fight. He was still
convinced that theory was what separated the serious novelist from the others, that
without it writers were just entertainers. His interest in theory, like his fondness for
stories with strong voices, also had a compensatory element. It served to satisfy
energies that would have been frustrated had they gone into aspects of fiction
writing he did not naturally excel at, like character development. (Max 74)
Compared to his writing teachers, Wallace found the MFA students at his new institution to be a
generally supportive—if slightly incestuous—group. Wallace was much more confident around
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them than the students at Amherst, and at times, his attitude was flatly arrogant. Social skills had
never been his forte, and Wallace’s theoretical posturing rubbed some of his fellow students the
wrong way. Looking back at his behavior at Arizona, Wallace would later tell Lorin Stein, “I
was a prick” (par. 13). No doubt contributing to Wallace’s new social confidence was his
increasingly heavy drinking and drug use. In Arizona, Wallace found this sort of experimentation
as beneficial for his social life as the formal experiments were for the pieces he was writing;
almost all of the stories in Wallace’s first collection of short fiction, Girl with Curious Hair,
were originally written for his MFA portfolio.
In the spring of 1986, Wallace and a group of friends in the MFA program went to see
David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. Unexpectedly, it was an experience that caused him to rethink both
his approach to experimental fiction and his responsibility as a writer. As he later recalled the
experience:
It was my first hint that being a surrealist, or being a weird writer, didn’t exempt
you from certain responsibilities. But in fact it obligated, it upped them. That
whatever the project of surrealism is works way better if 99.9 percent of it is
absolutely real.…It’s that one thing in a Lynch frame that’s off, that, if everything
else weren’t picture-perfect and totally structured, wouldn’t hit. (Lipsky 170)
Before Blue Velvet, Wallace had not thought serious writers needed to concern themselves with
anticipating readers’ emotional responses or expectations. But as he started to ask himself what
made Lynch’s film leave such an impact on him, he came to realize that “the very most
important artistic communications took place at a level that not only wasn’t intellectual but
wasn’t even fully conscious.” The genius of Blue Velvet’s juxtaposition of thematic content and
stylistic choices, Wallace felt, lay in its emotional—rather than cerebral—effects on the viewer,
in “the way the movie’s surrealism and dream-logic felt: they felt true, real” (“Supposedly” 201,
200). Upon further reflection, Wallace saw that the way the film achieved that emotional
impact—what made the “one thing in a Lynch frame that’s off” have such an effect on the
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viewer—was that except for the “one thing,” the rest of the film’s aesthetic operated in an
unironic, non-self-conscious, “capital-R Realist” mode. It was a turning point in Wallace’s
thought regarding the relationship between artist and audience. This relationship, Wallace
realized, was one that was modulated by the use of theory. And what was so upsetting about the
surreal moments was that they upset the moral and ethical expectations that the rest of the film’s
realist aesthetic set up. This realization—that “being a weird writer didn’t exempt you from
certain responsibilities…[that] in fact it obligated, it upped them” marks an important change in
Wallace’s approach. It signals Wallace’s turn toward a writing ethic grounded in the realization
that experimentation and theory can affect the moral and ethical dimensions of a narrative—and
that by extension, purely ironic or theoretical fiction tends to produce ethically vacuous or at
least amoral narratives. And it offered at least a hint of how to move past the postmodern trap of
metafiction’s awareness of its status as text. Still convinced that serious fiction necessitated the
use of theory in some capacity, Wallace began to look for a way to salvage what was productive
about metafiction without constantly calling attention to the narrative’s experimental status. The
more he could downplay metafiction’s self-consciousness, the easier he might be able to access
the powerful emotional register in his readers that he felt while watching Lynch’s film.
The work Wallace submitted in his Arizona workshops can be understood as trying to
advance the work of those authors who had first made him want to write fiction—experimental
writers like Barthelme, Pynchon, and Barth, who Wallace considered his literary fathers. Wallace
saw his generation of writers as the inheritors of the advances made by postmodern fiction, but
this inheritance came with a responsibility to push that fictional tradition forward with their own
fiction. Wallace’s attempts to move past postmodernism are apparent in his fiction during his
time at Arizona. There is in these workshopped pieces a perceptible shift away from the kind of
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writing he’d done in Broom. He was “beginning to play around with the props of narrative,
rearranging them to see what might catch his attention [by] going through the various tools in the
postmodern tool kit, [and] trying each one out” (Max 62). His fascination with how the
underlying mechanisms of language and fiction worked remained undiminished. In addition to
his fiction workshops, Wallace signed up for graduate courses on literary theory, such as
“Methods of Critical Reading and Writing,” a graduate seminar that focused on Derrida’s Of
Grammatology (56). Though Wallace was happy enough with the workshop pieces he was
steadily producing, he knew he’d made no real progress in his project to advance beyond what
postmodern fiction had accomplished, so he continued to look for a way to push his fiction
forward. Thematically, Wallace remained obsessed with the ideas he’d been so taken with in his
undergraduate philosophy courses—primarily the problem of solipsism and theories of meaning
that he first began writing about in his fiction at Amherst. Indeed, these fundamental issues of
language, meaning, and the conception of the self would be the subject of Wallace’s writing in
one form or another until the very end.
The process of publishing The Broom of the System didn’t take long: the editing process
with Wallace’s new editor was completed in six months, and the book was slated for publication
before Wallace was scheduled to graduate from Arizona. When the novel debuted, it was
generally well reviewed, though most reviewers generally found it to be too clever for its own
good. But it gained enough attention that Alliance Entertainment optioned the movie rights for
$10,000. Wallace capitalized on the book’s success by convincing Howard to offer him a
$25,000 advance on his next project, a collection of short fiction pieces from the portfolio he was
assembling for his MFA requirements. Taking full advantage of Arizona’s printing facilities,
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Wallace began mailing out some of his MFA-workshopped writing
4
for publication—a
requirement, his editor Gerry Howard told him, for their appearance in any future collection of
short stories.
Wallace took what he had learned from Blue Velvet to heart—after seeing the film,
Wallace began focusing his mental energies on finding more nuanced ways to integrate theory
with his fiction and “to treat seriously issues that had mostly been played for laughs in Broom”
(75). To varying degrees, the stories Wallace wrote at Arizona for the collection he was planning
represent incremental advancements in Wallace’s fiction, both in terms of traditional narrative
fundamentals like character development and voice, but also in their use of theory. They are
examples of Wallace’s early attempts to put into practice what he’d learned from his Lynchian
epiphany, and as a result, their fictional worlds feel more like readers’ lived experience, and
demonstrate another lesson he took away from watching Blue Velvet: that “first-rate
experimentalism was a way not to ‘transcend’ or ‘rebel against’ the truth but actually honor it”
(201). Contrary to The Broom of the System, the fictional experiments he was now writing
attempted to honor the truth by obscuring rather than foregrounding their theoretical
engagements. Whereas Wallace’s first novel makes mention of Wittgenstein by name and
devotes numerous long passages to the rehearsal of his ideas, the characters in Girl, even when
they are less-than-fully realized, never function solely as mouthpieces for others’ ideas. It turned
out that the clichéd edict of the creative-writing workshop—“show, don’t tell”—turned out to be
solid advice.
Thematically, Wallace’s Arizona stories remain preoccupied with the themes from
Wallace’s first novel: solipsism, loneliness, irony, substance abuse, and dichotomies of
4
These pieces appeared in Paris Review, Arrival, Fiction, Conjunctions, Playboy, Florida Review, Puerto de Sol,
and Harper’s.
89
interiority/exteriority self/other are all still present. Where Wallace achieves noticeable progress
is in the sublimation of his theoretical formal and stylistic impulses to his new goal of making his
stories feel true for his readers. In the end, these short fictional pieces succeed or fail according
to their ability to escape the recursive metafictional techniques they employ. Very few manage to
break completely out of their self-reflexive loops. The majority of the stories that make up his
first collection of short fiction, Girl with Curious Hair, fall into one of two categories:
minimalist meta-takedowns of nihilistic minimalism such as “Everything Is Green” and “Little
Expressionless Animals” or parodies of overused metafictional setups that achieve their critique
by creative rearrangement of those same tropes.
However, the stories’ recurrent thematic engagement with solipsism—especially those
that traffic in the vernacular of deadening U.S. pop-culture—often leaves the reader with a
lingering sense of isolation rather than community. It might be that because two-thirds of the
stories are parodies or outright hit-jobs of specific authors (e.g. “Girl with Curious Hair” takes
dead aim at Bret Easton Ellis in order to expose him as a writer of lazy, vapid, even harmful
fiction). The nature of these stories is necessarily critical and ironic, but sometimes so much so
that they run the risk of recreating the problem they intend to critique. While pitch-perfect
mimicries, their purpose as imitations is to expose the failures of the texts they parody. As a
consequence, these stories’ ability to connect with readers is necessarily attenuated by their
status as critical takedowns. That most of these stories leave readers feeling lonely or cold also
owes something to the fact that Wallace was still honing his craft. These pieces are, after all,
attempts to push past the postmodern American aesthetic without a clear idea of what such a
fiction might look like.
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But this does not mean that none of the stories succeed. Stylistically, the majority of the
stories are told in the postmodern vernacular of 1980s U.S. pop culture, but they differ from the
empty nihilism of then-popular minimalist writers like Ellis in that characters’ identifications
with and affinities for a particular corporate brand are not meant to stand in as symbolic
representations of their empty inner-selves. Instead, Wallace uses the shared language of pop-
culture and brand advertising to “honor the truth” of readers’ day-to-day existence—to make the
stories feel more real.
5
The remaining three pieces of short fiction (“Lyndon,” “Luckily the
Account Representative Knew CPR,” and “My Appearance”) succeed more than the preceding
six precisely because they aren’t intended as takedowns or parodic exercises of style or form.
The voices in these pieces are stronger, more like Wallace’s distinctive mature voice, the one
that he would eventually grow to fear had become a trope or a parody of itself. And as Wallace’s
own voice gets stronger, it tends to tell a similar kind of story, one closer to a morality tale or a
parable. Unburdened by the negative payload that weighs down stories like “Girl with Curious
Hair,” Wallace’s writing in these last three pieces manages to direct readers’ attention outside the
text itself and escape the form’s trap of self-awareness and hints at what Wallace will do on a
much greater scale in Infinite Jest.
Wallace had originally planned to return to Tucson for at least part of the fall of 1987,
finish up whatever writing and formal program requirements remained, and then graduate in
December—one semester longer than the MFA students usually took to complete the program.
But as the end of the spring term neared, Wallace’s anxiety over how he would earn a living after
5
As when, for example, Wallace locates the action of “Little Expressionless Animals”—a story that takes place on
the set of the TV show JEOPARDY!—in the “Merv Griffin Enterprises building” (6), or when the character “Sick
Puppy” in “Girl with Curious Hair” informs us: “I have the English Leather Cologne commercial taped on my new
Toshiba VCR and I enjoy reclining in my horsehair recliner and masturbating while the commercial plays repeatedly
on my VCR” (55).
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Arizona, the MFA program’s hostility toward his writing goals, and his failure to make any
progress toward them made finishing his MFA in Tucson seem like more of a hindrance than a
duty. Eager to get out of Arizona and on to what might come next, Wallace put himself under
additional pressure as he accelerated his pace in order to finish his MFA by the summer,
eventually deciding to leave Tucson in late spring to move back home to Illinois; Wallace could
mail in any writing still needed to meet his MFA degree-requirements. He had been accepted to
Yaddo, a prestigious writers’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, that offers residencies to
promising authors, for a stay that began in Late July, but beyond that, he had no concrete plans.
When Wallace had first arrived at Arizona as a new MFA student, he brought with him
the relatively moderate habit of smoking pot to help him study he’d developed at Amherst. But
as his time at Arizona wore on, he began to worry about the effects of the increasing levels of
alcohol and drugs he took in an effort to manage his stress and anxiety. In his letters to his old
Amherst friend Corey Washington, Wallace wrote that he “sat around smoking pot in air
conditioning” and “getting high too much” (Max 79, 77). When his fellowship ran out at the
beginning of his second year of the MFA program, Wallace had to get up early to teach
undergraduate courses in addition to his own coursework. He wrote Washington again, saying
that he had started drinking so that he could fall asleep early enough to teach in the mornings
(80). Though initially encouraged by the publication of his first novel, Wallace now worried
about the prospect of having to find a source of reliable income after graduate school. As his
time at Arizona came to a close, wrung out and exhausted by his accelerated schedule, and with
no job prospects, Wallace was experiencing an emotional low that verged on another bout of
full-scale depression. Wallace coped by turning to what had worked before, upping his self-
medicated dosages.
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Overloads and Collapses: Wallace Hits Bottom
After Arizona, Wallace spent the next two years on the move, living in New York,
Massachusetts, Illinois, and Arizona, but his first stop after leaving Tucson to finish his MFA
work from his parents’ house was in Saratoga Springs, New York, for his stay at Yaddo during
the summer of 1987. Over the course of his residency, Wallace ratcheted up his drinking to
compensate for (what must have been) a surprising lack of pot at the writers’ colony. But despite
debilitating hangovers, he was working constantly and making progress on the new project he’d
begun after leaving Tucson that he intended as the closing piece for his upcoming short fiction
collection. That summer, Wallace completed “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,”
recasting Barth’s story “Lost in the Funhouse” as a long piece of cerebral metafiction that was
“as much an attack on the work Wallace had done at Arizona with its mix of postmodern styles
as it is on Barth” (Max 94).
This novella-length story was conceived as a patricidal
6
literary project that would follow
the experimental literary-theoretical trajectory that he began with Broom to metafiction’s logical
and unavoidable conclusion. Fed up with the lack of progress despite all his experiments with
metafictional forms at Arizona, Wallace now intended to conclude Girl with Curious Hair with a
story in which he would overload the inward-bending, self-conscious form to the point of
collapse. But like planning a debauched weekend in Vegas before checking into detox—one last
bender-to-end-all-benders—hindsight revealed the plan as inherently flawed:
My idea in “Westward” was to do with metafiction what Moore’s poetry or like
DeLillo’s Libra had done with other mediated myths. I wanted to get the
Armageddon-explosion, the goal metafiction’s always been about, I wanted to get it
over with, and then out of the rubble reaffirm the idea of art being a living
transaction between humans, whether the transaction was erotic or altruistic or
sadistic. God, even talking about it makes me want to puke. The pretension.
6
Wallace lists the patriarchs he had in mind by name in “Westward”: alongside Barth are the usual metafictional
suspects “Robbe-Grillet and McElroy and Barthelme” (332).
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Twenty-five-year-olds should be locked away and denied ink and paper.
Everything I wanted to do came out in the story, but it came out as just what it was:
crude and naïve and pretentious. (Burn 41)
Wallace knew by “Westward” that he had to find a way to write without letting theory
drive his fiction. And if “Westward” taught Wallace anything, it was that the way to write past
postmodernism could not be achieved by employing still more theory. Once again, Wallace
found himself at an impasse. As with his substance abuse, Wallace had relied on theory so
heavily for so long that he didn’t know how to write without it.
That Wallace was still dependent on theory to the point of publicly defending it is evident
in another piece he published around this time. On June 21st, 1987, The New York Times
published an essay by the literary critic Jacques Barzun that caught Wallace’s eye. Titled “A
Little Matter of Sense,” Barzun’s prescriptive scolding opens with examples of his colleagues’
recent lexical crimes, offers a refresher on the proper use of metaphor, and spends its remaining
column-inches decrying “certain widespread social attitudes” before finally running out of breath
just north of 3,000 words. And along the way, Barzun isn’t shy about naming names: those
responsible belong to the “cult of creativity” a group of “obscure and pompous” critics (but
specifically “structuralists,” “semioticists,” and “deconstructionists”), who mistake themselves
for artists and whose work mistakes “complication for improvement.”
Among the responses elicited by Barzun’s essay, one reply—printed August 2, 1987, and
entitled “Matters of Sense and Opacity”—is signed “David Foster Wallace.” The rejoinder
Wallace sent to the Times takes issue with more than a few of Barzun’s points. Specifically,
regarding the charge of confusing critical for artistic writing, Wallace responds with hair-
splitting lecture:
Literary criticism is itself an artistic endeavor, and will naturally sometimes
sacrifice transparency for creative richness; literary theory, on the other hand, is a
branch of esthetics, which is essentially philosophy, and is often engaged in honest
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efforts at such rarefied heights that things are going to get unavoidably abstract and
technical; literary criticism and theory, by their natures, operate in dialogue with
art, with each other, and with themselves; such a tangle of reference and referents
cannot but lead to some occlusion and prolixity. It’s the price of admission.
In other words, Wallace’s advice to Barzun is that if he can’t keep up with the level of
complexity an analysis of theoretically-informed literature requires, then perhaps he should get
out of the literary-critical kitchen.
Against the charges of hiding behind overspecialized jargon or trafficking in obscurantist
metaphors, the tone of Wallace’s response is well rehearsed and even tempered. This is partly
because Wallace is reprising the same arguments he’d had with his professors and fellow MFA
students at Arizona: that contemporary writers who evaded or ignored critical theory’s insights
about the nature of fiction were not writing serious literature. And this type of fiction
necessitated that critics engage with it on its own “overspecialized” terms. Theoretically-aware
writers, among whose number Wallace certainly counted himself, aimed not to “erect walls of
impenetrability around the very stuff they’re trying to penetrate”; rather, he continues, “Some
might just be trying to come to grips with what they love.” But Wallace can’t seem to resist
getting in at least one jab in closing: “With all his rhetorical power, Mr. Barzun might do well to
write another essay, one for us young readers and readees, one about the value of cool-headed
restraint in critical housecleaning. There’s babies in that bathwater, dude.” Wallace, ever self-
conscious, is especially so in this moment. Given The Broom of the System’s publication that
year, which was still the work Wallace was known for (when he was known at all), Wallace felt
compelled to defend—or perhaps explain—the prevalence of theory in his first novel. But in
Wallace’s response there is a tempering of the anger he had felt in his classroom arguments over
theory at Arizona. Having finished the last piece for Girl with Curious Hair, Wallace is less
anxious about his ability to wield theory.
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His summer fellowship over, Wallace left Yaddo to take a teaching position at Amherst
in the fall of 1987. But the heavy drinking he learned to work with during his productive time at
Yaddo followed him to Amherst. Wallace knew it didn’t augur well. Though he would not take
on an AA sponsor until the summer of 1988—Rich C., who had been in the Arizona MFA
program with him—by September, Wallace knew that he had a “drinking problem,” and he
acknowledged as much in a letter to his friend J. T. Jackson, another former Arizona MFA
student (101). When Mark Costello came to visit him at their alma mater, Wallace confided in
his old roommate that he was suffering from another bout of depression and “worried that pot
smoking had ruined his brain permanently and [that] he would never be able to write [fiction]
again” (103). “Not being able to write” was Wallace’s way of saying that he had not figured out
how to follow up “Westward”; he had reached a formalistic dead end. But the teaching
appointment only lasted a single semester, and after it was over, Wallace would have to pull up
stakes. Before he left Amherst again, Wallace received a request from Steven Moore, then-editor
of the Review of Contemporary Fiction, to “contribute a piece to their ‘Novelist as Critic’ issue,”
in which Wallace was meant to “represent the younger generation” (109). He accepted. Grateful
to have been chosen by Moore as his generation’s “novelist,” Wallace had always held that the
long form of the novel was the true test of a writers ability. Additionally, he thought composing
the essay might give him a place and an occasion to organize his thinking on what kind of fiction
ought to succeed the postmodernists he’d parodied in Girl with Curious Hair and the
metafictional forms he’d followed to their paralytic and unsatisfying conclusions in “Westward.”
Wallace responded to Moore’s request with a long essay titled “Fictional Futures and the
Conspicuously Young.” In it, Wallace grouped and condemned current fiction by
contemporaneous young writers into one of three (rather convenient) categories; either
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“Catatonic Realism” or “Neiman-Marcus Nihilism,” under which Wallace filed young
minimalists like Bret Ellis or Jay McInerney (who then enjoyed a large popular readership) or
the kind of writing that he had rebelled against at Arizona, which he categorized as “Workshop
Hermeticism”—none of which Wallace thought was what young serious writers ought to be
producing.
Wallace had meant for “Fictional Futures,” published in the fall of 1988, to serve as a sort
of gloss for his upcoming collection of stories, Girl with Curious Hair, which was also slated for
release that fall (Max 106). Wallace begins by giving his account of what these “conspicuously
young” writers (including Wallace) have in common, which is “the new and singular
environment in and about which we try to write fiction” (3). This common, singular environment
is a tripartite affair, comprised of the “impacts of television, of academic Creative Writing
Programs, and of a revolution in the way educated people understand the function and possibility
of literary narrative” (3). In Wallace’s lengthy explication, the first two—television and MFA
programs—are something to be lamented; the first indoctrinates passivity and uncritical habits by
serving up a steady diet of the narrative equivalent of junk food without seeming to ask for
anything of value in return. It is a ubiquitous cultural environment, and the collective hours
Americans spend watching it testify to its addictive nature. Worse yet, this focus-group-tested
addictive quality is by design—because television does in fact want something from us. And we
sit, receptive, through its demands thirty seconds at a time because we have been conditioned to
do so by the very advertising agencies who collude with television producers to produce
entertainment that feeds our addictive instinct for consumption. Wallace finally understands the
reality that American television sells viewers as one completely coopted by addictive forces.
Along with the cultural debasement of television, Wallace names “Creative Writing Programs”
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as complicit. If MFA programs mainly produce writers of Realist fiction (of the type Wallace
rebelled against at Arizona), the mimesis of American culture this Realist fiction achieves cannot
but reify television’s harmful, late-capitalist version of reality.
But it is the last item, this “revolution in the way educated people understand the function
and possibility of literary narrative,” that Wallace devotes the most attention to, as he sets it up
as a possible antidote for the cultural decline that the first two, television and graduate fiction
programs, are responsible for. It is this “revolution” that was to serve as the aforementioned
gloss of Girl with Curious Hair’s more theory-heavy stories:
[O]ur generation is lucky enough to have been born into an artistic climate as
stormy and exciting as anything since Pound and Co. turned the world-before-last
on its head. The last few generations of American writers have breathed the
relatively stable air of New Criticism and an Anglo-American aesthetics untainted
by Continental winds. The climate for the “next” generation of American writers—
should we decide to inhale rather than die—is aswirl with what seems like long-
overdue appreciation for the weird achievements of such aliens as Husserl,
Heidegger, Bakhtin, Lacan, Barthes, Poulet, Gadamer, de Man. The demise of
Structuralism has changed a world’s outlook on language, art, and literary
discourse; and the contemporary artist can simply no longer afford to regard the
work of critics or theorists or philosophers—no matter how stratospheric—as
divorced from his own concerns.
Crudely put, the idea that literary language is any kind of neutral medium…or that
it’s any kind of inert tool lying there passively to be well- or ill-used by a
communicator of meaning, has been cast into rich and serious question. With it,
too, the stubborn Romanticist view of fiction as essentially a mirror, distinguished
from the real world it reflects only by its portability and mercilessly “objective”
clarity, has finally taken it on the chin. Form-content distinctions are now flat
planets. Language’s promotion from mirror to eye…is yesterday’s news [and now]
the tide of Post-Structuralism, Marxism, Feminism, Freudianism, Deconstruction,
Semiotics, Hermeneutics, and attendant -isms and -ics moves through the
(“Straight”) U.S. academy and into the consciousness of the conscious American
adult. (13)
In his reference to “Pound and Co.,” whose generation “turned the world-before-last on its
head,” Wallace is attempting his version of Pound’s modernist “make it new” edict. Wallace’s
demands of his contemporaries are essentially the same: stop ignoring the progress of recent
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years by rehashing outmoded literary models and narrative forms. As “Pound & Co.” wrote in
the 20-page manifesto that begins the 1914 issue of BLAST magazine: “DAMN all those to-
day…who crack their whips and tumble in Piccadilly Circus, as though London were still a
provincial town. WE WHISPER IN YOUR EAR A GREAT SECRET. LONDON IS NOT A
PROVINCIAL TOWN” (10). Wallace suggests here that writers who can integrate the lessons of
critical theory will not only push fiction forward, but write fiction which is immune to the type of
co-option he accuses “Catatonic Realism,” “Neiman-Marcus Nihilism, and “Workshop
Hermeticism” of being susceptible to. Wallace still hadn’t shaken his theory habit sufficiently to
understand that recourse to theoretical fiction wasn’t the answer to the darker, addictive parts of
American culture. And at least part of the reason he couldn’t see that was because he was still
addicted to using theory as a crutch for his own fictional shortcomings. Wallace may have
satisfied himself that he’d written to the end of metafiction’s possibilities with “Westward,” but
he still hadn’t figured out how to write without the theory he still considered the distinguishing
characteristic of serious fiction. But he knew that merely holding up a mirror to the problems of
empty materialist tendencies in culture would not itself be sufficient.
His Amherst appointment over, Wallace moved back into his parents’ house in January of
1988. By February, he began attending “weekly sobriety meetings” (Max 116). Trying to get
sober in order to improve his writing had by this point become a recurring theme in Wallace’s
life. He would cycle through periods of heavy drinking or drug use when he struggled to produce
work, followed by productive periods of relative sobriety, eventually relapsing back into heavy
using. Max purposefully avoids naming the program Wallace attended, but I am convinced these
weekly appointments represent Wallace’s first encounters with twelve-step culture, and that
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these sobriety meetings were with a Narcotics Anonymous group
7
. But Wallace was deeply
embarrassed at once again having to depend on “the Mr. and Mrs. Wallace Fund for Aimless
Children,” (Girl) for room and board, and quickly accepted another appointment, this time
teaching undergraduate courses that fall at the University of Arizona. Though the teaching job
didn’t start until August, Wallace decided to move back in May.
A month before he moved back to Tucson, Wallace received more bad news that would
ultimately delay the publication of his short fiction collection for an entire year beyond its
original launch date. Ironically, what stalled Girl with Curious Hair was a problem that arose
when the story that represents the collection’s most pointed criticism of television appeared on
TV. While watching reruns of Letterman, an editor at Playboy—where Wallace’s story “Late
Night”
8
had been accepted for publication—noticed some of the interview dialogue between
Letterman and his guest, Susan Saint James, seemed strangely familiar. Eventually, he tracked
down the source of his déjà vu: the dialogue between the character "Susan” and the fictionalized
version of David Letterman in Wallace’s story. The story takes place in part on the set of Late
Night with David Letterman, and Wallace had lifted some of their “fictional” conversation word-
for-word from an actual episode. Alice Turner, who had bought the story for Playboy, sent
Wallace a letter accusing him of plagiarism. Because it was too late to pull Wallace’s story
before the issue came out, Playboy’s legal department decided to simply hope no one noticed.
No one did—but that didn’t stop the magazine from informing Viking Penguin that publishing
7
My reasoning for this is twofold: Max makes it clear in this section of the biography that, for Wallace, the goal of
these weekly meetings was to quit smoking pot: “He had smoked pot heavily for most of the past decade. Pot had
opened the door for him as a writer. Now he was targeting it in the hopes his life, haunted by anxiety, failed
relationships, and a feeling that he could no longer write well, would improve” (106). But Max’s biography also
confirmed a longstanding rumor—that Wallace was the author of a testimonial by a “former resident” on the website
of a Boston-area halfway facility known as “Granada House”; and that testimonial reveals that its author had been in
Narcotics Anonymous.
8
The story appeared in Girl with Curious Hair under the title “My Appearance.”
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Wallace’s story represented a legal liability. Viking Penguin’s lawyers instructed Wallace’s
editor, Gerry Howard, to ascertain the source of every one of the collection’s characters,
paragraph by paragraph. In the end, the eighteen-page explanatory letter from Wallace to his
editor wasn’t sufficient to allay the publisher’s fear, and Viking Penguin’s legal department
scuttled the collection over fears that it would open them up to charges of violating the “right to
publicity” of Susan Saint James, David Letterman, Alex Trebek, and Pat Sajak—all of whom
appear in Girl with Curious Hair.
When he got to Tucson, he reconnected with his friend Rich C., who in the intervening
years had joined the twelve-step recovery program of Alcoholics Anonymous and was eager to
talk to Wallace about the benefits of sobriety. Already convinced that his drinking or drug use
(or both) was keeping his fiction from progressing, Wallace took Rich C. on as his sponsor and
started attending regular AA meetings in Tucson, where he began working the steps in earnest.
But Tucson AA was particularly hardline
9
, and around August, in the name of being substance-
free, Wallace decided to stop taking the Nardil he had been prescribed since 1985. The semester
started just after Wallace went off his medication, and only a few weeks into the school year,
Wallace had to call his mother to come get him. Back in Urbana, the psychiatrist who had
9
The use of pharmaceuticals, even when prescribed by a licensed physician, remains a controversial one in AA Due
to the independent nature of individual AA chapters, the advice a new member receives varies by location. AA
officially addresses this problem in a pamphlet titled “The AA Member—Medications and Other Drugs”: “We
recognize that alcoholics are not immune to other diseases. Some of us have had to cope with depressions that can
be suicidal; schizophrenia that sometimes requires hospitalization; bipolar disorder, and other mental and biological
illnesses.… Because of the difficulties that many alcoholics have with drugs, some members have taken the position
that no one in AA should take any medication. While this position has undoubtedly prevented relapses for some, it
has meant disaster for others…. AA members and many of their physicians have described situations in which
depressed patients have been told by AAs to throw away the pills, only to have depression return with all its
difficulties, sometimes resulting in suicide.… Unfortunately, by following a layperson’s advice, the sufferers find
that their conditions can return with all their previous intensity. On top of that, they feel guilty because they are
convinced that ‘AA is against pills’…. It becomes clear that just as it is wrong to enable or support any alcoholic to
become re-addicted to any drug, it’s equally wrong to deprive any alcoholic of medication, which can alleviate or
control other disabling physical and/or emotional problems” (6). Readers are then offered member testimonials of
two varieties: AAs who maintain sobriety with the help of pharmaceuticals and those who got off their medications
but are purportedly maintaining sobriety without pharmaceutical aid.
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originally prescribed Nardil put him back on it, but the drug now failed to pull Wallace out of his
depression. Demoralized, Wallace overdosed on the Restoril he’d been given to help him sleep
and, at the hospital he was taken to after his father discovered him, he was put on life support.
Though he recovered quickly from the overdose, his depression had not improved. In the
weeks that followed, Wallace underwent six courses of electroconvulsive therapy in an effort to
shake his depression. The ECT affected his short-term memory, but improved his mood to the
degree that his doctors felt the Nardil prescription alone would be sufficient to keep his
depression at bay. Wallace was also encouraged in November when he received word that his
editor, Gerry Howard, was now working for W. W. Norton and that Norton’s legal department
felt they could publish Girl with Curious Hair with only minor alterations. Wallace signed off on
the transfer of the collection from Viking to Norton, and in December, approved a short list of
changes that Norton’s lawyers required before they would greenlight Girl with Curious Hair for
publication.
As Wallace’s health returned, so did the guilt over being dependent on his parents, who
he felt he owed for the medical expenses they had covered when his insurance ran out during his
treatment. Wallace turned to a familiar solution: he applied to graduate school again, this time to
the philosophy PhD programs at Harvard, Princeton, and the University of Pittsburgh. Though all
three sent back acceptance letters and aid packages, Wallace chose Harvard for its prestige—
which would no doubt please his father—and for Harvard’s proximity to Mark Costello. By
April of 1989, Wallace had moved into an apartment with his old roommate in Somerville,
Massachusetts.
Over the summer that followed, Wallace started several projects: the only one he
completed was a book on hip hop that he and Costello co-authored and eventually published as
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Signifying Rappers. But without his roommate to keep his own projects on schedule, Wallace
had trouble finishing the other nonfiction pieces and book reviews he had taken on as a way to
supplement his income. One of these reviews, eventually published a year later in the summer
1990 issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction, was of David Markson’s novel
Wittgenstein’s Mistress—a book that had a profound impact on Wallace. But though he took the
novel and a copy of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus along with him for his stay at Yaddo in July,
Wallace wasn’t able to finish it. Some of the difficulty finishing the work at Yaddo that summer
was due to Wallace’s increasingly excessive drinking and drug use. Wallace brought pot with
him, and when it ran out, Kathe Burkhart—an artist Wallace met at the retreat—flew to New
York to get more. During this trip to Yaddo, Wallace went to visit his father’s family in nearby
Troy, where he drank “most of a bottle of Glenlivet and threw up in his sleep.” (127). His
appetites didn’t abate when he got home, and Wallace and Costello’s apartment in the weeks
leading up to the fall semester at Harvard was a bacchanal of partying, injuries, unpaid bills, and
three-A.M. phone calls (128). Wallace had reached peak substance abuse by the time his first
semester at Harvard commenced, and the review for Wittgenstein’s Mistress, along with several
other projects he’d taken on that summer, remained unfinished. Wallace’s level of substance
abuse had finally grown to a level that his natural ability was unable to overcome. Though he
didn’t yet recognize it, this was a disastrous state of affairs for Wallace’s mental health. In
addition to his continued frustration over the lack of progress in his fiction and the uncertainty
that he would ever discover a way forward, Wallace’s longstanding coping mechanisms were not
only no longer helping him get his writing done but rather making it impossible to write
meaningfully at all.
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Between the brutal course load Wallace signed up for, struggling to finish the freelance
projects he had started that summer, and the full-bore spiraling of his drug and alcohol habits,
Wallace broke down again toward the end of October, having lasted a little over a month in his
new graduate program. He developed the shakes, and the depression he recognized from the
previous year was back. Once again in crisis, he hit on a creative solution: to avoid getting
kicked out of school, Wallace informed Harvard’s Health Services that he was having suicidal
ideations, which left the school no choice but to put him on suicide watch at MacLean hospital, a
facility affiliated with the school.
By the end of October 1989, David Foster Wallace found out what hitting bottom looked
like for him: “a pink room, with no furniture and a drain in the center of the floor. Which is
where they put me for an entire day when they thought I was going to kill myself. Where you
don’t have anything on, and somebody’s observing you through a slot in the wall” (Lipsky 296).
But this bottoming out, for Wallace, may have saved his life. Max elaborates: “The four weeks
Wallace spent at McLean in November 1989 changed his life. This was not his first or most
serious crisis, but he felt now as if he had hit a new bottom or a different kind of bottom” (Max
135). After suicide watch at MacLean, Wallace was placed in a facility called Appleton House—
a communal, supervised facility “where the addicts went, with a large room for substance abuse
recovery meetings” (135). The staff did not mince words and forced Wallace to countenance the
uncomfortable truth that “he was a hard-core alcohol and drug user and that if he didn’t stop
abusing both he would be dead by thirty” (135). The experience was finally sufficient to shake
Wallace up enough to get serious about his sobriety, and in typical overachiever fashion, he not
only went to the daily meetings that residents were required to attend, he also asked for several
private sessions with a therapist over the month he lived at Appleton.
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After his four weeks of detox were up, Wallace could have opted to leave institutional
recovery system altogether. But newly, sober, Wallace decided he wasn’t ready and transferred
himself to the Granada House facility—a halfway house he would later fictionalize in Infinite
Jest. Throughout Wallace’s life, “Order, no matter how foreign the context, was always easier
for him that the unstructured world” (139), and it appears that as Wallace tried to pull out of the
spiral, his need for order was greater now than ever. The seven months that he spent at Granada
house, Wallace went to daily recovery meetings. Despite prioritizing his sobriety over everything
else in his life, it was not a wholly unproductive time in terms of writing. In one month, Wallace
managed to finish the review of Markson’s novel in time for publication in the summer 1990
issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction. His project with Costello, Signifying Rappers, was
published a few months later in November. After Granada house, Wallace moved into the “sober
house”—the final stage of the recovery program. Wallace stayed in this transitional house from
June of 1990 until September of 1991. During this time
10
he gave what would become his most
widely-cited interview with Larry McCaffery for The Review of Contemporary Fiction. The
topics Wallace and McCaffery covered in that lengthy conversation ranged from what made for
good fiction, to the role of theory, to Wallace’s own writing goals (“any novel that isn’t of the
theory/philosophy-inflected type doesn’t set up the sort of expectation serious 1990s fiction
ought to be setting up in readers” (138). When McCaffery asks Wallace about the function of
theory in realist fiction, the evolution in Wallace’s thought on the subject since his first novel is
evident. While Wallace was still insistent that serious contemporary fiction had to concern itself
with theory, he now felt that theory’s use had to be somehow constrained. The single most
important criterion for the use of theory in fictional narratives, Wallace told McCaffery, was that
10
April 1991 (Max 155)
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it not be deployed simply for its own sake—or rather, for the sake of impressing the reader alone.
The other condition Wallace gave for theoretically-aware fiction is that without it, the narrative
style necessarily reverts to “big-R Realism,” which after the theoretical turn, is a regressive and
dishonest move, and one that—more importantly—reifies the type of value system proffered by
television and driven by advertising concerns: that above all, difficulty is to be avoided because
it will drive ad revenues down when the audience becomes uncomfortable. Or in Wallace’s
words: “I'm not much interested in trying for classical, big-R Realism, not because there hasn't
been great U.S. Realist Fiction that'll be read and enjoyed forever, but because the big R' s form
has now been absorbed and suborned by commercial entertainment. The classical Realist form is
soothing, familiar and anesthetic; it drops us right into spectation” (McCaffery 138).
That Wallace’s positions on such fundamental issues remained virtually unchanged for
the rest of his life is a testament to how solid he already was in his sobriety. But even his time at
the sober house ended, Wallace was still anxious about enforcing the structure required to stay
sober outside the recovery system. The apartment he moved into after the sober house was one
he shared with another recovering addict, and recovery staff had a hand in setting the pair up in
their new space.
Wallace knew he owed his return to writing—in fact owed his continued existence—to
the experience of hitting bottom and his continued involvement with twelve-step recovery
programs. It was hitting bottom that forced him to accept that his intellect had not been sufficient
to save him. Humbled and receptive in a way he had never been, it was in recovery that Wallace
read and recognized in David Markson’s novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress what he had failed to do
in his first novel, The Broom of the System.
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Thinking Out Loud: Wallace’s Inter-Novel Criticism as a Progression Toward His Mature
Fictional Ethic
In the early stages of his 12-step recovery, the vulnerable Wallace found the prospect of
writing fiction too daunting to even attempt. His mind was in a fog, and he was being forced to
reconsider every choice he had made that led to his current state of affairs. But as time passed,
Wallace decided to try writing literary criticism to see if it wouldn’t lead him eventually back to
fiction. During this nascent period of sobriety, Wallace’s appraisal of his contemporaries’ fiction
—what he likes and doesn’t in terms of style, voice, and theoretical methods—can be read as a
record of how Wallace arrived at his mature writing ethic and its sublimation of theory to
emotional concerns and a desire for connection with readers. By reading for those things that
Wallace alternately praises or condemns in these literary-critical essays, especially in his review
of David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress, it becomes clear that Wallace is assembling two
punch lists—things he must do, and things he must not do—in his fiction’s use of theory going
forward.
As is well documented, Wallace saw his fiction as clearly situated in the lineage of
American letters. In his interviews and essays, Wallace is no less confident about his status as a
literary and cultural critic, composing in 1993 a now-exhaustively-cited, manifesto-grade call for
a generation of “new literary rebels” who would “eschew self-consciousness and fatigue,”
characteristics he saw as inherited by his generation from their immediate literary forbears (“E
Unibus” 193).
The earliest and longest of Wallace’s inter-novel critical analyses took nearly eight
months and several hundred pages of discarded drafts to complete. Its subject was a novel by
David Markson, a postmodern American writer famous for his experimental novels that
commonly feature “plots” comprised of a series of dense, nonlinear, and seemingly-unconnected
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allusions. The title of Markson’s novel, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, would have attracted Wallace
with its reference to Ludwig Wittgenstein—the philosopher Wallace had first encountered in his
philosophy courses and whose ideas he would reference constantly in The Broom of the System.
Despite (or because of) the difficulties it presented, the process of writing the essay was
extremely beneficial for Wallace. During its composition, a “new clarity was beginning to
emerge in his attempt to wrest such central concerns as self-consciousness and loneliness into
controllable form. The prose style that would later separate Wallace’s nonfiction writing from
that of his peers” began to take shape (Max 142).
Wallace begins his review of Wittgenstein’s Mistress, published in the summer 1990
issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction, by highlighting its status as philosophical novel:
Certain novels not only cry out for critical interpretations but actually try to direct
them[.] Frequently, too, those novels that direct their own critical reading concern
themselves thematically with what we might consider highbrow or intellectual
issues—stuff proper to art, engineering, antique lit., philosophy, etc. These novels
carve out for themselves an interstice between flat-out fiction and a sort of weird
cerebral roman à clef. (218)
But in the very next sentence, Wallace abruptly shifts gears mid-paragraph, and without naming
it, offers up Broom up as a failed example of this kind of philosophical novel:
When they fail, as my own first long thing did, they’re pretty dreadful. But when
they succeed, as I claim David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress does, they serve
the vital & vanishing function of reminding us of fiction’s limitless possibilities for
reach & grasp, for making heads throb heartlike, & for sanctifying the marriages of
cerebration & emotion, abstraction & lived life, transcendent truth-seeking & daily
schlepping, marriages that in our happy epoch of technical occlusion &
entertainment marketing seem increasing consummatable only in the imagination[.]
(218)
This passage’s first sentence contains a careful bit of rhetorical sleight-of-hand: despite its self-
deprecation, it categorizes The Broom of the System as belonging to the same general
philosophical novel category as Wittgenstein’s Mistress. But this sentence, in likening Broom to
Markson’s novel, has an extended function, one that ranges over the body of the essay: if these
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novels are basically comparable in type, then the characteristics of Markson’s novel—narrative,
formal, metafictional, philosophical, etc.—that Wallace praises are (obviously) things that he
thinks this sort of novel should do well. And by extension, since his novel of this type is set up as
a failed version of Markson’s, those things are (maybe not as obviously) things that Wallace saw
Broom as failing to do. As a writing teacher, Wallace was obsessively mindful of the amount of
readerly attention his writing demanded and paid careful attention to his own syntax.
11
This is
true even more so in his critical writing. So if Wallace has only written one novel, what is the
word “first” doing in the sentence “When they fail, as my own first long thing did, they’re pretty
dreadful”? That Wallace doesn’t strike it at some point during the revision process seems to
signal Wallace’s plans for his second novel.
I dwell on this detail because it has import for the rest of the Markson essay; specifically,
if Wallace intends to write another novel of this kind, another “weird cerebral roman à clef” (as
one could reasonably expect him to do, given what he said about “serious” novels necessarily
being “theory-philosophy-inflected”), anything that Wallace praises or condemns about
Markson’s novel can necessarily serve as a kind of punch list for his next novelistic attempt.
Bearing that in mind, one can assemble a sort of “to-do list” (or “to-don’t”) for Wallace’s
own writing from this point forward based on his assessment of Markson’s novel. The first item
on this list I’d like to examine is on its next page:
Wittgenstein’s Mistress, w/r/t its eponymous master, does more than just quote
Wittgenstein in weird ways, or allude to his work, or attempt to be some sort of
dramatization of the intellectual problems that occupied and oppressed him.
Markson’s book renders, imaginatively & concretely, the very bleak mathematical
world [of] Wittgenstein’s Tractatus…. The novel quickens W’s early work, gives it
a face, for the reader, that the philosophy does not & cannot convey…. His
11
Evidence for this claim is readily available by way of his comments on his own students’ papers and the markup
of his own draft materials available online and at the Ransom Center.
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mistress, though, asks the question her master in print does not: What if somebody
really had to live in a Tractatusized world? (219)
Here, Wallace has no reason for disparaging Markson’s novel for “quoting Wittgenstein in weird
ways,” or simply “allud[ing] to his work” because he goes right on to praise Markson’s novel for
the fact that it doesn’t do those things. Wallace’s focus is not on Markson’s prose here but rather
on his own. It is Wallace’s book, not Markson’s, that “just quote[s] Wittgenstein in weird ways”
in Wallace’s facile tendency in his first novel to simply have his characters digress at length on
the philosophers ideas, and turning them into mere ventriloquists for Wittgenstein himself. Later
in the essay, this is confirmed by the familiarity of an unlikely phrase; Wallace says that
Markson imbues the abstract world of philosophy with emotional consequences, that the novel is
not simply “written ‘in the margins of’ the Tractatus in the way Candide marginalizes The
Monadology” (223). The phrase “written in the margins” directs us to another text that Wallace
had published around the time he was working on the Markson essay. That text is Wallace’s
collection Girl with Curious Hair, which was published after much legal wrangling, and which
collection’s title page includes this phrasing: “Parts of ‘Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its
Way” are written in the margins of John Barth’s ‘Lost in the Funhouse.’” Clearly, this is
Wallace’s self-inflicted penance, his public flagellation over his own failings in Broom and
“Westward.”
In the introduction to Wallace’s recently-published Amherst philosophy thesis, James
Ryerson comments how Wallace saw Wittgenstein’s Mistress with regard to his own work,
writing that “Wallace felt that Markson’s novel had succeeded in uniting literature and
philosophy in the way that he, in Broom, tried but failed to do” (27). And while Ryerson doesn’t
adduce “The Empty Plenum” as evidence for these claims, his argument is certainly supported
by Wallace’s essay:
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I don’t mean to suggest that Markson’s achievement here consists just in making
abstract philosophy ‘accessible’ to an extramural reader, or that WM is in itself
simple…. Rather, for me, the novel does artistic & emotional justice to the politico-
ethical implications of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s abstract mathematical metaphysics,
makes what is designed to be a mechanism pulse, breathe, suffer, live, etc…. That
is, Markson’s WM succeeds [in] communicating the consequences, for persons, of
the practice of theory; the difference, say, between espousing ‘solipsism’ as a
metaphysical ‘position’ & waking up one fine morning after a personal loss to find
your grief apocalyptic, literally millennial, leaving you the last and only living
thing on earth, with only your head, now, for not only company but environment &
world, an inclined beach sliding toward a dreadful sea. (217-221)
As Wallace learned from Blue Velvet, the most important resonances that art has with its
audience are not intellectual but emotional. But for Wallace, what Markson has succeeded in
doing with Wittgenstein’s Mistress is a perfect marriage: it brings out the underlying emotional
resonance in the intellectual content of Wittgenstein’s philosophy by creating a fictional world in
which characters live according to the systems laid out by his writing—a writing in which there
is almost no emotion at all.
Furthermore, any fiction that aims merely at “making abstract philosophy ‘accessible’”
just to save the reader some work doesn’t make Wallace’s punch list for his own fiction going
forward, which is a sentiment that he reinforces in a later interview when he says that good
fiction facilitates communication between the reader’s consciousness and the writer’s, and “that
in order for it to be anything like a real full human relationship, she’s going to have to put in her
share of the linguistic work” (Burn 34). The importance of routine that recovery had instilled in
him had proven to Wallace that there is inherent value in doing the hard work himself. Here,
Wallace is clearly breaking with his motivations for writing Broom—the conspicuously clever
displays of intellect and humor Wallace composed out of a need to impress and be liked by his
readers.
Conversely, one of the things Wallace repeatedly comes back to in the essay is
Markson’s skillful marriage of form and content. Over the course of the review, Wallace more
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than once calls attention to Markson’s “formal ingenuity” (220), and one of the more interesting
ways Markson’s novel combines form and function is by way of the “messages” that appear in
its opening and closing sentences, messages which, though both diegetically “written” by the
narrator, operate quite differently: “The start of WM has Kate painting messages on empty roads:
‘Somebody is living in the Louvre,’ etc. The messages are for anyone who might come along to
see. ‘Nobody came, of course. Eventually I stopped leaving the messages.’ [Markson’s] novel
[ends] with the use, not the mention, of such a message: ‘Somebody is living on this beach’”
(221). This distinction between “use” and “mention” is one that Wallace carried over from his
study of philosophy, and his nod to Frege (the author of the use-mention distinction and who
shows up in Infinite Jest) in an earlier footnote (221 fn. 6) calls attention to the distinction as
such: “to mention a word or phrase is to speak about it, w/ at least implicit quotation marks: eg
‘Kate’ is a four-letter name; to use a word or phrase is to mention its referent: eg Kate is, by
default, the main character of Wittgenstein’s Mistress” (221). By pointing this out, Wallace
signals which side of the use/mention distinction he now comes down on—that of use—and in
doing, condemns Broom for merely mentioning the theoretical concepts that Markson’s novel
puts to formal narrative use. But beyond the pedantic explanation of Frege’s use/mention
distinction, Wallace is doing something else: he is crediting Markson with having successfully
brought to life not only Frege’s philosophy, but Wittgenstein’s philosophy that he had failed to
do in Broom, despite pages of glib dialogue on “meaning vs. use.” It seems worth mentioning
that in a meaning-as-use paradigm, the fact that various forms of the word “use” are central to
the institutional vocabulary of addiction: drug addicts are called “users,” drug-taking is referred
to as “using” or “ab-using.” It collapses a human identity and experience to a single point in
which a “user” is a subject who has become interchangeable with the substance she uses.
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For Wallace, the degree to which Markson had seamlessly married form and function was
nothing short of revelatory. It was a consummate specimen of the idea novel Wallace attempted
with Broom, and what made its perfection so excruciating was the way it exposes precisely the
places where Broom’s attempts to deal with the problem of solipsism fell short. Markson’s
achievement was Wallace’s literary equivalent of “hitting bottom.” Wittgenstein’s Mistress
achieves something magical; it is like a machine ideally suited to the task it performs; it is the
apogee of efficiency, and the effect of this efficiency on the reader is one of connection, of
sincere and authentic and emotional resonance and the surety in the reader’s mind that she
inhabits the mind of the text’s characters in a real way. This is the precondition for “meaningful”
literature—what Wallace calls “good fiction” or “serious art”—for the force of a character’s
narrative epiphany to resonate in the reader’s mind, to have it carry over into her actual life and
thereby communicate that force in a meaningful way—in other words, to do nothing short of
solving the paradox of solipsism or radical skepticism by confirming the existence of both the
writer and the reader.
In one particular section of his review, Wallace turns curiously confessional when
discussing the novel’s narrator, Kate, and her apparent need to sit typing out the novel, even
though she may be the last person left on earth. Wallace writes that he understands this
compulsion (one he supposes is shared by all writers who say simply that they “must write”)
because it satisfies an “ontological” need: “people who write…do [so] as a as a mode of
communication. It’s what critics like Laing call ‘ontological insecurity’—why we sign our stuff,
impose it on friends, mail it out in brown manila trying to get it printed.” It’s a strange turn of
phrase: “ontological insecurity”—the fear that one somehow does not really exist. That Wallace
expresses this fear in the vernacular of his philosophy training links it to another ontological
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problem: that of solipsism. Ontological insecurity,” conceived this way, is a kind of paranoid
solipsism in extremis. It is solipsism compounded by the realization of solipsism’s equally
logical counterpart: On the one hand, if no direct knowledge of other minds is possible and all
one can know with certainty is her own thoughts, nothing outside one’s own head can be
guaranteed to exist. But, on the on the other hand, this logic permits one alternate ontological
possibility: if our sensory experience of the world—the objects of which lie outside our own
thought—is real, one must entertain the notion that our notion of self—the self that our thought
alone makes coherent —is in fact what cannot be known. Feeling ontologically insecure is to
entertain as real the possibility of a nonexistent self. Wallace characterizes the acts of writing,
submitting his work, and publishing as a defense against this innate fear because they serve as
acts of communication with the reader that affirm both writer and reader exist (Max 144).
Writing and publishing in order to confirm one’s own existence is the recovering theory-addict’s
version of staying clean.
Wallace writes that at the end of the day, “Actually, what are finally at stake here [in
making the consequences of philosophy resonate through fiction] seem to be issues of ethics, of
guilt & responsibility…a logically atomistic metaphysics admits exactly nothing of ethics or
moral value or questions about what it is to be human” (228). Of Wittgenstein’s two books, only
the Tractatus—his first—is a work of “logically atomistic metaphysics.” By endorsing the
Tractatus by way of its ending, The Broom of the System is likewise incapable of admitting
“nothing of ethics or moral value or questions about what it is to be human” (228). Wallace
seems to signal his intent here, in condemning Broom, that his next novelistic project won’t
make the same mistake.
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In another critical essay from this inter-novel period that extends the ideas Wallace had
developed in the Markson essay, Wallace reviews H. L. Hix’s Morte d’Author: An Autopsy.
12
As
with Markson in “The Empty Plenum,” what is praised or condemned in Hix’s work can be read
as updates to Wallace’s own punch lists of what he will or won’t do form- and theory-wise in his
own writing going forward. As Hix’s title indicates, his book is a sort of postmortem roundup of
the disciplinary conversation kicked off by Roland Barthes’s 1967 essay “La mort de l'auteur.”
Wallace opens the review with a four-and-a-half line
13
rip-snorter of a sentence that describes
how such a conversation got started in the first place: “In the 1960s the poststructuralist
metacritics came along and turned literary aesthetics on its head by rejecting assumptions their
teachers had held as self-evident and making the whole business of interpreting texts way more
complicated by fusing theories of creative discourse with hardcore positions in metaphysics” (2).
Over the two remaining pages, he satisfies the book-review genre’s required criteria, but before
turning to a discussion of Hix’s book, Wallace makes a detour, contextualizing Hix’s subject,
and framing the extant/extinct author debate as really a fight over where the “meaning” of a text
originates—if texts can be said to mean at all. Tracing the concept of authorship back to
Hobbes’s Leviathan, Wallace identifies two requisite characteristics of the author figure: first,
authors “accept responsibility for a text, and, second, own that text, viz., retain the right to
determine its meaning” (2). Wallace goes on to detail not only Barthes’s arguments against these
two characteristics as belonging properly and only to the domain of the author, but also the
historical progression of literary-critical schools of thought that led up to Barthes’s well-
publicized death notice.
12
Harvard Book Review, No. 19/20 (Winter - Spring, 1991), pp. 2-3
13
(in the original pagination)
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Wallace characterizes Hix’s critical method as both “sensible and fun to watch” (3).
Sensible because it combines “a Derridean metaphysics that rejects assumptions of unified causal
presence” coupled with a “Wittgensteinian analytic method of treating actual habits of discourse
as a touchstone for figuring out what certain terms really mean and do” (3). And fun to watch
because “one of the wickedly fun things about following literary theory in the 1990s
is…watching young critics/philosophers now come along and attack their poststructuralist
teachers by criticizing assumptions those teachers have held as self-evident” (2).
Hix’s first order of business, then, is looking at the way the meaning of “author” varies
by critic and by context, and here again, Wallace is flagellating himself publically by
acknowledging in the work of another author the method he should have used in his first novel
instead of only making mention of it.
So with which side does Wallace cast his lot with regard to the deconstructors and
poststructuralists? He seems to want to have it both ways throughout the article, both faithfully
rehearsing their arguments without feeling the need to rebut them, but also seeming to betray
himself in the schadenfreude-dripping references to the “wicked fun” of watching Hix “subvert”
or “overturn” poststructuralists using moves straight out of Derrida’s playbook. The title of
Wallace’s review offers careful readers a hint as to Wallace’s real alliances: regarding Barthes’s
“Death of the Author,” Wallace’s essay makes eponymous reference to a Mark Twain quotation,
“reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”—indicating that he’s in on the joke and shares
Twain’s understanding that as authors they are most certainly “alive.” (Though it should be
noted that this title didn’t appear in the original organ of publication, the Harvard Review.)
Wallace’s final sentence leaves no doubt about which side of the debate he’s on. But
perhaps more importantly, it also signals that Wallace is beginning to consider other thinkers’
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stances on issues of value matter more than their positions on theoretical concerns: “As William
(anti-death) Gass observes in Habitations of the Word, critics can try to erase or over-define the
author into anonymity for all sorts of technical, political, and philosophical reasons, and ‘this
“anonymity” may mean many things, but one thing which it cannot mean is that no one did it’”
(3).
Because Wallace suffered from the “ontological insecurity” he described in his review of
Wittgenstein’s Mistress, the fear that he somehow doesn’t exist—and because the most effective
way that Wallace has found to assuage that fear is through writing and publishing his work, it’s
pretty easy to understand why he rankled at any pronouncement of authorial demise. Already, by
the end of 1991, post-Broom Wallace is on record as having revised his basic understanding of
how good fiction operates, moving away from an apathetic appraisal of the reader. Wallace’s
rhetoric gets a bit thick here, but this is the way he characterizes his thoughts on good fiction’s
basic machinery: “For those of us civilians who know in our gut that writing is an act of
communication between one human being and another, the whole questions seems sort of
arcane” (3). In this closing, Wallace once again affirms his commitment to sublimating
intellectual or theoretical concerns in favor of cultivating a connection with readers that feels
gut-level real and has the capacity to open lines of communication between writer and audience.
There can be little doubt that Wallace’s own “Wittgensteinian method” operates in the
ways he describes Hix’s as working, and when Wallace turns this analytical method on the
word/concept of “addiction,” he extends it out from himself while also complicating the usual
received meaning of it. Wallace sees the conditions of American consumer culture as symptoms
of addiction. And Wallace sees addiction as a spiritual disease—a manifestation of our desire to
find something worthy of giving ourselves away to. That we seem to choose the least
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redemptive, empty, or dangerous objects of worship like entertainment, our “watchability,” or
drugs exhibits the addict’s decision-making process, favoring the easy or pleasurable over the
difficult or unpleasant.
Toward Infinite Jest
By the time Wallace published “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” in the
summer 1993 issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction, one of the final critical pieces from
his inter-novel period (and the last that I examine in Chapter 3), Wallace had been sober for
almost four years, and his recovery-inspired ethic was on display in its full, mature form. In the
essay’s closing section, the unironic attitude cultivated by twelve-step programs—one that he
initially dismissed out of hand as too clichéd or simplistic to be useful—is plainly visible.
Wallace took to heart AA’s warnings about what the mind was capable of rationalizing when left
to its own devices, and had internalized the 12-step cliché that warns against his natural tendency
toward abstract intellectualizing: “my best thinking got me here.”
Revising his thesis from “Fictional Futures”—that the theoretical inflection of his
generation’s fiction was defensible because it avoided Realism’s reification of addictive
American culture—Wallace abandons any notion of a fiction driven by theory as redemptive and
instead calls for writers “who dare to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall
actually to endorse single-entendre values. Who treat old untrendy human troubles and emotions
in U.S. life with reverence and conviction” (192-193).
Wallace’s realization that theory had failed him in a fundamental sense is analogous to
the experience of “hitting bottom” in the substance addiction narrative. It is this bottoming out
that finally forces the addict to consider that her coping mechanisms are insufficient to sustain
her, that her understanding of reality and how to move within it is incommensurate with the facts
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of lived experience. Wallace wrote to Franzen shortly after he arrived at Granada house about
what getting sober has done to his writing:
[R]ight now I’m a pathetic and very confused young man, a failed writer at 28, who
is so jealous, so sickly searingly envious of you and Vollmann and Mark Leyner
and even David Fuckwad Leavitt and any young man who is right now producing
pages with which he can live and even approving them off some base-clause of
conviction about the enterprise’s meaning and end that I consider suicide a
reasonable—if not at this point a desirable—option with respect to the whole
wretched problem. (Max 143)
He reluctantly acknowledged that he might suffer from “a basically vapid urge to be avant-garde
and poststructural and linguistically callisthenic—this is why I get very spiny when I think
someone’s suggesting this may be my root motive and character; because I’m afraid it might be”
(Max 145). It’s not so much that theory failed Wallace, but that Wallace’s abuse of theory failed
his fiction. Wallace had to find a new motivation to write fiction; writing avant-garde fiction in
order to be regarded as an avant-garde fiction was no longer sufficient to sustain Wallace’s
writing.
Wallace’s mature writing couldn’t have happened without substituting the goal of
communicating with the reader for the “vapid urge to be avant-garde and poststructural,” a goal
that wouldn’t have occurred to Wallace before his newly accomplished sobriety (145). Wallace’s
rejection of theory-forward fiction is a bit more complex than his simply going cold theoretical
turkey. At the end of the day, recovering from theory didn’t mean that Wallace maintained a
prohibition against any and all ideas from outside thinkers in his fiction; to write for the reader
while enforcing such a rule would obviously prove impossible. Rather Wallace’s theory recovery
meant that any outside ideas he incorporated into his fiction had to serve the already preexisting
ends of that fiction.
In the nascent sobriety that his participation in 12-step recovery programs afforded,
David Foster Wallace realized and began to confront the difficult parts of both his writing and
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his personal life that he’d been dodging. This kind of “clarity” is precisely what most addicts
desperately try to avoid through substance abuse; the goal is oblivion, not awareness. But as he
sobered up, Wallace made explicit connections between his excessive use of and dependence on
drugs and alcohol and his writing difficulties. And to a degree, he was right: He couldn’t
progress past theory-centric writing until he got sober—and even then he could progress only
with great difficulty until he had accumulated enough sober time and the “fog of sobriety”
14
had
lifted.
As it did, Wallace started to emerge from this difficult but necessary liminal period of
personal transition, and almost immediately things begin to break Wallace’s way. Except for a
two-week period in November of 1991, David Foster Wallace would stay sober and out of
medical institutions until November of 2007, when he again decided his medication was holding
his writing back. But for now, Wallace’s recovery stuck, and in the two years that followed,
Wallace started writing fiction again. By April of 1992, he had sent 250 pages of draft materials
for his next novel, Infinite Jest, to Bonnie Nadell. Michael Pietsch at Little, Brown offered
$80,000 for Wallace’s new project the next month. Wallace travelled to Illinois to interview for a
position in the Illinois State English Department in February of 1993. By July, David Foster
Wallace found himself unpacking his things in Bloomington-Normal, Illinois, the most recent
tenure-track hire of ISU.
Clear-eyed, resolutely sober, and disabused of the value of cleverness and theory for their
own sake, in his second novel, Wallace would “use” those theories that he only “mentioned” in
his first, responding to the challenge confronting any writer brazen enough to attempt “serious”
literature after postmodernism. By Infinite Jest, Wallace had developed a writing ethic that is
14
This phrasing is from a letter David Markson wrote to Wallace, who at the time was recently sober and living at
Granada House.
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something like a pragmatic amalgam of Wittgenstein and AA’s notions of meaning-as-use. His
personal experiences of addiction and recovery having changed what he lets himself get away
with in his fiction, theory- and form-wise, Wallace’s mature work legitimizes its theory through
use.
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CHAPTER 4
BIG BOOKS: INFINITE JEST AND THE LITERATURE OF RECOVERY
There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we
denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or
curse. It is precisely as being solemn experiences that I wish to interest you in religious
experiences. … The divine shall mean for us only such a primal reality as the individual
feels impelled to respond to solemnly and gravely, and neither by a curse nor a jest.
—William James
The Varieties of Religious Experience
But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious
you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving
and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness,
and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice
for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real
freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness.
—David Foster Wallace
This Is Water
The “Normal Wallace”
Chapter 4 corresponds with the final stage of the substance- and theory-addict’s
narratives, focuses on Wallace’s life and writing in active recovery during his time in
Bloomington-Normal, IL. Chapter 4’s central claim is that after entering recovery, Wallace’s use
of theory moved beyond didactic narrative digressions into others’ thinking in favor of deep
fictional meditations on the psychic and material consequences of theory’s praxis for flesh-and-
blood human beings. In it, I cast Wallace’s second novel, Infinite Jest, as a sobriety-inflected
revision of his first, The Broom of the System. At 1,100 pages, Wallace’s last novel is comprised
of three carefully interwoven plotlines and populated by hundreds of characters. But it is first and
foremost Wallace’s attempt to produce a novel equal to the task of capturing the unease he felt
was a symptom of a contemporary American culture that made poor choices, gave itself away to
the wrong things, and was uniquely obsessed with entertaining itself over all else, content to be
distracted even to the point of its own demise. Ultimately, the novel suggests that making
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difficult choices—especially those that involve choosing pain over pleasure—may be too
demanding for a culture where being interesting to look at represents the apogee of human value.
By the time he moved back to Illinois, David Foster Wallace was three and a half years
sober. In July of 1993, Wallace moved into a house he’d rented from a member of the ISU search
committee, bringing the unfinished drafts of Infinite Jest
1
with him. His worldview had changed
dramatically since he’d hit bottom in late 1989, not only with regard to his attitude toward his
ability to manage his substance abuse alone, but in terms of how he approached his fiction. He
had, Max writes, “no tolerance for the person he was and gave no quarter to writers whom he
thought were like the writer he used to be” (178). The Wallace who was now the newest member
of the English faculty at Illinois was one who had begun applying the lessons he’d learned in
recovery to his fiction; lessons that came codified in clichés like “it works if you work it” or “one
day at a time.” Wallace no longer wrote in all-night jags, working in fits and starts. Working on
such a long project, Wallace embraced the comparatively unglamorous work of grinding out
pages on a slower schedule, knowing that working at a measured, steady pace was the only
sustainable way he could finish his latest undertaking. And his new approach had been paying
off: by the time he arrived in Bloomington, Wallace had already completed “nearly three
quarters” of his next novel (Max 183).
One of Wallace’s first priorities after moving to Bloomington was to find a new recovery
group—not just to find a new sponsor for himself, but to sponsor other addicts as well. Max
describes a Wallace who was deeply committed to helping others maintain their sobriety: “He
was always available to help other members with both spiritual and practical questions, rewriting
1
It is difficult to date the genesis Infinite Jest. When asked in 2002 when he began writing it, Wallace responded
that he had started the project “several times. ’86, ’88, ’89. None of it worked or was alive. And then in ’91-’92 all
of a sudden it did” (qtd. in Max 318, note 15).
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their job applications or professional correspondence” (179). Ever the overachiever, Wallace
often attended additional recovery meetings and sponsored addicts at the Lighthouse Institute, a
recovery facility where court-ordered addicts were sent (179-180).
However, the newly-transplanted Wallace was having difficulty regaining his writing
momentum. Having spent days “staring at the ceiling” in his new house unable to resume work
on his project, Wallace even “asked a friend…to call him every night to make sure he had
written, hoping that guilt would spur him to productivity,” but even that plan hadn’t worked.
(183). What got Wallace moving again on Infinite Jest, Max writes, was to draw on “the patience
and endurance he had learned in recovery” (184). And what Wallace had learned was that there
was no easy way out—no magic bullet or hidden secret to writing: he simply had to put in the
work. Or perhaps a better way to explain this change in Wallace’s ethic and methods is that his
lack of understanding about how recovery worked was what helped him. For someone who’d
had such success analyzing and articulating the complex arguments of literary theory or
following the difficult mathematic formulations of modal logic, Wallace found recovery to be a
complete enigma. As he told friends: “I don’t know how recovery works…but it works” (179).
What kept Wallace sober was “working it”—showing up, day in and day out. In fact, the
paradoxical nature of recovery—that it worked despite the clichés Wallace felt were too simple
to explain the results he’d achieved—drove Wallace to (as the AA adage goes) “keep coming
back.” If Wallace felt he’d “figured out” or “solved” how recovery worked, his tendency might
have been to dismiss it after having satisfied his intellectual curiosity or to search for a shortcut
in the system once he felt he’d mastered its logic—neither of which would have augured well for
his continued sobriety.
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Armed with this recovery-inspired work ethic, Wallace’s time at ISU—ten years, all
told—would be the most productive period in his life. As Charles Harris writes of Wallace’s
tenure at ISU in an essay-length remembrance: “Not only did he finish Infinite Jest, the work that
will ensure his permanence, but he assembled his first essay collection, A Supposedly Fun Thing
I’ll Never Do Again (1997), and his second collection of short fiction, Brief Interviews with
Hideous Men (1999), as well as completing his nonfiction book on mathematical infinity,
Everything and More (2003)” (Harris 170). Harris also mentions the work Wallace completed in
Bloomington for those publications that would appear in the years immediately following his
departure from ISU: “Wallace also wrote many of the stories and essays later collected in
Oblivion (2004) and Consider the Lobster (2006), respectively, and he began his final novel,”
The Pale King, which would be published posthumously in 2011 (Harris 170-171).
Wallace was trying to apply what he’d learned in recovery to other parts of his personal
life as well. Wallace had never been happy when he was single, but he also knew his personal
relationships with women affected his sobriety, which his writing depended on. But in recovery,
he no longer required the old divisions between his work, personal relationships, and writing.
Shortly after arriving in Bloomington, he started seeing Kymberly Harris, the daughter of
Victoria and Charles Harris—the latter of whom was Wallace’s department head in English at
ISU
2
. In addition to giving Kymberly Harris sections of Infinite Jest to read, Wallace also gave
her a copy of the Big Book, Alcoholics Anonymous (Max 181).
That Wallace was recovering from theory addiction was perhaps most evident in his
teaching at ISU. Students in his first courses there—a pair of fiction workshops (undergraduate
2
Wallace’s introduction to Kymberly Harris was far from a chance encounter; when he first met her mother,
Victoria had shown him her picture and asked, “Isn’t she beautiful?” She then added: “You should marry her” (Max
181).
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and graduate) in the fall of 1993—found him a “pedagogic hardass” intent on dissuading any
version of his younger self he encountered from repeating the mistakes Wallace had made as a
beginning writer. In his undergraduate workshop, he singled out one student who had made the
mistake of impressing the class with “a voicy, ironic short story,” immediately taking him out
into the hallway to tell him he’d “never witnessed a collective dick-sucking like that before”
(187). For the rest of the term, Wallace never missed an opportunity to pepper the student with
public criticism (188).
In his graduate fiction workshop, those students who had come to ISU because of its
reputation for producing writers of theoretical fiction found David Wallace to be thoroughly
traditional in his classroom despite his early fiction’s heavy reliance on name-dropping theorists
and philosophers. Max writes that on the first day of class, Wallace “put the names of major
literary theorists on the blackboard” and then informed them: “I know about all this stuff. You
don’t need to remind me of it” (188). Wallace’s ideas about the purpose of fiction were inflected
by his recovery: he now saw abstract intellectualizing as a way to avoid the difficult task of
honest engagement with the reader, and a dodge that led to disengaged, showy, and ultimately
hollow writing.
In the fall of 1994, Wallace was teaching an “undergraduate introductory course on
literature,” which Max characterizes as fulfilling Wallace’s “quiet wish since coming to ISU”
(197). Unlike his creative-writing courses, the undergraduate survey course was a “return to
teaching’s first purpose” (197). For someone who had written The Broom of the System and Girl
with Curious Hair, Wallace’s syllabus featured what might at first seem like a surprising amount
of novels by popular writers like Jackie Collins, Stephen King, and Tom Clancy. But Wallace’s
choices demonstrate how theory recovery had radically changed his criteria for determining a
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piece of fiction’s value. What he now knew, and what he was teaching in both his writing and
literature courses, was that fiction didn’t need to be intellectually dense in order to tell a good
story. One student characterized Wallace’s pedagogical method in his survey course as “an
engineer of literature” who highlighted “the building blocks of stories—voice narrative structure,
[and] point of view” to help his students understand how fiction worked (198). Back when he
was an MFA student, these traditional elements of fiction were the last thing on his priority list.
But as a teacher, Wallace’s priorities were reversed. By presenting these “building blocks” as the
starting point for studying literature, Wallace ensured that his students didn’t repeat his mistakes.
D.T. Max characterizes Wallace after Girl with Curious Hair as having a “crisis of
confidence,” one that, in addition to the “fog” of his new sobriety, paralyzed his will and left him
with writer’s block for the first time. Describing this mental state to Jonathan Franzen, Wallace
wrote, “I have in the last two years been struck dumb…. Not dumb, actually, or even aphasic.
It’s more like, w/r/t things I used to believe and let inform me, my thoughts now have the urgent
but impeded quality of speechlessness in dreams” (Max 144). This was due at least in part
because Wallace had intended with GWCH to write “a traditionally moral novel,” but looking
back on what he had produced, felt that most of the stories, which depend on outside theorists or
writers, had failed. Unable to give up his reliance on theory, even the piece that was supposed to
condemn bad metafiction, “Westward,” ended up as a long example of the kind of writing he
condemned as empty or solipsistic.
But Wallace’s rejection of theory-forward fiction was a bit more complex than simply
going cold theoretical turkey. As D.T. Max smartly asks: given how much stock Wallace placed
in “serious fiction” that acknowledged continental philosophy’s recent literary encroachments,
by what theory had Wallace abandoned literary theory? (289) At the end of the day, recovering
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from theory meant giving up the crutch of shallow engagement with ideas poached from big-
name theorists, but it didn’t mean that Wallace maintained a prohibition against any and all ideas
from outside thinkers in his fiction; to write for the reader while enforcing such a rule would
obviously have proved impossible.
This new concern for the reader finds its twelve-step analogue in the Big Book chapter
titled “Into Action.” According to this (collective-second-person narrated) section, recovering
addicts who have honestly and diligently worked the preceding steps can expect to “see how our
experience can benefit others. That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear. We will
lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows. Self-seeking will slip away. Our
whole attitude and outlook upon life will change…. We will intuitively know how to handle
situations which used to baffle us” (81-82). Ultimately, the purpose of Alcoholics Anonymous is
not simply to keep its members sober, but to restore their usefulness to others: “At the moment
we are trying to put our lives in order. But this is not an end in itself. Our real purpose it to fit
ourselves to be of maximum service to God and the people about us” (77). This feeling of
usefulness is impossible for an alcoholic in isolation, where the “self-will run riot” (62) indulges
itself at the expense of others. There is no doubt that the program’s emphasis on “use” and
“usefulness” resonated with Wallace, given the long sections of his first novel that deal
specifically with Wittgenstein’s conceptions of “meaning” and “use.” One wonders if it had
previously occurred to Wallace to understand himself in terms of these same concepts;
regardless, there would have been no escaping the implications in recovery that his own meaning
was directly tied to his usefulness to others, and that what had rendered him useless was
addiction. Wallace’s first-hand experience with these Big Book passages in a twelve-step-group
setting is evident in some of his notes from this period. Tucked in one of the Ransom Center’s
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folders of Infinite Jest’s draft materials are two pages from one of Wallace’s yellow legal pads.
Under the title “Heard at Meetings” are two sentences penciled in miniscule hand: “The
happiness of being with people. Just a person among people” (see fig. 4-1 and 4-2).
William James as Recovery Theorist
There is one thinker who survives Wallace’s “theory recovery” and who makes several
appearances in Infinite Jest, though not in the fashion that Wittgenstein and Derrida are deployed
in The Broom of the System. That philosopher is William James. But first, an attempt to answer
Max’s question: if David Foster Wallace is taking his cues from William James, or at least the
James that survives in the Alcoholics Anonymous literature he’s reading at meetings and at
Granada house around this time, what was it that motivated him to incorporate James into his
writing at the expense of his earlier theoretical or philosophical influences? The pragmatic
system proposed by James—open-ended, wary of the foreclosure of future possibility that comes
with a sense of certainty—served Wallace’s new writing goals better than the aporias and
indeterminacies of poststructuralism. It is less prescriptive in its insistence on an “ever not quite
to all our formulations” (McDermott 38:58) of the world and assesses value according to
outcomes for human agents. For William James, no final ethical systemization is possible
because his pragmatic philosophy acknowledges the fluctuations in ethical standards and
conceptions of truth that occur as necessary consequences of differences in time and culture. But
this constant state of flux should not deter interested thinkers from writing down their ideas so as
to clarify their philosophical propositions through open and honest engagement with others.
Toward the end of his introduction to Wallace’s thesis, James Ryerson writes about the
problem of determining value among competing systems of seemingly-equal validity:
Because all language and thought take place inside some language game or other,
there is no transcendent, non-language-game standpoint from which you can step
back, as it were, and see if any language game is better than any other—if one of
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them, for instance, does a better job of mirroring reality than another. Indeed, the
question of whether any language game accurately represents reality can be asked
only within some other language game, which operates according to its own set of
nonevaluable conventions. (30)
But is this true? James seems to claim just the opposite, disagreeing with this assessment (and
finding fault with its implied premises regarding the worth of any “objective” reality that
language might describe). James’s strategy, a method whose appellation, “pragmatism,” he
reluctantly assented to, was deceptively simple: when forced to decide a “winner” from among a
number of systems that seem equally valid, the single criterion for judging value is its
consequence for the human beings who will rise or fall according to the tenets and prescriptions
of that system:
The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that
otherwise might be interminable. Is the world one or many?—fated or free?—
material or spiritual?—here are notions either of which may or may not hold good
of the world; and disputes over such notions are unending. The pragmatic method
in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical
consequences. What difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion
rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced,
then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle.
Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical
difference that must follow from one side or the other’s being right. (Pragmatism
28)
The third phase of David Foster Wallace’s writing, with its “single-entendre” commitments,
corresponds to Wallace’s realization that he has the choice to set aside the isolating
consequences of Wittgenstein’s conclusions about the unbridgeable gap between language and
any possible objective world. In this phase, Wallace’s writing becomes more pragmatic; it
counters Wittgenstein’s solipsism with the Jamesian conclusion that “even if we cannot
objectively know the world, our actions have consequences within it” (McDermott 26:30). If we
are all denied access to any “objective” knowledge about the world because of the limits of our
language, then any world beyond the one we can know matters very little. Yet as I have argued,
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Wallace’s mature writing does not completely abandon his earlier belief that “serious writing”
was theoretically engaged. Rather, in his later writing, Wallace filters his use of theory through
the lessons he’d learned in recovery.
In this final phase of Wallace’s writing, I propose that Wallace’s assessment of other
writers’ underlying metaphysical outlooks becomes increasingly important. As one critic in the
recent anthology Gesturing Toward Reality: David Foster Wallace and Philosophy notes,
“Wallace is particularly good at unmasking the metaphysical arguments contained in or
concealed by logical ones” (Durantaye 22). Unlike in Broom, when philosophical or theoretical
ideas appear in Wallace’s later writing, they are always deployed with an eye toward their
possible ethical consequences and propensities for misuse. If an idea’s implicit metaphysics is
one that potentially tears down or blocks the connection between human beings, or which
purposefully obfuscates meaning through language, or dwells in verbal abstraction to the point of
paralysis, Wallace doesn’t use or mention it without qualification. And if, as Max suspects,
Wallace needed another theorist to lend credence to his approach, James would have served his
revised purposes.
As with The Varieties of Religious Experience, Infinite Jest’s “method” is in the
presentation of personal narratives of transformation and recovery. In Varieties, the individual
stories conform to the standard, three-part “recovery” or “conversion” model. But often, in
James’s account of the critical middle step—the addict’s experience of hitting bottom and the
subsequent epiphanic realization that propels him into the narrative’s third and final part—
remains hazy for readers. This is primarily because of the paradoxical nature of personal
epiphany: for the person who experiences it, the epiphany carries the literally life-altering force
of divinely revealed truth, but in trying to communicate the experience of what this shift in
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personal worldview actually felt like, no words will call it forth with sufficient force. The person,
however transformed, must still rely on metaphor or analogy or narrative devices, which
ultimately fail to fully communicate the depth of such a numinous experience. Failing to
understand how the epiphanies account for the radical changes in James’s various narratives, the
narratives’ effect on the reader is finally one of confusion or of frustration—not enlightenment or
transcendence. Though Infinite Jest is modeled in part on The Varieties of Religious Experience
(Wallace once wrote to Sven Birkerts that the novel was “a kind of contemporary Jamesian
melodrama”), Wallace sidesteps this narrative trap and finally finds a way to make good on his
critique of Markson’s “explanation” for the narrator’s mental state as outlined in “The Empty
Plenum”—and all by repurposing a technique he attempted but failed to properly bring off in
Broom (Max 191).
William James knew that religious experiences could not be externally verified by
outside authority however epiphanic or life-alteringly meaningful they may be. Wallace knows
the nature of hitting bottom and the opening of possibility it makes possible. But he also knows
language is an insufficient vehicle for conveying the life-changing weight of an epiphany. What
Wallace seems to want to offer us in Infinite Jest is that post-epiphanic mindset that enabled him
to accept help and enter recovery. In keeping with what he wrote in “The Empty Plenum” about
insufficient explanations and back-stories making it harder for readers to empathize with
fictional characters, Wallace chooses to leave out the particulars of Hal and Gately hitting
bottom from the narrative. They exist just outside the bounds of the text, but because we see Hal
and Gately both before and after their epiphanic experiences, we are faced with the simple truth
that they have changed—just not how. In choosing to leave out the “hitting bottom” portions of
the usual three-part narrative of addiction, it would seem, in keeping with his idea that providing
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explanations for characters makes a reader less able to empathize with them, that Wallace sought
to make it easier for readers to believe that radical life change was possible for these characters,
and in turn, for us as well.
The influence of William James on the thought and writing of David Foster Wallace
appears only sporadically in the related critical literature.
3
A notable exception, one of the two
focused treatments of the connections between James and Wallace to date, is David H. Evans’s
essay in Boswell and Burn’s excellent anthology, A Companion to David Foster Wallace
Studies. Titled “The Chains of Not Choosing: Free Will and Faith in William James and David
Foster Wallace,” Evans’s central thesis is that “William James was a crucial figure for Wallace, a
figure with whom he could recognize remarkable parallels, both in terms of the moral dilemmas
they confronted in thought and life, and in terms of the solutions that they attempted to apply to
them” (Evans 172).
As evidence, he cites three particular instances: first, Wallace’s response during a 1996
interview with Salon’s Laura Miller, wherein he mentions James’s The Varieties of Religious
Experience in a list of writers “who made him ‘feel unalone—intellectually, emotionally,
spiritually…human and unalone and…in a deep, significant conversation with another
consciousness in fiction and poetry” (172). Evans connects this response with the appearance of
that same text in Wallace’s fiction, noting that Infinite Jest’s Randy Lenz “keeps his emergency
stash of cocaine in a curiously deceptive container—a hollowed out copy of ‘Bill James’s
gargantuan Large-Print Principles of Psychology and The Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion’
3
Marshall Boswell’s “Trickle-Down Citizenship: Taxes and Civic Responsibility in The Pale King” and his chapter
on Infinite Jest in Understanding David Foster Wallace, Robert K. Bolger’s “A Less ‘Bullshitty’ Way to Live: The
Pragmatic Spirituality of David Foster Wallace,” and Casey Michael Henry’s 2015 “Sudden Awakening to the Fact
That the Mischief Is Irretrievably Done: Epiphanic Structure in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.”
133
(IJ 543) better known as The Varieties of Religious Experience
4
” (171). In the secondary
literature, Evans points out that while the introduction to Wallace’s recently-published
philosophy thesis mentions “Descartes, Voltaire, Sartre, J. L. Austin, Derrida, and above all
Wittgenstein,” its author (and Wallace’s own thesis advisor) James Ryerson “never mentions
James, despite the fact that the latter’s Pragmatism anticipates some of the central themes of
[Wittgenstein’s] Philosophical Investigations” (172). Indeed, Wallace names at least two
pragmatic philosophers in what is surely the central node of what Adam Kelly has called the
Wallace “essay-interview nexus”: the 1993 interview with Larry McCaffery. When listing the
authors who’ve “rung his cherries,” Wallace names not only James but the later pragmatist
thinker J. L. Austin.
Casey Michael Henry, in an excellent genetic examination of Infinite Jest’s draft
materials recently published in Critique, also notices the connections between the novel and
William James. Henry suggests that the epiphany, (a type of numinous experience) is the central
organizing structure for Infinite Jest. Henry writes that there were many allusions to James in the
drafts of Infinite Jest that were cut before its final published form, including explicit allusions “to
the ‘Sick Soul’ and ‘Divided Self’ chapters of James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience”
(484). Henry’s main claim involves the assertion that Infinite Jest’s enormous narrative both
requires and omits the “epiphanic” portions of its protagonists’ stories: the missing sections of
Hal Incandenza and Don Gately’s stories where they hit bottom. Because of Infinite Jest’s
circular narrative chronology, Hal Incandenza’s epiphany must take place in the space between
4
As the author of the other extended examination of the influence of William James in Wallace’s work, Casey
Michael Henry, writes: “The conscious alignment of Lenz and James is obvious from Wallace’s evolution of
thinking. In his first handwritten manuscripts, Lenz originally hides his cocaine in the Gould Medical Dictionary,
which by later transcripts has been modified, explicitly, to James’s The Principles of Psychology and The Gifford
Lectures on Natural Religion. The transition suggests a shift from biological explanations for actions—present in the
Medical Dictionary—to psychological and religious explanations—present in the Principles and Lectures on
Natural Religion” (“Sudden” 488).
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the novel’s ending and the chronologically final episode of Hal’s narrative that happens in the
novel’s opening section. Henry characterizes Infinite Jest’s entire narrative form as following the
blueprint laid out by William James: “the whole novel is…in Jamesian terms, a divided self
struggling for reunification across the final break” (494).
One area of thematic overlap in James and Wallace’s work is worth mentioning here—
that of their almost biological scorn for deterministic strains of thought. James scholar John J.
McDermott notes that “For William James, we are makers not only of things but of meaning as
well” (5:30) who should always “be alert to premature clarity, which can close off possibilities
available but not yet apparent” (21:26).
This focus on the human ability (or responsibility) to “make meaning” from experience is
one that shows up with frequency in Wallace’s work. D.T. Max writes that Infinite Jest is
singularly concerned with “how to live meaningfully in the present” (215). Like James, who was
writing against a current of scientific and philosophical determinism that prevailed in the waning
years leading of the nineteenth century, the determinism that Wallace writes against was one that
he saw as permeating American culture, an ironic detachment that had been learned from
postmodern literature and then commodified and widely disseminated via television. That
humans make meaning is a concept known as “constructivism” in contemporary psychology and
philosophy. Perhaps it is no accident that of the theoretical approaches Wallace found harmful in
American postmodernism, the strain that clearly stands in nominal opposition to constructivism
is “deconstruction.”
The Influence of William James in Infinite Jest
At over one thousand pages and featuring more than two hundred characters, Infinite Jest
takes place in the near-dystopian near future of the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment. (In
the novel, years are no longer referred to by sequential numbers; the naming rights for each year
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are now sold to the highest corporate bidder. Further complicating the novel’s diegetic timeline
is the fact that the novel’s chronology is non-linear, and its closing paragraph sends the reader
back around to the beginning of the novel to find out what happens to the protagonists, whom
readers don’t generally recognize as such on their first read-through.) The bulk of the novel’s
action takes place at a pair of interconnected Boston locations: Ennet House, a halfway house run
by staffer and recovering addict Don Gately, and the Enfield Tennis Academy, run by the
idiosyncratic Incandenza family, whose middle son Hal is the E. T. A. narrative’s focus. After
the disbanding of N. A. T. O., the United States, Canada, and Mexico are now allied under the
banner of the Organization of North American Nations, which alliance gives rise to the novel’s
third subplot, connecting the other two. A group of Quebecois separatists known as the
Wheelchair Assassins plans to terrorize O.N.A.N.’s population by disseminating copies of E. T.
A. founder and experimental auteur James Incandenza’s film, (also called Infinite Jest). The film
is something of an urban legend, a movie so entertaining that people who watch it lose all
interest in anything but immediately rewatching it, over and over, foregoing food and personal
hygiene until they eventually expire in front of the screen.
As I have argued, Wallace’s thematic interests remain effectively the same throughout his
writing. The difference between his two novels, however, lies in the way they respond to these
themes; more specifically, the difference lies in the way Wallace’s writing responds to the
problems these themes present for his characters.
The years between Broom and Infinite Jest had taught Wallace that while the conclusions
of philosophy and theory may be logically impossible to refute on their own terms, that living by
those conclusions was, at least for him, untenable. That at some level the fact that he worried that
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he might not exist meant that whether the idea of self was logically coherent or not mattered very
little.
Recovery introduced Wallace to another kind of theory, one that evaluated the strength of
its arguments not by pointing to the unimpeachable logic of how it proceeded from premise to
conclusion, but by the consequences of its conclusions for human actors. Or as it appears in the
text of Infinite Jest: “logical validity is not a guarantee of truth” (202). The pragmatic philosophy
of William James shaped the recovery program of Alcoholics Anonymous that saved his life.
James’s philosophy brings Wittgenstein’s conclusions about language out of the bloodless world
of linguistic abstraction and into the human world of lived experience. There may be valid
arguments as to the linguistic differences between “abstinence” and “recovery,” but the material
and psychic difference between “abstaining” from drugs and “recovering” from them may
literally be the difference between life and death for an addict.
In his second novel, Wallace applied the lessons of James’s pragmatism to evaluate his
fiction’s use of theory. What resulted from this mature method was a deep mediation on
addiction, loneliness, and the importance of choice in an American culture whose conditions
produced a feeling of isolation so total that it elevated entertainment to the status of virtue.
Infinite Jest dared to confront this loneliness not by entertaining readers, but by exposing the
source of their despair as a consequence of what they had chosen to give themselves away to,
what they had chosen to worship. The novel exposes entertainment for what it is: not an answer
to loneliness, but a distraction from it. Overcoming this loneliness, Wallace had learned in AA,
required restoring himself to use, a process that required more work than the passive temporary
solution of distraction. The solution was to risk the kind of communication and attempts at
community that Wallace could not yet attempt in Broom. One of the ways Wallace tries to offer
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solutions in his second novel is by revising the mistakes he made with the application of theory
in his first.
Infinite Jest’s Pragmatic Revisions to The Broom of the System
Infinite Jest revisits key tropes from The Broom of the System in order to own up to and
emend them with his recovery-inspired pragmatic approach to theory. One of the ways that
Infinite Jest uses James’s pragmatism to revise Broom’s shallow engagement with Wittgenstein
is to show the consequences of protracted solipsism for human actors.
In Broom, Wallace dramatized the consequences of solipsism via Lenore Beadsman’s
fear that her “self” was nothing more than a linguistic construct, that there was no difference
between her life and a character in a novel, that she was nothing more than what could be said
about her. While searching for her missing great-grandmother (who has the same name as
Lenore and who was a student of Wittgenstein) her solipsistic fear is assuaged by her brother
LaVache, who tells her that Gramma Lenore has disappeared in order to give her the space to
define herself in her namesake’s absence. This explanation seems to suffice for younger Lenore,
but LaVache’s explanation is undercut by the metafictional nature of Broom—at the end of the
day, the joke’s on her: Lenore is, in fact, only a character in a story.
But in Wallace’s second novel, he chooses not to play the consequences of solipsism for
laughs. In addition, unlike the solipsistic unease that Lenore feels in Broom, which we must
accept without any indication of its cause, in Infinite Jest, Wallace not only refuses to go easy on
characters who are content to live inward-turned, solipsistic lives, but provides a legitimate
reason for their state of isolation. In a passage from Infinite Jest that depicts a phone
conversation between Orin and Hal Incandenza, the two eldest sons of ETA’s founder, the
narrator gives us a bit of insight into what Hal, who has just returned to his dorm from smoking
pot, is thinking: “Hal never liked talking on the phone after he’d gotten high in secret down in
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the Pump Room. Even if there was water or liquid handy to keep the cotton at bay. He didn’t
know why this was so. It just made him uneasy” (136). But further than the emotional
discomfort, the effort of communication with another person—his own brother—causes a kind of
spiraling involution in his thinking itself: “It occurred to Hal that although he lied about
meaningless details to Orin on the phone it had never occurred to him to consider whether Orin
was ever doing the same thing. This induced a spell of involuted marijuana-type thinking that led
quickly, again, to Hal’s questioning whether or not he was really all that intelligent” (136). As
regards meaning and use, Hal’s use of pot has become such a part of his consciousness that it is
the sole ordering force that confers meaning on his experiences; as he will remark later in the
novel: “It occurred to me that without some one-hitters to be able to look forward to smoking
alone in the tunnel I was waking up every day feeling as though there was nothing in the day to
anticipate or lend anything any meaning” (853). To borrow a phrase from deconstructive
criticism, Hal is the novel’s empty center.
Because of the novel’s circular structure, the ultimate effect of Hal’s habitual marijuana
use is revealed to the reader in the opening scene. In it, Hal has quit smoking, but the
consequences of having habituated himself to an isolated interior life due to the discomfort of
interacting with others while on drugs renders him literally unable to communicate with the other
people in the room. Hal’s repeated statements about not being able to “make himself
understood,” along with the horrific reactions to the “animal sounds” and “flailing” that everyone
else in the room sees as Hal tries to speak and move, serve as something of an opening set piece
where Wallace achieves the dramatizing of Wittgenstein’s philosophy that he attempted with
Broom and later admitted failing to pull off in “The Empty Plenum.”
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Perhaps Infinite Jest’s most startling revision of a trope from The Broom of the System
involves an actual broom. For purposes of comparison, here again is the only passage where the
word “broom” appears in Wallace’s first novel: “What she did with me [was to] take a straw
broom and start furiously sweeping the floor, and she asked me which part of the broom was
more elemental, more fundamental, the bristles or the handle…and finally when I said I sup-
posed the bristles[, she yelled,] ‘Aha, that’s because you want to sweep with the broom, isn’t it?
Meaning as fundamentalness…Meaning as use’” (149-50). In this passage Broom’s broom
functions as a rather hamfisted example of Wittgenstein’s language theory that a word’s meaning
is determined by use.
By contrast, there is only one place in Infinite Jest that the word “broom” occurs. While
sweeping up at the close of the day, Lucien Antitoi is murdered in the shop he co-owns with his
brother with his own hand-carved broom by a member of a Quebecois separatist group. It is a
scene of profound violence, certainly the most brutal in the novel, and Wallace chooses Lucien’s
own personal and well-loved broom as the murder weapon. Wallace is drawing a deliberate
parallel here. To amplify the point, the wheelchair assassin who murders Lucien has twice, in the
same sentence, used the French word for “useless” to describe him before giving the word some
particularly cruel emphasis when “the broom is shoved in and abruptly down by the big and
collared A.F.R., thrust farther in, rhythmically, in strokes that accompany each syllable in the
wearily repeated ‘In-U-Tile’” (488). Here, Wallace is openly and brutally chastising his previous
novel: Yes, meaning is use, but what use one chooses is a far more important point in one’s day-
to-day lived experience. As Wallace’s former department head in the ISU English department
writes: Wallace’s mature engagement with the Wittgenstein’s concept of “‘meaning as use’
makes it possible to consider ‘the coherent possibility of things like ethics, values, spirituality &
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responsibility,’ the ‘things most important’ to Wittgenstein—and to David Wallace—which the
logically atomistic metaphysics of the Tractatus denied” (175). Wallace’s mature writing
understands the consequences of Wittgenstein’s revisions in the Philosophical Investigations
about how language operates—not as a map of an unknowable reality, but as mapped onto
concrete experience where those words describe objects and actions with ethical and moral
import. By literalizing the concept of “use” in terms of human cost, the novel can account for the
(in this case, extremely disturbing and violent) ethical and moral dimensions of “use” and
“meaning” in a way that the safety of Broom’s dialogic thought experiments about
Wittgenstein’s philosophy cannot.
Wallace’s mature opinion of the usefulness of theory is perhaps nowhere more clear than
in the aforementioned conversation between Hal and Orin, during the portion of the conversation
when they discuss their father’s suicide. Their conversation reveals that James Incandenza, the
auteur responsible for the filmic Infinite Jest that appears in the novel, committed suicide by
microwaving his own head:
[Hal:] ‘As we later reconstructed the scene, he’d used a wide-bit drill and a small
hacksaw to make a head-sized hole in the oven door, then when he’d gotten his
head in he’d carefully packed the extra space around his neck with wadded-up
aluminum foil.’
[Orin:] ‘Sounds kind of ad hoc and jerry-rigged and haphazard.’
[Hal:] ‘Everybody’s a critic. This wasn’t an aesthetic endeavor.’ […]
[Orin:] ‘“Reconstructed the scene” as in the scene when you found him was
somehow…deconstructed.”’
[Hal:] ‘You of all people, O. You know that was the one word he hated more
than—’
[Orin:] ‘So burned then. Just say it. He was really really badly burned.’
‘…’ (250-251)
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This is the only instance of “deconstruct” in any of the searchable electronic copies of Infinite
Jest. And given that one half of the “conversation” between theorists that Wallace explained was
happening at the heart of his previous novel, I don’t think the lack of reference to Derrida’s
theory is an oversight in Infinite Jest—rather the opposite. And when Orin uses the term
“deconstructed” as a euphemism for the post-microwave state of their father’s head, the
communication between Orin and Hal is immediately interrupted. The intrusion of theory into
the brothers’ conversation stops it in mid-sentence and can’t resume until Orin makes Hal speak
his mind in plain language that won’t allow Hal to look away from the horror of the scene.
Another obvious about-face between Wallace’s first and second novels concerns his
thinking about the cultural effects of television. One of Broom’s final vignettes is a broadcast of
a religious program in which the televangelist Reverend Sykes is joined on screen by Lenore
Beadsman’s quasi-profound pet bird, Vlad the Impaler. Reverend Sykes, in his final exhortation
to the late-night viewer watching at home, says: “Use me, friends. Let us play the game together.
I promise that no player will feel alone” (467). Syke’s words show the degree to which Broom
toys with the idea of television as a solution to solipsism’s consequence—that we can never
know anything outside our own thoughts; that is, television is held up as a technological solution
capable of combating human loneliness by connecting viewers with the outside world. But by the
time Wallace wrote Infinite Jest, his feelings about the possibility of a person finding real,
meaningful, human connection alone in a room with a TV had changed radically. The televisions
of Infinite Jest, “Interlace teleputers,” are clearly not vehicles for human connection, but rather
devices that serve to only deepen viewers’ isolation. The “mass spectations” that occur
throughout the novel instantiate the human need for connection coming to a sort of collective
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head, finding what’s described as an almost orgiastic, ecstatic release in the flash-mob style
spectations where everyone watches something together.
The Broom of the System’s ending evades Wittgenstein’s conclusions about solipsism
with poststructuralist theory. But deconstruction’s metaphysics of absence did nothing to
alleviate the fear and anxiety Wallace felt after reading Wittgenstein’s philosophy, and Broom’s
ending reflects this: Its final pronouncement, its very conclusion, trails off in midsentence. In the
place where we should find the novel’s final word on the matter, we instead find only silence, an
unfinished thought, a deferral and a dodge. Broom ends this way in part because it has to:
poststructuralism’s answer to solipsism’s conclusions—that either we can only fully know our
own thoughts and nothing else is provable or that we can only know the world of sense
experience and therefore our own thoughts and conception of self are what’s ultimately
unknowable—is to offer that the self was always already a construction anyhow, a notion that
offers little comfort.
By the time Wallace’s second novel concludes, what’s left unsaid doesn’t risk alienating
readers so that it can get in one last metafictional wink as it does in Broom. Rather, Infinite Jest’s
ending leaves us with questions about the resolution of conflicts within the fictional world of the
novel (What's happening to Hal in the opening scene? What is the ultimate fate of the master
cartridge of the Entertainment? Are we supposed to read Orin's fate literally? How is Gately
talking to the wraith of James Incandenza?).
This is because Wallace succeeds in getting the reader invested in what happens to the
novel’s characters, succeeds in forging a relationship with the reader. Furthermore, Wallace has
dropped enough hints along the way to satisfy these narrative questions if we're reading closely.
And this is part of Wallace’s point: doing this attentive work is analogous to the reader holding
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up her end of the conversation. This ratio of work vs. payoff is often cited by readers of Infinite
Jest—both its detractors and admirers. But as Max writes, Wallace’s long novel, “for all its
putative difficulty, cares about the reader,” and if it denies readers “a conventional ending, it
doesn’t do so out of malice; it does it out of concern, to provide a deeper palliative than realistic
storytelling can, because, just as in Ennet House, you have to work to get better” (215). Infinite
Jest succeeds precisely because the amount of work one puts into reading it is repaid not only in
the traditional sense of reading enjoyment, but more importantly in extratextual ways, in readers’
spheres of day-to-day existence outside the text: “Infinite Jest then didn’t just diagnose a
malaise. It proposed a treatment…it spoke of the imminence of collapse and the possibility that
one can emerge stronger” (214).
In its espionage-narrative, Infinite Jest levels a critique of an American culture unable or
unwilling to do the work of assessing the moral worth of what it chooses as its ultimate pursuit:
entertainment. Briefly: Agents Marathe (Canadian) and Steeply’s (American) story arc describes
an attempt by Quebecois terrorists, reacting to the United States’s redrawing of its border with
Canada, to secure a master copy of James Incandenza’s film Infinite Jest. Marathe’s organization
intends to clandestinely disseminate copies of the film to the American citizens and heads of
state, rendering them comatose and, eventually, dead. In one of their exchanges, Marathe
explains the logic of the Quebecois plan (in his idiosyncratic English) to Steeply: “This a U.S.A.
production, this Entertainment cartridge. Made by an American man in the U.S.A. The appetite
for the appeal of it: this is also U.S.A. The U.S.A. drive for spectation, which your culture
teaches” (318). Marathe continues:
This I was saying: this is why choosing is everything…. These facts of situation,
which speak so loudly of your Bureau’s fear of this samizdat: now is what has
happened when a people choose nothing over themselves to love, each one. A
U.S.A. that would die–and let its children die, each one–for the so-called perfect
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Entertainment, this film…. Us, we will force nothing on U.S.A. persons in their
warm homes. We will only make available. Entertainment. There will be then some
choosing, to partake or choose not to. (318)
How and when the United States of the novel lost its collective ability to make choices in service
of its own interests is not explained; Marathe only gestures vaguely to “Someone who had
authority, or should have had authority and did not exercise authority. I do not know. Someone
let your peoples forget it was the only thing of importance, choosing” (319). The concept of
American “freedom” is redefined here as the “freedom-from: no one tells your precious
individual U.S.A. selves what they must do. It is this meaning only, this freedom from constraint
and forced duress” (320). This duress is the “repugnant idea” in William James’s
conceptualization of “choice”: “Effort of attention to a naturally repugnant idea is the essential
feature of willing” (Principles 562), and in the near-future America of Infinite Jest, all the “effort
of attention” seems directed at ensuring one’s “freedom from” anything unpleasant. Somewhere
in American history, Marathe tells his American counterpart, “someone taught that temples are
for fanatics only and took away the temples and promised there was no need for temples. And
now there is no shelter. And not map for finding the shelter of a temple” (319-320). Marathe, like
Wallace, is trying to get his head around an American culture in which such ostensibly vaunted
and unimpeachable ideals like “freedom” have been bled dry. In the United States of the novel,
freedom— now divorced from its original context of colonial British rule of the American
colonies, has come to signify quite a different yet unmistakably American idea: that it is the
unassailable birthright of all U. S. citizens to live unfettered of all responsibilities outside
themselves.
When David Lipsky asks about the origin of Infinite Jest’s title, Wallace eventually gets
around to explaining what he wanted to do with the novel in terms of cultural critique:
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The only thing that I knew for sure, I wanted to do something that wasn’t just high
comedy, I wanted to do something that was very, very much about America. And
the things that ended up for me being most distinctively American right now,
around the millennium, had to do with both entertainment and about some kind of
weird addictive, um… wanting to give yourself away to something [that] I ended
up thinking was kind of a distorted religious impulse. And a lot of the AA stuff in
the book was mostly an excuse, was to try to have – it’s very hard to talk about
people’s relationship with any kind of God, in any book later than like
Dostoyevsky. … Plausibly realistic characters don’t sit around talking about this
stuff. You know?
So… I don’t know. But the minute I start talking about it, it just, it sounds number
one: very vague. Two: really reductive. And the whole thing to me was so
complicated, that you know it took sixteen hundred pages of sort of weird oblique
stuff to even start to talk about it. And I feel stupid talking about it. (Lipsky 82)
In the America of Infinite Jest, so many of its characters—finding no other viable coping models
available and nothing worth giving themselves away to—respond to the problem of solipsistic
isolation with drug use and, eventually, addiction. But Wallace, not content to simply fictionalize
the darker parts of his culture, offers the reader a possible alternative to addiction through the
AA sections of the narrative—and especially through one of the two principal characters, Don
Gately. Though Wallace’s early drafts contained a comparatively small amount of material about
him, as Wallace’s sober time increased, so did the number of pages in the novel concerned with
Gately, the recovering Demerol addict and reformed felon turned halfway-house counselor (Max
190).
Toward the end of Infinite Jest, Gately’s character steps in to defend another member of a
halfway house, Randy Lenz, who is being chased by a neighborhood resident after catching Lenz
killing his (the neighborhood resident’s) dog. Though Lenz is probably guilty of whatever he’s
being accused of, Gately nevertheless defends his halfway-house ward in a street fight that turns
into a shooting in front of Ennet House. We rejoin Gately later in the narrative as he regains
consciousness in a hospital. Though he is suffering from severe trauma and struggling to speak
because of a breathing tube, he refuses the pain medication offered by doctors for fear of
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jeopardizing his sobriety (Gately’s drug of choice before recovery was oral narcotics). Wallace
explains the recovering addict’s difficult feat of restraint by letting us in on Gately’s coping
technique: “Abiding. No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here:
he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and
stretching ahead, glittering” (860). This technique is one that Gately learned during a forced
detox in jail: “Gately remembered some evil fucking personal detoxes.… Feeling the edge of
every second that went by. Taking it a second at a time.… Any one second: he remembered: the
thought of feeling like he’d be feeling this second for 60 more of these seconds–he couldn’t deal.
He could not fucking deal. He had to build a wall around each second just to take it” (859-60).
Said another way: the period of his withdrawal, like the pain he’s experiencing in the hospital,
when conceptualized as a continuous, uninterrupted expanse of time, amounts to experiencing
the entire aggregate effect of each moment simultaneously.
The fourth edition of AA’s Big Book stresses the importance of taking sobriety “one day
at a time” in ten separate places (255, 286, 287, 288, 333, 345, 346, 401, 451, 528). But the
passage that best explains the material reality of the adage appears in a section titled “The
Missing Link”:
A couple of members, realizing I was there for my first meeting, took me
downstairs and sat down with me and outlined the program…. I remember telling
these members that AA sounded like just what I needed, but I didn’t think I could
stay sober for the rest of my life. Exactly how was I supposed to not drink if my
girlfriend breaks up with me, or if my best friend dies, or even through happy times
like graduations, weddings, and birthdays. They suggested I could just stay sober
one day at a time. They explained that it might be easier to set my sights on the
twenty- four hours in front of me and to take on these other situations when and if
they ever arrived. I decided to give sobriety a try, one day at a time, and I’ve done
it that way ever since. (286-287).
Like the anonymous author of “The Missing Link,” Gately’s solution is to choose to understand
or idealize time as a series of static moments, separate from one another like the individual
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frames of a film reel. Paradoxically, during this exercise, Gately realizes that he had “never
before or since felt so excruciatingly alive. Living in the Present between pulses. It’s a gift, the
Now: it’s AA’s real gift: it’s no accident they call it The Present” (860). The phrasing of
Gately’s technique may sound familiar. Its source is taken from another theoretical work whose
title is mentioned earlier in the narrative. The original formulation is from William James’s
Gifford Lectures, later published under the title The Varieties of Religious Experience.
5
The conceptualization of time that Gately learned in AA derives from James’s description
of a religious adherent who has achieved a certain kind of inner peace:
[She is] never anxious about the future, nor worr[ied] over the outcome of the day;
[she] took cognizance of things, only as they were presented to her in succession,
moment by moment. To her holy soul, the divine moment was the present
moment…and when the present moment was estimated in itself and in its relations,
and when the duty that was involved in it was accomplished, it was permitted to
pass away as if it had never been, and to give way to the facts and duties of the
moment which came after. (317-18)
Gately isn’t the only character in this section of the novel to profess the usefulness of this divide-
and-abide method of enduring otherwise-unendurable stretches of time. Joelle van Dyne tells
Gately that without a mindset capable of living in the present, she isn’t surprised that her
previous attempts at staying sober had failed:
‘This was why I couldn’t get off and stay off. Just as the cliché warns. I literally
wasn’t keeping it in the day. I was adding the clean days up in my head.… I’d
throw away the pipe and shake my fist at the sky and say As God is my fucking
witness NEVER AGAIN, as of this minute right here I QUIT FOR ALL TIME….
And I’d bunker up all white-knuckled and stay straight. And count the days. I was
proud of each day I stayed off…. I’d add them up. Line them up end to end. You
know? … And soon it would get…improbable. And the rest of the year, looking
ahead, hundreds and hundreds…Who could do it? How did I ever think anyone
could do it that way?’ (859)
5
A fictional edition that combines James’s Gifford Lectures and Principles of Psychology appears earlier in the
novel’s narrative. (Its owner, the character Randy Lenz, has hollowed out its midsection to use as a cocaine stash.)
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When compared with The Broom of the System, Infinite Jest is marked by a radical shift of
emphasis: rather than focusing on the philosophical problem of solipsism, or of Wittgenstein’s
“meaning as use” or poststructuralist conceptions of “self and other” (as Wallace understood it)
in American culture, Wallace instead focuses on alleviating loneliness and “illuminating the
possibilities for being alive and human” in a “grotesquely materialistic” American culture
(McCaffery 26-27). As Wallace told an interviewer: “Look man, we’d probably most of us agree
that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize
how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art
that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and
glow despite the times’ darkness.” (Burn 26).
Infinite Jest represents Wallace’s attempt at a solution to the philosophical problem of
Wittgensteinian solipsism and its fictional and cultural counterpart, the problem of sincerity in a
cynical America: “We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece
of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with characters’ pain, we might then also more
easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become
less alone inside. It might just be that simple” (McCaffery 22). Ultimately, it was Wallace’s entry
into recovery that allowed his writing to progress into an ethical dimension marked by a focus on
forging connections with readers. Wallace’s mature, recovery-inspired fiction, in D.T. Max’s
phrasing, “h[olds] out a hope rarely signaled in Wallace’s earlier work but dear to his recovery
experiences: the possibility that telling a story can heal” (Max 193). Recovery had changed not
only the way Wallace wrote, it had fundamentally altered the reason he continued to write
anything at all.
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Westward the Course of Wallace Takes His Way
After the book tour for Infinite Jest was over, Wallace felt relieved to return to Normal.
Back home, he resumed his regular AA meeting schedule at St. Matthews. The book tour’s
hectic travel schedule had made finding meetings difficult, and Wallace needed the regularity
that meetings provided. His attendance kept him accountable; without the support of his recovery
group, Wallace knew his sobriety could be in jeopardy. In isolation, Wallace’s particular cast of
mind—his “tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract thinking,” as he
characterized it—was capable of rationalizing his substance abuse (Water 48). But recovery had
become more important to Wallace beyond staying clean. It was now a central feature of his life,
both a lens that colored how he saw the world, and a part of who he was: an addict. Grateful for
his sobriety and what it had enabled him to do with his writing, Wallace’s adherence to Big Book
edicts like the importance of routine and “one day at a time” was stiffly doctrinaire because he
credited the program with “not just his literary development but his actual physical survival”
(Max 237). Wallace felt he owed his sobriety to Alcoholics Anonymous and its 12-step program
of recovery, which had made possible both the development of his mature writing ethic and the
creation of its fictional vehicle, Infinite Jest—his greatest personal and literary achievement. In
short, he identified.
But as Infinite Jest’s publication receded further into the past, Wallace began to realize
that the security Normal provided came with its own hidden cost: complacency. Back in familiar
surroundings, he found it easy to put off working. Wallace wrote to Don DeLillo during this
period that he was “frustrated not just with the slowness of my work but with the erratic pace I
work at,” and solicited advice from the senior author, assuring him that “any words or tips would
be appreciated and kept in confidence” (Max 235-6). Though he was occasionally producing
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shorter fiction pieces around this time, Wallace was growing anxious that he hadn’t begun work
on anything that could serve as a follow-up to Infinite Jest.
In addition to the paralyzing anxiety of producing a novel that could surpass his last one,
Wallace also seems to have been actively procrastinating by indulging the few of his remaining
addictive behaviors that were not expressly forbidden by his 12-step recovery. After Kymberly
Harris’s departure from Illinois, Wallace again started having casual sex with strangers as he’d
done during the height of his Boston hedonism with Mark Costello. Wallace was briefly
involved with a number of ISU students—both graduate and undergraduate. Even his AA
meetings were fair game, despite repeated warnings from other members of the group against his
predatory “13th-stepping”—when a more experienced AA pursues sexual involvement with
newly sober and often emotionally-fragile members. (Max 232-234).
After the short book tour for Wallace’s 1999 collection of fiction, Brief Interviews with
Hideous Men, which stories he had been composing since the end of the Infinite Jest tour,
Wallace began to lose his taste for this reckless behavior—in part because the composition
process for Brief Interviews had made him fully aware how much of himself went into its
“hideous men.” Wallace was also getting older, a point driven home by the fact that his younger
sister Amy had just given birth to her first child. Looking for stability, Wallace got a family from
his recovery group, the Poags, to set him up with a woman named Juliana Harms, and Wallace’s
personal affairs seemed to stabilize for a time. After a few months, Harms moved into Wallace’s
house. A social worker, she helped check Wallace’s self-destructive behaviors, though Harms
may have overstepped when she suggested he check himself into a treatment facility in
Pennsylvania to kick his nicotine habit. He returned when the program ended more than a week
later “highly agitated” and more anxious than ever about his lack of progress on his next big
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fiction project (Max 251). He again briefly considered going off his Nardil prescription to see if
it was causing his writer’s block, but the idea abated when Wallace started smoking again shortly
after he got home. But not long after his return from Pennsylvania, Harms began to suspect that
Wallace was being unfaithful, and when she confronted Wallace, he confessed to a relationship
with a graduate student, and Harms ended their relationship.
For the remainder of Wallace’s life, he published only short fiction or non-fiction
essays— mostly for magazines—with the exception of a book on mathematics that he agreed to
write for the Atlas Books series “Great Discoveries,” titled Everything and More: A Compact
History of Infinity. The book warrants mentioning here because it is emblematic of the level of
procrastination Wallace was capable of, especially considering the additional danger Wallace
knew the book’s subject matter would entail: indulging his abstract, theory-prone mind at the
cost of working on his next novel.
Wallace’s anxiety over what he had begun calling “the long thing” ultimately kept him
from publishing another novel after Infinite Jest. But Wallace was a productive procrastinator,
submitting a draft of Everything and More by the beginning of 2002, though it wouldn’t see
publication until 2003. By then, Wallace had moved to California, having accepted a position at
Pomona College. And though Wallace published with increasing frequency after he left Illinois,
Charles Harris
6
notes that Wallace had already completed the bulk of all his future work while
still at ISU:
David’s decade at Illinois State University was his most productive.… During this
prolific period, Wallace also wrote many of the stories and essays later collected in
Oblivion (2004) and Consider the Lobster (2006), respectively, and he began his
final novel, The Pale King, auditing advanced tax courses from ISU’s Accounting
Department[.] (170-171)
6
(who, as former head of English at ISU, was responsible for hiring Wallace)
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Compounding Wallace’s anxiety about writing a follow-up novel to surpass what he’d already
achieved was that Infinite Jest itself had inspired a crop of new novelists. Though none of their
work yet approached its level of success, by the end of Wallace’s time at ISU, a host of new
writers—Jonathan Franzen, Donald Antrim, Zadie Smith, Jeffrey Eugenides, Rick Moody,
Richard Powers, and Jonathan Safran Foer—had published novels similar enough in voice or
style that their work started drawing comparisons to Infinite Jest. And as their number grew,
Wallace felt the originality and importance of his own work diminish. Each year that passed
without another Wallace novel increased the likelihood his work would be eclipsed by writers
whose narrative aesthetic borrowed heavily from his original.
As Wallace struggled to write his next novel without the stylistic tics that others had
begun to imitate, he continued to pare down the last of what he felt were his writing’s gimmicks.
In 2004, Wallace assembled out of these efforts what would be his last collection of short fiction,
titled Oblivion. Max characterizes it as a work pervaded by a “studied and mature sadness,” its
“pitiless” stories written in “trick-free prose” that feature “Pynchon-free plots,” and an
“insistence that the reader work for his or her satisfaction” (280). And like his last collection,
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Oblivion seems for the most part content to simply hold a
mirror up to a bleak world populated by a damaged and hopeless cross-section of humanity
without offering them any way out. During this period, when Wallace was unable to start
working on his next novel, these shorter pieces allowed him to procrastinate not just because of
their length, but because he didn’t hold himself to the same ethical standards in his short fiction
as he did in his novels, rationalizing that short fiction couldn’t pull off moral prescription without
sounding preachy or hackneyed.
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In the summer of 2002, Accompanied by his two dogs, Werner and Jeeves, Wallace left
Illinois and drove west to Claremont, California, finally arriving at the house Pomona College
had arranged for him after six days on the road. In many ways, Wallace would flourish at
Pomona. Part of what had motivated him to accept the creative writing chair offered by
Pomona’s head of English, Rena Fraden, was the desire to snap his self-destructive streak of
relationships. But Wallace also thought the radical change of venue might help spur progress on
his next novel. Perhaps the best explanation was the one he gave to a departmental colleague at
ISU, Curtis White: that it was simply “time to grow up” (Max 267).
One of the two visitors Wallace had during his first week in his new Claremont house
was Karen Green, a visual artist who Wallace had given previously given permission to adapt his
story “The Depressed Person” into a piece of visual art. Wallace consented, even though Green’s
version of the story was rewritten to conclude with a happy ending. Green and Wallace must
have hit it off when she came by to deliver the piece to him—they started dating soon after
Green’s marriage ended in November of 2002, and when she invited him to spend Christmas
with her in Hawaii, Wallace—in a move uncharacteristic of someone who hated travel and had a
debilitating fear of sharks—accepted. Before they came back, Wallace asked Green to marry
him, but Green demurred. In December of 2004, a little over two years into their relationship,
they flew to Urbana and were married with Wallace’s family in attendance. Wallace had bought
a house in Claremont earlier in the fall, and Green moved in the following June. Having his
personal life in relative order made Wallace feel he was making good on finally growing up, and
those who knew him best—his sister, Amy; Jonathan Franzen; Mark Costello—all have similar
recollections of Wallace’s years with Green in California as being the happiest they’d seen him.
Wallace was now confidently sober; he and Green even kept wine in the house for guests (Max
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283). But Wallace remained stalled on his novel project, and decided that he was finally stable
enough to take drastic action to resolve his final lingering source of anxiety. Wallace had long
suspected that his medication might be what was impeding progress on “the long thing,” and
now Wallace felt good enough that with Green’s blessing and promise of support, he decided,
once again, to stop taking Nardil.
Hard-line, fundamentalist interpretations of what constitutes sobriety—e.g. that
antidepressants are to be considered “substances” and their daily use an addiction—are
specifically discouraged
7
in the official literature of Alcoholics Anonymous (“Medications 6”).
Nevertheless, fundamentalist interpretations appealed to the purist in Wallace and seemed
consistent with the all-or-nothing maintenance of his sobriety. It was, after all, what had saved
his life—and the only way he knew how to stay sober. But when Wallace consulted physicians
about his Nardil cessation, they convinced him to try tapering off the Nardil first, then as the
effects wore off, begin a controlled introduction of a later-generation antidepressant. The doctors
suggested that after the new drug had time to work, if Wallace still felt he could go without
medication, it would be an option.
Wallace’s physicians didn’t anticipate the scenario that unfolded when the new
antidepressants failed to prevent the onset of Wallace’s post-Nardil depression. In the months
that followed, Wallace tried several new drugs and ultimately several courses of
electroconvulsive therapy in an attempt to overcome his new depression, none of which proved
equal to the task. In June of 2008, Wallace was hospitalized twice following unsuccessful suicide
7
The AA pamphlet is quite clear on this point: “Just as it is wrong to enable or support any alcoholic to become re-
addicted to any drug, it’s equally wrong to deprive any alcoholic of medication, which can alleviate or control other
disabling physical and/or emotional problems.”
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attempts. And on September 12th, while Green was out running an errand, Wallace walked
outside to his back patio, stood up on a chair, and hanged himself.
The biographical details of David Foster Wallace’s life and his novels seem to me
inextricable from one another. While it is unreasonable to claim that the struggle to write The
Pale King killed Wallace, one can reasonably assert that the difficulty he had with his unfinished
novel was a factor in his decision to go off Nardil. Regarding the connection between the
difficulty of writing a follow-up to Infinite Jest and Wallace’s suicide, Max quotes Green
directly, saying that Wallace floated the idea of trying another antidepressant because “the
person who would go off the medications that were possibly keeping him alive was not the
person he liked,” and that “he didn’t want to care about the writing as much as he did” (Max
297).
Wallace’s novels are a record of his developing ethical concerns and his increasing
concern for his audience. Yet they are remarkable in their thematic consistency: each is
fundamentally concerned with the same set of recurring themes: solipsism, language, choice, and
the fundamental question of what it means to be alive and awake in contemporary America.
Wallace understood the novel as the only form of fiction capable of “fulfilling his compact with
readers” that he’d originated in “E Unibus Pluram” when he called for writing by “the next real
literary rebels” who would “eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue” and instead choose to
endorse “single-entendre principles.” For Wallace, “the novel was the big form, the one that
mattered, that reviewers and other authors cared about and by which he could fulfill his compact
with readers,” through honest empathic concern for readers and the alleviation of human
loneliness. (Max 237). It was the only standard by which Wallace ultimately measured his
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fiction’s success and the only place where he allowed himself to elevate ethical and moral
concerns over formal or theoretical ones.
In a 1993 interview for Whiskey River Magazine, Hugh Kennedy asks Wallace flatly,
“What would you like your writing to do?” And in a rare instance of brevity, Wallace replies, “I
think all good writing somehow addresses the concern of and acts as an anodyne against
loneliness. We’re all terribly, terribly lonely. And there’s a way, at least in prose fiction, that can
allow you to be intimate with the world and with a mind and with characters that you just can’t
be in the real world.… I think what I would like my stuff to do is make people less lonely”
(“Looking” 53).
For a time, David Foster Wallace dealt with this fear of loneliness by busying himself
with the complex puzzles of philosophy, postmodern fiction, and poststructuralist theory.
Recovery helped him see that these pursuits were distractions that merely delayed an inevitable
head-on confrontation with loneliness. Infinite Jest is Wallace’s attempt to not only fully
countenance that loneliness in himself, but to help alleviate that loneliness in others. By offering
up his own experience and the recovery community that had saved his life, Wallace forged a new
fiction that was not only innovative but mature and humane. But in his attempt to universalize
his diagnosis onto the larger culture, Wallace took on too much. Though Infinite Jest was
ultimately successful at solving those problems he’d been avoiding with metafiction, no work of
fiction could solve the larger problem he sought to address.
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Figure 4-1. Photograph of David Foster Wallace’s AA Meeting Notes, page 1.
158
Figure 4-2. Photograph of David Foster Wallace’s AA Meeting Notes, page 2.
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CHAPTER 5
AFTERWORD: DAVID FOSTER WALLACE’S TRANSFORMATIVE GIFTS AND THE
LABOR OF GRATITUDE
Youth ends when egotism does; maturity begins when one lives for others.
—Hermann Hesse
Gertrude
Labors of Gratitude, Gift Economies, and Wallace Communities
Intended as a coda to my larger project, this afterword opens by examining Lewis Hyde’s
theorization of what he calls “gift economies” and their currency, expressed as “labors of
gratitude” (40-57). I then consider how the last phase of Wallace’s 12-step substance-abuse and
theory recovery informs his most widely-read piece, the commencement address he gave to the
graduating class of 2005 at Kenyon College, which “labor of gratitude” I regard as the most
concentrated distillation of the mature writing ethic Wallace had honed in Infinite Jest. Finally, I
use Hyde’s concepts to frame my discussion of both on- and offline Wallace communities and to
discuss the tensions between the gift economies of Wallace communities and the prestige
economies of the traditional academy.
Lewis Hyde and The Gift Economy
Before delving into Hyde’s text The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World,
in which he defines his conception of “gift economies,” I should first acknowledge a connection
between Wallace and Hyde. In the obligatory “Praise for” section of The Gift’s opening pages,
we find an enthusiastic recommendation of Hyde’s text from Wallace himself:
The Gift actually deserves the hyperbolic praise that in most blurbs is so empty. It
is the sort of book that you remember where you were and even what you were
wearing when you first picked it up. The sort that you hector friends about until
they read it too. This is not just formulaic blurbspeak; it is the truth. No one who is
invested in any kind of art, in questions of what real art does and doesn’t have to do
with money, spirituality, ego, love, ugliness, sales, politics, morality, marketing,
and whatever you call ‘value,’ can read The Gift and remain unchanged.
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Wallace’s copy of The Gift—now housed at UT Austin’s Harry Ransom Center—contains his
many annotations (see fig. 5-1).
Hyde—who had spent several years counseling alcoholics in a hospital detoxification
ward—presents the recovery program of Alcoholics Anonymous as a prime example of a
“transformative gift,” one which must be offered without any expectation of return. In a footnote
on page 74 (2006 ed.), Hyde reasons that for alcoholics, AA’s “gift” is a function of the
program’s spiritual requirement—the belief in a “higher power”:
Alcoholics who get sober in AA tend to become very attached to the group, at least
to begin with. Their involvement seems, in part, a consequence of the fact that
AA’s program is a gift. In the case of alcoholism, the attachment may be a
necessary part of the healing process. Alcoholism is an affliction whose relief
seems to require that the sufferer be bound up in something larger than the ego-of-
one (in a “higher power,” be it only the power of the group). Healings that call for
differentiation, on the other hand, may be more aptly delivered through the market.
(74 fn)
Hyde describes here a sort of hermeneutics of recovery: the only membership requirement of
Alcoholics Anonymous is “a desire to stop drinking,” which desire almost nobody truly has
without hitting bottom. Time and again, AA’s official literature seems to go out of its way to
remind newcomers that it is only in the depths of such a low that most alcoholics are willing to
submit to the rigors of the program.
This receptiveness in the early days of AA’s program of recovery is doubly important
because the next step after an honest and sincere desire to quit drinking is often the most
difficult: the surrendering of will to a higher power. And here again, this may explain the pains
taken by AA’s literature when it emphasizes over and over that this higher power can take
whatever form a member chooses. In Infinite Jest, Wallace talks about this kind of hardcore
receptiveness as the only real prerequisite for recovery:
The bitch of the thing is that you have to want to. If you don’t want to do as you’re
told—I mean as it’s suggested you do—it means that your own personal will is still
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in control[.] The will you call your own ceased to be yours as of who knows how
many Substance-drenched years ago.… This is why most people will Come In and
Hang In only after their own entangled will has just about killed them.… You have
to want to take the suggestions, want to abide by the traditions of anonymity,
humility, surrender to the Group conscience. If you don’t obey, nobody will kick
you out. They won’t have to. You’ll end up kicking yourself out, if you steer by
your own sick will. (357)
And in an extraordinarily convenient coincidence in terms of my present argument, Hyde
chooses AA as his example to explain the circular nature of transformational gifts:
[M]ost artists are converted to art by art itself. The future artist finds himself or
herself moved by a work of art, and, through that experience, comes to labor in the
service of art until he can profess his own gifts. Those of us who do not become
artists nonetheless attend to art in a similar spirit. We come to painting, to poetry,
to the stage, hoping to revive the soul. And any artist whose work touches us earns
our gratitude.… [F]or it is when art acts as an agent of transformation that we may
correctly speak of it as a gift. A lively culture will have transformative gifts as a
general feature – it will have groups like AA which address specific problems, it
will have methods of passing knowledge from old to young, it will have spiritual
teachings available at all levels of maturation and for the birth of the spiritual self.
(48)
To restate this passage for my purposes here: The best art is transformative for author and
reader alike. Whether one is the giver or receiver of transformational art is merely a function of
one’s position in the cycle. The transformational gift is passed freely from giver to recipient,
who, transformed by gratitude, feels a duty to pass the gift on to the next recipient. This last step
is the same gratitude-inspired service that AA’s fifth tradition and twelfth step refer to: the
transformational gift of AA, received by those able to “hang in there” and “keep coming back,”
is that (as yet another AA maxim goes) “it works if you work it.”
And this is where recovery’s hermeneutic process cycles back into itself: working the
twelfth step is the point at which the recipient, no longer a newcomer—having been transformed
by AA’s gift—can assume the role of the giver by sponsoring new members. AA’s gift appears
in several places throughout Infinite Jest. Wallace’s Boston AA members understand “giving it
away” in a rather transactional sense, though not one that diminishes the effects of the gift:
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Giving It Away is a cardinal Boston AA principle. The term’s derived from an
epigrammatic description of recovery in Boston AA: ‘You give it up to get it back
to give it away.’ Sobriety in Boston is regarded as less a gift than a sort of cosmic
loan. You can’t pay the loan back, but you can pay it forward, by spreading the
message that despite all appearances AA works, spreading this message to the next
new guy who’s tottered in to a meeting and is sitting in the back row unable to hold
his cup of coffee. (344)
Reading this passage from Infinite Jest against Hyde’s description of the reciprocal relationship
between gifts and gratitude, several parallels become apparent:
In each example I have offered of a transformative gift, if the teaching begins to
“take,” the recipient feels gratitude. I would like to speak of gratitude as a labor
undertaken by the soul to effect the transformation after a gift has been received.
Between the time a gift comes to us and the time we pass it along, we suffer
gratitude. Moreover, with gifts that are agents of change, it is only when we have
come up to its level, as it were, that we can give it away again. Passing the gift
along is the act of gratitude that finishes the labor. The transformation is not
accomplished until we have the power to give the gift on our own terms. Therefore,
the end of the labor of gratitude is similarity with the gift or with its donor. Once
this similarity has been achieved we may feel a lingering and generalized gratitude,
but we won’t feel it with the urgency of true indebtedness. (48)
Profound examples of this labor of gratitude within AA communities are frequent. That AA
members “suffer gratitude” in response to such an immense and personally meaningful gift is
visible on the flyleaves of the UF library’s lending copies of AA literature (see fig. 5-2). In Trysh
Travis’s The Language of the Heart, she notes that “The foundational opposition between the
logic of AA’s gift economy and that of the mainstream is encapsulated in the AA slogan
explaining the role 12th step work plays in sobriety maintenance: ‘You have to give it away in
order to keep it’” (92). In the previous figure’s inscriptions by Curtis, Robert, Terry, and Rich—
some of which even break anonymity by supplying their last names—we see “the ability to give
the gift,” which Travis goes on to say “is the marker of true sobriety[.] The sober AA is only
sober because another alcoholic gave him the gift at an earlier time” (92).
Hyde describes the gift-recipient’s “transformation” as one that produces a “similarity
with the gift or with its donor.” As I re-read the AA sections of Infinite Jest, I cannot
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understand Wallace’s use of the word “identification” to mean anything other than this process
of “achieving similarity.” In these sections of the novel, Wallace manages to show us precisely
the part of recovery that Boston AA’s newcomers can’t see—even though the gift’s
transformation is already underway.
Wallace’s Kenyon Commencement as Labor of Gratitude
Considered as a stand-alone piece, Wallace’s commencement address to Kenyon
College’s graduating class of 2005 amounts to the clearest and most distilled example of his
mature writing ethic. Written in the first person, the commencement opens with an anecdote:
“There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish
swimming the other way, and he nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And
the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and
goes: ‘What the hell is water?’” (0:50-1:08). As Wallace goes on to explain, “I am not the wise
old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often
the ones that are hardest to see and talk about” (1:15-1:23). These important realities, Wallace
says, are most often expressed as clichés, and as the commencement speech continues, it
becomes apparent that the cliché that Wallace intends to address with his commencement speech
is that “the value of your liberal arts education” lies in “teaching you how to think” (2:25). This
cliché about how to think, Wallace argues, hides a deeper, more important reality:
Twenty years after my own education, I have come gradually to understand that the
liberal-arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much
deeper, more serious idea. Learning how to think really means learning how to
exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and
aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct
meaning from existence. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult
life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an
excellent servant but a terrible master.” This, like many clichés, so lame and
unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the
least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always
shoot themselves in the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that
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most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger. And I
submit that this is what the real, no-bullshit value of your liberal arts education is
supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable,
prosperous, respectable, adult life dead. Unconscious. A slave to your head and to
your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in
and day out. (8:38-10:10)
Wallace explains that operating unconsciously in this sort of death-in-life existence is our
“default setting,” but that left unchecked, living this way amounts to “an imprisonment so total
that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up” (5:50-5:52). But as an example of Wallace’s
mature ethic, the commencement address does not merely describe a problem, it needs to present
a solution, to point towards a way out of the problem. The solution, Wallace explains, lies in
realizing that we have the freedom to choose what we worship.
Around the 22-minute mark of the November 5, 2016, episode of Matt Bucher and Dave
Laird’s Podcast, “The Great Concavity,” which focuses on Wallace and his work, the
conversation turns to Wallace’s Kenyon College commencement address. At this point in the
podcast, the hosts are discussing the section of the speech where Wallace talks specifically about
the things it’s OK for us to worship and derive our sense of meaning. Drawing a distinction,
Bucher notes:
He [Wallace] says something about if you worship money and things, if that’s
where you get, you know, your meaning out of life, you’ll never have enough. If
you worship this other thing—if you worship beauty and sexual allure, you’ll
always feel ugly, you’ll die a million deaths. All that stuff is him saying: “Don’t
worship anything except a higher being.” And that’s really where I think me and
Wallace personally, like as a philosophy, part ways in that I disagree with that. And
I think that that’s not the definition of “atheism”—because he says: “in the day-to-
day trenches of adult life there’s no such thing as atheism,” and he says: “everyone
worships.” And I say worshipping is different than a belief in a higher power….
You can tap real meaning in life from something that is not centered out of a higher
power. And he says: “no, it has to be,” and for me that’s a little bit different.
Bucher’s distinction is interesting to me in a couple of ways. First, this part of the
commencement speech has always bothered me for what sounds like the same reasons Bucher
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cites. Though my grandfather was a Methodist minister and I grew up going to church, I do not
consider myself to be a religious person—at least not in the dogmatic or doctrinal senses that
“religious” generally connotes. Wallace’s restriction of the acceptable places for me to “tap real
meaning” to a list of outmoded spiritual traditions has always seemed odd. This is the relevant
sentence from Wallace’s address: “The compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of God
or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh, or the Wiccan Mother
Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty
much anything else you worship will eat you alive.”
What is the commonality between the items on this list that keep them from eating us
alive? Do these traditions share some particular quality that keeps them from ultimately bending
back inward, toward the self, that keeps them from cultivating in us the selfish desire to
accumulate and display the things that Wallace names: money, beauty, power, intellectual
mastery? Why this particular list? The answer has everything to do with Wallace’s phrasing. His
wording here provides a clue, I think, to his source material.
Wallace’s commencement-address phrasing—“God or spiritual-type thing”—and the
plurality of choices in his list of religious traditions has a familiar ring to it. The particular
resonance I hear occurs in the Big Book chapter titled “We Agnostics.” In the chapters that lead
up to it, alcoholism is presented as a self-inflicted problem, with the self here understood as a
tripartite construction comprised of the “mind,” “body,” and—crucially—the “spirit” of the
alcoholic. This spiritual side of the self is basically the human capacity for numinous or
spiritual experience—something like the feeling of being moved emotionally by the sublime.
The Big Book presents it as an explanation for the preponderance of religions in so many
disparate cultures, for the “persistence of the myth”—whether it be true or not. But most
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importantly, they see this innate spiritual capacity as something that is exceptionally and
singularly human. In “We Agnostics,” AA’s Big Book elaborates on how this third component,
the alcoholic’s spiritual or metaphysical aspect, must be reformed.
In it, we read that as agnostics, some of the first members of AA had difficulty following
the second step. This amounts to a fairly big problem for someone in AA because the rest of the
12 steps hang on the acceptance of the first two: “1. We admitted we were powerless over
alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable” and “2. Came to believe that a Power greater
than ourselves could restore us to sanity” (79). Now, writing as former agnostics who had been
able to overcome their skepticism, the authors are “at pains to tell why we think our present faith
is reasonable, why we think it more sane and logical to believe than not to believe, why we say
our former thinking was soft and mushy when we threw up our hands in doubt and said ‘We
don’t know’” (53). When the agnostics looked closely at what held them back from being
“restored to sanity” through belief in a “Power greater than [them]selves,” (59) they found it was
another belief—a belief in their own ability to reason, or a faith in their reasonable faculties:
…let us think a little more closely. Without knowing it, had we not been brought to
where we stood by a certain kind of faith? For did we not believe in our own
reasoning? Did we not have confidence in our ability to think? What was that but a
sort of faith? Yes, we had been faithful, abjectly faithful to the God of Reason. So,
in one way or another, we discovered that faith had been involved all the time! (53-
54)
Now, with regard to the “particular resonance” I mentioned hearing above, this next bit is where
the bells started going off:
We found, too, that we had been worshippers.… Had we not variously worshipped
people, sentiment, things, money, and ourselves? … Who of us had not loved
something or somebody? How much did these feelings, these loves, these
worships, have to do with pure reason? Little or nothing, we saw at last. Were not
these things the tissue out of which our lives were constructed? Did not these
feelings, after all, determine the course of our existence? It was impossible to say
we had no capacity for faith, or love, or worship. In one form or another we had
been living by faith and little else. (54, my emphasis)
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The authors go on to explain that the matter of their conversion was no small thing; if they had
not been primed to accept the necessity of handing over their wills to a higher power, they
probably wouldn’t have been able to do it—save that they had recently experienced a particular
event in the narrative common to all addicts: hitting bottom. And at the point in David Foster
Wallace’s life when the Big Book crosses his path, hitting bottom is precisely where he found
himself.
Ultimately, the items on Wallace’s approved worship-list in the Kenyon address are there
because they’re traditions that direct us toward a love of something outside of ourselves as their
primary principles—Christianity’s first two commandments, for example, are to “Love God with
the entirety of the heart, intellect, and will,” and that basically, if the first commandment is
properly understood and followed, that one cannot help but follow the second: “love others as
yourself.” The spiritual traditions that make up Wallace’s list are variations on that same
theme—something like Augustine’s “Love, then do what thou wilt.”
On February 1, 2016, Tom Bissell published a piece in The New York Times, which is an
excerpt from his introduction to the recently-published twentieth-anniversary edition of
Wallace’s own big book. Bissell writes: “While I have never been able to get a handle on
Wallace’s notion of spirituality, I think it is a mistake to view him as anything other than a
religious writer. His religion, like many, was a religion of language.” I agree with Bissell that to
understand Wallace (at least post-Jest Wallace) as anything other than a religious writer is a
mistake—but only with the caveat that “religious” here means something very specific and non-
doctrinaire. However, I am confused by Bissell’s confession of difficulty with “getting a handle”
on Wallace’s spirituality. Maybe this is some sort of rhetorical strategy on Bissell’s part; perhaps
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the introduction to an 1,100-page novel isn’t the place to launch into a paean to Alcoholics
Anonymous.
But if he truly means what he says—that he cannot “get a handle on Wallace’s notion of
spirituality”—he must not have looked very hard. Wallace mentions spirituality and religion in
numerous places, from interviews with Brian Garner and Larry McCaffery, to the Kenyon
speech, to nonfiction essays like “The Nature of the Fun,” to Infinite Jest itself. What’s
more, Wallace is reasonably consistent about what he says. This consistency, I would argue,
stems from Wallace’s fidelity to (what I understand as) the source of his first serious
engagements with religion: his participation in AA.
But in typical Wallace fashion, he couldn’t just take what AA said about spirituality on
faith; he had to do his own research. At least one of the texts Wallace consulted for this research
was Huston Smith’s The World’s Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions (which by the time
Wallace read it had been re-issued and re-titled; it was originally published as The Religions of
Man).
Fig. 5-3 shows the cover of the 1991 edition of the Smith text (like the one owned and
annotated by Wallace, which copy is available for viewing at UT’s Harry Ransom Center) and of
the image reproduced on it in another context. The cover image is a reproduction of a Norman
Rockwell’s “Golden Rule,” a piece that first appeared on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post
in 1961. (A mosaic version of the Rockwell piece still hangs in the United Nations building in
New York.) The text that sits on top of the image, “Do unto others as you would have them do
unto you,” is there in the original—as in Rockwell put it there.
I mention this here because I think it goes a long way toward helping us “get a handle on
Wallace’s notion of spirituality.” Fig. 5-4 contains a photograph of a page of Wallace’s
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annotations in the Smith text. The following is a transcription with Wallace’s underlining for
clarity’s sake:
Might not becoming a part of a larger, more significant whole relieve life of its
triviality? That question announces the birth of religion. For though in some
watered-down sense there may be a religion of self-worship, true religion begins
with the quest for meaning and value beyond self-centeredness. It renounces the
ego’s claims to finality.
But what is this renunciation for? The question brings us to the two signposts on
the Path of Renunciation. The first of these reads “the community,” as the obvious
candidate for something greater than ourselves. In supporting at once our own life
and the lives others, the community has an importance no single life can command.
Let us, then, transfer our allegiance to it, giving its claims priority over our own.
This transfer marks the first great step in religion. It produces the religion of duty,
after pleasure and success the third great aim of life in the Hindu outlook. Its power
over the mature is tremendous. Myriads have transformed the will-to-get into the
will-to-give, the will-to-win into the will-to-serve. Not to triumph but to do their
best—to acquit themselves responsibly, whatever the task at hand—has become
their prime objective.
In the margin next to this underlining is Wallace’s note: “AA.”
I do not mean here to equate the underscoring of a passage with its unequivocal or
uncritical endorsement. But neither do I think it a stretch to say that Wallace had read the AA
literature closely enough to see in this passage from Smith the core principles of “spirituality” as
they’re presented by Alcoholics Anonymous: the twin necessities of self-renunciation via the
relinquishment of the will to a power greater than oneself, and the consequent undertaking of
work in service of others. As the Big Book (cribbing KJV’s James 2) cautions: “faith without
works is dead.”
One of the things that allowed Wallace to suspend his disbelief about the AA-mandated
belief in “a power greater than himself” was the way the Big Book conceptualizes the notions of
“meaning” and “use” as intrinsically bound up with one another. In the AA model,
Wittgenstein’s aphorism is applied not only to language, but to the rather more immediate case
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of the recovering alcoholic struggling to cope with life after alcohol. In this context,
asking “What is the meaning of life?” is to ask “What is the use of my life?” or “Am I useful to
others”?
This notion of “usefulness” and its relation to the “default-mode” of self-centeredness
Wallace talks about in the commencement is one that crops up again and again in AA’s Big
Book: “Never was I to pray for myself, except as my requests bore on my usefulness to others.
Then only might I expect to receive…. Simple, but not easy; a price had to be paid. It meant the
destruction of self-centeredness” (13–14, my emphasis). In fact, the concept of service work—
“passing it on,” as it is codified in one AA maxim—is directly and repeatedly correlated with
the chances of a successful recovery:
For if an alcoholic failed to perfect and enlarge his spiritual life through work and
self-sacrifice for others, he could not survive the certain trials and low spots
ahead. If he did not work, he would surely drink again, and if he drank he would
surely die. Then faith would be dead indeed. With us it is just like that…. Faith has
to work twenty-four hours a day in and through us, or we perish (14–16); Our very
lives, as ex-problem drinkers, depend upon our constant thought of others and
how we may help meet their needs (20); Whatever our protestations, are not most
of us concerned with ourselves, our resentments, or our self-pity? Selfishness—
self-centeredness! That, we think, is the door of our troubles…. So our troubles,
we think, are basically of our own making. They arise out of ourselves, and the
alcoholic is an extreme example of self-will run riot, though he usually doesn’t
think so. Above everything, we alcoholics must be rid of this selfishness. We must,
or it kills us! (Alcoholics Anonymous 62, my emphasis).
Ultimately, the mere cessation of drinking is presented as not finally the point; it is rather a
means to another rehabilitation—it is a restoration of the capacity for service: “At the moment
we are trying to put our lives in order. But this is not an end in itself. Our real purpose is to fit
ourselves to be of maximum service to God and the people about us” (77, my emphasis). I am
inclined to read all of Wallace’s writing from Infinite Jest on as a function of “working the
steps.” And if Wallace was sincere about working them, which I believe he was, this sincerity
has a certain bearing on questions that get asked over and over about his work.
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Labors of Gratitude and Wallace Communities
The Kenyon commencement speech might never have come to light without one
Wallace-community in particular—the internet’s oldest community of Wallace fans (and the first
one I participated in)—the David Foster Wallace listserv, or “Wallace-l.”
1
This online
community of Wallace enthusiasts is nearly as old as Infinite Jest itself, and marked twenty years
of continuous operation on April 26th, 2016. The listserv, one of the earliest forms of internet-
based mass communication, enables group discussion by taking a single message sent to its
address (e.g. “Wallace-l@waste.org”) and relaying a copy of the message to the email address of
each of its “subscribers.” Subscribing is generally a matter of sending an email to the listserv’s
address with the single word “subscribe” in the subject line.
The genesis of Wallace-l begins on another listserv dedicated to the discussion of
Thomas Pynchon’s work. According to their archives, talk of creating Wallace-l initially began
on pynchon-l due to its subscribers’ irritation over the amount of non-Pynchon-related discussion
that flooded their list in the wake of Infinite Jest’s publication:
From: MASCARO@[omitted]
Date: 19 Mar 1996 17:53 -0800
Subject: curmudgeonly
Since most of my posts seem to be getting clogged in some dead gopher bum, I'm
sure no one will read this little note, but I do need to say it.
For the past week or more IJ has been occupying the vast bulk of this list's
imaginative meanderings, so why don't one of you just go start a DFW list? Is
there one?
john m
1
The Kenyon commencement address was first transcribed and posted to the internet by Wallace-l member Devin
Thompson.
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This conversation thread continued until one of pynchon-l’s administrators, Dan Schmidt, sent
out an inaugural message to the subscribers of the newly-created Wallace-l listserv:
From: dfan at lglass.com (Schmidt, Dan)
Date: Fri, 26 Apr 1996 12:06:26 -0400
Subject: Wallace-l: Welcome to Wallace-l!
Because I did not get around to writing an info message until a day after I opened
the list, none of you have received it yet. So here it is. We already have around
twenty people, so if you have something to say, there are people listening.
Dan Schmidt | dfan at lglass.com | http://www2.lglass.com/~dfan
The first conversations on Wallace-l were mostly about Infinite Jest, but there weren’t that many
of them: during its first year, entire months sometimes passed without a single message being
sent to wallace-l. But since the early days of the list, the traffic has steadily increased and,
predictably, has recorded its heaviest periods of traffic when Wallace published new material or
after significant Wallace-related developments like the news of his suicide in September of 2008.
As of August 2016, the list has added more than 1,400 subscribers and distributed upwards of
77,000 emails.
Unlike a forum, where members’ post-counts act as a system of capital accumulation
(indeed, some forums display their posters’ “ranks” below their names, which ranks are a
function of the number of posts they’ve made to the forum), the email-based format of the
Wallace-l listserv ascribes no authority to any individual member’s contributions. Whereas
systems like Facebook and Twitter keep track of content via likes or retweets, recommending
popular content to users via personalized notifications, the Wallace-l system itself makes no such
endorsements; there is no mechanism in the listserv software to make them. So unlike current-
generation social media platforms, the level of the Wallace-l list’s engagement with a topic is
solely a function of the list members’ interest in a message’s content.
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Of the roughly 1,400 current members of Wallace-l, only 79 are subscribed to the list
using an email address with a .edu TLD designation. I do not mean to suggest by this ratio that
only six percent of all Wallace-l subscribers are professional academics; however, it reveals
something about the character of the Wallace-l community that less than six percent of those
who participate in list discussions advertise their affiliation with an academic institution via their
email addresses. Unlike the experience of studying literature in a university humanities program
—where it is not uncommon to find multiple course offerings per semester devoted to the study
not of theory applied to literary texts but to understanding a particular theorist or theoretical texts
themselves—on Wallace-l, theory enters the discussion in service of textual explanation.
This unwritten prohibition of theory for its own sake or of theoretical discussions that
privilege abstract intellectualizing over an idea’s narrative application or consequences grows
organically out of the list’s engagement with Wallace’s texts. The David Foster Wallace I have
framed as a recovering theory addict was a writer who by the advent of Wallace-l had instituted a
strict pass/fail litmus test governing the use of theory in his own work: to make the cut, they had
to perform a narrative function beyond the mere statement of themselves qua theory. It is this
mature Wallace that my phrases “recovering theory addict” or “recovering smart aleck”
designate, and they are, I believe, apt descriptions of the majority of subscribers who comprise
Wallace-l.
Most new members don’t start threads themselves until they’ve spent time observing the
other subscribers’ messages to the list in order to get a feel for the listserv’s tenor, unwritten
conventions, and group dynamics. This type of passive participation by the newcomer—like
sitting in the back row of an AA meeting—amounts to a sort of eavesdropping. And as with an
AA meeting, to observe without sharing with the group for too long is a discouraged behavior,
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which is reflected in the listserv’s term for it: “lurking.” Often, a newcomer’s first post to the list
begins with a nod to this practice as a way to break the ice. Here’s an example of a recent
subscriber’s first post from March 5 of this year:
From: Jameson Randall McBride j.mcbride@columbia.edu
Date: Sat, 5 Mar 2016 13:41:42 -0800
Subject: Re: wallace-l: Jarret Kobek's I Hate the Internet
Longtime collegiate lurker here. I'm reading I Hate the Internet right now & I think
that's a little unfair: his narrator takes an (ironically?) polemical attitude against
pretty much all U.S. lit, believing that the idea of a "good novel" is a C.I.A.
conspiracy, etc.
The tone of the novel attempts to reflect the overblown, angry tone of online
content. It's a cool idea, and I think he executes it well.
This practice of acknowledging one’s first contribution serves as a sort of self-deprecating
introduction of the newcomer to the group—a practice that recalls the traditional salutation of
call-and-response by speakers in the AA tradition (“Hi, I’m Jameson, and I’m an alcoholic”).
Another behavioral parallel between Wallace fan communities and twelve-step groups—
one that sets it distinctly apart from the academic community in general—is these groups’
common anticompetitive ethos. David Hering, in the introduction to his 2010 anthology
Consider David Foster Wallace, attributes the willingness of Wallace scholars to share
information across academic/non-academic boundaries to Wallace’s writing itself:
Wallace’s ability to create this sense of intense intimacy in his writing is what has
garnered him a legion of devoted, obsessed fans. There is a unique quality about his
fan base. Wallace’s philosophy and writing style prompt both serious literary
criticism and regular human conversation. Quite frequently the online listserv
Wallace-l discusses items of personal interest and offers opinions about general
topics that have nothing to do with Wallace’s work, not an uncommon practice for
internet communities but certainly uncommon for communities devoted to single
literary figures that generally stick to more aesthetic topics. There also seems to be
more interaction between electronic and academic communities on the subject of
Wallace’s work than is standard. (15)
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This “interaction between electronic and academic communities” is exactly what the recent
campaigns for “open access” in academic circles are about: they are attempts to break down the
kinds of barriers put in place in order to protect career academics’ (and their publishers’)
monetary interests via copyright. The current push to get University faculty to publish their work
in open-access journals stands in stark contrast to the usual cutthroat approach, though this is
perhaps more pronounced in the sciences than in the humanities. This sort of openness is one that
characterizes communities of Wallace scholars. Consider the following snippet of an email
response to a lengthy Wallace-l thread from 2011:
From: jtractatus at gmail.com
Subject: in a pinch, need some smart help from smart helpers
Date: 5 May 2011 20:09 -0800
Hey Jonah,
I'm currently also writing a Thesis on DFW's conception of PPM [post-
postmodernism] or "the new thing" we've all speculated about and how this is a
fundamentally ethical construct. So I guess we can consider ourselves competitors,
but I'd prefer to think of us as colleagues.
This poster, James McAdams, went on to volunteer a lengthy answer to the original poster’s
request for help with his thesis, as did over a dozen other Wallace-l members, two of whom,
Maria Bustillos and Adam Kelly, have published numerous print articles on Wallace, and
another, Greg Carlisle, published the first monograph-length study of Infinite Jest. I chose this
message as a representative example of Wallace-l’s anticompetitive nature for a personal
reason—it was this message, which I read shortly after joining the list myself, that finally
convinced me to reorient my academic focus and commit to a project on Wallace.
Since then, my project has benefitted in innumerable ways from this type of support
beyond my initial experience of the Wallace-l group. I owe an enormous debt to the unusual
generosity of several different fan communities, but the greatest personal debt I owe to any one
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Wallace fan or scholar is unquestionably to Matt Bucher. I first met Matt at the Marriott bar after
the initial day of panels at Illinois State University’s first annual Wallace conference in 2014.
Since that conversation, Matt has made available to me over 600 personal photographs of
Wallace’s book-annotations, correspondence, research notes, and draft materials from the
holdings of the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center archives. As the administrator of the
Wallace-l listserv, (a job he took over from the original administrator, Dan Schmidt, on April 17,
2002), he has also provided me with access to the administrative backend of the software, which
has made my own research into the Wallace-l community for this project easier by several orders
of magnitude. It was through Matt’s influence that I and the other attendees of the 2015 ISU
Wallace conference screened an advance copy of the recent Wallace biopic The End of the Tour
in the theater attached to the conference hotel, after which, on that same screen, the audience
participated in an interview with the film’s director, James Ponsoldt. My gratitude for Matt’s
generosity with both his research materials and his time cannot be overstated.
So what is it that compels thousands of strangers to organize themselves—both on the
internet and in person—for the sole purpose of talking to each other about David Foster
Wallace’s writing? With the possible exception of Thomas Pynchon, I can’t think of another
figure in contemporary American literature whose readers generate and engage in so much
collaborative work. The amount of scholarship that Wallace fan groups contribute to both
professional and independent Wallace studies already represents an enormous body of
information, and its scope is now expanding at a rate impossible for a single scholar to keep pace
with.
In addition to Wallace-l, consider the following list of projects, all of which charge no
access fee (though some require significant financial resources), and all of which have helped
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shape this project: Nick Maniatis’s thehowlingfantods.com, Matt Bucher & Dave Laird’s
podcast, The Great Concavity (which has featured among its guests Wallace biographer D.T.
Max
2
), multiple international conferences (including Paris & London, the annual conferences at
Illinois State University, and an upcoming one in Australia), and Chris Ayer’s Poor Yorick
Entertainment tumblr, “A Visual Exploration of the Filmography of James O. Incandenza”
(Ayers has designed and donated the logos for all of the ISU conferences, and his art is featured
on all of the merchandise sold by ISU to keep the DFW conferences sustainable).
Two final online, group-sourced Wallace projects bear mentioning here in a little more
detail because of the sheer number of people who participated in them: the original group read of
Infinite Jest that took place in 2009, “Infinite Summer,” and one of this year’s group reads,
“Infinite Winter.” Participation in Infinite Winter eclipsed the enormous response of the original,
with its own 800-member subReddit, 600 Twitter followers, and 200-member Goodreads group,
not to mention the multiple weekly posts by the six “guides” that appear on the website,
infinitewinter.org and their accompanying comment threads.
When I’ve been lucky enough to make a contribution to projects like these, I’ve always
come away from the experience feeling like I’m running on rocket fuel. Collaborative work has
the unique ability to remind me why I started writing about Wallace in the first place. Whatever
my level of participation, I always get back far more than I put in. But none of these
communities would exist without the dedicated people who maintain them and whose
involvement far exceeds anything that could reasonably be called “participation.” Given the
amount of labor required, what drives those who devote time and energy to their creation and
2
The hosts were for some reason interested in what I’d have to say about Wallace for an hour, the result of which
was Episode 16, available here: http://greatconcavity.podbean.com/e/episode-13-discussing-david-foster-wallace-
with-rob-short/.
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maintenance? In an attempt to answer this question, I offer the following account of my own
experience.
The only plausible explanation for this kind of dedication to an author’s work I’ve come
across is Lewis Hyde’s conception of “gift economies.” Just as writing Infinite Jest was a part of
David Foster Wallace’s recovery, reading the novel has been instrumental in helping others with
issues of addiction as well. In The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s
“Infinite Summer: Reading, Empathy, and the Social Network” describes, among many other
empathic connections made between readers and Wallace’s long novel, one case in particular:
“Infinite Summer,” a season-long project started by Matthew Baldwin on June 1, 2009. Baldwin
structured the project as a combination blog-and-reading-group and set a reading schedule of 75
pages per week and called for other bloggers to join him in reading and discussing Infinite Jest
on his site through guest posts and comments.
Fitzpatrick’s piece calls special attention to one participant, who posted under the name
“Infinitedetox,” had a “relationship with ‘pharmaceutical opiates’ that quickly trended from ‘an
experiment’ to a ‘recreation’ to clear ‘dependency,’ a relationship that a first encounter with
Infinite Jest helped to change” (194.) Only a month into the project, in a post that began “My
name is Infinitedetox and I am an addict,” the poster wrote that “Somehow the book—and now
brace yourself for one of those clichés that Wallace seems so interested in in IJ—made me want
to be a better person. And it inspired me to stop taking drugs immediately, to Kick the Bird, via
a mechanism which I’ve had a hard time articulating.” Infinitedetox describes the process of one
that sounds remarkably like McDermott’s line about William James’s education, “He ceded his
mind to the thinking of other minds” (11:15). By surrendering his thought to the ideas in
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Wallace’s text, he “came to care about its concerns as much as its author did, thus laying the
groundwork for an empathic engagement with the text” (195).
The poster went on to say that “Wallace’s judgments on addicts and addictions fell upon
me with great force, and something about the ferocity of his critique, coupled with his profound
compassion and humaneness toward the subject, compelled me to waste absolutely zero time in
booting the pills and Getting My Shit Together” (195). We can’t know if the novel was sufficient
to change this participant’s behavior enough to stay clean. The veracity of its narrative is one that
would certainly strain credulity—if it weren’t for so many other similar accounts.
Fitzpatrick’s essay conducts an examination of the first large-scale group read of Infinite
Jest, organized by Matthew Baldwin in June of 2009. In it, Fitzpatrick wields a veritable Swiss-
army knife of literary critical authorities, including appearances by Maurice Blanchot, Dominick
LaCapra, Alison Landsberg, and Robert McLaughlin, but for all the piece’s AA terminology-
dropping, Lewis Hyde’s name is conspicuously absent.
Fitzpatrick notes that during the composition of Infinite Jest, “Wallace’s marginalia in
George Gilder’s Life After Television makes clear he was thinking about the relationship between
television and what Gilder refers to as the ‘telecomputer,’” a device that roughly approximates
today’s internet-enabled devices. But in the margins of this particular section, Wallace—whose
prescience about the future of American culture makes Infinite Jest an eerie reading experience
even twenty years after its publication—was unable to predict the rise of communities like
Facebook and Twitter: “So where is the community? Everyone stays home, everyone does his
own thing” (Fitzpatrick 205 n12). But while the shift from one- to two-way communication that
social media enables has certainly increased the number of our online interactions with others,
the quality of those conversations is another matter. As an increasing amount of our time is spent
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online, what seems clear is that the quality of our online interactions with one another pretty
much mirrors those that happen offline. The reading group, a community of people whose
interactions center on the shared experience of reading a common text, is no different.
The extraordinary nature of online communities that coalesce around Wallace’s work lies
precisely in the quality of these online interactions. I agree with Fitzpatrick’s assertion that in the
subset of Wallace-related online groups that “those human interconnections…are bound up in the
need to understand something about one’s life by engaging with the stories told by others” (198).
Though made anonymously, the public nature of communication in these online
communities gives the statements members make in front of the rest of the group something like
the force of a commitment. At the very least, these statements enjoy a sort of collective holding-
to-account by virtue of their vocalization. This phenomenon—the public airing of personal
struggle—was, as Fitzpatrick writes, something that happened during Infinite Summer:
One pseudonymous participant, for instance, published a guest post on the site
about a month into the project, beginning “My name is infinitedetox and I am an
addict.” The author then told the story of a relationship with “pharmaceutical
opiates” that quickly trended from “an experiment” to “a recreation” to clear
“dependency,” a relationship that a first encounter with Infinite Jest helped to
change. [Infinite Summer] provided infinitedetox with both the impetus for a return
to the novel and its perspective, as well as a venue for the kind of safe, anonymous
sharing that AA inspires [, and led to] an individual blog detailing both the reading
and the recovery process. (194-95)
And though Fitzpatrick is careful to note that “in enacting such a literal form of self-surrender,
Infinitedetox gives the impression of having mistaken a text about the struggle with addiction for
the struggle itself,” (195) I hope to have provided here more evidence of the transformational
power of a growing number of Wallace communities that argue this user’s experience was not
such an anomaly. In her closing, Fitzpatrick further qualifies the work done in service of Infinite
Summer in terms of the gift’s transformative ability:
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The writing that was produced on an around Infinite Summer wasn’t just shouting
into the void, and it wasn’t just the kinds of self-absorbed rambling critics often
associate with personal blogs. The public, open nature of the group and the kinds of
sharing that it produced reveal the degree to which AA, blogs, and Infinite Jest all
represent an opportunity to build empathic relations with others, transforming self-
expression into a generous mode of Giving It Away that, like Wallace’s novel,
creates the possibility of connection for other readers. (195-96)
David Hering’s aforementioned introduction ends with a similar sentiment, but he adds an overt
call to arms: “If our responses to Wallace in our electronic communities can spill out into our
classrooms, into more print resources, and into conferences[,] I think we stand a good chance of
bringing Wallace’s conversation to a wider readership[.] This community is vital to continuing
and expanding the conversations Wallace started with his readers. Let’s keep talking” (23).
Hering’s reminder to Wallace scholars about our common endgame—to get Wallace’s work in
front of as many eyes as possible—is also a reminder that while meeting up face to face is an
incredibly energizing experience, it is important to harness that energy toward our shared goals
once we have returned home and the buzz of the conference wears off.
“Offline” Wallace Communities, Personal Gratitude, and Prestige Economies
As briefly noted in my introduction to Chapter 1, the last half-dozen years have seen a
nearly logarithmic spike in the size of the scholarly apparatus that attends Wallace’s writing. My
own level of involvement in Wallace-related projects has similarly grown. All of my recent
collaborative work, culminating in the formation of the International David Foster Wallace
Society
3
and the launch of its print periodical, The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies, can
be traced back to my first Wallace Conference, held at Illinois State University in 2014. My
experience there was not only one that validated my decision to study Wallace, but one that
provided such emotional and intellectual sustenance that I have attended every subsequent
3
The IDFWS website at http://www.dfwsociety.org serves as the hub for both the Society and the journal.
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meeting. This yearly trip to Normal has become something of an annual pilgrimage for me; it
marks the high point of my year, the event at which I refill my tank with enough fuel to sustain
me for another 365 days.
Last year, as the date for the conference approached, Ryan Marnane—a doctoral
candidate at the Salve Regina University who teaches at Bryant University and the MIT Office
of Engineering Outreach—emailed a group of DFW2015 attendees, myself included. Marnane
suggested we pool our grad-student resources and avoid the conference hotel’s inflated rates by
renting a large, old, Victorian house near campus through AirBNB, which we did. The
atmosphere at the conference that week was unlike anything I’ve experienced at an academic
event. The overwhelming collegiality and genuine interest in each other’s’ work led to several
late-night collaborative sessions we read and workshopped our presentations like MFA-seminar
pieces. The house was a constant hub of activity at nearly all hours. At night, “porch panels”
were convened over drinks. It was during one of these sessions that the idea for the Wallace
Society and the Journal were originally conceived.
All of this would be an indulgent recollection if those assembled at the house in Normal
had not backed up their talk with action. By the end of January 2017, several Skype-meetings
later, we had formally assembled a board of directors for the Society and the journal, drafted a
mission statement, retained legal counsel, and opened bank and PayPal business accounts in the
DFW Society’s name. The Society is governed by a board of twelve volunteers whose academic
affiliations range from English faculty at Loyola University and University College Dublin to
graduate students, high-school teachers, and independent Wallace scholars from Canada to
Australia. My biggest contribution to these projects outside of collaborating on things like our
documents of incorporation and mission statement or serving as a reader for the journal was to
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design and launch our website. Since it went live on January 2, the Society has attracted over 125
members. Their signups have generated over $4,500 during the first month, exceeding our
$4,000 goal to fund the journal’s first print run. On January 19th, Nick Lindsay, the journals
director for MIT Press, emailed the president of The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies,
Tony McMahon—another conference attendee who had stayed at the Normal AirBNB house—to
see if the society would be interested in publishing with his organization.
But here, where money enters the discussion, is where the gift economies of these
particular Wallace communities enters into tension with the prestige economy of the traditional
American academy. In one of my earlier quotations from Hyde’s The Gift, recall that he writes
that gift economies are driven by a concern for something greater than the singular self, that it is
necessary for a person who participates in a gift economy “be bound up in something larger than
the ego-of-one”—something that emphasizes the sameness or “identification” of its constituent
members (74 fn). Hyde contrasts the sameness that the healing, transformative gift of AA
emphasizes with the type of recovery that is motivated by financial gain, saying that “Healings
that call for differentiation, on the other hand, may be more aptly delivered through the market”
(74 fn). It is this need for “differentiation” that short-circuits the logic of the gift economy, and
this focus on individual differentiation is one that Hyde binds inextricably with undertakings that
are motivated by primarily financial concerns.
I have seen firsthand the tensions between these two competing economies. When the
board of The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies was first approached by MIT, who had
expressed interest in publishing the journal for us, one of the first concerns raised by members of
the board was whether or not we would be able to keep to our goal of making the journal’s
content available through the mechanisms of open access. In our negotiations with MIT Press,
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we had been told that any online content would need to be hosted behind the MIT paywall and
protected by subscription-based access, save the single article from each issue of the journal we
would be allowed to distribute freely on our own website. At this time, the board continues to
negotiate with MIT for some kind of compromise—perhaps a time-limit on how long the articles
must only exist behind their paywall before being taken to full open access—and the tension
between these two economies may ultimately mean that the journal has to sacrifice the name-
recognition that would allow it to command higher-quality scholarship for its ecumenical stance
regarding open access, a debate that for now remains undecided.
Still: in three years, what began with submitting a (what I thought would surely be
rejected) paper proposal to the ISU Wallace conference has propelled me to what is still, for me,
an entirely inexplicable situation in which things like “Video-conference with MIT Journal
Director” are actual appointments that exist on my phone’s calendar. In the current market—
where finishing a PhD in no way guarantees tenured employment after graduation—I am
incredibly grateful for the generosity of time and spirit that I have experienced as a result of my
decision to study Wallace. As my defense date approaches, as I look back at those things I
helped to bring into the world that will put Wallace’s work in front of others, and the gratitude I
feel at having been allowed to be a part of these things affirms the reason I came back to
graduate school in the first place. At the end of the day, these connections are what matter most,
and they will sustain me.
This project, teaching my own course on David Foster Wallace’s work, the inclusion of
his work in the survey classes I taught, and my continued contributions to and participation in
various online Wallace groups represent my efforts to answer Hering’s call to put Wallace’s
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work in front of as many eyes as possible. They are the best ways I have to repay the enormity of
Wallace’s gift.
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Figure 5-1. Photograph of David Foster Wallace’s annotations in The Gift.
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A B C
Figure 5-2. Series of photographs of annotations. A) Alcoholics Anonymous, front flyleaf. B) Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions,
front flyleaf. C) Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, front flyleaf.
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A B
Figure 5-3. Series of photographs of Norman Rockwell’s “Golden Rule” A) Cover of The World’s Religions. B) Cover of The
Saturday Evening Post.
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Figure 5-4. Photograph of David Foster Wallace’s annotations in The World’s Religions.
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LIST OF REFERENCES
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2011, aa.org/assets/en_US/p-11_aamembersMedDrug.pdf.
Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How Many Thousands of Men and Women Have Recovered
from Alcoholism. 4th ed., Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, 2001.
Aubry, Timothy. “Selfless Cravings: Addiction and Recovery in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite
Jest.” American Fiction of the 1990s: Reflections of History and Culture, edited by Jay
Prosser, Routledge, 2008, pp. 206-219.
Bolger, Robert K. “‘A Less “Bullshitty’ Way to Live: The Pragmatic Spirituality of David Foster
Wallace.” Gesturing Toward Reality: David Foster Wallace and Philosophy, edited by
Robert K. Bolger and Scott Korb, Bloomsbury, 2014, pp. 31-51.
Boswell, Marshall. Understanding David Foster Wallace. U of South Carolina P, 2003.
Burn, Stephen J. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: A Reader’s Guide. 2nd ed., Continuum,
2012.
---, editor. Conversations with David Foster Wallace. UP of Mississippi, 2012.
Carlisle, Greg. Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Sideshow
Media Group, 2007.
Cohen, Samuel and Lee Konstantinou, editors. The Legacy of David Foster Wallace. U of Iowa
P, 2012.
Evans, David H. “The Chains of Not Choosing: Free Will and Faith in William James and David
Foster Wallace.” A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, edited by Marshall
Boswell and Stephen J. Burn, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 171-189.
Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. “Infinite Summer: Reading, Empathy, and The Social Network.” The
Legacy of David Foster Wallace, edited by Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou, U of
Iowa P, 2012, pp.182-207.
Freudenthal, Elizabeth. “Anti-Interiority: Compulsiveness, Objectification, and Identity in
Infinite Jest.” New Literary History, vol. 41, no. 1, Winter 2010, pp. 191-211.
Hamilton, Hamish. “Celebrating the Life and Work of David Foster Wallace: 1962–2008.” In
Memoriam: David Foster Wallace, special issue of Five Dials, no. 10, 2010.
fivedials.com/number-10-in-memoriam-david-foster-wallace.
Harris, Charles B. “David Foster Wallace: ‘That Distinctive Singular Stamp of Himself.’”
Critique, vol. 51, no. 2, 2010, pp. 168-176.
191
Henry, Casey Michael. “‘Sudden Awakening to the Fact That the Mischief Is Irretrievably
Done’: Epiphanic Structure in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.” Critique, vol. 56, no.
5, 2015, pp. 480-502.
Hering, David. Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays. Sideshow Media Group, 2010.
Holland, Mary K. “‘The Art’s Heart’s Purpose’: Braving the Narcissistic Loop of David Foster
Wallace’s Infinite Jest.” Critique, vol. 47, no. 3, 2006, pp. 218-42.
Hyde, Lewis. The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World. Canongate, 2006.
James, Caryn. “Wittgenstein Is Dead and Living in Ohio.” New York Times Book Review, 1 Mar.
1987. nytimes.com/books/97/03/16/reviews/wallace-r-broom.html.
James, William. Pragmatism. Harvard UP, 1975.
---. The Principles of Psychology. Vol. 2, Henry Holt, 1890. 2 vols.
---. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. Modern Library, 1994.
Kakutani, Michiko. “Life Distilled From Details, Infinite and Infinitesimal.” New York Times, 1
June 2004. nytimes.com/2004/06/01/books/books-of-the-times-life-distilled-from-details-
infinite-and-infinitesimal.html.
Kelly, Adam. “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction.” Consider
David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays, edited by David Hering, Sideshow Media Group,
2010, pp. 131-146.
---. “David Foster Wallace: The Death of the Author and the Birth of a Discipline.” Irish Journal
of American Studies Online, no. 2, 2010. ijas.iaas.ie/index.php/article-david-foster-
wallace-the-death-of-the-author-and-the-birth-of-a-discipline.
---. “Development Through Dialogue: David Foster Wallace and the Novel of Ideas.” Studies in
the Novel, vol. 44, no. 3, 2012, pp. 265-81.
---. “Dialectic of Sincerity: Lionel Trilling and David Foster Wallace.” Post45, 17 Oct. 2014.
post45.research.yale.edu/2014/10/dialectic-of-sincerity-lionel-trilling-and-david-foster-
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Lipsky, David. Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David
Foster Wallace. Broadway, 2010.
Markson, David. Wittgenstein’s Mistress. Dalkey Archive, 1995.
Max, D. T. "Angels of Death: David Foster Wallace and the Battle against Irony, Letterman and
Leyner?" MIT, 11 Mar. 2013. cms.mit.edu/podcasts/colloquia/cms-colloquium-2013-03-
07-max.mp3.
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---. Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace. Viking-Penguin, 2012.
---. “The Unfinished: David Foster Wallace’s Struggle to Surpass ‘Infinite Jest.’” The New
Yorker, 9 Mar. 2009, pp. 48-61.
McCaffery, Larry. “An Expanded Interview with David Foster Wallace.” Conversations with
David Foster Wallace, edited by Stephen J. Burn, UP of Mississippi, 2012, pp. 21-52.
McDermott, John J. William James: The Psychology of Possibility. Davidson Films, 2003.
“Memories of David Foster Wallace.” Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. McSweeney’s,
16 Sept. 2008. mcsweeneys.net/pages/memories-of-david-foster-wallace.
Miller, Laura. “David Foster Wallace.” Salon.com, 9 Mar. 1996.
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“Mission Statement.” The International David Foster Wallace Society, 2 Jan. 2017,
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Wallace.” Fate, Time and Language: An Essay on Free Will, edited by Steven M. Cahn
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Smith, Zadie. “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: The Difficult Gifts of David Foster Wallace.”
Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays, Penguin, 2009, pp. 257-300.
Spalding, Emily. “The Addiction Spectrum: An Analysis of the Three Branches of Addiction in
David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.” Normal 2015: Selected Works from the Second
Annual David Foster Wallace Conference, edited by Carissa Kampmeier, et al., Lit Fest,
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van Ewijk, Petrus. “‘I’ and the ‘Other’: The Relevance of Wittgenstein, Buber and Levinas for an
Understanding of AA’s Recovery Program in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.”
English Text Construction, vol. 2, no. 1, 2009, pp. 132-145.
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Wallace, David Foster. “1458 Words on a Book That Has More Than 1000 Pages.” Speak
Magazine, Spring 1996, pp. 41-42.
---. The Broom of the System. Penguin, 1987.
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---. “E Unibus Pluram.” A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, Back Bay-Little, Brown,
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---. “Matters of Sense and Opacity.” The New York Times, 2 Aug. 1987.
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Compassionate Life. Little, Brown, 2009.
Wallace, James D. “Pleasure as an End of Action.” American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 3,
no. 4, 1966, pp. 312-316.
Warhol-Down, Robyn. “Academics Anonymous: A Meditation on Anonymity, Power, and
Powerlessness.” Symplokē, vol. 16, nos. 1 & 2, 2008, pp. 51-59.
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Hacker, and J. Schulte, rev. 4th ed., Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.
---. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by C.K. Ogden, Dover, 1999.
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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Robert Short received his PhD from the University of Florida in the spring of 2017. In
addition to teaching courses for the Department of English and the University Writing Program,
he worked as the webmaster for the English Department and for the United Faculty of Florida.
His work on David Foster Wallace has appeared in Normal 2015: Selected Works from The
Second Annual David Foster Wallace Conference and on the website for James Ponsoldt’s film
about Wallace’s extended road-trip interview with David Lipsky, The End of the Tour. He is
married to another former doctoral student of the University of Florida’s graduate English
program, Dr. Caroline Short. He is originally from Gardendale, Alabama.
