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ISSUE 5
2025
THE JOURNAL OF DAVID FOSTER WALLACE STUDIES
IS S U E 5
www.dfwsociety.org
Essays by
Lee Konstantinou
Mike Miley
Paolo Pitari
Joseph Hunter
Richard Decker
Book Reviews by
Saul Leslie
George Kowalik
Pia Masiero
Ed Jackson
Design by David Jensen
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies is published by the
International David Foster Wallace Society.
Copyright © 2025 International David Foster Wallace Society
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies (Print)
ISSN 2576-9995
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies (Online)
ISSN 2577-0039
Cover and interior designed by David Jensen.
STAFF
Editors
Rob Short and Michael O’Connell
Reviews Editor
Ryan Kerr
Managing Editor
Matt Bucher
Editorial Board
Subscriptions
To subscribe to The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies,
become a member of The International
David Foster Wallace Society at dfwsociety.org.
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Grace Chippereld
Danielle Ely
Cory Hudson
Dave Laird
Matt Luter
Mike Miley
Ándrea Laurencell Sheridan
Dominik Steinhilber
ISSUE 5
spring 2025
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
Rob Short ............................................7
ESSAYs
David Foster Wallace’s Déformation Professionnelle
Lee Konstantinou .....................................11
“Verbal Chaos”: Authorial Absence in Oblivion
Mike Miley ..........................................37
Excerpt from The Problem of Free Will in David Foster Wallace
Paolo Pitari ..........................................61
Wallace and Description: The Inner Drama of the Observer
Joseph Hunter ........................................91
Community, Humanity, & Redemption: Innite Jest and Fyodor Dos-
toevsky’s Notes from a Dead House
Richard Decker ......................................121
REVIEWs
Review of Jerey Severs, David Foster Wallace’s Balancing Books: Fictions
of Value
Saul Leslie ..........................................145
Review of Tim Personn, Fictions of Proximity
George Kowalik .....................................155
Review of Mary Shapiro, Wallace’s Dialects
Pia Masiero .........................................161
Review of Andrew Bennett, Suicide Century: Literature and Suicide from
James Joyce to David Foster Wallace
Ed Jackson ..........................................165
Contributors ..................................173
Issue 5 • 2025
7
Letter from the Editor
Rob Short
Welcome to Issue 5 of The Journal of David Foster Wallace Stud-
ies! An enormous and sincere thank you is owed to everyone
who helped get this thing across the nish line and out into the
world. I know it’s been a minute since we put out our last issue, but
we’ve been busy! For starters, immediately following the release of
Issue 4, Wallace Society- & Journal alum Matt Bucher moderated an
online forum on translating Innite Jest, featuring panelists who have
variously expanded Wallace’s audience to include Greek, German,
Serbian, Turkish, Farsi, and Portuguese readers.1
Fast-forward to June of 2024, when our conference returned to
Austin and featured keynote speakers Amy Wallace-Havens, Joy
Williams, and Jim Gauer. Their talks were generously hosted by UT
Austin’s Harry Ransom Center, which also houses Wallace’s archive.
We’re taking a break from the conference scene this year, but we
hope you’ll join us in Austin again for DFW26. We’ll be posting
more information on the Society’s website as we get closer to the
conference date.
We also partnered with the 92nd Street Y’s Roundtable project2
last year to present courses on Wallace’s work; so far, IDFWS board
members Mike Miley and Michael O’Connell have both recorded a
lecture series for it, with more to come.
OK, I think you’re caught up—let’s talk about what’s going on
between the covers of the issue you’re currently holding in your very
1. https://dfwsociety.org/translation/
2. https://roundtable.org
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
8
own human hands! Our leado piece is Lee Konstantinou’s “Da-
vid Foster Wallace’s Déformation Professionnelle,” which was originally
delivered as the keynote at the Society’s 2023 conference in Get-
tysburg, PA. In it, Konstantinou mines an underexplored area of
Wallace’s output—his criticism—to investigate the tensions between
Wallace’s critical writing and his ction before swinging out in in-
creasingly wider arcs to examine Wallace’s situation in the tradition
of contemporary literary criticism and the larger history and current
state of professionalization in the neoliberal University.
Next up is Mikey Miley’s “Verbal Chaos’: Authorial Absence in
Oblivion.” Miley opens with the observation that despite the narrative
density of Wallace’s nal collection, Oblivion is the work Wallace’s
own authorial presence is most absent from. Miley then extends the
Barthesian through-line from Konstantinou’s piece to enumerate
the ways Wallace’s presence in (or absence from) a text aects its nar-
rative (in)stability and the underlying act of communication between
writer and reader before nally surveying the impact of Wallace’s
literary project on the current state of ction.
In our third oering, Joseph Hunter employs a similarly narrato-
logical approach in “Wallace and Description: The Inner Drama of
the Observer.” Hunter contends that the embodied nature of Wal-
lace’s descriptive technique is animated by his focus on characters’
attention, and that the eect of such a focus is the encouragement
of an ethical self-awareness in readers.
Extending this ethical focus is Richard Decker’s “Community,
Humanity, and Redemption: Innite Jest and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s
Notes from a Dead House.” In it, Decker outlines the thematic intertex-
tualities between Wallace and Dostoevsky that, he argues, warrant a
fresh, autobiographical reading of the two novels.
For our nal essay, we have the privilege of printing an ex-
cerpt from Paolo Pitari’s The Problem of Free Will in David Foster Wal-
lace (Routledge, 2024). Pitari’s approach collapses any distinction
Issue 5 • 2025
9
between Wallace’s ction and nonction; both are subsumed under
the heading of what Pitari terms “Wallace’s Sociology.” Wallace’s
entire corpus, Pitari argues, “constitutes a unity with one clear goal:
to nd the possibility of salvation from unbearable suering.”
Finally, we round out the issue with four reviews: Jeery Severs’s
David Foster Wallace’s Balancing Books: Fictions of Value, reviewed by Saul
Leslie; Tim Personn’s Fictions of Proximity, reviewed by George Kow-
alik; Mary Shapiro’s Wallace’s Dialects, reviewed by Pia Masiero; and
Andrew Bennett’s Suicide Century: Literature and Suicide from James Joyce
to David Foster Wallace, reviewed by Edward Jackson.
Our continued ability to publish not only new pieces of original
criticism, but also multiple reviews of monograph-length publica-
tions on David Foster Wallace’s work in every issue speaks to the
thriving character of Wallace Studies. When we rst kicked around
the idea for this project in a creaky old Victorian AirBNB during one
of the rst Wallace conferences in Normal, Illinois, I don’t think any
of us thought it had much chance of actually getting o the ground.
Our only real goal was to get the writing that had brought us togeth-
er in front of as many people as we could.
I know that none of us would have laid even money that our lit-
tle group would establish the rst single-author society and academic
journal devoted to Wallace’s work, or that we would go on to secure
partnerships with R1 universities (and all the other million things that
have to happen) to pull o hosting our own international conferences,
or start podcasts, or sponsor panels at MLA or ALA, or—and this
one’s important—get to meet so many truly amazing people.
I’ll close with this: I distinctly remember sitting in the audience of
a roundtable discussion at that early conference at Illinois State. And
I remember it because something one of the panelists said that night
has stuck with me all these years later. The panel was discussing the
random acts of kindness Wallace’s former students ascribed to their
teacher—little things, like leaving overgenerous feedback in their
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
10
papers’ margins or giving them a lift when it was cold or they had a
long way to walk. And what this tenured panelist said was that, as a
professional academic who published on Wallace, she had to “ignore
all that ‘big heart stu.’”
It will surprise no one that I reject this cold, sterile reasoning even
more now than I did in that dark, enormous conference room over
a decade ago. Because that “big heart stu” is why this incredible
community of readers exists at all. Underneath all of Wallace’s inci-
sive observations, technical brilliance, and literary artistry, it’s what
drew us to the work in the rst place.
Wallace’s writing is taught in high schools, collected in the an-
thologies required by freshman survey courses, and translated into
an ever-increasing number of languages. It has occasioned whole
literary-critical monograph series from top-tier academic houses, in-
spired feature-length lms and music videos...in short, it has become
a part of the culture that Wallace turned such a keen eye on. This is
no burgeoning eld. Wallace Studies is an established fact. And we
couldn’t be prouder of us—and that most certainly includes you.
Issue 5 • 2025
11
David Foster Wallace’s
Déformation
Professionnelle
1
Lee Konstantinou
1. Professional Artistry
I’d lIke to thank matt and Vern2 and everyone involved with the
David Foster Wallace Society for inviting me to deliver this talk.
I’m really honored and genuinely moved to have been given this
opportunity. It’s been a long time—a surprisingly long time—since
I rst started studying Wallace. I say “study” advisedly because I
rst started reading Wallace systematically in graduate school, and
though I was also a fan of his writing, reading Wallace, for me, has
always been inseparable from my evolving identity as an academic
and, so to speak, a professional reader.
Before I was asked to deliver this talk, I thought I’d said every-
thing I had to say about Wallace. But one of the pleasures of Wal-
lace’s writing is that there’s always more to discover, and I’m excited
to talk with you about some new questions I’m working through.
The title of my talk is “David Foster Wallace’s Déformation Profession-
nelle.” (Sorry for my mangled French.) The title is an allusion to a
recent book by the literary critic John Guillory, which I’ll talk about
in a bit. But a good alternative title might’ve been “David Foster
1. Originally delivered as the keynote address at The International David Foster
Wallace Society’s 2023 conference in Gettysburg, PA.
2. Matt Bucher and Vern Cisney.
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
12
Wallace’s Professional Artistry,” which is an allusion to Wallace’s es-
say on Michael Joyce, and which captures nicely in the phrase “pro-
fessional artistry” a very Wallacean paradox or double bind.3
That is, I’m interested in Wallace’s unsettled relationship to the
institution of professional literary criticism. As Marshall Boswell has
observed, Wallace often seems to be lled with “antipathy” toward
lit-crit, and yet his ction and essays are, at the same time, “full of
literary criticism.”4 Indeed, Wallace was an avid reader of lit-crit,
as is evident everywhere in his writing and as is evident, also, in
his archive at the Harry Ransom Center, which holds, among other
things, his annotated copies of Tom LeClair’s In the Loop: Don DeLillo
and the Systems Novel and Frank Lentricchia’s Introducing Don DeLillo.
And Wallace has, depending on how you look at it, himself written
quite a lot of literary criticism. Moreover, he wrote his own ction
very highly conscious of the possibility that he might be studied by
academic critics. So I don’t know if you want to call this a paradox
or a tension or a contradiction. Boswell calls it Wallace’s “divided at-
titude toward scholarly research.”5 Or maybe Wallace’s “antipathy”
toward lit-crit was just a natural byproduct of his having read and
written so damn much of it.
I would claim that there are two big payos to studying this “divided
attitude.” First, I think “literary criticism” isn’t one of the genres we usu-
ally associate with Wallace. We’re comfortable calling him a novelist, a
short story writer, a journalist, an essayist, a philosopher even. But a critic?
Second, as we’ll see, contemporary literary criticism is wrapped up
in a much bigger history, the history of professionalization. Which
3. David Foster Wallace, “Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a
Paradigm of Certain Stu about Choice, Freedom, Limitation, Joy, Grotesquerie,
and Human Completeness,” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (Boston:
Back Bay Books, 1998).
4. Marshall Boswell, preface to A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, eds. Mar-
shall Boswell and Stephen J. Burn (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), x.
5. Boswell, x.
Issue 5 • 2025
13
means Wallace’s “divided attitude” turns out to be, I will nally
claim, symptomatic of some much larger, much hairier dynamics
within the history of capitalism, the long-term development of the
techno-scientic research University as an engine of knowledge pro-
duction and economic growth, and (in more recent years) the rise of
adjunctication as an ambiguously de-professionalizing force within
the neoliberal University.
We should be asking not only why Wallace as an individual au-
thor feels divided about literary criticism, but also what factors have
led academia to become the troubled home of literary criticism as a
profession and specialized practice in the rst place.
So let’s get started.
2. Before the University Administration
I’ll begin with a quote with which you are, I’m sure, at least pass-
ingly familiar. In an INTERPOLATION, in a footnote, in the essay
“Authority and American Usage”—which was originally published
under a dierent title in Harper’s Magazine in 2002, and then repub-
lished and greatly expanded in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays in
2005—David Foster Wallace oers a widely quoted perspective on
what he calls “US academic prose.” He tells us that “the truth is, most
US academic prose is appalling: pompous, abstruse, claustral, inated,
euphuistic, pleonastic, solecistic, sesquipedalian, Heliogabaline, oc-
cluded, obscure, jargon-ridden, empty: resplendently dead.”6
I should mention this sentence appears only in the expanded
version of the essay; I guess it was just too spicy for the editors at
Harper’s. It might be a little snarky of me to note, as many before
me have done, that Wallace was nothing if not a creature of the
academy, born to a philosophy-professor father and an English-pro-
fessor mother, a denizen in one way or another of various academic
6. David Foster Wallace, “Authority and American Usage,” in Consider the Lobster and
Other Essays (New York: Little, Brown and Company 2006), 81.
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
14
departments, critical and creative, almost his entire adult life, and a
holder of tenure at not one but two institutions of higher education!
So surely Wallace was nothing if not a perfect specimen of what
Mark McGurl has called “the Program Era”—”a Program Man if
ever there was one,” as McGurl himself writes of Wallace.7
But defending the honor of academic writers isn’t why I’m inter-
ested in this passage. Instead, I’m interested in it as a piece of writ-
ing. What I want to draw attention to is the style in which Wallace
lambastes the American academy. Wallace’s style encodes an inter-
esting and hitherto understudied aspect of his writing and career.
At the risk of myself being sesquipedalian, Wallace is engaging in a
kind of “autological” rhetoric in this sentence. That is, Wallace’s list
of pejoratives—“pompous, abstruse, claustral, inated, euphuistic,
pleonastic, solecistic, sesquipedalian, Heliogabaline, occluded, ob-
scure, jargon-ridden, empty”—is an entertaining example of what
the list is, at the same time, condemning.
So Wallace imitates an idiom that he’s also, at the same time, de-
nouncing. Sounds familiar. He does the very same sort of thing in a
story like “Mr. Squishy,” which invokes the dead language of market-
ing, focus groups, and so on in order to expose and undermine them.
This technique is an example of what literary critic James Wood calls
Wallace’s “unidentied free indirect style,” which he describes in his
book How Fiction Works as “an amalgam of the kind of language we
might expect this particular community to speak if they were telling
the story.”8 Wood complains that Wallace’s “full-immersion” meth-
od comes with certain artistic risks: “His ction prosecutes an intense
argument about the decomposition of language in America, and he
is not afraid to decompose—and discompose—his own style in the
7. Mark McGurl, “The Institution of Nothing: David Foster Wallace in the Pro-
gram,” Boundary 2 41, no. 3 (2014): 32.
8. James Wood, How Fiction Works (New York: Picador, 2008), 31-32.
Issue 5 • 2025
15
interests of making us live through this linguistic America with him.”9
At one level, Wood is obviously right. Wallace is engaged in a
kind of imitative aesthetic. Yet I think Wood presumes that Wallace
is more removed from the object of his condemnation than he really
is. If Wallace’s linguistic America is decomposing, Wallace recogniz-
es this fact as an American who fully inhabits this linguistic world.
The same might be said of Wallace’s relationship to US academia.
In Wallace’s gure for US academic prose, academic writing is a
colorfully garbed corpse, sitting in state, as if on a dais, resplendent
but alas dead. Would we be wrong to detect a kind of admiration or
weird attraction for the corpse of criticism? And if there is a trace of
admiration here, mixed with horror, would we be wrong to propose
that Wallace is doing more than just imitating academic jargon?
Might he not also be seeking to exorcise, from himself, the habits of
mind that compel such writing?
Spoiler alert. I think the answer is yes to all of these questions,
and I also think that if you pull at the thread of this problem—the
problem of Wallace’s “decomposed” language as it relates to “US ac-
ademic prose”—you can go a long way toward unraveling some more
fundamental tensions of Wallace’s literary project. After all, Wallace’s
solution to the problem of bad dead writing isn’t exactly to just go
ahead and write the sort of lapidary Updikean prose that we might
assume a critic like James Wood would approve of, or to see real life as
only ever happening, somehow, outside the groves of academe.
Hal Incandenza, let us recall, begins Innite Jest in an oce in
“a cold room in University Administration,” and when he assures
us that he’s “in here” we might assume that he’s saying that an em-
ber of his humanity still burns within him, capable of narrating his
rst-person experience, despite the coldness of his academic envi-
rons.10 But as McGurl notes, there’s an uneasy doubleness to Hal’s
9. Wood, 33.
10. David Foster Wallace, Innite Jest (New York: Back Bay Books, 2006), 3.
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
16
“inside.”11 He’s both a subject inside of a body, as well as a body
inside of an institution.
We can gain more insight into Hal’s being doubly “in” or “in-
side” “University Administration” if we bring to mind Wallace’s
indirect reading of Franz Kafka’s parable “Before the Law” in a
speech he delivered on Kafka at a symposium sponsored by the PEN
American Center in 1998—which is an indirect reading, I should
mention, because Wallace doesn’t actually name “Before the Law”
or The Trial in the speech, but in a sense recreates it in the nal para-
graphs of his talk. Wallace says, “You can ask US college students
to imagine Kafka’s stories as all about a kind of door. To envision us
approaching and pounding on this door, increasingly hard, pound-
ing and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it; we
don’t know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter,
pounding and ramming and kicking. That, nally, the door opens...
and it opens outward—we’ve been inside what we wanted all along.”12
What’s notable about Wallace’s account of Kafka isn’t only
the way it resonates with Hal’s language about himself. Allard den
Dulk has already noted that connection, suggesting that Innite Jest
holds out a “redemptive” hope for Hal.13 And maybe it does. Lucas
Thompson has also discussed how Wallace “refracts Kafka’s themes
and ideas within a US context,” which he certainly does.14
But what I can’t help but notice, rereading this essay, is that Wal-
lace’s anxiety about Kafka is framed specically as a pedagogical
11. McGurl, 37.
12. David Foster Wallace, “Some Remarks on the Funniness of Kafka from Which
Probably Not Enough has been Removed,” in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
(New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2006), 65.
13. Allard den Dulk, “‘I Am in Here’: A Comparative Reading of David Foster
Wallace’s Innite Jest and Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis,” English Literature 8 (De-
cember 2021): 29-49.
14. Lucas Thompson, Global Wallace: David Foster Wallace and World Literature (New
York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 22.
Issue 5 • 2025
17
problem. Kafka faces Wallace with a crisis of teaching. In his
speech, Wallace is asking: How do you communicate to these jad-
ed/cynical American adolescents what Kafka has to teach them?
How do you let them know that Kafka knows the terror that they
have fearfully been failing to confront? How, as an older teacher—
not quite yet middle aged, but also not quite not middle aged—do
you get through the anxious skulls of smart adolescent undergrad-
uates who are determined, more than anything, not even to ac-
knowledge that there’s any kind of real problem that Kafka might
be addressing to begin with? How do you get these kids to do the
fucking reading, and not just “to do” the reading, but actually, you
know, to really read the reading?
American adolescents are the kinds of humans, Wallace tells us,
who are uniquely unsuited to recognizing that “the horric struggle
to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is insepara-
ble from that horric struggle.”15 And adolescence is “the single most
stressful and frightening period of human development,” which is
also “when we most yearn inside for a return to the same childish
oblivion we pretend to scorn.”16 It may therefore be no coincidence
that Wallace uses the term “admission” for what the person (the ado-
lescent?) pounding on the door most needs. It’s as if the hypothetical
adolescent human in Wallace’s reconstruction of “Before the Law”
were a high-schooler, desperate to get into a good college, who dis-
covers upon admission that he, so to speak, left his full humanity at
the door when he stepped across the threshold. Perhaps, we might
retitle Kafka’s parable, as refracted through Wallace, “Before the
University Administration.”
Imagine Hal Incandenza, sitting “in here,” this time with Wal-
lace the teacher of undergraduate humans, Wallace the pedagogue,
Wallace the reader, assigner, and even sometimes writer of “US
15. Wallace, “Some Remarks,” 64.
16. Wallace, “Some Remarks,” 64.
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
18
academic prose.” Imagine Wallace sitting on the other side of the
desk, watching this boy melt down in front of his eyes, trying to get
through to a sad dissociating US adolescent who can’t even admit
that he’s dissociating. Hal is knocking at the door, pounding on it, try-
ing desperately to get inside. And Wallace-the-pedagogue is looking
at him, marshaling all the resources of his professional training, and
he’s opening his mouth, ready nally to penetrate the thick skull of
this dying student, and out of his mouth comes the following string of
words: “pompous, abstruse, claustral, inated, euphuistic, pleonas-
tic, solecistic, sesquipedalian, Heliogabaline, occluded, obscure, jar-
gon-ridden, empty: resplendently dead.” No wonder, then, it’s Don
Gately who’s the hero of Innite Jest, and not one of the many, many
teachers who’ve touched, or really failed to touch, Hal’s life.
3. His Churn-Sized Arm
In a recent article, Tim Yu gives a good overview of Wallace’s
“deeply ambivalent” relationship to professionalization and the pro-
fessionalization of creative writing.17 As Yu notes, Wallace’s writing
repeatedly features top professionals and professional-like gures
who specialize in incredibly narrow domains, whose specialization
is both key to their wild vocational successes and the very things that
degrade their full humanities. The path to virtuoso mastery, it turns
out, is also the royal road away from personhood. The troubled g-
ure of the professional is best exemplied, for Yu’s Wallace, by the
professional athlete. Wallace wrote extensively about the amazing
capacities—which also are, at the same time, the amazing incapacities—
of the gure of the tennis pro. Recall how Wallace argues that Tracy
Austin is great not despite the vapidity and seeming banal atness
of her memoir, but because of it. The thing that allows the great ge-
nius-level tennis pro to be great and genius-level, as Wallace puts it
17. Tim Yu, “David Foster Wallace, Both Professional and Not,” abstract, English
Studies 104, no. 2 (2023).
Issue 5 • 2025
19
in the case of Austin, is being able to think “nothing at all.”18 So one
extreme solution to what Jon Baskin calls the “Cartesian trap” of
pathological self-consciousness is evacuating yourself of any sense
of self in the rst place.19
Another illuminating metaphor for the simultaneous capaci-
ty and incapacity of the professional athlete is Orin Incandenza’s
“oversized left arm and big left leg.”20 At one point in Innite Jest,
Wallace’s narrator describes Orin’s “tennis arm” as “roughly churn-
sized,” and the other arm as having “dimensions” that are merely
“human.”21 Again, specialization and professionalization stand in
stark opposition to the “human.” In this particular case, the distor-
tion of the human happens not because of any lack of conscious-
ness—Orin is nothing if not self-aware—but as a byproduct of do-
ing one thing over and over again, of radically leaning into some
capacities, and of systematically ignoring others.
Whatever the cause of their professional deformation, Wallace
saw in the gure of the expert/specialist a picture of his own per-
ilous situation as a creative writer.22 In Yu’s analysis, Wallace’s writ-
ing registers the uneven or incomplete professionalization of cre-
ative writing as a pseudo-discipline. Ultimately, Yu suggests, Wallace
“refuses the tempting and totalising power of professional ideology
in favour of an unprofessional ideal of authorship.”23 If “ction’s
about what it is to be a fucking human being,” as Wallace once put
it, then being a specialized/professional writer would seem to be the
18. David Foster Wallace, “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart,” in Consider the
Lobster, 154.
19. Jon Baskin, Ordinary Unhappiness: The Therapeutic Fiction of David Foster Wallace
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019), 15.
20. Wallace, Innite Jest, 43.
21. Wallace, Innite Jest, 291.
22. Yu, abstract.
23. Yu, abstract.
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
20
least promising way of realizing this human purpose.24
Yu’s article, overall, is quite convincing, but to say that Wallace
“refuses” the ideology of professionalism risks making it seem as if
professionalism was something one could embrace or push away,
choose or reject, put on or discard at will. A sociology of profession-
alism would enrich and complicate Yu’s account, and it is precisely
this sort of enrichment that John Guillory oers in his recent his-
tory of literary criticism, Professing Criticism. In this book, Guillory
describes the process by which literary criticism came to be incorpo-
rated into the University, and specically the way that it transformed
from an amateur activity—associated with but not identical to the
world of journalism—into a profession with its own code of con-
duct, its own norms, and its own expert practices.
Before the onset of professionalization, literary critics were
“self-legitimating,” not requiring an institutional patron to autho-
rize them. With the incorporation of literary criticism into higher
education, that all changed. The question of who or what legit-
imates lit-crit became newly important, and new tensions arose
between literary studies as a discipline “specialized to the liter-
ary object” and literary studies as a profession dedicated to the
manufacture of critics.25 In this context, the status of literary crit-
icism’s central object—literature itself—came into question, and
those whose jobs it were to do literary criticism got more and more
caught up in methodological debates. While departments of lit-
erary study claim to study literature, what they’re really doing, in
Guillory’s view, is professing criticism.
There are, obviously, creative writing programs as well, which
ostensibly give students access to the thing itself (literature), but
24. Larry McCaery, “An Expanded Interview with David Foster Wallace,” in Con-
versations with David Foster Wallace, ed. Stephen J. Burn (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2012), 26.
25. John Guillory, Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study (Chica-
go: The University of Chicago Press, 2022), 44.
Issue 5 • 2025
21
Wallace’s concerns about specialization suggest that creative writing
faces a similar set of problems as literary criticism. As Wallace wrote
in “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young” in the Review of
Contemporary Fiction way back in 1988:
Writing Programs, while claiming in all good faith to train
professional writers, in reality train more teachers of Creative
Writing. The only thing a Master of Fine Arts degree actu-
ally qualies one to do is teach...Fine Arts.... Envision if you
dare a careful, accomplished national literature, mistake-free,
seamless as ne linoleum; ction preoccupied with norm as
value instead of value’s servant; ction by academics who
were taught by academics and teach aspiring academics;
novel after critique-resistant novel about tenure-angst, coed-
lust, cafeteria-schmerz.26
Creative writing, at least as Wallace saw it in the late 1980s, is no oa-
sis from the perils of professionalization. On Wallace’s account, the
literary professional seems fated to suer from what Guillory wants
to call a “déformation professionnelle” by virtue of being a professional
in the rst place. The term “déformation professionnelle” designates the
idea that professionals have a tendency to see the world in a partial
way, through the lens of their training, rather than from a general
or human perspective. Such deformation is not, on Guillory’s ac-
count, a personal failing of the individual person—or even a nega-
tive phenomenon!—but is rather “an unavoidable by-product of the
assertion of that autonomy enabling the cultivation of professional
expertise to begin with” and a disposition “that insulates such ex-
pertise to some extent from the tyranny of the market and from the
draconian interventions of the political system.”27
26. David Foster Wallace, “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young,” in Both
Flesh and Not (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2012), 61.
27. Guillory, 9.
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
22
Because of the tyranny of the market and power of the
state, it only becomes possible to study literature as such, in
the rst place, by playing the game of professionalization.
But our protocols of professionalization are ultimately, also,
what remove us from our object of study. The better literary
critics we become, the less we talk and think about litera-
ture at all. Worse, this is not a problem that can be solved
through what Baskin calls “therapy,” by which he means a
kind of Wittgensteinian expurgation of philosophical con-
fusion. Rather, one’s “déformation professionnelle” is constitutive
of your situation as a professional.
In laying out this argument, Guillory draws on the famous por-
trait of the scholar that Friedrich Nietzsche evokes in The Gay Science:
In a scholar’s book [Nietzsche writes] there is nearly always
something oppressive, oppressed: the “specialist” emerges
somehow—his eagerness, his seriousness, his ire, his overes-
timation of the nook in which he sits and spins, his hunch-
back—every specialist has his hump. Every scholarly book
also reects a soul that has become crooked; every craft
makes crooked.28
And
One pays dearly for any kind of mastery on earth, where
perhaps one pays too dearly for everything; one is master of
one’s trade at the price of also being its victim.29
Nietzsche’s account is pitched in terms Wallace might have ap-
preciated. The very act or choice of specialization forecloses other
possibilities, and the dangerous situation of the master is well-nigh
28. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josene Nauk-
ho, poems trans. Adrian del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001), 230.
29. Nietzsche, 230-231.
Issue 5 • 2025
23
existential. But Guillory does better, I think, when he redescribes
Nietzsche’s inquiry in terms of the sociology of professions. To re-
frame the fate of the specialist this way leads us to ask what institu-
tional relations have created the dilemmas of the “professional cre-
ative writer,” and it leads me, at least, to conclude that escaping one’s
professional “déformation” would require, at one level, an escape
from the specic institutions that deform the profession and, on a
deeper level, an escape from institutional life as such.
A desire for such an escape is what I take to be at stake in Wal-
lace’s invocation of “the human.” But such a desire might seem
impossible by Wallace’s reckoning. Yet if we recall Marx’s famous
image, in the German Ideology, we can approach Wallace’s desire for
the “human” from a slightly dierent angle.
In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive
sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any
branch he wishes, society regulates the general production
and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and
another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, sh in the after-
noon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as
I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, sherman,
herdsman or critic.30
For Marx, problems of specialization can be solved pragmatically,
by dismantling capitalism and building a better, more rational alter-
native economy governed by society. Communist society banishes
the problem of déformation professionelle by unbundling profession-
al activities from named professions. To the degree that a division
of labor persists in a communist world, it’s a volitional pursuit of
specic activities, unassociated with reied job labels that are only
subordinated to a general social planning process. Only under such
circumstances, Marx suggests, is the full development of human
30. Karl Marx, “The German Ideology” (1845), Marxists Internet Archive, https://
www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm.
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
24
potential possible. Marx would seem to oer a solution to the prob-
lem Wallace highlights. But it seems to me that Wallace would prob-
ably dissent from Marx’s vision, or at least not regard it as a serious
answer to his worry. For Wallace, as for Nietzsche, mastery seems to
be dicult, if not impossible, to imagine without some accompany-
ing form of self-corruption. The problem is not material, or not only
material, but spiritual.
4. “The thing I like about my own prison...
is I have
tenure
in my prison.”
Of course, in many ordinary cases of professionalization, becom-
ing more specialized wouldn’t seem to be that much of a problem,
spiritual or otherwise. Sure, you can’t write a compelling memoir,
but you’ll have a prodigious near-miraculous backhand. In the case
of the ction-writer, however, becoming professionalized threatens
to take you away from the lived experience of humanity whose care-
ful observation is the very raw material you use to write ction in
the rst place. Unfortunately, if you want to be an ambitious c-
tion-writer, the academy is one of the safer routes to continued sur-
vival, if not necessarily ourishing. You might nd yourself in a sort
of academic prison, yes, but as D. T. Max quotes Wallace telling
Steven Moore, “The thing I like about my own prison...is I have ten-
ure in my prison.”31
If we accept the Nietzschean framing of Wallace’s prison as in-
escapable, what are the implications for the professional study of
Wallace’s own writing? Well, one obvious implication would be to
try to do what Tim Yu and many others have done, to nd examples
of Wallace talking about the dilemmas of professionalism and to
map out his career in terms of that topic. We could excavate all the
moments in which some form of literary criticism—and interpretive
31. D. T. Max, Every Ghost Story is a Love Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (New York:
Penguin Books, 2013), 126.
Issue 5 • 2025
25
criticism more generally—matter in his ction. Think, for example,
of Hal’s own youthful forays at interpretive criticisms, the way in
the seventh-grade essay he submits to “Introduction to Entertain-
ment Studies,” he reads the dierence between Hawaii Five-O’s Steve
McGarrett and Hill Street Blues’s Frank Furillo as reecting dier-
ent historical understandings of the nature and possibility of hero-
ism.32 Or remember the description of Rick Vigorous in The Broom
of the System as “Editor, Reader, Administrator, All-Around Literary
Presence.”33 And of course James O. Incandenza’s full lmography,
which is for my money one of the most enjoyable sections of Innite
Jest, is among other things a kind of CV.34
To be even more on the nose, we might note that some of Wal-
lace’s most important essays see him directly discussing literary crit-
icism, and, specically, the vexed question of the Death of the Au-
thor and the Intentional Fallacy. Wallace was also very interested in
Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Inuence, as Charles B. Harris and others
have documented. Think of Wallace’s critique of Edwin William-
son’s biography of Borges, in which he excavates the “unhappy par-
adox of literary biography,” viz. that chronicles recounting the life
of a great writer are both irresistible and inevitably disappointing,
paling before the greatness of the writing itself, which here seems
somewhat to endorse the idea that the Intentional Fallacy is indeed
a fallacy.35 Then again, consider Wallace’s praise of Joseph Frank’s
biography of Dostoevsky, in which Wallace suggests that Frank is
not only “giving an enormous silent raspberry to his old New Criti-
cal teachers” by embracing the Intentional Fallacy but also mount-
ing a tacit “assault on lit theory’s premises” far more eective than
32. Wallace, Innite Jest, 140.
33. David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System (New York: Penguin Books, 2004),
43.
34. Wallace, Innite Jest, 985n24.
35. David Foster Wallace, “Borges on the Couch,” in Both Flesh and Not, 285.
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
26
“any frontal attack could be.”36 These are doctrines Wallace again
thought through in his critical review of H. L. Hix’s Morte d’Author:
An Autopsy, which he rst wrote for the Harvard Book Review in 1991
and which was collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
in 1997.
Even more interesting than Wallace’s commentary on liter-
ary-critical orthodoxies, in my view, are his own eorts to write criti-
cism. There was an uncertain and dicult period in the 1990s when
Wallace tried his hand at writing book reviews, which is of course
when his review of Morte d’Author came out. If you look at Wallace’s
bibliography, it’s full of these occasional reviews, and they’re among
the least discussed pieces in his career. He panned Clive Barker’s
The Great and Secret Show in a review for The Washington Post and wrote
a positive review of Michael Martone’s Fort Wayne is Seventh on Hit-
ler’s List for the Harvard Book Review, both in 1990. In the latter re-
view, Wallace wordsmiths various turns of phrase regarding what
he comes to call “the Fiction of Image.” In his review of Martone’s
collection, Wallace writes, “Today, when we can eat Tex-Mex with
chopsticks while listening to rap music and watching a CBC-cable
newscast of the Berlin Wall’s dismantling, i.e. when just about every-
thing oers itself as familiar, a lot of the best realist ction seems to
be trying to make the familiar strange, and, in so doing, to restore
what is ‘real’ to three dimensions, to reconstruct an environment/
world out of an object/spectacle.”37
The same sentence appears almost verbatim in “E Unibus Plu-
ram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” though in that version of the
essay we’re listening to “reggae” and watching a “Soviet-satellite
36. David Foster Wallace, “Joseph Frank’s Dostoyevsky,” in Consider the Lobster and
Other Essays, 259n7.
37. David Foster Wallace, “Review of Fort Wayne is Seventh on Hitler’s List: Indiana Sto-
ries by Michael Martone,” Harvard Book Review, no. 15/16 (Winter-Spring 1990): 12.
Issue 5 • 2025
27
newscast.”38 He favorably reviewed Greil Marcus’s Dead Elvis for
the Los Angeles Times, panned F. J. Fiederspiel’s Laura’s Skin for the
New York Times Book Review, praised Reinaldo Erena’s The Doorman
for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and oered a mixed assessment of J. G.
Ballard’s War Fever for the Washington Post. His most widely read and
remembered book reviews are those that, in one way or another,
transcend the genre, using the occasion of the book review to break
with professional protocol and cast a wide net on topics of ultimate
importance, but many of the less-cited reviews are very dutiful and
insightful in fairly straightforward ways.
The most interesting occasional review he wrote is his 1992 re-
view of Kathy Acker’s Portrait of an Eye, which reprints Acker’s rst
three novels. Wallace’s review begins:
There are certain ction writers I feel like I have to admit
are literarily important but whose stu I don’t think is very
good. How can this be? Do you have this problem, some-
times? If so, can you account for the discrepancy between
importance and apparent low quality without ending up at
a grim disjunction whereby either you’re a hypocrite and a
literary camp-follower or you’re a Philistine who just can’t
appreciate certain worthwhile kinds of stories?39
Regarding Acker’s rst novel, The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula:
Some Lives of Murderesses, Wallace writes “Tarantula is less a ction than
a theory-vector, pointing not at an imagined world but at certain rar-
ied critical conceptions of political and literary identity.”40 And he
concludes: “Maybe I’m best o claiming that Ms. Acker’s three early
novels are valuable for academic critics but low-quality for readers
38. David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” in A
Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, 52.
39. David Foster Wallace, “Review of Portrait of an Eye: Three Novels by Kathy Acker,”
Harvard Review, no. 1 (1992): 154.
40. Wallace, “Review of Portrait of an Eye,” 155.
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
28
who like ction that makes some attempt to communicate, or mean,
or live. W/r/t the important-writer-but-crummy-writing problem
Ms. Acker presents, it may be that it’s the conundrum’s implications
for academic criticism itself that turn out to be grim. Caveat emptor
[emphasis original] all around.”41
Across these reviews, Wallace consistently prosecutes his own
emerging aesthetic project. He engages largely with experimental
and postmodern texts that, in one way or another, lose the plot, be-
come too self-involved, too inward-looking. As his review of Acker
suggests, there are certain literary artifacts that only an academic
could love, and who could love a text that only academics love? Wal-
lace is clearly doing the thinking that will pave the way for Innite Jest.
Would a book like Innite Jest only meet the approval of “professional
readers,” graduate students in everything but name, festooned with
guidebooks and eager to do online detective work, or is the form of
a book like Innite Jest a route not to a cartoonishly large “churn-like”
emotional and intellectual life, but rather a perfectly normal-sized—
fully and merely human—existence?
5. On Reading DFW
The answer to my question seems inescapable. While much has
been written about how Wallace’s writing isn’t only the province of
academics, we in this room are mostly or wholly professional read-
ers of David Foster Wallace, even if we’re not all University-aliat-
ed. As Matt Bucher mentioned to me, many of the participants at
this conference have backgrounds that are not traditional academic
backgrounds, whatever that means in today’s increasingly precari-
tized economy. Yet to have a journal and a society dedicated to the
study of David Foster Wallace is, in some sense, to reify and isolate
Wallace from the world.
41. Wallace, “Review of Portrait of an Eye,” 155.
Issue 5 • 2025
29
Do we do justice to Wallace by studying him in the professional
terms of the literary critic? Do we betray his project? Should we even
care what Wallace thought of us? I mean, Wallace would surely have
answered that we’re all making a terrible mistake being here talking
about him in these terms, but he would also maybe be a little happy
that we’re taking the time. The example of Wallace’s life might also
suggest that even if we’re making a mistake, we nd it fairly hard to
avoid making this mistake. And one of the most prevalent habits of
the professional Wallace critic is to lament that Wallace Studies has
been too captured by Wallace’s self-description of his own project.
Our consideration of the knotty problems of professionalism
might also oer a dierent way to reply to Amy Hungerford’s injunc-
tion against reading Wallace.42 The nal chapter of her book Making
Literature Now—entitled “On Not Reading DFW”—links the question
of whether to read DFW to the problem of the “overproduction”
of literature. There’s just too much to read, she notes, so maybe we
shouldn’t feel so bad if we pass over DFW, since hard choices are in-
evitable. More crucially, she ties her own refusal to read DFW to her
status as a literary professional who identies with “Post-45” as a criti-
cal school. This is a critical group which, I should mention, has its own
journal and book series with Stanford University Press, and in which
Hungerford’s own monograph was published. As one of the founders
of Post-45 and advisor of many graduate students, her chapter, there-
fore, is not only expressing her private opinion about DFW but is also
letting her little corner of the profession know whether they have an
obligation to read or engage with DFW at all.
Hungerford asks:
What if we just stop talking about such a work before it
matters that much to the culture at large? Stop reading it,
stop teaching it, stop studying it? What if we start suggesting
42. Amy Hungerford, Making Literature Now (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2016), 141.
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
30
something else to read, instead? To put the question of Wal-
lace’s work more personally: Is it ever acceptable, as a pro-
fessional matter, to refuse the culture’s rising call to attend to
a literary work? Is the scholar the servant of the culture she
studies? Is her relevance and authority contingent on her
responding to the cues that ow without cease from editors,
biographers, reviewers, and fans? Is attending to these what
it means to be professional?43
Hungerford describes her encounter with an editor at the Los Angeles
Review of Books (LARB) who politely suggests that she might want
actually to read Wallace, if she thinks she has some sort of judg-
ment to pass on his writing, and she explains that “if the scholar
in my example did need a publication, she might well have taken
the editor’s advice.”44 Fortunately for her, she has tenure at Yale, so
she doesn’t need to debase herself in this way. Her refusal, we are
told, is “neither unprofessional nor mysterious.”45 Indeed, she writes
“refusal can be an intentional and transparent part of professional
life for the scholar.”46 It might be worth mentioning that the LARB
editor in question, like many who’ve contributed in recent years to
the semi-public sphere of online magazines of which LARB is ex-
emplary, was a contingent faculty person. Which opens up a whole
other interesting set of questions I won’t discuss here.
Anyway, I take for granted that everyone in this audience will not
be sympathetic to Hungerford’s argument, though this audience is
likely to take more seriously Mary Holland’s similar comments on
Wallace’s misogyny. Unlike Hungerford, after all, Holland has done
the readings, and she has done them very well. In an essay collect-
ed in a volume on #MeToo, which she also edited with Heather
43. Hungerford, 151.
44. Hungerford, 161.
45. Hungerford, 163.
46. Hungerford, 163.
Issue 5 • 2025
31
Hewett, and which was excerpted in Literary Hub, Holland writes:
That Wallace struggled with his own misogyny at least as
much as do his characters is signicant to me as a critic not
solely because of what it says about Wallace but because
it underscores the ction’s own struggles and helps us see
how it can open up a necessary conversation about these
problems: our critical readings can construct the critiques
of misogyny and rape culture that the ction cannot ful-
ly mount. And given the enduring popularity of Wallace’s
work, especially among young male readers—in particular
with dissertating graduate students and so with future assis-
tant professors—it’s crucial that we continue to do so. So
while this essay may be the last I choose to write about Wal-
lace’s work, having invested a signicant portion of my ca-
reer so far in it, and now wanting to take my writing in new
directions, I continue to view Wallace’s work as requiring (a
new kind of) critical attention.47
What I am most interested in with respect to Hungerford’s and Hol-
land’s arguments is the way that the language of professionalism
mingles with various ethical positions on whether and in what way
to judge Wallace.
We are again in the liminal zone where individual judgments,
preferences, tastes, and ideals transform into collective impera-
tives—and not just standard-issue aesthetic and normative judg-
ments but full-blown professional judgments. Holland’s stance on
Wallace matters precisely because writing and thinking about this
author is part of her everyday work as a scholar and teacher, a
47. Mary K. Holland, “Quite Possibly the Last Essay I Need to Write about David
Foster Wallace,” in #MeToo and Literary Studies: Reading, Writing, and Teaching about
Sexual Violence and Rape Culture, ed. Mary K. Holland and Heather Hewett (London:
Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 125. Excerpted in Literary Hub, November 29, 2021,
https://lithub.com/the-last-essay-i-need-to-write-about-david-foster-wallace/ (ac-
cessed June 15, 2023).
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
32
reminder that the #MeToo movement was, among other things, a
movement about sexual harassment and abuse in the workplace, and
in many cases the workplace of creative professionals. Many literary
manifestations of #MeToo—the Shitty Media Men spreadsheet,
and so on—were precisely about the sorts of boundary-crossings
and violations that happen at and around the professional ritu-
als of contemporary literary culture. It’s about an acclaimed au-
thor being abusive toward you during the Q&A session; the writer
who crosses the line as a mentor or teacher; the awkward ritual
of the after-talk dinner going uncomfortably awry. And the cre-
ative workplace is also, for better or worse, the academic workplace,
whose myriad inequities have been amplied by contingency, ad-
junctication, and the truly horric job market.
So what is at stake in taking a position on Wallace is whether
and to what degree you as a literary critic are a good literary profes-
sional, whether and to what degree you’ll be allowed to become a
literary professional at all. We might disagree with these assessments,
but from what position are we disagreeing? Some might say we’re
disagreeing from the perspective of “the human” or “the nonspe-
cialized” or “the amateur.” “Hey,” they’d say, “I don’t know what
goes on at those fancy academic conferences; I’m just a regular per-
son who likes to read and think about Wallace!” The more political-
ly ambitious among us might paraphrase Marx and say, “My only
desire is to do a little criticism after dinner.” But in my view, and to
invoke Arthur C. Clarke, any suciently advanced fandom is indis-
tinguishable from professionalism. So maybe we’re all a little more
stuck than we’d like to admit.
I for one am inclined to believe that professionalism can be a
good thing, and that what we should be talking about isn’t wheth-
er we’re professional readers, but how we can make the profession
better, truer to the aims we aspire to achieve, whether we can build
a profession that does what it says on the tin. That is, I’m going
Issue 5 • 2025
33
to suggest nally that there are great and unrealized possibilities in
embracing our “déformation professionnelle.” Rather than think we can
avoid de-formation, we might aspire perhaps to de-form ourselves
better. And even the prisonhouse of tenure can look kind of, almost,
good in an age of precarity, contingency, and adjunctication. But
you all, again, might dier in your views of what a good or profes-
sional reader of David Foster Wallace should be like. Should look
like. Should be allowed to do or to say. Or whether being a profes-
sional reader of Wallace is a good idea in the rst place.
OK, then, what’s it going to be?
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
34
Bibliography
Baskin, Jon. Ordinary Unhappiness: The Therapeutic Fiction of David Foster
Wallace. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019.
Boswell, Marshall. Preface to A Companion to David Foster Wallace Stud-
ies, ix-xii. Edited by Marshall Boswell and Stephen J. Burn.
London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
den Dulk, Allard. “‘I Am in Here’: A Comparative Reading of Da-
vid Foster Wallace’s Innite Jest and Franz Kafka’s The Metamor-
phosis.” English Literature 8 (December 2021): 29—49.
Guillory, John. Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary
Study. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022.
Holland, Mary K., “Quite Possibly the Last Essay I Need to Write
about David Foster Wallace.” In #MeToo and Literary Studies:
Reading, Writing, and Teaching about Sexual Violence and Rape Culture,
edited by Mary K. Holland and Heather Hewett, 113-134.
London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. Excerpted in Literary
Hub, November 29, 2021, https://lithub.com/the-last-essay-
i-need-to-write-about-david-foster-wallace/ (accessed June
15, 2023).
Hungerford, Amy. Making Literature Now. Stanford: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 2016.
Marx, Karl. “The German Ideology.” Marxists Internet Archive.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/ger-
man-ideology/ch01a.htm.
Max, D. T. Every Ghost Story is a Love Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace.
New York: Penguin Books, 2013.
McCaery, Larry. “An Expanded Interview with David Foster Wal-
lace.” In Conversations with David Foster Wallace, edited by Stephen
J. Burn, 21-52. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012
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McGurl, Mark. “The Institution of Nothing: David Foster Wallace
in the Program.” boundary 2 41, no 3 (2014): 27-54.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Edited by Bernard Williams,
translated by Josene Naukho, poems translated by Adrian
del Caro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
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ature. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016.
Wallace, David Foster. “Borges on the Couch.” In Both Flesh and Not,
295-298. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2012.
Wallace, David Foster. The Broom of the System. New York: Penguin
Books, 2004.
Wallace, David Foster. “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fic-
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York: Little, Brown and Company, 1997.
Wallace, David Foster. “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously
Young.” In Both Flesh and Not, 37-72. New York: Little, Brown
and Company, 2012.
Wallace, David Foster. Innite Jest. New York: Back Bay Books, 2006.
Wallace, David Foster. “Review of Fort Wayne is Seventh on Hitler’s List:
Indiana Stories by Michael Martone.” Harvard Book Review, no.
15/16 (Winter-Spring 1990): 12-13.
Wallace, David Foster. “Joseph Frank’s Dostoyevsky.” In Consider the
Lobster and Other Essays, 255-274. New York: Little, Brown and
Company, 2006.
Wallace, David Foster. “Review of Portrait of an Eye: Three Novels by
Kathy Acker.” Harvard Review, no. 1 (1992): 154-156.
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Issue 5 • 2025
37
“Verbal Chaos”:
Authorial Absence in
Oblivion
Mike Miley
“The last vestige of my personality was my
terror at my personality’s dissolution, so I
clung to it desperately, climbed it like a rope
ladder back into my body.”1
“That distinctive singular stamp of himself”
In many regards, davId foster Wallace’s nal story collection,
Oblivion, stands as his most demanding work of ction. Other
works may be longer or more digressive or less tautly constructed,
but Oblivion surpasses them all in challenging readers and scholars
alike in sheer narrative density. The standard-issue storytelling de-
vices such as clearly intelligible plot points and decipherable, stable
narrative points of view are strangely absent from these detail-rich
nested narratives, with Wallace leaving little to take their place be-
yond a void of uncertainty or, well, oblivion.2 Indeed, the stories in
Oblivion are “abundant with disappearance”: absence, distance,
and removal permeate every story, making the collection’s nesting
1. Ben Lerner, 10:04 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 190.
2. Wyatt Mason, “Don’t Like It? You Don’t Have to Play,” The London Review of
Books, November 18, 2004, accessed June 14, 2016, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/
n22/wyatt-mason/dont-like-it-you-dont-have-to-play.
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
38
narratives into “the literary equivalent of a game of...Telephone”
that creates “a vertiginous sense of dislocation” in the reader.3
For an illustration of how rampant this disorientation is, consider
just how many relationships within the stories are dened by their
distanced or provisional quality: Randall’s stepfather-in-law and his
second wife Hope in “Oblivion,” Neal’s adoptive parents in “Good
Old Neon,” the interns in “The Suering Channel,” or the substi-
tute teacher Mr. Johnson in “The Soul is Not a Smithy.” In addi-
tion to the characters being estranged from each other, the narrators
often feel removed from themselves. The main character of “The
Soul is Not a Smithy” describes himself as attending class “in body
only,” “absent in both mind and spirit.”4 The boy in “Incarnations
of Burned Children” “learn[s] to leave himself and watch the whole
rest [of his life] unfold from a point overhead,” becoming little more
than “a thing among things.”5 Neal’s belief in his own fraudulence
in “Good Old Neon” alienates him from himself and others so
much that he can no longer see either clearly. Further, David Wal-
lace, the true narrator of “Good Old Neon” describes himself as a
“dithering, pathetically self-conscious outline or ghost of a person”
who imagines Neal as possessing a self so coherent that he appeared
to have a “neon aura around him all the time.”6 Everything in the
stories becomes “conditional” because the narrators are “insecure”
at best, oblivious at worst, and unreliable at every moment.7 Several
3. Brian Phillips, “The Negative Style of David Foster Wallace.,” The Hudson Re-
view 57, no. 4 (2005): 677; Ted Gioia, “Oblivion by David Foster Wallace,” The
New Canon, accessed March 2, 2021, http://www.thenewcanon.com/oblivion.html.
4. David Foster Wallace, “The Soul is Not a Smithy,” in Oblivion: Stories (New York:
Back Bay Books, 2005), 71, 80.
5. David Foster Wallace, “Incarnations of Burned Children,” in Oblivion: Sto-
ries (New York: Back Bay Books, 2005), 116.
6. David Foster Wallace, “Good Old Neon,” in Oblivion: Stories (New York: Back Bay
Books, 2005), 181, 180.
7. Charles Nixon, “Attention, Retention, and Extension in Oblivion: Stories,” in Critical
Issue 5 • 2025
39
stories—”Mister Squishy,” “The Soul is Not a Smithy,” and “Phi-
losophy and the Mirror of Nature”—feature characters who feel
so distanced from events taking place around them that they pres-
ent competing narratives in an attempt to direct the reader away
from the main action of the story. Other stories—”Mister Squishy,”
“Good Old Neon,” “Oblivion”—end “abruptly and unexpectedly
with narrative twists that open up an outer layer of interiority into
which the story’s principal layer has been nesting all along,” usually
in the form of revealing a previously hidden narrator or central con-
sciousness not suggested by the rest of the story.8 Most challenging
of all is the occasion of “Another Pioneer,” which relates a story
“derived from an acquaintance of a close friend who said that he
himself overheard” one man telling another on a plane that devolves
into multiple iterations with varied settings and events.9 In short,
these narratives seem, to quote from “Incarnations of Burned Chil-
dren,” “untenanted.”10
Of all the absences and layers of removal that permeate the col-
lection, no absence is greater felt than the absence of the authori-
al presence of David Foster Wallace. Outside of Oblivion, Wallace’s
presence within the text, both implied or often stated outright, func-
tions as a hallmark of his writing. No matter whether Wallace made
his presence felt in the form of frequent and vigorous footnotes, end-
notes, or authorial interpolations and intrusions, Wallace’s “person-
ality is stamped on every page” throughout his work, compelling the
reader to acknowledge that David Foster Wallace the author, “the
living human holding the pencil” is, in fact, here, present in the text,
Insights: David Foster Wallace, ed. Philip Coleman (Salem: Salem Press, 2015), 181.
8. Marshall Boswell, “‘The Constant Monologue Inside Your Head’: Oblivion and
the Nightmare of Consciousness,” in A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, ed.
Marshall Boswell and Stephen J. Burn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 152.
9. David Foster Wallace, “Another Pioneer,” in Oblivion: Stories (New York: Back Bay
Books, 2005), 117.
10. Wallace, “Incarnations,” 116.
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
40
talking to the reader directly.11 While Wallace’s technique of insert-
ing himself into his narratives was hardly new, Wallace “inverts the
procedures of metaction” that Barth and Roth employed not with
the intent to make the reader aware of ction as constructed ction,
but rather to demolish any sense of fakery or narrative sleight-of-
hand in his ction and instead place the reader in direct dialogue not
with “some abstract narrative persona” but with the authentic writer
himself, who has descended from his “gleaming abstract Olympian
HQ” to quiver with the lonely reader “in the mud of the trench.”12
Wallace’s metactional announcements of his presence contribute to
the sense of authenticity and sincerity that have become ubiquitous
in any discussion of Wallace as a writer or cultural gure because
these authorial intrusions invite the reader to, as Lee Konstantinou
claims, “believe in the total, genuine honesty, the ‘100% candor’ of
the author—not the narrator, but the author [emphasis original], Wal-
lace.”13 This quality of Wallace’s writing cultivates a “hunger for
11. A.O. Scott, “The Best Mind of His Generation,” The New York Times, Septem-
ber 21, 2008, accessed June 16, 2016, http://nytimes.com/2008/09/21/weekin-
review/21scott.html; David Foster Wallace, The Pale King: An Unnished Novel (New
York: Back Bay Books, 2012), 68.
12. Wallace, The Pale King, 68; David Foster Wallace, “Octet,” in Brief Interviews with
Hideous Men (Boston: Back Bay Books, 200), 160.
13. Lee Konstantinou, “No Bull: David Foster Wallace and Postironic Belief,”
in The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, ed. Samuel S. Cohen and Lee Konstantinou
(Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012), 94. However questionable the authen-
ticity of this sense of sincerity may be, what is certain is the sway it holds over
Wallace’s reputation both in and out of the academy. While its power has certainly
increased since Wallace’s death in 2008, Wallace’s narrative persona had become
so successful and distinct during his lifetime that he feared this “distinctive singular
stamp of himself ” had metastasized into mere schtick, and he sought to escape the
“negative entailments of his style” in his later ction by playing down those ele-
ments that had become as synonymous with his persona as his signature bandanna,
even going so far as to publish several stories under pseudonyms. (Wallace, “Joseph
Frank’s Dostoevsky,” 260n9; Lee Konstantinou, “Unnished Form,” Los Angeles Re-
view of Books, July 6, 2011, accessed March 2, 2021, http://www.lareviewofbooks.
org/article/unnished-form/). This transition in style correlates to a transition in
the thematic focus of his later ction, which places more emphasis on attention and
Issue 5 • 2025
41
the author” among readers, typifying Benjamin Widiss’s description
of authorship at the end of the twentieth century: authors produce
texts featuring “writing revelatory of authorial personality and biog-
raphy, writing that signals its accessibility and that cultivates within
its readers a sense of intimacy.”14 The recent successes of metac-
tionists such as Karl Ove Knausgaard, Sheila Heti, and Ben Lerner
lead one to believe that Wallace represented the front lines of this
new and intimate form of metaction whose main stylistic signier
is authorial presence.
However, within Oblivion, such moments are conspicuously absent,
and when a writer as textually visible as Wallace chooses a collection
entitled Oblivion to adopt a new, more absent style, something more
than coincidence is at play. Charles Nixon attributes the narrative
uncertainty that denes Oblivion to “the displacement of Wallace as a
centrally-directing author gure,” and in looking at the collection in
relative isolation from his typical style, we can gain a stronger under-
standing of why Wallace’s presence looms so large in his other work
and how that presence functions as the cornerstone of his purpose
as a writer.15 As Wallace eaces “that distinctive singular stamp of
himself ” and his trademark techniques in Oblivion and adopts a more
absent authorial position than that of his earlier work, the narratives
themselves (and the reader’s ability to grasp them) become inundated
consciousness, alleging that aiming outward and paying close attention to all that
occurs outside oneself in the moment, while initially boring, leads toward a type of
transcendent empathy and awareness, a “constant bliss in every atom” that one
could not get through remaining stuck in his or her self-centered “default setting
hardwired...at birth.” David Foster Wallace, “Notes and Asides,” in The Pale King: An
Unnished Novel (New York: Back Bay Books, 2012), 548; David Foster Wallace, This
Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Signicant Occasion about Living a Compassionate
Life (New York: Little, Brown, 2009), 38.
14. Benjamin Widiss, Obscure Invitations: The Persistence of the Author in Twentieth-century
American Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 28, 3.
15. Nixon, “Attention, Retention, and Extension,” 182.
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
42
by a “cascade of random noise” and drift closer to chaos.16 Without
a strong, self-aware presence, both in the characters and in the au-
thorial voice, the reader encounters a horrible oblivion in the form
of absence and dissolution, suggesting that a loss of self-awareness, a
loss of consciousness, may be the true nightmare to be avoided.17 It is
this aspect of Wallace’s technique in Oblivion that makes the collection
stand alone among Wallace’s oeuvre and suggests a need to revise our
understanding of Wallace and his later work in particular. Wallace’s
authorial absence in Oblivion serves as the strongest textual argument
for the need for writer and reader both to construct, present, and, in
the writer’s case, announce a coherent self in order to avoid the obliv-
ion that comes from being forgotten and lost in the “verbal chaos”
16. David Foster Wallace, “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky,” in Consider the Lobster and
Other Essays (New York: Little, Brown, 2006), 260n9; David Foster Wallace, “Mister
Squishy,” in Oblivion: Stories (New York: Back Bay Books, 2005), 44.
17. Wallace scholars have employed varying denitions of oblivion when discussing
Wallace’s work, but equating oblivion with disappearing or being forgotten opens up
a productive discussion of Wallace’s authorial presence in Oblivion in particular and
throughout his ction. In his thoughtful analysis of Wallace’s literary journalistic
techniques, Josh Roiland employs Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of oblivion, den-
ing oblivion as “an active screening device” that functions much like “a concierge”
that can “shut temporarily the doors and windows of consciousness; to protect us
from the noise and agitation...to introduce a little quiet into our consciousness.”
(Josh Roiland, “Getting Away from It All: The Literary Journalism of David Foster
Wallace and Nietzsche’s Concept of Oblivion,” in The Legacy of David Foster Wallace,
ed. Samuel S. Cohen and Lee Konstantinou (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press,
2012), 27-28). Greg Carlisle links oblivion to “obscurity: ‘limbo, anonymity, nonex-
istence, nothingness, neglect, disregard,” claiming that this denition captures the
dilemma of many of the characters in the collection, who “are extremely attentive
and/or self-conscious, but their activities often serve to distract them from what
they don’t want to think about,” leading to “stasis or limbo or to a crisis of iden-
tity.” (Greg Carlisle, Nature’s Nightmare: Analyzing David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion (Los
Angeles: Sideshow Media Group Press, 2013), 10). Roiland considers oblivion as
a self-protecting form of unconsciousness—we tune out certain external things
in order to avoid harmful or weakening stimuli—while Carlisle views oblivion as
actively ignoring the interiority of the self because its incoherence is too frightening
to face directly. While Carlisle and Roiland speak of what a person chooses to be
oblivious of, oblivion works both ways, both as a state of forgetting and of being
forgotten or unknown by others.
Issue 5 • 2025
43
or drowned in the “cascade of random noise” that is an increasing-
ly mediated, corporatized, dehumanizing, and entropic world.18 The
collection goes one step further to conclude with the implication that
the author must also be observed in the process of creation in order to
avoid the disappearance of oblivion.
The untenanted narrative
Despite its brevity, “Incarnations of Burned Children” illustrates
the consequences of absence. While the child who learns “to leave
himself and watch the whole rest [of his life] unfold from a point
overhead” may achieve a higher level of awareness as a result of this
traumatic incident, one could hardly argue that such an awareness is
desirable as depicted in the story, even without the catalyzing trau-
ma. This kind of absence, in the form of an “objective solipsism”
that rejects “the boundary between one mind and another,” renders
the character not only unable to form a boundaried self but also un-
able to connect with others or make a dierence in the world around
him.19 The narrator of “Another Pioneer” exhibits a comparable
“untenanted” quality. One could argue that the narrator of “Anoth-
er Pioneer” is present to narrate their tale; however, they are so far
removed from the tale they relate that they might as well be absent
from the narrative altogether. After all, this narrator, unlike many of
the other less reliable narrators in the collection, cannot even settle
on what version of the story to tell, let alone establish basic narra-
tive elements such as setting, leaving the narrative as “untenanted”
as the child in “Incarnations of Burned Children” and open to the
same charges of fraudulence as the gifted child in the story or Neal
in “Good Old Neon.” Becoming an “untenanted...thing among
things” sounds as much like a death in life as addiction does in Innite
18. Wallace, “The Soul is Not a Smithy,” 99.
19. Clare Hayes-Brady, The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace: Language, Iden-
tity, and Resistance (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 112.
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
44
Jest or the empty worship of self, beauty, or materialism in This is
Water. In this regard, the title “Incarnations of Burned Children” is
quite ironic, as the burned child is not being made incarnate at all.
Rather, his soul is separating from his body. If anything, he is being
disincarnated, suggesting that when one escapes the self, he or she
becomes oblivious to him- or herself as a person in the world, not a
“self among selves” but “a thing among things.”20
Surprisingly, the most “tenanted” narrator in Oblivion, that is, the one
most persistently present and eective, may be the narrator of “Philoso-
phy and the Mirror of Nature.” As absent as his lack of awareness may
make him seem, the narrator of “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature”
is actually present enough to successfully perform his main role in the
story, which is authorial. While Clare Hayes-Brady is correct in claiming
the narrator, similar to many narrators in Oblivion, is more in control of
his vocabulary than the narrative, he does fulll his primary narrative
duty, which is to provide the explanation for the “chronic mask of insane
terror” that is his mother’s face to the public, lest they “read” her face
incorrectly.21 Granted, he spends most of the story mired in digressions,
but those digressions come only after he has successfully explained his
mother’s botched surgical procedures and the necessity of him accom-
panying her on the bus. No matter how awed of a storyteller he may
be, his presence makes a dierence in explaining something dicult to
gure out on one’s own, suggesting that such tales of horror and trauma
benet from the presence of some kind of storyteller or narrative agent.
After all, it is “only with [his] presence [emphasis added] and protection
throughout the long ride” that his mother can move through her life
with even a hint of normalcy.22
20. Hayes-Brady, Unspeakable Failures, 93; Wallace, “Incarnations of Burned Chil-
dren,” 116.
21. Hayes-Brady, Unspeakable Failures, 143; David Foster Wallace, “Philosophy and
the Mirror of Nature,” in Oblivion: Stories (New York: Back Bay Books, 2005), 182.
22. Wallace, “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,” 183
Issue 5 • 2025
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The characters who attempt to be absent or oblivious wind up
having reality intrude into their fantasies of oblivion anyway, and the
intrusion only adds to the trauma that the oblivion attempts to avoid.
The narrator of “The Soul is Not a Smithy” is perhaps actively ab-
sent, using his powers of creation as a way to avoid attending to what is
going on in front of him; however, he ultimately is not absent in mind
or body because “the atmosphere of the classroom...subconsciously
inuence[s] the unhappy events of [his] narrative fantasy.”23 While it
would seem that his narrative fantasies would represent the creation
of a boundary between himself and the world around him, his lack
of presence (similar to Hope in “Oblivion”) causes that boundary and
his creative powers to fail as he loses control of his own creation. Thus,
narrative control is inextricable from a sense of presence, and when
they separate, narrative collapses into indeterminacy.
Yet another example of the porousness of certain
borders
While many read the traumatic narratives of Oblivion as depic-
tions of troubled souls who seek oblivion as an alternative to the pain
of consciousness, Oblivion highlights the dangers that ow from a self
whose boundaries have been dissolved. When compared with Wal-
lace’s other work, these narrative techniques suggest that a height-
ened awareness of others and one’s surroundings may be equally,
if not more horrifying than acute self-consciousness. Clare Hayes-
Brady makes an important distinction often glossed over in assess-
ments of Wallace’s salvos against narcissism in favor of other-di-
rectedness: Wallace’s work “simultaneously seek[s] to recognize the
other and [emphasis original] reinforc[es] the primacy of the individ-
ual” by dramatizing how one discovers the self through engaging in
23. Wallace, “The Soul is Not a Smithy,” 92.
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
46
dialogue with others.24 To outline her view of Wallace’s depiction of
the self, Hayes-Brady uses Paul Ricoeur’s description of the conict
between “an overdeveloped self (solipsism)” and “overdeveloped
empathy (overrelation).”25 While Hayes-Brady applies overrelation
to the characters in the story “Oblivion” specically, it also serves
as a useful lens through which to assess Wallace’s authorial presence
in the collection as a whole. Much of the current understanding of
Wallace’s work rightly characterizes solipsism as catastrophic but,
I argue, goes too far in favoring overrelation. Oblivion stands as the
work in Wallace’s oeuvre that demonstrates the perils of overrelation,
both for the characters and for the ction itself. Without a “centrally
directing author gure,” the stories take on the feeling of raw, un-
processed data that presents the reader with the “verbal chaos” of
“an abstract mash of letters.”26
Overrelation abounds in “Oblivion.” Randall and Hope Na-
pier of “Oblivion” have over-related to such a degree that they
have “collapsed into each other”: Hope is able not only to think
his thoughts about her, her family, his own past, and their rela-
tionship, she also can repress his desires (and have them return
in unwanted ways).27 Her dream of Randall’s repressed desire
for her daughter (and his stepdaughter) Audrey blurs with her
repressed memories of being abused by her own stepfather, thus
making her collapse into Randall more complete. The story’s twist
ending, in which we discover that what we have been reading is
Hope’s dream, makes the reader uncertain how much of Ran-
dall’s thoughts and feelings are real or simply Hope’s projections.
This confusion mirrors the central conict of the story where
24. Hayes-Brady, Unspeakable Failures, 11, 93.
25. Hayes-Brady, Unspeakable Failures, 103, 104.
26. Nixon, “Attention, Retention, and Extension,” 182; Wallace, “The Soul is Not
a Smithy,” 99.
27. Hayes-Brady, Unspeakable Failures, 146.
Issue 5 • 2025
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Randall and Hope cannot tell whether or not Randall snores or
when either of them is asleep when the snoring may or may not
be taking place. The truth (as revealed in Hope’s dream) that they
are both asleep and Randall is snoring, breaks down every border
imaginable because it makes every possibility true all at once.
Although both Hope and Randall are present equally in the nal
page of the story, because no one controls the narrative, a void
exists at the center of the story. Wallace conates the oblivion of
sleep and repression with the oblivion of self that comes from
Hope and Randall’s overrelation. Unlike the ending of “Mister
Squishy” or “Good Old Neon,” both of which employ a similar
narrative device, the revelation of a central consciousness on the
nal page of “Oblivion” does not provide the sense of authority
that usually attends such a reveal.
One need not look far in Oblivion to nd additional cases of
dissolved boundaries or porous borders brought on by overrela-
tion. The stories whose dissolved boundaries most closely resemble
“Oblivion” are “Mister Squishy” and “Good Old Neon.” The over-
relation between the narrator David Wallace and the protagonist
Neal in “Good Old Neon” is so strong that, as in “Oblivion,” the
reader does not know who the narrator is until the nal pages of the
story. As with “Oblivion,” we end the story uncertain as to which of
the qualities Neal attributes to himself are actually qualities in David
Wallace that he projects onto Neal in order to identify with him and
his pain as he looks at Neal “through the tiny keyhole of himself.”28
Starting from its title, “Mister Squishy” hints that any boundaries the
story presents will not hold rm against outside pressure. From the
rigid glass of the conference room window to the “imsy neopoly-
merized wrappers” of the Felonies! snacks to the integrity of the focus
group, every border, both concrete and abstract, will be ruptured.29
28. Wallace, “Good Old Neon,” 180.
29. Wallace, “Mister Squishy,” 30.
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
48
These ruptures occur at an authorial level long before the reader
learns of the myriad acts of subterfuge that comprise the clandes-
tine plot of the story. In retrospect, one can hardly say that Wallace
ruptures narrative borders in “Mister Squishy” the way he does in
other stories in the collection, because none existed in the rst place.
The narrative point of view is uid from the start, alternating from
third-person limited in its focus on Terry Schmidt to third-person
omniscient in its description of the man climbing the window to
rst-person when the narrator announces “I was one of the men in
this room” roughly ten pages into the story; the story continues to
shift among these perspectives to the point that, by the story’s end,
the reader cannot say with much condence who is telling the story
or what, if anything, has taken place.30
These breakthroughs in “Mister Squishy” hardly represent the
types of breakthroughs championed by Wallace elsewhere that lead
to “constant bliss in every atom” or some higher level of awareness.31
Rather, “Mister Squishy” is a narrative of overrelation in which the
story itself draws few boundaries among its points of view, making
it a descent into chaos whose end goal is absence. In the story, Alan
Britton wants to remove human facilitators from market research,
so he orchestrates the elaborate scenario the story depicts to prove
that their presence aects the data. The parallels to authorial ab-
sence in the collection as a whole are quite striking, making “Mister
Squishy” a most tting, if most foreboding, opening to a collection
characterized by absence and removal. Wallace removes (or at least
conceals) a central authority from the story, and in doing so demon-
strates the dierence an authorial presence makes to his narratives.
In the context of the story itself, the narrative technique Wallace
employs in “Mister Squishy” signies that Britton has already won.
30. Wallace, “Mister Squishy,” 14.
31. David Foster Wallace, “Notes and Asides,” in The Pale King: An Unnished Nov-
el (New York: Back Bay Books, 2012), 548.
Issue 5 • 2025
49
What Schmidt or any other character does in the story will not make
much of a dierence on the story’s outcome because, as we learn in
the nal pages, Britton’s behind-the-scenes machinations have de-
termined the course of events well in advance of the story’s begin-
ning. In this way the narrative functions as its own “Captured Shop”
in that it appears autonomous but lacks a central authority through
which to lter the enormous amounts of incoming data in an ac-
cessible and intelligible way. Like the human facilitator, Wallace’s
absence shows how he can “make a dierence in [his] chosen eld
simply by the fact of [his] unique and central presence in it.”32 While
such presence does present obstacles that Wallace is often critical of,
namely succumbing to “the belief that [one is] fundamentally dif-
ferent from the common run of man, unique and in certain crucial
ways superior, more as it were central, meaningful,” the alternative,
as “Mister Squishy” and most of the other stories in Oblivion amply
illustrate, is a kind of “verbal chaos” in which writer and reader both
become overwhelmed by the entropy of “a machine of which no
single person now...could be master.”33 Such a state may be chaotic
for a corporation, but the story shows how it can be absolutely cata-
strophic for a work of ction.
Called to account
As the most straightforwardly told story in the collection (rela-
tively speaking), “The Suering Channel” represents a reward at the
end of a long and dicult task; however, despite its relative conven-
tionality, it contributes to and extends Wallace’s ideas about authori-
al disappearance. Scholars are quick to note the similarities between
reporter Skip Atwater and the persona Wallace adopts in his literary
journalism, and part of the joy of the story is watching Wallace push
32. Wallace, “Mister Squishy,” 30.
33. Wallace, “Mister Squishy,” 30, 45.
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
50
the absurd types of assignments magazines frequently sent him on—
state fairs, cruises, food festivals, awards ceremonies for pornogra-
phy—to their most absurd conclusions. In this absurdity, though,
Wallace, through the writer-at-work Skip Atwater, stumbles into ar-
ticulating the challenge of creating art and being a present artist in
the modern world in a way unique to his body of work. Atwater
denes “the great informing conict of the American psyche” as
“the conict between the subjective centrality of our own lives ver-
sus our awareness of its objective insignicance.”34 Atwater’s senti-
ment brings the collection full-circle by echoing Terry Schmidt’s fear
that all of the work his company does is irrelevant. Further, Atwater
experiences this conict rsthand, both literally and guratively. On
the one hand, he struggles to convince his editors of the worth of
a story about a man whose shit is also art. On the more gurative
side, his sexual encounter with Amber Moltke results in a state of
oblivion, or disappearance as she engulfs him to the point that “any-
one trying to look in either side’s [car] window would have been
unable to see any part of Skip Atwater at all.”35 Wallace’s aside that
Amber’s movements cause the car to sink “even more deeply into
the overlook’s mud” suggests that the entire incident runs the risk of
being engulfed in shit and thus not worth looking at.36 This comic
disappearance serves as a foil to the decidedly not comic events of
September 11, in which most of what we see in the story will be
destroyed. In fact, much of the action of “The Suering Channel”
irts with such insignicance. Little is created in the story at all: the
only “works” produced in are Moltke’s shit and the promotional
video for The Suering Channel itself. With 9/11 looming in the
background, Wallace seems to place waste and suering as the only
34. David Foster Wallace, “The Suering Channel,” in Oblivion: Stories (New York:
Back Bay Books, 2005), 284.
35. Wallace, “The Suering Channel,” 287.
36. Wallace, “The Suering Channel,” 287.
Issue 5 • 2025
51
byproducts of the contemporary world, which naturally makes the
dilemma of the author in modern society even more dire and the
absence of Oblivion even more signicant. How can writers assert
their own presence and subjectivity when they must also know that,
in the grand swarm of information that is the modern media land-
scape, little of it could possibly matter? It will all vanish into oblivion
or be ushed away like shit.
There is a hopeful reading to “The Suering Channel,” one al-
beit tempered by the knowledge that many of the characters will
die in the September 11 attacks and that the magazine, slated to be
nished September 10, is also destined for oblivion. Regardless, peo-
ple still gather at the story’s climax to watch Brint Moltke produce
his art. This scene and its placement in the story (and the collection)
suggests that the act of creating the art may be of greater import
than the art itself. After all, without Moltke’s presence, his “art” is
merely shit. Without him, it has been, as Laurel Manderley says,
decontextualized, and when something becomes decontextualized,
“suddenly it’s disgusting.”37 However, when Moltke, the creator, is
present and creating the work, the work has meaning and context,
just as Wallace’s presence in the text furthers his ctional goals be-
cause the text and his purpose for it are no longer decontextualized.
As in “Mister Squishy,” the “unique and central presence” of hu-
man facilitators make a dierence.38 “The author’s absent presence”
gives the reader a feeling of intimacy, of being engaged in active
communication with another person rather than corporate Ameri-
ca’s “cascade of random noise meant to befuddle.”39 “The Suering
Channel,” and Oblivion as a whole, suggest that if people in an over-
mediated, overstimulated society cannot see the artist, then the artist
risks the oblivion of being forgotten, reduced to the level of shit, the
37. Wallace, “The Suering Channel,” 309.
38. Wallace, “Mister Squishy,” 30.
39.. Hayes-Brady, Unspeakable Failures, 106; Wallace, “Mister Squishy,” 44.
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
52
thing that everyone knows exists but no one wants to acknowledge,
let alone look at. In “The Suering Channel,” therefore, the artist
must be present in order to be seen as an artist, to avoid the oblivion
of being forgotten. Further, an artist’s presence is not sucient: an
audience must be present as well to witness the artist making art,
witness it coming out of him or her, lest they be unaware, oblivious,
that anyone did it. Thus, Oblivion shows how the contemporary era
of meaningless consumption and waste makes presence a mutual
necessity between writer and reader.40
The gure of the witness runs throughout the stories in Oblivion,
often appearing at the climax of the story.41 Consider the endings
of “Another Pioneer” and “Good Old Neon” alongside the ending
of “The Suering Channel.” In each case, the creative gure—the
exceptional child of “Another Pioneer,” Neal in “Good Old Neon,”
and Brint Moltke in “The Suering Channel”—comes to be regard-
ed as a fraud, either by outside sources or by himself. In the case
of “Another Pioneer” and “Good Old Neon,” these accusations
of fraud instigate catastrophes: warriors set re to the village and
Neal commits suicide, while the end of “The Suering Channel,” in
which Brint Moltke either will or will not be exposed as a fraud, has
the cataclysm of 9/11 lingering behind it. The creators, in confront-
ing such accusations, face, like Skip Atwater, their “objective insig-
nicance,” and it destroys them, sending them and their narratives
headlong into chaos. However, the stories do not end on such a dire
note, for each fraud is attended by a witness. The “keen-eyed child”
40. Hayes-Brady, Unspeakable Failures, 96.
41. Each of these moments of witnessing, along with the endings to most of the sto-
ries in Oblivion, feature a strong ash of light or light imagery: the “great at blank
white screen” that ends “Mister Squishy,” “the sun up and down like a yoyo” that
concludes “Incarnations of Burned Children,” “Another Pioneer”’s “great rapa-
cious re,” “the ask like neon” of “Good Old Neon,” “a minuscule sliver or ray or
‘blade’ of light” that appears at the end of “Oblivion,” and, of course, the “searing
and amorphous light” that ends “The Suering Channel” and the collection as a
whole (66, 116, 140, 179n, 237, 329).
Issue 5 • 2025
53
at the end of “Another Pioneer,” David Wallace at the end of “Good
Old Neon,” and the television audience at the close of “The Suer-
ing Channel” stare out “through the tiny keyhole” of themselves at
the artist present and suering before them. This act of witnessing,
one could argue, permits true communication to occur because the
witness’ presence institutes a boundary between self and other. They
stare out “through the tiny keyhole” of their perspective to under-
stand another person more fully. More importantly, the act of wit-
nessing allows the witness to reach a greater level of self-awareness.
“Good Old Neon” serves as the best example of how communi-
cation for Wallace requires a strong, mutual interaction between a
present writer and reader-witness. At rst glance, “Good Old Neon”
may seem like yet another tale of overrelation and overly porous
boundaries between the self and other, both within the fraudulent
Neal and the hidden narrator David Wallace, the person “who this
is really about.”42 Although the bulk of the story demonstrates the
chaos of overrelation through Neal’s inability to establish a true and
coherent self and David Wallace’s projection of himself into Neal’s
life, the nal paragraphs of the story oer a moment of triumph
over the entropy of overrelation and a step toward constructing a
realer, more present self. For much of the story, it would appear that
“Good Old Neon” is headed for the same kind of nightmarish cat-
aclysm as the rest of the stories in Oblivion; however, through his
interpretation of Neal’s life, David Wallace sees the chaos and death
that overrelation leads to in Neal and silences it in himself before
it reaches its logical nihilistic end. The story’s conclusion features
“the realer, more enduring and sentimental part” of David Wallace
staring at the “inbent spiral that keeps [him] from ever getting any-
where,” best represented by Neal himself, and telling it “Not another
word.”43 For the rst time in this bleak collection, the “realer” self
42. Wallace, “Good Old Neon,” 152.
43. Wallace, “Good Old Neon,” 181.
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
54
triumphs. While David Wallace’s appearance as the true narrator
at the end of “Good Old Neon” reuses the same narrative device
employed in “Mister Squishy” and “Oblivion,” here the story turns
away from the absence and chaos of those stories and resolves into
a positive order where growth and communication can take place. It
can hardly be a coincidence that this singular triumph of establish-
ing selfhood features an explicit instance of authorial presence, the
only one in the collection. The deciding factor in that success is an
authorial presence that clearly denes its own borders at the story’s
climax and comes about via an act of witnessing.
Although the fact that one “can’t ever truly know what’s going on
inside somebody else” may doom such an endeavor to failure, the
attempt, failed though it may be, leads one closer to establishing a
self that can function in the world among others because, as Hayes-
Brady writes, such an attempt forces a person to “accept his/her po-
sition as an other as well as a self.”44 Without such acceptance, both
self and other are lost in total noise. Wallace’s choice of a keyhole
for this metaphor characterizes the self as a door, a boundary with
an opening through which one can peer and apprehend an other
outside the self and thus become aware of both without inviting
confusion or overrelation between the two. While the image of a
closed (and locked) door may invite feelings of isolation and despair,
such separation ensures the integrity and uniqueness of the self in a
way that an open door does not.
“Shuttling between
the you and i”
Of course, we have no way of knowing where Wallace would
have taken this new approach to authorial presence and the insights
that it oers, if anywhere at all. What we can see, however, is how
44. Wallace, “Good Old Neon,” 181; Hayes-Brady, Unspeakable Failures, 104.
Issue 5 • 2025
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Wallace’s later ction ushers in an era of American ction with a
strong interest in authorial presence. Some of the writers most close-
ly identied as heirs to Wallace’s legacy, Ben Lerner foremost among
them, have written work that appears to instantiate the narrative
ethics posited in Oblivion. While autoction itself seems to embrace
notions of authorial presence so thoroughly as to dissolve the bound-
ary between ction and memoir, other moments in these works, such
as the two climactic exchanges in Lerner’s 2019 novel The Topeka
School, seem to function as a continuation of “The Suering Chan-
nel” in the way that they emphasize how selfhood and community
depend upon direct, personal, sincere communication between two
present individuals. Such moments indicate a desire among readers
and writers for a more engaged form of authorship less interested in
the artice of language games and more devoted to “instantiat[ing]
single-entendre principles.”45
In their harrowing depictions of the erasure of consciousness to-
ward oblivion, the stories in Oblivion exemplify why Wallace often
takes exception to the deconstructionists’ understanding of author-
ship, which Wallace describes as follows: writing is “abstract because
it is a function not of presence but of absence: the reader’s absent
when the writer’s writing, and the writer’s absent when the read-
er’s reading...meaning in language requires a cultivation of absence
rather than presence, involves not the imposition but the erasure
of consciousness.”46 Despite going into great and at times apprecia-
tive detail about the deconstructionists, Wallace ultimately dismisses
their arguments in favor of a dead author by stating that “us ci-
vilians...know in our gut that writing is an act of communication
45. David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” in A Sup-
posedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments (Boston: Back Bay Books,
1998), 81.
46. David Foster Wallace, “Greatly Exaggerated,” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never
Do Again: Essays and Arguments (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1998), 140.
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
56
between one human being and another.”47 If writing is the act of
one human being communicating with another, erasing conscious-
ness and cultivating absence would be the worst way to go about
forging a strong and meaningful connection. Rather, the “erasure of
consciousness” seems to be the real nightmare of nature in Oblivion,
as characters and authorial voices become swallowed by “cascade[s]
of random noise,” sexual trauma, and national tragedies.
Wallace’s line of thinking here (and the line of thinking of this
paper) is not to reject Barthes wholesale and argue in favor of the in-
tentional fallacy or univocal readings of Wallace or any other writer;
however, despite some statements Wallace made to the contrary, his
work explores methods to keep the author alive in the text post-Bar-
thes, and this paper’s reading of Oblivion illuminates the essential role
authorial presence plays in Wallace’s work as a whole. In his other
work, Wallace’s authorial presence accomplishes the separation nec-
essary to creating a form of communication that leads to establish-
ing a coherent identity by reinstituting a boundary between reader
and writer, self and other. Oblivion shows why this boundary may be
necessary by showing what happens when it is not strongly delin-
eated. Regardless of the theme his work pursues, presence stands
as the main criterion for success, and that process starts with the
writer Wallace making his readers sense that he is present in the text,
talking to them. It is through this act of one human being commu-
nicating with another that Wallace achieves the “postironic belief ”
that Lee Konstantinou describes: the mutual-but-abstract presence
of an author who refuses to hide and a reader who agrees to witness
and believe. In their separation, reader and writer are locked togeth-
er in a mutual dependence as a means of avoiding the verbal chaos
of what Wallace refers to elsewhere as “total noise, the seething stat-
ic of every particular thing and experience, and one’s total freedom
47. Wallace, “Greatly Exaggerated,” 144.
Issue 5 • 2025
57
of innite choice about what to choose to attend to and represent.”48
“Tonight I see no spheres, but project myself
and then gaze back, an important trick because
the goal is to be on both sides of the poem,
shuttling between the you and I.”49
48. David Foster Wallace, “Deciderization 2007—A Special Report,” in Both Flesh
and Not: Essays (New York: Little, Brown, 2012), 302.
49. Lerner, 193.
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
58
Bibliography
Boswell, Marshall. “‘The Constant Monologue Inside Your Head’:
Oblivion and the Nightmare of Consciousness.” In A Compan-
ion to David Foster Wallace Studies, edited by Marshall Boswell
and Stephen J. Burn, 151-70. New York, NY: Palgrave Mac-
millan, 2013.
Carlisle, Greg. Nature’s Nightmare: Analyzing David Foster Wallace’s Obliv-
ion. Los Angeles: Sideshow Media Group Press, 2013.
Gioia, Ted. “Oblivion by David Foster Wallace.” The New Canon.
Accessed March 2, 2021. http://www.thenewcanon.com/
oblivion.html.
Hayes-Brady, Clare. The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace:
Language, Identity, and Resistance. New York: Bloomsbury Aca-
demic, 2016.
Konstantinou, Lee. “No Bull: David Foster Wallace and Postironic
Belief.” In The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, edited by Samuel
S. Cohen and Lee Konstantinou, 83-112. Iowa City: Univer-
sity of Iowa Press, 2012.
Konstantinou, Lee. “Unnished Form.” Los Angeles Review of Books,
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viewofbooks.org/article/unnished-form/.
Lerner, Ben. 10:04. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.
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dont-like-it-you-dont-have-to-play.
McCarey, Larry. “An Expanded Interview with David Foster Wal-
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J. Burn, 21-52. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012.
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Nixon, Charles. “Attention, Retention, and Extension in Oblivion:
Stories.” In Critical Insights: David Foster Wallace, edited by Philip
Coleman, 176-91. N.p.: Salem Press, 2015.
Phillips, Brian. “The Negative Style of David Foster Wallace.” The
Hudson Review 57, no. 4 (2005): 675-82.
Roiland, Josh. “Getting Away from It All: The Literary Journalism
of David Foster Wallace and Nietzsche’s Concept of Oblivi-
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of Iowa Press, 2012.
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Wallace, David Foster. “Another Pioneer.” In Oblivion: Stories, 117-40.
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Arguments, 21-82. Boston: Back Bay Books, 1998.
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Wallace, David Foster. “Incarnations of Burned Children.” In Obliv-
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Wallace, David Foster. “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky.” In Consider the
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Wallace, David Foster. “Mister Squishy.” In Oblivion: Stories, 3-66.
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Wallace, David Foster. “Octet.” In Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,
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Wallace, David Foster. The Pale King: An Unnished Novel. New York:
Back Bay Books, 2012.
Wallace, David Foster. “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.” In
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Wallace, David Foster. “The Soul is Not a Smithy.” In Oblivion: Stories,
67-113. New York: Back Bay Books, 2005.
Wallace, David Foster “The Suering Channel.” In Oblivion: Stories,
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Wallace, David Foster. This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Sig-
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The System of David Foster
Wallace’s Literary Sociology1
Paolo Pitari
1. Introduction
DavId foster Wallace Was fIrst and foremost a ction writer
who thought of himself as a ction writer. When interviewers
asked him about his nonction, he answered: “I’ll be honest: I think
of myself as a ction writer.”2 So why write about his sociology? Is
there even such a thing? And why should it be interesting? What
follows shows that the answers to these questions unveil the core of
Wallace’s lifelong project: Wallace did construct a sociology, and one
which presents a clear and convincing diagnosis of the loneliness
so widespread in American society and establishes the foundation
of his attempt to provide a solution to the American contemporary
predicament via his ction. For this reason, his sociology must be
understood to be the core of his literary project.
2. What is Sociology?
Ideology determines the denition of sociology. An ideology is a
“system of ideas.”3 In its original meaning, the term is devoid of all
1. From: The Problem of Free Will in David Foster Wallace, rst edition, by Paolo Pitari,
Copyright 2024, Imprint. Reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis Group.
2. Tom Scocca, “David Foster Wallace,” in Conversations with David Foster Wallace, ed.
Stephen J. Burn (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 83.
3. Oxford Dictionary of English, ed. Angus Stevenson, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
62
the pejorative connotations assigned to it in contemporary culture. An
ideology is a mode of interpreting the world and, therefore, having
one is necessary to live. Each one of us interprets the world according
to their ideology, and so does each society, and all denitions come to
light within a certain system of values and beliefs, which establishes
the foundation of everything we say and think about the world.
It therefore is impossible to dene “sociology” without delving
into ideological and, ultimately, ontological discussions. The term and
practice were born within positivism as Auguste Comte introduced it
in his Cours de philosophie positive (1830-42). Being the daughter of pos-
itivism, then, sociology is the granddaughter of the Enlightenment,
that great philosophy of “reason and individualism,”4 without which
human beings would have never believed in the possibility of positiv-
ism, i.e. “a philosophical system recognizing only that which can be
scientically veried or which is capable of logical or mathematical
proof, and therefore rejecting metaphysics and theism.”5
Without the Enlightenment and positivism, therefore, sociology
would have never been. Hence why it was founded as “the idea of a
‘science of man,’ devoted to uncovering scientic laws determining
the basic dynamics of human interactions.”6 (Blackburn 2008, 342):
because of Western society’s fundamental belief in the “scientic
method.” But what is the “scientic method”? It is the method built
on empiricism. But empiricism, too, is a set of beliefs, and, therefore,
a philosophy, like every other set of beliefs. The founding belief of
empiricism is that only what can be scientically veried can be true.
But this belief is not scientic, and its truth-value cannot be scientif-
ically veried. This belief is a philosophical proposition.
University Press, 2010), s.v. “Ideology.”
4. Oxford Dictionary of English, s.v. “Enlightenment.”
5. Oxford Dictionary of English, s.v. “Enlightenment.”
6. Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, ed. Simon Blackburn, 2nd ed. Revised (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2008), s.v. “Enlightenment.”
Issue 5 • 2025
63
Heidegger was among the rst to show that the meaning of sci-
ence cannot itself be scientic. In What Is Called Thinking (1951-52), he
wrote that “science does not think,”7 and in Gesamtausgabe I.16 (2000),
he explained why: “using physical methods, for example, I cannot say
what physics is. What physics is, can only be thought following the
manner of philosophical question.”8 Heidegger was not criticizing sci-
ence. He was simply recognizing that science is not beyond ideology.
Like everything else, it depends on a prior metaphysics (in its case
empiricism, positivism, the Enlightenment), i.e. on a philosophy.
We take the meaning of “science” and “scientic” for granted,
but within these terms lie abysses of presuppositions and uncertain-
ties. Émile Durkheim was one of the original positivists. His de-
nition of sociology’s goals in The Rules of Sociological Method (1895)
was “to extend the scope of scientic rationalism to cover human
behaviour.”9 After him, though, sociology went through an anti-pos-
itivist turn and Horkheimer, Adorno, Schmidt, and others agreed
with Heidegger, while many appropriated Hegel’s critique of em-
piricism and Marx’s dialectics, and Weber and Simmel pioneered
Verstehen, the interpretative method.
Today, positivism is by no means dead, but while Durkheim would
never have accepted Wallace’s works as sociological, now the eld is
open, uid, and interdisciplinary, and the practice is dened as “the
study of social problems” or “the study of the development, struc-
ture, and functioning of human society.”10 (Stevenson 2010, 1370).
This denition is as wide as can be, and it accepts the largest variety
7. Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, trans. Fred D. Wick and J. Glenn
Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 8.
8. Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe I.16 (Frankfurt: Verlag Vittorio Klostermann, 2000),
P, quoted in Rado Riha, “Does Science Think?,” Filozofski vestnik Verlag 26, no. 3
(2012): 97.
9. Émile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method (and Selected Texts on Sociology and
its Method), trans. Steven Lukes (New York: Macmillan, 1982) 33.
10. Oxford Dictionary of English, s.v. “Positivism.”
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
64
of works under its label, and today sociology is lled with references
to philosophy, psychology, and even literature. For example, in In
Praise of Literature (2016), Bauman and Mazzeo write that literature is
crucial for sociology, and no claim can be more anti-positivist than
that.11 Therefore, Wallace’s nonctional discourse today unprob-
lematically ts within the denition of sociology. After all, sociology
means lógos of and about society, i.e. to reason and converse about
society. And throughout his works Wallace does just that: he studies
our social problems, their development and structure, what caused
their advent, and how to overcome them.
3. Outline of Wallace’s Sociology
Two of Wallace’s most famous nonctional texts, “E Unibus Plu-
ram” (1993) and This Is Water (2005), essential to Wallace’s man-
ifesto, are sociological to the core. In them, Wallace explores the
causes of American social predicaments and submits solutions to
them. This indicates the centrality of sociology to his literary proj-
ect. Part of his diagnosis is that “this is a generation that has an
inheritance of absolutely nothing as far as meaningful moral values,
and it’s our job to make them up, and we’re not doing it.”12 Part of
his solution is that writers must produce literature that functions “as
an anodyne against loneliness,”13 i.e., their duty is to recreate a sense
of community.14
This is the structure of Wallace’s sociology: to dene the
11. Zyqmunt Bauman and Riccardo Mazzeo, In Praise of Literature (Cambridge: Pol-
ity, 2016).
12. Hugh Kennedy and Georey Polk, “Looking for a Garde of Which to Be Avant:
An Interview with David Foster Wallace,” in Conversations with David Foster Wallace,
ed. Stephen J. Burn (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 18.
13. Kennedy and Polk, 16.
14. A point he reiterates to Lipsky, saying that “the moral job is ours” (Lipsky 84),
and in “Up, Simba,”, focusing on the “‘moral poverty’ in America” (185).
Issue 5 • 2025
65
predicament against which he can theorize writing as therapeutic,
corrective, redemptive, and a response to the problems of our time.
This is why his sociology constitutes the foundation of his intellectu-
al project. There is no division between Wallace’s ction and nonc-
tion. His ctional production explicitly refers to its historical, social,
political, ethical, and metaphysical context, i.e., to what is addressed
in the nonction. His work thus constitutes a unity with one clear
goal: to nd the possibility of salvation from unbearable suering.
For Wallace, valuable literary ction makes arguments. Hence, for
example, his praise of Dostoevsky because his “mature works are
fundamentally ideological and cannot truly be appreciated unless
one understands the polemical agendas that inform them.”15 Or his
praise for Pynchon: “Mr. T. Pynchon...argues in Gravity’s Rainbow
for why the paranoid delusion of complete & malevolent connec-
tion, wacko & unpleasant though it be, is preferable at least to its
opposite—the conviction that nothing is connected to anything else &
that nothing has anything intrinsically to do with you.”16 The idea of
“argumentative ction” may be outrageous to some, but arguments
are “sets of reasons given in support of an idea”17 and ction can
produce them through all its means: dialogue, dramatization, plot,
form, structure, etc. In this sense, Wallace’s works are exemplary, and
this is why they are known as “philosophical ction.” James Ryerson
wrote of them that they “belong to the genre of the novel of ideas,”18
and Kennedy and Polk that “his writing benets from a mathematical
and philosophical grasp of symbolic systems and large, overarching
15. David Foster Wallace, “Joseph Frank’s Dostoyevsky,” in Consider the Lobster and
Other Essays (New York: Little, Brown, 2006), 258.
16. Wallace. “Roger Federer as Religious Experience,” in Both Flesh and Not: Essays
(New York: Penguin, 2012), 88.
17. Oxford Dictionary of English, s.v. “Argument.”
18. James Ryerson, introduction to Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will, by
David Foster Wallace (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 21.
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
66
concepts, drawing out every implication to its fullest.”19
Wallace chose philosophical ction over philosophy because he
saw ction as the better chance to connect with his readers. He
wanted to confront philosophical problems by making them con-
crete. He counted on ction’s “ability to talk meaningfully to us.”20
Because of this intent, his ction exists in inextricable relationship
with his nonction, and his overall work is characterized by consis-
tency in subject matter and variation in perspective, weaving ction,
nonction, literature, philosophy, sociology, psychology, and science
to try to nd the truth and in it salvation from despair.
The apparent paradox in his system is that it systematically rejects
systematization in trying to confront the same issues over and over
from myriad dierent angles. Yet, at bottom, the system is based on a
clear diagnosis of contemporary American social predicaments and
19. Kennedy and Polk, 11. For more examples see Adam Kelly’s “Development
Through Dialogue: David Foster Wallace and the Novel of Ideas” and two collec-
tions on Wallace and philosophy: Gesturing Toward Reality: David Foster Wallace and
Philosophy (Bolger and Korb) and Freedom and the Self: Essays on the Philosophy of David
Foster Wallace (Cahn and Eckert). Most importantly, see Wallace’s own words: “I
come to writing from a pretty hard-core, abstract place. It comes out of technical
philosophy and continental European theory, and extreme avant-garde shit” (Do-
nahue, 71). Note also that Wallace underlined the following in his copy of DeLillo’s
Mao II available at the HRC archive: “a writer creates a character as a way to reveal
consciousness, increase the ow of meaning” (200).
20. David Eggers, “To Try Extra Hard to Exercise Patience, Politeness, and Imagi-
nation,” in David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview, and Other Conversations, Laura Miller
and David Foster Wallace (Brooklyn: Melville House Publishing, 2012), 89. See
Wallace’s interview with Schmeidel: “Most of the modern writing I like the best is
both sophisticated and colloquial...and I think I do little more than try to achieve
this same high-low blend” (Schmeidel, 59). As well as assessments like Katovsky’s,
which can in large part be extended to all of Wallace’s ction: “Broom’s multilayered
narrative structure and excessively antiminimalist style bring to mind the metac-
tional playground of Thomas Pynchon and Robert Coover...The challenge to the
reader is wading through densely written passages that touch upon metaphysical
conundrums, language games, theories of the self and tantalizing antinomies...But
balancing his heady philosophizing is a playfulness of intent rooted in pop culture”
(Katovsky, 5).
Issue 5 • 2025
67
on the proposal of a solution to them. Robert L. McLaughlin wrote
that Wallace’s project was “to reenergize literature’s social mission,
its ability to intervene in the social world, have an impact on real
people.”21 (McLaughlin 2004, 55). Den Dulk reiterated that Wallace’s
ction was his mode “of engagement in response...to the problems
of our time, an attempt to address these problems” (2015, xii, 267).
The present analysis adopts the same perspective. Wallace’s ction
is a response to the diagnosis of his sociology, and this is why his so-
ciology is the foundation of his project. By questioning his sociology,
therefore, we can question the foundations of his project. Too many
studies of his work have taken his sociology as legitimate a priori, and
this unfounded legitimization has inuenced too many readings of
his work and evaluations of his solution to the human predicament.
In addition, while the two fundamental texts of Wallace’s sociol-
ogy are “E Unibus Pluram” and This Is Water, his sociology spreads
throughout his nonction. And while the critical consensus has been
that “E Unibus Pluram” and the McCaery interview constitute
the essay-interview nexus that composes Wallace’s manifesto, from
a wider point of view, Wallace’s entire manifesto includes multi-
ple other essays and interviews—at the very least the essays “Fic-
tional Futures and the Conspicuously Young” (1988), “The Empty
Plenum” (1990), “David Lynch Keeps His Head” (1995), “Joseph
Frank’s Dostoevsky” (1995) and the interviews with Kennedy and
Polk (1993), David Lipsky (1996), and Laura Miller (1996), as well
as This Is Water (2005). Proof of this will follow: Wallace’s sociology
extends throughout his career, from his rst major published essay,
“Fictional Futures,” to his latest nonctional work, This Is Water.
To confront Wallace’s sociology is to rst ask whether the picture
it presents is accurate and then to inquire on whether the solution
it oers is viable. Most critics have evaluated Wallace’s ction for its
21. Robert L. McLaughlin, “Post-Postmodern Discontent: Contemporary Fiction
and the Social World,” Symplokē 12, no. 1-2 (2004): 55.
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68
ability, or lack thereof, to provide solutions to the predicaments he
diagnosed. The present analysis, instead, will begin by questioning
the diagnosis itself. It will do so by contrasting Wallace’s sociology
with that of some major sociologists of our time: Zygmunt Bauman,
Ulrich and Elisabeth Beck, Anthony Giddens, David Harvey, and
Christopher Lasch. Most of these authors have already found their
way into Wallace criticism,22 but here, they are introduced in an un-
precedented comparative method that contrasts them with Wallace
to test his assessment of contemporary society. This approach will
shed new light not only on Wallace but on these sociologists too. And
while the focus will be on questioning Wallace, this does not entail
that Wallace’s diagnosis will turn out to be incorrect or inferior to
those of these sociologists. On the contrary, what will come to light
is how Wallace’s sociology is indeed profound and incisive (and often
more profound and incisive) but aected by theoretical aws in its
conceptualization of agency, freedom, free will, and their relation
to ethics and existentiality; aws that haunt all the above-mentioned
thinkers and, in general, contemporary Western interpretation of
the world. We fail to understand the necessary consequences of our
ideas of humanity, and these inconsistencies are what the present
work names “existentialist contradiction.”
4. The Relationship between Wallace’s Fiction
and Nonfiction
This relationship is fundamental. The two cannot be split apart.
22. Several works have recognized Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism as a major in-
uence on Wallace: the best-known are Marshall Boswell’s Understanding David Foster
Wallace (2009), David Hering’s David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form, and Mary Hol-
land’s “‘The Art’s Heart’s Purpose’: Braving the Narcissistic Loop of Innite Jest.”
Allard den Dulk studied the relationship between Wallace and Giddens in his Exis-
tentialist Engagement in Wallace, Eggers and Foer. Nicoline Timmer talked about Bauman
in Do You Feel It Too?: The Post-Postmodern Syndrome in American Fiction at the Turn of the
Millennium. See also Dorson.
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And this explains why Wallace’s nonction is creative and his ction
philosophical, and why the boundary in his writings between ction
and nonction is always unclear. In fact, Wallace’s ction belongs
to that genre of INTERPRET-ME ction that Wallace himself de-
nes in the essay “The Empty Plenum: David Markson’s Wittgen-
stein’s Mistress” (1990). Here Wallace writes that INTERPRET-ME
novels “carve out for themselves an interstice between at-out c-
tion and a sort of weird cerebral roman à clef”;23 that is, they “con-
cern themselves thematically with what we might consider high-
brow or intellectual issues—stu proper to art, engineering, antique
lit., philosophy, etc.”24
In other words, these novels blur the boundaries between ction
and nonction, storytelling and argumentation, and they present
stories whose themes are abstractions made concrete. They actualize
the abstract, and here lies their greatest value: they “serve the vital
and vanishing function of reminding us of ction’s limitless possibil-
ities for reach and grasp, for making heads throb heartlike, and for
sanctifying the marriages of cerebration & emotion, abstraction &
lived life, transcendent truth-seeking & daily schlepping” (ibid.).
INTERPRET-ME ctions, thus, teach us that the abstract is con-
crete, the essence of everyday life. Wallace cites Voltaire’s Candide
(1759), Gombrowicz’s Cosmos (1965), Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game
(1943), Sartre’s Nausea (1948), Camus’s The Stranger (1942), Pynchon’s
Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), and Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988)
as notable examples of this genre, but the point of course is that his
ction belongs to it too. Like Dostoevsky before him, Wallace chose
ction precisely to care for philosophy by manifesting its pervasion
of the daily concrete; he chose ction to make philosophy concrete.
This is precisely the sense in which he quoted Wittgenstein’s famous
23. David Foster Wallace, “The Empty Plenum: David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mis-
tress,” in Both Flesh and Not: Essays (New York: Penguin, 2012), 74.
24. Wallace, “The Empty Plenum,” 74.
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70
note to Norman Malcolm (from Malcolm’s Ludwig Wittgenstein: A
Memoir, 1988): “what is the use of studying philosophy if all that
it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about
some abstruse questions of logic, etc. and if it does not improve your
thinking about the important questions of everyday life?”25
In “The Empty Plenum,” Wallace uses a technique that he will
employ throughout his nonction: praising artists who actualize the
ideals, ends, and features of his own art while never explicitly refer-
ring to his own goals or stating that someone represents a model for
him. Instead, he lets the obvious and essential conformities between
him and the artists he praises arise through this strategy of impli-
cation that pervades his nonction. Thus, he never writes “artist x
produces valuable art because he strives to do y, as I myself try to
do.” Instead, in essay a, he says that “artist x produces valuable art
because he does y;” in essay b, that “the contemporary human pre-
dicament needs art that does y;” and in interview c, that “I humbly
attempt to do y.”26
This strategy of implication is common throughout intellectual
history because it allows authors to arm their ideals in the third
person, i.e., to present them as higher than individual opinions, and
arguments to stand for themselves by separating them from the per-
son presenting them. Wallace uses this technique to align himself
with some of the greatest writers in history and to point to him-
self as the leader of his generation while avoiding any grandiose
statements. But when one becomes familiar with his discourse, one
quickly understands that every word of praise for David Lynch or
Dostoevsky or Markson also functions as a description of Wallace’s
own eorts.27
25. Wallace, “The Empty Plenum,” 86.
26. Note the importance of interviews being the only place where Wallace ever slips into
referring to his own art. He never wrote about it, not once, not anywhere.
27. The same is true of what Wallace wrote on Borges. Borges, another idol for
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For example, Wallace praises Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress for
its “imaginative portrait of what it would be like actually to live
in the sort of world the logic and metaphysics of Wittgenstein’s
Tractatus posit.”28 He appreciates Markson’s novel as an example
of profound INTERPRET-ME ction because it successfully roots
the abstract in the everyday and shows that anyone who accepts
the fundamental tenets of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosoph-
icus (1921) is condemned to live in a “metaphysical hell,”29 “a hell
of utter subjectivity,”30 of “ultimate loneliness,”31 and of “solip-
sism.”32 This is what makes Markson a true artist: “he has eshed
the abstract sketches of Wittgensteinian doctrine into the concrete
theater of human loneliness.”33
It is not a coincidence that this review comes three years after
the publication of The Broom of the System (1987), where Wallace
had tried to do just that: esh the abstract sketches of Wittgenstein’s
philosophy into the concrete theater of human loneliness. That is,
Wallace, was himself a literary philosopher. See e.g. the following passage Wallace
underlined in his copy of Williamson’s Borges: A Life (2004) available at the HRC ar-
chive: “Borges’s...imagination was equally stirred by the philosophy of Berkeley and
Hume, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. From Berkeley and Hume he took his basic
premise—the subjective nature of all knowledge and experience; from thinkers like
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche he derived a sense of the fragility of personal identity, as
likely to be the product of self-assertion as a mere conceit of some cosmic intelligence.
Lacking objective truth, man was condemned to play in a game of no xed rules
and no specic end, for if the existence of beings other than oneself was uncertain,
the presence of God or a hidden demiurge could not be ruled out” (viii). Or this
sentence he underlined in Borges’s Labyrinths (1964): “Familiarity with Neo-Platonism
and related doctrines will clarify Borges’s preferences and intentions, just as it will, say,
Yeats’s and Joyce’s” (xx).
28. Wallace, “The Empty Plenum,” 86.
29. Wallace, “The Empty Plenum,” 86.
30. Wallace, “The Empty Plenum,” 105.
31. Wallace, “The Empty Plenum,” 91.
32. Wallace, “The Empty Plenum,” 91.
33. Wallace, “The Empty Plenum,” 108.
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72
precisely as Markson eshed the abstractions of the Tractatus into
the concrete loneliness of his protagonist, Wallace tried to esh the
abstractions of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1953) into
the concrete loneliness of his protagonist. Broom is all about Le-
nore’s loneliness. She believes she may be nothing but a linguistic
construct to which people try to ascribe the function they desire.
She is afraid that she is a character in other people’s stories. She
dreads that human interactions are inescapably violent and consist
of individuals trying to force specic identities upon one another to
full their individual needs. She is terried that if this is true, then
life is only a narrative constructed by one’s consciousness, which
ascribes functions to itself and everything else. This would make
solipsism true and human interactions nothing but an innite clash
of solipsistic narratives. This is the Wittgensteinian metaphysical
hell that terries her.
Wallace’s Broom and Markson’s Mistress thus attempt to achieve
the same goal. But the only explicit admission of Wallace’s inten-
tions we have comes not from his publications but from a letter he
sent to the editor of Broom in 1986:
a big subplot of the book, which is essentially a dialogue
between Hegel and Wittgenstein on one hand and Heide-
gger and a contemporary French thinker-duo named Paul
De Man and Jacques Derrida on the other, said debate hav-
ing its root in an essential self-other distinction that is per-
ceived by both camps as less ontological/metaphysical than
essentially (for Hegel and Witt) historical and cultural or (for
Heidegger and De Man and Derrida) linguistic, literary,
aesthetic, and fundamentally super or metacultural.34
This is a clear example of what INTERPRET-ME ction intends
to be, and this intentionality pervades all of Wallace’s ction. The
34. David Foster Wallace, quoted in D.T. Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life
of David Foster Wallace (New York: Penguin, 2012), 69.
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Pale King, for example, is a ctionalization of the issues faced in This
Is Water. And Innite Jest directly dramatizes the social predicaments
that Wallace analyzes in “E Unibus Pluram” and elsewhere, and
which originate in the dread of solipsism.35 In fact, the novel even
explicitly recalls the essay in a dialogue: “‘We’re all on each other’s
food chain. All of us.... Welcome to the meaning of individual. We’re
each deeply alone here. It’s what we all have in common, this alone-
ness.’ ‘E Unibus Pluram,’” (1997, 112).36
Explicit references of this kind, from his ction to his nonction,
recur frequently in Wallace, and they indicate the inextricable re-
lationship between the two. This relationship can be described as
one of question and answer. The nonction diagnoses contempo-
rary American despair and asks how it can be overcome, the ction
reiterates the question and tries to oer a solution to ameliorate “our
struggles to connect with one another, to erect bridges across the
chasms that separate selves.”37
5. The Content, Structure, and Development of
Wallace’s Sociology
The structure of Wallace’s sociology can be eciently sketched by
35. See e.g. Houser (2012) and Holland (2018).
36. Wallace, Innite Jest (New York: Little, Brown, 1997), 112. Wallace’s works con-
stitute an eective response to the social dynamic highlighted by Ulrich Beck in
“On the Mortality of Industrial Society” (1995): “what emerges from the fading so-
cial norms is naked, frightened, aggressive ego in search of love and help...someone
who is poking around in the fog of his or her own self is no longer capable of notic-
ing that this isolation, this ‘solitary connement of the ego’ is a mass sentence” (40).
In response to this predicament, Wallace reminds us that “everybody is identical in
their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are dierent from everyone
else” (1997e, 205), and that a reason for community can be found in this shared
experience of loneliness. In this sense, Bartlett (2016) is right: Innite Jest establishes
a genuine connection between reader and writer.
37. David Foster Wallace, “Back in New Fire,” in Both Flesh and Not: Essays (New
York: Penguin, 2012), 172.
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74
focusing on his two major nonctional works, “E Unibus Pluram” (1993),
the essay published at the beginning of his career, and This Is Water
(2005/2009), the speech given three years before his death.38 Supercially,
the essay’s focus appears to be social analysis, while the speech seems to
be mainly concerned with psychology, existentialism, and ontology, i.e.,
with the individual’s relationship with Being. But in truth, the same spirit
and the same dread pervade the two texts: “existential loneliness,” (Miller
2012, 62), “solipsism,”39 “our default setting.”40 This dread constitutes the
essential thrust of Wallace’s sociology, of which the essay and the speech
represent the rst and last (chronologically) major nonctional instanti-
ations. In fact, this dread constitutes the raison d’être of all of Wallace’s
works. Wallace’s entire oeuvre was an attempt to confront it. Hence why
his sociology belongs to the core of his existential project.
6. Solipsism is the Dread
Wallace gave the commencement speech that became This is Wa-
ter in 2005. He died in 2008. During that three-year span, he pub-
lished only a few secondary nonction pieces and two excerpts from
The Pale King (2011).41 The speech, thus, is the last major work Wal-
lace presented to the public while still alive. And in it, he attempts to
determine our psychological, existential, ontological predicament,
and to propose a solution to it. The predicament he denes as our
38. For a denition of the structure of Wallace’s project constructed from another
point of view see: Paolo Pitari. 2019. “Consciousness According to David Foster
Wallace.” Revue Française d’Études Américaines 2018/4, 185-198.
39. Stephen J. Burn, introduction to Conversations with David Foster Wallace (Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi), xiv.
40. David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Signicant Occasion,
About Living a Compassionate Life (New York: Little, Brown, 2009), 38.
41. The essays are “Host” (2005), “Roger Federer as Religious Experience” (2006),
“Deciderization 2007—a Special Report” (2007), and “Just Asking” (2007). The ex-
cerpts from The Pale King are “Good People” (2007) and “The Compliance Branch”
(2008).
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default setting, the most fundamental ontological truth of experi-
ence, what we are made of, what we forget, lose sight of, are unaware
of because it is always right in front of our eyes, around us and
within us. The speech aims to manifest this fundamental truth and
therefore belongs to Wallace’s most ambitious works.
It opens with the statement that “the most obvious, ubiquitous,
important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and
talk about”42 and warns us of our tendency “to get lost in abstract
thinking instead of simply paying attention to what’s going on right
in front of me. Instead of paying attention to what’s going on inside
me.”43 Wallace submits that if we look inside, we see that “our de-
fault setting, hardwired into our boards at birth”44 is our “natural,
basic self-centeredness,”45 i.e. “my deep belief that I am the absolute
center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person
in existence.”46
Our default setting is the solipsistic nightmare that Descartes
feared in the Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) and which Wallace
had already cited in “The Empty Plenum”: the “terrible truth”47
of our experience is this natural condition that makes us “uniquely,
completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.”48 Yet despite this
42. Wallace, This Is Water, 8. This is the point of the sh parable that gave the title
to the speech, which Wallace had already included in Innite Jest (1997, 445), and
which again relates to a diary entry of Wittgenstein’s: “how hard it is for me to see
what is right in front of my eyes” (1970, 44). See also Roiland (2012).
43. Wallace, This Is Water, 48-49.
44. Wallace, This Is Water, 38.
45. Wallace, This Is Water, 37.
46. Wallace, This Is Water, 36.
47. Wallace, “The Empty Plenum,” 57.
48. Wallace, This Is Water, 60. In his annotated copy of Berlinski’s A Tour of the Cal-
culus (1997) Wallace underlined the following passage which explains how Descartes
theoretically opened the modern path to solipsism: “Drawing a distinction between
the mind and the body, and thus between the world of experience and the physical
world, Descartes argued prophetically that it is the mind and not the body that is
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
76
being our default setting, Wallace contends that its content is illusory
and that we can become conscious of it being a delusion, thus free-
ing ourselves from the suering it entails.
On the surface, “E Unibus Pluram” does not seem to have these
ontological concerns. Yet at its core resides the same dread. Wal-
lace laments in the essay precisely the exacerbation of existential
loneliness in contemporary society. The phrase “E Unibus Pluram”
literally means “out of one, many,” and it indicates how we have
become fragmented into myriad individual monads by inverting the
US motto on the Great Seal, “E Pluribus Unum” (“out of many,
one”).49 The inversion is ironic, and it aims to explode the hypocri-
sy of the supposed values of togetherness, citizenship, and brother-
hood that should ground US society when in truth individualism has
turned this “from some community of relationships to networks of
strangers connected by self-interest.”50
In other words, the essay takes the sociological point of view pre-
cisely to denounce how contemporary culture aggravates solipsism,
our default setting.51 Wallace opens it by stating that only few people
can “bear the psychic costs of being around other humans,”52 and
his argument rests on this existential premise: our default setting
is solipsism and fear of judgment and our society aggravates this
intuitively known, easily accessible” (28). Relatedly, in his copy of Malcolm Gladwell’s
Blink (2005) Wallace’s heavily annotated the passages on Antonio Damasio’s book
Descartes’ Error (1994).
49. Richard Sennett focused on this issue in all his major works: The Fall of Public
Man (1978), The Conscience of the Eye (1991) Flesh and Stone (1994), The Uses of Disorder
(1996), and The Corrosion of Character (1998). A comparative reading of Wallace and
Sennett may prove insightful in this sense.
50. Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram,” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (Lon-
don: Abacus, 1997), 26.
51. In the context of Wallace’s oeuvre, this applies to Western society in general, not
only the US, as the opening story of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999/2000b),
“A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life” (1999/2000a), shows.
52. Wallace, “E Unibus,” 22.
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original psychological condition by raising the psychic costs of inter-
action to levels unbearable for most individuals.53 This is the number
one cause of our loneliness, which our society proceeds to worsen by
oering distraction (entertainment) as a remedy, the result being that
we stare at screens trying to numb our despair all the while being
fully aware that, in so doing, we make everything worse.
The essay, as Wallace’s entire discourse, thus, is founded on the
ontology of This Is Water. Our society aggravates, rather than ame-
liorates, our default setting. This is the social criticism Wallace voic-
es throughout his texts. Even in his rst important essay, “Fictional
Futures and the Conspicuously Young” (1988), Wallace wrote that
our “existential predicament” is that we “tend to think of our own
lives this way: we’re each the hero of our own drama, others around
us remanded to supporting roles or (increasingly) audience status.”54
This is the very idea reiterated in This Is Water seventeen years later,
and this shows that, from 1988 to 2005, Wallace’s dread was always
the same: the “metaphysical hell”55 and “Cartesian nightmare”56 of
“ultimate loneliness”57; the “hell of utter subjectivity”58 that leads
“straight into insanity”59: solipsism.60
53. As Wallace writes in “Authority and American Usage” (1998/2006a): “Of
course, people are constantly judging one another” (97). For more on this see Bur-
gess (2014).
54. Wallace, “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young,” in Both Flesh and
Not, 50.
55. Wallace, “The Empty Plenum,” 86.
56. Wallace, “The Empty Plenum,” 93.
57. Wallace, “The Empty Plenum,” 101.
58. Wallace, “The Empty Plenum,” 105.
59. Wallace, “The Empty Plenum,” 105.
60. Another example from the essay “Getting Away from Already Being Pretty
Much Away from It All” (1993) where Wallace talks about his memories of being
a child: “this weird, deluded but unshakable conviction that everything around me
existed all and only For Me [...] That everything exterior to me existed only insofar
as it aected me somehow” (89). Wallace confesses that for his child-self everything
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78
7. Community Is Salvation
In This Is Water, Wallace contends that we can overcome our de-
fault setting by “learning how to think,”61 how to exercise “the choice
of what to think about.”62 To him, this is the only real freedom pos-
sible: “to choose how you construct meaning from experience,”63 and
the only way to emancipate oneself from the default setting.
This ties Wallace to existentialist philosophy: when he states that
“the only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide...what
has meaning and what doesn’t,”64 he voices the existentialist belief
that the self is not a given, that one must attain it, and that free will
is a fundamental ontological truth.65 Yet, Wallace’ existentialism is
also other-directed, as he asserts that, to free oneself from the default
setting and achieve real freedom, one must sacrice for other people:
“the really important kind of freedom involves attention, and aware-
ness, and discipline, and eort, and being able truly to care about
other people and sacrice for them, over and over, in myriad petty
little unsexy ways, every day.”66
This is Wallace’s picture of redemption from unbearable suering,
existed “For-Him alone, unique at the absolute center” (ibid. 89-90), and that this is
the denition of immaturity: “it was radically self-centered, of course, this convic-
tion, and more than a little paranoid” (ibid. 89-90).
61. Wallace, This Is Water, 53.
62. Wallace, This Is Water, 14.
63. Wallace, This Is Water, 54.
64. Wallace, This Is Water, 95.
65. In “The Nature of the Fun” (1998/2012i), Wallace writes that ction must
function as “a way to countenance yourself and the truth instead of being a way to
escape yourself ” (198-99). This voices an existentialist ethics against escapism, what
Sartre called “bad faith.”
66. Wallace, This Is Water, 120. This necessity of commitment to the other is reit-
erated throughout his works, see e.g. even “Authority and American Usage” (1998),
an essay on the surface about grammar, where he writes that “we should share what
we have in order to become less narrow and frightened and lonely and self-centered
people” (113).
Issue 5 • 2025
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of freedom from “irony, cynicism, narcissism, nihilism, stasis, loneli-
ness.”67 One needs to become “conscious and aware enough to choose
what you pay attention to”68 not fall prey to nihilism. This is the
message of his sociology.69 And it establishes the foundation for this
conception of ction as an anodyne against loneliness.70
Fiction must provide guides to why and how to choose; it must
teach people how to think, how to pay attention and achieve the
freedom to construct meaning from experience. Fiction must show
readers that this is where their future is decided: in their ability
to free their thoughts by choosing to commit to the care of other
people. This is the meaning of the famous ending of “E Unibus
67. Wallace, “E Unibus,” 73.
68. Wallace, This Is Water, 54.
69. One of Wallace’s latest essays too, “Deciderization 2007—A Special Report”
(2007) explicitly reiterates “E Unibus Pluram” in this sense. In it, Wallace writes
that contemporary culture is “a kind of Total Noise” (301) where we as citizens
“are reduced to being overwhelmed by info and interpretation, or else paralyzed
by cynicism and anomie” (316). This is why - it continues - today’s writers have a
duty to help us “handle and respond to the tsunami of available fact, context, and
perspective that constitutes Total Noise” (312), i.e. a duty to “serve as models and
guides for how large or complex sets of facts can be sifted, culled, and arranged in
meaningful ways—ways that yield and illuminate truth instead of just adding more
noise to the overall roar” (312).
70. This is the central thesis of Wallace’s manifesto, which he tirelessly repeated
through his works and interviews: in the interview with Kennedy and Polk: “I think
all good writing somehow addresses the concern of and acts as an anodyne against
loneliness” (Kennedy and Polk 2012, 16); in the McCaery interview: “ction’s pur-
pose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to
give her imaginative access to other selves...We all suer alone in the real world; true
empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of ction 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” (Mc-
Caery 2012, 22); in the interview with Lipsky: “there’s stu that really good ction
can do that other forms of art can’t do as well. And the big thing, the big thing
seems to be, sort of leapin’ over that wall of self ” (Lipsky 289); in the interview with
Miller: “there is this existential loneliness in the real world. I don’t know what you’re
thinking or what it’s like inside you and you don’t know what it’s like inside me. In
ction I think we can leap over that wall itself in a certain way” (Miller 62); etc.
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80
Pluram” in which Wallace calls “the next real literary ‘rebels’ [to]
treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life
with reverence and conviction.”71
8. The Rat Race Realizes the Default Setting
As “E Unibus Pluram” anticipates the ontology of This Is Water,
This Is Water reiterates the social criticism of “E Unibus Pluram.”
The essay denounces contemporary society for making us “feel in-
adequate”72 and “fundamentally apart from [the world], alienated
from it, solipsistic, lonely,”73 for turning other people into “something
fearsome”74 and constantly reminding us that “it’s better, realer...to
y solo,”75 for fostering dynamics whereby “other people become
judges”76 and we live in “fear of ridicule” and in “great despair and
stasis.”77 The speech does exactly the same by explicitly stating that
our society encourages us to live in our default setting: “the so-called
‘real world’ will not discourage you from operating on your default
settings, because the so-called “real world” of men and money and
power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and
frustration and craving and the worship of self.”78
71. Wallace, “E Unibus,” 81.
72. Wallace, “E Unibus,” 38.
73. Wallace, “E Unibus,” 38.
74. Wallace, “E Unibus,” 56.
75. Wallace, “E Unibus,” 56.
76. Wallace, “E Unibus,” 49.
77. Wallace, “E Unibus,” 49.
78. Wallace, “The Empty Plenum,” 115. In his copy of Gruen’s The Insanity of
Normality (1992) available at the HRC archive, Wallace underlined “Eugene O’Neill
once referred to the United States as a moral failure because ‘[its] main idea is that
everlasting game of trying to possess your own soul by the possession of something
outside it, thereby losing your own soul and the thing outside it, too’” (17). And
through the annotations in his copy of Anthony de Mello’s Awareness (1992) one
notices the profound inuence this book must have had on This Is Water. Here are
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81
The unity of Wallace’s nonctional works is again clear here. His
sociology is constructed upon this “diagnosis -› cure” structure. His
existentialist solution to our default setting is to achieve “real free-
dom,”79 and this existentialist solution is other-directed: it establishes
an equation between freedom and caring for others. Only an eort
of this kind can enable us to free ourselves and our society. It is thus
our duty to act in the social space to rebuild our mutual commitment
to one another. Therefore writers must commit to writing ction that
can function as an anodyne against loneliness.80
just a few of the passages Wallace underlined: “Be aware of what you’re saying, be
aware of what you’re doing, be aware of what you’re thinking, be aware of how
you’re acting. Be aware of where you’re coming from, what your motives are. The
unaware life is not worth living” (67); “People go through life with xed ideas; they
never change. They’re just not aware of what’s going on. They might as well be a
block of wood, or a rock, a talking, walking, thinking machine. That’s not human.
They are puppets, jerked around by all kinds of things. Press a button and you get
a reaction” (68); “What you are aware of you are in control of; what you are not
aware of is in control of you. You are always a slave to what you’re not aware of.
When you’re aware of it, you’re free from it. It’s there, but you’re not aected by it.
You’re not controlled by it; you’re not enslaved by it. That’s the dierence” (71); “If
you’re attached to appreciation and praise, you’re going to view people in terms of
their threat to your attachment or their fostering of your attachment” (139); “So we
were given a taste of various drug addictions: approval, attention, success, making
it to the top, prestige, getting your name in the paper, power, being the boss. We
were given a taste of things like being the captain of the team, leading the band,
etc. Having a taste for these drugs, we became addicted and began to dread losing
them” (163).
79. Wallace, “The Empty Plenum,” 121.
80. The inuence of Lewis Hyde’s The Gift (1983) on Wallace, already noted by
Adam Kelly in “David Foster Wallace and New Sincerity Aesthetics” (2010), relates
precisely to this central idea in Wallace’s aesthetics. When Wallace writes that “real
art” is a “gift...really for the person it’s directed at” (1997, 289) he explicitly echoes
Hyde. When he states that “we need seriously engaged art” to establish “a feeling
of intimacy between the writer and the reader” that “given the atomization and
loneliness of contemporary life” is “our opening” and “our gift” (Lipsky 71-72),
he echoes Hyde: “it is when art acts as an agent of transformation that we may
correctly speak of it as a gift” (Hyde 59). When he declares that “a particular job of
ction is...to wake readers up to how observant they already are” (Schechner 105),
he echoes Hyde: “the spirit of an artist’s gift can wake our own” (Hyde xii). When
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
82
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Wallace and Description:
The Inner Drama of the
Observer
Joseph Hunter
Description and Its Tensions
The nature of descrIptIon In works of ction can seem self-ev-
ident: the evocation by language of the material ctional world
and events within it. It is one of the key basic components by which
ction of all kinds is assembled. Yet description, foundational as it
may be, comprises a contested site in narratological criticism. By
putting David Foster Wallace’s work in this narratological context,
and specically by studying his descriptive methods and their critical
heritage, we can uncover tensions central to realist, modernist, and
postmodernist ction. How these tensions manifest in Wallace’s work
is key to understanding important aims of Wallace’s ctional project.
In his ction—Innite Jest in particular—descriptions enact an inner
drama of the observer. Often, this observer is a focalized character;
sometimes a dened narrator is implicated; very often the reader’s ob-
servation is an important facet of this dynamic, as I hope to show.
The inner drama (of character and/or narrator) contains its own
movement, one specic to description. This is how Wallace moves
beyond the supposedly static descriptions identied in realist ction
by critics such as Georg Lukács. By adding a self-conscious, post-
modern dimension to a modernist-inected concern with interiority,
Wallace’s descriptions also bring the reader into the equation. His
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92
descriptions both model and provoke self-consciousness of attention.
In what follows I will trace the key tensions in realist, modernist,
and postmodernist ction, attending to how these tensions are nego-
tiated in Wallace’s work (and in Wallace scholarship). Such a brief
history inevitably must be simplied and reductive. However, my
hope is that salient features of realist, modernist, and postmodernist
ction will emerge—and, building on this, I will show how the richly
textured “inner drama of the observer” works in practice in a key
descriptive passage from Innite Jest (1996). In such an account it will
be useful to refer to Wallace’s Kenyon address, which I suggest com-
prises a kind of manifesto of description. My analysis of the passage
from Jest has been aided by the work of Heather Houser, whose essay
“Managing Information and Materiality in Innite Jest and Running
the Numbers” features a reading of the same passage—albeit with-
out my particular narratological framework. I will also be attending
to questions of focalization, since the question of who is seeing/
feeling and who is speaking at a given moment is crucial to many of
Wallace’s descriptions.
Previous critical work has explored Wallace’s narrative technique,
although without the specic focus on description that guides this es-
say’s inquiry. Richard Stock, in an essay that attempts painstakingly
to apply the narratological terminology developed by Gérard Gen-
ette to a complex passage from Jest, nds a mismatch between Gen-
ette’s tools and the task at hand. He concludes that “[we] need a way
to study narrative that can account for such a natural, eective, and
common way of telling stories as this.”1 The passage in question is
an endnote divorced from clear temporal context. In the note, Hal is
transcribing Pemulis’s account of a mathematical equation, replete
with authorial mediation by Hal and interjections by Pemulis. It is
important to consider the postmodern aspects of this passage. It is
1. Richard Stock, “Beyond Narratology: David Foster Wallace’s Innite Jest,” Prague
Journal of English Studies 2, no. 1 (2013): 48.
Issue 5 • 2025
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metactional in that its mode of composition is an overt part of the
reexive text. By “relegating” it to an endnote, too, Wallace draws
attention to it as extra-textual material. I suggest that this passage,
like others in Wallace’s work, is part of the text’s postmodern kalei-
doscopic texture, in this case presented as if “found writing,” the lit-
erary equivalent of Marcel Duchamps’s “Fountain” sculpture, lifted
from the material landscape of the world in which the ction is set.
As such, like many other aspects of his writing, it requires a peculiar
attentiveness in the reader in order to negotiate its layers.
More recently, Pia Masiero has grounded Wallace’s narratolog-
ical technique in the context of postmodernism, arguing that the
often complex, layered nature of his narratives incorporates post-
modernist techniques only insofar as they do not overly alienate the
reader. Interestingly, Masiero emphasizes Wallace’s desire to create
ction that is innovative and timely while still being pleasurable and
rewarding to read: “Wallace’s narratological choices are aimed at
squaring this complex circle, by attending to the reader while em-
ploying the tools of the postmodernist trade, when needed, if need-
ed.”2 Like Stock, Masiero’s focus is not on descriptive technique
specically, but more broadly on the complexities of Wallace’s nar-
rative voice(s) and the text-reader relationship. In order for his texts
to recreate the workings of the contemporary mind in ways that go
beyond mere replication or imitation, they must be embodied.3 A key
part of how this embodiment is achieved is through materiality—
and for materiality, I suggest, you need description.
However, the materiality of the world(s) in which Wallace’s c-
tions are set is a postmodern one. Wallace’s historical proximity to
postmodernist ction means that his work is shaped by the concerns
and techniques of postmodern writers, but he should not be seen as
2. Pia Masiero, “David Foster Wallace and Narratology,” in Wallace in Context, ed.
Clare Hayes-Brady (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 15.
3. Masiero, “Narratology,” 18-19.
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94
“simply” postmodernist (nor, for that matter, as an anti-postmodern-
ist). If Wallace has, nevertheless, been associated with postmodernist
ction it might be because, as Stephen Connor notes, “to engage
with postmodernism, even in the form of a detached survey, or a
negative critique, however hostile, is to become part of it.”4 Post-
modernism in Connor’s account absorbs discourse, so that to have
an opinion on it or to employ any of its techniques means to be
claimed by it.
Wallace did both. He used the techniques of postmodernist c-
tion, in particular reexive metaction and a kaleidoscopic approach
to the creation of a ctional text. The sensory overload that some
of his ction presents, with its barrage of information and compet-
ing discourses (mass media, advertising, metactional self-conscious
narrators, etc.) can however be seen as simply a more realistic way
of describing 1990s US life than older forms of realism. His de-
scriptions, therefore, encompass the internal reactions of his char-
acters (and narrators) to all of this external stimulus. Kiki Benzon,
writing about the “realism” of Jest, argues that in the information-,
entertainment-, and marketing-saturated world in which Wallace’s
ction is set, “[the] real...is known not only by its observable artifacts
and structures but also through its eects upon perceiving subjects.”5
His descriptions are realistic, since they convey the chaos of con-
temporary reality, but also the reactions of the subjects within this
world: “Wallace’s chaotic ction...is neither a contemporary stab at
traditional realism nor a gamey metactional exercise, but it is a mo-
bilization of the two modes toward an expression of actual, ‘lived’
experience”6 In Wallace’s work description includes accounts of in-
4. Stephen Connor, Postmodernist Culture (Blackwell, 1997), 6.
5. Kiki Benzon, “‘Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders’:
Chaos and Realism in Innite Jest,” in Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays,
Kindle Edition, ed. David Hering (Los Angeles: Sideshow Media Group, 2010),
location 1797.
6. Benzon, location 1797.
Issue 5 • 2025
95
ternal states (a legacy of modernism), as well as the more common-
ly-accepted function of conveying external, material detail.7
Realist Description
What, then, of description in “classical” realist ction, descrip-
tion it is tempting to see as relatively straightforward and material?
If Wallace’s descriptions aim to capture a fragmentary lived experi-
ence, this is nothing new—classical realists were, arguably, attempt-
ing something similar. Fredric Jameson, in The Antinomies of Realism
(2013), suggests that society and aesthetic experience are not “stable
substances that can be studied empirically and analyzed philosophi-
cally.”8 If classical realism appears to be empirical, stable, and exter-
nal in nature then this is an illusion. When talking about realism we
are always talking about contradictions: tensions between opposing
forces rather than a stable artistic form.
The Marxist scholar Georg Lukács identies one such tension.
According to David Cunningham, Lukács saw the bourgeois clas-
sical realist novel as inevitably tending towards the particular and
the everyday, since unlike the older epic form the novel of middle
class modernity must reside within particularity9—hence the ten-
7. Corrie Baldauf has examined aspects of description in Wallace’s work, but em-
phasizes the importance of ekphrasis, or set-piece descriptions of art. I agree that
such descriptions are important in Wallace’s ction, and nd particularly useful Bal-
dauf ’s notion of “ekphrastic transfer...dened as ekphrastic description applied to
objects and landscapes not traditionally considered art” (Corrie Baldauf, “Wallace
and Visual Culture,” Wallace in Context, 99-100). However, I disagree that in such
descriptive set-pieces Wallace is overtly presenting such material as “art.” More
interesting to my enquiry is the prevalence of active description itself. As Baldauf
indicates, this active and self-conscious perception is an intrinsic part of Wallace’s
ctional project.
8. Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism (London: Verso, 2013), 6.
9. David Cunningham, “Capitalist and Bourgeois Epics: Lukács, Abstraction
and the Novel,” in Georg Lukács: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence (New York:
Bloomsbury, 2013), 50.
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96
dency towards description. This particularity consists of the “con-
cretely everyday,”10 detailed descriptions of which abound in realist
novels. However, Lukács’s formulation of what is abstract and what
is concrete is unusual, since what is necessarily abstract (the system
of power relations that is capitalism) is concrete in the sense that
it informs the lives of those who live within it (and the characters
within novels), whereas the apparently concrete in terms of everyday
concrete detail (embodied by realist description) is actually abstract
in that it obscures the governing totality of the capitalist system and
its power relations.11
In Lukács’s foundational narratological essay “Narrate or De-
scribe?” (1936), he establishes description as being secondary in im-
portance to narration, and in some ways actually opposed to the lat-
ter’s aims. Description, in this account, is static; narration provides
momentum. He compares two horse races in realist novels, one in
Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1878) and another in Zola’s Nana (1880): “In
Zola the race is described from the standpoint of an observer; in
Tolstoy it is narrated from the standpoint of a participant.”12 Lukács
oers no actual denition of either description or narration, but we
can infer such denitions from his argument. In the Tolstoy example
an important character is a participant in the race, whereas in the
Zola example that is not the case. Narration is about action, but
a certain kind of action which involves important characters. Like-
wise there must of course be description within the Tolstoy race,
but clearly for Lukács such description is subsumed by the narrative
function of the entire set-piece.
It is not merely the static quality of realist description that Lukács
10. Cunningham, 50.
11. Cunningham, 55.
12. Georg Lukács, “Narrate or Describe? A Problem in Realistic Representation”
(1936), in Writer and Critic, ed. and trans. Arthur D. Khan (London: Merlin Press,
1970), 111.
Issue 5 • 2025
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has a problem with. He is worried, too, by descriptive writing that is
(to his mind) overly subjective. Marshall Boswell refers to Lukács’s es-
say in a discussion about Wallace’s Oblivion (2004), writing that “when
Lukács remarks of Zola’s technique that ‘investigation of social phe-
nomena through observation and their representation in description
brings such paltry and schematic results that these modes of compo-
sition easily slip into their polar opposite—complete subjectivism,’ he
inadvertently outlines one of Wallace’s key purposes.”13
In many ways, subjectivism is the point in Wallace’s work. Al-
though Boswell is referring specically to Oblivion’s extended interi-
or-aect set pieces, the point has a broader relevance for Wallace’s
ction. It is fair to speculate that Lukács may not have liked Wal-
lace’s descriptive writing, had he lived long enough to read it. The
workings of the individual subject’s mind as experienced under
advanced consumer capitalism (and without any overt or coherent
resistance to capitalism) is one of Wallace’s key subjects. Lukács
may therefore have seen in Wallace’s ction an advanced form of
the externally static, subjective descriptions he decries in “‘Nar-
rate or Describe?”. But that does not mean that there is nothing
redeeming about it. Dierent times call for dierent methods, and
I suggest that Wallace’s ction not only represents but interrogates
this “static” subjectivism.
The reason why external movement, action, and participation are
so important to Lukács is that “accurate appreciation of the motive
forces of the social process and a precise, impartial, profound and
comprehensive reection of their eects on life are always manifest-
ed in movement.”14 For Lukács, this “movement” is a forward-mov-
ing force that reveals truth by means of action, both for society and
13. Marshall Boswell, Understanding David Foster Wallace, revised and expanded edi-
tion (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2020), 118.
14. Lukács, “Narrate or Describe?” 123.
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98
individual characters alike.15 For him it is not enough “simply” to
observe and describe.
Wallace’s work contains many examples of what could be called
“external” realist description. For Wallace, however, the condition
of being an observer had a particular kind of relevance. In “E Uni-
bus Pluram” (1993) Wallace notes that the proliferation of mass me-
dia and pop culture references in postmodern ction led to both
recognition and a vague discomfort in his generation. Recognition,
because of the fact that “what binds us became what we stand wit-
ness to,”16 and discomfort at the realization that they were united in
being a generation of passive observers. For US Americans, by the advent
of postmodernism in ction, what bound them was their condition
of being observers of capitalism, rather than agents in any social
change. A predicament worsened by the increasing prevalence of
irony within the media they consumed, and in their own outlook
(and, indeed, output). Wallace’s descriptions are where this predica-
ment is dramatized—but they are also, I suggest, where such a pre-
dicament can be overcome, since they draw attention to (and indeed
require) the active nature of the observation they model.
Modernist Description
We noted above that Wallace’s descriptions often (indeed, usually)
encompass the internal reactions of the observer—whether they be
a character, a narrator, or some combination of both. This inner, af-
fective dimension of description has perhaps its fullest expression in
modernist ction. In “Modern Fiction” (1925), Virginia Woolf rails
against the supposed “materiality” found in the work of contempo-
rary realists, declaring, “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrical-
ly arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent surrounding
15. Lukács, “Narrate or Describe?,” 123.
16. David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram” (1993), in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll
Never Do Again (London: Abacus, 2012), 42.
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us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”17 The reference
to “gig lamp,” the small lamps mounted on the sides of carriages,
invokes the everyday materiality she detests. The phrase “symmet-
rically arranged” suggests the external nature of description in such
works, the material patterns given as much importance as the inner
workings of the mind. For Woolf, everything is a “halo,” a use of
religious imagery that recalls her deploying the term “soul” earlier
in the essay. This passage shows Woolf making a religion out of the
individual consciousness: “from the beginning...to the end.”
In the kind of description favored by Woolf, ordinary everyday
experience is ltered through the individual consciousness, thereby
fracturing and intensifying that experience. “Look within,”18 Woolf
suggests, and you will nd that the everyday, the apparently ordinary,
is anything but: “an ordinary mind on an ordinary day...receives a myr-
iad of impressions...and as they fall [they] shape themselves into the life
of Monday or Tuesday.”19 In modernist ction, descriptions of inner
states become an artistic aim and are clearly dynamic in intent. An or-
dinary Monday or Tuesday, says Woolf, becomes a story with momen-
tum. Wallace, talking to Larry McCarey about early modernist ction
writers, remarks: “Their idea was, well, experience is vastly more dis-
located and fragmentary, scrambled, jumbled, you pick ‘em, than most
people think—certainly more so than novelists usually let on—and so
they’ll show you this.”20 Similar to Wallace’s use of postmodern tech-
niques, what modernist writers were doing with their descriptions was
“realism” in the sense that they were trying to recreate in their ction a
reality that was as fragmentary as they perceived it.
17. Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram,” 160.
18. Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” 160.
19. Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” 160.
20. Larry McCarey, “An Expanded Interview with David Foster Wallace,” in Con-
versations with David Foster Wallace, ed. Stephen J. Burn (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2012), 38.
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100
Fredric Jameson appears to be in agreement with Lukács when he
characterizes modernism as subjective, internal, and anti-narrative.
As such, modernism dwells in what he calls the “realm of aect.”
However, this is not to say that interiority in ction is necessarily, in
and of itself, anti-narrative. In modernist (and modernist-inected)
ction, supposedly “static” elements can take on a movement of
their own. How they do this has a lot to do with what Jameson calls
the “play of aect.” There is “a temporality specic to aect,”21 a
new kind of movement distinct from the narrative impulse in which
it is the change from one aective state to another that provides
the momentum. This is the kind of subjective, internal, aective
movement that can exist within description, contrary to those de-
scriptions of it as static in nature. Heather Houser, noting this ap-
parent contradiction in ctional description, writes that “[tracking]
the narrator’s movements and gaze puts readers in a transitive re-
lation to the text, while pause puts us in an intransitive relation.”22
Even the most leisurely description, or a description of an internal
state in which no external “real world” action is taking place, has
movement of the eye or the mind, and as such creates “a vibratory
state in the pull between frozenness and dynamism.”23 Whether or
not this qualies as “real” movement in a Lukácsian sense is dubi-
ous. What is certain is that this kind of movement (and the tension
between stasis and forward movement) is particularly suitable for
rendering the inner lives of the couch-locked, TV-watching, iro-
ny-paralyzed subjects sketched out in “E Unibus.”
Gérard Genette’s Narrative Discourse (1980) is both a founda-
tional work of narratological theory and a sustained close reading
of Marcel Proust’s À la recherce de temps perdu (1913). Genette
21. Jameson, 42.
22. Heather Houser, “Shimmering Description and Descriptive Criticism,” New
Literary History 51, no. 1 (Winter 2020): 6.
23. Houser, 6.
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demonstrates the importance of a temporal movement within
Proustian description, consisting of “a narrative and analysis of
the perceptual activity of the character contemplating: of his im-
pressions, progressive discoveries, shifts in distance and perspective,
errors and corrections, enthusiasms or disappointments, etc.”24
Not only is this movement of aect central to such descriptions,
it is clearly marked in the text (in the form of dynamic connecting
phrases related to the active act of perception) so that it becomes
a notable feature. The kinds of reexive descriptive “signposting”
in Wallace’s ction arguably operate in a comparable way, alerting
the reader to the mediated, active nature of such descriptions. In so
doing, Wallace encourages the reader to attend to observation and
description as an active process.
Postmodernist Description
Modernist ction intensied dynamic, aective descriptions on
the basis of the “cult” of the individual consciousness, as argued for
by Woolf. However, by investing so much in consciousness and di-
vesting from the external world, ction was being led into a trap. In
postmodernist description that trap becomes apparent. Modernist
ction writers such as Woolf believed they were capturing the partic-
ular intensity of individual experience in a new way. But it may also
be possible that the thing that shaped that very experience was the
introduction of a kind of reexive awareness. Connor writes: “if one
way of characterizing modernist culture and modernity in general is
in terms of its discovery of experience, then another way is to see it
as the moment when self-consciousness invaded experience.”25
Self-awareness is intensied in postmodernist ction, lead-
ing Wallace to comment that “[it’s] almost like postmodernism is
24. Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980),
102.
25. Connor, 4.
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102
ction’s fall from biblical grace. Fiction became conscious of itself in
a way it never had been.”26
In ction writing, this self-awareness had the eect in some writ-
ers’ work (and criticism) of making it seem as if the ctional enter-
prise itself might be at risk. John Barth suggests in his essay “The
Literature of Exhaustion” (1967) that ction writing appears (in his
opinion and that of his peers and students) to have “shot its bolt,”
that the novel in particular as a form has had its day. He asserts,
however, that just because there is a general feeling that this is the
case doesn’t mean that novels will not and should not continue to
be written. The dierence is that they will be highly self-conscious,
“imitations-as-novels...attempt to represent not life directly but a
representation of life.”27 These novels will be imitations of an ob-
solete form that attempted to imitate life itself. The benet of this,
it seems, is that to do the latter is to be impossibly and deplorably
naïve, whereas in doing the former, the author-who-is-imperson-
ating-an-author can still be “serious and passionate despite [the
work’s] farcical aspect.”28 Recalling Wallace’s Eden metaphor, and
the apparent shame associated with self-consciousness in ction, it is
perhaps signicant that in Barth’s memoir-ish foreword to the essay
(added more than a decade later) he describes anarchist ags being
waved at faculty-student meetings, and “dope” being smoked open-
ly on campus. Clearly, Barth’s essay is a reaction to wider cultural
shifts in the late 1960s. In a later essay, “The Literature of Replen-
ishment” (1982), Barth does mention realistic description as a nec-
essary component of ction, but it is clear that in the earlier essay
his argument is more about sensibility and point of view: the mind
observing and describing, which in Barth’s work and that of many
26. McCarey, 30.
27. John Barth, “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967), in The Friday Book (New
York: Putnam, 1984), 72.
28. Barth, 72.
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103
of his contemporaries is a thoroughly postmodern one.
Wallace was familiar with Barth’s work—Wallace’s story “West-
ward the Course of Empire Takes its Way” is in part a reaction to
Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse.” Boswell argues that Wallace’s essay
“E Unibus Pluram” “reads like a response, one generation later, to
Barth’s response to his modernist forebears.”29 It has a similar stance
towards postmodernism that Barth’s essay has towards modernism
(and realism), in terms of the ways in which Wallace articulates what
is by that point conning or “used up” about postmodernist tech-
niques. Comparing realism to metaction, Wallace writes that “[if]
Realism called it like it saw it, Metaction simply called it as it saw it-
self see itself see it.”30 The amusingly convoluted second part of this
sentence evokes the convolution of many metactional narratives—
both an enactment of and a commentary on the self-awareness of
such ction (emphasized with the knowingly inappropriate use of
“simply”). The idea being that metactional texts are texts that read
themselves writing as they write, that second-guess or spectate their
own reception as part of their creation.
This embracing of self-consciousness cannot, however, comprise
simply reproducing in the form of ction the irony and self-conscious-
ness of that ction’s human subjects. If that were its only aim, the
result would be a ction that merely recreates the irony-conditioned
paralysis Wallace criticizes in “E Unibus.” Paralysis being, arguably,
not only the end-state of passivity-inducing realist ction but also of
the championing of interiority that comes to the fore in modernist
ction. Wallace’s ction aims to communicate something else through
the irony and metactional reexivity, without simply recreating con-
temporary self-consciousness. His mature ction aims to provoke a
more productive, ethically aware self-consciousness in the reader,
and descriptions are a crucial part of how he achieves this.
29. Boswell, 5.
30. Wallace, “E Unibus,” 34.
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104
Wallace’s Description
Before attending to how Wallace achieves this in Innite Jest, I
would like to briey examine some examples of description in an
earlier Wallace piece that foregrounds the “contemporary self-con-
sciousness” referred to above. “Westward the Course of Empire
Takes its Way” is part patricide (with Barth as patriarch), part
metactional showboating. But underneath the patricide and self-
aware postmodern playfulness are traces of both realist and mod-
ernist sensibilities. The same tensions—movement/stasis, internal/
external—Lukács is concerned with are present here.
The supposedly external landscape in which most of the story
is set has a symbolic, metactional aspect. It is an American Mid-
west landscape of crisscrossing roads surrounded on all sides by ter-
rifyingly lush, colossally tall corn that prevents the characters from
seeing where they are going. Jurrit Daalder notes the importance of
the Midwestern landscape in Wallace’s work: “place and text take
on parallel status, resulting in an ontological confusion that Brian
McHale identied as the dominant of postmodernist writing.”31 In
other words, in “Westward” the landscape takes on a role similar to
the reexive text itself, which tries to understand the nature of what it
can know. The paradoxically over-lush desert of the cornelds—”so
much corn that it’s literally worthless”32—mirrors the over-wrought
metaction, which seems to oer “growth” in the form of contin-
ual innovation and progress but in fact leads to a non-landscape in
which its human characters are lost, almost alien things. It leads, in
other words, to paralysis.
All that being said, the landscape must still be rendered in
31. Jurrit Daalder, “Wallace’s Geographic Metaction,” in The Cambridge Companion
to David Foster Wallace, ed. Ralph Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2018), 221.
32. David Foster Wallace, “Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way,” in Girl
with Curious Hair (1989; reis., London: Abacus 2008), 299.
Issue 5 • 2025
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descriptions before it can have this symbolic and reexive signi-
cance. Early in the story J.D. looks out of the airport window at this
at, menacingly lush landscape, and sees “the underwater blue of
landing lights in a circle under a by-now licorice sky pricked with
fading stars, trillions of them, the corn tallishly black and still, even
with wind, and wet with dew. Facing Eastward like this it’s almost
hard to even look: at right to the Earth’s curve, East: never a hill...
there’s nothing to hold your eye, you have to pan back and forth, like
a big No....”33 The landscape here is described initially in external,
realist language—“underwater blue,” “licorice sky.” The lushness of
the landscape is both menacing (“black and still, even with wind”)
and on a scale without measure with its proximity to, and compa-
rability with, the “trillions” of stars in the sky above. What follows
the external, material description is, in a modernist sense, a descrip-
tion that contains a movement comprising the play of internal aect
within the consciousness of the observer. Like Genette’s account of
Proustian description, both the process of looking (“it’s hard to even
look,” “pan back and forth”) and the observer’s aective reaction to
what they are seeing (“like a big No”) is part of the description.
Other descriptions in the story are also oered in a similarly
knowing way, one that in a metactional manner acknowledges their
place within the story as part of the ctional project rather than as
(or as well as) a means of rendering either an external reality or an
aective internal reaction. “By way of a weather report”34 is how one
description of gathering clouds is abruptly introduced near the end
of the story—like many other occasional descriptions of the land-
scape outside the travelling car that are littered in between stretches
of dialogue and inner monologue it is presented in a deliberately
articial way, as in the way the TV tells about what may be happen-
ing outside the TV (“weather report”), but whose meaning is entirely
33. Wallace, “Westward,” 244.
34. Wallace, “Westward,” 330.
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106
subsumed by its context. The weather description itself, “dark ngers
of scout-clouds have reached past the sun and are groping at the ma-
levolent car’s shallow sky...an oriental watercolor whispering muted
color,”35 while beautifully composed contains both personication
of weather (“dark ngers,” “groping”) and overtly artistic references
(“watercolor”), meaning that this external description is presented
in terms that are knowingly articial in that they are literary/artistic
and refer to existing tropes of how one might describe weather. Ulti-
mately, however, the self-conscious postmodernist dimension is built
on a foundation of realist and modernist description.
Wallace’s earlier ction, of which “Westward” is a fascinating
example, is sophisticated, well-crafted, often funny, and sometimes
disturbing. It is also thoroughly postmodern, and embraces a broad
range of styles. GCH does so from story to story: the lyrical “Every-
thing is Green” bears such little resemblance to “Westward,” for ex-
ample, that the two might have been written by two dierent writers.
The earlier work oers compensations but not solutions; most often
the emphasis is on style and experimentation. Wallace’s later work,
however, contains a more coherent and active ethical sensibility.
Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon College commencement address, an au-
dio recording of which later achieved viral fame on the internet in
a truncated form as This is Water, is arguably a victim of its own
success. The edited, animated viral video version seemed to owe
its shareability to its similarity in certain respects to the easy sloga-
nizing of mindfulness practitioners. The highlights that comprised
the video, when paired with glossy stock-footage, upped the feel-
good factor and elided some of the nuance of Wallace’s argument.
Mike Miley has observed that the formatting of the subsequent pub-
lished book version of the speech “with a single sentence on each
of its pages...distilled Wallace’s literary mission down to under 200
35. Wallace, “Westward,” 330.
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easy-to-read sentences,”36 and in so doing emphasized the self-help
aspect. Not only that: Clare Hayes-Brady has noted a historical ten-
dency in Wallace criticism to “overbiographize Wallace’s outputs.”37
Nevertheless, the Kenyon speech is of interest to our present inquiry
because the kind of “attention” Wallace calls for in the speech is so
similar to observation and description as to be interchangeable with
them. As a statement about descriptive technique (as opposed to a
pillar holding up the “Saint Dave” myth of Wallace’s supremely eth-
ical personality), it is enlightening. Indeed, Alice Bennet has argued
convincingly that attention may be the most consistent theme across
all of Wallace’s output.38
David Turnbull argues that despite Wallace’s repeated claims in
the speech that he is not making an ethical argument, it is “a metaethi-
cal one; it is an argument about the nature of morality, saying that the
way we choose to attend to and see situations [emphasis mine] is absolutely
central to the way we react to the world.”39 In the speech Wallace
describes a series of everyday scenarios, and oers rst an automatic,
cynical, selsh interpretation of them and then another, more gener-
ous and non-self-centered interpretation. Wallace’s method is to ask
his audience to consider how we describe the situation to ourselves in
the rst place, and encourages us to include that as part of the ethical
equation. This is a useful technique since, as Turnbull writes, “the
usual method of moral philosophers is to take the description of the sit-
uation in question as a given [emphasis added], and ask, on the basis of
this situation, so described, what is the right or wrong, the required
36 Mike Miley, “Author Here, There, and Everywhere,” in Wallace in Context, ed.
Clare Hayes-Brady (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 372.
37. Clare Hayes-Brady, introduction to Wallace in Context, 3.
38. Alice Bennett, “David Foster Wallace and Attention,” in Wallace in Context, 109.
39. David Turnbull, “This is Water and the Ethics of Attention: Wallace, Murdoch,
and Nussbaum,” in Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays (Los Angeles: Side-
show Media Group, 2010), Kindle Edition, location 3438.
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108
or forbidden, thing to do.”40 Wallace’s technique instead suggests
that the condition of being an observer (and, for a ction writer, a
describer) is or can be an active, ethically-involved one if done in a
self-aware way. This is no longer a question of simply rendering the
external world, as in realist description. Nor of exploring the inte-
rior play of aect as a “truer” reality, as in modernist description.
But nor, either, is it a case of “merely” attending to the artice of
description itself, in which either interpretation—selsh or magnan-
imous—is equally valid since both are ctional constructions.
This idea, that by being self-conscious about the way one observes
and describes the everyday—the concrete and virtual environments
of late 20th-century consumer capitalist society—might constitute an
ethical process is a long way from Lukács’s idea that the only valid
kind of ction is that which recreates in narrative form the move-
ment and action of social change. However, it is an idea that is cen-
tral to understanding Wallace’s descriptions and his ctional project
in general. Rather than aiming to change the material conditions of
that society (or to show in ction the action of that change), in Wal-
lace’s ction, the inner drama of the observer and how it relates to external
reality actually constitutes those material conditions. Importantly, this is
true not only of subjective characters and narrators within Wallace’s
ction, but of the reader as well, who must negotiate the complex
and richly layered nature of his descriptions.
In Jest’s descriptions, this dizzying and layered experience of the
observer and how that aective experience relates to external reality
becomes, arguably, the novel’s compositional principle (as well as a
thematic concern). It is a novel that for much of its hefty page count
employs, à la much classical realism, external non-focalized third per-
son narration. To be clear: by non-focalized narration I mean prose
where no character subjectivity appears to inect the writing, and the
voice seems unambiguously the narrator’s. However, the narrative
40. Turnbull, Location 3438-3451.
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voice/voices can and often does/do internally focalize characters,
creating what Masiero calls “a polyphonic storyworld in which the
authorial narrator may decide to disappear to make room for the
individual subjectivities of characters whose existential and linguistic
specicities deserve full-edged status.”41 For this reason it will also be
crucial for us to consider questions of focalization in the novel.
In Genette’s narratological framework, focalization gets to the
heart of questions about who is “seeing” and who is “speaking” (of-
ten two dierent things, or ambiguous). However, I follow the work
of more recent critics such as Eric Rundquist42 in seeing the more
salient question in focalization as being who feels/sees, and who
speaks—especially since, in Jest, the question is so often one of inter-
nal aect rather than sight.
It is important to clarify some points about Jest’s narrative mode.
The narration and narrator are not consistent. There are multi-
ple narrators in the novel. Setting aside shorter stylistic deviations
(embedded “scripts” such as Mario’s lm, monologues from minor
characters such as Clenette and yrstrly, etc.) there are key sections in
which Hal is a rst person narrator. The rest of the time the novel
is narrated in a mode that is often non-focalized and that demon-
strates knowledge exceeding what any one character could (or rather
should) know. Starting with Greg Carlisle,43 Wallace critics have sug-
gested that at least some of this narration can be assigned to Hal,
the James-wraith, or Lyle. However, I am more interested in the
diversity itself rather than nding any speculative “key” that might
reveal the “true” narrator.
For example, during the Don Gately driving passage that falls in
41. Masiero, “Wallace and Narratology,” 23.
42. Eric Rundquist, Free Indirect Style in Modernism: Representations of Consciousness (Am-
sterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2017), 174.
43. Greg Carlisle, Elegant Complexity (Los Angeles: Sideshow Media Group, 2007),
148.
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110
almost the dead center of the novel, the narrator at one point asks:
“Has anyone mentioned that Gately’s head is square?”44 Here the
metactional aspect is important, with the accompanying endnote
200 deepening the impression of narrative diversity and complexity,
referring to other sources of authority for the description of Gately’s
head and hair. There are multiple narrators and they do not have
perfect knowledge of one another, nor do they have full control of
the narrative. Other endnotes in the novel also disavow authority,
such as endnote 216, which accompanies a mention in the main text
of the “Coatlicue Complex” but simply reads “No clue.”45 The pres-
ence of these multiple, uctuating narrators and of characters in the
text who are internally focalized means that there is a rich, layered
texture to the descriptions. This texture both enacts the self-con-
scious attention outlined earlier, and provokes such attention in the
reader, who must attempt to decipher it.
Establishing the importance of description in the Gately driving
passage, Houser argues that description has a particular relevance
in the kaleidoscopic and polyphonic world of Jest because “[the]
descriptive function as a locus for information management com-
mands a high premium at a time when data overload meets envi-
ronmental and social exigencies such as ecosystem degradation due
to hyper-consumerism.”46 Houser asserts that Jest both responds to
information overload and uses it as material. Wallace’s descriptions
equate trash and information, exhibiting a descriptive compulsion. At
times this resembles the “reality eect” criticized by Roland Barthes
in realist description. However, the aim in Jest is not mastery but
that of indicating incommensurability. Houser endorses the multiple
44. David Foster Wallace, Innite Jest (1996; reis., London: Abacus, 2010), 476.
45. 1036n216. For a fuller analysis of this particular footnote and the Coatlicue
Complex, see Toon Staes, “The Coatlicue Complex in David Foster Wallace’s In-
nite Jest” (2014).
46. Heather Houser, “Managing Information and Materiality in Innite Jest and
Running the Numbers,” American Literary History 26, no. 4 (Winter 2014): 743.
Issue 5 • 2025
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narrator reading of the novel: “In dividing itself, the describing nar-
rator comments on description qua novelistic device but through a
move distinct from l’eet de réel and postmodernism.”47 I agree with
Houser’s reading up to a point, but would go further and suggest
that the descriptions in the Gately driving passage (and elsewhere
in the novel) combine non-focalized realist description and modern-
ist-inected internal focalization, along with a postmodernist-con-
ditioned self-consciousness. This amounts less to a compulsion than
to a rich and complex layering of external detail, internal aect,
and multiple narrators that negotiate between these layers by means
of reexivity. This descriptive passage is something that—like the
novel as a whole—requires careful, self-conscious attention from the
reader. Importantly, Houser pays little attention to narratological
features such as internal focalization and free-indirect discourse, key
ways in which Gately’s subjectivity is evoked and narrator-diversity
managed within the descriptions.
During the driving passage, momentum is provided by both ex-
ternal movement (Gately is driving through Boston) and the internal
play of aect. Gately is often, but not always, internally focalized.
There is also non-focalized narration and many grades in between.
The passage begins:
Then tonight, at the prospect of boiled hot dogs, the two
newest residents had pulled the typically standard new-res-
ident princess-and-pea special-food-issue thing.... [T]he
weirdly-familiar-but-Southernish-sounding girl Joelle van
D. with the past-believing bod and the linen face announc-
ing she was a vegetarian and would “rather eat a bug” than
even get downwind of a boiled frank. And but in an incred-
ible move Pat M. has asked Gately, at like 1800h., to blast
down to the Purity Supreme down in Allston and pick up
some eggs and peppers so the two new delicate-tummied
47. Houser, “Managing Information,” 749.
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
112
newcomers can make themselves quiche or whatever....
The Joelle v.D. girl seems to have like inordinate immediate
weight and pet-status with Pat.... Gately has long since quit
trying to gure Pat Montesian out.
It’s a weird-weather evening, both thundering and spitting
snow. Gately had nally become able to distinguish genuine
thunder...48
In the opening paragraph Gately is being focalized, as signaled by
the deictic “tonight” followed by syntactic and lexical indicators of
free-indirect discourse (“past-believing bod,” “long since quit trying
to gure”).
This provides narrative momentum—the reason(s) for Gately’s
errand—and internal aect in the form of Gately’s responses to the
situation, detectable in the subjectivity of certain phrases (“in an
incredible move”). Then the second paragraph opens with a descrip-
tion of the “weird-weather evening,” begging the question (and to
echo a repeated refrain from “Westward”): for whom is the weather
“weird”? The narrative may still be focalizing Gately, although un-
like the previous paragraph the second no longer has clear indica-
tors of free-indirect discourse. The “weird-weather” is either being
described from Gately’s subjective perspective, or via non-focalized
narration. In the latter case, the description is a narrator’s account,
appealing to some assumed, commonly-understood idea about what
is weird in weather. However, there is the small detail of a tense
change, from the present perfect (“has asked”) in the rst paragraph
to the present tense in the second. The switch to the present tense
is a kind of anchor for the description, a present tense moment in
which Gately is the central gure. In which case, potentially, the
weather is being observed (and judged as weird) by him even though
the attribution (narrator or Gately) is ambiguous.
48. IJ, 475.
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113
The reason all of this is important is that the ambiguous attribu-
tion of the weather description is complicated on a structural level in
the text. The “weird-weather” turns out to have narrative signicance.
Something ominous and important is about to happen for which the
weather appears to be a brooding harbinger. However, it is not going
to happen to Gately (at least, not yet) but to the Antitoi brothers,
who are soon to be brutally murdered. In this reading, clues such
as the weather description function as non-focalized narration, an
example of a narrator’s greater knowledge anticipating forwards. It
also has a reexive function for the reader, but only later, in retro-
spect. In this way a reexive dimension is blended with the external
detail and play of aect—and not for the last time.
Gately’s drive continues: “One of the possible weak spots in Gate-
ly’s AA recovery-program of rigorous personal honesty is that once
he’s jammed himself into a black-as-water Aventura and watched
the spoiler throb as he turns over the carnivorous engine, etc, he
often nds himself taking a little bit less of a direct route to a given
Ennet-errand-site that he probably could.”49 The comparison of the
car’s color to water in this apparently non-focalized description ap-
pears odd.
Ordinarily, water would be described as clear, or perhaps blue or
green if a larger body of open water. Most references to water in the
novel come in the form of descriptions of Boston’s polluted river,
which is an unnatural blue. The only possible reason for describing
water as black would be if it were extremely—even nightmarishly—
deep.50 This deep-water reading is, again, a reexive, textual-struc-
tural anticipation. During the fever dreams Gately has in the hospi-
tal later in the text are several dreams involving deep water. Deep,
49. IJ, 475.
50. The description recalls a brief earlier description of the car’s colour on page
461: “its black has the bottomless quality of water at night.” But in both places what
is notable about the comparison is that the unusual connection is made to dark,
deep water—a connection that is explored in more detail in the driving passage.
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
114
dark water may also relate to the necessarily active, self-conscious
nature of Gately’s (and other’s) sobriety, in which the origin and pur-
pose of every aect is murky and suspect and must be interrogated.
Indeed, in the above passage the narrator suggests that Gately’s re-
lationship with Pat’s Aventura is suspect, sobriety-wise. Then there
is the description of the car’s spoiler “throb[bing],” perhaps an an-
ticipation of important Gately-related throbbing ceilings later in the
text. Therefore although the description presents as non-focalized,
it nevertheless contains traces or shadows of Gately’s subjectivity
that can only be divined by an attentive reader in retrospect. That
the passage contains so many other descriptions clearly colored by
Gately’s aect encourages this reading. To give one such example:
the car’s engine is described as “carnivorous” which, given the con-
text of his errand for picky vegetarians seems closely allied to the
disgruntled, meat-eating Gately.
To return for a moment to the subject of multiple narrators: part-
way through Gately’s drive comes the question about, and descrip-
tion of, his head: “Has anybody mentioned Gately’s head is square?
It’s almost perfectly square, massive and boxy and mysticetously
blunt: the head of someone who looks like he likes to lower his head
and charge.”51 The narrator responsible for this non-focalized de-
scription is one among many, the “Has anybody...?” referring to oth-
er authorities, including characters. Shortly afterwards, for example,
part of a description of Gately’s hair is attributed to Chandler Foss
in endnote 200. The word “mysticetously,” used to describe Gately’s
head, is a coinage of Wallace’s. The description continues at some
length, adding childhood backstory, then describing Gately’s hair,
then the shape of one of his ears. It is a piling on of detail that, in
keeping with the zoological coinage, is comparable to a researcher’s
account of a new life form.
The above, self-consciously narrative description distances us
51. IJ, 476.
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115
from Gately, even making him seem somewhat grotesque. And yet
after the “break” in the main text for endnote 200, Gately’s drive
continues: “Nobody that lives in these guano-spotted old brown
buildings along Comm. with bars on the low oors’ windows201 ever
goes inside, it seems like.”52
The distance is closed again: here both deictics (“these guano-spot-
ted buildings”) and syntax indicate Gately’s internal focalization. In
addition, endnote 201 that interrupts the description contains a nar-
rator who points out that Gately (an ex-burglar) “still automatically
notices bars and mesh” and other building security measures.53 Our
attention as readers is drawn explicitly to who is attending to what,
and how that attention is being conditioned. Gately is often sympa-
thetically portrayed in the novel, but here as elsewhere the descrip-
tions associated with his subjectivity are often colored by prejudice
and/or ignorance. For example, further on in his drive Gately passes
through what are described as “eerily alien lands” for the reason
that the businesses use Spanish and there are “ads for lottery tickets
in what isn’t quite Spanish.”54 Not to mention Gately’s persistent
internal uses of the N-word and other slurs, some of which are dain-
tily apologized-for by a narrator in endnotes while others are left to
stand in the main text. Likewise, non-focalized narration may appear
neutral in oering external detail or narrative judgements, but Jest’s
multiple narrators cannot be relied upon in this regard—something
to which the careful reader’s attention is drawn by means of the
reexive and metactional dimension, which moves “in and out” of
the main text via endnotes and self-consciously structural features.
Jest encourages self-conscious attention in the reader, because
there is no single identiable source of narrative authority within the
text, and the mediation is made explicit through the use of multiple
52. IJ, 477.
53. IJ, 1034n201.
54. IJ, 479.
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116
narrators, endnotes, and other reexive dynamics. In the same way
that Gately’s aects are “nested” among non-focalized descriptions,
readers are encouraged to interrogate the nature and focus of their
own attention. In this way, the layered descriptions are deliberately
and repeatedly problematized.
Wallace and his contemporaries could not simply stand aloof and
observe the material world as non-participants, not least because their
awareness of their own irony-conditioned paralysis was a constant
source of discomfort and required active attention. Their (and indeed
our) subjective reality is certainly fractured and tends towards the so-
lipsistic, but the modernist techniques had rendered this fracturing
so well in ction had run their course. The innovations of postmod-
ernism were useful and entertaining but had a hollow ring—the ex-
perimentation of “Westward” had been replaced by a more coherent
ethical purpose by the advent of Jest. The key for Wallace was to be
aware that all of these “realities”—material, subjective, fractured, and
reexive—could be true at the same time. He wanted to provoke an
awareness of such layering in his readers. It’s how we negotiate these
layers that is important. This is why his descriptions are key to un-
derstanding his ction: they render the material, they capture frac-
turing and solipsism, and they contain a movement all of their own.
For many of Wallace’s contemporaries, the inner drama of being an
observer was the stu of life. By attending to the momentum of atten-
tion we are made aware of this. And it is never truer than when we are
readers, since then our attention is all we have.
Issue 5 • 2025
117
Bibliography
Baldauf, Corrie. “Wallace and Visual Culture.” In David Foster Wal-
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bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
Barth, John. “The Literature of Exhaustion.” In The Friday Book.
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Bennett, Alice. “David Foster Wallace and Attention.” In David Fos-
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Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
Benzon, Kiki. “‘Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain
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Wallace, David Foster. Innite Jest. London: Abacus, 2010; rst pub-
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Issue 5 • 2025
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Community, Humanity, &
Redemption:
Infinite Jest
and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s
Notes from a Dead House
1
Richard Decker
The connectIons betWeen Wallace and Dostoevsky are well es-
tablished in recent scholarship,2 and special attention has been
paid to Wallace’s review of Joseph Frank’s biography and analysis
of Dostoevsky entitled “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky.”3 And although
the secondary literature acknowledges the intertextual connections
between Innite Jest and The Brothers Karamazov (BK)—what it lacks
is a focused discussion of the two authors’ semi-autobiographical
novels: Innite Jest and Notes from a Dead House. Therefore, this pre-
liminary discussion attempts to demonstrate how some of the schol-
arship about Wallace, Dostoevsky, and NDH lays the foundation for
an analysis of both IJ and NDH—and how an exploration of their
intertextuality helps illuminate their shared themes of community,
humanity, and redemption.
Ellen Chances notes that Wallace’s review was written while
he was writing IJ.4 D. T. Max reveals that Wallace began writing
1. Originally presented in a slightly dierent format at the International David Foster
Wallace Society 2024 Conference, University of Texas, Austin, TX, June 8, 2024.
2. Ellen Chances, Timothy Jacobs, and Lucas Thompson’s work in this area is exemplary.
3. David Foster Wallace, “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky,” in Consider the Lobster and Other
Essays (2005); repr., New York: Little, Brown, 2006), 255.
4. Ellen Chances, “David Foster Wallace and Dostoevsky: On Parallel Tracks?,” Liter-
ature of the Americas 11 (2021): 139, doi.org/10.22455/2541-7894-2021-11-134-154.
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
122
the review close to the beginning of the copyediting phase of IJ,
sometime around July of 1995,5 and during this phase, Max says,
“The parallels between Dostoevsky’s [life] and his [Wallace’s] own
[life] certainly caught his eye, as they had at Granada House.”6 In
his comparison of IJ and BK, Jacobs notes that Wallace’s review
of Frank’s works demonstrates Wallace’s heavy engagement with
Frank’s scholarship and Dostoevsky’s art and, drawing from Steven
Moore, demonstrates that, even after having a full draft of IJ by
1993, “Wallace also added much to the nal version, which suggests
that Frank and Dostoevsky became more urgent as the novel moved
closer to its nal, published version.”7 And Lucas Thompson be-
lieves the work done on this review (which began in 1995) occurred
during the height of Wallace’s Dostoevsky fascination.8 Dostoevsky’s
work and life shaped Wallace’s imaginative landscape—and some of
this shaping occurred during the years Wallace was writing IJ.
One of Frank’s volumes, which Wallace would presumably have
read for his review,9 entitled Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860-
1865, denes NDH as a prison memoir that is heavily based on
Dostoevsky’s experiences in a Siberian work camp “as a political
convict.”10 The work is a blend of fact and ction—a “double per-
5. D. T. Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (2012; repr.,
New York: Penguin Books, 2013), 205, 209.
6. Max, 208.
7. Jacobs, 290n3.
8. Lucas Thompson, Global Wallace: David Foster Wallace and World Literature, David
Foster Wallace Studies, ed. Stephen J. Burn, vol. 1 (2017; repr., New York: Blooms-
bury Academic, 2018), 93.
9. “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky” was published in 1996. At that time, the fourth
volume of Frank’s ve-volume masterwork on the life and works of Dostoevsky,
entitled Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871, was published one year prior.
The nal volume, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881, would not be
published until 2002.
10. Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860-1865 (1986; repr., Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 213-14.
Issue 5 • 2025
123
spective” as Frank calls it11—as its lead character Alexander Petro-
vich Goryanchikov is simply a ctionalized stand-in for Dostoevsky
himself.12 Frank is clear that NDH is an accurate account of prison
life in Siberia13 and that, upon NDH’s release, “all sorts of reforms
were suggested or advocated as a result of the information it provid-
ed.”14 Furthermore, Frank says, “Dostoevsky had succeeded in ‘re-
deeming’ a whole class of criminals and outcasts (not all, to be sure,
but the vast majority), whom he had returned to the human fold,
as it were, by depicting them with sympathetic insight.”15 Chances
mentions the impact that NDH had on Wallace, sharing the following
regarding Dale Peterson, one of Wallace’s professors from Amherst
College as well as a friend of his family: “Peterson...discussed a letter
from Wallace that included observations about Goryanchikov’s rela-
tionship with the common people in Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House
of the Dead.”16 Chances also notes Max’s reference to “a letter that
the writer [Wallace] wrote to Peterson, in which he compared him-
self to Dostoevsky, whose life experiences provided fuel for Notes from
the House of the Dead.”17 Max himself quotes Wallace as saying, “‘go-
ing from Harvard to here’ [“here” being Granada House] was like
‘House of the Dead...with my weeks in drug treatment composing
the staged execution and last minute reprieve from same.’”18 Chanc-
es quotes this same passage,19 and Thompson uses this passage to
demonstrate what he calls a “psychological imperative” present in
11. Frank, 214.
12. Frank, 219-20.
13. Frank, 214.
14. Frank, 215.
15. Frank, 219-20.
16. Chances, 141.
17. Frank, 215.
18. Max, 141. Second ellipsis is original to source.
19. Chances, 142.
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
124
Wallace’s emphasis on the connections between Dostoevsky’s life
and his own.20 “[T]he staged execution” Wallace mentions is a ref-
erence to Dostoevsky’s own experience. After a death sentence for
Dostoevsky and his cohort was commuted to a term in the Siberi-
an work camps, Emperor Nicholas I still called for “a mock execu-
tion” by ring squad to be carried out until right before the triggers
were to be pulled, at which point Dostoevsky and his band would
be notied of their real sentence.21 Wallace, as his review reveals,
was obviously aware of this experience.22 Despite the excellent work
by Chances, Max, Thompson, and Jacobs, the secondary literature
still lacks a singular examination of the intertextual connections be-
tween IJ and NDH.
These scholars agree that Wallace saw Dostoevsky’s works as an
example of how to impact Wallace’s own culture. Jacobs states that
there are parallels “in the correspondence between both artists’ un-
inching eschatological depiction of debased and despairing hu-
man nature toward a redemptive end.”23 Chances writes that both
Wallace and Dostoevsky share similarities in their understanding
of certain “moral and spiritual values.”24 Regarding “E Unibus
Pluram,” Max says that Wallace, within “an ironic culture,” be-
gan “diagnos[ing] a disease” in this essay but “now he was giving
a model for the cure.”25 The Frank review and IJ are a part of this
“model.”26 Thompson, citing Max’s analysis, agrees,27 and he goes
20. Thompson, 98-99.
21. Richard Pevear, foreward to Notes from a Dead House, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, trans.
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), vii-viii.
22. Wallace, CL, 267.
23. Jacobs, 266.
24. Chances, 136.
25. Max, 209.
26. Max, 208-09.
27. Thompson, 99.
Issue 5 • 2025
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on to say that “Wallace looked toward the Russian novelist in order
to appropriate a specic sense of existential redemption.”28 Draw-
ing on Jacobs, in Thompson’s analysis of “POP QUIZ 4” from Brief
Interviews with Hideous Men (BI), he explains that the action that takes
place (the generosity one addict displays for another cold, dying
addict by giving him his coat) is close to the setting of the Bar-
ry Loach/Mario scene in IJ, where Mario, in an act of kindness,
“touches” Loach who is begging in the streets for human connec-
tion, the latter of which references BK and Alyosha/Ivan directly,
and is an “intertextual allusion.”29 For Thompson, the connections
between IJ, BI, and BK reveal two questions that Wallace is asking
readers in this “POP QUIZ,” which amount to the following: Is it
possible for “redemptive self-sacrice and altruism” as well as “spir-
itual and moral redemption” to exist in Wallace’s own dicult con-
temporary era as it did in Dostoevsky’s own time?30 Taken together,
these scholars reveal that Wallace, upon reading Dostoevsky’s work,
sought a way to have a similar impact on his own culture. Dos-
toevsky’s NDH inuenced Russian culture by helping to redeem a
whole class of criminals and outcasts; Wallace’s work, likewise, takes
seriously the possibility of redemption.
Thompson addresses Wallace’s markings in his copy of Tolstoy’s
What Is Art? that highlight a passage in which Tolstoy says: “but [art]
is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same
feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being
of individuals and of humanity.”31 Thompson writes that this rep-
resents what Wallace sought to bring about in his own culture as a
28. Thompson, 100.
29. Thompson, 102, 104; David Foster Wallace, Innite Jest (1996; repr., New York:
Little, Brown, 2006), 969-71.
30. Thompson, 104-105.
31. “David Foster Wallace, Annotations in Tolstoy’s What is Art?,” David Foster
Wallace Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, quoted
in Thompson, 108.
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
126
way to counteract its “solipsism and loneliness” through art.32 And
using Wallace’s word “hologram” from an “early draft” of his review,
Thompson suggests that the word is benecial in understanding how
Wallace utilizes—or “appropriat[es]”—Dostoevsky’s works.33 Wal-
lace’s works that possess traces of such “appropriations” (including IJ),
serve as “hologram[s]” in that they “seem almost overlaid [emphasis
original] onto Dostoevsky’s work, superimposed images that rework
the original material and nd new thematic inections.”34 But, as op-
posed to replacing one text with another, Thompson says, “the ho-
lographic mode of inuence...allows two texts to coexist”35 and that
“‘intertextual quotation’ [a phrase taken from the Frank review] in-
vites direct comparison to the way Wallace integrated Dostoevsky’s
texts within his own ction.”36 For Thompson, the hologram is the
way in which Wallace applied Dostoevsky’s “model” as Wallace al-
ludes to in the conclusion of his Frank review.37 Thompson makes no
mention of NDH outside what has been mentioned above, but given
the connections between Wallace, Dostoevsky, and NDH, the latter,
arguably, is another intertext within IJ—and IJ a hologram “overlaid”
onto NDH.
Turning now to the texts themselves,38 a notable instance of in-
32. Thompson, 108.
33. Thompson, 111-12.
34. Thompson, 112.
35. Thompson, 112.
36. Thompson, 115.
37. Thompson, 112; Wallace, CL, 274.
38. The text of NDH quoted below is the Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
translation published in 2015, which makes it impossible for Wallace to have had a
copy. For some readers, this may disqualify its being used in an intertextual analysis
of IJ as its translation may distort or change the meaning of NDH in a way in which
Wallace would have been unfamiliar. However, Wallace was unsatised with the
translations of Dostoevsky’s works to which he had access. Jacobs, drawing from
Wallace’s own review of Frank, explains that Wallace felt both Constance Garnett’s
and Pevear and Volokhonsky’s translations of Dostoevsky’s works were not quite
Issue 5 • 2025
127
tertextuality between IJ and NDH is the “Ennet House Drug and
Alcohol Recovery House,” as it is rst introduced in IJ,39 and the
“Dead House,” as identied by Goryanchikov in NDH.40 Both are
considered “houses” or dwelling places of some sort. Jacobs makes
a similar observation regarding Ennet House as “resembl[ing] Dos-
toevsky’s monastery” in BK.41 The narrator of IJ explains that if
readers are ever to stay somewhere like Ennet House for an ex-
tended period, they “will acquire many exotic new facts.”42 NDH
begins with a frame narrative, in which the narrator purchases the
writings of the late Goryanchikov from his former landlady,43 among
them Goryanchikov’s account “of the ten years of life at hard labor”
in a Siberian prison for “murder[ing]...his wife.”44 Thus, Goryanchi-
kov has dwelled in his respective house. And it is the time spent in
this house that Goryanchikov makes many “observations,” evidenced
in his writings, that intrigue the narrator.45 Similar to Goryanchikov,
Donald Gately of Ennet House is guilty of murdering Guillaume
up to par as they both do not seem to grasp the original meaning of these texts (Ja-
cobs, 266; CL, 262, 262n11, 263n12). According to Jacobs, though Wallace lacked
the knowledge to translate Dostoevsky’s novels into English, “...he is, however, in a
unique position to translate in a more gurative sense” (Jacobs, 266; emphasis added).
This understanding of translation aligns with Thompson’s understanding of inter-
textuality and holograms as discussed above by supporting an idea of intertextuality
among Wallace and Dostoevsky that emphasizes the thematic/metaphorical whole
of the two works—a “gurative sense” that exists between and within the works of
the two authors. This is the approach to discussing the intertextuality between IJ
and NDH that this discussion takes. And, therefore, the use of Pevear and Volok-
honsky’s translation of NDH should not be problematic.
39. David Foster Wallace, Innite Jest (1996; repr., New York: Little, Brown, 2006), 137.
40. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from a Dead House, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa
Volokhonsky (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), 7.
41. Jacobs, 271.
42. Wallace, IJ, 200.
43. Dostoevsky, 6.
44. Dostoevsky, 4, 7.
45. Dostoevsky, 7.
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
128
DuPlessis—albeit unintentionally due to a robbery gone wrong. But, it
is Ennet House that keeps Gately out of jail due to Gately’s other cases
being put on hold so long as he participates in a recovery program.46
Therefore, due to his criminal record, Gately ends up living in Ennet
House, just as Goryanchikov’s crimes lead him to the Dead House.
Ennet House, though not a prison, has its connections to prison
life. Its founder, “the Guy Who Didn’t Even Use His First Name,”
is said to have “spent the bulk of his adult life under the supervision
of the Massachusetts Department of Corrections”47 and was “deter-
mined to pass on [emphasis added] to other chronic drug addicts and
alcoholics what had been so freely given to him in the E-tier shower
[i.e., sobriety].”48 Interestingly, both Goryanchikov and the Ennet
House founder have already “pass[ed] on”—the narrators speak of
them in past tense—and have both “pass[ed] on” something for their
readers: prison writings and recovery respectively. And in NDH, as
seen above, Goryanchikov inadvertently “pass[ed] on” his “observa-
tions” of the Dead House that were so compelling to the narrator
that he decided to then pass them on to readers. Also, the Ennet
House founder whose practice of having residents “eat rocks” as a
part of understanding “the gift of sobriety” is now “a grim bit of
mythopoeia”;49 similarly, the frame narrator in the opening of NDH
says of Goryanchikov that “[t]here was something enigmatic about
him.”50 These facts, as well as how the Ennet House founder’s rst
name is not even known, shroud the characters and what they have
passed on in mystery and establish intertextual connections between
the two Houses and their inhabitants.
However, it is not the Guy Who Didn’t Even Use His First Name
46. Wallace, IJ, 463-64.
47. Wallace, IJ, 137.
48. Wallace, IJ, 137.
49. Wallace, IJ, 138.
50. Dostoevsky, 5.
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that Goryanchikov’s story arc most resembles but rather that of
Donald Gately. As mentioned above, both are guilty of murder, and
it is Ennet House that keeps Gately out of jail and his criminal cases
from being reopened. It is Gately’s criminal record that leads him
to Ennet House just as Goryanchikov’s crime leads him to the Dead
House. And both Goryanchikov and Gately are inspired by the re-
al-life experiences of Dostoevsky and Wallace respectively. As previ-
ously mentioned, Goryanchikov is essentially a ctionalized form of
Dostoevsky himself. And Gately, according to Max, is based on Big
Craig, a resident and supervisor from Granada House, who came
“from a dierent world” than Wallace and had “a sort of Dosto-
evskian gloss to him, the redeemed criminal, and Dostoevsky was
on Wallace’s mind.”51 Such is the same with Goryanchikov, a “re-
deemed criminal” who “come[s] from a dierent world” than his
fellow prisoners.52
Both Gately and Goryanchikov experience community and hu-
manity dierently in their respective houses. Thompson, drawing
51. Max, 141
52. The biographical connections between Wallace and Dostoevsky also aid in the
intertextuality between IJ and NDH. As mentioned above, Frank shows the impor-
tance of recognizing the “double perspective” of NDH, and in his review of Frank,
Wallace addresses what he identies as traces of “the Intentional Fallacy” latent
within Frank’s works as they look to see “what Dostoevsky himself wanted the books
to mean”; however, Wallace does not criticize Frank for this, understanding Frank’s
approach as one possessing a “tone...of maximum restraint and objectivity: he’s not
about imposing any particular theory or method of decoding Dostoevsky” (CL, 258-
59, 259n7). Furthermore, Wallace notes that Frank’s approach to the analysis of
Dostoevsky’s works “are extremely close and detailed,” which calls for readers of
Frank to have to “go back and actually reread” the works he is discussing, but Wal-
lace does not necessarily see this negatively since “part of the appeal of a literary
bio is that it serves as a motive/occasion for just such rereading” (CL, 259n8). The
same can be said for the biographical and intertextual contexts of IJ and NDH in this
discussion: incorporating both in the discussion of the intertextuality of these works
encourages further reading and discussion of both authors and their life, philoso-
phies, and works. And these biographical and textual elements help establish the
intertextuality of Gately’s and Goryanchikov’s experiences in their respective houses.
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
130
from BK and IJ, says, “both novels are concerned with the ways in
which communities work together to decide what to worship,”53 and
that “Wallace felt that Dostoevsky’s work gave artistic expression to
many of the truths he had discovered in Alcoholics Anonymous.”54
Wallace’s marginalia in his copy of one of Frank’s biographies is
evidence of these ideas.55 It bears repeating that the narrator of IJ
reveals that “many exotic new facts” can be discovered if one takes
the time to dwell in a place like Ennet House, from which a detailed
list of facts are presented to the reader.56 Some notable facts (or
“truths”) that one discovers when part of the Boston AA community
are as follows: “That certain persons simply will not like you no mat-
ter what you do,”57 “That concentrating intently on anything is very
hard work,”58 and “[t]hat God—unless you’re Charlton Heston, or
unhinged, or both—speaks and acts entirely through the vehicle of
human beings, if there is a God”59—and it is noted that “[i]n none
of these Anonymous fellowships anywhere is it possible to avoid con-
fronting the God stu, eventually.”60 In NDH, Goryanchikov pro-
vides his own observations of the Dead House. He says, “Here [in
prison] you were in a special world, unlike anything else; it had its
own special laws, its own clothing, its own morals and customs, an
alive dead house, a life like nowhere else, and special people.”61 Sim-
ilarly, Jacobs says, quoting IJ, that many of its characters are “in
a ‘spiritual torpor’ (692), spiritually dead, and ignore the spiritual
53. Thompson, 101.
54. Thompson, 98.
55. Thompson, 101.
56. Wallace, IJ, 200-05.
57. Wallace, IJ, 201.
58. Wallace, IJ, 203.
59. Wallace, IJ, 205.
60. Wallace, IJ, 998n69.
61. Dostoevsky, 8.
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aspects of their lives, the potential for belief in something greater
than themselves.”62 Goryanchikov is in “an alive dead house” sur-
rounded by the metaphorically dead prisoners, and the same can be
said of Gately, who is surrounded by recovering addicts who have
hit their “Bottom” as it is referred to in the Gately story arc.63 Like
Ennet House, the Dead House is unique—”exotic.”
Goryanchikov also reveals that he was a “nobleman” before he
entered prison, yet the prisoners “took a dark and unfavorable view
of former noblemen” and admits that “[i]t took...almost two years
of living in the prison before...gain[ing] the sympathy of some of
the convicts. But the greater part of them nally came to like [him]
and recognized [him] as a ‘good’ man.”64 Regarding the biograph-
ical aspects of NDH, Pevear notes that Dostoevsky had a similar
experience to Goryanchikov when entering prison, as he, too, was
despised for being a nobleman.65 But, like Goryanchikov, Dosto-
evsky, as evidenced in one of his letters, eventually discovers that
his fellow prisoners were amazing people of “deep, strong, beautiful
natures.”66 But as in Ennet House, in the Dead House, some “will
not like you no matter what you do”; Goryanchikov is separate from
the prisoners but eventually (in ways) becomes a part of them—
much like how Gately goes from being a resident to a live-in staer
at the Ennet house.67 There is also the diculty that Goryanchikov
has with “concentrating” and being able to see things in the Dead
House for what they really are, for he says, “prison could not present
itself to me in its true light at rst glance, as it did later on...even if
I did look at everything with such greedy, heightened attention, I
62. Jacobs, 276.
63. See, for example: Wallace, IJ, 707; 723.
64. Dostoevsky, 28.
65. Pevear, viii.
66. Pevear, viii-ix. Here, Pevear quotes a letter by Dostoevsky.
67. Wallace, IJ, 461-69.
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132
still did not perceive many things that were right under my nose.”68
Goryanchikov identies a need to be able to see and to understand
the Dead House and all who inhabit it, yet as with Ennet House, this
“is very hard work.”
The diculty to see and to understand is a struggle for Gory-
anchikov that presents itself throughout NDH, and it is a struggle for
Gately as he attempts to work through the tenets and sober life of AA.
The lifestyle and sense of community in Ennet House and its focus
on AA’s steps to recovery and the Dead House as seen through the
lens of Goryanchikov’s observations are notably similar. In Boston
AA, speakers on “a Commitment...’share their experience, strength,
and hope’” at another group’s meeting,69 strengthening their sense
of community. In the Dead House, Goryanchikov and the other pris-
oners must practice a—as Goryanchikov puts it—”forced communal
cohabitation [emphasis original].”70 Goryanchikov’s time in prison is
one where he is “forced” to spend time with others—especially those
who are dierent from him. But, as seen in Boston AA, another goal
of meetings is to practice “empathy”: “Everybody in the audience is
aiming for total empathy with the speaker....Empathy, in Boston AA,
is called Identication.”71 The idea of “empathy”/”Identication”
presents itself in the Dead House in several ways. For although Go-
ryanchikov is separate from the prisoners due to class structures, his
time spent with the prisoners allows him in many ways to practice
“Identication.”
In one striking scene,72 in a communal bathhouse where Gory-
68. Dostoevsky, 74.
69. Wallace, IJ, 343.
70. Dostoevsky, 23.
71. Wallace, IJ, 345.
72. I have discussed this scene and its allusions to the Christian Bible before in a
dierent way and context in “From Fetters to Freedom: Distortion and Fantastic
Realism in Dostoevsky’s Notes from a Dead House” (presentation, the Southeast
Conference on Christianity and Literature, Lee University, Cleveland, TN, June
Issue 5 • 2025
133
anchikov and the other prisoners must bathe together, Goryanchi-
kov says that such a place is like “hell” where men are “packed”
tightly together—where “[s]team clouding your eyes, soot, lth, such
crowdedness that there was nowhere to set your foot down,”73 “[t]
he shaven heads and steamed red bodies of the prisoners looked
uglier than ever. [And o]ld scars from whipping or ogging usually
stand out more vividly on a steamed back.”74 Goryanchikov admits
that he “was frightened and wanted to turn back, but Petrov im-
mediately reassured [him].”75 Petrov is an acquaintance, of sorts,
for Goryanchikov during his stay in prison, like how AA crocodile
Ferocious Francis G. acts as Gately’s sponsor in AA. And like Francis
G., Petrov displays a sort of “tough love” that one nds in the AA
crocodiles as they guide Gately and others through the program as
sponsors.76 Petrov stays by G.’s side in the bathhouse and decides
to wash Goryanchikov’s entire body, including what he calls Gory-
anchikov’s “little feet [emphasis original].”77 Goryanchikov explains
that Petrov’s words “had absolutely no servile tone to it; Petrov sim-
ply could not call my feet ‘feet,’ probably because other, real peo-
ple had feet, while mine were still only little feet.”78 Goryanchikov
then says, “I was about to say I could wash them myself, but did not
contradict him and surrendered myself completely to his will [emphasis
added].”79 Petrov seems to act simply out of duty; Goryanchikov
“surrender[s]...his will” to Petrov. The image of washing feet calls
to mind Christ washing His disciples’ feet in the Christian Bible:
7, 2019).
73. Dostoevsky, 121.
74. Dostoevsky, 122.
75. Dostoevsky, 121.
76. See, for example: Wallace, IJ, 138; 355-58.
77. Dostoevsky, 122.
78. Dostoevsky, 122.
79. Dostoevsky, 122.
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134
“Then he [Christ] poured water into a basin and began to wash the
disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was wrapped
around him.”80 Christ later says, “If I then, your Lord and Teacher,
have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For
I have given you an example, that you also should do just as I have
done to you.”81 In this light, Petrov acts as a kind of Christ gure: he
washes Goryanchikov’s “little feet.” But the connection to this Bib-
lical allusion also suggests that Goryanchikov must eventually follow
Petrov’s example and wash the feet of others—must serve those who
are just as human as he is.
The bathhouse scene also calls to mind what the AA crocodiles
like Francis G. and others teach at AA: “You have to want to surrender
your will to people who know how to Starve The Spider. You have
to want to take the suggestions, want to abide by the traditions of
anonymity, humility, surrender [emphasis added] to the Group con-
science.”82 One must be dutiful in abiding by the tenets of AA in
order to achieve sobriety, and a similar sense of duty is seen in NDH.
For Gately and the others in Boston AA to “Identify,” all they
must do is “sit up front and listen hard [emphasis added], [as] all the
speakers’ stories of decline and fall and surrender are basically alike,
and like [their] own.”83 It sounds simple, but one must take the
time to empathize with others—to “listen hard.” Many very di-
cult stories are told in the communal space of Boston AA. This in-
cludes “the skinny hard-faced Advanced Basics girl[‘s]” story about
her foster parents’ daughter being sexually assaulted (“diddled”) by
her biological father84 and the story of the “round pink girl” who
birthed her stillborn child while high on a hotel-room oor, carrying
80. John 13:5 (English Standard Version).
81. John 13:14-15.
82. Wallace, IJ, 357.
83. Wallace, IJ, 345.
84. Wallace, IJ, 370-74.
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her around until Social Services stepped in.85 In the Dead House,
one can “ learn patience”86 in its communal spaces like the sleeping
quarters where “[s]ome thirty men shared the same bunk... [ellip-
sis original] alone [where there is] noise, din, guawing, swearing,
the clank of chains, fumes and soot, shaven heads, branded faces,
ragged clothes, everything abused, besmeared.”87 For instance, in
prison, Goryanchikov hears “a drunken robber” talking about kill-
ing a child88 as well as a story of a man named Shishkov who beats
and eventually murders his own wife.89 Yet, as Goryanchikov says,
“The ability to be surprised at nothing was considered the greatest
virtue [in the Dead House],”90 just like the people of Boston AA
had “heard it all.”91 Both Gately and Goryanchikov are in positions
to “Identify” by “listen[ing] hard” in their own ways. But to “listen
hard” is “hard”: even in Boston AA, which says one must “Identify,”
there appears to be a failure in its own ability to “listen hard” by
placing a fear of “irony”—forbidden in Boston AA92—over stories
like the Advanced Basics Girl’s, leading Gately and the others to
criticize her during her talk because it sounds too much like an “Ex-
cuse” [emphasis original] for her addiction.93 Alexis Young addresses
this problem and seems to attribute it to an inherent insincerity in
Boston AA’s system stemming from what she argues is the program’s
ties to capitalist ideals.94 Young, it seems, believes that capitalism’s
85. Wallace, IJ, 376-79.
86. Dostoevsky, 9.
87. Dostoevsky, 10.
88. Dostoevsky, 11-12.
89. Dostoevsky, 218-20.
90. Dostoevsky, 12.
91. Wallace, IJ, 352.
92. Wallace, IJ, 369-70.
93. Wallace, IJ, 370-74.
94. Alexis Young, “Addiction and Spectacle in Innite Jest: A Disability Studies
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136
emphasis on selling products is the impetus for causing addiction
and that due to Boston AA’s dependency on capitalism, it is insin-
cere (as opposed to sincere) and ironic (as opposed to anti-ironic) in
contrast to what its members—including Gately—would believe.95
Young’s argument is noteworthy, as it addresses the diculty Gately
and the others have with listening to a speaker whom they deem
ineective due to her tendency to blame her abusive father for her
addiction, which Young demonstrates when she references Gately
and the other’s evaluation of this speaker as a “B+” as well as the
mentioning of Boston AA’s ideals as “proto-Fascist.”96 This might be
true; Young makes a strong argument that should not be neglected.
However, despite their failure, the members of Boston AA, like the
narrator says Gately does prior to the Girl’s talk, must “tr[y] hard to
really hear the speakers....”97 To “listen hard” is “hard,” which, as
will be seen below, is more of a human issue than an economic one.
Another aspect of Boston AA is the presence of God and/or a
Higher Power. As the narrator of IJ says, “It’s suggested in the 3rd
of Boston AA’s 12 Steps that you turn your Diseased will over to
the direction and love of ‘God as you understand Him.’”98 At the
“Tough Shit But You Still Can’t Drink Group,” Gately speaks in
a “church basement” about how he cannot wrap his head around
the concept of God and is praised for his honesty.99 After his talk,
Robert F. (a.k.a. Bob Death) asks him, “if by any chance he’s heard
the one about the sh,”100 which foreshadows Wallace’s This Is Water
Perspective” (paper presented at the International David Foster Wallace Society
2024 Conference, University of Texas, Austin, TX, June 7, 2024).
95. Young.
96. Young; Wallace, IJ, 374.
97. Wallace, IJ, 369.
98. Wallace, IJ, 442-43.
99. Wallace, IJ, 442-44.
100. Wallace, IJ, 445.
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(TIW) commencement speech given at Kenyon College nine years
after IJ was published. The version told in IJ is as follows: “This wise
old whiskery sh swims up to three young sh and goes, ‘Morning,
boys, how’s the water?’ and swims away; and the three young sh
watch him swim away and look at each other and go, ‘What the
fuck is water?’ and swim away.”101 Wallace’s version given at Kenyon
is essentially the same.102 Later that night, the narrator recounts a
dream Gately has where he is submerged “under a sort of sea, at
terric depths the water all around him silent and dim and the same
temperature he is [emphasis added].”103 Chances, in her discussion on
the similarities between Wallace and Dostoevsky, sees TIW as an
example of “empathy,” particularly in its emphasis on people focus-
ing on the needs of others as well as the importance of worshiping
that which is beyond oneself as well as the things of “the material
world”—such as a Higher Power.104 In this regard, the story about
the sh comes to a head: by following the steps of AA—and abiding
by the “cliché[s]” that seem “vapi[d]” but contain “real truth”105—
one begins to see that what is around them is actually there: a sort
of self and other coming closer together and more apparent. The
water of Gately’s dream is visible and is “the same temperature” as
Gately, which can represent his moving toward “identify[ing]” and
connecting with others beyond himself yet “the same” as him.
Gately is connecting to that which he was once separated from
through the steps of AA—including the God/Higher Power steps
despite his struggles with them. Such is the same with Goryanchi-
kov: he must enter into the community of the Dead House—into
101. Wallace, IJ, 442-43.
102. David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Signicant Occa-
sion, about Living a Compassionate Life (New York: Little, Brown, 2009), 3-4.
103. Wallace, IJ, 449.
104. Chances, 137-38.
105. Wallace, IJ, 446.
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138
the water of the prison—to better understand the humanity of the
Russian people whom he once did not understand due to his social
standing as a nobleman. And as the allusion to the Christian Bi-
ble suggests above, Goryanchikov must learn to serve—to care for
those who are just as human as him. Wallace, in a direct reference
to Frank’s discussion of NDH, notes a similar process that occurred
when Dostoevsky was sent to the Siberian work camps: Dostoevsky’s
commitment to “the fashionable socialism of his twenties” was called
into question when he had to spend time with the prisoners because
“he came to understand that the peasants and urban poor of Russia
actually loathed the comfortable upper-class intellectuals who want-
ed to ‘liberate’ them, and that this loathing was in fact quite justi-
ed.”106 In the Frank volume that Wallace references here, Frank says
during his discussion of NDH and “the social-cultural situation” at
that time: “Indeed, it can be well argued that the entire book [NDH]
was written as a response to this situation, and that Dostoevsky’s por-
trayal of the instinctive Christianity of the peasant-convicts, as well
as of their hostile alienation from the educated class, was intended to
reveal the patent futility of revolutionary hopes inspired by a radical
ideology that the peasants would reject with abhorrence if they un-
derstood it at all.”107 Wallace makes his observation when discussing
how the mock execution spurred on a “conversion experience” in
Dostoevsky and led to his works being supported by a certain set
of “Christian convictions” that are dicult to pinpoint “to any one
church or tradition.”108 The religious elements of both Dostoevsky’s
biography and “the instinctive Christianity of the peasant-convicts”
as referenced by Wallace and Frank reveal how these same elements
are present in the text of NDH—in the community of the Dead
106. Wallace, CL, 269n24.
107. Frank, 230. Though it cannot be said for sure, it is possible that this is part of
the exact passage Wallace is referencing on p. 296n24 of CL.
108. Wallace, CL, 269.
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House and the water of the prison.
Like Gately, Goryanchikov must enter the community of the
Dead House in a spiritual manner to better “Identify” with the pris-
oners and understand the disconnect between his class and theirs.
One example of this is after Lent (an example of the prisoners prac-
ticing their “instinctive Christianity” and worshiping their Higher
Power) when Goryanchikov and the other prisoners go to a church
to receive Communion. This brings him back to his youth when he
was still of the noble class; as a child, he would see “the simple folk”
there, and says, “they were not praying as we [higher class] were,
they were praying humbly, zealously, bowing to the ground, and with
a full awareness of their own lowliness.”109 But as a prisoner, Gory-
anchikov says, “Now I, too, had to stand in that same place, and not
even in that place; we were shackled and disgraced.”110 Goryanchi-
kov, through a religious ceremony in a manner like “the simple folk”
is now “Active,” so to speak, in engaging with their Christian faith—
their Higher Power. The water of the prison is present here; as Wal-
lace says, “ an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or
spiritual-type thing to worship—be it J.C. [Jesus Christ] or Allah, be
it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths
or some infrangible set of ethical principles—is that pretty much
anything else you worship will eat you alive.”111 For the prisoners,
they have chosen Christianity (i.e., “J.C.”) to worship as their Higher
Power—they refuse to be “eat[en] alive,” and Goryanchikov now
begins to see the water.
After this, Goryanchikov sees that “[t]he Prisoners prayed very
assiduously, and...brought his beggarly kopeck to church for a candle
or the collection. ‘I’m also a human being,’ he may have thought or
felt as he gave it. ‘Before God we’re all equal.’... [ellipsis original] We
109. Dostoevsky, 225.
110. Frank, 230.
111. Wallace, TIW, 102.
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140
took communion at the early liturgy.”112 By engaging with this Higher
Power, like Gately and the Boston AA members, Goryanchikov plac-
es himself in the shoes of those he once thought so dierent and sep-
arate from himself. Goryanchikov is beginning to understand and
“Identify”: “Before God we’re all equal.” Both Gately and Gory-
anchikov, through the community and spirituality of Ennet House/
Boston AA and the Dead House respectively, begin to connect to
others as human as themselves.
Such “empathy” and “Identication,” through community and
humanity, moves them toward redemption. Toward the end of IJ,
Gately ends up in the hospital due to what may be fullment of his
“sick little fantasies of saving somebody from harm, some innocent
party, and getting killed in the process and getting eulogized at great
length in bold-faced Globe print”113 in defending Randy Lenz from a
group of Canadians who seek to retaliate against Lenz for brutal-
ly killing their dog (of which Gately is unaware).114 The altercation
carries on for several pages, involving several residents of the Ennet
House, including Gately, and ends with the Canadians badly beaten,
Gately shot, and Joelle van Dyne coming to Gately’s aid.115 Chances,
comparing IJ to BK, says that this scene represents Gately displaying
“active love” toward Lenz and “acting responsibly toward anoth-
er person.”116 While in the hospital, Gately moves toward redemp-
tion. As mentioned above, the A.D.A is furious over losing Gately’s
case because Gately and Kite robbed the A.D.A.’s home, stuck the
A.D.A.’s wife’s toothbrush up their anuses, and sent a picture of it
to the A.D.A. afterward.117 Gately, in the hospital, “imagine[s] the
112. Dostoevsky, 226.
113. Wallace, IJ, 611.
114. IJ, 585-89, 605-08.
115. IJ, 608-619.
116. Chances, 150.
117. Wallace, IJ, 55-56.
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A.D.A. with his hat o earnestly praying [he] Gately would live so
[the A.D.A.] could send him to M.D.C.-Walpole.”118 But later, the
narrator says, “He [Gately] saw the A.D.A. with his head bowed and
his hat against his chest.”119 Chances notes the A.D.A. coming to vis-
it Gately in the hospital and says that “[h]e has come in order to tell
Gately that he forgives him, yet he cannot get himself to do so.”120
But what is key is that later in the novel the A.D.A. says, “Haven’t
yet been willing [to ask]. Yet. I wish to emphasize yet [emphasis orig-
inal].”121 Although the A.D.A. has “yet” to ask Gately’s forgiveness,
there is still movement toward redemption for Gately—a possibility
for redemption. Chances says, “Wallace either undermines the pos-
sible happy outcome and/or exaggerates the horror of a specic
incident,”122 and the A.D.A.’s inability to “forgiv[e]” Gately is one of
her examples.123 But, as mentioned above, later in the novel, Gately
“s[ees]”—not “imagines”—the A.D.A., and the reader knows what’s
on the A.D.A.’s mind. Therefore, the movement toward redemption
is evident in Gately’s standing up for his community and the A.D.A’s
realizing that Gately is as human as him and moving Gately closer
to being released from the A.D.A.’s wrath.
Similarly, Goryanchikov moves toward redemption when he is
released from prison. At the end of NDH, Goryanchikov says, “these
people [the prisoners] are extraordinary people. They are perhaps
the most gifted, the strongest of all our people.”124 And when Gory-
anchikov is nally freed, his movement toward redemption begins:
“‘Well, go with God, go with God!’ the prisoners said[.] Yes, with
118. Wallace, IJ, 973.
119. Wallace, IJ, 974.
120. Chances, 150-51.
121. Wallace, IJ, 964.
122. Chances, 149.
123. Chances, 150-51.
124. Dostoevsky, 296.
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142
God! Freedom, a new life, resurrection from the dead[.] What a glo-
rious moment!”125 Here, Goryanchikov is a new man “resurrect[ed]”;
Goryanchikov, having communed with the prisoners, now sees them
as human beings. After his release, he is exiled to the frame narra-
tor’s small town where (like many others who are exiled) he serves as
a French instructor for the children126—children of those he once did
not understand. After Goryanchikov’s death, the frame narrator asks
Goryanchikov’s student Katya what she can recall of him, but “[s]
he looked at me [the narrator] silently, turned to the wall, and began
to cry,” from which the narrator concludes that “the man had been
able to make at least somebody love him.”127 Goryanchikov, similar to
Gately, has spent time among the prison community and eventually
serves the Siberian people as an instructor (a kind of metaphorical
washer of little feet); Goryanchikov discovers their humanity, which
moves him toward redemption.
By investigating the elements of community, humanity, and re-
demption that exist within both IJ and NDH, readers and scholars
alike get closer to understanding the ways in which Dostoevsky’s
works helped Wallace advance “a specic sense of existential re-
demption” and a “union among men.” The redemptive elements
present in IJ are enhanced by those found in NDH. And this, in turn,
opens the door for new possibilities within Wallace/Dostoevsky
scholarship in general and discussions on the redemptive qualities
of IJ in particular.128
125. Dostoevsky, 298.
126. Dostoevsky, 4.
127. Dostoevsky, 7.
128. For example, I hope to discuss Karl A. Plank’s study of the redemptive qualities
of IJ—particularly his recognition of the religious and theological aspects of IJ; his
identifying Gately as a “boneless Christ,” which he reveals hinges on parallels be-
tween Gately’s altercation with the Canadians and the tragic story Orin Incanden-
za, Sr. tells his son Jim; Plank’s acknowledgment of Gately as a “Christ-gure” of
“a Dostoevskian” bent; and the ways in which IJ can be redemptive for readers—in
Issue 5 • 2025
143
Bibliography
Chances, Ellen. “David Foster Wallace and Dostoevsky: On Paral-
lel Tracks?” Literature of the Americas, 11 (2021): 134-54. doi.
org/10.22455/2541-7894-2021-11-134-154.
Decker, Richard A. “From Fetters to Freedom: Distortion and Fan-
tastic Realism in Dostoevsky’s Notes from a Dead House.” Paper
presented at the Southeast Conference on Christianity and
Literature, Lee University, Cleveland, TN, June 7, 2019.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes from a Dead House. Translated by Richard Pe-
vear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.
Frank, Joseph. Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860-1865. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988. First published in 1986
by Princeton University Press.
Jacobs, Timothy. “The Brothers Incandenza: Translating Ideology
in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and David
Foster Wallace’s Innite Jest.” Texas Studies in Literature 49, no. 3
(Fall 2007): 265-92, www.jstor.org/stable/40755487.
Max, D. T. Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wal-
lace. New York: Penguin Books, 2013. First published in 2012
by Penguin Books.
Pevear, Richard. Foreward to Notes from a Dead House, by Fyodor Dos-
toevsky. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhon-
sky, vii-xvi. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.
Plank, Karl A. The Fact of the Cage: Reading and Redemption in David
Foster Wallace’s Innite Jest. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2021.
conjunction with NDH. See Karl A. Plank, The Fact of the Cage: Reading and Redemption
in David Foster Wallace’s Innite Jest: Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature,
vol. 50 (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2021), chap. 4 and chap. 5. Due to time and
space, however, I must do so in a future discussion. Plank’s and my own thinking
are rather parallel on the matters of Gately and the redemptive qualities of IJ, but
I believe we take slightly dierent approaches—in particular, my emphasis on NDH.
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
144
Thompson, Lucas. Global Wallace: David Foster Wallace and World Lit-
erature. Edited by Stephen J. Burn New York: Bloomsbury Ac-
ademic, 2018.
Wallace, David Foster. Innite Jest. New York: Little, Brown, 2006.
First published in 1996 by Little, Brown.
Wallace, David Foster. “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky.” In Consider the
Lobster and Other Essays, 255-74. New York: Little, Brown, 2006.
First published in 2005 by Little, Brown.
Wallace, David Foster. This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Sig-
nicant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life. New York: Lit-
tle, Brown, 2009.
Young, Alexis. “Addiction and Spectacle in Innite Jest: A Disabili-
ty Studies Perspective.” Paper presented at the International
David Foster Wallace Society 2024 Conference, University of
Texas, Austin, TX, June 7, 2024.
Issue 5 • 2025
145
Review of
David Foster
Wallace’s Balancing
Books: Fictions of Value
,
Jeff Severs
Saul Leslie
311 pp. New York: Columbia University Press,
2017
The cash regIster has a history in US literature. Years before he
is gunned down by Michael Corleone in a restaurant, the young
Mark McCluskey prides himself on his part in the New York pro-
tection racket, taking money from storekeeper tills while his father,
also a corrupt police sergeant, watches on. One of Jennifer Egan’s
Goon Squad—impoverished and anxious Scotty—pretends to work
at Hudson News, manning the register during the lunch break of
an inexperienced employee who believes he works there. Outside
ction, the cash register occupies a signicant place in American
letters. In 1987, having arrived at a conference dedicated to his own
work, Saul Bellow could tolerate only ten minutes of a paper be-
fore he departed, admitting that “if I have to listen to any more of
this, I think I’m going to die.” The particular paper that compelled
Bellow’s exit? “The Encaged Cash Register: Existentialism in Early
Saul Bellow.”1
To this stash, Jerey Severs adds David Foster Wallace. In his
1. Richard Bradford, Martin Amis: The Biography (New York: Pegasus Books, 2012),
249.
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
146
2017 study, David Foster Wallace’s Balancing Books: Fictions of Value, Sev-
ers oers an extensive analysis of the cash register, the currencies
contained within it, and the world of nance and consumerism this
tender serves. Throughout his career Wallace writes about cash reg-
isters and the citizens in the queue, asking questions about auton-
omy and freedom, “revising the scene of endless consumer choice
into one of what to “choose [emphasis original] to pay attention to.”2
Balancing Books places centrally the issue of what give and take means
in a nation where the economy has triumphed over community. Sev-
ers highlights the various currencies contained in Wallace’s literary
register: curious coins, erasing treasure, selsh gifts, suicide notes as
presents, to make the case that the USA at the turn of the millenni-
um is a site for an evaluation of “neoliberal nancial vagary.”3 The
argument about the signicance of historical, economic moments
is articulated well throughout. Severs convincingly traces the im-
portance of such epochs as Reaganomics in shaping the conditions
about which Wallace writes. In the gure of Johnny Gentle this is
clearest but, as Severs points out, years before the Crooner-in-Chief,
Wallace “satirizes aspects of Reagan’s rhetoric”4 in The Broom of the
System. Reagan’s lmography is also t for Wallace’s scrutiny, per-
haps including the 1942 lm King Row in which Reagan plays a man
whose legs are amputated in a railway accident, a storyline which
parallels that of “Les Assassins en Fauteuils Roulants” in Innite
Jest. Severs’s book helps to draw our attention to these surprisingly
dramatic combinations of nance and ction of a world which is
“neoliberal to the core.”5 He presents a wealth of notions about the
2. Jerey Severs, David Foster Wallace’s Balancing Books: Fictions of Value (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2017), 246.
3. Severs, 246.
4. Severs, 37.
5. Severs, 103.
Issue 5 • 2025
147
prominence of money, forged and “fake intimacies,”6 legal tender,
paid and unpaid labor, as well as impressive meditations on how
Wallace tried to make a literary living; on an author’s hustle, earning
that paper through paper. All of this contributes to an impressively
accessible, fresh approach to the often-opaque world of banking and
brokering, a world that aects us all.
Key to the success of Severs’s argument is the prominent posi-
tioning of a broad theme in Wallace’s oeuvre: give and take. This ap-
pears in polarizations of impoverished human relations and maxed-
out consumerist pop-culture. It also emerges vividly in Wallace’s
portrayals of physical bodies. The extremes of embodiment mirror
how diminished or bloated economies become: obsessive weight-loss
in the form of Chris Fogle’s “anorexiant”7 drug of choice Obetrol,
for example, is oset against Norman Bombardini’s exponentially
expanding obesity, whose body is “the site of an illusory primitive
accumulation.”8 Both of these extremes demonstrate how bodily
worship becomes sabotage, a body politic made inactive by decien-
cy and excess. Elsewhere, arbitrary commodities are treated as valu-
able gifts, talents disregarded or squandered in the pursuit of plea-
sure. In Innite Jest the monastic pursuit of trophies by the teenage
tennis players, whose bodies have been distorted beyond any healthy
limit as their natural athletic talents are exaggerated by commer-
cial success. The ipside of this coin is, then, the addictive pursuit
of pleasure and the painful demands of recovery at Ennet House,
inhabited by AA Members whose addictions have impaired their
skills and talents, as evidenced by Hal Incandenza’s arrival at one
of the meetings. The solution Wallace oers involves the language
of anti-capitalism as well as the triumph of community over the
individual. The twelfth step, Severs writes, means “‘Giving It Away,’
6. Severs, 217.
7. Severs, 211.
8. Severs, 22.
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
148
engaging in the network of speaking Commitments,”9 and we might
imagine this to mean reaching into the cash register and not trading
but gifting to others what is inside, in a spirit of communion.
Bodily and economic limits are dramatized in the site of the “ex-
tremes of work,”10 where Severs locates unemployment at one end
and overwork or burnout at the other. In The Pale King these polari-
ties translate into the labor market as the double columns in chapter
25, with Severs speculating that the balancing of books is conveyed
by the many characters arduously turning pages of IRS forms which
are “a kind of ledger for American culture, asserting its credits and
debits.”11 Here the theme of excess remains a moral concern even
while it is inserted into the tax system, where human relations are
reduced to trade-os and cheapened services. This means that in
the world built by Wallace a gift is never freely given; neither is there
such a thing as an altruism which does not negate itself. The starkest
instance of this philosophical notion is Leonard Stecyk, a patholog-
ically generous boy in The Pale King. One of the many delights of
Severs’s book is his close attention to the value of names (Innite Jest’s
“Steeply” whose name suggests a “sloped yield curve of returns”;12
or the ancient Greek oikos signied in The Broom of the System’s ction-
al place-name East Corinth, Ohio13). With Stecyk he uncovers yet an-
other gem, rst by dividing Leonard’s unusual surname into “Ste.-
cyk,” before converting it into the treasured nomenclature “sick
saint.”14 This term recalls philosopher Susan Wolf ’s essay “Moral
Saints,” in which Wolf argues that if a person pursues total goodness
in everything he does, maxing out the ethical credit card as he goes,
9. Severs, 111.
10. Severs, 199.
11. Severs, 1.
12. Severs, 104.
13. Severs, 43.
14. Severs, 232.
Issue 5 • 2025
149
then the result is someone we neither want to be nor be around. He
cannot tell or laugh at jokes because “a cynical or sarcastic wit...re-
quires that one take an attitude of resignation and pessimism toward
the aws and vices to be found in the world.”15 He cannot devote
himself to “reading Victorian novels, playing the oboe or improving
his backhand”16 because he must spend his time being totally Per-
fect, and these actions that usually develop a recognizable person-
ality constitute a decit in the pursuit of total Perfection. Leonard
Stecyk is the embodiment of what Wolf describes as “the standard
moral virtues to a nonstandard degree,”17 whose pursuit is Bombar-
dini-like in its attempt at illusory accumulation. The Moral Saint is,
in Wolf’s words, “patient, considerate, even-tempered, hospitable,
charitable in thought as well as in deed”;18 he is unbearably Perfect
and is, as Wallace writes of the sick saint Leonard, hated by every-
one: “It is a complex hatred, one that often causes the haters to feel
mean and guilty and to hate themselves for feeling this way about
such an accomplished and well-meaning boy, which then tends to
make them involuntarily hate the boy even more for arousing such
self-hatred.”19
Note the exponentially growing hatred towards the ideal and the
Perfect. The zero-sum of Leonard’s morality is clearly demonstrat-
ed by his inability to accept what is oered to him. Severs’s focus
on transactions makes the following scene poignant and tragicomic:
When Leonard’s father wants to surprise his son with a trip to an
ice-cream parlor, Leonard replies that “he’d like it even more if they
took the money his father would have spent on the ice cream and
15. Susan Wolf, “Moral Saints,” in Ethical Theory: An Anthology, ed. Russ Shafer-Lan-
dau (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 221.
16. Wolf, 221.
17. Wolf, 222.
18. Wolf, 222.
19. David Foster Wallace, The Pale King (Boston: Little, Brown, 2011), 4
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
150
instead donated it.”20 Here Severs’s cash register opens once again,
and the money inside swiftly changes hands. At rst, it is tender used
by a father for a surprise gift, but it is transformed into a charity do-
nation by the son, a gesture of sickly sainthood which metamorpho-
ses the bond between parent and child into something gangrenous,
futile, and unhuman.
Leonard’s is just one of countless portrayals in Wallace’s work of
intentional exaggeration and comic distortion. His famous cruise-
ship essay is another, which also ags up the signicance of money
for a jobbing writer like Wallace. The all-inclusive luxury trip around
the Caribbean was made economically viable, Wallace’s quips to live
event’s audience, in part because the expenses on his previous jour-
nalistic commission cost Harper’s magazine only $24.21 That pre-
vious commission was an essay called “Getting Away from Already
Being Pretty Much Away from It All,” in which Wallace attends a
State Fair. More so than the cruise-ship piece, “Getting Away” dis-
plays all of the moments of commerce, conning, pleasure-seeking,
grotesquery in the “world of men and money”22 that Severs alerts
us to throughout Balancing Books. The people running the carnival
around Wallace “slouch and slump in awnings’ shade. Every one
of them seems to chain-smoke.”23 Channeling a voice seemingly
borrowed from Flannery O’Connor, Wallace reaches the excessively
grotesque conclusion that “carnies must be the rural U.S.’s gypsies—
itinerant, insular, swarthy, unclean, not to be trusted.”24 The other-
20. Wallace, TPK, 32.
21. “Another Random Bit: The Perspective of David Foster Wallace,” streamed by
University of California Television on January 31, 2008, YouTube video, 28:02,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwS5pEfcQNk.
22. David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Signicant Occa-
sion, About Living a Compassionate Life, 115 (Boston: Little, Brown, 2009).
23. David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (Boston: Back
Bay, 1996), 96.
24. SFT, 109.
Issue 5 • 2025
151
ness of these bodies and the threat they pose to the Fair attendees’
nances connects to Ronald E. Ostman’s view about the dishonest
economy of freakshows, where the abnormal, unt, disabled body is
paraded in order to “empty the ‘natives’ pockets.”25 Still channeling
O’Connor, a section of Severs’s book subtitled “Coins of Grace”
describes the “uncanny wallets” in Wallace’s writing. These displace
“the presumed contents—money—with materials that have life-or-
death value.”26 At the State Fair another attendee warns Wallace to
“watch your wallet, boy”27 while he notes that the queues for tickets
“are the longest for the really serious Near-Death Experiences.”28
This demonstrates Severs’s point that wallets contain the grandest
treasures, and that human consciousness, “no embodiment of homo
economicus,”29 is irrational and unstable when it comes to placing val-
ue not just on what money can buy but on the billfold itself.
Despite or maybe because of this irrationality and instability,
storytelling tries to forge connection, rather than mimic the trade
of cash for a pleasurable experience or the development of athletic
prowess to beat an opponent. In other parts of the world Wallace
creates, “money has led to paralysis,”30 but in places like AA the
sharing of experiences of pain and suering is the activating force
that drives the story forward. This could be why for Wallace the
pursuit of bodily perfection is not a socially-validating ideal, but
rather is as unreal as it is undesirable—even the hetero-normative
body is regarded with suspicion, as Severs writes of Mark Nechtr’s
25. Ronald E. Ostman, “Photography and Persuasion: Farm Security Administra-
tion Photographs of Circus and Carnival Sideshows, 1935-1942,” In Freakery: Cul-
tural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (New York:
New York University Press, 1996), 124.
26. Severs, 107-8.
27. SFT, 110.
28. SFT, 133.
29. Severs, 108
30. Severs, 175
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
152
“monstrous radiance of ordinary health.”31 Like the encaged cash
register, here the social currency of perfection is imprisoning. Or, as
Wallace puts it as a maxim in This is Water: “worship your body and
beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly.”32
Of Wallace’s approach to writing, Severs quotes the revitalizing
action that applies CPR to what is human. This requires having a
cardo-value system, and Severs warns us that “to have value(s) [is] to
be uncool [emphasis original].”33 Balancing Books helps to emphasize
which parts of Wallace’s writing successfully apply CPR, and as such
it has a huge amount of value. But it feels unfair to conclude that it
is therefore an uncool book. As with so many prexes, un-, ab-, dis-,
they mislead the arming value of being uncool, abnormal, or dis-
abled. What can be stated simply is that Severs’s book helps to draw
attention to these and many other aspects of Wallace’s work without
diminished returns.
31. Severs, 15
32. TIW, 108.
33. Severs, 233
Issue 5 • 2025
153
Bibliography
“Another Random Bit: The Perspective of David Foster Wallace.”
Streamed by University of California Television on January
31, 2009. YouTube video, 28:02, https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=GwS5pEfcQNk.
Bradford, Richard. Martin Amis: The Biography. New York: Pegasus
Books, 2012.
Ostman, Ronald E. “Photography and Persuasion: Farm Security
Administration Photographs of Circus and Carnival Side-
shows, 1935-1942.” In Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraor-
dinary Body, edited by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, 121-138.
New York: New York University Press, 1996.
Severs, Jerey. David Foster Wallace’s Balancing Books: Fictions of Value.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.
Wallace, David Foster. The Pale King. Boston: Little, Brown, 2011.
Wallace, David Foster. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. Bos-
ton: Back Bay, 1996.
Wallace, David Foster. This is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Signif-
icant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life. New York: Little,
Brown, 2009
Wolf, Susan. “Moral Saints.” In Ethical Theory: An Anthology. Edited
by Russ Shafer-Landau, 221-234. Oxford: Blackwell Publish-
ing, 2007.
Issue 5 • 2025
155
Review of
Fictions of
Proximity
, Tim Personn
George Kowalik
298 pp. New York: Lexington Books, 2023
WIth Fictions oF Proximity, tIm Personn oers a valuable con-
tribution to the always growing, mutating, and essential body
of Wallace Studies scholarship. Personn recalibrates the cultural con-
sensus that David Foster Wallace and particularly Innite Jest (1996)
has inuenced—and continues to inuence—authors both contem-
poraneous to him and who have come after, in the US but also in-
ternationally. By also discussing Wallace’s own inuences, Personn
emphasizes a two-way relationship between Wallace and the wider
literary world. Fictions of Proximity frames this as a “Wallace nexus”: a
coterie consisting of Mark Costello, Bret Easton Ellis, David Mark-
son, Tom McCarthy, Zadie Smith, and Wallace that is “representa-
tive of a shift in contemporary Anglo-American literature away from
the philosophy of logical positivism that had reigned over American
intellectual life for the better part of the twentieth century.”1
Moving between works of contemporary literature by these au-
thors and the philosophy of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and many
others (who he accesses via Wallace’s old teacher Stanley Cavell),
Personn discusses various connective threads within his nexus. This
brings an array of terminological possibilities, and Personn balances
1. Tim Personn. Fictions of Proximity: Skepticism, Romanticism, and the Wallace Nexus
(New York: Lexington Books, 2023), 2.
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
156
postmodernism and post-postmodernism with ideas more closely re-
lated to the philosophical turn he has identied, such as “post-positiv-
istic”2 and “neo-romantic.”3 Central to Fictions of Proximity’s pursuit
are recurring interests in union, isolation, failure, and legacy—in both
Wallace’s works and those by others in the coterie. Personn’s hook is
an investigation into how silence, detachment, and inaction construct
what he calls a “metaphysical vocabulary of spatiality.”4 He writes that
his book “is about dramas of human beings trying to know each other
and the world.”5 The dictum is one that cannot be understated, as this
bottom line links the author to the reader to the critic.
At the outset, Personn emphasizes that “emptiness will serve as a
stepping stone into Wallace’s ambivalent fascination with the prom-
ise of freedom.”6 It is tting that, in a book analyzing the various
boundaries and distinctions that come with proximity’s duality (to
and from), emptiness leads to such a considered, substantial, full in-
terdisciplinary study. Personn’s book uctuates between published
texts and archival Wallace material from the University of Texas,
between autobiographical detail and the ctional narrative of Jest
(as well as other works). The scope of Fictions of Proximity is con-
trolled by its starting point: the “mysterious manila folder with the
title “Emptiness/Closeness Essay”7 found amongst Wallace’s papers
at the Harry Ransom Center. This folder comes to symbolize Wal-
lace’s career fascination in both precision and depth, replicated by
Personn in a study that is simultaneously meticulous and generative.
The angle of Personn’s Jest chapter—perhaps inevitably, the
2. Personn, 3.
3. Personn, 4.
4. Personn, 2.
5. Personn, 4.
6. Personn, 1.
7. Personn, 1.
Issue 5 • 2025
157
book’s main event—is “stuckness.”8 Built from various ideas in-
cluding “Emersonian resistance to conformity,”9 this concept is, as
Personn puts it, “expansive rather than compressed.”10 The opening
gambit of this chapter’s argument is, again, both curious and inno-
vative: Stephen King’s Carrie (1974), which as Personn notes Wal-
lace “was reading” when “he began drafting” Jest.11 In this chapter,
Personn projects a pathway out of stuckness for Wallace’s charac-
ters, readers, and Wallace himself; but such a destination must rst
contend with aporias of irony and self-interest. In this chapter and
throughout, Fictions of Proximity restates and justies its intervention,
which includes how “theoretical entanglements within the philo-
sophical tradition suggest the need to renovate existing accounts of
Wallace’s relationship with irony.”12
This chapter foregrounds Jest where other chapters keep it in the
background, either giving a voice to texts, authors, or thinkers that
have not been placed alongside Wallace before or giving existing
connections to Wallace new consideration. But the coverage of Fic-
tions of Proximity’s chapter on Jest is as wide and layered as Personn’s
analysis elsewhere in the book. This chapter includes discussions of
the Eric Clipperton and Ken Erdedy episodes of the novel, Gravity’s
Rainbow (1973), Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” (1919), Baudelaire,
Emerson, Socrates, Toni Morrison, and Zadie Smith (who, like Per-
sonn’s other nexus authors, is not restricted to their focus chapter).
But rather than only mention points of comparison, Person often
also reads these connections against the grain. Thomas Pynchon’s
novel, for instance, is viewed through the lens of immobility; but
Personn suggests that the subject is (ironically) “release for Pynchon,
8. Personn, 190.
9. Personn, 189.
10. Personn, 196.
11. Personn, 190.
12. Personn, 191.
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
158
anxiety for Wallace.”13 Fictions of Proximity constantly prefers and/
with to either/or. In this chapter, this principle takes many forms,
including intersections of style and sincerity and scepticism and
positivism, instances of agreeing and disagreeing with Jonathan
Franzen’s assessment of Wallace’s project after his death, and un-
packing how Wallace is both a “harbinger of the return to earnest-
ness” and a fervent “use[r] of irony.”14
One of the most interesting chapters of Personn’s book is its
fourth, on Ellis’s American Psycho (1991). Personn develops the inu-
enced-inuencer dialectic I mentioned earlier in this review into a
discussion of the conicting tones that can come with these relation-
ships. But where other scholars have read Ellis’s work alongside Jest
with the qualication that Wallace did not rate American Psycho (1991),
Personn only mentions this as a caveat. As he writes, the connection
between Wallace and Ellis can be more productively viewed as “an
anxiety of resemblance.”15 As Personn would have it, there are equal
grounds to considering Ellis’s work next to Wallace’s—from the an-
gle of appreciation rather than critique—as there are to doing this
with Markson’s, for instance, which Wallace publicly expressed his
admiration of in a 1990 essay for The Review of Contemporary Fiction.
Like Zadie Smith has done, Personn is comfortable disagreeing with
Wallace—here about Ellis’s incendiary third novel.
While acknowledging Psycho’s close proximity to doing the exact
thing it is critiquing, Personn’s Ellis chapter nds use in this risk,
discussing a “complex aective, and deeply uncertain, experience
of reading” the novel.16 By way of Brecht, Personn draws com-
parisons between German modernity and the postmodern world of
Ellis and Wallace. His chapter also addresses rather than ignores
13. Personn, 198.
14. Personn, 216.
15. Personn, 151.
16. Personn, 174.
Issue 5 • 2025
159
the “charge of misogyny” that has been “levelled at both [Ellis and
Wallace].”17 The role of Donald Trump in Psycho is connected to
this, Personn suggests, examining the implications of Trump’s name
being mentioned thirty times in Ellis’s novel. Yet, the narrative eth-
ics of occupation and abandonment, as well as fantasies of purity,
oer an antidote to “the voyeuristic inability to reveal oneself ”18 in
Psycho and Jest. As he does throughout his book, Personn reads this
potential optimistically.
Fictions of Proximity leaves its reader understanding the impor-
tance of a negotiation between distance and proximity. Adopting a
Russian doll approach to reading Wallace—that is, reading others’
readings of him; while also reading the things he himself formatively
read, in part thanks to Cavell—Personn opens more doors for Wal-
lace Studies. Returning to the discussion of stuckness in Jest, Per-
sonn stresses that “nothing in the book resolves these contradictions,
leaving it up to the reader to discern what is valuable and what is
expendable.”19 Like Wallace, Personn proceeds to leave doors open
rather than close them after they have been opened. He concedes
that, “sure, Innite Jest is in the company of dicult novels that are
more being talked about than read”;20 but the talking is the destina-
tion of the reading process anyway. Talking, discourse, and produc-
tive disagreement keep our collective understanding of David Foster
Wallace and others’ work moving forwards. We can do much more
with this than we can with looking back.
17. Personn, 152.
18. Personn, 150.
19. Personn, 207.
20. Personn, 230.
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
160
Bibliography
Personn, Tim. Fictions of Proximity. New York: Lexington Books,
2023.
Issue 5 • 2025
161
Review of
Wallace’s
Dialects
, Mary Shapiro
Pia Masiero
221 pp. New York: Bloomsbury, 2020
“And yet at the same time English is all we have to try to un-
derstand [what’s really going on at the most basic level] and
try to form anything larger or more meaningful and true
with anybody else, which is yet another paradox.”1
I
begIn thIs revIeW of mary Shapiro’s Wallace and Dialects (vol. 3 of
the David Foster Wallace Studies Series by Bloomsbury, edited by
Stephen J. Burn) with a quote from one of Wallace’s most antholo-
gized pieces because it condenses one of the crucial issues to which
Wallace keeps returning. Shapiro’s book is a most welcome addition
that manages to ll an important gap in Wallace studies.
David Foster Wallace’s outstanding talent in handling language,
his obsessive focus on and pleasure in its multiple variables certainly
stems from his acute awareness that “English is all we have” as the
protagonist of “Good Old Neon,” Neal, puts it. Language—English
for Wallace—is the bridge we depend upon to understand who we
are and to form meaningful and true relationships with others. The
twice repeated verb “to try” and the generic “anything” conveys
unequivocally Neal’s recognition that we can only approximate un-
derstanding and authenticity because language is inherently limited
1. David Foster Wallace, Oblivion (New York: Back Bay Books, 2004), 151.
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
162
both on the coding end (in conveying thought) and on the decod-
ing end (in interpreting intended, and non-intended, meanings). For
someone who envisioned writing ction as a conversation with read-
ers, and not, simply, as an act of communication, the question of
how to use language to convey meaning becomes even more central.
Wallace was interested in the philosophy of language, in the
debates among linguists and in words per se (in Shapiro’s book
we are told about all these aspects too), and he was pragmatically
interested in “how language functions in US society to reect and
reinforce social divisions,”2 in other words, he was interested in
representing people and their dialects. Dialects—systematic lin-
guistic variations which are recognized as marking the belonging
to one group—signal, synecdoche-like, our way of being in the
world and contribute to the denition of who we are in relation
to others. Focusing on Wallace’s peculiar way of handling these
representations per se has never been done before with such a sys-
tematic approach.
The structure of the book is presented immediately: a taxono-
my of dialects in Wallace’s work is rendered with a tree diagram
whose nodes from upper-left to bottom-right go from more general
(human) to more specic (jock/nerd). The intermediary nodes in-
clude the pair foreign/American, the subdivision of American into
African American/European-Jewish American/White, the further
subdivision of White into Regional (subdivided into Southern/Mid-
western/Boston) and Upper Class (subdivided into Jock/Nerd). The
diagram conveys “a splintering, recursive fractal image” which, in its
unfolding, conveys Wallace’s gappy sense of America (for example
“there are no native American Indians in Wallace’s works”3). Shap-
iro both gives a precise contour of Wallace’s (relative) knowl-
edge of the actual dialect features, touching, for example, on his
2. Mary Shapiro, Wallace’s Dialects (New York: Bloomsbury, 2020), 15.
3. Shapiro, 132.
Issue 5 • 2025
163
“misunderstanding of AAE [African American English] grammat-
ical rules”4 (which comes together with a list of features that Wal-
lace could have used but hasn’t), and tries to connect to Wallace’s
broader intentional system. On the much-debated question of his
representation of AAE she writes: “Wallace may have been asserting
that privilege and power distinctions continue to exist, but it would
appear that he was (perhaps clumsily) trying to show the unfairness
of the systems that continue to segregate and disadvantage people
like Clenette.”5
Each sub node of the diagram is the focus of one chapter which
opens with a list of the characters belonging to that linguistic va-
riety (with one exception due, in my opinion, to a mere oversight)
rst tackled touching upon broader issues such as ethnicity (associ-
ated rst with segregation and then with assimilation), regionality,
social classes and upward mobility, then focusing on the characters
in the initial list, one by one. Shapiro asks us to (re-)consider through
a linguistic lens both well-known and more peripheral characters.
She isolates in great detail linguistic matters that might appear a bit
overwhelming to the untrained reader if it weren’t for her attention
to how each linguistic detail bears on Wallace’s storyworlds, mostly
notably on his perspectival choices.
Shapiro moves from ctional to nonctional page to archival pa-
pers and secondary materials and back with clarity and precision,
unearthing for us a web of details concerning Wallace’s language-re-
lated reections. Quite a number of her close-readings, which Ste-
phen Burn, the editor of the Series, characterizes as “intensive,”
unearth veritable hidden gems6 which pave the way for the next
4. Shapiro, 56.
5. Shapiro, 78.
6. Alongside Shapiro’s well-known essay “The Poetic Language of David Foster
Wallace,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 60, no. 1 (2019), see Mary Shap-
iro, “Hidden Gems. Unexpectedly Poetic Lines Easily Overlooked (?) in Innite
Jest’s Voluminous Flow,” English Literature 8 (2021). https://edizionicafoscari.it/it/
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
164
(necessary) re-reading of a book by Wallace.
The chapters on the dierent varieties of English Wallace repre-
sented are framed by an initial chapter which prepares the ground
for what follows, providing the coordinates of Shapiro’s project: “a
sociolinguistic reading of Wallace’s work” which demonstrates how
his dialect representations “are more symbolic and playful than mi-
metic” and have to be interpreted as “statements about language—
and the social realities it reects.”7
At the end of the linguistic journey Shapiro takes us on, we come
up with “a semiotic web of voices” which maps not so much Ameri-
ca, but Wallace’s perception of America, or to be more precise, Wal-
lace’s sense of “the features that his readers may come to associate
with dialects.”8 In this folk dialectology of sorts, we perceive the
reection and subversion of entrenched beliefs about linguistic va-
rieties and about the people that use them. In this sense—I would
argue—Shapiro’s book demonstrates that Wallace’s representation
of dialect is mimetic, indeed. James Phelan, the founding father of
rhetorical narratology, denes the mimetic component of a narra-
tive as referring “to the results (evident in both textual phenomena
and readerly response) of authorial shaping of readerly interests in
the narrative’s imitations of—or references to—the actual world.”9
Shapiro demonstrates convincingly that Wallace incorporates the
very biases that belong to his American readers starting from his
“default whiteness” (and his “default maleness”10). Dave Wallace,
the “master conversationalist”11 who conates both upper class’s
edizioni4/riviste/english-literature/2021/1/hidden-gems/#!
7. Shapiro, 5.
8. Shapiro, 24.
9. Matthew Clark and James Phelan, Debating Rhetorical Narratology (Columbus, The
Ohio State University Press, 2020), 146.
10. Shapiro, 109.
11. Shapiro, 187.
Issue 5 • 2025
165
declinations (jock and nerd) in the bottom-right part of the initial
taxonomy and the stylistic quirks of his idiolect, is the somewhat
necessary point of arrival of Shapiro’s trajectory—the “me” against
which the “not-me” can be measured. In the nal chapter titled
“Language and Humanity” Shapiro returns to our inescapable de-
pendence on English. This common-ground, illuminated with such
competence and detail and gusto, becomes in many important ways,
more readable.
It is all too apt that, as the Acknowledgments page testies, this book
was born in the classroom, when Shapiro’s students of her Fall 2017
“Linguistics and Literary Criticism” class “made [her] realize that not
nearly enough linguistic criticism had been done on Wallace.”12
Her stepping up for it has made the eld of Wallace scholarship
much richer, indeed. English may suce after all.
12. Shapiro, 201.
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
166
Bibliography
Clark, Matthew and James Phelan. Debating Rhetorical Narratology. Co-
lumbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2020.
Shapiro, Mary. Wallace’s Dialects. New York: Bloomsbury, 2020.
Wallace, David Foster. Oblivion: Stories. New York: Back Bay Books,
2004.
Issue 5 • 2025
167
Review of
Suicide
Century: Literature and
Suicide from James Joyce
to David Foster Wallace
,
Andrew Bennett
Ed Jackson
276 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2017
In hIs IntroductIon to suicide Century: Literature and Suicide from
James Joyce to David Foster Wallace, Andrew Bennett observes that
there is “a pervasive societal anxiety with regard to representations
of suicide that do not explicitly denounce or interdict the act.”1
There is a worry, in other words, that representing suicide is also a
way of condoning or encouraging it. Perhaps the most famous ex-
ample of this is the “Werther eect,” whereby Goethe’s The Sorrows
of Young Werther (1774) allegedly inspired some readers to take their
own lives. Yet as Bennet shows throughout Suicide Century, modern
and contemporary literature is rife with self-killing. Writers as di-
verse as Ford Madox Ford, Stevie Smith, and Jerey Eugenides have
produced texts that are not only preoccupied with suicide but, often-
times, do not warn against it. Literature therefore “stands outside
of the dominant modern discourses of suicide prevention even as it
1. Andrew Bennett, Suicide Century: Literature and Suicide from James Joyce to David Foster
Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 18.
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
168
has the potential to scandalize them.”2 As such, literary writers have
a unique perspective on suicide. They can investigate “what the act
means for the subject and for his or her survivors—what it is like,
what is involved in the contemplating or deciding to kill yourself:
how [emphasis original] it is.”3 This concern with examining, as it
were, the lived experience of suicide is what connects the various
writers and texts Bennett analyses in Suicide Century.
The century of Bennett’s title is the twentieth, though a penul-
timate chapter on Wallace’s The Pale King (2011), and an epilogue
on contemporary suicide memoirs, also pushes his focus into the
twenty-rst. As he explains, at the beginning of the twentieth-cen-
tury “two major paradigms for suicidal behaviour are emerging...
symbolized by [Émile] Durkheim’s account of suicide as a function
of societal forces, on the one hand, and Sigmund Freud’s account
of the aetiology of suicide as primarily psychical on the other.”4 An
interplay between these social and psychological explanations, Ben-
nett argues, comes to dene literary suicide over the ensuing de-
cades. Hence, in contrast to previous eras, when a person who killed
themselves was considered to be “other—criminal, evil, or insane,”5
in twentieth-century literature “he or she becomes the object of a
particularly urgent need for explanation.”6 Nonetheless, as Bennett
also argues, “what twentieth-century literature suggests, again and
again,”7 is that the meaning of suicide is “always just out of reach,
tantalisingly elusive, intangible.”8 The texts Bennett explores in Sui-
cide Century may prompt our desire to explain a suicide—to know
2. Bennett, 20.
3. Bennett, 4.
4. Bennett, 50.
5. Bennett, 54.
6. Bennett, 54.
7. Bennett, 20.
8. Bennett, 20.
Issue 5 • 2025
169
why they did it, how they did it, what it felt like, and so on—but they
also frustrate this desire by confronting us with the “fundamental
epistemic obscurity”9 of the act.
Bennett formulates these arguments in Chapter 2, “‘The ani-
mal that can commit suicide’: History, Philosophy, Literature.” This
chapter showcases the breadth of Bennett’s research, and readers
with a general scholarly interest in suicide will nd it fruitful. The
rest of the book consists of ve chronological case studies and the
epilogue, each of which tackles a specic writer, text, or period. At
their best, these chapters contain excellent close readings. For exam-
ple, in Chapter 3, “A World without Meaning: Ford Maddox Ford
and Modernist Suicide”, Bennett conducts a granular analysis of
Ford’s The Good Solider (1915). He shows how the novel’s “narrato-
logical equivocations, hiatuses, [and] aporias are specically attuned
to, even generated by, a narrative that is impelled by not one but
two acts of suicide”10—that of the narrator’s wife, Florence, and of
his friend, Edward Ashburnham. Bennett shows similar insight in
his chapter on Stevie Smith and Sylvia Plath, where he carefully
unpicks the dierent ways these poets write about suicide. While for
Plath “suicide is articulated as a weapon—not only against others...
but also, as Plath herself understood, against herself,”11 Smith em-
phasizes the “therapeutic value of reading and writing poems about
suicide.”12 Specically, in Smith’s poetry the option—but not the in-
tention—of killing oneself is a source of comfort when life does not
seem worth living. Along with a chapter on suicide in James Joyce’s
work, and another on the limits of empathy in contemporary novels,
these case studies fully support Bennett’s contention that suicide is a
major area of interest in twentieth-century literature.
9. Bennett, 2.
10. Bennett, 61.
11. Bennett, 112.
12. Bennett, 146.
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
170
Unfortunately for readers of this journal, the one case study that
falls short in this regard is Chapter 7, “Inside David Foster Wallace’s
Head: Attention, Loneliness, Boredom and Suicide.” Bennett uses
much of this chapter to argue that The Pale King is a “literary-phil-
osophical playing out”13 of Arthur Schopenhauer’s conception of
boredom. Suicide recedes into the background of his analysis, which
indeed lacks the perspicacity of his earlier chapters. In essence, Ben-
nett proposes that Wallace draws on Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s the-
ories of controlling one’s attention as a way of transcending bore-
dom, which, like Schopenhauer, Wallace conceives as being “one of
the fundamental problems in and of human experience.”14 Though
convincing, this reading oers little more than a philosophical re-
statement of one of the novel’s most obvious messages, namely that
paying “close attention to the most tedious thing you can nd”15 is
the pathway to experiencing “constant bliss in every atom.”16 This
is perhaps indicative of the fact that Chapter 7 is a reprint of Ben-
nett’s contribution to Robert K. Bolger and Scott Korb’s 2014 essay
collection Gesturing Toward Reality: David Foster Wallace and Philosophy.
It therefore belongs to an earlier, more explicatory period of schol-
arship on The Pale King, when critics were still working out what Wal-
lace was trying to achieve in his nal novel. Even so, in the context
of Suicide Century, this chapter is something of a missed opportunity.
For when it comes to Wallace’s writing and suicide, there is plenty
of material to work with. Suicide appears across his oeuvre, from
an “incident involving electric appliances in the bathtub”17 in “The
Planet Trillaphon as it Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing” (1984),
13. Bennett, 170.
14. Bennett, 171.
15. David Foster Wallace, The Pale King (London: Penguin, 2012), 548.
16. Wallace, 548.
17. David Foster Wallace, “The Planet Trillaphon as it Stands in Relation to the
Bad Thing,” in The David Foster Wallace Reader (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2014), 5.
Issue 5 • 2025
171
to Neal’s tortured path to taking his own life in “Good Old Neon”
(2004). Bennett’s chapter does not do justice to the richness of this
topic, but Suicide Century will still be a touchstone for any account of
how Wallace engages with self-killing. Chapter 2 in particular is a
trove of philosophical insights into suicide, while Bennett’s analyses
of other writers oer expert models of how to write on the subject
well. As a declarative act of what Bennett dubs “literary suicidolo-
g y, ”18 Suicide Century is the rst step from which studies of suicide in
Wallace’s work can proceed.
18. Bennett, 1.
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
172
Bibliography
Bennett, Andrew. Suicide Century: Literature and Suicide from James Joyce
to David Foster Wallace. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2017.
Wallace, David Foster. The Pale King. London: Penguin, 2012.
Wallace, David Foster. “The Planet Trillaphon as it Stands in Rela-
tion to the Bad Thing.” In The David Foster Wallace Reader, 5-19.
London: Hamish Hamilton, 2014.
Issue 5 • 2025
173
List of
Contributors
Richard A. Decker is a poet and aspiring scholar. His poetry
has been published in Ekstasis Magazine and Oak Grove Review. He
has also published a few writings—including a two-part essay on
The Catcher in the Rye—for MoralApologetics.com. Other writings of
his have been featured in Larry Ferlazzo’s Classroom Q&A blog host-
ed by Education Week and the Shenandoah Valley National Writing
Project’s 2021-2022 More than Words. His research interests include
Dostoevsky, David Foster Wallace, and Bible/Christianity and liter-
ature. He is currently working on a PhD in Literature and Criticism
at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
Joseph Hunter is a ction writer, poet, and postgraduate re-
searcher. He studied English at Trinity Hall, University of Cam-
bridge, and completed his MA at the University of Manchester in
2020. He went on to study for a PhD in English and Creative Writ-
ing at Manchester, where he now teaches. His critical research is
primarily concerned with narrative theory.
Edward Jackson is an Associate Lecturer at The Open Univer-
sity, U.K. He is the author of David Foster Wallace’s Toxic Sexuality: Hid-
eousness, Neoliberalism, Spermatics (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), and a
co-editor of Supposedly Fun Things: A David Foster Wallace Special Issue
for Orbit: A Journal of American Literature (2017).
The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies
174
Lee Konstantinou is Associate Professor of English at the Uni-
versity of Maryland, College Park. He wrote the novel Pop Apocalypse
(2009), the literary history Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction
(2016), and the single-novel study The Last Samurai Reread (2022). Не
со-edited The Legacy of David Foster Wallace (2012) and Artful Break-
downs: The Comics of Art Spiegelman (2023). He is at work on a new
monograph called “Creator-Owned Comics.”
George Kowalik is a writer and researcher based in London,
UK. He has a PhD in contemporary transatlantic literature and is
the author of Hybrid Novels: Post-postmodernism, Sincerity, and Race at the
Turn of the 21st Century (Routledge, forthcoming). Other research has
appeared in academic journals including ASAP/J, Humanities, and
Orbit.
Saul Leslie specializes in portrayals of disability and employ-
ment in literature. His remarks on disability have featured in Times
Literary Supplement and The Poetry Review. In 2022 his academic re-
search helped to pass the British Sign Language Bill into law. He
teaches creative writing at the University of Liverpool and assists
disabled writers with their novels for Penguin-Random House. His
rst novel is forthcoming with Repeater Books (2025).
Pia Masiero is Professor of North American Literature at Ca’
Foscari University of Venice. Her research interests include modern-
ist and contemporary literature, literary theory at the intersection of
cognitive sciences, and second generation post-classical narratology.
She has published, among others, on Philip Roth, William Faulk-
ner, David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Alice Munro, Richard
Powers, Jorge Luis Borges, and Roberto Bolaño. She is the author of
Philip Roth and the Zuckerman Books: The Making of a Storyworld (2011)
and Names across the Color Line: William Faulkner’s Short Fiction 1931-1932
Issue 5 • 2025
175
(2012). More recently she contributed to the volume David Foster Wal-
lace in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2022) with an essay ti-
tled “David Foster Wallace and Narratology” and to The Bloomsbury
Handbook to Philip Roth with an essay titled “Philip Roth’s Novels: A
Matter of Ventriloquism” (2023). Together with Allard den Dulk
and Adriano Ardovino she edited Reading David Foster Wallace between
Philosophy and Literature (Manchester University Press, 2023).
Mike Miley is the author of David Lynch’s American Dreamscape:
Music, Literature, Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2025) and Truth and Consequences:
Game Shows in Fiction and Film (UP Mississippi, 2019) and the co-edi-
tor of Conversations with Steve Erickson (with Matt Luter, UP Mississip-
pi, 2021). His work has appeared in the Arizona Quarterly, Critique, Lit-
erature/Film Quarterly, Orbit, and elsewhere. He lives in New Orleans.
Paolo Pitari completed a joint PhD in English at the University
of Venice and at LMU Munich. He is the author of The Problem
of Free Will in David Foster Wallace (Routledge, 2024) and of numer-
ous academic articles in literature and philosophy. He was awarded
research grants by the University of Venice, the JFK Institute of
Freie Universität Berlin, and the DAAD. He is currently doing a
PhD in Philosophy at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam with a thesis on
the problem of induction.
T J D F W S
176
176
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ISSUE 5
2025
THE JOURNAL OF DAVID FOSTER WALLACE STUDIES
IS S U E 5
www.dfwsociety.org
Essays by
Lee Konstantinou
Mike Miley
Paolo Pitari
Joseph Hunter
Richard Decker
Book Reviews by
Saul Leslie
George Kowalik
Pia Masiero
Ed Jackson
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