(American Literature Readings in The 21st Century) Marshall Boswell, Stephen J. Burn (Eds.) - A Companion To David Foster Wallace Studies (2013, Palgrave Macmillan US)

A MERICAN LITERATURE R EADINGS IN THE 21ST CENTURY
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A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies
Edited by Marshall Boswell and Stephen J. Burn
A Companion to David Foster
Wallace Studies
Edited by
Marshall Boswell
and
Stephen J. Burn
A COMPANION TO DAVID FOSTER WALLACE STUDIES
Copyright © Marshall Boswell and Stephen J. Burn, 2013.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-0-230-33811-1
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A companion to David Foster Wallace studies / edited by Marshall
Boswell and Stephen J. Burn.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Wallace, David Foster—Criticism and interpretation. I. Boswell,

Marshall, 1965– editor of compilation. II. Burn, Stephen J., editor of
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List of Abbreviations vii

Preface ix
Stephen J. Burn and Marshall Boswell
1 Almost a Novel: The Broom of the System 1

Patrick O’Donnell
2 A Fiction of Response: Girl with Curious Hair
in Context 23
Kasia Boddy
3 David Foster Wallace and the Mathematics of Infinity 43
Roberto Natalini
4 “Webs of Nerves Pulsing and Firing”: Infinite Jest and
the Science of Mind 59
Stephen J. Burn
5 “Location’s Location”: Placing David Foster Wallace 87
Paul Quinn
6 Mediated Immediacy in Brief Interviews with
Hideous Men 107
Mary K. Holland
7 “ . . . ”: Language, Gender, and Modes of Power in
the Work of David Foster Wallace 131
Clare Hayes-Brady
8 “The Constant Monologue Inside Your Head”:
Oblivion and the Nightmare of Consciousness 151
Marshall Boswell
9 “The Chains of Not Choosing”: Free Will and Faith
in William James and David Foster Wallace 171
David H. Evans
vi CONTENTS
10 The Pale King, Or, The White Visitation 191

Brian McHale
11 The Novel after David Foster Wallace 211
Andrew Hoberek
Works Cited 229

Notes on Contributors 241
Index 245
A bbr ev i at ions
Quotations from Wallace’s books are from the following editions,

and are cited parenthetically with the abbreviations listed below:
BOS The Broom of the System. New York: Penguin, 1987.

GCH Girl with Curious Hair. New York: Norton, 1989.
IJ Inﬁnite Jest. 1996. Boston: Little, 1997.
SFT A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. Boston: Little,
1997.
BI Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. 1999. New York: Back-
Little, 2000.
EM Everything and More: A Compact History of ∞. New York:
Norton, 2003.
CL Consider the Lobster. New York: Little, 2005.
OB Oblivion. New York: Little, 2004.
TIW This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Signiﬁcant
Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life. New York:
Little, 2009.
TPK The Pale King. Ed. Michael Pietsch. New York: Little, 2011.
CW Conversations with David Foster Wallace. Ed. Stephen J. Burn.
Jackson, MS: U of Mississippi P, 2012.
BFN Both Flesh and Not. New York: Little, 2012.
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Pr eface
Toward the end of his life, David Foster Wallace wrote to William
Kennick to praise his former philosophy professor’s provocative essay,
“Who Needs Literary Theory?” Wallace explained that he’d found
the essay
fine and funny, not only because its arguments were cogent and
true but because . . . there are elements of “theory” that I find
interesting—mostly DeMan and early Derrida—but as you point out
so well “theory” as dogma, as a Trojan horse for political agendas, or as
a pretender to anything approaching philosophical rigor is pernicious
and bad. I cannot tell you how dispiriting it is to have grad students
spout theory dogma as revealed truth, or to pretend to “understand”
Derrida without having read Heidegger or Husserl. So three cheers
from this end. (letter)
Along with a cluster of similar remarks stretching back to the start of

his writing career, this letter would seem to indicate a long-standing
antipathy—or at the very least suspicion—toward literary criticism:
“lit-speak,” he told Larry McCaffery, was “jargon we dress common
sense in” (CW 29); reviews, he suggested to Richard Powers, were
part of a communications loop that does not “include . . . the author”
(CW 115). While the procedural appeal to literary theory attracted most
of Wallace’s ire, his general wariness toward what Infinite Jest calls the
“ozone” prose of some scholarly writing (1056n304) may make the
academic study of his fiction seem an antithetical undertaking.
Nevertheless, Wallace is one of the few major writers to have emerged
from the 1980s M.F.A. industry with a solid grounding in the very
same critical theory of which he registered so many reservations, and
he was willing at times to see the writing of a 467-page novel (The
Broom of the System), as no more than a “little poststructural gag”
(CW 41). At the same time, for all his studied wariness, Wallace’s fic-
tion is full of literary criticism. His sequence of novels begins with Rick
Vigorous trying to write his own fiction by carrying out a collabora-
tive critique of other stories. While Rick is clearly the object of Wallace
satire, this is a parody whose edge is blunted by the fact that Wallace’s
x PREFACE
later work generates its own narrative momentum by either implicitly

outlining an adroit commentary on other works, or—in the works
that are “written in the margins” (as Wallace said of “Westward”) of
earlier texts—by explicitly functioning as a critical act.
Yet if Wallace’s work betrays a divided attitude toward scholarly
research, when we trace the vectors in the opposite direction, it’s nota-
ble that academic appreciation of Wallace’s writing swiftly followed
its publication, and by way of laying the foundation for the chapters
that follow, it’s worth sketching the early evolution of such investiga-
tions. The earliest critical references to his writing are not studies or
elucidations of his fiction, but rather attempts to position Wallace’s
work as ancillary to another critical act. Presumably in recognition
of his fiction’s critical energy, Wallace is first cited in an academic
context by scholars seeking to draw his work into the magnetic field
of their own critical agendas: just three years after his first novel was
published, Arthur Saltzman quoted Girl with Curious Hair to frame
a study of minimalism for Contemporary Literature in 1990; one year
later, Cecelia Tichi’s Electronic Hearth invoked Wallace’s fiction and
nonfiction to help articulate “the cognitive and perceptual acts that
define a generation” that grew up in the “TV environment” (9); while
in 1992, Judith McDonnell drew on Wallace’s work to make a larger
argument about rap for the journal Popular Music and Society.
Wallace is a sideline in such studies—an interesting new voice, a
quotable perspective—but more than 20 years after this first critical
moment, and in the dark shadow cast by Wallace’s suicide, the
relationship between Wallace’s own writing and his critics’ has changed
utterly. Although the coming years will likely bring variorum editions,
juvenilia, and perhaps newly discovered short stories, such additions
will fill out the total body of his work, but will surely be little more
than adjuncts to a fictional project that is now already complete. At
this point, much of the ground-clearing critical work on Wallace’s fic-
tion has also been completed: Wallace’s writing is no longer simply a
subsidiary component of a broader critical project, but has been read in
terms of Wittgenstein, Buber, film theory, environmentalism, chang-
ing conceptions of the encyclopedic, and so on. His work has also pro-
vided the central focus for several book-length studies, two of which
were written a decade ago by the editors of this book. The current vol-
ume is designed not to replace these studies, but rather to consolidate
where Wallace studies stands after all the novels have been published.
The chapters gathered in this collection fill out this skeleton his-
tory of Wallace criticism, by tracing and evaluating the scholarly work
on Wallace, to date, while also connecting his fiction to larger criti-
cal arguments that run through the discipline. Such an approach is
PREFACE xi
necessary because if Wallace’s fiction may initially seem suspicious of lit-

erary criticism, it is also true that professional literary critics have, so far,
been slow to take on the substantial work of establishing the contours
of Wallace’s achievement.1 Conversely, a disproportionate amount of
the existing work on Wallace has been produced by independent schol-
ars, graduate students, journalists, intrepid fans, bloggers, and the like.
While this situation has guaranteed a lively and vibrant discussion, one
whose variable quality has sometimes fruitfully circumvented whatever
official channels govern the production of literary scholarship, this same
heterodox approach to Wallace studies has also highlighted the need to
submit his work to more rigorous study. Academic criticism is not—and
should not be—the only conversation about Wallace’s work, but nor is
it an irrelevant context when dealing with a writer who was the child
of two academics, who enrolled in two advanced degree programs, and
who spent most of his professional life as a college professor.
A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies addresses this uneven
situation with a more systematic and focused approach to Wallace’s
fiction that attempts to capture the unusual combination of centrip-
etal and centrifugal energies that characterize his work. The intrin-
sic complexity of Wallace’s books demands close attention to their
unique organization and verbal density; but at the same time, these
works insistently reach outside themselves, through layered allusions,
metaleptic jumps, and a thematic obsession with connection. In line
with this dual movement, our volume attempts a stereoscopic take
on Wallace’s achievement, by alternating between chapters solely
devoted to close examination of individual works, and thematically
based chapters that accept his fiction’s implicit invitation to connect
his writing to larger individual currents.
Looked at in more detail, this approach testifies to the wide range
of concerns, themes, and intellectual engagements that cohere around
his work. While Wallace criticism has (for understandable reasons)
predominantly focused upon Infinite Jest, we seek to redress the bal-
ance with detailed readings of each book of fiction. These studies are
designed to provide the starting point for further critical readings of
Wallace’s work by taking stock of where academic criticism of each
work stands today. At the same time, they also attempt to advance
that criticism by providing new perspectives that variously invoke
granular synthesis, creative writing programs, antipsychiatry, feminist
poetics, mentalese, and post-Pynchonian fiction by way of reframing
and illuminating a given text. These work-specific readings are com-
plemented by interchapters that (after the first two chapters) inter-
rupt the procession of single-text studies by pressing larger segments
of Wallace’s work into dialogue with eclectic critical environments,
xii PREFACE
ranging through mathematics, the spatial turn in contemporary criti-

cism, gender theory, the legacy of American Pragmatism, and the
emergent field of post-postmodern literary studies.
Along the way there are divergences between chapters: alternate read-
ings of the same narrative sequences, arguments for different genealogies,
and varying estimates of individual achievements. Our editorial stance
has been that such plural readings are the natural territory of Wallace
criticism, because what Wallace did take from the literary theory revo-
lution was his belief that “once I’m done with the thing . . . it becomes
simply language, and language lives not in but through the reader”
(CW 40). Yet even this Barthesian statement does not go far enough:
Wallace went beyond simply affirming Roland Barthes’s diagnosis of
the “birth of the reader” (130), and elevated it to an architectural prin-
ciple. His fiction is designed to enact rather than simply reflect Barthes’s
“multi-dimensional space” (128) by deliberately creating an arena in
which a variety of sometimes conflicting theoretical lenses find a rich
breeding ground. The chapters in this volume do not attempt the illu-
sory project of exhaustively covering the many dimensions of Wallace’s
work, but, in concert, they do try to reflect the kaleidoscopic nature of
the Wallacian text. Our hope is that, taken together, these chapters not
only enrich our understanding of Wallace’s work but also mark out the
coordinate points for more exacting estimates of his achievements.
The editors are grateful to the David Foster Wallace Literary Trust for
permission to quote from Wallace’s writing, and to everyone at Palgrave
Macmillan for their support and patience throughout this entire process.
STEPHEN J. BURN AND M ARSHALL BOSWELL
Note
1. At risk of seeming to split hairs, there have also been difficulties in
the extant body of Wallace criticism, with Infinite Jest’s textual laby-
rinth, in particular, acting (perhaps understandably) as an incubator
for scholarly error. Even insightful studies of the novel have been
prone to missteps, as in Michael North’s claim that the lethal enter-
tainment “is never referred to by name in the novel” (Machine 164),
when Molly Notkin—despite questioning the film’s existence—
refers to the “lethally entertaining Infinite Jest” in the novel’s final
stages (IJ 788). Elsewhere, Elizabeth Freudenthal’s essay on the novel
describes the opening section as “the novel’s only instance of first-
person narration” (203), when, in fact, Infinite Jest not only includes
other first-person sequences devoted to Hal (IJ 851–54), but also
first-person sequences (IJ 127–28) that may stem from what Michael
Pietsch called “an ‘I’ who may be the one trying to put everything
together” (qtd. in Max 182).
CH A P T ER 1
Almost a Novel: The Broom of

the System
Patrick O’Donnell
A new broom sweeps clean, but the old broom knows the corners.
—Irish Proverb
When I say: “My broom is in the corner,”—is this really a statement
about the broomstick and the brush?
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (29)
The Broom of the System is apprentice work, a young man’s novel about
his generation, in much the same way that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This
Side of Paradise (1920) is about the fabled jazz age generation and
the amorous adventures of the homophonically named Amory Blaine.
Both wise and wise-ass, Broom is clearly the product of the smartest
kid in the class (and he really was). It could only have been written—
this first novel, initiated as a senior thesis—by someone who has
read everything he could get his hands on from the age of five, and
absorbed it all not semiotically or hermeneutically, but in the manner
of granular synthesis, a method of assimilating sound and informa-
tion, according to the The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary
Music, comprised of sound “grains” assembled into
short snippet[s] of about ten to a hundred milliseconds, an elemen-

tary particle as opposed to a complex soundscape. By combining
different grains over time, and by overlapping several grains at the
same instant of time, interesting sonic effects can be produced. The
2 PATRICK O’DONNELL
synthesis techniques in which different sound grains are combined is

known as granular synthesis. . . . Since its inception, many composers
have utilized granular synthesis as a musically powerful technique to
create and manipulate complex sonic universes using basic particles”
(Sarafin 207).
Think of granular synthesis in terms of writing, and this seems to me

a fair ballpark description of how Wallace writes, or how he processes
reading into writing. This comparison is based more on a reading of
his fiction than on personal observation, which in my case was slight:
he dropped into a couple of sessions of my course on narrative theory
at the University of Arizona (we were reading Roland Barthes, who
was still in vogue at the time, S/Z to be specific), he sampled, he
wandered off. He was clearly not cut out for the long haul of a semi-
nar; he had moved on to other venues, restless, endlessly absorbing,
sampling, trying it on for size and noticing the tight fit, the lack of
oxygen in the room.
At the time and for many years afterward, I confess, as Wallace’s
fame and cult grew, I more or less ignored his fiction, even as I was
investing time and books and considerable energies into the teaching
and study of contemporary American fiction. I don’t think it was per-
sonal—I barely even registered his presence in the class, save to notice
what appeared to be the affectation of a headscarf and a distracted
air that I took to be a sign of boredom but which easily could have
been the look of one whose wheels spun at a much higher speed than
normal. No, my view of Wallace for a long time—I am embarrassed to
admit it—was that he was (as many of those critical of his fiction have
repeatedly said) a Pynchon wannabe: the same encyclopedic excess,
the same slapstick comedy spinning into the absurd, the same range
and heft and heavy demands on the reader, save that (I thought) with
Pynchon the payoff was bigger because (I thought) one got a world
as complex, with as many blind alleys and odd characters and strange
places on the map to explore, as the real one.
What I didn’t notice, from first to last in Wallace’s writing, is the
quality and depth of affect that he achieves in navigating the relational
terrain between the culture one inhabits, identities, and emotion—a
terrain Pynchon rarely explores, obsessed as he is with processes of
signification. Pynchon’s writing is semiotic; Wallace’s is that of a
naturalist, in the sense that he is interested in the affective, environ-
mental relations between objects, animals, humans. The same author
who writes The Broom of the System writes one of the most engaged
and probing discussions of the relation between the human pleasure
ALMOST A NOVEL 3
principle and animal suffering in “Consider the Lobster,” where lob-

sters, “basically giant sea insects,” are transformed into affective enti-
ties via a meticulous scrutiny of the specificities of natural science (CL
237). While Pynchon experiments with language in the hermeneutic
mode (how many connections can one make between dispersed word-
strings with the Gadamerian hope that a quantitative array will even-
tually instantiate a qualitative enlargement of perspective?), Wallace
experiments with language in the antinomic mode (How do we adapt
ourselves to the inexorable frayed ends, blunt oppositions, and disso-
ciations of human experience? How do we feel about having to do so?
How does the writer sample the frayed, the blunt, the dissociative at
the granular level, thus rendering experience as symptomatic?). In its
interrogative registers, granularity, and cultural specificity, Wallace’s
fiction, from first to last, requires a kind of sampling, a mode of read-
ing that locates its partialities and inconsistencies, paying more atten-
tion to its noise and distortions than its harmonies. It is within this
framework that I wish to consider Wallace’s first novel by scrutinizing
a small sample of its elements.
Title
An antinomy of old news: two familiar epigraphs, one from the phi-
losopher who is widely acknowledged as one of David Foster Wallace’s
primary intellectual sources, and one familiar to those of Celtic
heritage, both coincidentally overlapping with their figuring of the
relation between corners and brooms.1 Here, I am not so interested
in frontally addressing the relationship between Wittgenstein and
Wallace that others have previously assessed (justly troubling notions
of influence and source), as I am in pursuing Adam Kelly’s call, in
reading Wallace, “to show as precisely as possible (Wallace teaches us
that absolute precision is necessarily impossible) how Wallace’s radi-
cal method for waking readers up to agency operates in his texts, and
how this technique is linked to his highly original style” (“Death”).
Understanding how Wallace articulates a relation between “agency”
and “technique” in The Broom of the System —one that carries the
dual sense inherent in Kelly’s formulation of awakening and alarming
the reader—will demand a partial inventory of the novel, made up
as it is of intentionally mismatched parts, precise in themselves, but
imprecise in their joining.
The title of the novel is, indeed, indicative of Wallace’s concern
with “agency” as comprising an interactive and highly mutable ratio
of “self” to “other,” which for Wallace is homologous to the rela-

tion of part to whole (we can consider Wallace’s generic sense of
the novel as a totality made of up of many discursive and rhetori-
cal parts). Wittgenstein’s elaborate discussion of the broom-object in
Aphorism 60 of Philosophical Investigations is, in part, a reflection
on the linguistic relation between part and whole and a querying of
the method that enables the figuring of that relation. The questions
raised by Wittgenstein’s thought experiment are as fundamental to
rhetoric and the structuralist poetics of the novel as they are to phi-
losophy: when it is recognized that the object (or language system,
or novel) is comprised of parts, what becomes of its status as a whole?
Who determines which parts are essential to the whole, and which are
ancillary (Wittgenstein’s question might be applied ad infinitum to a
series of smaller parts: the brush composed of bristles and wood, the
bristles composed of animal hair or polyester blends that are parts of
an animal or strands of fused elements, etc.)? To what extent is each
part a whole unto itself, and to what extent is a part not a part and a
whole not a whole unless the two are matched and joined instrumen-
tally, aesthetically, rhetorically?
These questions pertain to a form of philosophical investigation
that Wallace conducts in The Broom of the System, beginning with its
title, which refers to his exploration of the post-systematic nature of
a contemporary “reality” made up of multiply mediated and, often,
colliding forces, granular singularities, and narratives. Positing the
relation of part to whole as an open question, and accepting that
relation as indubitably asymmetrical and recursive comprises much
of the work of The Broom of the System. The novel comprises a total-
ity where binaries like “part/whole,” “self/other,” and “system/
chaos” are rendered dynamic in their deconstitution (Wallace breaks
down a massive reality into its particularities and specificities) and
recognized for their exclusions and the cultural logics that under-
gird them. The “excluded middle” of Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot
49 (1966) that Oedipa Mass had registered abjectly as hermeneutic
“bad shit” becomes in Wallace’s hands an arena—the novel itself—
where a contentious, fractious, and dynamic set of relations between
asymptomatic particularities and incorporative entities, identities
self-destructive and obsessively domineering, and broken systems and
generative disorders are allowed to play themselves out (181).2
There is, perhaps, a “healthy” or steady state to be achieved in
this mediate comprehension of reality, but Wallace is more interested
in observing the limit-conditions of a performative, deconstituted
“real” that—as he writes of the vision of his favorite director, David
ALMOST A NOVEL 5
Lynch—“is about somebody turning into somebody else,” where the

long-short scrutiny of a facial expression “is just held there, fixed and
grotesque, until it starts to signify about seventeen different things
at once” (SFT 151, 163). One of Wallace’s favored techniques is to
exaggerate to the point of absurdity to make visible the grotesque-
ness of agency or identity conceived in certain ways. Thus, Norman
Bombardini, the owner of the building that houses the publishing
firm of Frequent & Vigorous, the employers of the novel’s put-upon
heroine, Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman. Presiding over a genetic engi-
neering concern with a murky agenda, Bombardini (his name says it
all) is the operatic limit-case of The Broom of the System. Announcing
the parameters of “Project Total Yang” to Lenore and her obsessive
boyfriend and boss, Rick Vigorous, in a restaurant where Bombardini
is in the process of consuming nine steak dinners, he articulates an
incorporative fantasy that exists at the extreme end of the novel’s slid-
ing scale marking the fuzzy and dynamic relationship between “self”
and “other”:
“A full universe, Vigorous, Ms. Beadsman. We each need a full universe.

Weight Watchers and their allies would have us systematically decrease
the Self-component of the universe, so that great Other-set will be
physically attracted to the now more physically attractive Self, and run
in to fill the void caused by that diminution of self. Certainly not cor-
rect, but only half of the range of valid solutions to the full-universe
problem. Is my drift getting palpable? Just as in genetic engineering,
Vigorous. There is always more than one solution.”
“I think I—”
“An autonomous full universe, Vigorous. An autonomously full
universe, Ms. Beadsman.”
“What should I do with these mints, here?”
“I’ll just take that bowl, thank you. Rather than diminishing Self
to entice Other to fill our universe, we may also of course obviously
choose to fill the universe with Self ” (BOS 91)
Following the binary logic of “Project Total Yang,” Bombardini plans

to keep eating until he incorporates everything else, but his specific
target or “significant other” in this regard becomes Lenore, whose
problem lies at the opposite end of the spectrum: “she simply felt—at
times, mind you, not all the time, but at sharp and distinct intuitive
moments—as if she had no real existence” (BOS 66). But the “full/
empty” binary that both Bombardini and Lenore (at moments) map
onto “self/other” binary—indeed, the entire question of thinking of
objects and identities in binary terms—is deflected by Wittgenstein’s
aphorism and the novel’s title: if an object can no longer be thought

of as merely the collection of its parts, if the relation of part to part
and part to whole is assymetrical and recursive, and if the entire
room of the system is rendered problematic by the mere object of the
broom that would sweep it of its impurities, then the idea of reality
as comprised of “yin” and/or “yang” becomes moot. One aspect of
Wallace’s investment in narratively tackling the familiar question of
self versus other is rendering of this relation in affective terms: one is
always partly full or partly empty; fullness and emptiness are dynamic
physical states registered in the body that signify, at the extreme, sub-
lime or impoverished emotional conditions as well as states of being
and nonbeing. In fact, both Bombardini and Lenore implicitly recog-
nize, from their positions of extremity (Bombardini, by novel’s end,
a destructive engine by virtue of his sheer size; Lenore receding into
the invisibility of the West), the erroneous logic of the binary that
Wallace both elaborates and contests in the novel. Bombardini says
it himself: “There is always more than one solution” even though he
does not manage to think it through (BOS 91). If there is more than
one solution, then there are more than two, et cetera (to use one
of Wallace’s characteristic expressions). The narrator goes on in the
inventory of Lenore’s consciousness to state that “as if she had no real
existence, except for what she said and did and perceived and et cetera,
and that these were, it seemed at such times, not really under her con-
trol. There was nothing pure” (BOS 66, emphasis added). “Nothing
pure” might be considered an alternative title for a novel in which the
system, because it is not one, cannot be swept (clean).
Plot
The plot of The Broom of the System is an assemblage of half-finished sto-
ries, intentions gone awry, and discursive trajectories: despite its mass,
the novel can be considered an ode to incompletion. Chronologically,
it begins in 1981 in the Mount Holyoke dorm room of Clarice
Beadsman, Lenore’s sister. Lenore, aged 15, is checking out the col-
lege scene, and there encounters future principals of the novel Melissa
Sue Metalman (“Mindy”), a roomate, and Andrew “Wang-Dang”
Lang, one of two intrusive frat boys from Amherst. After this side-
ways origin story, we are cast forward in time to late August, 1990
where we next encounter Lenore working as a switchboard opera-
tor in Cleveland at Frequent & Vigorous, a directionless firm mired
in navel-gazing and incompetence, and conducting a treacherous
affair with the domineering Rick Vigorous, the parodically phallic
ALMOST A NOVEL 7
off-rhyme of his name suggesting his failure as both a businessman

and a romantic partner who is hyperaware of his “freakishly small
penis” (BOS 137). With the singular exception of Chapter 4, dated
1972, which transcribes a meeting between the governor of Ohio,
Raymond Zusatz, several aides, and Ed Roy Yancy, vice-president of
Industrial Desert Design, Inc., in which the planning of an immense
artificial desert—The Great Ohio Desert, or GOD—is discussed, the
remainder of the novel takes place between August 25 and September
11, 1990. Dates are important to Wallace: he scatters them liberally
throughout the novel. Every chapter is dated by year, and many of
them are sectioned into alphabetical parts, but the sporadic dating
and layout of the chapters typifies the asymmetry that extends to
every corner of the novel. The longest of 21 chapters is Chapter 11,
which runs over 75 pages and is sectioned into 9 alphabetized parts;
the shortest is Chapter 19, consisting of 2 sentences, and the remain-
der run the gamut in terms of length and plot complexity.
The mismatch and hybridity of the novel’s parts goes well beyond
these structural and temporal elements. Its story arcs (they might be
better described as story squiggles) are conveyed through a mélange
of discourses: transcripts of “rap” sessions between “Dr. Curtis Jay,
Ph.D.” and Lenore, who is seeing the analyst to address her feeling
that she does not exist (Rick Vigorous is also one of Jay’s patients—
the fact that they are both seeing the same analyst further complicates
their relationship); long conversations at a restaurant, on a plane, in
a bar between Rick and Lenore in which Rick recounts shaggy dog
stories he has received as editor of F&V’s literary magazine—actually
his own as he appears to be sole contributor to the publication;
excerpts from Rick’s journal, some of them containing entries from a
sequence of stories he is writing about the adventures of an alter ego,
one “Monroe Fieldbinder,” who takes on multiple roles as a parodic
noir detective, insurance agent, Hemingwayesque hunter, and voy-
euristic neighbor; dialogues with Lenore’s parrot, Vlad the Impaler,
who has acquired the capacity to ventriloquize human speech at an
advanced level in an assemblage of sentence-fragments from mul-
tiple speakers; an article excerpted from a professional advertising
magazine; a transcript of a wedding; a passage from the duty log of
a Chicago emergency room doctor; and letters, dreamwork, jokes,
aphorisms, assorted puzzles, and codes.
The Broom of the System is thus an encyclopedic novel—one that
contains multiple knowledges, discourses, styles, lists, and catalogues.3
It may also be considered as pastiche, in Fredric Jameson’s sense of
what constitutes postmodern parody: “the imitation of a peculiar or
unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in

a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without
any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse,
devoid of laughter” (Postmodernism 17). However, Jameson’s severely
limited definition is contested by Wallace’s use of “linguistic masks,”
“dead languages” (Vlad the Impaler comes immediately to mind),
and “idiosyncratic styles” to appositely (and comically) convey a satir-
ical portrait of American capitalism and the middle class in the 1980s,
especially as these formations infiltrate the self/other dynamics of
human relationships. The Broom of the System can be equally consid-
ered within the framework of “Menippean satire,” which Northrop
Frye defined as a “loose-jointed narrative form”:
The Menippean satire deals less with people as such than with men-
tal attitudes. Pedants, bigots, cranks, parvenus, virtuosi, enthusiasts,
rapacious and incompetent professional men of all kinds, are handled
in terms of their occupational approach to life as distinct from their
social behavior. The Menippean satire thus resembles the confession
in its ability to handle abstract ideas and theories, and differs from the
novel in its characterization, which is stylized rather than naturalistic,
and presents people as mouthpieces of the ideas they represent. (309)
Yet, as much as the novel is invested in performing satirical work as

it reveals the mental attitudes and philosophical positions of a variety
of bigots, pedants, quacks (most notably, Dr. Jay) and cranks, it is
equally invested—contra Frye’s definition of Menippean satire—in
“persons,” and in exploring the nature (an aspect of its “naturalism”)
of personhood existentially and affectively.
These conceptual frameworks, then, both illuminate the subject of
The Broom of the System and show the extent to which any attempt to
categorize a novel that so thoroughly scrutinizes categorization (an
act that depends upon a stable relation between part and whole) will
fall short. Wallace places the generic categories of “novel” and “story”
under such scrutiny at several points in the novel, most notably in a
conversation between Rick and Lenore about a Fieldbinder story that
Lenore dislikes, which leads to a debate over the role of context in sto-
rytelling. The story recounts a couple’s voyeuristic observation of the
activities of the family next door, which may include an incident of
child molestation. Lenore suggests that the story lacks an appropriate
use of context: “Shouldn’t a story make the context that make people
do certain things and have the things be appropriate or not appropri-
ate? A story shouldn’t just mention the exact context its supposed to
ALMOST A NOVEL 9
really create, right?” (BOS 335). Rick counters that the story is “like
a story about a story . . . Almost a story about the way a story waits
and never dies, can always come back, even after ostensible characters
have long since departed the real scene” (BOS 335). He reveals that
this story, like all of the Fieldbinder stories, is really about his need to
separate “inside” from “outside,” “self” from “other”:
I seem to remember that he [the anonymous author, i.e., Rick him-

self] said he conceived it as a story of neighborhood obsession . . . how
it’s usually impossible for the respective neighbors to know about
such things, because each neighbor is shut away inside his own
property . . . Locked away . . . Kept private . . . Except that occasionally
the Private leaked out . . . and became Incident. And that perceived
Incident became Story. And that story endured, in Mind, even behind
and within the isolating membrane of house and property and fence
that surrounded and isolated each individual neighbor-resident . . . And
that, as I recall, some of the references in the story . . . had to do with
a context created by a larger narrative system of which this piece was
a part. (BOS 336)
Rick’s defense of the story manifests his anxiety about boundaries

of all kinds, between public and private, inside and outside, text and
context, even as he explains the “aboutness” of the story—its life and
repeatability—as a “leaking” or crossing of those boundaries. The
Broom of the System can equally be thought of as “almost a novel,”
one that is about, in part, its own categorical leakiness, its incapacity,
among other things, to keep text and context separate, to be a “nar-
rative system” or a piece of the larger narrative system of the novel
as a genre that categorized as one of its elements. This recognition
informs, once more, Wallace’s “sampling” technique, which registers
the partial narrative, the symptomatic instance, in the collusions of
text and context, as the “whole” story.
Accordingly, The Broom of the System consists of a series of inter-
secting plots that are “almost” plots in the traditional sense, but
something is always left out or unconnected in the novel’s multiple
stories: the switchboard at Frequent & Vigorous, broken through-
out the novel and continuously routing calls from every business on
the circuit to a beleaguered Lenore and her coworker and roommate,
Candy Mandible, serves as a comic metaphor for the disconnect
between call and response, intention and act, and cause and effect
that pervades the novel. The novel’s partial plotting formally signifies
its being about the condition of the “almost” in several senses: almost
a novel; almost inscribing a character with a completed agency and

destiny; almost a part of a whole that is, itself, only almost a whole. A
summary, then, of (almost all) of its plots.
(1) The narrative of the disintegrating relationship between Lenore

Beadsman and Rick Vigorous. Lenore’s problem: she lacks “identity”;
Rick’s problem: he is a mini-Bombardini, attempting to incorporate
Lenore’s identity into his own by compelling her to linguistically exte-
riorize her inwardness. Rick: “So then why do you love me?” Lenore:
“Oh, gee. I’d really rather not do this now.” Rick: “No, I’m serious,
Lenore, why? On the basis of what? I need to know, so that I might
try desperately to reinforce those features of me on the basis of which
you love me. So that I can have you inside myself, for all time” (BOS
286) . . . Lenore: “You want to know what I really don’t love? I don’t love
this sick obsession with measuring, and demanding that things be said,
and pinning, and having, and telling. It’s all one big boiling spasm that
makes me more than a little ill, not to mention depressed” (BOS 289).
The resolution to the plot of this narrative yields no spasm of epiphany,
only to a series of vexed conversations between the pair that contribute
to Rick’s ever-increasing desperation over “possessing” Lenore to the
point of absurdity: venturing with her into the Great Ohio Desert, he
handcuffs her to himself in a “remake” of Frank Norris’s McTeague
(1899). Lenore takes up with Lang, and in the novel’s penultimate
scene—a parody of romantic melodrama—with all of the principles
gathered around Lenore, each demanding that she respond to a con-
trolling need, she pronounces a single word, “Hey” (BOS 457), seem-
ingly as a form of acquiescence to Lang’s offer of immediate departure
to his family home in Texas. But this final, gnomic pronouncement
or “telling,” along with her lighting out for new territories that is
reported second hand in the novel’s final chapter, offers only a met-
onymic extension of the novel’s self/other problematic: the phallically
named Lang, who has left his wife (the Mindy Metalman of the novel’s
first chapter) because, in his words, she’s “just run out of holes in your
pretty body, and I’ve run out of things to stick in them. My pecker,
my fingers, my tongue, my toes . . . my hair, my nose, my wallet, my car
keys. So on. I’ve just run the fuck out of ideas” (BOS 176–77), seems
a postreflective version of Rick Vigorous, and there appears to be no
language available to Lenore beyond the explicative syllable to advance
our knowledge of her consciousness. The novel’s major figure thus
disappears into a kind of “et cetera” of remoteness and repetition: how
long will it take for Lang to conceive of her identity as a limited collec-
tion of “holes” or parts bereft of a whole as well?
ALMOST A NOVEL 11
(2) The narrative of Lenore’s search for her great-grandmother,

an Oxford-trained Wittgensteinian philosopher who has disappeared
along with 15 other patients and staff from the Shaker Heights Rest
Home. This narrative trajectory, a parodic conflation of quest-romance
and conspiracy, has it that Lenore’s great-grandmother/mentor/sub-
stitute mother (also named Lenore) and a cabal of the elderly have
escaped the home after coming into possession of research related
to the manufacturing prototype of a baby food additive that will,
supposedly, geometrically increase cognitive development in infants:
the additive is the brainchild of R&D at Stonecipheco, a giant of
the baby food industry presided over by Lenore’s imposing father,
Stonecipher Beadsman. What Lenore’s great-grandmother and her
group intend to do with the stolen information is unclear, though the
conspiracy (and the influence of Lenore’s great-grandmother) seems
to be far-reaching. Dr. Jay, for example, has been directed to ana-
lyze Lenore by her great-grandmother according to a certain invented
method that accords with the Wittgensteinian language-training
that the younger woman has experienced at the hands of the
philosopher-elder. Lenore’s lifelong resistance to talking about her-
self, confessing her feelings, or emoting over the “big boiling spasm”
of the self is related to her great-grandmother’s instruction in the
nature of language as, from her perspective, fundamentally descrip-
tive of the status of the object in its outward appearance (BOS 289).
The “case” of the self is precisely what it appears to be, outwardly,
on the surface of the body. Lenore takes on the search for the miss-
ing Lenore (the double-naming clearly suggesting that the quest for
her great-grandmother is also a quest for herself) that leads her back
to one point of origin at Amherst, where she discusses philosophy
and conspiracy with her brother, Stonecipher Lavache Beadsman,
and to another in the Great Ohio Desert (the scene of her entrap-
ment by Rick Vigorous), but Lenore’s great-grandmother has disap-
peared for good from the novel in its opening pages, and what lies
behind her disappearance, the intentions informing the conspiracy
she apparently foments, and Lenore’s reasons for tracking her remain
unknown. Under the aegis of a quest gone awry from the beginning
of the novel, narrative intention itself goes wandering in The Broom of
the System: motive, affect, direction are not so much hidden as outside
the domain of the narrative, or only partially and sporadically visible.
Affective or empathetic incapacity is one of Wallace’s primary con-
cerns here and throughout his writing.
(3) The narrative of the Beadsman family in which the relation
between genealogy and destiny is tested in apposition to story of
Lenore Beadsman as the heroine of an irresolute bildungsroman.

While information about the Beadsman family going back several gen-
erations is provided sporadically throughout the novel and via several
narrators whose memories and grasp upon historical reality is ques-
tionable, it seems evident that the family suffers from a “curse” that
especially afflicts its female members. Like her great-grandmother,
Lenore Beadsman’s “just plain grandmother” (BOS 37), Concarnadine
Beadsman, is housed in the Shaker Heights Rest Home, but unlike
the elder Lenore, who is there merely because of the physical effects of
old age, Concarnadine is suffering an advanced case of Alzheimer’s.
Lenore’s mother, Patrice Lavache Beadsman, resides in a sanitarium
in Madison, Wisconsin, as the result, in part, of being driven mad by
the machinations of her husband.
Lenore’s grandfather (husband of Concarnadine and son of the elder

Lenore) is Stonecipher Beadsman II, the founder of Stonecipheco
Baby Food Products and one of the principal developers of East
Corinth, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, viewable from the air as built
in the shape of Beadsman II’s favorite movie star, Jayne Mansfield.
Beadsman II has died spectacularly “in a vat accident during a brief
and disastrous attempt on the part of Stonecipheco Baby Food
Products to develop and market something that would compete with
Jell-O” (BOS 45). Lenore’s father, Stonecipher Beadsman III has,
among other things, virtually imprisoned his wife in a suite of rooms
in the Beadsman mansion while she was pregnant with Lenore’s
younger brother, Lavache, because he fears that her depressive behav-
ior (primarily induced by his quite visible affair with the children’s
governess) will adversely affect his children, to whom he administers
standardized tests to determine who will oversee the Stonecipheco
empire upon reaching maturity.
Lavache Beadsman, brilliant but damaged, is a perennial stu-
dent at Amherst, where he spends his time watching game shows
and writing expert papers on every subject imaginable for other stu-
dents while tending to his wooden leg. The prosthesis is the conse-
quence of an injury he suffered when his mother fell from a trellis
that she had climbed to view her children whom she has been forbid-
den to see through an open window in their upper-floor nursery;
the fall results in Lavache’s immediate birth, his “leg . . . torn off in
[his] explosive ejaculation from Patrice’s womb” (BOS 267). Lenore’s
other brother, John Beadsman, “an academic in Chicago who was not
well” (BOS 63), navigates in an out of therapy sessions and emergency
mental health clinics. And after graduating from Mount Holyoke,
ALMOST A NOVEL 13
Clarice, Lenore’s only sister, has gone into business and become the
owner of a tanning-salon franchise; she is married to Alvin Spaniard,
who has been made a vice-president at Stonecipheco, and has two
children, Stonecipher (“Stony”) and Spatula.
Like the Beadsman family, the Spaniard family is extraordinarily
dysfunctional: they engage in an absurdist form of “family therapy”
in which they don masks of themselves while watching an audi-
ence projected on their television screen “respond” to a scripted
narrative that they each voice in turn: “There once existed,” Stony
recites behind his mask, “a unit called the Spaniard family . . . What
is more . . . the people who were in the family thought of themselves
more as . . . members of the family than as real people who were spe-
cial individual people. All they thought about was the family, and
all they thought of themselves as was family-parts” (BOS 167). This
mock-performance of the incorporation of the self into a larger
whole (“special individual people” into “family unit”) is but a varia-
tion of Bombardini’s fantasy, and underscores the twisted relation
between part and whole that the novel’s family narratives manifest:
the Beadsmans are scattered across the realms, disappeared, insti-
tutionalized, literally (in Lavache’s case) with pieces missing; the
Spaniards must conduct an irreal, hypersimulated ritual that anneals
the “part” of self into the “whole” of family to sustain the domestic
fiction. In both cases, all attempts to control the fate of the family
or its individual members—to impose upon reality a genetic destiny,
a determinate relation between the whole of the familial social order
and the partiality of identity—result in comic disaster. The novel’s
family narratives reveal Wallace’s sardonic take on the infamous
opening line of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1873–77): “All happy
families alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” as
well as the recognition that repetition (as in giving all male heirs
the same name) offers no historical certainty and that chance rules
circumstance. Like the “most sadistic board game ever invented”
(BOS 160) played by the Spaniard children, Chutes and Ladders, in
which “certain rolls of the dice got you into board positions where
you fell into chutes and slid ass-over-teakettle all the way down to
the bottom . . . the chances of falling into chutes increas[ing] as you
climbed more ladders” (BOS 160)—a game event realized in Patrice
Beadsman’s unfortunate fall—destiny in The Broom of the System is
a matter of climbing “up ladder after ladder until the End was in
sight . . . nixed by a plummet down,” a “dashing of hopes and return
to the recreational drawing board” (BOS 160–61). In other terms, a
narrative without ends, a rising and falling without climax.
The Broom of the System is composed of many other narrative grains

and fragments, including multiple narratives of relationships such as
that between Lang and his former wife, Mindy Metalman, or that
between Rick Vigorous, his former wife, Lenore Peck, and his son,
Vance, all of which are dysfunctional or lopsided in some way, indica-
tive of Wallace’s portrayal of a social order in which relationality itself
can only occur through a semi-chaotic system of misunderstandings,
passive/aggressive physical and emotional encounters, and projections
of fantasies. There is as well the novel’s dreams, primarily those of
Rick Vigorous as related to Dr. Jay: of particular note is Rick’s dream
of stimulating Queen Victoria’s clitoris with a hairbrush; his dream
of being checked into a motel by an enormous mouse; and an elabo-
rate dream of a phantasmagoric, eroticized Lenore emerging from the
page of a manuscript as an ink drawing while Rick urinates, flooding
the confines of his office. Additional miscellaneous narratives abound,
including the Fieldbinder stories, the stories tracking the journey of
Vlad the Impaler, stories illustrating the novel’s cultural architecture,
including the construction of the Great Ohio Desert, the “Gilligan’s
Island” bar frequented by the novel’s principals, or the elaborate
revolving chair arrangement of Dr. Jay’s office. Binding many of these
fragmentary narratives together is the connective narrative tissue of
contingency and coincidence (the source of the novel’s many fatalistic
and paranoiac moments) including the fact that Vigorous and Lang
are both Amherst alumni and brothers in the same fraternity (“Psi
Phi”), or the coincidence of Mindy Metalman being, at once, Clarice
Beadsman’s former roomate, Lang’s former wife, and Vigrous’s back-
yard adolescent fantasy. As Lang says of the various coincidences lead-
ing to his becoming employed by Vigorous in translating material
from the Greek for the Stonecipheco gene-altering food additive,
“Ti symptosis . . . it’s just this expression . . . idiomatic modern Greek
for, like ‘What a hell of a coincidence.’ Which this is, sure enough, let
me tell you.” (BOS 234).
The list of narrative particles, grains, threads, and linkages might
go on: this novel is comprised of dozens of stories and potential sto-
ries, trajectories and partial lines of flight, and unconnected dots. Yet
there is no singular system in The Broom of the System, no overriding
graph or chart of the novel’s plots and subplots that could show how
they are thematically or homologically related, as in Dickens, or bear
the potential for paranoid connection, as in Pynchon. Even in those
moments, as above, when coincidence might lead to narrative fate—
perhaps Lenore is destined for Lang in the novel’s melodramatic
dimension—the thin, frayed fabric of contingencies that ties one to
ALMOST A NOVEL 15
the other, as well as Wallace’s insistence on the irresolute nature (and

future) of his protagonist, suggest the degree to which the reality of
plot, or the sense that reality is in any way plotted, is put into question
in the novel. In another sense, plot reveals its partiality in The Broom
of the System: all of these stories can only be filled out and connected
(or not) through extrapolations entirely dependent on the unpre-
dictability, responsiveness, and individuality of the singular reader,
Wallace’s audience first and last.
Language
Perhaps above all, The Broom of the System reflects on language as
a figurative and communicative agent (or failure of agency); yet—
despite the significant references to Wittgenstein—Wallace is neither
interested in a systematic theory of language, nor in critiquing the
notion of language as a system. Rather, the novel makes its investment
in the deployments in various narrative rhetorics that, in Wallace’s
hands, are indicative of a partial and often abrasive relationship between
language and reality. Three symptomatic instances will suffice.
(1) Antinomy. Classically (from the moment of Kant’s invocation

of the concept in the Critique of Judgment), this is a form of paradox
in which two equally valid statements contradict each other, and yet,
because both are valid, each must be allowed to stand as authentic or
truthful. There are several instances of antinomy in the novel, includ-
ing a recurring instance explained by Lenore to Mr. Bloemaker, the
director of the Shaker Heights Rest Home, as one of the elder Lenore
Beadsman’s favorite philosophical conundrums that she has visual-
ized in a cartoon of a man in a smock with a razor whose head is “an
explosion of squiggles of ink” that she has drawn on the label of a
Stonecipheco baby food jar:
“Gramma really likes antinomies. I think this guy here,” looking down
at the drawing on the back of the label, “is the barber who shaves all
and only those who do not shave themselves.”
Mr. Bloemaker looked at her. “A barber?”
“The big killer question . . . is supposed to be whether the barber
shaves himself. I think that’s why his head’s exploded here.”
“Beg pardon?”
“If he does, he doesn’t, and if he doesn’t, he does.” (BOS 42)
Lenore describes an antimony in which the subject of the statement

(the barber) by virtue of his agency (he shaves all and only those who
do not shave themselves) both must and cannot possibly shave himself
(if he does shave himself, then the statement that he shaves only those
who do not shave themselves is untrue; if he does not shave himself,
then the statement that he shaves all who do not shave themselves is
untrue).
The linguistic example can be extended to a general condition in
The Broom of the System in which, as we have seen, dream, fantasy, and
obsessive projection contend with each other in an incomplete reality
comprised of multiple and contradictory parts, inhabited by identities
who attempt to (ful)fill themselves by emptying out (psychologically
consuming and dominating) others. The novel’s relationships—
particularly that of Rick and Lenore—illustrate what Slavoj Žižek
has conceived as the antinomy of “extreme individualization” that
characterizes contemporary identity: “the injunction to ‘be yourself,’
to . . . achieve self-realization by fully asserting your unique creative
potential” (Ticklish 373). Žižek explains: “The inherent obverse of
‘Be your true Self!’ is therefore the injunction to cultivate perma-
nent refashioning, in accordance with the postmodern postulate of
the subject’s indefinite plasticity”; but in the pursuit of this postulate
(Bombardini might be the star example), “individualization reverts
to its opposite, leading to the ultimate identity crisis: subjects experi-
ence themselves as radically unsure, with no ‘proper face,’ changing
from one imposed mask to another, since what is behind the mask
is ultimately nothing, a horrifying void they are trying to fill in with
their compulsive activity” (Ticklish 373). Žižek’s description could be
applied almost word for word to the parodic scenes of the Spaniard’s
family therapy, Bombardini’s attempt to fill himself by eating the
world, or Rick’s fantasies of incorporating Lenore’s “insides” by get-
ting her to talk. The linguistic and performative condition of identity
in The Broom of the System is one in which self-actualization becomes
its opposite, its other, an antimony that speaks to Wallace’s sense,
“self” is always partial, in process, and (in part) self-destructive.
(2) Hypotaxis/Parataxis. Both of these venerable means of think-
ing about how sentence structure conveys emotion and significance
are freely deployed in The Broom of the System, and sometimes mixed
together in the same sentence though they are stylistic alter egos.
Hypotaxis refers to a complex sentence in which clauses and phrases
are subordinated to signify the ways in which the primary meaning
(often residing in the “independent” clause) of the sentence “domi-
nates” its parts; parataxis refers, appositely, to a complex sentence (or
a set of sequential simple sentences) in which subordination does not
occur, indicating that each of the parts are “equal” or contentious in
ALMOST A NOVEL 17
terms of semiotic and affective weight: the coordinating conjunction

“and” is the connecting tissue of paratactic writing, and metonomy,
which pursues the logic of substitution, is its favored figure of speech.
One could argue that all writing is either hypotactic, or paratactic,
or a mixture of both, but in Wallace’s novel these modes become
reflexive as the writing itself, in effect, comments upon its capacity
to represent a reality that has the status of an incomplete, or end-
lessly protracted sentence. Here is an example comprising Section B
of Chapter 3, a single sentence of 238 words, devoted to the history
of Lenore’s relationship with her great-grandmother:
Well, now, just imagine how you’d feel if your great-grandmother —great
it could really probably be argued in more than one sense of the word,
which is to say the supplier of your name, the person under whose
aegis you’d first experienced chocolate, books, swing sets, antinomies,
pencil games, contract bridge, the Desert, the person in whose pres-
ence you’d first bled into your underwear (at sixteen, now, late sixteen,
grotesquely late as we seem to remember, in the east wing, during the
closing theme of “My Three Sons,” when the animated loafers were
tapping, with you and Lenore watching, the slipping, sick relief, laugh-
ter and scolding at once, Gramma using her left arm and there was her
old hand in Lenore’s new oldness), the person through whose personal
generosity and persuasiveness vis à vis certain fathers you’d been over-
seas, twice, albeit briefly, but still, your great-grandmother, who lived
right near you—were just all of the sudden missing, altogether, and was
for all you knew lying flat as a wet Saltine on some highway with a tire
track in her forehead and her walker now a sort of large trivet, and
you’ll have an idea of how Lenore Beadsman felt when she was informed
that her great-grandmother, with whom all the above clauses did take
place, was missing from the Shaker Heights Nursing Home, in Shaker
Heights, right near Cleveland, Ohio, near which Lenore lived, in East
Corinth. (BOS 31, emphasis added)
In its hypotactic dimension, everything in this mini-novel of a sen-

tence is subordinated to what comes in between and follows from the
phrases (italicized above): “Well now, just imagine how you’d feel if
your great-grandmother . . . were just all of the sudden missing . . . and
you’ll have some idea of how Lenore Beadsman felt.” The casting of
the sentence considered hyptotactically is notable: although it com-
pletes the trajectory of its invocation to the reader to “imagine” how
Lenore feels upon learning that her great-grandmother is missing, it
relies on a form of rhetorical doubling in its recursiveness and ven-
triloquy to do so, as if the sentence (and its narrator, addressing the
reader in the second person) were unsure, despite the profusion of
“evidence” it provides, that its language is able to nail down precisely

how Lenore feels, as if it could not “imagine” on its own the affect it
names. Paratactically, the sentence induces a seemingly endless cycling
of equally recursive clauses that, we are assured, “did take place” (as if
the performative efficacy and historical positing of the language is in
doubt even as it unfolds), one clause leading to another, none gaining
ascendency in terms of its significance. One of several Proustian details
in the passage, the musical theme of the TV family sitcom “My Three
Sons,” which ran from 1960 to 1972, is heard in the background
(or, more precisely, you, the reader, are asked to imagine it playing in
the background) as Lenore menstruates for the first time. The fact
that “My Three Sons” depicts a motherless, all-male, yet idealized
heteronormative family of the 1960s in contrast to the dysfunctional
families of the novel, or that the partial subject of this nonperiodic
sentence is—in one of Wallace’s awful-yet-funny isomorphic puns—
Lenore’s period, may or may not be significant. The sentence reflects
the casual, laid-back complexity of Wallace’s writing, which here relies
upon certain kinds of narrative work to enact its sense and sensibil-
ity while, at the same time, putting into question its own capacity to
complete its project as a sentence. This is more than yet another ver-
sion of the postmodern reflexivity and recursivity that John Barth,
that most self-reflexive of high postmodernists, parodically character-
ized in the context of navigational star-gazing during a sea voyage as
“like that legendary bird that flies in ever diminishing circles until it
vanishes into its own fundament” (Sabbatical 321). In the language
of his fiction, Wallace is most concerned with bringing the reader in
on what might be termed the “inconclusivity” of language in its ten-
dency to always “imagine” that there is more than it can possibly ref-
erence. What might have been skepticism or despair in the face of the
recognized limits of language, caught up in its own self-recognitions
regarding linguistic agency and performative capacities, becomes in
Wallace’s hands a narrative invitation to the reader to join “him” (that
is, the narrator of the novel, or its many narrators) in engaging with
an empathetic and (always) incomplete project of inculcating person-
ality in the language of fiction.
(3) Simile/Metaphor. Like hypotaxis and parataxis, metaphor and
simile are obverse sides of the same figurative coin: while simile relies
on the connective tissue of a conjunction to make a comparison
between two seemingly unrelated or disconnected elements, meta-
phor is a form of verbal compression that transforms one element
into another (etymologically, metaphor comes from the Greek meta-
pherein, meaning “to transfer.”) What Wallace does with figurative
ALMOST A NOVEL 19
language in The Broom of the System and throughout his writing—in

effect, bending and breaking the rules implicit in the construction
of figures of speech—further suggests how he views language itself
as both limit and opportunity. In the passage above, recalling that
the reader is asked to imagine the scene of her great-grandmother’s
demise along with Lenore, the simile of “lying flat as a wet Saltine on
some highway with a tire track in her forehead and her walker now
a sort of large trivet” is a figurative mash-up that takes the generic
“squashed flat as a pancake,” exchanges it for a real-world commod-
ity recognizable to contemporary readers (a wet “Saltine” cracker),
and tentatively conflates it with an entirely dissociated old-fashioned
object usually placed beneath a hot serving dish to protect the
table upon which it sits from the heat (“a sort of large trivet”). The
comparisons engendered by the simile—disjointed, nonsensical,
defamiliarizing—draw attention to the sketchiness of the language
itself rather than enabling an empathetic connection to the vision of
the elder Lenore lying dead in the road. Yet what might be viewed
as a figural failure also becomes a means for enlivening a dead meta-
phor (“flat as a pancake”) and engaging readers in scrutinizing the
language we use to describe events, real or projected, as well as situat-
ing us within a specific cultural horizon. We are consumers of brand
names; we are inhabitants of a mediated world in which we more
readily comprehend death or accident in cartoonish terms; we dwell
within a contemporary culture that, as Wallace fictionalizes it, is an
assemblage or bricolage of dissociated objects, forms, projections,
and temporalities—one in which the Saltine cracker and the archaic
“trivet” (something of a blast from the past of the Victorian novel)
exist in adjacency as enjambed, and oddly inappropriate, descriptors
of an old woman lying in the middle of the road.
For Wallace, the force of figural language can be violent and hyper-
bolic: as Lang says to Lenore late in the novel, using a simile to do
so, “You just seem weird about [words] . . . Like you take them awfully
seriously . . . Like they were a big sharp tool, or a chainsaw, that could
cut you up as easy as some tree. Something like that” (BOS 398).
Perhaps the most elaborate figure of the novel occurs in one of
Rick Vigorous’s journal entries that records a conversation between
Fieldbinder and Dr. Jay in which Fieldbinder constructs an elaborate
metaphor for “self”:
Think of it this way, doctor . . . Think of the Self as at the node of a fan-
shaped network of emotions, dispositions, extensions of that feeling and
thinking Self. Each line in the protruding network-fan may of course

have an external reference and attachment. A house, a woman, a bird, a
woman. But it need not be so. The line that seeks purchase in an attach-
ment to an exterior Other is necessarily buttressed, supported, held; it
thus become small, weak, flabby, reliant on Other. Were the exterior ref-
erence and attachment to disappear, unlikely as that obviously sounds
in my own case, the atrophied line would crumble weakly, might also
disappear. The Self would be smaller than before. And even a Self as
prodigious as myself must look upon diminution with disfavor . . . Better
to have the lines of the fan stand on their own: self-sufficient, rigid, hard,
jutting out into space. Should someone find herself attracted to one of the
lines, she could of course fall upon it with all the ravenousness that would
be only natural. But she shall not be the reference. Only the ephemeral
night-insect, drawn to the light that is intrinsically inaccessible. She may
be consumed in the line’s flight, but the line still stands, juts out, rigidly,
far into the space exterior to the Self. (BOS 351)
Recalling that Rick Vigorous is voicing Monroe Fieldbinder in this

passage, the metaphor of self generated by Rick’s alter ego is a contra-
diction in terms that both reflects Rick’s voracious need to consume
“the other” and one that obliterates the boundaries of its figurative
construction. It is both mechanistic (the self conceived as a “net-
work fan” replete with rigid, phallic protrusions) and organic (it’s
octopoidal “lines” shooting out to grasp onto the other of house,
bird, woman, or insect). As a metaphor, this image of self-sufficiency
is weird, highly artificial, and nonsensical. If the point of metaphor
is to attach referent to object in such a way that they both appear to
be one (for example, in “a blanket of snow fell on the landscape,”
the domestic object is annealed to the event of snow falling in such a
way that artifice of snow falling in blankets seems natural and unre-
markable), then Fieldbinder’s metaphor of the self is an abject failure.
Instead of the metaphor working to naturalize the artifice, lulling
us into inattention to the literal (an image of actual blankets falling
from the sky would render the image of the snowy landscape absurd),
Fieldbinder’s metaphor has the reader scratching his or her head try-
ing to figure out how it works as a figure that conveys his (Vigorous’s)
sense of self as both fragile and dominating, both mechanistic and
organic, both self-sufficient and utterly dependent upon the “refer-
ent” of the other: what is a “network-fan” and what does it look like?
What are the “lines” of the fan and how do they become projec-
tiles attached to other objects? Only by doing a kind of violence to
the language—by, in effect, linguistically jamming square pegs into
round holes—is Fieldbinder able to make the metaphor “work,” but
ALMOST A NOVEL 21
then it only works as a means of showing up the paradoxical fragility

and tenacity of figural language. In the end, Fieldbinder’s metaphor
achieves the opposite of its intended effect: as a figure of speech, it is
self-destructive, and like much of Wallace’s reflexive rhetoric, speaks
to the incomplete project of reality to which Wallace contributes and
limns in his novel of incompletion.
* * *
As this inventory of its title, plot, and rhetoric suggests, The Broom
of the System encourages the reader to wander through a distended
and often dissociated series of conversations, stories, images, dreams,
landscapes, and tropes in pursuing the narrative of Lenore Beadsman
and her uncertain destiny, conveyed third hand.4 The novel com-
mends re reading, but not for the purposes of discerning the hid-
den connections missed the first time though that, once discovered,
would make everything hang together. To conclude with a final
comparison to Pynchon, in The Crying of Lot 49, an image of the
reader is presented in the figure of Oedipa Maas, the novel’s pro-
tagonist, who, like Lenore, traverses the novelistic landscape search-
ing for something that has been lost, but unlike Lenore, has been
trained as a New Critic at Berkeley in the 1950s, “mothered over”
in her “so temperate youth” by “Secretaries James and Foster and
Senator Joseph, those dear daft numina” who “had managed to turn
young Oedipa into a rare creature indeed, unfit perhaps for marches
and sit-ins, but just a whiz at pursuing strange words in Jacobean
texts” (104). While Pynchon’s novel pokes fun at the limitations of
the textual hermeneutist, this is, at the same time, precisely the kind
of paranoid reader The Crying of Lot 49 seems to demand—one who
ferrets out the stray connections and decodes the strange words and
hidden meanings with the sense that a final revelation that would
“complete” reality is at hand. The Broom of the System might be con-
sidered “post-paranoid” in this regard: though Lenore, like Oedipa,
suffers at certain moments from a sense that everything is conspir-
ing against her, and though there do seem to be some half-baked
conspiracies afoot, the landscape of the novel she inhabits is one that
refuses to “add up” to a finality or totality, a singular, comprehen-
sive plot, even if only in the offing. Against the simulated, broken,
and absurdist systems offered by such spectacles as the Great Ohio
Desert and the deep tunnels of the communication system underly-
ing Cleveland, Wallace posits a reality that contains multiple, par-
tial orders, languages, and selves. The novel points the way to the
writing that Wallace will pursue throughout his career—peripatetic,

curious, often incomplete and unvarnished, and open to surprise and
the grotesque—and to his readers, who scrutinize the particularities
of his work until it begins to mean 17 different things at once.
Notes
1. See Marshall Boswell’s illuminating consideration of Wittgenstein’s
and Wallace’s entangling ideas about the connections between words,
objects, selves, and worlds (Understanding 21–64); Lance Olsen’s
foundational (and frequently hilarious) essay on Wittgenstein,
Wallace, and the etymological association of the word “broom” in
“Termite Art”; and Wallace’s own Wittgensteinian commentary in
“The Empty Plenum.”
2. The longer passage from which these phrases come in The Crying of
Lot 49 reads: “The waiting above all; if not for another set of pos-
sibilities to replace those that had conditioned the land to accept
any San Narcisco among its most tender flesh without a reflex or a
cry, then at least, at the very least, waiting for a symmetry of choices
to break down, to go skew. She had heard all about the excluded
middles; they were bad shit, to be avoided; and how had it ever hap-
pened here, with the chances once so good for diversity? For it was
now like walking among the matrices of a great digital computer,
the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles
right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless. Behind the hieroglyphic
streets there would either be transcendent meaning, or only the
earth” (181). Pynchon’s obsession with semiosis as the permanent
condition of “the middle” is on full display here.
3. The classic (and, ironically, highly prescriptive) discussion of ency-
clopedic narrative is Edward Mendelson’s “Encyclopedic Narrative:
from Dante to Pynchon.” As an encyclopedic narrative, The Broom
of the System is much more flexible than the novels of Mendelson’s
model, which in his view aspire to modes of epic and national narra-
tive—that is, they aspire to a condition of systematicity that Wallace
clearly rejects.
4. An excellent discussion of the novel as a genre that entices wander-
ing and indirection is provided in Ross Chambers, Loiterature.
CH A P T ER 2
A Fiction of Response: Girl with

Curious Hair in Context
Kasia Boddy
Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived
its socially charged life.
—Bakhtin, “Discourse” (293)
Criticism is response. Which is good.
—David Foster Wallace (GCH 240)
David Foster Wallace’s second book, Girl with Curious Hair, is best
known for its concluding 144-page novella, “Westward the Course of
Empire Takes Its Way.” Along with Wallace’s 1993 essay, “E Unibus
Pluram,” with which it is often paired, “Westward” has come to
be seen both as a “manifesto” for fin-de-siècle fiction’s “next step”
(Boswell, Understanding 68; Cohen 72) and the key to Wallace’s sub-
sequent work. While not ignoring “Westward,” this essay argues that
the novella should be read in the context of the collection as a whole,
and that the volume itself should be read in the context of the place
and time of its composition: specifically that of the 1980s intersec-
tions between graduate creative writing programs and the “economi-
cally viable domains of serious middlebrow fiction” (McGurl 29).
Girl with Curious Hair can been seen both as an exemplary product
of what Mark McGurl has dubbed “the program era”—Wallace
wrote the stories while enrolled in the University of Arizona’s MFA
program—and as an interrogation of that era’s modes and mores. In
other words, as much as any literary critic, Wallace took his subject to
24 KASIA BODDY
be “the increasingly intimate relation between literary production and

the practices of higher education” (McGurl ix). He was an avid reader
of fiction by his MFA contemporaries, of the literary theory that then
flourished in the academic side of the English Department, and of
works of literary criticism that sought to ascertain the state, actual
and potential, of the American novel. Wallace made his own con-
tribution to that diagnostic tradition in a jeremiad called “Fictional
Futures and the Conspicuously Young” (1988). It was in this essay,
rather than “E Unibus Pluram,” that he first revealed his “intense
theoretical interest” in the forms, modes, and purposes of American
literary fiction (Lipsky 231), as it was and as it could be “some distant
hard-earned day” (GCH 332). In many ways, Girl with Curious Hair
reads like a companion volume to the essay, articulating its central
anxieties and offering preliminary solutions to the problems it raises.
Doing as Much as Possible

The short story became the staple of the writing workshop for several
reasons. In practical terms, short works are both faster to complete and
easier to discuss in class than long ones. At a public reading in 2005,
writing school veterans Chang-rae Lee and Lorrie Moore exchanged
stories about their teaching experiences. “You really don’t want your
students writing novels,” said Lee; “Absolutely!” Moore concurred
(New Yorker). But the workshop’s attraction to short fiction is more
than purely pragmatic. As Andrew Levy has noted, the short story is
widely regarded as the perfect “practice field” for apprentice writers,
being both formally easier than the novel—so that “beginning
authors, or authors whose ability to compose a sophisticated narrative
was otherwise impaired” might be able to have a go—and, in view of
its constraints, more difficult, requiring “greater discipline and skill”
(8). Short fiction, argues McGurl, offers “maximalism in a minimal-
ist package” (375): the task for writers is “to do as much as possible
within a very small space” (376).
The first thing that reviewers noted about Girl with Curious Hair
was just how much Wallace had done. The book’s “range” was par-
ticularly praised; the fact that each of the stories had “its own dis-
tinct style, its own set of rhetorics” (Alcorn 14–15). The narrators
include an elderly Jewish man, a middle-aged trailer-park resident, a
writing-school student, Lyndon Johnson’s personal aide, and a proto-
type American Psycho. Each was associated with a particular style of
writing popular at the time: for example, the title story takes on “blank
fiction”; “Everything is Green” is a version of what was known as “hick
A FICTION OF RESPONSE 25
chic” (Yardley); and “John Billy” reads like a homage to two works
Wallace would later describe as “direly underappreciated” (BFN 203):
William Gass’s Omensetter’s Luck (1966) and Cormac McCarthy’s
Blood Meridian (1985).1 In 2005, Wallace praised McCarthy’s “abil-
ity to use antiquated, ornate English in ways that don’t seem silly or
stilted” and said he was under “no illusion” he could do the same
(CW 156–57). In 1988, however, he wasn’t so shy.
As well as engaging with the literary trends of the 1980s, Wallace
also addressed metafiction, a 20-year-old mode that he interrogates
most directly in the book’s culminating novella. There he con-
fronts John Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse,” “American metafic-
tion’s . . . most famous story” (GCH 237), and, by using metafictional
techniques himself, tries “to expose the illusions of metafiction” (CW
40). In other words, “Westward” is a version, as well as a repudiation,
of “Lost in the Funhouse”—it’s not insignificant that it’s “nearly
six times as long as its source text” (Rother 218)—just as Wallace’s
“beyond postmodernism” statement, “E Unibus Pluram” has come
to be seen as the equivalent of Barth’s 1967 clearing-the-decks essay,
“The Literature of Exhaustion” (Boswell Understanding 9; Giles
Global Remapping 164). The emulation, I would argue, extends to
the level of the collection as a whole. Just as Barth arranged the stories
in Lost in the Funhouse in such a way as to lead the reader from con-
ventional well-made story (“Ambrose His Mark”) through a parodic
struggle to construct such a story (“Lost in the Funhouse”) to the
new beginning (“Menelaiad”), Wallace arranges Girl with Curious
Hair to culminate with “Westward.”2
Wallace’s ambition then is not the “neutral practice” of pastiche,
which Fredric Jameson defined as the “imitation of a peculiar or
unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask” without
“ulterior motives” (Postmodernism 17). His parodies, like Barth’s, are
designed both to demonstrate the “used-upness of certain forms, or
the felt exhaustion of certain possibilities” (Barth Friday 64) and to
act as a provocation to new forms. Robert Coover, another of Wallace’s
metafictional mentors, also believed that the variety offered by a story
collection—in his case, Pricksongs and Descants (1969)—enabled a
writer to dramatize the proposition that fiction was “at the end of
one age and on the threshold of another” by presenting both old and
new “modes of perception and fictional forms” (Coover 61–62). Girl
with Curious Hair similarly presents itself as a transitional work, “on
the cusp between two eras” (GCH 162). Its politics are the identity
politics of generation and its audience “kids our age” (GCH 263).
It is little surprise then that a recurrent tableau is the death of an
26 KASIA BODDY
old man observed, with detailed relish, by a young man—think of

David Boyd looking at the “sharp points of [Lyndon] Johnson’s old
men’s breasts” at the end of “Lyndon” or the company vice presi-
dent, seen by his subordinate, “with his mouth fishily agape, forehead
toad-white and sickly sour” in “Luckily the Account Executive Knew
CPR” (GCH 118, 50). The literary implications of these scenes become
clear if we remember Wallace’s characterization of elderly mimesis as
surviving “on life-support” (BFN 64) and his later “definition of good
art” as art that “locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s
human and magical that still live and glow” (CW 26). Should Wallace
pull the plug on what Paul Giles organically described as “sclerotic
humanism” (Global 171)? Or should he pump in oxygen and bring it
back to life? And what about almost-as-elderly metafiction? The col-
lection’s interest in patricide (which is never less than sympathetic to
the patriarch in question and with the condition of being a patriarch)
culminates in the displacement of “charismatic” Professor Ambrose
(Barth), emblem of the “preceding generation” (GCH 269), by the
young Mark Nechtr—as his surname suggests, a bit like Ambrose,
but also different. As Marshall Boswell notes, Wallace sets up his story
“in deliberate accordance” with The Anxiety of Influence, Harold
Bloom’s influential model of literary history as Oedipal struggle
(Understanding 103).
Like Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System, and, to some
extent, Infinite Jest, Girl with Curious Hair therefore represents a
kind of K ünstlerroman, a portrait of the artist’s growth through his
virtuosic engagement with other books. “Westward,” a story about
apprentice writers, makes those self-referential concerns explicit, but
they also occur in the more realist stories, stories that rely instead on
the time-honored method of “figural” embedding (Chambers, Story
33). Whether the “figure” is a concert pianist, a game-show panelist,
an engineering student, or an account executive, he or she is always
“representative in some sense of ‘art’ or of the production and recep-
tion of narrative” (Chambers, Story 33). For Wallace, the key ques-
tion that all these figures address is not simply “how to” write fiction
(the provenance of the writing schools) but “why to” write fiction
(GCW 237).
Fictional Futures for “Kids Our Age”

Literary history can sometimes seem like a continuous revolution,
particularly as we approach the present, when the temptation to act
“as if the beginning of a new decade in its own right dictated a new
set of cultural and political styles” (Lasch 53) becomes irresistible.

In 1980, when Wallace began his university education, that temp-
tation was stronger than ever. First, Ronald Reagan’s election was
seen as “somehow consonant with broader social, economic and cul-
tural transformations” (Thompson 4); then, on September 16, 1985,
“when the Commerce Department announced that the United States
had become a debtor nation,” some declared the end of the American
Empire (Vidal 17). In “Westward,” Wallace talks about Americans
of his generation as poised in “this awkwardest of post-Imperial
decades, an age suspended between exhaustion and replenishment”
(GCH 254).
Talk of a literary paradigm shift began even earlier. In 1982, for
example, Larry McCaffery published The Metafictional Muse, a sum-
mation of the achievements of William Gass, Robert Coover, and
Donald Barthelme. Praising these writers was a step toward bury-
ing them, as McCaffery also noted that “so-called artistic revolutions
have a natural span” and are “inevitably succeeded by a new artistic
climate generated by practitioners who do not share the enthusiasms
of the previous group and who are anxious to define themselves as
artists in new ways” (261).
The desire to make it new was particularly pronounced in the
nation’s universities that, since the Second World War, had established
themselves as the “center of artistic activity in America” (Myers 148).
McCaffery’s triumvirate were all Academicallybased: Coover at Brown
University; Gass at Washington University in St. Louis; and Barth
at Johns Hopkins (from which he had graduated in 1947). By the
mid-1980s, the writer-as-student-turned-professor had become the
norm—100 of the country’s 150 graduate writing programmes had
been established in the previous 10 years (Howard 34) and in 1983,
Barth estimated that the 2,500 “newly ordained fictionalists” were
produced annually (Friday 108). In 1987, Rust Hills, fiction editor
of Esquire, declared that the universities now supported “the entire
structure of the American literary establishment—and moreover,
essentially determine the nature and shape of that structure” (184).
By the time Wallace became a graduate student, as he himself noted
in “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young,” “rumors had
agents hunting prestigious writing workshops like pro scouts at Bowl
games” (BFN 37).
The quest for the “conspicuously young” began in earnest in
1984, after a 28-year-old editor called Gary Fisketjon launched a styl-
ish trade paperback series, “Vintage Contemporaries” (VC), with the
aim of presenting “the Best of a New Generation” to that generation.
28 KASIA BODDY
VCs received their first publication in expensive, desirable paperback

editions, modeled on, and marketed like, rock albums. The first book
in the series, Bright Light, Big City —by Jay McInerney, Fisketjon’s
classmate from Williams College—became a huge bestseller, and
soon agents and editors looked to secure similar works about, and
by, hip young people. At Bennington College, Brett Easton Ellis
“watched with a mixture of fear and fascination” as Less Than Zero
was transformed from “a student assignment into a glossy hardcover
that became a huge bestseller and zeitgeist touchstone” (Lunar Park
7). Bennington was a particular powerhouse of youthful produc-
tion—the class of 1982 also included Jill Eisenstadt and, coming later
to success, Donna Tartt and Jonathan Lethem—as was Columbia
University, where Gordon Lish, once Raymond Carver’s editor
at Esquire and Knopf, taught the likes of Amy Hempel and David
Leavitt.3 In 1986, Debra Spark introduced an anthology, 20 Under
30, by asking what features distinguished the “fiction people my age
write.” The most obvious answer was that “many are, or recently have
been, associated with universities or writing programs” (ix).
The stories that make up Girl with Curious Hair should be under-
stood as in no small part a response to this group of editors, writ-
ers, and teachers; they were written “under professors” (Lipsky 64)
but with an eye on the literary mainstream. Another important con-
text, however, was Wallace’s exposure to the academic side of the
English Department, where the study of “Straight Literature” had
been exposed to “Continental winds” (BFN 63). The rise of the cre-
ative writing program coincided with the rise of literary theory, or
“Theory,” and, as Marjorie Perloff noted in 1986, it often seemed as
if the study of literature had become a kind of battle “between the
Creative Writing Workshop and the Graduate Seminar in Theory”:
“The A Team accuses the B Team of writing impenetrable jargon and
pseudo-Marxist double-talk; in return, the B Team accuses the A of
being ‘soft and na ïve,’ and of failing to understand that all language
is mediated” (45). In “Fictional Futures,” Wallace (a product of the A
Team) aligns himself firmly with the B Team by name-checking a list
of “aliens,” including Barthes, De Man, and Lacan, whom “the con-
temporary artist can simply no longer afford to regard . . . as divorced
from his own concerns” (BFN 63).4 By 1988, as he pointed out, “lan-
guage’s promotion from mirror to eye” was “yesterday’s news.” Today’s
news, at least in the “leftist cultural world” (Lipsky 48) of Tucson
that Wallace frequented, was written by the likes of Fredric Jameson,
whose enormously influential essay on “the cultural logic of late cap-
italism” he quotes in “E Unibus” (SFT 65), and Donna Haraway,
whose sense of the “leaky distinction . . . between the animal-human

(organism) and machines” (10), provides a distinct leitmotif for Girl
with Curious Hair.5 In Team-B’s Theory seminar, discussion increas-
ingly turned away from linguistic matters toward what Jameson called
“ethical criticism” (Political 44). Ethics—understood, quite precisely,
as “the arena in which the claims of otherness . . . are articulated and
negotiated” (Harpham 394)—played a part in debates on everything
from Marxism, feminism, and posthumanism to postcolonial and
queer studies, and also clearly informs the concerns, characters,
and even the language of Wallace’s stories. In “Little Expressionless
Animals,” for example, Julie tells her girlfriend Faye that “lesbianism
is one kind of response to Otherness” (GCH 32), while “Lyndon”
imports otherness to produce an ethically (if anachronistic) revisionist
history. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson’s chief of staff, Walter Jenkins, had
been arrested for making “indecent gestures” in a YMCA restroom
(see Edelman); in Wallace’s story, LBJ is imagined instead sharing
his deathbed with the AIDS-stricken Haitian lover of his openly gay
advisor.
But for all that the new ethical critics believed that their work was
“conducted in the world” (Booth x), academic “Theory” remained a
paradigm of hermeticism in the popular imagination. In June 1987,
Jacques Barzun published an article in the New York Times, deriding
the fact that “communication was rare” between theorists and “the
public”: this was a shame, he concluded, because “language was not
invented for monologues.” Barzun’s article so offended Wallace that
he sent a response from Tucson. His letter is notable for two things:
first, Wallace’s emphasis on the point of view of “us young read-
ers and readees”; and second, its insistence that, “not all theorists”
were “trying to erect walls of impenetrability” around literature.
“Some,” he said, “might just be trying to come to grips with what
they love” (“Matters”). The binary Wallace presents here—between
the construction of defenses, and the attempt to breakdown those
defenses in the name of love—would soon become familiar to readers
of his fiction and essays.
“Westward” contains Wallace’s most direct consideration of the
relationship between Team A and Team B, not least in the Jamesonian
attack it mounts on “Field Marshall Lish”6 and “the pained product
of inglorious minimalist labor in countless obscure graduate writ-
ing workshops across the U.S. of A.” (GCH 265). The story con-
tends that the creative writing class is not a refuge from, but rather
an example of, corporate capitalism. Its products were not individual-
ized pieces of artisanal handwork (as the term “workshop” suggests),
30 KASIA BODDY
but, as one critic put it, manufactured mechanically and en masse

by an “assembly-line” (Aldridge 34).7 Metafiction in particular had
become as “familiar as syndication,” an idea that Wallace dramatizes
by aligning its academic “franchise” with that of the fast food chain
McDonalds. Much of the plot of “Westward” involves the “Reunion
of Everyone Who Has Ever Appeared in a McDonalds’ Commercial”
(GCH 235); the organizer of the event, J. D. Steelritter, has also been
hired to turn “Lost in the Funhouse” into a franchise of Funhouse dis-
cos. Wallace had taken Jameson’s argument that “aesthetic production
today has become integrated into commodity production generally”
(Postmodernism 4) and used it to show how metafiction had become
“meatfiction” (GCH 310); easily digestible and unnutritious.
The position of the writer in capitalist society was not, of course,
a new subject. In “Paraguay” (a story published in 1970), Donald
Barthelme imagined a world in which everyone would be given only
“as much art as his system can tolerate” and the artist’s product
would therefore be “minimized” and “air-dried,” his role reduced
to supplying a “variety” of “bulk art” for the purposes of “distrac-
tion” (133). Barthelme was not unaware that the scenario he depicts
could describe his own experience as a prolific contributor to the New
Yorker. When Wallace began to write journalism in the 1990s, he too
emphasized his position “as someone being paid” for his opinions
(Giles Global Remapping 168), but even as early as 1987 he had been
uneasily conscious of being an insider, a willing beneficiary of the
publishers’ obsession with the “conspicuously young.” In 1985, only
a few months after Ellis’s Less Than Zero became a succès de scandale,
Wallace sent a chapter of The Broom of the System, the novel that he’d
produced for his Amherst College undergraduate thesis, to a literary
agent, along with a letter noting that he was roughly the same age as
Ellis and Leavitt “whose fiction has done well partly because of read-
ers’ understandable interest in new, young writing” (qtd. in Max 65).
The novel appeared in Penguin’s “Contemporary American Fiction”
series in 1987, just as Wallace completed his MFA: “Westward” was
submitted “in partial fulfillment” of the degree on July 4. A month
later, Esquire magazine produced a graphic “Guide to the Literary
Universe” in which Lish and Fistekjon are placed at the “red hot cen-
tre,” along with Carver, who, we are told, “led a host of young dis-
ciples to embrace the minimalist style and the short-story form, the
two dominant trends of the last decade” (53); Wallace was included as
an “approaching comet.” Given this background, it’s hardly surpris-
ing that the stories in Girl with Curious Hair are so concerned with
the relation of the marketplace to the workshop.
Just This Side of Standing Still

There’s a word for people like you, Mark. “Minimal.” You never
really react to things. Even art.
—(GCH 251)
Minimal Mambo . . . the dancers appearing to be just this side of

standing still.
—( IJ 229)
“Three or four” of the stories that made it into Girl with Curious Hair
were originally “workshopped,” a brutal process that, Wallace later
admitted, gave him a “tremendous thrill” (Lipsky 263). His relish for
a fight might also have been a factor in Wallace’s choice of Arizona,
whose MFA programme he described as “incredibly hard-ass realist”
(Lipsky 47), rather than somewhere like Johns Hopkins known to be
sympathetic to other kinds of writing. Renamed in “Westward,” for
legal reasons, as the East Chesapeake Tradeschool, Johns Hopkins
ran a prestigious MFA presided over by John Barth, “Professor
Ambrose” in the story. Wallace later told David Lipsky that he “was so
in thrall to Barth” that becoming his student would have been “sort
of a grotesque thing” (4). By going to Arizona, in other words, he
could attack Barth from a safe distance while using Barth’s methods
against his own teachers, engaged as they were in “the Resurrection
of Realism” (GCH 265).8 Wallace’s “combative classroom man-
ner” (CW 92) meant that, whenever he could, he liked to subvert
the “good graduate-workshop story” (GCH 358). On first sight, his
break-up tale, “Here and There”—the “only really autobiographical
piece” in Girl (Letter to Steven Moore)—seemed a perfect example of
an MFA tale; until, that is, we get to the student-professor argument.
The protagonist, Bruce, is explaining (in some detail) the measures
he takes to keep his girlfriend’s photograph safe in his car when he is
interrupted by an instructor who reminds him that “fiction therapy,”
to be effective, needed “a strenuously yes some might even say harshly
limited defined structured space” (GCH 153). Bruce replies that
he’s not interested in that kind of well-made fiction—the workshop
product Wallace described elsewhere as “nice, cautious, boring . . . as
tough to find technical fault with as . . . to remember” (BFN 60)—
and continues in his digressive way. By inserting a “really blatant
and intrusive interruption,” as he was to describe such moments in
“Westward” (GCH 264), into “Here and There,” Wallace himself
32 KASIA BODDY
informs his readers (and teachers) that his story won’t be bound
by the conventions of the realist workshop and instead aligns him-
self with the locus classicus of metafiction, “Lost in the Funhouse,”
Barth’s exposition of the difficulty of saying something fresh about
“‘the problems of sensitive adolescents’” (Lost 92). Wallace took great
pleasure in the fact that contrary to his teacher’s judgment—Jonathan
Penner, he said, “absolutely” hated the story—“Here and There” was
published in Fiction magazine and then chosen for the 1989 O. Henry
Prize Stories (Lipsky 263).9
During Wallace’s student years, the opposition between metafic-
tion and what was known as the “new realism” or the “new mini-
malism” was often presented in stark terms. One of the starkest and
most influential of those statements was made by John Gardner in
1978, in a fiercely polemical book called On Moral Fiction. Gardner
argued for a return to what he called “life-giving” fiction and decried
much of the writing produced during the preceding decade as “triv-
ial” or “false” (Gardner 15–16.) The following year, William Gass,
Gardner’s former teacher, responded to the charge, and a debate on
the nature and value of fiction between the two writers appeared in
the New Republic. “I have very little to communicate,” said Gass, “I
want to plant some object in the world”; “I think [fiction] helps you
live,” said Gardner, “I think with each book you write you become a
better person” (qtd. in LeClair “William Gass” 47, 48, 52).
Although many dismissed Gardner as “creating illusory polarities”
(McCaffery 261), others championed him as a kind of standard-bearer.
This was partly because Raymond Carver, one of the most fêted writ-
ers of the 1980s, had been Gardner’s student (at Chico State College in
California) and often spoke of his debt to his professor, most notably in
“The Writer as Teacher” that became the foreword to Gardner’s 1983
“how to” book, On Becoming a Novelist. Echoes of Gardner can also
be heard in Carver’s various statements on the aims and purposes of
fiction. Introducing the Best American Short Stories 1986, for example,
he announced that “the day of the campy, or crazy, or trivial, stupidly
written account of inconsequential acts that don’t count for much in
the world has come and gone”; what he wanted was stories that “throw
some light on what it is that makes us and keeps us, often against great
odds, recognizably human” (xiv). We can find echoes of these remarks
in Wallace’s own published views on the value of fiction.
Asked by Larry McCaffery in 1993 about Carver’s “huge influ-
ence on your generation” (CW 45), Wallace was keen to distinguish
Carver himself (an “artist,” a “genius”) from the “movement” he had
initiated (CW 46). Indeed the distinction between “pioneers” and
what he called “crank turners, the little grey people who take the
machine others have built and just turn the crank” (CW 31), was one
that preoccupied him greatly. The problem with minimalism then,
was that, like metafiction, it lent itself so easily to the crank turning
or assembly-line production associated with MFA writing; it was “so
easy to imitate” (CW 46). Within months of the publication of What
We Talk About When We Talk About Love in 1981, MFA students
were “accusing each other” of writing Carver stories (Newlove 77).
In “Everything is Green,” Wallace attempted his own “low-rent”
tragedy (Carver Collected 323).
The story is set in a trailer kitchenette the morning after a rainy
night. Mayflower sits on a sofa lounger and keeps saying how green
everything outside is. The narrator, Mitch, however, notices puddles
gathering on a card table, among beer cans, and cigarette butts float-
ing in ash trays. Like Carver’s men, who often have “things” that they
want to say but then aren’t sure what those things “could possibly be”
(Collected 295, 326), Mitch “can not feel what to say” (GCH 229).
One of the charges that Wallace leveled against “catatonic realism,”
a phrase that he borrowed from the critic Alan Wilde (Wilde 119),
was that its protagonists were “blank perceptual engines, intoning in
run-on monosyllables” (BFN 40). In “Westward,” he decried mini-
malism’s “obsession with the confining limitations of its own space,
its grim proximity to its own horizon” (GCH 267). In “Everything
is Green,” though, the main problem is the difficulty one person has
in escaping the confinement of his own being: “In me there is needs
which you can not even see any more, because there is too many needs
in you that are in the way” (GCH 229). On one level, this sentence
reads like a parody of monosyllabic minimalism; on another, however,
it expresses one of Wallace’s most enduring and deeply felt preoccupa-
tions. Here the issue of solipsism is resolved when, in the final para-
graph, Mitch turns to look not at the pastoral scene but at Mayflower
herself, “and there is something in me that can not close up, in that
looking. Mayfly has a body. And she is my morning. Say her name”
(GCH 230). As Adam Mars-Jones notes, “minimalism in literature
always seems to play hide and seek with sentimentality” (15); but
that didn’t seem to bother Wallace. His critique of “neo-Realism” in
“Westward” concludes with a volte-face into endorsement: “it’s some
of the most heartbreaking stuff available at any fine bookseller’s any-
where. I’d check it out” (GCH 267).
Wallace was less ambivalent about the variety of minimalism
he dubbed, with reference to an upmarket department store,
“Neiman-Marcus Nihilism” (BFN 39), although once again he
34 KASIA BODDY
distinguished the pioneer—Less Than Zero, he said, was “very, very

powerful” (Lipsky 22)—from the crank turners. If wannabe Carvers
set their stories in trailer-parks, the Brat Pack that followed in Ellis’s
wake had only one subject—the “salon-tanned, morally vacant”
wealthy young, “none of whom seemed to make it from limo door to
analyst’s couch without several grams of chemical encouragement”
(BFN 39–40). Once again Wallace’s critical diagnosis was accompanied
by a parody, “Girl with Curious Hair.” The story personifies moral
vacancy in the figure of Sick Puppy, a short-haired Young Republican
who hangs out with, and buys drugs for, a group of curious-haired
LA punks; he himself can’t get high, can’t, indeed, feel anything
much (except when engaged in fetishistic sex whose appeal is rooted
in childhood trauma). Wallace is adept at mimicking the Brat Pack fic-
tion’s combination of “fake flash and punk and menace,” as Ellis later
characterized it (Lunar Park 11), and its tendency to describe charac-
ters “in terms of what brands of stuff they wear” (CW 26).10 One of
the first things the narrator tells us about himself is that he has “the
English Leather Cologne commercial taped on my new Toshiba VCR
and I enjoy reclining on my horsehair recliner and masturbating while
the commercial plays repeatedly on my VCR” (GCH 55).
The action of “Girl with Curious Hair” takes place at a Keith
Jarrett concert. As someone who can use his art to express a “life
story” of “special experiences and feelings” (GCH 66), Jarrett func-
tions as a “counterpoint” to Sick Puppy (Boswell, Understanding 81).
Jarrett improvises with “old melodies” so that “each of his piano con-
certs was different from all others” (GCH 66). Sick Puppy, however, is
mired in the uniform clothing, behavior, and language of his class. As
he can’t escape the inevitable progression of “prep school and college
and business school and law school”(GCH 58), so he is lingusitically
trapped in cliché—“like greased lightning” (GCH 58)—repetition—
“instantly the instant” (GCH 56)—and tautology—“pain and
unpleasantness are very unpleasant” (GCH 57). Unlike Mitch (who
at least can “say her name”), Sick Puppy can see no way out of his
“closed up” life: the limits of his language are literally the limits of
his world.11 The story ends “And here’s what I did”—a line, Wallace
told Steven Moore, that “is supposed to render performatively what
sociopathology-in-spectation is: seeing something horrid and not only
doing nothing about it but not even taking the trouble to say you did
nothing: the blankness after the line says it for you” (Letter).
Boswell argues that Jarrett’s improvised jazz performance “can be
read as a self-reflexive description of Wallace’s art” (Understanding 81).
But enlivening old melodies is only part of what Wallace wants to do.
His other ambition, as he suggested to Moore, was avoiding “specta-

tion.” The role model for this is Cheese, one of the punks and the story’s
“intelligent” and “curious” analyst-moralist (GCH 67, 68). Wide-eyed
behind his pink glasses (no unmediated access there), Cheese offers
theories on everything from Jarrett’s technique to the politics of punk
to Sick Puppy himself. More importantly, he has real relationships.
While Sick Puppy simply uses his friends for expensive thrills, Cheese
worries about their well-being. He looks out for Gimlet when she has
a bad LSD experience (GCH 69), and is genuinely “interested” in the
narrator “as a person” (GCH 64). Being a theorist need not be about
erecting “walls of impenetrability,” then; it “might just be trying to
come to grips” with something you could love.
The character of Cheese allows Wallace to go beyond parody of a
style that, as he said to McCaffery, simply dramatized “how dark and
stupid everything is” (CW 26). Although Sick Puppy proves incapable
of any response, Cheese’s attempt at intimacy and understanding is
the most positive aspect of the story. The necessity, and difficulty, of
communication is something to which Wallace returns repeatedly. In
“Say Never,” Wallace’s old-Jews pastiche,12 Lenny Tagus can’t speak
honestly to his mother but instead provides her with a “doomed exer-
cise in disinformation” (a letter) and “a torrent of misdirections” (via
the “electromagnetic communication with my flesh” that is the tele-
phone [GCH 220]). But the problem is not caused, only represented,
by technological mediation.
In “Here and There,” an engineering student called Bruce13
both distrusts his ability to “unlock” his girlfriend “like a differ-
ential” (GCH 152) and despairs of her capacity to understand “the
intimate importance of me” (GCH 156). Most of all, Bruce tells his
fiction-therapist, he’s “afraid of feeling alone even when there’s some-
body else there” (GCH 168). After breaking up with his girlfriend, he
retreats to the Maine woods. A Thoreauvian withdrawal, it is implied,
might enable him to find a way to “stop playing games with words in
order to dodge the real meaning of things” (GCH 166). Once deter-
mined to be “an aesthetician of the cold” (GCH 155), Bruce begins
to feel “the labor pains of a nascent emotional conscience” (GCH
165). He is “on the cusp of two eras” (GCH 162). Reading this story,
it’s hard not to think of James Joyce’s The Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man (1916) and another cool clever boy, Stephen Dedalus,
who, on the novel’s final page, records his mother’s prayer “that I may
learn in my own life . . . what the heart is and what it feels” (275). An
anxiety about their tendency to “bloodless abstraction” is one of the
threads that connect Joyce to Barth to Wallace (GCH 254).
36 KASIA BODDY
The subject is first addressed in “Little Expressionless Animals,”

the novella that opens the collection and that introduces many of its
preoccupations. Here we get a portrait of the artist as a young woman.
Julie Smith, a contestant on the TV game show Jeopardy, begins the
story as an aesthetician of the cold; like Bruce, she’s a “poet of tech-
nology” (GCH 155). While off-camera she is “expressionless” and
unable to communicate, once the show’s lights come on, her face
“radiates a sort of oneness with the board’s data” (GCH 17). She has
a rare power to “inform trivia with import”:
She makes it human, something with the power to emote, evoke,

induce, cathart. She gives the game the simultaneous transparency
and mystery all of us in the industry have groped for, for decades.
(GCH 25)
Julie represents a kind synthesis of the modes offered, in “Girl with

Curious Hair,” by Jarrett and Cheese. Like Jarrett, she is able to
express herself through second-hand materials—here game-show
trivia—but it takes her a little longer than Cheese to learn what the
heart is, to develop an emotional conscience. One afternoon, Julie
and her girlfriend Faye leave the studio and go for a walk-and-talk
through Los Angeles. Faye is worried about what to say when people
ask about her sexuality and so Julie makes up a series of possible,
increasingly complex and absurd, stories: “here’s one,” she says; “give
them this one” (GCH 33, 34). Soon Faye joins in, becoming even
more inventive. One story prompts another and eventually the tellers
become less concerned about what to “give” other people and more
focused on each other. Their exchange of stories is presented as a form
of love-making, the kind that Bruce can only dream about.
“ The Stake of the Other”14

In 1993, Wallace described Girl with Curious Hair as “a very tradi-
tionally moral book,” telling his interviewers that he was writing for
a “generation that has an inheritance of absolutely nothing as far as
meaningful moral values” and that “it’s our job to make them up,
and we’re not doing it” (CW 18). His problem, however, was how to
distinguish that project from the creative writing classroom’s “naive
pursuit of group therapy” (McGurl 308) and its affiliation with John
Gardner’s “moral didacticism” (CW 18, 26). As I’ve already sug-
gested, Wallace found an intellectually respectable alternative to “fic-
tion therapy” (GCH 153) in the ethical turn of the Theory Seminar,
in the work of critics like Haraway and Jameson. The contemporary

philosopher whose ideas, and affable tone, seem closest to Wallace,
however, is Stanley Cavell: in 1989, Wallace attended Cavell’slectures
at Harvard, and after he died, two of Cavell’s books were found in his
personal library.15 Cavell’s grounding in late Wittgenstein would have
appealed to Wallace, as would his emphasis on the strenuous “work
of becoming human” (New Yet 10) and his Romantic view of “the
everyday” as “an exceptional achievement” (Claim 463). There is no
space here to explore the connection in detail, simply to note that
Wallace too believed that the “ordinary” was less a starting point than
a “goal” (Critchley 38) and that he continually asserted how “distinc-
tively hard” it was to be “a real human being” (CW 26). These issues
in turn related to what he saw as the fundamental problem of mak-
ing a “meaningful connection to the world” (SFT 33); what Wallace
often calls “solipsism,”16 and what Cavell, in turn, describes as the
“metaphysical problem” of our “progress from narcissism . . . to the
acknowledgement of otherness” (Pursuits 102).
For Cavell, a more traditionally psychological moralist than
Jameson or Haraway, a prerequisite of making such a connection
was assuming “the responsibility of making myself known to oth-
ers” (Claim 351), which in turn entailed both the acknowledgment
of others who can know that self and a late-Wittgensteinian faith in
language as a public phenomenon; “the single most beautiful argu-
ment against solipsism,” said Wallace (CW 44). One character who
assumes that Cavellian responsibility is the actress who appears on the
David Letterman Show in “My Appearance.” Her husband tells her
to “appear,” rather than to “be,” relaxed (GCH 181), while a friend
advises her to “act as if you know from birth that everything is clichéd
and hyped and empty and absurd and that that’s just where the fun
is” (GCH 183). This is the Sick Puppy nihilist-minimalist solution,
but it’s one that the actress refuses. She is “a woman who lets her feel-
ings show rather than hide them” (GCH 185). “I was just the way I
am,” she says afterward (GCH 199). By “moving,” against all odds,
“into expression,” as Julie puts it in “Little Expressionless Animals”
(GCH 42), the actress makes a commitment to a kind of existen-
tial authenticity and refuses, in Cavell’s phrase, to regard herself “as
unknowable” (Claim 464).
If Wallace’s understanding of language as a “function of rela-
tionships between persons” (CW 44) owes a lot to Wittgenstein, his
sense of the nature of those relationships draws on an another early
twentieth-century figure, the Russian Formalist Mikhail Bakhtin.
English translations of Bakhtin’s works were published during the
38 KASIA BODDY
1980s and Wallace lists him as a stimulating “alien” in “Fictional

Futures.” Bakhtin’s understanding of the workings of language cen-
tered on the concept of voice. More specifically, thinking about voice
enabled him to distinguish between a “monologic” understanding of
language, which, he said, pretended that the context of an exchange
of words was unimportant, as if each utterance was “the word of no
one in particular” (“Discourse” 276), and what he called a “dialogic”
account. To think of language as “dialogic” is to recognize two fac-
tors: first, that there is no neutral point of view—“all words,” Bakhtin
said, “have the ‘taste’ of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a
particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the
day and hour” (“Discourse” 293)—and second, that the “expression
of an utterance” is always a response, expressing “the speaker’s atti-
tude toward others’ utterances” (“The Problem” 92), toward “some-
one else’s speech ” (Problems 185).
An opposition between the monologic and dialogic is repeat-
edly presented in Wallace’s early stories: at one extreme, Sick Puppy
reciting his life story in a way that “semi hypnotized” Cheese (GCH
73); at the other, Julie and Faye, lovingly exchanging utterances. For
everyone else in the book, however, dialogical intimacy remains an
aspiration. “Lyndon,” “Here and There,” “Everything is Green,”
“Luckily The Account Representative Knew CPR” all end with a
solitary voice calling out for a response. Or consider “John Billy,”
which initially offers itself as a conventional mimicry of oral, that is,
single-voiced, storytelling. The eponymous narrator has been given
a simple task: “Was me supposed to tell Simple Ranger how Chuck
Nunn Junior done wronged the man that wronged him and fleen to
parts unguessed” (GCH 121). Once he starts, however, things get
complicated—John Billy creates various metaphors and analogies,
decides to relegate parts of his tale to “etc, etc” (GCH 123), is joined
in his tale-telling by Chuck Nunn’s girlfriend Glory Joy, and corrected
on points of interpretation by Nunn’s adversary, T. Rex. John Billy
completes his “legend” but his ending is rather a pause as he offers
further stories—“now go on and ask me . . . go on” (GCH 147). This
suggestion that we’re still in medias res is the antithesis of the blank-
ness that concludes “Girl with Curious Hair.” Like Wallace himself
in his later, longer work, John Billy doesn’t want to stop talking, he
doesn’t want to say good-bye.
By considering his connections with the work of Cavell and
Bakhtin, I’ve drawn attention to Wallace’s deep interest in what he
saw as the fundamental difficulty of human interaction and to the
ways in which he presented that difficulty as metaphysical, moral, and
linguistic. But Wallace also, as perhaps was inevitable from a former

math student and tennis player, described the problem geometrically.
In “Luckily,” for example, two men leave an office building at the
same time and proceed to the basement car park in “parallel lines”;
despite differences in age and status, “they shared pain, though of
course neither knew” (GCH 48). Their paths, their lines, finally cross
when the Vice President in Charge of Overseas Production collapses
with chest pains and the Account Representative comes forward to
perform CPR. Intimacy, Wallace suggests, relies on proximity, but
it’s not clear just how much is optimal. In “Little Expressionless
Animals,” Julie tells Faye that “whole point of love” is to be “perme-
able” (GCH 13), “to get your fingers through the holes in the lover’s
mask” (GCH 32), but in “Lyndon,” the President’s wife, Lady Bird
informs the narrator that the word “love” refers to a relation between
“separate things” and that it therefore requires keeping some distance
(GCH 115). She and LBJ “do not properly love each other,” she says
because “we ceased long ago to be enough apart for a ‘love’ to span
any distance” (GCH 115). Lyndon himself imagines love as a federal
highway, “lines putting communities that move and exist at great
distance, in touch” (GCH 115). Other characters in the collection
struggle to ascertain the nearness that intimacy demands, the cor-
rect way to approach “there” from “here” (“Here and There”). As
Wallace put it in an essay about his tennis-playing youth, “geometric
thinking” is “the ability to calculate not merely your own angles but
the angles of response to your angles” (SFT 9). Off the tennis court,
it is an even trickier business: think of Cheese tentatively placing his
hand on “the wrist of the sleeve” of Sick Puppy’s coat (GCH 74), or
the leaning “across” and “in” that link Letterman and the actress,
the account executive and the company vice president, and Lyndon
Johnson and David Boyd (GCH 199, 52, 118).
Cavell describes the progress from narcissism to an acknowledg-
ment of others as “the path and goal of human happiness” (Pursuits
102); for Wallace’s characters, however, happiness remains elusive. The
outcome of “My Appearance” is the actress’s realization that she has a
more intimate connection with Letterman than she does with her hus-
band. In “Here and There,” Bruce stops “playing games with words”
(GCH 166) but ends up “afraid of absolutely all there is” (GCH 172).
“Lyndon” begins in a similar way, with David Boyd “burned-out
cool” and “empty” (GCH 77), and ends with him “marked for a . . . a
kind of frailty by the evident love and responsibility” he feels “toward
others” (GCH 112). “Responsibility,” the story suggests, is more
important than personal happiness; an idea that Wallace extends into
40 KASIA BODDY
a political context, when Boyd tells his Haitian lover Duverger that,
“in this nation,” need and responsibility are “part of love” (GCH 99).
Lyndon Johnson’s “love” (conceived in these terms) is then set against
the desire for personal fulfillment and expression that seems to drive
the “youths” of 1968. The story is sympathetic to Johnson’s remark
that the antiwar protesters need to “go be responsible for something
for a second” (GCH 107).17
Wallace often spoke of the relationship between writer and reader
as “very strange and complicated” (CW 62), but ultimately, he argued,
narrative voice was the key to creating “a feeling of intimacy” between
the two (Lipsky 72). What I’ve attempted to demonstrate in this essay
is the extent to which Wallace was a reader as well as a writer. In other
words, the first feeling of intimacy that he hoped to cultivate was with
the writers and critics whose work he admired. Each individual story
engages in what Harold Bloom calls a “strong misreading” (xxiii) of its
sources or manages what Bakhtin terms a “double-voiced discourse”
(Problems 199), while the collection as a whole stages a debate about
fictional futures. Ultimately, then, it didn’t matter whether Girl with
Curious Hair achieved a “Reunion of All Who’ve Appeared” or sim-
ply provoked a “Collision” between the “old melodies” of realism
and metafiction, creative writing and Theory, ethics and geometry.
Speaking in many other voices, Wallace had made an important step
toward the development of his own, inimitable (and soon to be much
imitated) voice—the ultimate goal of the writing workshop.
Notes
1. Wallace, however, claimed not to have read Blood Meridian until
later (Max 165–66). Larry McMurty’s 1985 bestseller about Texas
Rangers, Lonesome Dove, is another likely source. Boswell says the
story is “mock Faulknerian” (85).
2. Any reading of the book’s shape must take into account Wallace’s
prolonged negotiation with his editor, Gerald Howard. Although
Wallace later agreed with Steven Moore’s assessment that “Luckily,”
“Girl,” and “Here and There” were “weaker than the rest,” Howard
liked them and so he “traded” their inclusion for that of “John
Billy” and “Westward,” which “were supposedly ‘too hard to read’
for a commercial audience” (“Letter”). Wallace’s original lineup was
as follows: “Little Expressionless Animals,” “Luckily the Account
Representative Knew CPR,” “Other Math,” “Girl with Curious
Hair,” “Lyndon,” “Here and There,” “All Things to One Man,”
“Crash of ’62, ” “Say Never,” “Everything is Green,” and “Westward
the Course of Empire Takes its Way.” The scheduled publication at
Penguin fell through because of legal problems concerning the use

of real names in several stories; Wallace made revisions and Girl with
Curious Hair was eventually published by Norton in 1989. The col-
lection’s original title was “Long and Short of It ” (Max 87).
3. Lish appears as Stanley Flunt in Leavitt’s roman à clef, Martin
Bauman (2000).
4. Boswell discusses Infinite Jest ’s “elaborate and ingenious critique of
Lacan” (151–56).
5. Giles argues that Wallace’s work developed “under the intellectual
sign of posthumanism” (165).
6. A joke on Lish’s nickname, “Captain Fiction” (see Hempel).
7. Wallace picks up the phrase (BFN 61).
8. The “New Real guys” mentioned in “Westward” are John Gardner;
John L’Heureux, a former Jesuit priest who taught at Stanford; and
Frank Conroy, director of the influential Iowa Writer’s Workshop
from 1987 (GCH 265).
9. Lipsky mistakenly gives the story a 1988 award.
10. Although Wallace studied Less than Zero in an Arizona fiction survey
class, he later denied having read the book, claiming A Clockwork
Orange as the inspiration for “Girl” (Max 60, 73).
11. A paraphrase of Tractatus 5.6 (Wittgenstein 68).
12. Boswell says the story parodies Philip Roth (97–99) but Wallace’s
target might be a “minor” “crank turner,” Wallace’s unsympathetic
teacher at Amherst, Alan Lelchuk (CW 36).
13. The name Bruce for his alter ego might be a nod to Robert the
Bruce, the Scots king under whom Wallace’s “ancestor” William
Wallace served (Lipsky 168). There are also three Davids in the col-
lections (including Letterman).
14. Borrowed from Cavell “Othello and the Stake of the Other.”
15. Wallace’s personal library (held at the Harry Ransom Center,
University of Texas) contains Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness and In
Quest of the Ordinary. A copy of Gardner’s On Moral Fiction is also
there. On Wallace’s disillusionment with Cavell as a teacher, see
Max (132–33).
16. Ryerson argues that Wallace often used “solipsism” simply as “a
metaphor for isolation and loneliness” (27).
17. Compare Wallace’s comments on anti-Vietnam protesters, who
“may have hated the war” but “also wanted to be seen on televi-
sion,” and on post-1960s “cynicism about authority” (SFT 34, 62).
CH A P T ER 3
David Foster Wallace and the

Mathematics of Inf inity
Roberto Natalini
Most mathematicians agree that mathematics is the science of pat-

terns, and so it is possible to find mathematical structures more or
less everywhere. But if math is ubiquitous, then it is especially impor-
tant to locate the meaningful structures, rather than simply incidental
patterns, when approaching David Foster Wallace’s pattern-obsessed
fiction. Wallace used math to create something new in his work, but
it was not his systematic approach to all his fiction. Although there
are allusions to mathematical forms throughout his work—as in, say,
the Zeno-like movement of “Westward,” constantly approaching
but never reaching its zero-point destination—he claimed only to
be “someone with a medium-strong amateur interest in math and
formal systems, and . . . also someone who disliked and did poorly in
every math course he ever took, save one, which wasn’t even in col-
lege” (EM 2). Nevertheless, as Wallace’s interviews make clear, math-
ematics was partly a rhetorical tool,1 a distinguished expansion of his
already enormous vocabulary that helped differentiate between the
average reader and the reader with enough mathematical knowledge
to recognize that references to the hyperbolic functions, or to Fourier
and post-Fourier transforms, and other detailed discussions were not
always really meaningful. On the other hand, he considered math to
be one of humanity’s great cultural enterprises and was interested,
at a deeper level, in math as a language that could convey and trans-
mit beautiful and difficult ideas, a sort of reservoir that provided the
sometimes hidden narrative ingredients for his fiction.
44 ROBERTO NATALINI
To understand Wallace’s interaction with mathematics, let us start

from the end, with his book-length essay Everything and More, which
he considered an exercise in “pop technical writing” (EM 1). Although
Wallace explained in a letter to Prabhakar Ragde that his mathemati-
cal goal in this book was “not correctness . . . but simplicity, perspicuity
for a non-math audience”—thus addressing the audience problem
that he had outlined in an earlier review of what he called the “Math
Melodrama” (BFN 212–13)—Everything and More begins by tracing a
detailed history of infinity and mapping the specific complexities that
arise from mathematical abstraction. Amongst the simplest paradoxes
arising from abstraction is the Dichotomy, one of Zeno’s arguments
against the possibility of motion. Suppose a pedestrian wants to cross
a street: before she can get all the way across, she must reach the half-
way point; before she gets to that point, she must make it a quarter of
the way across, and so on. As Wallace explains, “The paradox is that a
pedestrian cannot move from point A to point B without traversing all
successive subintervals of AB” (EM 49). This circular paradox—what
Everything and More calls the Vicious Infinite Regress or VIR—is a
vital example for Wallace, because it is one of the simplest instances
where a philosophical problem was solved using pure mathematical
arguments. After many (often controversial) attempts to solve the VIR,
the paradox was rigorously resolved by Karl Weierstrass using the mod-
ern definition of the limits and convergence of a series, and by Cantor
and Dedekind via the construction of real numbers. As Wallace notes,
The Dichotomy’s central confusion is now laid bare: the task of mov-
ing from point A to point B involves not a ∞ of necessary subtasks, but
rather a single task whose “1” [the distance from A to B] can be validly
approximated by a convergent infinite series. It is the mechanism of this
approximation that Weierstrassian analysis is able to explain—meaning
really explain, 100% arithmetically, without infinitesimal analogies,
or any of the natural-language ambiguity . . . After Weierstrass, the
Dichotomy becomes just another Word Problem. (EM 195)
For Wallace, Weierstrass’s achievement provides a paradigm for facing

one of the central problems addressed in his fiction: how to escape the
vicious circle of the infinite regress to reach a more stable knowledge.
Mastering infinity was a way to escape the infinite circularity of word
problems, and it could even apply to Wallace’s obsession with escaping
solipsistic loneliness by communicating with another consciousness.
Wallace’s fiction acrobatically stretches in new directions—through
endnotes, footnotes, text boxes, and long digressions—to try to
THE MATHEMATICS OF INFINITY 45
transmit our branching, complex thoughts and feelings through the

linear, discrete form of written language. In “Good Old Neon,” a
short story that was written around the same time as Everything and
More, Wallace outlines this problem:
This is another paradox, that many of the most important impressions

and thoughts in a person’s life are ones that flash through your head
so fast that fast isn’t even the right word, they seem totally different
from or outside of the regular sequential clock time we all live by,
and they have so little relation to the sort of linear, one-word-after-
another-word English we all communicate with each other with that it
could easily take a whole lifetime just to spell out the contents of one
split-second’s flash of thoughts and connections, etc.—and yet we all
seem to go around trying to use English. (OB 150–51)
The countable universe of human language seems unsuitable to

describe the continuous reality of our mind. Is it possible to create an
accurate map of our mind in the mind of someone else? Everything
and More’s mathematical explorations are invoked by the word “para-
dox” in the preceding quote, and, in fact, Wallace’s technique adopts
a form that’s analogous to the Weierstrass-Cantor paradigm. “Good
Old Neon” presents itself as a proleptic narrative, and the narrator
tries to explain how communication works after death:
All the different words are still there, in other words, but it’s no longer
a question of which one comes first. Or you could say it’s no longer the
series of words but now more like some limit toward which the series
converges. It’s hard not to want to put it in logical terms, since they’re
the most abstract and universal . . . I don’t know if that makes sense.
I’m just trying to give it to you from several different angles, it’s all the
same thing . . . It’s the closest thing to what it’s really like. (OB 167)
Underneath this discussion of language, we see mathematics as the

model for the possibility of direct communication. Like the math-
ematical approach to infinity, where, Zeno’s paradox was eventually
reduced to a simple calculus exercise, Wallace hoped that “true” com-
munication could be obtained by finding the right concepts and ideas,
that is, the “good” definitions, to map and describe our thoughts in
a new and more effective fashion. In this regard, Wallace’s writing
might be seen as a serious attempt to create a sort of mathematics of
human thought. As in mathematics, we cannot just solve problems by
a straight reasoning, but we need to build up a whole set of tools and
devices—as for instance the idea of “limit of a series,” which makes
46 ROBERTO NATALINI
it possible to pass from the discrete and countable infinity of natural

numbers to the continuous infinity of real numbers—to prove and to
share our results. In a similar fashion, Wallace’s work adopts unusual
narrative perspectives—in this instance, commingling different time
periods (pre- and postdeath), but elsewhere mixing voices, narrative
levels, and styles—which can be considered comparable attempts to
use new forms to pass to another “level” of understanding that allows
the author to share complex feelings with readers.
Everything and More emphasized the emergence of Cantor’s math-
ematically rigorous and useful conception of infinity, which built
on Weierstrass, against the older, dead end, sense of the Vicious
Infinite Regress. Wallace emphasizes this opposition as one of the
main themes in his most mathematical novel, Infinite Jest. The VIR
presents looping arguments, trapping us forever in infinite cycles of
repetitions, and it is most often present in the novel’s obsession with
circles2 and elliptical movements. The lethal entertainment itself—
Infinite Jest—is a pleasure without exit, an endless “recursive loop ”
(IJ 87): people under the cartridge’s influence cannot escape and are
obliged to see the movie again and again in a fatal circle of addiction
and pleasure. Cyclic patterns are also crucial for annular fusion, the
source of energy which is one of Onanite society’s greatest techno-
logical achievements. Thanks to this process it is possible to create
energy by using waste materials, since it is “a type of fusion that can
produce waste that’s fuel for a process whose waste is fuel for the fusion”
(IJ 572). The origin of the idea of annulation is reported in one of the
novel’s mock autobiographies, when James Incandenza recalls helping
his father repair a bedframe. At the end of this long account, we fol-
low the boy into his room, where, by accident, the closet door’s brass
knob is struck by a falling iron pole:
The round knob and half its interior hex bolt fell off and hit my room’s
wooden floor with a loud noise and began then to roll around in a
remarkable way, the sheared end of the hex bolt stationary and the
round knob, rolling on its circumference, circling it in a spherical
orbit, describing two perfectly circular motions on two distinct axes,
a non-Euclidian figure on a planar surface, i.e., a cycloid on a sphere.
The closest conventional analogue I could derive for this figure was
a cycloid . . . But since here, on the bedroom’s floor, a circle was roll-
ing around what was itself the circumference of a circle, the cycloid’s
standard parametric equations were no longer apposite, those equa-
tions’ trigonometric expressions here becoming themselves first-order
differential equations . . . It occurred to me that the movement of the
amputated knob perfectly schematized what it would look like for
someone to try to turn somersaults with one hand nailed to the floor.
This was how I first became interested in the possibilities of annula-
tion. (IJ 502)
The appearance of this “cycloid on a sphere” has some interesting

ramifications. First, it explains the shape of the tennis academy.
Among the various mathematical structures mentioned in Infinite
Jest, the very first one is revealed in the third endnote, which explains
that “E.T.A. is laid out as a cardioid, with the four main inward-fac-
ing bldgs. convexly rounded at the back and sides to yield a cardioid’s
curve,” which gives the whole structure a “Valentine-heart aspect”
(IJ 983n3). A cardioid is a curve that lies in the Euclidean plane, and
is traced by a point on the perimeter of a circle that is rolling around
another fixed circle of the same radius (see figure 3.1). It is a special
case of an epicycloid, a plane curve produced by tracing the path of a
chosen point of a circle—the epicycle—which rolls, without slipping,
around a fixed circle. On the other hand, the curve displayed on page
502 of the novel is, mathematically speaking, a spherical cycloid,
that is a cycloid traced by a vertically inclined circle rotating along
a fixed plane circle. Both curves are generated by rotating a circle
along another circle in the plane, but the cardioid’s rotating circle
lies on the same plane, while the spherical cycloid’s rotating circle is
vertical. So, roughly speaking, the cardioid is just a flattened, two-
dimensional version of the spherical cycloid. E. T. A.’s shape, then, is
a symbolic tribute to the old inspiration of its founder, while it is also
a direct reference to a looping mechanism, a circle rotating around
a circle, which belongs to the first species of infinity, Zeno’s end-
lessly recursive closed loops. At the same time, there is also a clear
Figure 3.1 The cardioid. This curve is generated by a circle rotating around
another circle.
48 ROBERTO NATALINI
link to one of the novel’s precursors, Don DeLillo’s mathematically

inflected Ratner’s Star, which is set in a remote laboratory shaped as
a “cycloid” (15).3
All these looping structures share circular, bounded forms. To
overcome this kind of paralysis, Wallace looks toward the other kind
of mathematical infinity—with limits, convergence, asymptotes, and
so on—to go beyond our standard boundaries. We can get a deeper
sense of how such a conception of infinity functions in Wallace’s long
novel, by comparing a passage from Infinite Jest with an earlier pas-
sage from one of Wallace’s mathematically inflected essays. In Infinite
Jest, Wallace gives a powerful description of Cantorian mathematical
expansion, which holds both for the practices of tennis and writing:
Schtitt . . . seemed intuitively to sense that [tennis] was a matter not of

reduction at all, but—perversely—of expansion, the aleatory flutter of
uncontrolled, metastatic growth—each well-shot ball admitting of n
possible responses, n 2 possible responses to those responses, and on
into what Incandenza would articulate to anyone who shared both his
backgrounds as a Cantorian continuum of infinities of possible move
and response, Cantorian and beautiful because infoliating, contained,
this diagnate infinity of infinities of choice and execution, mathemati-
cally uncontrolled but humanly contained, bounded by the talent and
imagination of self and opponent, bent in on itself by the containing
boundaries of skill and imagination that brought one player finally
down, that kept both from winning, that made it, finally, a game,
these boundaries of self. (IJ 82)
This description of “Cantorian tennis” can be juxtaposed with a simi-

lar passage in “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley,” originally published
in Harper’s in 1990 with the revealing title “Tennis, Trigonometry,
Tornadoes”:
Competitive tennis, like money pool, requires geometric thinking,

the ability to calculate not merely your own angles but the angles of
response to your angles. Because the expansion of response-possibili-
ties is quadratic, you are required to think n shots ahead, where n is a
hyperbolic function limited by the sinh of opponent’s talent and the
cosh of the number of shots in the rally so far (roughly). (SFT 9)
While the Cantorian tennis paragraph appears as an extension of the

essay’s description, beyond the addition of the reference to Cantor, it
is striking that the reference to the hyperbolic functions “sinh” and
“cosh” have been removed. What Wallace is talking about is that, if
you want to predict the evolution of a game, this prediction becomes

more difficult and complex if (1) your opponent is good (sinh), and if
(2) you have already exchanged a lot of shots (cosh). In fact, the num-
ber of shots you have to think ahead rises exponentially with these
two factors. The function sinh(x) is the hyperbolic sine, and cosh(x)
is the hyperbolic cosine, so the exchanges between the players (which
we can think of as analogous to the exchanges between the writer
and the reader) traces the form of a hyperbola, which is subjected
eventually to an infinite expansion—“mathematically uncontrolled
but humanly contained,” in Schtitt’s words.
Another more direct reference to hyperbolas appears later in the
novel, in connection with its related figure of speech, after a heavy
drill session at E. T. A.:
“Exhausted, shot, depleted,” says Jim Struck, grinding at his closed

eye with the heel of his hand
...
“Beat. Worn the heck out.”
“Worn the fuck-all out is more like.”
“Wrung dry. Whacked. Tuckered out. More dead than alive.”
“None even come close, the words.”
“Word-inflation,” Stice says . . . “Bigger and better. Good
greater greatest totally great. Hyperbolic and hyperbolicker. Like
grade-inflation.” . . .
Hal raises his eyebrows at Stice and smiles. “Hyperbolicker?”
“My daddy as a boy, he’d have said ‘tuckered out”ll do just fine.”
“Whereas here we are sitting here needing whole new words and
terms.” (IJ 100)
The new generation needs different tools and words to communicate

familiar meanings—like the writers Wallace described in Capri, who
adopted “postmodern formal techniques for very traditional ends”
(“Le Conversazioni”), who tried, in short, to be “hyperbolic and
hyperbolicker.” In an early thesis devoted to the novel, Chris Hager
suggested that the figure of the parabola might provide an overarch-
ing structure for the novel (8–9, 20–24), but these references suggest
that the hyperbola (unlike the circular VIR, another open structure,
projecting to infinity) may provide a more suitable analogy for the
novel’s structure. Hal and Gately—Wallace’s two most contrasting
autobiographical projections—form the two branches of this curve:
Hal, the young overeducated son of a grammarian, is devoted to his
dictionary, drugs, and tennis; D. W. Gately shares his first two initials
with Wallace, and, like his creator, has to live in a halfway house at
50 ROBERTO NATALINI
the end of his twenties. They are close to merging in the middle of
the novel, when they live a few hundred meters apart, and the rela-
tionship between their stories is reflected in the novel’s larger double
symmetry: first, there is a mirror symmetry that Hager describes in
the parabolic narrative structure of the book (e.g., Poor Tony Krause
experiences a seizure around page 300, and then reappears some 300
pages before the book’s end); but there is also the inverse (hyperbolic)
relationship between Hal’s rise and fall, and Gately’s fall and subse-
quent rise. The hyperbola’s foci could be located in the Eschaton inci-
dent and Gately’s fight with two Nucks, which respectively occur at
1/3 and 2/3 of the way through the novel. The two protagonists, as
the two branches of the hyperbola, only meet beyond our view, which
is to say at infinity, a point indicated by mysterious clues placed at
the beginning and end of the novel. This seems consistent with some
comments Wallace made in an online interview in 1996:
There is an ending as far as I’m concerned. Certain kind of parallel

lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an “end” can
be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no
such convergence or projection occurred to you, then the book’s failed
for you. (qtd. in Max 321n19)
The expanding infinity is directed toward the reader who stands at

the “point of infinity”—that is, outside the book, from which vantage
point the reader can see the connection between Hal and Gately that
does not take place inside the novel. In this sense, the point of infin-
ity is being used in both a geometrical sense (the point where all the
stories asymptotically converge) and in the traditional perspectival
sense (a distance point of view). To understand what really happens
in the novel—why this projection at infinity it is not only a rhetorical
figure—we have to change our point of view.
Wallace had problems with his head; in addition to his well doc-
umented psychological difficulties, he also had problems with the
relations he found, or didn’t find, between the worlds inside and out-
side his head. The head, our “terrible master” (TIW 56), gives us
constantly the same point of view: we are alone at the center of the
universe and true communication with other human beings seems
impossible. The head is also the location of narcotic pleasure, as in
Gately’s experience with Demerol:
The mind floats easy in the exact center of a brain that floats cush-
ioned in a warm skull that itself sits perfectly centered on a cushion
of soft air some neckless distance above the shoulders, and inside all
is a somnolent hum . . . and what you feel is mostly gratitude at your
abstract distance from anything that doesn’t sit inside concentric cir-
cles and love what’s happening. (IJ 890)
In this case, the mind is disconnected, in a delusional but temporar-

ily happy state, from the external world. The situation is different,
however, when internal and external states start to interact and mix
together. The book begins with the Hal’s claim, “I am in here” (IJ 3),
and ends with Gately on a beach with the tide “way out” (IJ 981). This
inside/outside dynamic is one of the novel’s main narrative strategies,
and—as Dowling and Bell have observed—it represents a strong
philosophical concern that accounts for the frequent oscillations
between what a character sees as “in here” and what is seen as “out
there” (212). To find a “way out” of our interior loneliness was, for
Wallace, the main goal of literature, and was possible only through
an artistic perception of reality. Toward the end of Infinite Jest, Joelle
recalls discovering some sort of “flashes” in James Incandenza’s work
that “betrayed something more than cold hip technical abstraction”
(IJ 742). Repeatedly viewing his movie, Pre-Nuptial Agreement of
Heaven and Hell, she starts to sense a new meaning in a long static
shot of Bernini’s statue:
The whole film was from the alcoholic sandwich-bag salesman’s POV,
and . . . his head . . . was on-screen every moment . . . except for the four
narrative minutes the alcoholic sandwich-bag salesman stood in the
Vittorio’s Bernini room, and the climactic statue filled the screen and
pressed against all four edges. The statue, the sensuous presence of
the thing, let the alcoholic sandwich-bag salesman escape himself,
his tiresome ubiquitous involuted head, she saw, was the thing. The
four-minute still shot maybe wasn’t just a heavy-art gesture or audi-
ence-hostile herring. Freedom from one’s own head, one’s inescapable
P.O.V. (IJ 742)
The main strategy proposed by Wallace, in both Infinite Jest and This
is Water, his Kenyon commencement speech, is to radically change
our point of view so that we can escape from our heads. From a math-
ematical perspective, we can do this by performing an inversion pro-
cess, namely a process creating an exchange between the inside and
the outside, so that the world enters the mind and, at the same time,
the mind invades the world. Such an inversion of our point of view
arguably represents the novel’s main goal. In line with this goal, the
author carefully plans a narrative strategy to enter our minds, which
52 ROBERTO NATALINI
represents the consciously thinking part of the world external to the

author. At the same time, the novel offers a window into the author’s
mind: as Wallace said, originally of his nonfiction, “what I can do
is . . . slice open my head for you. And let you see a cross-section of
just a kind of average, averagely bright person’s head at this thing”
(CW 86). This is not simply a metaphor. If we look more closely at
the world depicted in Infinite Jest, what we find is an internal world
turned inside out.
From the perspective of biography, Wallace’s life experiences are
the bricks used to build a new kind of world: competitive tennis,
the halfway house, addiction, and depression. All the characters, on
some level, are shadows of Wallace’s real life: in addition to Hal and
Gately, there is Orin (who “wakes with his own impression sweated
darkly into the bed beneath him” [IJ 43]) and Mario (“basically a
born listener” [IJ 80], as Wallace was), the Moms, Marlon Bain, the
P. G. O. A. T. All these characters seem like projections of his per-
sonal experiences, refracted through a complicated medium. More
concretely, Infinite Jest ’s landscape is shaped according to this sort of
inverted geometry. E. T. A. is shaped as a heart, just near a “lung,”
which is regularly inflated. The M. I. T. Student Union is in the
shape of a great realistic brain-frame. Excreting activities are per-
formed in the surrounding neighborhoods. It is worth noting that
all of the “inverted” buildings—the cardioidal E. T. A., the lung,
the M. I. T. Student Union brain—are designed by the same person,
the famous (fictional) mathematician, and “Avril’s old and very dear
friend, the topology world’s closed-curve-mapping-Übermensch A.Y.
(‘Vector-Field’) Rickey of Brandeis U., now deceased” (IJ 983n3).4
On the other hand, in a generalized inversion, the outside—American
society, with its sadness and lethal search for extreme entertainment—
enters our minds, and the minds of the characters, revealing its deeper
nature to be just another form of addiction. It is interesting, there-
fore, to explore in further detail mathematical ideas that are naturally
connected with the inversion of internal and external worlds.
The concept of “inversion” has a precise mathematical meaning,
and has been intensively studied since the nineteenth century. It is one
of the elementary conformal (i.e., angle preserving) transformations5
studied by the German mathematician, August Ferdinand Möbius,
and it is defined as the plane transformation that maps each circle of
radius R on the circle of radius 1/R. For instance, a circle of radius 2
is mapped in the one of radius ½, and so on.6 To see the result of such
an inversion, we can consider the inversion of a common chess board,
centered in the origin (figure 3.2).
Figure 3.2 A chessboard after the inversion with respect to the unit circle.
The only fixed set in this map is given by the unit circle and so,
what is inside the unit circle is mapped outside, and the other way
round, and the point of coordinates (0,0) is formally exchanged with
the point at infinity by the inversion. Analytically, we can introduce
the standard (x,y) coordinates on the plane, and so the inversion trans-
formation is just the map defined by the new variables x’=x/(x 2+y2),
y’=y/(x 2+y2); when x=y=0, the mapped point is at infinity. Moreover,
there is a direct connection between Möbius transformations and the
Riemann sphere, a geometrical object named after the nineteenth-
century mathematician, Bernhard Riemann, which is obtained from
what mathematicians call the complex plane by adding a point at infin-
ity. Imagine a three-dimensional sphere lying on a two-dimensional
plane and consider the map from this sphere on to the same plane,
which is called a stereographic projection. This map is defined in the
following way: for each point p’ on the surface of the sphere, there
is only one straight line that also intersects the North Pole of the
sphere. This line has only one point p of intersection with the plane
on which the sphere lies, and this point p is the image according to
the stereographic projection of the point p’ (figure 3.3).
This transformation has a special feature: the North Pole itself will
be in correspondence with the so-called “point at infinity” on the
plane, since in this case every straight line intersecting only the North
Pole on the sphere is a tangent to the North Pole, and so parallel to
the plane, with no intersection with the plane itself. This way, any
set in the plane has a one-to-one correspondence with a set on the
sphere. Now, imagine the following operation, which creates a new
transformation of the plane. Take a point on the plane, and find its
map on the sphere. Then, move the sphere on the plane in a “regular”
54 ROBERTO NATALINI
North pole
Tangent line
P’ Riemann
sphere
Figure 3.3 The Riemann sphere and the sterographic projection. The point
p is mapped in the point p’.
way (for instance spin the sphere like a top, or just raise it along the
vertical axis) and map back to the same point on the plane. This cor-
respondence produces an important consequence: every elementary
conformal Möbius transformation of the plane is now associated in
a unique way to a movement of the Riemann sphere. In this associa-
tion, the inversion corresponds to the movement that exchanges the
position of the North and the South Poles. So the point at infinity
can rigorously take the place of the origin of the plane, just by turn-
ing upside down the Riemann sphere. It may seem, at this point, that
we are very far from Wallace’s natural territory. Yet, in Everything and
More, Wallace observes,
[in Riemann geometry] a line on the complex plane is the shadow

of something called the Great circle on a Riemann Sphere, mean-
ing a circle whose circumference goes through the R.S.’s north pole,
which pole is defined, literally, as “a point at ∞” . . . 0 is the Riemann
Sphere’s south pole, and ∞ and 0 are by differential geometric defini-
tion inversely related (because taking the inverse of a number on the
complex plane is equivalent to flipping the Riemann Sphere over—
long story). So that in Riemannian geometry, ‘0= 1/∞’ and ‘∞ = 1/0’
are not only legal; they’re theorems. (EM 177)
It is clear not only that Wallace was familiar with the Riemann Sphere
and stereographic projection, but also, considering these ideas in relation
with Infinite Jest, that we have a sort of visual explanation for the way
the novel alters our point of view. When the sphere is in the standard
position (the North, at the top) the point at ∞ is out of the plane, since
the line that intersects only the North Pole does not intersect the plane
(the author is a sort of deus ex machina, who imposes his vision, by
remaining out of reach). But when inversion takes place, what is at
infinity—the author’s point of view, and perhaps the author himself—is
mapped into the center of the stage; what was outside becomes inside,
and in this conceit we can “see” inside of the author’s head.
This Riemannian material may appear to be a meaningless coin-
cidence. Yet, we have seen that some curves can be seen as symbol-
izing different approaches to infinity: from Zeno’s infinity, flawed
by paradox and infinite regression, which is expressed in E. T. A.’s
cardioids, and by the lemniscate Orin traces on his Subjects’ flanks;
to the parabolas and hyperbolas, standing for Cantorian expansion,
the infinite potentiality of the relation between the text (or author’s
mind) and the world (or reader), as in Schtitt’s discussion of Cantorian
Tennis. Now comes a crucial point, which can hardly be considered a
coincidence: the curve obtained as the result of a cardioid’s inversion
is a parabola; the inversion of the leminscate yields the hyperbola. So,
during inversion we can pass from one kind of infinity to the other;
the way out from the cage of VIR can be found by passing to the
superior dimension of the Riemann’s Sphere. This may seem to be a
joke, little more than a metafictional trick to surprise the reader. In
actual fact, it is one of the essential mechanisms driving the narrative
fate of all the main characters.
Orin, for example, is submitted to a radical inversion near the end
of the book. The last time we see him, he is inside of an enormous
“inverted glass” (IJ 971, emphasis added), in the same position as the
roaches he asphyxiated in his bathroom: the bad dreams that have
occupied his sleeping mind have become a part of his waking reality,
and Luria Perec can now consider him as a “Subject,” in a total inver-
sion of his point of view.
Hal’s inversion starts during the Eschaton accident, when he “feels
at his own face to see whether he is wincing” (IJ 342). But in his case
there is a fatal problem, because there is no inside to exchange with
the outside. Wallace explains: “one of his troubles with his Moms is
the fact that Avril Incandenza believes she knows him inside and out
as a human being, and an internally worthy one at that, when in fact
inside Hal there’s pretty much nothing at all, he knows” (IJ 694). He
is smart, a great tennis player with exceptional cultural knowledge,
but he knows that “in fact he’s far more robotic than John Wayne”
(IJ 694). So, after the inversion, we find that the external Hal, or bet-
ter the collection of his past experiences, is completely sealed inside
56 ROBERTO NATALINI
his head. He is “in” there, but he is completely isolated and unable to

communicate with the external world, which, from his new perspec-
tive, appears to be empty and unreachable. He retains only the capac-
ity to play tennis, since this ability is now hardwired into his body.
Hal has now obtained a full citizenship in Schtitt’s second world, and
the mind is no longer in position to disturb his body.
Gately’s fate is to some extent the reverse of Hal and Orin’s. Aside
from the digging scene recalled at the start of the book (IJ 17), the
chronologically latest scene devoted to Gately is when “he felt an
upward movement deep inside that was so personal and horrible he
woke up” (IJ 974). The intrusion of the outside (the wraith) inside his
head happens at the end of a long route out of the cage of addiction.
Gately’s point of view has changed and the “upward movement deep
inside” stands as just the beginning of a process of rebirth, which
will follow a (failed?) attempt to divert the Continental Emergency.
Eventually, the narrative ends with a scene on the beach, which, even
if it precedes Gately’s meeting with the wraith in the novel’s chronol-
ogy, nevertheless suggests that for Gately the inversion process oper-
ated in a better direction and he really has found a “way out.”
In the case of James O. Incandenza, we can assume that his inver-
sion occurs at the moment of his suicide. To escape his head, James O.
Incandenza decides to put it inside a microwave oven. This action
provokes an almost instantaneous inversion of his head’s contents.7
Perhaps here Wallace is nodding at one of Ratner’s Star’s fake theo-
ries: after death, DeLillo writes, “there’s some kind of turning inside
out . . . An unknotting of consciousness in a space of n dimensions.
A turning outward” (242). The mind(/soul?) of J. O. I. expands out-
side in the world, thus becoming one of the main characters in the
second part of the novel. As a wraith, he “had no out-loud voice of its
own, and had to use somebody’s like internal brain-voice if it wanted
to try to communicate something” (IJ 831). With its mathematical
foundations in Riemann and Cantor, this description fits perfectly
with Wallace’s vision of the role of the literature. Even after la mort
de l’auteur, his voice is entering our heads.8
Notes
1. See, for instance, Wallace’s use of the invention of calculus to
critique Bret Easton Ellis’s work (CW 27–28).
2. On circles, see Burn, A Reader’s Guide (29, 41–42). With infinity
specifically in mind, Michael North sees the novel’s fascination with
incest as “the main pattern for this kind of infinity” (Machine 181).
3. Actually a cycloid is a curve traced by a given point on a circle when

the circle is rotating on a straight line, that is, the path traced by
the valve of a bicycle tube, while the bicycle is moving. Instead,
Infinite Jest ’s cardioid and spherical cycloid involve a rotation
along another circle, a rotation on a rotation. Notice also that the
book includes some other explicit references to Ratner’s Star. In
DeLillo’s novel, for instance, when Billy Twillig wins a Nobel prize
his mentor “did this trick he does with turning his jacket inside out
without taking it off. That’s all that happened” (314). This can be
compared to the scene in Infinite Jest, where A. Y. Richey “used
to wow Hal and Mario in Weston by taking off his vest without
removing his suit jacket, which M. Pemulis years later exposed as a
cheap parlor-trick-exploitation of certain basic features of continu-
ous functions” (IJ 983n3). These tricks are essentially the same one
from a mathematical perspective, since they rely on the same topo-
logical properties of the surfaces under continuous deformations.
4. A. Y. Rickey is also the only fictional person in the list of famous
mathematicians made by Pemulis (IJ 1072n324).
5. Other elementary Möbius transformations include dilations, rota-
tions, and translations.
6. Even if the mathematical concept of inversion is not part of a high
school student’s usual background, it is easy to understand. Popular
and elegant presentations of this idea can be found in some classi-
cal books, which are mentioned in Everything and More, such as
What is Mathematics? by Courant and Robbins and The History of
Mathematics by Boyer.
7. The brainwas probably blown out through one’s eye sockets all
around the kitchen walls, so that the skull might remain intact
(Schmidt). Let us also notice a further inversion: James Incandenza
(JI), produced Infinite Jest (IJ), which is just an inversion in a set of
two points.
8. I would like to thank Elisabetta Carcano (alias Laura) of the wallace-l
list for supporting me all the time in this research (and the wallace-l
list for existing). I’m very grateful to Chiara Valerio, who forced me
to present in 2008 a first elaboration about the relations between
Wallace and mathematics at the “Festival della Letteratura” in
Mantova, and to Stephen Burn, for his great help in preparing this
essay. I have also to apologize to my students and collaborators for
the time stolen from math. Don’t worry, I’m coming back!
CH A P T ER 4
“Webs of Nerves Pulsing and Firing”:

Inf inite Jest and the Science of Mind
Stephen J. Burn
Farragut was a drug addict and felt that the consciousness of the
opium eater was much broader, more vast and representative of the
human condition than the consciousness of someone who had never
experienced addiction.
—John Cheever, Falconer (43)
To make so much of consciousness may have been my first mistake.
—Philip Roth, The Anatomy Lesson (474)
David Foster Wallace’s second novel, Infinite Jest, had a long gesta-
tion. As Wallace explained to Marshall Boswell, he began the book,
“or something like it, several times. ’86, ’88, ’89. None of it worked
or was alive. And then in ’91-’92 all of a sudden it did” (letter). The
finished book “worked” and “was alive” to the extent that Infinite
Jest now stands, by common critical consent, at the heart of Wallace’s
oeuvre. As his longest book, the novel deliberately overloads generic
conventions, flaunting stylistic display and demonstrating an ency-
clopedic range of knowledge that courses through sport, national
identity, addiction, media theory, linguistics, and mathematics.1 Yet
for all the book’s intellectual plenitude and exuberant humor, it is
also an anatomy of melancholy, and as the millennial self inventories
its increasingly empty estate, the book becomes a harvest of souls,
chronicling different ways to suffer.
60 STEPHEN J. BURN
The novel’s many-sided construction has inevitably left it open to

a broad spectrum of critical approaches. Tom LeClair’s early study
addressed the book’s scale by articulating Wallace’s “radical realism,”
a technique predicated on a panoramic vision designed to register
personalities who remain only “background characters” in “most lit-
erary fiction” (“Prodgious” 32). In 2003, Boswell mapped much of
the book’s intellectual context, tracing Wallace’s intertextual dialogue
with Lacan, Kierkegaard, and William James. More recently, Jonathan
Franzen described the book in broader terms, seeing “annotation,
digression, nonlinearity, hyperlinkage” as the novel’s primary resis-
tance strategies to a technological monoculture (Farther 34). Yet even
as the book supports a multitude of different readings, and seems cer-
tain (as Charles B. Harris argues) to “ensure his permanence” (“David
Foster Wallace” 170), there are nagging problems in the text, frac-
tures in its surface, that disrupt our traditional expectations of nar-
rative cohesion. Such problems were apparent even before the novel
was published. In Fall 1995, Wallace sent a copy of the manuscript
to Franzen, and one part of his long response precisely located some
of the difficulties arising from the gap between the novel’s opening
sequence and the chronologically earlier scenes that follow:
I can’t quite figure it out on the basic story level. This is probably
my problem, rather than the book’s, so forgive the rawness of this
response . . . (Hal’s little communication problem in the opening
scene can be due to 1.) extrapolation of the problem he was having
in the lockerroom when we last see him in YDAU, 2.) later ingestion
of DMZ, or [conceivably] 3.) exposure to the lethal Entertainment.
Occam’s Razor invites us to look no further than possibility #1, mean-
ing that his weird facial expressions and submammalian utterances in
Year of Glad offer no clue about post-blizzard events.) . . . I understand
that this is all extremely crude summarizing of extremely complicated
themes; I’m aware of having only a small fraction of your capacity for
metaphysics and sustained close analysis; I’m tired and depressed and
oversmoked and slightly sick to my stomach today; I’m just trying to
get a handle on what has happened. But what does happen after the
blizzard? (letter)
Despite the novel’s critical and popular success, such questions dogged
Wallace for years to come: before the book was published, Wallace’s
editor Michael Pietsch protested the lack of resolution, prompting
Wallace to insist “that the answers all existed, but just past the last
page” (qtd. in Max 206), a position that he would later elaborate
upon in a letter: “We know exactly what’s happening to Gately by
“WEBS OF NERVES PULSING AND FIRING” 61
end, about 50% of what’s happened to Hal, and little but hints about
Orin” (qtd. in Max 199). Almost ten years later, the same questions
would prompt the same response, as Wallace insisted in a 2004 radio
interview that the novel “does resolve, but it resolves . . . outside of the
right-frame of the picture. You can get a pretty good idea, I think, of
what happens” (CW 145). While it’s possible to find theoretical justi-
fications for these claims, it’s notable that Wallace privately conceded
the point to Franzen, who recalls “that Dave admitted, when I spoke
to him on the phone, that the story can’t fully be made sense of, but
said that if I ever told anybody he’d admitted this he would deny he’d
ever said it” (email).
Yet if Infinite Jest ’s plot doesn’t exactly go where it’s meant to,
it’s nevertheless notable that the novel has been widely read as if its
vectors zeroed directly in on a larger goal: D. T. Max summarizes
the orthodox version of this reading when he argues that “Infinite
Jest . . . didn’t just diagnose a malaise. It proposed a treatment” (214).
For many readers, this is a tempting position to adopt, perhaps in part
because it outlines a utilitarian justification for reading such a dense
and complex novel, while it also seems to fulfill the programmatic
blueprint for fiction’s future that Wallace variously outlined in essays
and interviews.2 But despite the wide currency such views enjoy, it’s
notable that Infinite Jest ’s resistance to ordinary textual cohesion is not
a simple matter of plot, and an antiteleological spirit infects the entire
novel, refusing or parodying the notion of resolution or goal-reaching
on multiple levels.3 Such resistance is manifest even in the book’s
smallest narrative particles. Although Wallace often wrote with what
the novel calls “the aural landscape” in mind (IJ 583), creating care-
fully structured assonant sequences (“in pine-shaded twilight he is
almost glowingly white” [IJ 80]), one of the novel’s signature sen-
tence structures itself embodies this antiteleological spirit, as we can
see in the following example: “It’s hard to say for sure whether this is
even exceptionally bad, this tendency” (IJ 54). A micro model of the
novel’s critique of linearity, such sentences strategically depend upon
mildly unclear pronouns (“this”) to introduce a hint of ambiguity
that’s dispelled when the sentence reaches its resolution and the final
clause bends back to clarify the pronoun. The clarification, however,
is both semantically unnecessary and so syntactically awkward that
the sentence becomes more sclerotic than it would have been without
the final clause. As the book is built from sentence to sentence, such
small-scale syntactical torture forms a subterranean thread that ridi-
cules the value of both progress and a final revelation: Wallace’s style
here, as Robert Alter has argued in a different context, “is not merely
62 STEPHEN J. BURN
a constellation of aesthetic properties but is the vehicle for a particular

vision of reality” (4).4
This vision is extended in a number of the book’s thematic arcs
that similarly resist notions of linear progress toward some goal: the
idea that one moves “Straight ahead,” Gerhardt Schtitt insists at the
tennis academy, “is myth” (IJ 80); James Incandenza’s movies are
typically characterized by “no movement . . . that drew you along”
(IJ 375); Hal envisages a “hero of non-action” who will succeed the
postmodern age (IJ 142); while even the process of “cold fusion”
is based upon annulation equations that trace “gaps and incongrui-
ties” rather than a clear path (IJ 185). Moving beyond the novel,
this vision echoes through Wallace’s work. While his famous essay
“E Unibus Pluram” is too frequently considered a kind of skeleton
key to Infinite Jest, it, nevertheless sets out a similar dynamic when
Wallace challenges the facile assumption that “etiology and diagnosis
pointed toward cure” (SFT 67), an idea that is, in fact, so central to
Wallace’s thought that he repeats it in the Pale King (TPK 486). In
the world of Wallace’s novels, the diagnosis is painstakingly exact, but
the final steps—whether cure or resolution—hardly ever come.
The novel, then, is built around epistemic chasms, bottomless
voids that forestall the routine gratification of narrative wholeness and
whose implications ripple outward into the novel’s form and themes.
But if this design makes the novel-as-panacea conceit hard to accept,
an alternative approach to Infinite Jest is available if we focus less on
Wallace’s explicit (and often misleading) claims about his work, and
more on the concepts, language, and imagery that shape his explana-
tions of what he was trying to achieve. Shortly after finishing the
novel, for instance, Wallace wrote a short essay—eventually published
as “The Nature of the Fun”—that contains important clues about how
Infinite Jest works. Wallace begins his explanation with a metaphor
borrowed from Don DeLillo’s Mao II (1991):
[DeLillo] describes a book-in-progress as a kind of hideously dam-

aged infant that follows the writer around, forever crawling after the
writer . . . hideously defective, hydrocephalic and noseless and flipper-
armed and incontinent and retarded and dribbling cerebro-spinal
fluid out of its mouth as it mewls and burbles and cries out to the
writer . . . you love it and dandle it and wipe the cerebro-spinal fluid off
its slack chin. (BFN 193–94)
Although Wallace describes this set piece as a “perfect” trope for fic-
tion writing (BFN 193) in general, the metaphor can also be mapped
onto Infinite Jest to highlight three specific issues that help illuminate
the novel’s hidden skeleton. First of all, the borrowing from DeLillo
introduces the idea that a new work of fiction is not a discrete object,
but a point on a web or network that’s vitally connected to ancestor
works.5 This idea is underlined by the fact that DeLillo’s metaphor is
itself a second-order metaphor, first borrowed from William Gaddis’s
J R (1975), where Gibbs describes his interminable work-in-progress
as an “invalid” whose “eyes follow you around the room” (603). The
borrowing is only obliquely acknowledged in DeLillo’s novel—his fic-
tional novelist, Bill Gray, shares his initials with Gaddis—but the idea
of literary inheritance has been vital to critical appraisals of Infinite
Jest. Although the novel scathingly refers to “Professor H. Bloom’s
turgid studies of artistic influenza” (IJ 1077n366) and “mispri-
sion” (IJ 465), early readings of Infinite Jest stressed the extent to
which Wallace was deliberately offering a coded rewrite of (variously)
Hamlet, The Brothers Karamazov, and Joyce’s Ulysses.6 Yet even aside
from such large-scale parallels, the idea of creativity as the strategic
retooling of an earlier work is precisely embedded in references that
initially seem to be merely contingent details. When Hal’s father dies,
for instance, we’re told that Hal “listened to Tosca over and over”
(IJ 41), and this allusion functions on several levels. On one level
the opera’s famous “I lived for art” aria is surely being invoked, but
since Puccini’s Tosca is itself a revision of Victorien Sardou’s La Tosca
(1887), Hal’s rendition of Puccini’s rendition of Sardou, is itself an
example of a story being told “over and over”: this is infinity at work
in literary history’s closed field, constantly recombining a set of com-
ponents to create endless variations, and the way such small details
constellate into coherent patterns is just one sense in which the novel
(like Madame Psychosis’s monologues) “seems both free-associative
and intricately structured” at the same time (IJ 185).
The first link in the web proposed by Wallace’s essay takes us
back to DeLillo’s novel, and the minor variations between Mao II
and Wallace’s revision point to a second important overlap between
Infinite Jest and “The Nature of the Fun.” In the original sequence
in Mao II, Gray looks at a sentence from his work-in-progress “and
saw the entire book as it took occasional shape in his mind, a neu-
tered near-human dragging through the house, humpbacked, hydro-
cephalic, with puckered lips and soft skin, dribbling brain fluid from
its mouth” (55). Juxtaposing the original with Wallace’s reformula-
tion, it’s clear that the two passages are initially separable in terms
of each writer’s stylistic signature (DeLillo’s alliterative pairs; the
oppressive rhythm of Wallace’s paratactic construction), but Wallace’s
64 STEPHEN J. BURN
vocabulary also indicates a desire to be more precise in capturing a

language for deformity, and amongst many small changes it’s notable
that mere “brain-fluid” is upgraded to “cerebro-spinal fluid.” Like
Franzen’s exploration of “the medicalization of human experience”
in “My Father’s Brain” (How 19), Wallace’s passage reflects what I’m
going to argue is Infinite Jest ’s attention to the essential ways that
medical language and especially neural theories, invade and reorder
our relationship to ourselves.
Closely related to the passage’s neuroscientific overtones is the
third aspect of “The Nature of the Fun” that’s important to a read-
ing of Infinite Jest : Wallace’s willingness to see the various discrete
episodes and sections of a book as a kind of gestalt entity, forming
a body (in this case, an infant). Bodily gestalts are a recurring fea-
ture in Wallace’s fiction. Wallace begins his novelistic career with
such a gestalt, when Broom announces that “the people of East
Corinth . . . crawled and drove and walked” around a town shaped in
“the form of Jayne Mansfield” (BOS 46), while the ground beneath
the Bombardini building (metonymically, in this trope, the skin) is
thick with tunnels “like nerves” for “the city’s . . . body” (BOS 127).
Such images echo through the later books: Girl with Curious Hair
opens with the characters beneath a “bulbous and wrinkled and
shiny” gray sky that “looks cerebral,” (GCH 3), an appropriate set-
ting for a story that’s partly preoccupied with cognitive functions
(recall, explanation, assemblage of parts); as LeClair intuited in 1996,
Infinite Jest ’s topography similarly “resemble[s] a prodigious human
body” (“Prodigious” 35), while Broom’s tunnels are reprised beneath
the buildings that comprise the tennis academy.7 The pattern alters
to some extent in the Pale King, where the REC’s various elements
combine to make a “mosaic representation of a blank IRS 1978 Form
1040” (TPK 281), but even this gestalt has a bodily resonance given
that the novel’s epigraph blurs the meaning of form between bureau-
cratic paperwork and bodily form.
Such gestalts partly serve a comedic function: they are a kind of
cosmic joke about our failure to realize (in Richard Powers’s words)
that “the world isn’t simply taking place at eye-level view, there’s lots
going on above us and below us” (“Salon Interview”). But—taken
together—Wallace’s conception of a book’s web-like history, his
attention to the medicalization of experience, and the idea of the
book as a body, provide a composite lens that helps bring certain
aspects of Infinite Jest into sharper focus, clarifying both the novel’s
narrative procedures and many apparently cryptic aspects of the frag-
mented plot. Such an approach, however, does not exhaust the novel’s
meanings: Wallace’s fiction is always a product of a layered aesthetic,

designed to constantly generate multiple meanings depending on
which clues and interpretative layers the reader isolates.8 Nevertheless
the extent to which a biologizing, or medicalizing, impulse runs
through Wallace’s thought is striking, and is partially reflected by
a brief collation of the Wallace comments quoted earlier in this
essay: the book came “alive,” it can be seen as a living organism (an
“infant ”), the writer performs a “diagnosis.”
Turning to the novel’s title provides further support for this
approach: the title’s allusion to Hamlet obviously introduces the con-
cept of literary ancestry, while this allusion itself adds a focus on the
physical body, since the title stems from a meditation prompted by
a skull. It’s also worth noting here that Wallace typically embedded
homophonic puns in his titles, which were often built around acro-
nyms or shortened titles: “Good Old Neon’s” initials, for example,
yield the appropriately bleak homophone gone; omitting the article
and treating the Pale King as if it were a person’s name similarly
throws up P. King, homophonically suggesting the peeking that
underscores the posthumous novel’s obsession with vision and a “plu-
rality of eyes” (TPK 54).9 Continuing in this mode reveals a further
bodily dimension to Infinite Jest ’s title: in his notes for the novel,
Wallace would sometimes abbreviate the title to In. Jest, a homo-
phone, of course, for ingest.
Drawing on such biological undertones, we can think of Infinite
Jest as a zone in which a preoccupation with “living in your body”
(IJ 158) and a nested set of allusions come together to interrogate
and dramatize a range of theories of consciousness. If Wallace saw
fiction as an exploration of what it is to be a “human being ” (CW 26),
that exploration could not take place, for him, without reference to
neuroscience and theories of mind. From this perspective, Wallace’s
work seems to be built around what Oblivion calls “intricate exploded
views of the human brain” (OB 285),10 and Infinite Jest ’s specific
preoccupation is with forcing the reader “to learn how schizophrenia
manifested itself in the human body’s brain” (IJ 48). To understand
how the novel carries out this multileveled exploration, it’s necessary
to trace the novel’s biomedical skeleton—elucidating multiple
allusions to neuroscience and theories of mind—and to resituate the
novel within the “web” of literary history that Wallace constructs, an
approach that inevitably engages with his postmodern ancestors.
“Postmodernism,” Fredric Jameson famously announced, “is what
you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is
gone for good” (Postmodernism ix). But while many postwar novels
66 STEPHEN J. BURN
support his vision of “the consumption of sheer commodification as a

process” (Postmodernism x), nature persists in much postmodern fic-
tion through the movement’s often-overlooked negotiations with the
mind’s biological substrate. A neural foundation is insistently present
in many postmodern texts—from Joseph McElroy’s 1987 account of
fantasies of the “right brain” in Women and Men (298) to John Barth’s
increasing tendency to attribute behavior to “neurological . . . circuitry”
(Last Voyage 242–43)—but this tendency is palpable perhaps nowhere
more consistently than in Don DeLillo’s mid-70s fiction.
Viewed from a neuroscientific perspective, DeLillo’s third and
fourth novels— Great Jones Street (1973) and Ratner’s Star (1976)—
are atomizing fictions that imply that the self, under the concentrat-
ing pressure of neuroscientific theories, cannot be represented as a
unity, but must explode, distributing and isolating cerebral modules
not in a single character but across a range of different personalities.
I’ve argued elsewhere that Great Jones Street unfolds in this fashion
according to Paul D. MacLean’s Triune Brain theory, which DeLillo
most likely encountered in Nigel Calder’s study, The Mind of Man
(1970).11 In this model, the human brain is divided into three func-
tionally separate cerebral modules, which MacLean termed the rep-
tilian, paleomammalian, and neomammalian brains. These three
brains originate in three distinct phases of evolutionary history, with
each brain’s disparate processes reflecting the broad potentials of
their particular evolutionary moment. The reptilian brain is the old-
est cerebral unit, representing what Calder likened to an “old croco-
dile under our skulls,” and governing both basic fear reactions (the
binary fight-or-flight response) and reproductive urges (275). Next, is
the paleomammalian brain, which can be compared to a “horse-like
brain” (276), and is largely built around the limbic system, a neu-
ral structure that is “very much involved in emotional responses”
(276). At the very top of this hierarchy is the neomammalian brain
(effectively the cerebral cortex), which controls the special cognitive
strengths that distinguish humanity.
In Great Jones Street, DeLillo projects MacLean’s model on to the
three-level building that provides the main theater for the novel’s
action, and assigns one of MacLean’s cerebral modules to each of
the characters according to the floor they occupy. Thus in the novel,
Fenig is an exaggerated form of the cortex; Bucky Wunderlick is the
midbrain; and the Micklewhite boy embodies the reptilian complex,
with his character constructed around heightened fear responses—
the “fundamental terror inside things that grow” (Great Jones 51).
DeLillo reprises MacLean’s system in Ratner’s Star, imagining the
triune brain as a “model for examining the relative depths of proto-

historic and modern terror” (381), but he also supplements it with an
emphasis on split-brain research. Evidently drawing on Roger Sperry’s
studies of the opposed and complementary processing strengths of
the two cerebral hemispheres, characters in Ratner’s Star function
as individual representatives of qualities associated with each hemi-
sphere. According to this framework, the novel classifies Billy Twillig
as a character whose “right side of the brain outprocessed the left”
(195), while Robert Softly—one of Billy’s doubles—represents “a
parody of the left brain” (245). This atomistic approach to individual
psychology partly explains why Ratner’s Star, in particular, is so often
classified as a menippean satire, which, as Bakhtin argues, “destroy[s]
the epic and tragic wholeness” of the individual to test “an idea”
rather than “a particular human character” (Problems 116, 114). Yet
it’s vital to note that DeLillo’s treatment of neuro-rhetoric—whether
borrowed from MacLean, Sperry, or elsewhere—is neither simply
a passive transcription of their claims, nor an attempt to borrow
whatever scientific authority accrues to their viewpoints. Rather
DeLillo’s fiction creates a psychological matrix that draws on such
theories both to explore their incompleteness, and to force them into
dialogue with competing discourses, a strategy that’s most markedly
evident in Ratner’s Star, where neuroscience’s explanatory power is
set against Thomas Nagel’s famous critique of such materialist expla-
nations in “What is it like to Be a Bat?” (1974). In capsule form,
Nagel’s essay argued that no theory that attempted (like MacLean
and Sperry) to understand consciousness from a study of the brain’s
physical basis could “account for the subjective character of experi-
ence” (445): in effect, we could not understand what it was like to
be a bat purely from analyzing the physical structures of the bat’s
brain. Nagel’s specific argument is incorporated in the novel through
Maurice Wu’s belief that he can understand “bat consciousness” (394),
though the substance of his research—collecting bat droppings—
implies DeLillo’s skeptical attitude toward the physical basis of both
Wu’s theorizing, and materialist approaches to the mind in general.
But while Wu’s research program introduces Nagel’s argument into
the novel, the broader philosophical implications of this theory reach
their climax when Billy affirms the gap between quantifiable knowl-
edge and existence, insisting that “there is something between what
I know and what I am and what fills this space is what I know there
are no words for” (370).
In line with Wallace’s recombinant aesthetic, Infinite Jest can
be thought of as another gestalt, a millennial update and hybrid
68 STEPHEN J. BURN
reformulation of these two DeLillo novels. Critics have documented

both explicit allusions and overarching plot parallels that reach back
to both books,12 while Hal’s refusal of reductive theories in the open-
ing scene (“I’m not a machine . . . I am not what you see and hear”
[IJ 12–13]) closely parallels Billy’s claim that “I am not just this but
more” (370). Aside from such general overlaps, however, Wallace evi-
dently intuited both DeLillo’s compositional process of dramatizing
specific neuroscientific theories13 and his tendency to atomize those
theories across a cast of characters.
Wallace’s fascination with the mind’s material substrate—a vision
of “webs of nerves pulsing and firing” (IJ 168)—informs Infinite Jest
on several levels. The novel bases its concept of a lethally entertaining
cartridge on neuroscientific research carried out in the 1950s, while
there are also clusters of explicit references to, for example, Gilbert
Ryle’s The Concept of Mind (1949) and phrenology (IJ 521).14 Less
obviously, submerged allusions infiltrate all areas of the novel so that
theories of consciousness lie beneath the text like a watermark: thus,
an apparently incidental title in James Incandenza’s filmography
such as “Insubstantial Country” (IJ 992n24), does not just intro-
duce a movie about the mind’s biological basis (the film may docu-
ment a “temporal lobe seizure” [IJ 992n24]), but specifically invokes
Julian Jaynes’s term for consciousness (“the insubstantial country of
the mind” [1]) from the start of The Origin of Consciousness in the
Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976). The insubstantial realm
of consciousness is the true territory explored and interrogated by
all Wallace’s fiction, but in terms of DeLillo’s legacy, specifically, it’s
notable that MacLean’s triune model of consciousness seems to be
projected across the Incandenza children,15 unfolding according to
the following hierarchy:
1) Hal = the neomammalian cortex: characterized by what the

novel calls “coldly logical cognition” (IJ 322), Hal’s tendency to
be “overcognitive” (IJ 896) is emphasized in the novel’s open-
ing scene where low-level physiological failure—to speak, to
move appropriately—is compensated for by a display of abstract
thought, taking in Camus, Kierkegaard, Hobbes, Rousseau, and
Hegel (IJ 12). More comically, his emphasis on thought rather
than feeling is replayed when he visits the Inner Infant meeting
expecting to collect “serious data” (IJ 801). Representing the
opposing pole to Orin’s satyriasis, Hal takes “lifetime virginity”
as a “conscious goal” (IJ 634), and ultimately considers emotions
“to be like so many variables in rarified equations” (IJ 694).
2) Mario = the paleomammalian brain: primarily composed of the

limbic system, which Infinite Jest glosses as “the part of the
brain that causes all sentiment and feeling” (IJ 698), Mario is
unremittingly connected to relatively pure emotion rather than
cerebrally conceived contempt. As “the least cynical person in
the history of Enfield” (IJ 184), he admires Madame Psychosis
because she talks about straightforward emotional material,
“about heartbreak and people you loved dying” (IJ 592).
3) Orin = the reptilian brain: the first scene that takes Orin as a
central character begins by stressing his connection to the rep-
tilian past, as his body leaves a “fossilized image” on his bed (IJ
43). Orin is the book’s representative professional athlete, and
he insists that “the pro ranks” are where “you’ll understand
primitive” (IJ 243). He hates nail clippers, which Hal points
out is a further evolutionary throwback, since nails are “the ves-
tiges of talons and horns,” developing “long before the cerebral
cortex” (IJ 242, 257). As is characteristic of the “deep reptile-
brain level” (IJ 548), he is obviously connected to emotionless
sex throughout the novel.
These correspondences are suggestive rather than rigidly categorical,

since this is just one interpretative strata in a richly layered text rather
than a simple case of novelized theory. Yet the relative ages of the
characters parallel the respective histories of each cerebral module
(Orin, like the reptilian brain, is the oldest; Hal and the cortex are
the most recent to emerge), and the coexistence of three evolutionary
histories within a single moment might be linked to the scenes in the
novel that see time as not linear but static, the “annularized Great
Concavity’s No-Time,” a “clock with hands frozen eternally” (IJ 183,
558). Projecting MacLean’s theory in this way also illuminates a
dimension of Wallace’s characterization strategy: as in DeLillo, these
characters’ abilities are exaggerated within a narrow range to maxi-
mize their impact, while much of the book serves to underline the
failure of the cortex—as embodied by characters that “identify their
whole selves with their head” (IJ 272)—to operate in isolation. In this
respect, it’s notable that Hal, in particular, tends to function in binary
pairings that allow him to externally bolster the degree to which he’s
“asymetrically hobbled” (IJ 269): moving down the evolutionary
scales, he most frequently pairs with Mario, whom he “almost ideal-
izes” (IJ 316), and the “reptilian Michael Pemulis” (IJ 50, emphasis
mine). Taken together, the Incandenza boys represent the individual
neural components of a single person “broken into pieces and trying
70 STEPHEN J. BURN
to join” (IJ 952) and that the names, when laid out in this schematic,
yield another typically medical acronym—this is the book’s HMO,
albeit by negative example—seems consistent with the biological
framework introduced by “The Nature of the Fun.”
In fairly obvious ways, such splittings indicate an overarching argu-
ment about the need for unity and integration, over detachment and
isolated specialization (a position that’s, of course, elaborated in the
athletes’ outsized and asymmetrical bodies). Beyond the Incandenza
family, however, MacLean’s vertical axis is invoked through Gately’s
narrative as it stretches toward the unity that the Incandenza fam-
ily has lost. Introduced in reptilian terms as resembling a “young
dinosaur” (IJ 55), with a youth that’s closely connected to the leg-
endary past (the mock Arthurian epic of “Sir Osis” [IJ 449]), Gately
spends much of his early career with characters such as Bobby C, who,
we’re pointedly told, has a “flat lipless head, like a reptile” (IJ 919).
After his figurative rebirth in the amniotic waters at the book’s end,
Gately—unlike the Incandenzas—is able to move between cerebral
levels. He begins to remove himself from the world of addiction—
which Wallace nearly always outlines according to reptilian codes of
selfishness and fight-or-flight responses16 —and begins to experience
(and sometimes literally relives) life in the emotional terms of the
limbic system, as he “suddenly started to remember things . . . that
he’d barely even been there to experience, in terms of emotionally, in
the first place” (IJ 446).
But while MacLean’s model provides a tool to decode the
Incandenza family system and to reframe Gately’s story, the triune
brain also allows Wallace to reach beyond DeLillo’s example because
it introduces—at a relatively abstract neural level—a concept that
seems central to his work and thought: schizophrenia. The functional
separation between what MacLean called the three “biological com-
puters” (339) of his triune system, creates an internal conflict of inter-
ests that MacLean termed a “schizophysiology” in which we “look at
ourselves and the world through the eyes of three quite different men-
talities” (qtd. in Sagan 55). Burdened with a self that’s agonizingly
trisected between the sometimes conflicting processing strengths of
the various cerebral modules, MacLean’s model prompted Arthur
Koestler to announce that “man—normal man—is insane” (qtd. in
Calder 276). The divide between the brothers’ skills can be seen,
then, as indexing the family system’s schizophysiology, while in a
broader sense Wallace’s total body of work is noticeably filled with
references to internal division in general, and schizophrenia in par-
ticular. Whether Wallace is writing about cinema, weather systems,
or transfinite mathematics, schizophrenia is regularly called in as an

organizing trope in his nonfiction,17 while at the level of character,
his fiction is full of schizophrenics: Lenore laments in Broom that her
brother’s “still got this schizophrenic thing about his leg” (BOS 327);
The Pale King universalizes the condition, diagnosing “the split self
required by society” (TPK 540n), and describing Lane Dean as “bro-
ken and split . . . like all men” (TPK 42).
Viewed through a broader lens, Infinite Jest ’s fascination with men-
tal disorders forms a consistent current through the critical literature
devoted to the novel. LeClair saw “the noise of mental illness” as one
of the novel’s “conceptual bases” (“Prodigious” 34), while Catherine
Toal reads the novel in terms of an opposition between “two distinct
kinds of depression” (318). More recently, Mary K. Holland elucidates
Infinite Jest ’s embedded links between “medical incapacitation” and
physical “infantilizing” (235), Elizabeth Freudenthal argues that the
novel features “obsessive-compulsive disorder, ad nauseam” (195),
and Heather Houser diagnoses a “medicalized environmental con-
sciousness” at work in the book (139). Such readings are pertinent
to the novel’s thematic arcs, but it’s worth noting that the book’s
more subtle details merge Wallace’s medical subtext with further
webbed genealogies reaching toward his literary ancestors. Gately’s
incarceration betrays echoes of Roth’s The Anatomy Lesson (1983),18
but in terms of the novel’s overall development, it’s significant that
Lenz is the butterfly flapping its wings in the plot’s complex frac-
tal system: his actions disrupt Gately’s rehabilitation, thus bringing
him into contact with Hal, which leads to the 2009 exhumation of
James Incandenza’s corpse. Given such a pivotal role, it’s notable that
Lenz’s name is a double pun: in part, his name is a homophone for
lens, which ties into both the novel’s fascination with cinema, and the
more general act of vision, which I’ll argue is vitally connected to the
novel’s treatment of the mind; in terms of literary history, however,
he also shares his name with the eponymous hero of Georg Büchner’s
Lenz (1836), whose already unhinged mind—bereft of any “coherent
and sustaining relationship to the world” (Swales 100)—descends
into madness. The plot’s crucial escalation, then, is strategically
arranged to stem from a character whose name is synonymous with
mental illness, which places the misfiring mind as the novel’s engine.
In somewhat more specific terms, Infinite Jest also presents Wallace’s
most detailed exploration of schizophrenia and the divided self.
Self-division is ubiquitous in Wallace’s novel and is relayed on sev-
eral levels. Sometimes spatial movement reveals such splits, as in our
introduction to Erdeddy, which ends with the hapless addict trying to
72 STEPHEN J. BURN
satisfy two impulses at once “so that he stood splay-legged . . . entombed

between the two” (IJ 27). Elsewhere, a specifically schizophrenic divi-
sion is evoked by the book’s peripheral sport: when Orin feels that ten-
nis has left him a typically schizophrenic “psychic husk” (IJ 288), his
substitute sport—football—merely confronts him with a sport char-
acterized by “schizoid bounces” (IJ 289). Schizophrenic splits seem
inescapable, and—like most aspects of Infinite Jest —these divisions
can be parsed in multiple ways. Wallace’s favored term for a joint—
“duBois” (IJ 75)—can be read, for instance, as evoking W. E. B.
DuBois notion of “double consciousness,” a link that’s strengthened
by the shared centrality of certain key words—particularly veil —in
both texts. Equally the quality of “both ness” that Wallace locates in
David Lynch’s cinematic vision could be invoked (SFT 211), along with
the different ways that Wallace’s prose seems to be double-voiced.19
But more exacting parallels seem to point to R. D. Laing’s classic
study, The Divided Self (1960), which Wallace read and annotated
during the years when he was planning Infinite Jest.
Laing’s work is often classified as an example of antipsychiatry, an
approach that disdained routine therapeutic procedures, which were
deemed actively damaging, in favor or “a different way of conceptualiz-
ing and acting upon mental disorders” (Pickering 72). Such a position
has loose affinities with the scathing portraits of therapists that appear
in every Wallace novel, from Broom’s Dr. Jay, to the amateur counsel-
ing carried out in the Pale King by Meredith Rand’s manipulative
husband.20 More precisely, Laing’s own working procedure—what
he called “the existential-phenomenological method” (18)—is
effectively the process employed by novels in general and Infinite Jest
in particular: Laing sought “not so much . . . to describe particular
objects of [a patient’s existence] as to set all particular experiences
within the context of his whole being-in-his-world” (17), and the
wider implications of this approach provided Wallace with a skeleton
that helps organize the novel’s overall structure, demarcate the cen-
tral characters’ primary crises and histories, and allows Wallace to
reach beyond clinical histories to address the larger literary field.21
When studying a schizophrenic patient, Laing argued, “it is in terms
of his present that we have to understand his past” (32). Embodying
this dictum, Infinite Jest is arranged to preface its long excavation of
the Incandenza past with the chronologically most advanced narra-
tive unit, a decision that ensures that a reader can only get to the past
through the present. In line with Laing’s existential-phenomenological
method, this narrative present carefully sets up Hal’s “being-in-his
world” by emphasizing what Barth calls “texture.” As such, Wallace
devotes his prose less to “Special Effects . . . than [to] the descrip-
tive details” of his experience (Barth, Every 158), with fine-grained
descriptions of sensory data, and location.22 Again emphasizing a
holistic perspective, Laing stressed that the patient must not be con-
sidered “simply . . . abstracted from her family” but situated amid “the
total family constellation” (183, 189): thus, the book’s movement
into the past traces the family line back to the chronologically earliest
narrative sequence, which functions as the novel’s origin story. In this
scene, Wallace precisely locates a schizoid division as emerging from
the family system, when he reveals that James Incandenza’s parents
pressed him toward conflicting modes of existence: the mother char-
acterizing him in terms of his “scientific-prodigy’s mind,” the father
insisting “you’re a body” (IJ 159).
Such a mind-body divide—where a patient “experiences himself . . . as
a mind more or less tenuously linked to a body” (Laing 17)—is
Laing’s typical schizophrenic mode, and in addition to its temporal
organization, Infinite Jest is designed to explore schizophrenia against
a backdrop of different kinds of embodiment. This investigation
is introduced by the novel’s title—Hamlet ’s graveyard scene is, of
course, addressed to a skull that’s been separated from a body—
and the novel goes on to map a continuum of embodiment, with
individual characters (in a fashion that again recalls DeLillo’s atom-
izing precedent) representing different gradations along this scale.
Orin’s reptilian characteristics, for instance, might be reconceived
as one extreme within this range, representing the mind’s near-total
submergence in the body; Incandenza’s wraith, by contrast, presum-
ably stands as the opposing pole of pure mind. In this schema, Lyle
might represent some perfect midpoint: on one level he lives totally in
and through the body, even living “off the sweat of others” (IJ 128);
at the same time, he is—in a fashion that looks forward to The Pale
King ’s Drinion—a radically mindful character, able to use his body in
ways that suggest that mindfulness can transcend physical constraints.
Lyle’s fusion may partly explain why James (like Hal with Mario or
Pemulis) so frequently sought to offset his polarity by seeking out
Lyle when he was alive (IJ 375, 379).
The consequence of disembodiment, for Laing, is “people who
experience themselves as automata, as robots, as bits of machinery, or
even as animals” (23); such a condition is near universal in Wallace’s
novel, from the opening scene, where Hal sounds “like an animal”
(IJ 14), through the players whose heads are figured as “gears and
cogs being widgeted into place” (IJ 635) to the barroom paranoids
who insist that “most of these fuckers are—: metal people . . . under a
74 STEPHEN J. BURN
organic layer that’s micro-thin” (IJ 733). In this respect, the tendency
of Wallace’s fiction to imagine the body not as a living part of the self
but as a gestalt figure for understanding the landscape—as a map—
places us squarely in the world of the schizophrenic. As John Vernon
argued in an early study of literature and schizophrenia, the map is a
figure for the “transformation of the world into object” (14), and the
disembodying process presumably reaches its apex when the body is
objectified into a navigational tool for the mind. As reality is drained
of color, this disembodying process leaches outward and “the world
becomes a map of the world” (IJ 693).
The origin of such schizophrenic problems can be located, accord-
ing to Laing’s construction, in “early infancy” (77), when an indi-
vidual fails to develop an existential position of “primary ontological
security ” (39), that is, a “centrally firm sense of his own and other
people’s reality and identity” (39). Without such ontological security,
an individual is vulnerable to a variety of psychic traumas, including
what Laing calls engulfment, in which “the individual dreads related-
ness as such” and in which “the main manouevre to preserve iden-
tity under pressure from the dread of engulfment is isolation” (44).23
Such fears often stem from mothers whose controlling influence cre-
ates a child who cannot become an autonomous entity because he is
too busy being “what [the mother] wanted him to be” (71). In these
situations, the individual may try “to be nothing” (89) and can split
into an inner self and “a false-self system,” that is a “mask . . . that such
individuals wear” (73). The “false self of the schizoid person is com-
pulsively compliant to the will of others” (96), becoming “a response
to what other people say I am” (98). In a paragraph that Wallace
marked, Laing concludes that the “most extreme form” of such obe-
dience is “the catatonic” (102). Behind the mask, Laing finds (in
another passage Wallace annotated) a “shut-up self, [which] being iso-
lated, is unable to be enriched by outer experience, and so the whole
inner world comes to be more and more impoverished, until the indi-
vidual may come to feel he is merely a vacuum” (75).
Laing’s model is generally registered throughout Infinite Jest, and
Wallace alerts the reader to its seminal importance when he directly
incorporates the language and form of Laingian schizophrenia in a
passage near the end of the book in which Avril diagnoses Hal’s con-
dition for Mario:
There are, apparently, persons who are deeply afraid of their own emo-
tions . . . [of] engulfment . . . This interpretation is “existential.” . . . cer-
tain types of person are terrified even to poke a big toe into genuinely
felt regret or sadness, or to get angry. This means they are afraid to
live. They are imprisoned in something (IJ 765–66, emphasis added)
That Avril can so precisely diagnose Hal’s condition but not cure it,
is consistent both with the novel’s antiteleological spirit, and with the
larger sense in Wallace’s work that knowing a disorder’s etiology may
nevertheless offer little hope of alleviating the symptoms. Indeed, as
Wallace wrote to Pietsch, his book explored “clarification of ques-
tions > solutions” (qtd. in Max 193). Nevertheless, in line with Avril’s
diagnosis, Hal’s narrative closely follows Laing’s description: early
in his life, Hal’s primary ontological security is exchanged for outer
compliance as young Hal seems to be “trying as if his very life were
in the balance to please some person or persons” (IJ 999n76). Within
what the novel calls a “schizogenic . . . family” (IJ 1040n234), Avril
has engulfed Hal’s identity, as she’s “got Hal’s skull lashed tight to
hers” (IJ 1040n234). Under pressure of engulfment, Hal has already
flirted with the possibility that he might “be no one” (in the tran-
script of Tennis and the Feral Prodigy [IJ 175]), and his sense of his
own unreality grows during the novel’s final stages as he increas-
ingly seeks isolation. Although the “almost ontological” effects of
DMZ cannot be discounted (IJ 170), he fantasizes about “ontological
erasure” (IJ 689) and suspects that he exists as “postures and little
routines, locked down and stored and call-uppable for rebroadcast”
(IJ 966). Closely following Laing’s claim that the schizophrenic indi-
vidual will “come to feel he is merely a vacuum” (75), Hal concludes
that “inside [him] there’s pretty much nothing at all” (IJ 694). The
continuity from this condition to Hal’s state in the opening scene
seems clear: on a basic level, Hal’s communication problems at the
start illustrate Laing’s contention that “one of the great barriers
against getting to know a schizophrenic is his sheer incomprehensi-
bility” (163), while his barrage of allusions may also support Laing’s
claim that the schizophrenic deliberately uses “obscurity and com-
plexity as a smoke-screen to hide behind” (163). More specifically,
at the novel’s opening Hal is obviously in the midst of a radical dis-
connection between his mind and body, since he can think but can-
not turn thought into comprehensible speech, confidently summon
what “will be seen as a smile” (IJ 5), or even type without produc-
ing “some sort of infant’s random stabs on a keyboard” (IJ 9). Such
physical problems, however, do not explain why he is nevertheless
able to play high-level tennis (“On court he’s gorgeous” [IJ 14]), a
mismatch that presents—as Wallace scholarship attests24 —one of the
enigmatic opening’s most vexing problems. Yet one way to resolve
76 STEPHEN J. BURN
this apparent paradox is to read it as a vital and hidden clue point-

ing to the fact that Hal suffers from schizophrenia: tennis, Wallace
observed elsewhere, is a sport that requires a “schizoid” vision taking
in both “ball and court” (SFT 235), so Hal’s problems—as well as the
ubiquity of robotic bodies at Enfield Tennis Academy (ETA)—seem
counterintuitively to be perfectly calibrated for tennis success.
Laing’s theory, then, seems to comprehensively explain Hal’s
problems, and—critically—it does so in a fashion that has very little
to do with the gaps in the novel’s plot. Comprehension, in Infinite
Jest, comes not by moving forward, but by tracing where we’ve come
from, making visible both familial and literary genealogies. Yet while
schizophrenia forms a thematic nexus, drawing together sport, men-
tal illness, and family history, it also reaches beyond the tennis play-
ers toward the Ennet House narrative. Laing observes that while
the schizophrenic “self . . . is empty . . . one might call it an oral self
in so far as it . . . longs to be and dreads being filled up. But its oral-
ity is such that it can never be satiated by any amount of drinking
[or] swallowing” (144–45). In short, schizophrenia is a vital ancil-
lary to addiction: it makes sense, then, that Hal is described as “by
all appearances addicted to everything that is not tied down, can-
not outrun him, and is fittable in the mouth” (IJ 1074n332); that
Orin’s emergence from the same “family constellation” leaves him
feeling like “an empty . . . husk” (IJ 288) that drives him to his own
(albeit not necessarily oral) addiction; that the family’s patriarchs had
alcohol addictions; and that at Ennet House “schizophrenia is . . . the
norm” (IJ 435).
In overarching fashion, Laing’s model of schizophrenia outlines
an algorithm for character development and plot structure, but The
Divided Self also influences other aspects of the book, providing, in
particular, a governing metaphor that shapes the novel as a whole.
Viewed in these terms, Wallace’s narrative technique in Infinite Jest
might be thought of as a kind of schizo-narration that functions
within the novel on two levels. The first level is hinted at toward the
end of The Divided Self, when Laing quotes a patient’s explanation
that “schizophrenics say and do a lot of stuff that is unimportant,
and then we mix important things in with all this to see if the doctor
cares enough to see them and feel them” (164). This double voicing
can be considered the model for Infinite Jest ’s dialectical alternation
between narrative progression and digression, and while it has lit-
erary precedents—paralleling Joyce’s use of a “blurred margin” in
Ulysses (Ellmann 366)—as a governing metaphor, it makes the novel
as a whole read like an elaborate Laingian case history.25 At the same
time, Laing’s model also allows Wallace to draw visual perception

into the novel’s core concerns.
The schizophrenic—as conceived by Laing—is unusually
preoccupied with vision, and Wallace marked a passage in The Divided
Self where Laing argued that “no one feels more ‘vulnerable,’ more
liable to be exposed by the look of another person than the schiz-
oid individual . . . to the schizoid individual every pair of eyes is in
a Medusa’s head which he feels has power actually to kill or deaden
something precariously vital in him” (76).26 To some extent, this vul-
nerability helps contextualize the novel’s fascination with the medusa
and the odalisque, even as it crystallizes Wallace’s general conception
of fiction writers, who he described as “born watchers” who “dislike
being objects of people’s attention” (SFT 21). Yet even more directly
invoked is Laing’s earlier observation on this subject that “a schizo-
phrenic may see that he is made of glass, of such transparency and
fragility that a look directed at him splinters him to bits and pen-
etrates straight through him” (37). This description clearly supports
the idea that schizophrenia runs through the novel’s family system
since the so-called glass delusion is at different times attributed to
works produced by both Hal and his father (IJ 7, 989n24), while the
centrality of vision can also be considered a secondary aspect of the
novel’s schizo-narration.
Wallace connects the eye with the operation of the brain when he
revises the famous story of Phineas Gage’s brain injury (a staple of
most neurology primers), in a recurring image of a “railroad spike”
running through an “eye” rather than the left frontal lobe (IJ 485);
but James Incandenza’s movie, Kinds of Pain, more directly clari-
fies the novel’s relationship to the function of the visual cortex. As
Oliver Sacks has noted, “visual consciousness is a threshold phenom-
enon” (231n13), with much activity taking place below the conscious
mind’s horizons. The significance of such nonconscious processes can
be vividly illustrated when a movie is slowed down so that our rou-
tine experience of a fluid filmic narrative is revealed to depend upon
the nonconscious brain stitching together a series of static snapshots.
Kinds of Pain is a technical demonstration of exactly this fact, since it
requires “PROJECTION AT .25 NORMAL” speed so that it reveals
not movement, but “still-frame” images (IJ 987n24). Such a strategy
affirms DeLillo’s later claim that “human perception is a saga of cre-
ated reality” that’s engineered by “every eyeblink” (Point Omega 28),
but it also opens up opportunities to think about the way Infinite
Jest ’s structure unfolds: the novel’s emphasis on gaps and stasis rather
than fluid linear progress can be thought of as an analogy that draws
78 STEPHEN J. BURN
our attention to the static optical input that precedes conscious brain
function. Rather than focusing on narrative development, Wallace
invokes the example of preconscious input to make the plot “break
into frames” (IJ 608), and this visual analogy works in two direc-
tions, providing not only a structural model for the novel, but also
casting light on the role of Wallace’s reader. Wallace criticism has long
postulated that his work’s fragmentary nature might be a gesture to
the reader—suggesting that a representative reader is empowered by
incompleteness to the point that she has “participated jointly in the
game, instead of being on the receiving end of a barrage of authorial
poses” (Jacobs, “American” 226). Such a reading is hard to square
with the real ways that Infinite Jest does deliberately barrage the
reader, but the novel’s core investment in optical science provides
a way to reframe this relationship. If we take seriously the analogy
between the eye’s static snapshots and the novel’s structure as a way to
conceptualize the book’s obsession with vision, then we can see that
this analogy situates the reader as the brain process that stitches those
frames into a continuous whole. The logic underpinning this analogy
does not necessarily invoke brains to empower the reader, but rather
works in the opposite direction, by using the reader to comment
upon the brain. Just as the reader is forced to piece the static units of
the plot together in the hope of creating a soothing narrative whole
that isn’t really there, so Wallace’s optical trope works to reveal the
conscious mind’s dependence upon active processes that are forced
to alter and mediate our sensory input to create meaning rather than
presenting the mind’s eye as an unmarked lens through which we
experience reality. While Wallace’s work famously explores the con-
scious mind’s war against itself, with its obsessive “inbent spiral[s]”
(OB 181), his late fiction also displays an interest in neural operations
that take place “out of conscious awareness” (TPK 93). Prefiguring
such investigations, Infinite Jest ’s optical structure serves to highlight
the active brain’s dangerous—because unperceived—primacy at the
interface between sensory input and consciousness.
Viewed in terms of the medical framework introduced by the
“Nature of the Fun,” Infinite Jest seems to rehearse Laing’s theory of
schizophrenia, and juxtaposing the novel and The Divided Self brings
Hal’s problems, the dynamics of the Incandenza family system, and a
skein of related aesthetic strategies into sharper focus. But the impor-
tance of this approach isn’t localized to the novel’s internal devices
and personalities. Schizophrenia also functions as a supple tool that
allows Wallace to project his concerns beyond the limits of mental
phenomena to articulate both his place within, and his distance from,
the late century’s literary field. Fredric Jameson’s famous discussion

of schizophrenia in Postmodernism is clearly invoked in the novel, 27
but by drawing on Laing’s emphasis on ontological security, Wallace
also articulates a more nuanced distinction between postmodernism
and his own artistic blueprint. In Brian McHale’s lucid and influ-
ential model of the transition between modernism and postmod-
ernism, the two movements can be distinguished in terms of their
respective dominants : modernist fiction’s dominant is epistemolog-
ical, raising such questions as “What is there to be known?; Who
knows it?; How do they know it, and with what degree of certainty?”
(Postmodernist 9); in postmodern fiction, by contrast, “epistemology
is backgrounded, as the price for foregrounding ontology” (11), which
leads to questions exploring “what kinds of world” there are and how
they might be constituted (10). Though McHale contextualizes his
analysis within a rich and varied theoretical matrix, one of the major
sources of postmodernism’s ontological confusion is the rise of what
McHale calls “the plural ontology of television-dominated everyday
life” (128). Infinite Jest seems to deliberately replay McHale’s position
through the novel’s account of Steeply’s father’s inability to distin-
guish between reality and “a plain old television program” (IJ 639).
But even as Wallace reprises McHale’s theory, his novel also distances
it, by displacing the disorientation that stems from television’s “plural
ontology” onto a member of the previous generation, one of the nov-
el’s many fathers who, while largely absent, nevertheless continue to
orbit the book’s characters like satellites. Staying true to his first criti-
cal essay’s insistence that his generation required a different approach
to television than the figurative parents who “regard the set rather as
the Flapper did the automobile” (BFN 42), Infinite Jest incorporates
postmodernism’s world-multiplying conception of television only to
disavow its relevance to the current generation, while his novel instead
grounds ontological disruption in cognitive processes that do trickle
down from earlier generations.28
In his much-quoted 1993 interview with Larry McCaffery, Wallace
argued that “good art” would apply “CPR to the elements of what’s
human” (CW 26). To apply CPR , in this line, is generally taken as a
loose synonym for revitalize, but in terms of Infinite Jest ’s overarch-
ing engagement with brain function, mental disorders, and theories
of mind, CPR’s more precise denotation of a process that preserves
brain function seems more than coincidental. Much that seemed
excessive or digressive to the novel’s early readers appears, in light of
the novel’s invocation of medicalizing discourse and neuroscience, to
be tightly interwoven into a cohesive, informationally rich whole. Yet
80 STEPHEN J. BURN
this coherence is based around thematic, rather than narrative, unity,

and the novel employs its descriptive energies to provide a diagno-
sis but not a cure, because it is precisely the illusion that knowledge
alone can redeem you that Wallace sets out to discredit by splitting
MacLean’s model so that much of Hal’s helpless flailing can be seen
to represent the perils of an isolated cortex. The brain as mapped
by MacLean is fundamentally divided; the Laingian mind is prey to
neurotic splintering; but perhaps art’s best hope, in Wallace’s eyes, is
revealed by one last link back to an ancestor text and Georges Perec’s
conception of a different kind of fragmentation.
Perec is invoked in Infinite Jest through the shadowy figure of
Luria Perec, whose name is split in two directions as Wallace fuses his
literary forebear with a Russian neurophysiologist (A. R. Luria).29 But
while much of this essay has been devoted to exploring the schisms
connected to the neural half of this equation, Perec can be considered
a kind of literary counterbalance. On one level, Perec’s lasting influ-
ence on the novel might be connected to An Attempt at Exhausting
a Place in Paris (1975), which proposes to substitute straightforward
narrative for a cataloguing impulse that excavates “that which is gen-
erally not taken note of” (3), a process that has significant parallels
in both Infinite Jest and The Pale King. Yet the deeper connection
may lie in the preamble to Perec’s earlier novel, Life A User’s Manual
(1970), which opens with “a basic introduction to Gestalt” (xv).
Perec’s representative gestalt is the fragmented form of the jigsaw
puzzle, a solitary entertainment that—in Perec’s formulation—can be
set against the internal divisions traced by the century’s psychologies,
and seen as an interface between two minds. “Despite appearances,”
Perec explains, “puzzling is not a solitary game: every move the puz-
zler makes, the puzzle-maker has made before” (xvii). Drawing on
Perec, one way that Infinite Jest might function (in Wallace’s words)
as “an anodyne against loneliness” (CW 16)—a loneliness that stems
from our entrapment in the mind—is by simultaneously presenting
its readers with two puzzles: first, Wallace (like Perec) conceives of
narrative as a fractured puzzle that the reader must follow the writer
by attempting to re assemble (rather than collaborating with him in
its co-creation); and, second, he presents his characters as divided or
atomized selves in a fashion that encourages readers to trace the psy-
chic histories back to their schizoid origins. The emphasis on con-
nection that underlies the puzzle reprises the web-like vision that
underlies the book’s other obsessions—the endless links to earlier
books, the biological pathways between the “webs of nerves” that
embody the self—and Infinite Jest ’s thematic and narrative energies
insistently foreground connection, even as the book can locate, but

cannot replace, what the novel calls the “interior jigsaw’s missing
piece” (IJ 350).
Notes
1. It’s tempting to classify Infinite Jest ’s genre as a “novel epic,” by
taking the terms outlined in a book written by two Amherst pro-
fessors and dedicated to Dale Peterson, who oversaw The Broom of
the System’s emergence as an undergraduate thesis. Griffiths and
Rabinowitz’s Novel Epics (1990), focuses on Russian literature and
describes the form in terms that might equally be applied to Wallace’s
novel: such works possess a “double plot” that simultaneously out-
lines a story while alluding to its literary heritage (7); it is interested
in the “documentation of fallen empires” (9); it has connections to
cinema and ghosts (12, 16); it sees “time moving to apocalypse”
(18); and presents the perfect form for “novelists who want to over-
come . . . the anomie of their age” (18).
2. Mary K. Holland critiques this position in “The Art’s Heart’s
Purpose,” arguing that, in fact, the novel “fails to deliver on the
agenda that Wallace set for it” (218).
3. Wallace criticism has responded to this issue in a number of ways:
by working from clues in the text, Boswell argues that “there is no
conventional ‘release’ from the book, just as there is no final ‘release’
from the self” (Understanding 176); by moving beyond the text, and
juxtaposing the novel’s irresolution with Wallace’s biography, Samuel
Cohen argues that the novel’s “inconclusion” stems from Wallace’s
exploration of “what it is like to live ‘in the middest’ of history” (64);
disdaining the goal of explication, Jeffrey Karnicky reads the novel’s
narrative “breakdowns” (103) by seeking to “catalog kinds of stasis
[but] not with the goal of understanding them” (93–94).
4. For further discussion of Wallace’s sentences, see Sven Birkert’s dis-
cussion of the intermingling of comedy and anxiety in Wallace’s
“orchestrations of language” (7); my exploration of the aural quali-
ties of Wallace’s prose (Reader’s Guide 14–16); and Heather Houser’s
reflections on Wallace’s tactical use of the passive voice and “strings
of possessive prepositional phrases” (123).
5. Cohen has reasonably described Infinite Jest as employing “a voice
built out of old voices” (77), and as I trace the various webbed-links
backward from Wallace’s texts, I don’t want to suggest that Wallace
couldn’t write a novel without forcing in multiple allusions, nor that
he simply distilled earlier achievements in some facile imitation.
Wallace, as I’ll try to demonstrate in this essay, saw such references as
performing very specific functions, and when a fellow writer accused
him of taking elements from his work he replied: “‘Your whole idea of
82 STEPHEN J. BURN
‘ripping off” seems a bit extreme and oversensitive, actually . . . Trust

me: there are all sorts of weird bits and toss-offs from all over the place
in that story . . . if you don’t get at least 50% of your toss-offs from the
world around you—either observation, or somebody’s anecdote, or
little snippets of other peoples art—all I can tell you is you’re a very
unusual fellow.”
6. Boswell’s Understanding discusses the novel’s relationship to
Shakespeare and Dostoevsky (165–69); building on Boswell,
Timothy Jacobs reads the novel as “a transposition of The Brothers
Karamazov ” (266); my Reader’s Guide explores the novel’s relation
to Joyce’s work (24–28).
7. Essays by Natalini and Quinn in this volume consider Infinite Jest ’s
bodily geography in more detail. In a related fashion, my 2004 essay
“The Machine-Language of the Muscles” (later collected in revised
form in my Reader’s Guide), argues that Infinite Jest unfolds accord-
ing to a kind of psychic geography, where places are specifically refer-
enced to highlight the novel’s larger argument about the self.
8. Max notes that Wallace “reveled in Jacques Derrida’s essays, ‘The
Double Session’ and ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’” (38), and the novelist may
have found theoretical justification for the way his novel refuses to
privilege any single interpretation in the infinite play of signification
explored in those texts.
9. Eyes are mentioned more than one hundred times in The Pale King.
10. In “A Paradigm for the Life of Consciousness,” for example, I
examine the way The Pale King develops a model informed by what
Timothy Wilson calls “the adaptive unconscious.”
11. For a full account of DeLillo’s engagement with neuroscience in this
novel, see Burn, “Don DeLillo’s Great Jones Street and the Science of
Mind.”
12. Jeremy Green’s Late Postmodernism (2005) observes that Infinite
Jest “includes allusions to DeLillo’s early work, notably End Zone
and Ratner’s Star ” (218n10). See also, my Reader’s Guide (26, 35,
69–70). In a further link, Hal and Gately’s parallel relationship is
stressed by the fact that the younger man is mostly known by his first
name while the older man is known by his last; equally, in Ratner’s
Star, Billy Terwilliger is known as Billy, while his mentor, Robert
Hopper Softly, is typically referred to by his last name.
13. Wallace, in fact, annotated one passage in his copy of Ratner’s Star
with the name “Nagel.”
14. For the lethal entertainment’s basis in experiments by James Olds,
see Burn, A Reader’s Guide (3, 105n4). For Ryle, see the same text
(71–75). In earlier essays, I’ve stressed different aspects of Infinite
Jest ’s dualisms. The reading in this essay is intended to comple-
ment, rather than supersede those readings, since the different essays
address different interpretative layers of Wallace’s complicated novel.
15. Whether derived from DeLillo or not, the triune model seems to
have wide currency in Wallace’s generation, and is clearly invoked
in Franzen’s description of Midland Pacific’s headquarters in the
Corrections (351), while it’s also an animating presence in Powers’s
The Echo Maker (2006).
16. In this respect, an echo of MacLean’s “old crocodile under our
skulls,” may be intended in the description of the former addicts who
are associated with the distant past: “the old ruined grim calm long-
timers . . . ‘The Crocodiles’” (IJ 354, emphasis added).
17. A Supposedly Fun Thing figures Lynch’s Lost Highway as representing
“schizophrenia performatively ” (SFT 184), and describes the Illinois
wind as “schizophrenic” (SFT 10); Wallace’s account of Cantor diag-
noses an “abstraction-schizophrenia” that we owe to the Greeks (EM
30n18).
18. As far as narcotics go, for example, Gately’s favored drug, Demerol,
has a reasonable literary pedigree: near the end of Thomas Harris’s
Red Dragon (1981)—a novel beloved by Wallace—Will Graham is
injected with the drug, and when Nathan Zuckerman is incarcerated
in a Chicago hospital in the Anatomy Lesson, he learns that Demerol
is “a great favorite with us folks whose pain drags on and on”
(492). Zuckerman’s recovery seems to loosely prefigure Gately’s
hospitalization, while—like many of Wallace’s characters—Zuckerman
learns from his pain the consequences of isolating a sense of self in
his head (“Your mouth is who you are. You can’t get very much
closer to what you think of as yourself. The next stop is the brain”
[Roth 495]).
19. For more on Wallace’s fiction in light of Bakhtin, see the essay by Boddy
in this volume. Moving in a different direction, Frank Louis Cioffi
sees the novel creating a “Divided Consciousness” in the reader, split
between a “‘caught-up-in-the-story’ reading consciousness” and a mind
that “tries to unravel the meaning of words” rather than plot (177).
20. There are other broad overlaps between the two. The Divided Self
maps out a canon of artists who are in tune with schizophrenic
energies, and make “the effort to communicate what being alive is
like . . . without feeling alive” (40). While this description parallels
what we might call Infinite Jest ’s normative psychology (most vividly
evident in the novel’s many references to “death in life” [IJ 346, 698,
839]), Laing’s representative artists—Samuel Beckett and Francis
Bacon—along with his other literary touchstone, William Blake, are
all notable presences in Wallace’s novel. While Beckett was evoked
in Wallace’s earlier work— Girl with Curious Hair ’s description of
the “nothing-new sun” (GCH 347) echoes the opening of Beckett’s
Murphy (1938)—Michael North has argued that Infinite Jest shares
a fascination with “The mutual dependence, of Eye and Object”
with Beckett’s Film (163). Francis Bacon’s work is one of the novel’s
84 STEPHEN J. BURN
touchstones for horror (IJ 199, 1031n162), while Blake is sometimes

invoked as a bizarre consolation (IJ 379).
21. Laing’s work is famously associated with the double-bind (derived
from Gregory Bateson), but since such situations have been widely
discussed in terms of Infinite Jest (even by Wallace himself) I have not
re-covered that familiar ground here.
22. Indeed, in the first critical essay about Infinite Jest, LeClair noted
that Wallace’s novel was distinguished by an unusual attention to
such textures, stressing his eye for the “particularities and histories
of characters” (32).
23. Laing draws on Kierkegaard, so we should be unsurprised, here, to
find overlaps with Boswell’s discussion of “hiddenness” in the novel
in relation to Kierkegaard’s aesthete (Understanding 140).
24. In this collection alone, essays by Roberto Natalini and Clare
Hayes-Brady explore alternative ways to address this issue.
25. Even in terms of its smaller narrative units, Wallace’s fiction is never
far from degenerating into case histories: Infinite Jest ’s description
of “InterLace Telentertainment” slides seamlessly into an account of
“carpal neuralgia” (IJ 60), while after just ten sections, The Pale King
breaks down into a two-page list of “syndromes/symptoms associ-
ated with Examinations postings” (TPK 87).
26. Cf. Morris Berman’s Coming to Our Senses (1989)—another of
Wallace’s sources—in which Berman argues that “schizophrenia is a
situation that can be called totally visual” (38).
27. In Postmodernism (1991), Jameson diagnosed a “waning of affect
in postmodern culture” (10), and Wallace seems to endorse this
critique in his later association of the “lively arts of the millennial
U.S.A.” with an “ennui” and “jaded irony” that voids any emotional
freight (IJ 694). More specifically—and given that Wallace famously
associated television with postmodern literary techniques—it is
not a coincidence that the first time schizophrenia is named in the
novel is in connection with the novel’s advanced form of television
(Orin watches a documentary on “SCHIZOPHRENIA: MIND OR
BODY ” [IJ 47]), and the Jamesonian angle is strengthed when the
documentary’s patient is described as possessing “flat blank affect-
less . . . eyes” (IJ 47). Jameson’s Lacanian account of schizophrenia
(“the schizophrenic is reduced to an experience of . . . a series of pure
and unrelated presents in time” [Postmodernism 27]) can itself be read
as a provocative analogy for Infinite Jest ’s structure; the validity of
this connection, however, is partially questioned by the fact that it’s
Molly Notkin—as her last name suggests (she is not kin), she is hardly
an authorial surrogate—who comes closest to outlining Jameson’s
vision of schizophrenia, when she insists that “the purportedly lethal
final cartridge was nothing more than a classic illustration of the
antinomically schizoid function of the post-industrial capitalist
mechanism” (IJ 792).
28. Yet even as Wallace’s twin allusions to Jameson and McHale mark the
grounds of his difference from his postmodern ancestors, the book’s
debt to Laing forges a further link back to Barth. While The Tidewater
Tales (1987) proposes a “new scholarly-critical study . . . schizophrenia
in the American literary imagination” (557), Barth also recognized
that “schizophrenia . . . lies near the dark heart of writing” and
described some of his work as exploiting “the Laingian scenario”
(Friday 3, 140). Charles B. Harris has also read the Floating Opera
(1956, 1967) in light of Laing’s The Divided Self and The Politics
of Experience, documenting a case of “cultural convergence” rather
than influence, since “The Floating Opera appeared before Laing’s
books” (Passionate 29n4).
29. See Burn, A Reader’s Guide (110–11); in the Pale King Wallace
describes Perec as “an immortally great fiction writer” (TPK 73).
CH A P T ER 5
“Location’s Location”: Placing David

Foster Wallace
Paul Quinn
It seems counterintuitive to read David Foster Wallace as a writer of

place, let alone a regional writer. The child of transplanted intellectu-
als, he was a citizen of the world of ideas. It is hard to imagine (or
perhaps to stomach) the prospect of some future tour of the Midwest
rebranded, along the lines of Hardy’s Wessex, as Wallace Country. (A
gazetteer of metro Boston, ghost-mapped by Infinite Jest, as Dublin
has been by Ulysses, appears more plausible.)1 Nevertheless, it is sur-
prisingly instructive, if provocative, to examine his evocations of, and
reflections upon, place, space, and region, even as they complicate or
confound our assumptions about such writing.
Location is never approached straightforwardly in Wallace’s work;
reflexivity, mediation, and allusion divert and thicken empirical or
phenomenal description. This essay sketches various ways in which
place and region are represented, with particular emphasis on the
intensely dialectical nature of Wallace’s topography. Specifically, it
considers the dialectic of abstraction and concretion, or map and
territory, evinced in a markedly cartographic imagination that none-
theless hankers after the real terrain that maps simplify or subsume;
the dialectic of center and periphery that shapes a perspective self-
consciously and ambivalently positioned “between Coasts”; the nego-
tiation of past and present inherent in the use of transhistorical and
encyclopedic spaces; before turning, finally, to Wallace’s own, pecu-
liar, regional yet universal, adaptation or sublation of encyclopedic
form—the “tornadic.”
88 PAUL QUINN
Terrain= Map
It is difficult to get to the heart of Wallace territory without prior
reference to maps. Indeed, the vexed relationship between the
abstraction of cartography and the empirical fact of real country is an
abiding Wallace obsession, predisposed perhaps by the paradoxically
map-like nature of his formative terrain. As the cast of his trailblazing
novella, “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,” head-off in
the direction their story’s title intends, the Central Illinois country-
side “encases them in a cartographic obelisk, walled at the sides and
tapered to green points at the horizons front and back” (GCH 299).
Time and again in Wallace, descriptions of actual Midwestern topoi
turn into meditations on maps; distinctions between the abstract and
the concrete become malleable or moot.
In his lyrical essay on regional space, “The Flatness,” Wallace’s
fellow Midwesterner, former colleague and editor, Michael Martone,
contends that “flatness informs the writing of the Midwest” (31). In
this flatness, “everything is surface” (33). “The Midwestern land-
scape is abstract,” it resembles “a map as large as the thing it repre-
sents” (33, 29). The region where Martone and Wallace were raised,
one can say, gives vivid topographical form to an idea that has long
excited writers of a distinctively cerebral stripe. In his Sylvie and
Bruno Concluded, Lewis Carroll, even more than Wallace a math-
ematically minded storyteller, fantasized about a map on the scale
of 1:1. The cartographers of his narrative achieve their goal, but are
prevented from fully unfurling their map when farmers object it will
shut out the sunlight (545–46). This prefigures, at the level of intel-
lectual play, a dark prospect of the actual eclipsed by the abstract that
Wallace will worry over and rework throughout his career. Following
Carroll, Jorge Luis Borges fabricated his own totalizing map, coincid-
ing at every point with the Empire it depicts; a map that over time
becomes frayed and ruined, its shreds rotting in the unforgiving des-
erts. Jean Baudrillard declared Borges’s conceit “the finest allegory
of simulation,” before arguing, notoriously, that in our hyperreal
postmodernity “it is the map that precedes the territory . . . and if we
were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds
are slowly rotting across the map” (166). The “sovereign difference”
between map and territory “has disappeared” (166) in a world gener-
ated by “matrices, memory banks and command models,” by “com-
binatory algebra” (167). This debate is replayed and parodied during
the Eschaton sequence in Infinite Jest when Michael Pemulis, one of
the war game’s Hall-of-Famers, screams at a younger boy who wants
“LOCATION’S LOCATION” 89
deteriorating conditions taken into consideration: “It’s snowing on

the goddamn map, not the territory, you dick!” (IJ 333).
While such allusions to the map-territory opposition place Wallace’s
work squarely and self-consciously within well-rehearsed postmodern
debates about simulation and the dreadful fate of the authentic, his
markedly cartographic imaginary can also be situated within longer
continuities. For example, while the Eschaton dispute clearly channels
Baudrillard, there is, in additional, a carefully encoded premodern
conception of space located not beneath the surface, but as the play-
ing surface of the game: “the four courts of Eschaton’s earth-map”
(IJ 340). This particular game is presided over by a game master,
called Lord, who has to umpire, or “play God.” In various medieval
mappae mundi, the image of Our Lord, or Christ in Majesty, sits in
last judgment, the ultimate umpire, atop the circular map (Kline 64).
This reference is doubly significant because such medieval artifacts
were not only maps, but also encyclopedias, as dense with the accu-
mulated information of their day, as Infinite Jest is with its.
Various critics have remarked the way anthropomorphic allusions
are scattered across that novel’s map of metropolitan Boston. Graham
Foster, for example, notes that the word “map” is often used as slang
for body/head/life, “linking the very existence of human beings to
the territory they occupy” (45). On one level this signifies contempo-
rary alienation, humanity reified and reduced to an abstraction; but
Wallace’s evocations of place draw also on the manifold traditions that
underlie encyclopedic form. Parts of his Boston are likened to a brain,
heart, lung, and so on. This recalls not only the Burtonian Anatomy
mode that surgically carves up a text, or an encyclopedic novel like
Ulysses (1922) that slices Dublin into, among other things, dedicated
body parts, but also, by extension, an older, analogical universe that
was often represented spatially: whether in mappae mundi like the
Psalter or the Ebstorf world maps shaped as the Body of Christ (Kline
230–32), or anthropomorphic city plans, such as those of Francesco di
Giorgio Martini from the late quattrocento. One of Francesco’s most
celebrated drawings shows a walled city in the shape of a human body,
with a fortress supported like a crown at the head and towers ringing the
feet and elbows (Pepper 115–16). Wallace’s analogous metro Boston is
not so much a Body Public, or Body Politic, as a Body Institutional.
MIT’s “cerebral rooftop,” complete with “convolutions,” (IJ 950)
provides the brain; the Enfield Tennis Academy (E.T.A.) is shaped
like a heart, and boasts an inflatable lung; many-institutioned Enfield
is itself positioned as an extended “arm” of the city.2 As is often the
case in Wallace, the extremities are inhabited by those without the
90 PAUL QUINN
walls of institutions, whether subsisting in the projects that ring metro

Boston, or in the here-be-dragonscapes of trailer parks.
These premodern and European antecedents help us situate
Wallace’s use of place and space within a wider, transnational, ency-
clopedic tradition, but it should not be forgotten that the cartographic
imagination is particularly crucial in the development of his own native
literary canon. Indeed, American literature, it can be argued, what
with its frontier myths, was founded on spatial reflection. Moreover,
ever since D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature
(1923), the American canon has often been critically defined in spa-
tial terms and in contradistinction to the temporally freighted or
archeologically layered literature of the Old World.3
Describing late capitalist American space, however, involves rather
different challenges than did the eras of colonialism, primitive accu-
mulation, or imperialism. The frontiers are more fluid, internal as well
as external. “Of capitalist space we can posit a Spinozan pantheism,”
writes Fredric Jameson, “in which the informing power is everywhere
and nowhere all at once, and yet at the same time in relentless expan-
sion, by way of appropriation and subsumption alike” (Representing 7).
While this first mode of expansion, appropriation, persists in Wallace
(most glaringly in the aggressively redrawn North American map in
Infinite Jest), his most distinctive and radical contribution to this
evolving spatial imaginary, I would argue, is to shift emphasis toward
the latter mode, its much harder to render complement. Subsumption,
in the Marxian sense, is first defined and developed in Capital, where
it has distinct historical stages of “formal” and “real.” For Jameson, it
extends into evermore encompassing postmodern phases, approach-
ing a state “in which the extra-economic or social no longer lies out-
side capital . . . Where everything has been subsumed under capitalism,
there is no longer anything outside it” (Representing 71). A state,
that is, where exchange-value has, like Carroll’s and Borges’s maps,
subsumed (etymologically, taken under) reality on a scale of 1:1. The
resultant capitalist space is like the Expo building in Wallace’s State
Fair essay writ large: “Every interior inch . . . is given over to adversion
and commerce of a very special and lurid sort” (SFT 118).
One of Wallace’s signal achievements, then, is to represent this
historico-economic process of subsumption artistically, urgently,
dynamically, and often translated into spatial or topographic terms.
Thus, while the title of “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its
Way,” explicitly refers to an earlier American age of appropriation, to
the unscrolling frontier and Manifest Destiny, the story’s westering
movement leads ultimately toward the sunset of subsumption. The
characters are on course to Collision, Illinois, and the apocalyptic

reunion of all McDonald’s commercial actors, which, for the adver-
tising magnate sponsor, J. D. Steelritter, will culminate in a long-
cherished goal:
thirty years’ consumers, succumbing, as one . . . The revelation of What

They Want will be on them; and in that revelation of Desire, they will
Possess. They will all Pay the Price—without persuasion . . . Life, the
truth, will be its own commercial. (GCH 310)
This rapturous dream-vision of total subsumption, of adversion and

reality reaching a 1:1 scale (where truth: commercial are no longer
distinct) recurs reconfigured throughout Wallace’s writing. The
spirit of Steelritter haunts the business model of Belt and Britton in
“Mr Squishy,” from Oblivion, where the world of advertising cam-
paigns and focus groups is to be altered irrevocably, with flesh and
blood Field Researchers no longer having to traverse real territory;
consumer “tracking algorithms” (like Baudrillard’s matrices and
combinatory algebra) will do their work for them (and take their jobs
from them):
For now, in Belt and Britton’s forward- looking vision, the market
becomes its own test. Terrain = Map. Everything encoded. And no
more facilitators to muddy the waters by impacting the tests in all
the infinite ephemeral unnoticeable infinite ways human beings always
kept impacting each other and muddying the waters. Team Δy would
become 100% tech-driven, abstract, its own Captured Shop (OB 64)
In Wallace’s final work, The Pale King, we are given what in effect is
a prehistory of the rapture of consumption that Steelritter dreams of,
and that Belt and Britton work toward; in the New IRS, civic virtue
will be replaced by the profit motive, and flesh and blood tax exam-
iners replaced, or rationalized, by another abstracting algorithm, the
“thanatoid- sounding,”4 ANADA (for “Audit-No Audit Discriminant
Algorithm”) (TPK 68). Infinite Jest, too, can be read as the logical, if
dystopian, fulfillment of processes we see launched in The Pale King ’s
remorselessly marketizing 1980s; ONAN. (Organization of North
American Nations) is the perfect geographical acronym for a society
that, subsumed under capital, cannot relate to anything outside itself:
a near future where absorption by the commodity form is all but total
and time itself is sponsored.
Wallace’s art traverses the critical distance of that “all but.” His
forays into the late capitalist landscape, reveal, like Baudrillard’s twist
92 PAUL QUINN
on Borges’s fable, residual shreds of a real territory not yet entirely

subsumed beneath the map of simulation. The Broom of the System
describes a textbook Baudrillardian Desert of the Real, the Great
Ohio Desert, or G.O.D., a faux- desert with concession stands around
the rim, pointedly built over a real Wilderness, the Wayne National
Forest. In his nonfiction, too, Wallace zealously excavates the natu-
ral, however hidden it is beneath synthetic layers. When he visits the
Help Me Grow tent at the Illinois State Fair, for example, he carefully
ponders the ground beneath his feet: “Solid bent-over investigative
journalism reveals that in fact it’s artificial grass . . . A quick look under
the edge of the fake grass mat reveals the real grass underneath, flat-
tened and already yellowing” (SFT 89). As passages like this indicate,
the aforementioned opposition between a geographically oriented
American literature and an archaeological European one needs to be
nuanced when applied to a writer so tirelessly dialectical as Wallace.
The seemingly flat surfaces of the commodified or synthetic spaces
he explores are shown to be nonetheless stratified, to contain hidden
depths, and, subsequently, are sifted for traces of the real.
In writers who come after Wallace, the dialectic of territory and
map, actuality and abstraction, is less often expressed as an agon,
more often resolved into a habituated irreality: not natural but natu-
ralized. Thus, for example, in his encyclopedic novel, Reamde (2011),
Neal Stephenson, an important writer who emerged from the field
of science fiction and William Gibsonesque cyber-spatialities, moves
effortlessly and exuberantly between the Midwest and the commod-
ified virtual.5 The main protagonist is a billionaire game designer
from Iowa who has constructed a massively profitable online gaming
world, called, tellingly, “T’Rain.” Swathes of the narrative unfold in
this pseudo-world and many of the characters feel entirely at home
there, living the dream courtesy of an algorithm that has usurped the
place of real terrain. In texts like this, the American novel has moved
from mapping a territory to territorializing the map—“Settling” the
virtual, as the pioneers tamed the frontier. In Wallace, however, we
have not yet reached this sanguine point; his texts are complex, sym-
bolic sites of resistance and struggle that seek to explore and defend,
even if they often cross, the borderland between map and territory.
The Fringe That Is the Country’s Center

Location plays a significant part even in Wallace’s most abstract works,
and, equally, even his most concrete or personal evocations of local
or regional spaces are wont to slide into abstraction. Tellingly, the
conceptual term he developed and championed in his undergraduate
philosophy thesis on modal logic, which James Ryerson calls “his only
formal, systematic contribution to the world of ideas” (2), was “situ-
ational physical modality,” which was “highly sensitive to details of
time and place” (11). In his book-length account of the mathemati-
cal concept of infinity, Everything and More, Wallace illustrates Zeno’s
paradoxes and “Vicious Infinite Regress” with the following example:
(1) Whatever exists is in a location.

(2) Therefore, location exists.
(3) But by (1) and (2), location must be in a location, and
(4) By (1)–(3), location’s location must be in a location, and . . .
(5) . . . so on ad inf. (EM 57)
The contemplation of boundless horizons seems natural enough

for anyone raised on the Midwestern flatlands, however troubling
existentially. “ There`s nothing to hold your eye,” he writes of the
Illinois landscape in “Westward,” “it can be scary” (GCH 244).
Everything and More ’s illustrative glimpse of “the dreaded regressus
in infinitum” (EM 49) rewrites in spatial terms the dizzying recur-
sivity that Wallace’s critics most often associate with his distinctive
mode of meta-metafiction. Marshall Boswell, for example, writes
that “Wallace’s work is not simply hyper-self-aware. It is always
self-aware about its own self-awareness, and self-aware about that
double self-awareness, etcetera, etcetera ad infinitum” (“A Gesture”
8). Despite the risk of cerebral vertigo inherent in locating location’s
location, however, it is important to stress that abstract thought is by
no means simply or exclusively an occasion for dread in Wallace. As
Michael North observes, Everything and More ultimately celebrates
Cantor’s mathematics because it “helps to make infinity thinkable
and thus to reduce the intellectual and ethical paralysis it can induce.
That there are infinite points of view, for example, need not mean
that assertion is impossible” (“Everything” 10).
That descriptions of place can, ideally, be properly attentive to
both map and terrain, to intellectual abstraction and felt detail, is
exemplified in “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley,” Wallace’s appar-
ently most personal, most homespun text, a cerebral yet loving evoca-
tion of growing up in Philo, a “boxed township of Illinois farmland”
(SFT 3). Its opening is both a parody of and an innovative contri-
bution to the nostalgic mode characteristic of the memoir form. It
might be subtitled, How Flat Was My Prairie?
College math evokes and catharts a Midwesterner’s sickness for home.

I’d grown up inside vectors, lines and lines athwart lines, grids—and,
94 PAUL QUINN
on the scale of horizons, broad curving lines of geographic force, the

weird topographical drain-swirl of a whole lot of ice-ironed land that
sits and spins atop plates. The area behind and below these broad
curves at the seam of land and sky I could plot by eye way before I
came to know infinitesimals as easements, an integral as schema. Math
at a hilly Eastern school was like waking up; it dismantled memory and
put it in light. Calculus was, quite literally, child’s play. (SFT 3)
This extraordinary passage exhibits two aspects of Wallace’s

place-writing worth emphasizing here. First, an unlikely synthesis of
rooted sentiment and mathematical abstraction; in Wallace, topog-
raphy is often approached via topology or geometry. Infinite Jest,
as early critic-cartographers of that novel have established, is thor-
oughly informed, structured, shaped, divided, by triangles, pyramids,
Seirpinski gaskets, circles. So, too, Philo is presented here as Math
maven heaven: Edwin A. Abbot’s mathematical fantasia Flatland
relocated to Martone’s “The Flatness.” The second aspect the pas-
sage above brings home is Wallace’s habitual mediation of his region:
here, it is evoked from a distanced perspective (the studied contrast of
a hilly Eastern school), and tailored, albeit in a witty and conflicted
fashion, for a “swanky” East-Coast magazine and the edification of
an implied non-Midwestern readership.
Philo, it should be stressed, to the consternation of the many critics
who have taken “Derivative Sport” as straight autobiography, was not
Wallace’s hometown. As Charles B. Harris definitively established from
the author’s father, Wallace never “set foot in Philo” (“Hometown”
185). Born in Ithaca, New York, he was raised in Champaign-Urbana,
Illinois, a “plain of beanfields” north of Philo, according to the
essay’s bucolic and decidedly nonabstract map reference (SFT 13).
Philo (which boasts a water tower bearing the legend “Center of the
Universe” alongside its zip code) is an almost-but-not-quite version of
the truth, an alternate or parallel universe hometown, whose Greek
name bears its own heartland-appropriate connotations. As reimag-
ined by Wallace, then, Philo, although geographically a real place, is
also a utopian “no place” where conventional divisions of intellectual
labor do not obtain, and poetic observation, mathematical terminol-
ogy, and even tennis, happily coexist as child’s play. This utopian,
almost tender, dimension of his place-writing is often neglected by
those critics for whom place in Wallace seems only to denote a dena-
tured dystopia or soulless mediascape.
What is more, the boxed townships of Illinois farmland where
Wallace grew up are not simply backwaters—neither Urbana nor its
body-double Philo. These gridded exemplars of American pastoral

in fact, as John R. Stilgoe observes, “objectify the Enlightenment in
America” (87, cf. Bayley 5). They are the result of Thomas Jefferson’s
land ordinances that determined the organization of two-thirds of the
United States; “a model example of European abstraction.” The grid
concept and geometric order extrapolated William Penn’s urban plan
for Pennsylvania across the Western farmlands (Stilgoe 88–103). To
adapt a notorious Situationist graffito: Beneath the prairie, the flag-
stone! “By the 1860s,” writes Stilgoe, “the grid objectified national,
not regional, order, and no one wondered at rural space marked by
urban rectilinearity” (106–7). But whereas Thomas Pynchon in Mason
& Dixon (1997) laments the imposition of this Enlightenment grid,
Wallace is capable of delighting in the elegance, order, and geom-
etry of the resultant territory; the logician and mathematician (as
well as the nostalgic) in him cannot turn his back entirely on this
Enlightenment project written into the land.
The complex and paradox-provoking physical nature of the flat
and map-like Midwestern terrain, is complemented by its ambigu-
ous cultural location—actual center but (despite the underlying
Enlightenment grid) perceived periphery. This is also often expressed
in paradox: in The Broom of the System the Midwest is “both in the
middle and on the fringe. The physical heart and the cultural extrem-
ity . . . this strange, occluded place . . . a place that both is and isn’t”
(BOS 142); in “Westward” it is “the fringe that is the country’s cen-
ter” (GCH 242). In Infinite Jest, the mysterious blind Dymphna’s
vague Midwestern origins are pinpointed by Michael Pemulis as
“Nowheresburg” (IJ 567). This contradictory sense of place seems to
have been further compounded by an upbringing that, according to
David’s sister, Amy Wallace, was grounded in ambiguity: “Growing
up here we were the kids of academics, our parents were from some-
where else. The kids who had been here for generations treated us
as if we were East-Coasters, and then when David went off to the
East-Coast and realized they treated him like a hayseed, he realized
he was from a place no one else was. Somewhere in the middle, I think
that was David’s Midwest, the neither here nor there” (Interview).
This geographic and existential space, somewhere in the middle
and neither here nor there, is navigated in different ways and with
varying degrees of success or discomfiture throughout the corpus. In
his essay on language, “Authority and American Usage,” Wallace situ-
ates himself somewhere between the Prescriptivists and Descriptivists,
explaining his propensity both to honour and creatively to breach
grammatical rules by invoking his “two native English dialects—the
96 PAUL QUINN
SWE of my hyper-educated parents and the hard-earned Rural

Midwestern of most of my peers” (CL 99). Even his signature use
of footnotes and endnotes, as various critics have noted, can be read
for its dislocating effect, disturbing received assumptions about what
properly belongs in the main body of a text and what is merely supple-
mentary, what is center and what is fringe.
In Wallace’s most extended journalistic description of the region,
his account of the Illinois State Fair, he self-mockingly engages in
“pith-helmeted anthropological reporting on something rural and
heartlandish” for a “swanky East-Coast magazine,” at the behest of
the kind of editors whom, he surmises, every so often “slap their fore-
heads and remember that about 90% of the United States lies between
the Coasts . . . ” (SFT 83). Even when evoking the territory in between,
however, Wallace remains hyperconscious of those coasts; he is always
aware of contexts of publication and reception, sometimes exhilarat-
ingly, sometimes excruciatingly so. His assigned location is frequently
refracted through another location: and that other location is often
the East-Coast as enshrined in Harper’s Magazine, whose perspective
he habitually anticipates and second guesses.
At one point in the essay, Wallace enlists an old friend as a trav-
eling companion: “No anthropologist worth his helmet would be
without the shrewd counsel of a colorful local” (SFT 90). There is
an easily skipped play on words here that alludes to the tradition of
“local color” in literary journalism, a tradition Harper’s itself helped
establish in the nineteenth century. Leigh Ann Litwiller Berte relates
the early popularity of regional fiction, travel writing, and these local
color vignettes to the growth of railroads and the need to exoticize
those American spaces most distant (geographically or experientially)
from the class-conscious East-Coast readership. Given that Wallace
tends to be read almost exclusively within a postmodern or innovative
literary fiction context, it is intriguing to consider “Ticket to the Fair”
(to use the essay’s original Harper’s title) in a continuum with early
Harper’s pieces like “A Stage Ride in Colorado” (July 1807) or “Wild
Cattle Hunting on Green Island, Georgia” (July 1860). The disori-
entating new mobility of the nineteenth century produced a com-
pensatory hunger for authentic places, what Berte calls “geographical
essentialism” (172). The magazines provided vicarious rail journeys
and a native exotica, “a rustic cultural foil to European travel writ-
ing” (188n6). Approached from this longue durée, then, one could
argue that Wallace’s regional pieces, with their conflicted narrator
interpreting his “exotic” yet “prosaic” territory to the coasts, stand at
the end of a generic line.6
In the journalism, Paul Giles writes, “Wallace foregrounds his role

as someone paid for his reportage, and, therefore, as a compromised
observer” (Global 168). It is not just the fact of being paid, however,
but by whom, that informs this ambivalent reflexivity. His commis-
sion comes definitively from the East-Coast. Subsequently, as a rhe-
torical defence mechanism, the conflicted Wallace of the State Fair
essay assigns the worst things he has to say about the lumpen elements
of his own region to a temporarily and uneasily assumed East-Coast
perspective: thus, for example, “Something East-Coast in me prick-
les at the bovine and herdlike quality of the crowd” (SFT 103–4).
Or, prefacing what is probably his unworthiest journalistic moment:
“This is going to sound not just East-Coastish but elitist and snooty.
But facts are facts. The special community of shoppers in the Expo
Bldg. are a Midwestern subphylum commonly if unkindly known as
Kmart people. Farther south they’d be a certain fringe-type of White
Trash . . . They’re the type you see slapping their kids in supermarket
checkouts . . . I’m sorry, but all this is true. I went to high school with
Kmart People. I know them” (SFT 120–21). Even with the apolo-
gies, and the inference that painful high school memories are being
accessed, it is unedifying stuff ; one cannot imagine Pynchon, say,
with his unwavering concern for the preterite, expressing such sen-
timents. But it is revealing that Wallace is careful to displace these
observations onto an elitist “East-Coastish” viewpoint, one befitting
the deep history of Harper’s.
In his account of the journalism, Christoph Ribbat argues that
Wallace makes belated amends to the Kmart people in This is Water,
where the checkout line image is reprised, but invested with newfound
sympathy. His Kenyon College graduation class audience is entreated
to “choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up
lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line” (TIW 89). The
mature Wallace, now well aware that facts are never just facts, chooses
himself to look differently at the kind of Kmart person traduced in
the earlier journalism; he is now able to find compassion not only
for the extreme cases of certified suffering researched at AA half-way
houses (or drawn from his own awful experiences), but also for the
low-level, ambient miseries of the stressed and put upon.
“The Suffering Channel,” from Oblivion, can be read as another,
extended, response to the earlier writing, a deconstruction of the
ambivalent regional journalism, with journalist Skip Atwater as, in
Ribbat’s phrase, an “ albeit cartoonish stand-in for Wallace” (196).
Skip is an exiled Midwesterner working for a swanky Manhattan-based
magazine, Style. His journalistic color pieces are extreme parodies of
98 PAUL QUINN
Wallace’s own assignments as Midwestern village-explainer. Here the

reductio ad absurdum of the parochial regional curiosity is an outsider
artist who can defecate sculptured stools. This might be a genuine,
authentic art, or it might be, as the consensus at Style has it, merely
gross. Ambiguity is everything in this carefully poised narrative: the
Style offices are based at the World Trade Center, and the story is
poised, too, on the brink of 9/11—which global event removes any
hope of this grotesque regional phenomenon going national, and
demonstrates Wallace’s deft deployment of nested spatial scales. If the
territory between coasts is on the periphery, out of sight and mind of
the cultural center, so too, is the wider world beyond the coasts. Until,
that is, something obscene or world-historical seizes the attention, or
irrupts into view.
While “The Suffering Channel” rewrites the journalism in
tragi-comic mode, “The View from Mrs Thompson’s,” an essay also
overshadowed by 9/11, revisits the Midwest in a very different reg-
ister. It is immensely sympathetic to the working-class inhabitants of
Bloomington, Illinois. We journey a mile away from Wallace’s home,
“on the other side of a mobile-home park,” where he goes to watch the
aftermath of the attack unfold at the home of Mrs Thompson, “one of
the world’s cooler seventy-four-year-olds” (CL135). The congregants
of the local church gathered there, mostly older ladies, sit watch-
ing TV and praying. Giles argues that Wallace’s writing “speaks to a
new kind of American regionalism, one reliant less upon the distinct
properties immanent within any given place than upon the cartogra-
phies relating ‘here’ and ‘there’ to all-encompassing global networks”
(Global 175). To a large extent there is truth in this: Wallace’s writing
on place is certainly relational, what with its hypertrophied sensitiv-
ity to contexts of transmission and reception. Nevertheless, distinct
properties of place persist even when describing the most global and
networked of events. Televison is portrayed here not simply as the
homogenizing or flattening force that Wallace scholars, following
“E Unibus Pluram,” tend to accentuate. Significantly, although the
essay hinges on a global event that brings a nation together, television
is also the occasion for reflection on regional particularities. In this
Midwest, TV watching (and not only on this momentous day) is not
the recourse of isolatoes, but an invitation to a communal hearth:
“There don’t really tend to be parties or mixers per se so much here—
what you do in Bloomington is all get together at somebody’s house
and watch something” (CL 134). In a powerful and characteristic dia-
lectical reversal, the arch delivery-device of homogenization becomes
a defining source of regional specificity.
The essay also effects a reversal of another sort. Wallace is able to

reassure one of the ladies that, given the geography of New York City,
a relative working there is unlikely to have been exposed to danger:
“I end up doing pretty much the only good I do all day by explaining
to Mrs. R- where Midtown Manhattan is” (CL 139). Contrary to his
usual practice, then, he is explaining the East-Coast to the Midwest,
even though, in an essay originally written for Rolling Stone, he is by
implication simultaneously explaining to the sophisticated coasts why
uninformed but fundamentally decent folks who don’t know where
Midtown Manhattan is are nonetheless worthy of scrupulous and
sympathetic attention. Wallace can never give simple, straightforward
directions, there are always convolutions involved; location’s location
must once again be taken into account.
The Tornado Continues . . .

Not least of these complicating convolutions are the ripple-
effectsgenerated by the elaborately allusive form of Wallace’s long nov-
els. The Pale King was projected as an extended return not only to
the writer’s home ground of Illinois, but also to the grand scale of
the encyclopedic novel: a mode that by its nature (indistinguishable
from its culture) invites transhistorical comparisons and references pre-
decessor texts. In Wallace, such allusions are themselves often tellingly
concretized and place-based, sedimented within locational form. When
the fictional “David Wallace” escapes the orbital “monoculture” of
Self-Storage Parkway and penetrates the Peoria Regional Examination
Center’s inner sanctum, he finds a location that, Peoria or not, is any-
thing but ordinary; its labyrinthine skewed perspectives and secreted
rooms are inhabited by monkish IRS men, dependent on Rules and
tithe-gathering, bent over strange scribal desks. This ascetic, contem-
plative environment seems to owe more to the archly premodern post-
modernism of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1980), than to
any realist novel of place or region. More glaringly, the REC’s elabo-
rate facade renders in sculptural form (a wholly fictional version of)
the official seal of the IRS, in which Bellerophon is depicted battling
the Chimera, surely another loaded reference to Wallace’s career-long
precursor-antagonist and fellow encyclopedic novelist, John Barth.
Another carefully deposited allusion encapsulates the way Wallace’s
place-writing, though fully contemporary, can be subtly intertwined,
as befits the encyclopedic form, with older topographic sources and
procedures. When “Irrelevant Chris” is inspired to join the IRS, or
“called to account,” by the epiphanic lecture given by a pseudo-Jesuit
100 PAUL QUINN
(TPK 233), this clearly alludes to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young

Man (1916) and the powerful lecture by a bona fide Jesuit that so
affects Stephen on retreat. Indeed, in some ways the allusion is very
precise: Joyce’s Jesuit quotes the God of Genesis “calling His crea-
ture man to account” (127). What is most interesting here, how-
ever, is that Wallace employs his pseudo-Jesuit not only to lend a
quasi-religious aura to his boredom-transcending characters, but
also to insinuate into the novel (it is never made explicit) a specifi-
cally Jesuit “Spiritual Exercise”: composition of place. In the greatest
encyclopedic novel, Ulysses, Stephen draws upon this technique to
conjure up Shakespeare’s London for his audience at the National
Library: “Local colour.7 Work in all you know. Make them accom-
plices . . . Composition of place. Ignatius Loyola, make haste to help
me!” (188). When employing St. Ignatius Loyola’s “composition of
place,” a person is enabled “to see with the eye of the imagination” an
absent object or person by forming a vivid mental image of the place
where that object or person is (or was) found. But, in another reso-
nant example of the “doubled self-reflexivity” (to borrow Marshall
Boswell’s term [Understanding 96]) habitual to Wallace, what is com-
posed in Chris’s memory is not just a specific place—the DePaul lecture
hall—but a place where composition of place is promoted. “You might
wish to recall,” suggests the “Jesuit,” “this room, this moment, and
the information I shall now relay to you” (TPK 228). Furthermore,
Chris’s epiphany is prepped and enhanced by a drug-assisted pro-
cess he calls “doubling,” a kind of chemically induced, hyper-aware,
meta-dimension that makes the encyclopedic totality of experience
seem momentarily graspable. The pseudo-Jesuit’s invitation to recall
clearly works, for Chris “even remember[s] what I was wearing as
I sat there—a red-and-brown-striped acrylic sweater, white painter’s
pants, and Timberland boots” (TPK 190). Whereas Stephen Dedalus
uses the technique in an outward-directed way, to evoke the Globe
and its environs, Chris’s doubled-version of composition of place, in a
quintessential Wallace move, circles back to incorporate an image of
that place’s composer. Location is, once again, intimately bound up
with the process of locating.
These literary and religious allusions are self-conscious engage-
ments with the wider encyclopedic tradition and seem to take us away
from the specificities of region and its description, so let us conclude
by considering the novel twist or adaptation of the encyclopedic
imagination that Wallace employed to return to regional space, albeit
in a radical and disorienting way; a twist that strives to get beyond
the paradoxes and ambivalences sketched in section one and two by
means of a synthesis of vertiginous abstraction and grounded mate-

rial. “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley,” describes the writer’s home
region not only as the mathematician’s idyll we observed earlier, but
also as an exposed flatland buffeted by a phenomenon at once disrup-
tive and sublime: “Tornadoes were, in our part of Central Illinois, the
dimensionless point at which parallel lines met and whirled and blew
up. They made no sense” (SFT 17). The geometrically delineated,
logical pursuit of tennis (at least as practiced by so cerebral a player
as Wallace, forever calculating angles) meets its counterforce in the
irrational irruption of that essay’s climactic tornado: logic is turned
on its head when, in a characteristic recursion, Wallace tries to return
his own windblown shot. Art and tornadoes can do things that even
mathematics and sports cannot.
But tornadoes are not intrinsically or irretrievably irrational, they can,
like the concept of infinity, with risk and effort be studied and under-
stood. Tornadoes “were a real part of Midwest childhood” (SFT 16),
Wallace writes, “Midwestern life is informed and deformed by wind”
(SFT 5). In “Westward,” storm-watching is described as a “spectator
sport in rural Illinois. Obscure elsewhere” (GCH 326). In “Derivative
Sport,” Wallace remembers studying tornadoes at junior high school,
and records that East-Central Illinois “is a proud part of what meteo-
rologists call Tornado Alley” (SFT 15). He grew up within a regimen
of Tornado Awareness Days and practice drills, ever alert for sirens.
Historically, Champaign-Urbana, Wallace’s hometown, was not only
conducive to amateur storm-watching, it was the site of a crucial break-
through in the hard science of “tornadogenesis.” On April 9, 1953,
Daniel Staggs, a chemical engineer based at Champaign’s State Water
Survey Office was testing his weather radar when he captured a shape
on his screen that looked like a huge hook. It was, it transpired, the first
“tornado-related hook” to be identified in real time. At this moment,
according to Thomas P. Grazulis, “The era of tornado research with
radar was born” (29–30). It seems all too appropriate that Wallace’s
home territory, so paradoxically map-like, as we have seen, a region
where the concrete and the abstract seem to collide and combine so
often and intriguingly in the writer’s imagination, should be the loca-
tion where this natural phenomenon was first mapped, and thus trans-
lated into an abstraction: a “hook-echo” on the radar screen.
In his introduction to The Pale King, the novel’s editor, Michael
Pietsch, writes,
It became apparent as I read that David planned for the novel to have a
structure akin to that of Infinite Jest, with large portions of apparently
102 PAUL QUINN
unconnected information presented to the reader before a main story

line begins to make sense. In several notes to himself, David referred
to the novel as “tornadic” or having a “tornado feeling”—suggesting
pieces of story coming at the reader in a high-speed swirl. (TPK viii)
One such reference is included in the “Notes and Asides” published

with the text, the cryptic: “The tornado continues . . . ” (TPK 545).
Tornadoes and the tornadic indeed run continuously throughout
Wallace’s work, traceable to his early biographical fascination, but
transformed from a merely regional phenomenon into a method of
composition and a model of both the artistic process and think-
ing itself. “I know why I stayed obsessed as I aged,” he writes in
“Derivative Sport,” “Tornadoes, for me, were a transfiguration”
(SFT 17). Etymologically speaking, tropes and tornadoes are closely
linked, both have root-meanings of turning. Although tornadoes are
objects of terror, and “transfiguration” here is represented as some-
thing scarily sublime, an awesome verticality rearing up from “the
Euclidian monotone of furrow, road, axis, and grid” (SFT 17) that
otherwise marked his flat region, the figural is also the ultimate ter-
ritory, or home ground, of a writer.
Tornadoes, whether literal or metaphorical, twist and turn
throughout the Wallace oeuvre but, crucially, when raised to the
power of the “tornadic,” they allow him to remodel the encyclope-
dic mode for an age of information-bombardment rather than stately
Enlightenment rationality and order. Moreover, the structural cor-
respondence between the regional-meterological phenomenon and
the narrative technique of Wallace’s long novels is more precise than
one might first imagine. Thus, there are five scientifically accepted
stages of a tornado life cycle; the first stage, “Dust Whirl,” is char-
acterized by very high speeds of whirling dust and debris, when the
“funnel cloud aloft and the dust swirl below may not appear to be
connected” (Grazulis 38). This stage, before the tornado yields its
organizational principles, corresponds to the initially confusing swirl
of information that Pietsch associates with Wallace’s two encyclo-
pedic works. Stephen Burn has remarked the way many of Infinite
Jest ’s early critics, faced with its data-swirl and daunting scale, found
that text “diffuse, and random” (Reader’s Guide 36). Nevertheless,
he argues that complex interconnection ultimately reveals itself, for
example, in the apparently random scene that in fact brings together
the hitherto disconnected worlds of Don Gately, Hal Incandenza,
and the entertainment cartridge that gives the novel its title. Gately is
driving to a store in Inman Square; he “blows through,” his vehicle’s
backwash “raising an odd little tornado of discarded ad-leaflets and

glassine bags and corporate-snack bags . . . and one piece of the debris
Gately’s raised and set spinning behind him, a thick flattened M.F.
cup, caught by a sudden gust as it falls, twirling, is caught at some
aerodyne’s angle and blown spinning all the way to the storefront
of one ‘Antitoi Entertainment’” (IJ 479–80). For Burn, the “move-
ment from low-level action to higher-level pattern is characteristic of
emergent networks” (Reader’s Guide 58). It is characteristic of tor-
nadoes, too. In the crucial second stage of tornado formation, the
“Organizing” stage, the vortex becomes visible, the funnel cloud aloft
and the dust swirl below connect up, like dramatis personae (high and
low) and plot-strands in Infinite Jest.
Gately’s is, indeed, “an odd little tornado,” comprised of ads and
corporate waste, the branded debris of a lifeworld subsumed under
capital. There is a comparable scene in The Pale King when Chris’s
father is trapped by a Chicago commuter train’s door and dragged to
his death across a crowded platform full of shoppers, raising a tornado
of debris comprised of “numerous small, subdivided packages and
individually purchased bags, many of these could be seen flying up in
the air and rotating or spilling their contents in various ways” creat-
ing “the illusion that it was somehow spurting or raining consumer
goods” (TPK 202). Examples like these, where the tornado is not
literal but a metaphor for the whirlwinds of consumption that engulf
us all, bear out Paul Giles’s claim that “the coruscating brilliance of
Wallace’s posthumanist style involves finding objective correlatives for
the American experience of dislocation, in order to describe how glo-
balization works not just as a distant political theory but something
that impacts the hearts and minds of the national community” (174).
The tornadic, I would argue, is one of the most powerful and com-
plex of such correlatives, allowing Wallace to invoke a force of nature
that violently makes manifest dislocation, yet is always grounded in a
specific location, to evoke the disorientation inherent in global capi-
tal, and by extension in our (turbulently naturalized) networked and
commodified reality, which both arrives from above and emerges, at
the local level, from the ground up.
Like the tornadic itself, the organizing principles of this complex
global capitalist lifeworld, although unquestionably there, are hard
to discern or describe as a totality. Nonetheless, that is exactly what
Wallace’s modulation of the encyclopedic strives to do. As noted
regarding the ad infinitum clause, there is a constant struggle in
Wallace between being overwhelmed by abstraction and mastering
it, thinking it through. This struggle, what Ryerson calls “the agony
104 PAUL QUINN
of cognition” (1), is endured by any writer dedicated to interrogating

the world in its encyclopedic totality, as Wallace was. In Everything
and More, as we saw, Wallace dwells ruefully on “the dreads and
dangers of abstract thinking” (EM 13); he ponders the etymology of
“abstraction” and its literal meaning: drawn away (EM 8). “He was
perpetually on guard,” writes Ryerson, of being drawn away “from
something more genuine and real” (1). That the tornado with its
ominous propensities could serve as a correlative for this uprooting
abstraction is clear enough, but at the same time it should be stressed
that Wallace’s interest in the tornadic is itself rooted in his home terri-
tory, and what could be more genuine and real than that ? Or, indeed,
what realer than the physical matter and debris drawn into the coils
of a tornado as irresistibly as heterogeneous materials and data are
sucked up by an encyclopedic novel? Like so much associated with the
Midwest in this radically revised regional writing, tornadoes are para-
doxical: at once a reminder of home and utterly uncanny, nebulously
abstract in appearance but a material phenomenon. By providing a
dynamic figure, structure, or symbol, the tornadic allows Wallace to
transform, or sublate, these paradoxes and tensions into a working
model of art and thought—and thus go beyond them.
What might lie beyond the agonies of cognition? What are the
rewards for art and thought that achieve such a sublation? They
are perhaps signaled in the notes for The Pale King, where Wallace
acknowledges the “crushing, crushing boredom” attendant on
proper, intense attention to the most tedious object; a boredom that
will wash over you in waves “and just about kill you.” But, “Ride
these out,” he promises, “and it’s like stepping from black and white
into color . . . Constant bliss in every atom” (TPK 546). There is a
deep-lying allusion here to what Grazulis calls “the most famous of all
tornadoes” (41), the Midwestern one pivotal to The Wizard of Oz (and
one that like many of Wallace’s own descriptions of tornadoes is tied
up with a dream-vision).8 Avril Incandeza, in Infinite Jest, it should
be noted, has a Xerox of Magaret Hamilton as the movie’s Witch of
the West affixed to her study door (IJ 191), and, on a crucial date in
the novel, sports a “steeple-crowned witch’s hat” (IJ 380).9 The film
famously features a transformation from black and white into color,10
and involves an uplifting translation (or abstraction, a drawing away)
to another stranger place that, it turns out, is really home all along.
(The underlying message of Oz contradicts Thomas Wolfe’s famous
aphorism: it is not that you cannot go home again—you cannot go
anywhere else.) Characters and plot elements are sublated to another
dimension; reconfigured as if by a twist of a kaleidoscope. Something
akin to this latter effect occurs in “Westward,” when Mark writes

a story-within-the-story that shuffles and recombines the main nar-
rative’s cast (including actor Jack Lord, now a prison warder) in a
“weird blind rearrangement” (GCH 356).
The studio-created funnel that delivers Dorothy to Oz, then, pre-
figures, at the level of fantasy, the multivalent tornadoes that blow
through Wallace’s writing: alien yet homegrown, abstracting yet
freighted with debris and details, transcendent and grand scale, yet
still insistently regional. Tornadoes are connected with place and with
displacement in Wallace’s work; they are a process (the figural play of
writing) and, as the “tornadic,” an arrangement of information. Like
dialectics as defined by David Harvey they are “matter in motion,”
both “wave” and “particle” (50). A spatial correlative for Wallace’s
intensely pressured and exhilarating writing, the tornadic in these
texts is not only an idiosyncratic adaptation of encyclopedic form
able to mimic the spins and cycles of reflexive thought, and evoke
the speed of contemporary information-overload, but it also turns
on, tropes, transfiguration—the metaphorical itself—and that is the
region where all true writers are ultimately located.
Notes
1. Danielle Dreilinger and Javier Zarracina, in fact, mapped Infinite
Jest ’s Boston geography when they proposed a “Wallace memorial
tour” as a parallel to the Joycean Bloomsday.
2. The “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” sequence of stories is also
carved up into institutional space: the geographically dispersed facili-
ties where each troubled soul is interrogated are logged in lieu of
latitude and longitude.
3. See, for example, Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination
(33); Sally Bayley, Home on the Horizon (21).
4. In all likelihood, Wallace takes the term “thanatoid” from Thomas
Pynchon`s Vineland (1990), another historical novel about Reagan`s
America.
5. Stephenson was born three years before Wallace and spent a period
of his childhood in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. Though the two
writers never met, Stephenson examines theWeltanschauung they
shared, one particular to the mindset of the Midwest American
College Town (or MACT), in his foreword to the paperback edition
of Everything and More, a text that is reprinted and revised in Some
Remarks.
6. It is not only preppy editors at Harper’s, past or present, who find
this territory head-slappingly ambiguous. In a memorial tribute, Dave
Eggers, though a Midwesterner himself, recalls being fascinated by
106 PAUL QUINN
Wallace’s “exotic” yet “prosaic” mailing address, “Rural Route 2,

Box 361, Bloomington, IL” (3).
7. Which phrase summons up an unlikely constellation of Joyce,
St. Ignatius Loyola, and Harper’s.
8. D. T. Max’s biography notes that as a boy Wallace “devoured . . . The
Wizard of Oz” (5).
9. On further significances of this date and witch’s garb, see Burn,
Infinite Jest: A Reader’s Guide, 63.
10. Michael Martone in “The Flatness” recalls that when he was growing
up, a taped Danny Kaye would appear before regional TV screenings
of the movie to forewarn and reassure Midwestern children about the
disorienting transitions between black and white and color (32).
CH A P T ER 6
Mediated Immediacy in Brief Interviews

with Hideous Men
Mary K. Holland
Comprising 23 separate pieces and 37 or so different voices, Brief

Interviews with Hideous Men aggressively explores the warped
workings of relationships—largely male-female and primarily their
linguistic workings—by creating personae that shock and disgust
us with admissions of bad behavior, then add offense by demanding
our identification and understanding. Though it has only begun to
receive serious critical attention,1 its brazen solicitation of empathy for
all kinds of mental, physical, and emotional disfigurements through
likewise discomforting generic disfigurements represents a powerful
development of themes and goals for fiction that David Foster Wallace
had been articulating for several years, not only in Infinite Jest but also
in his 1993 interview with Larry McCaffery and essay on television
(“E Unibus Pluram: Television and U. S. Fiction”). Most essentially,
the book continues his rejection of postmodernism’s unproductive
irony in favor of a return to sincerity through metafiction. But to this
concern about irony, Brief Interviews adds an unflinching critique of
narcissism as an impediment to empathy and sincerity, most often as
wielded by men in solipsistic “relationship” with women. Indeed, the
collection is Wallace’s only work to focus on the intersection between
problems of language and male-female relationships, or, as Wallace
himself has described the book, on sex.2 The reader quickly finds,
however, that Wallace is not so much interested here in the physi-
cal act of sex, whose juicy specifics get little to no mention in the
book, as he is in the linguistic contortions men undergo to make the
108 MARY K. HOLLAND
physical ones happen. Brief Interviews, then, explores the degree to

which men’s sexual desire for women taints and often prevents any
attempts by men to extend empathy, or anything like their “true”
selves, to women because of the fraught interplay between language,
desire, and power.
Clearly the problem of linguistic power as deployed by desiring
men to manipulate and objectify women was on Wallace’s mind as he
was writing Brief Interviews. In 1998, he delivered his now-famous
razing/“review” of John Updike’s Toward the End of Time, in which
he criticizes the “radical-self-absorption” and “uncritical celebration
of this self-absorption both in themselves and in their characters” of
the “GMNs,” or Great Male Narcissists (Roth, Mailer, and Updike),
whose fiction ruled the 1960s and 1970s. Wallace cites Updike’s
characters particularly for being “deeply alone, alone the way only
an emotional solipsist can be alone,” and therefore unable to love
anyone, especially women—not so much despite as because of their
obsessive praising and pursuing of women’s sexual parts (CL 53).
Ultimately Wallace disparages both the novel’s main character and
Updike himself for “persist[ing] in the bizarre, adolescent belief”
motivating much of the hideous behavior in Brief Interviews as well:
that sex is a cure for human despair (CL 59).3
This male appropriation of women in solipsistically conceived
quests to escape despair is a gender-specific manifestation of the
narcissism that Wallace has explored in fiction and nonfiction (most
thoroughly in “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”), dem-
onstrating it as both inherent to the human experience and as exacer-
bated by a culture driven by image, consumption, and technological
modes of representation. In Infinite Jest, he also identifies narcissism
as the primary fuel for postmodern irony. As in Jest, Brief Interviews
tackles these twin problems of irony and narcissism through not only
a return to earnestness via ironized irony and self-conscious metafic-
tion, but also through formal innovations, such as footnotes, mul-
tiple narrative voices, and shifting points of view, which remind the
reader at every turn that she and the fiction are constructing empathy
together through language.
Structurally, Brief Interviews does for the short story collection
what Infinite Jest did for the novel, reimagining its generic form in
order to accommodate its manifold clamor of self-conscious voices,
and to traverse via technique the gulf between selves they express.
Brief Interviews stands apart from both his earlier collection Girl
with Curious Hair and the later Oblivion, in that it incorporates the
most variety and innovation in the genre, ranging from quarter-page
MEDIATED IMMEDIACY 109
flash fiction to fully developed, though formally fractured and

self-mediating stories. Yet it maintains throughout a dedication to
the idea of the interview, in which every story depicts only one side
and voice of what could be, needs to be, or is, a larger conversation.
This consistent structural monovocality enacts exactly the interior
solipsism and resulting communicative barriers that Wallace’s fiction
as a whole aims to diagnose and overcome. At the same time, the
interrogatory format of the many interviews and quizzes that make
up a large portion of the book creates a mechanism for eliciting and
examining characters’ and readers’ understanding of their beliefs,
values, and selves, thus structurally insisting that the linguistically
experimental stories be, as Wallace proposed in his 1993 interview,
“for the sake of something” (CW 27).
Though Wallace published nearly every story in the collection prior
to the publication of the book,4 Brief Interviews is much more a short
story cycle than a random collection of previously uncollected work.
Its 23 pieces assert a kind of integrity by implying echoes and connec-
tions among themselves and a logic to their placements in the collec-
tion. Such connection and logic are not absolute, however, as part of
the logic of the whole is its consistent insistence on its missing parts,
and its refusal fully to explain the order in which we encounter them.
In this way, the structure of Brief Interviews can seem more akin
to that of Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition,5 which resists readerly
attempts to connect and order its pieces both in its original 1970 text
and in Ballard’s marginalia added 20 years later, than to the short
story collection from which Brief Interviews most overtly takes its
influence: Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse (1968). Unlike Barth, who
declares in two different prefatory pieces his intention that the work
be read as a “tale cycle” or “series” (Lost v, xi), Wallace makes no such
request of the reader; indeed, he disclosed in an interview that his
editor, Michael Pietsch, determined the final order for the collection
(CW 93). And the work itself refuses to provide the kind of overt rep-
etition of character and setting, or overarching thematic narrative arc,
that makes the otherwise radically innovative Funhouse almost con-
ventional in comparison. As Wallace’s novels loop rather than close by
proceeding and ending in nonchronological and seemingly discon-
nected ways, so does Brief Interviews withhold overarching closure
and coherence by comprising pieces and series of pieces that signify
gaps, incompletion, and disorder as much as meaningful presence.
The book offers only 18 out of what appear to be at least 72 inter-
views, and only 3 of what must be at least 24 “Example[s] of the
Porousness of Certain Borders.” These recurring pieces, divided into
110 MARY K. HOLLAND
identically titled sections, instigate a pattern of doubling, or echoes—

repetition with a difference—that is also enacted by the two “The
Devil is a Busy Man” stories, which, despite being altogether different
in content, share the exact same title. Another doubling, or perhaps
in this case splitting, results from the author’s failure to complete
a story, or his insistence on a whole new way of defining a story as
“complete”: “Adult World (II)” provides an outline for the end of
“Adult World (I).” And like the multiple incomplete series, one piece,
“Octet,” stubbornly identifies itself as eight-pieced while offering
only four or five segments (Wallace makes it hard to tell), numbered
up to not eight but nine. At every turn, the collection escapes or dis-
appoints its own plans for itself, leaving the reader to make sense of
the incommensurate mess in her hands.
Conversely, it is the collection’s ability to compel its reader to do
this logicking work, and to manufacture the compulsion from its faint
logical promise, that provides its ultimate integrity. For as its pieces
and incomplete series assert the gaps between and among them, so
do their repetitions and echoes imply that they all participate in some
larger whole, or series of wholes, that themselves might be connected.
The mere fact of the multiple series that contain so many pieces sug-
gests a unity outside of the book itself but to which each piece points.
And, as I will discuss in more detail below, the interview series implies
its own internal logic and narrative, while the collection as a whole
suggests a logic to the arrangement of some of the series’ pieces, as,
for example, in the placement of interview #20 as the last interview
of the collection and “Yet Another Example of the Porousness of
Certain Borders (XXIV)” as the book’s concluding piece. Further,
thematic overlaps accrue as voices in different pieces tell similar tales
or set up similar quandaries.6
Characters often share oddly specific details: the narrator in
“Church Not Made with Hands,” for example, remembers the same
“bowl haircut” (BI 194) received by the tortured narrator in the
book’s last piece (BI 319); and the County Mental Health Director of
“Church” repeats the curious tick of the Depressed Person’s psychia-
trist, habitually forming “cagelike” shapes with his hands (BI 45n1,
50, 54n4, 64n6[1], 208). Such strange overlapping, a kind of experi-
ential doubling, functions as a more subtle and dispersed version of
the dream/vision eerily shared by Gately and Hal of digging up the
Infinite Jest cartridge that lies in the stead of Incandenza’s head. These
repetitions create a palpable yet unexplained familiarity among char-
acters and stories despite the collection’s estrangement of them among
pieces disconnected by form and storyline. Further, the particular
repetitions are themselves meaningful. The “cagelike” shapes formed

by the County Mental Health Director signify the sacred space and
comfort we cannot create for ourselves, no less in “The Depressed
Person” than in “Church Not Made with Hands.” And the infantiliz-
ing “bowl haircut” suffered by the narrator of “Porous Borders” as he
discovers his self-estrangement transfers that same painful discovery,
retroactively, to our re reading of “Church”’s Day, who cannot find
his way into that cagelike church. Separated by stories whose plotlines
know nothing of each other, these characters through unexplained
repeated minutiae occupy the same narrative of maturation and com-
ment upon and extend each others’ journeys in it.
This simultaneous assertion of absence and presence, silence and
echo, fracture and connection suggests a shared human experience
whose documentation in this collection is necessarily incomplete, as
if the gathered texts function like the results of a survey—its pieces
representing more than the sum of its parts, however much they
remain discrete, each piece able to speak truly for only its one par-
ticular voice. In this way, Brief Interviews implies commonality of
experience and struggle while also staying true to its fundamental
poststructural acknowledgment of the irreducible singularity, partic-
ularity, and multiplicity of human experience. Thus, as is implied by
the interview format itself, these pieces both enact the estrangement
of the self and suggest that only in placing discrete selves in conjunc-
tion, connection, and proximity to each other can anything meaning-
ful and beyond the self arise.
The first three pieces introduce the problems and changed world
texture that will occupy the entire book. The opening story greets
us conspicuously from page 0, providing a blueprint for reading the
collection thematically, and indicating, with the even-numbered
right-facing pagination that it forces on the entire book, the structural
contortions the stories will undergo in building these themes. With
its slight 79 words, “A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial
Life” reads a bit like a radically condensed version of Barthelme’s “At
the End of the Mechanical Age” (1973), indicating that even a decade
post-Girl, Wallace continues the patricidal work of riffing explosively
on his postmodern ancestors. Postmechanical, Barthelme writes
romantic love as the performance of a predictable narrative in com-
pensation for all that is lost when God is reduced to a meter reader of
grace, which “is electricity.” Postindustrial, Wallace reduces romance
further while adding the sharp piquancy of social anxiety: girl and
boy meet, “hoping to be liked,” then drive home separately, “with
the very same twist to their faces,” while “the man who introduced
112 MARY K. HOLLAND
them didn’t much like either of them, though he acted as if he did,

anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times” (BI 0). This
anxiety to be “liked,” which Wallace himself baldly expresses in mul-
tiple interviews,7 opens the book as a formative human need. In col-
lision with all the “acting-as-if” of interpersonal relationships, such
anxiety produces a chasm of uncertainty into which all attempts to
both know the other and rest secure in the other’s true love of the self
fall obliteratingly: “One never knew, after all, now did one now did
one now did one,” ends the story as it trickles into the meaningless
void of the signifying chain (BI 0). This final uninflected repetition
of unknowingness signifies all the stutteringly impotent attempts at
knowing and communicating knowledge and empathy through lan-
guage that will characterize the stories to come. The twisted faces,
however, suggest not only the problem of ubiquitous masks in postin-
dustrial social interactions and thus the constant question of sincer-
ity in such a culture, but also the faith that something true remains
beneath the façade to be discovered through empathy. The challenge
remains, for this boy and girl, for the hideous characters to come,
and for the reader disturbed equally by their hideousness and by
the twisted narrative techniques that communicate it, to discover a
method of getting behind masks built as unthinkingly by contempo-
rary social forces as by always-elusive poststructural language.
The cycle’s third story, “Forever Overhead,” emphasizes how gen-
der and sexuality complicate understanding of self and other, in a
narrative style that is a dramatic departure for Wallace. One of the
two earliest published stories collected in Brief Interviews (both it and
“Church with No Hands” first appeared in 19918), this story is sur-
prisingly realistic and linear in its telling. Along with the book’s final
piece, “Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders
(XXIV),” “Forever Overhead” is one of few pieces in this collection
that is more realist than metafictional, both in its narrative style and
in its theme of a coming to self-awareness and an emotional maturity
that includes the ability to empathize with others. Thus it provides
the bildungs-roman heart of this narratively and structurally antireal-
ist collection,9 a touchstone toward which the book’s metafictional
pieces reach as they enact Wallace’s larger project of creating empathy
in the reader and depicting acts of empathy by characters outside the
bonds of realist fiction.
“Forever Overhead” depicts with great tenderness and sensitivity a
boy’s inner experience of standing perched at the cusp simultaneously
of his body’s and mind’s sexual awakening, and of the diving board
at a public pool. Preparing to take the plunge into adolescence and
pool—both done, it can’t be helped, in a horribly public manner—

the boy in his suspended animation between boyhood and manhood,
air and water, also stands for the self’s splintered exile from itself, the
private self bound by story’s end to “step into the skin and disappear”
in the social mass that awaits it below (BI 16). Wallace signals this
self-division in his use of second-person point of view, which both
divides the boy from himself via externalized inner monologue, and
extends the intimacy of his inner experience to the reader who inevi-
tably becomes the owner of that second-person “you.”
Estranged from himself by his sudden crop of “crunchy, animal
hair” and newly “full and vulnerable” testicles, the boy has “grown
into a new fragility” (BI 5) involving aches and “spasms of a deep
sweet hurt” that herald his movement from childhood’s simplicity
into the painfully sweet ambivalence of adulthood. In fact the boy
registers much around him as complexly “sweet,” not only the “clean
sweet smell you can’t believe comes from anything inside you” of his
morning’s crunchy animal hair, but also the “bleached sweet salt”
smell of the pool that awaits him, the coconut oil on the sweating
bodies around it, and the Pepsi above which a bee floats madly, in
tiny visual echo of his own expectant stance on the board. The bee
connects the boy to his thoughts about his position in the world:
“moving faster than it can think,” to seem to stay still, the bee is
the boy’s lesson in perspective before he even reaches the end of the
board to peer down. From the end of the board and the story, per-
spective is everything: “the water, of course, is only soft when you’re
inside it,” and “cold is just a kind of hard”; “it all changes when you
get back down” (BI 15, 16). The sweet bleach smell that connects
the boy to his future self as a sexual person and a social person, the
future he is poised to join with his plunge, is thus both an arriving
and a leaving, and also simply the entrance into a multiple under-
standing of self in which one must always be negotiating between its
parts in hellos and good-byes. The story ends with “Hello”—said to
the boy? in the boy’s head to himself? to the reader in second-person
address?—a salutation whose multiple valences speak both to the
splintering of selves managed by the story and to the tender, earnest
greeting the story wants to give to all of them, and to us. Such desire
directly to meet and greet the other echoes the boy’s own repeated,
simply and deeply felt moments of empathy, which he registers even
amid his anxiety on the board and about his new awkward self. Of
a varicose-veined woman he thinks “her legs make you feel like your
own legs hurt” (BI 11); in the discolored board’s end he reads the
residue of all the people who have come, also somewhat woundingly,
114 MARY K. HOLLAND
before him: “the weight and abrasion of their disappearance leaves

little bits of soft tender feet behind” (BI 14). Ultimately it is into these
“eyes of skin” (BI 16) that he must step to accomplish his leap into the
adult world and into—quite literally, given the image of the board’s
accrued human detritus—the social body.10
But accomplishing such empathy in the adult world, outside one’s
head, and in way that can be communicated to others, is hard and
fraught, and this is the challenge of representation that the cycle
confronts. Its second piece, “Death Is Not the End,” dramatizes the
difficult problem of representing any “true” self through art and lan-
guage. Through its only character, a poet, who demonstrates many
of the qualities of the GMNs Wallace so excoriated in his review of
Updike, the piece introduces the stultifying problem of narcissism,
and suggests that “the end lies in this stasis, not in death itself”
(Goerlandt 165). But it also suggests something equally unnerving
about the formal vehicle for this thematic observation. Running three
and a half pages but comprising one paragraph and only three sen-
tences, the story merely describes a man lying motionless outside,
and his surroundings, themselves “wholly still and composed and
enclosed” (BI 4). Its three main verbs are insistently inactive. Seeming
a bit of old-fashioned, massively descriptive realism, the piece turns
on its head, or, better, fractures hydralike into many heads, when its
final sentence entirely denies its object’s mimetic capacity—and then
denies the denial. Ultimately the story asserts that its scene is “not
like anything else in the world in either appearance or suggestion,”
prohibiting a reading of the description as either visually mimetic or
symbolically meaningful; a demure little footnote then adds, “that
is not wholly true.” Initially devoted solely to describing “real life,”
the story instead converts life into a kind of mimetic painting, or
metaphor for a painting (as a linguistic pun on “still life”). If its final
denial of the description’s veracity to real life (“not like anything else
in the world”) questions the mimetic capacity of its realism, its more
final denial of that denial, via footnote, seems to question the status
of representation itself. The complicated series of realities and mask-
ings created through this fracturing end becomes the literary equiva-
lent of the twisted faces introduced in the first story, in a method that
will continue throughout the cycle, as will the stories’ dependence
on both linguistic and visual motifs to explore masking and com-
munication of what selves might lie behind the masks. Here Wallace
creates a postmodern revision of William Carlos Williams’s modernist
manifesto, from “No ideas but in things” to “No ideas but in how we
see and represent things.”
Always for Wallace characters, one thing that lies behind the mask,
and the thing that so often creates both the mask and the hideous-
ness it is masking, is narcissism. In this cycle it erupts all over the
place, but nowhere more baldly, horribly, and heartbreakingly than
in the awkwardly titled “On His Deathbed, Holding Your Hand,
the Acclaimed New Young Off-Broadway Playwright’s Father Begs
a Boon.” Awkward, because the title contains all of the little we will
know about the story’s son, and, worse, it contains all of him in a pos-
sessive appositive descriptor modifying “Father.” This story is about
the father, the father’s needs, the father’s pain, the father’s words,
and in this/his context, the needs, pain, and words of his boy do not
matter at all. Dying, the father expresses his final need, to document
for all posterity his feelings for his son: “Listen: I did despise him.
Do” (BI 256). The hatred is born with the babe himself, as the man
discovers through fatherhood his “disgust” and “loathing” (BI 259)
for “the selfishness, the appalling selfishness of the newborn” (BI
257). Veteran Wallace readers, schooled in his abiding awareness
of and anxiety about the infantile narcissism that is the dark heart of
every human being, register the irony of the father’s resentment of
his newborn’s “genius: to need ” (BI 266). Such a father encounters
with monstrous envy his babe’s blithe indulgence in total fulfillment:
“At home in his body as only one whose body is not his job can be at
home. Filled with himself, right to the edges like a swollen pond. He
was his body” (BI 264). This wholly indulgent and indulged state of
being, the essence of infancy and the envy of all who have been shut
out of it, the father characterizes as “an essential disorder of character.
An absence of whatever we mean by ‘human’” (BI 258); as “Insanity.
Solipsism” (BI 260). The irony of course is that in hating the child for
the infant’s insatiable need, and for converting his wife into the baby’s
mother—no longer his own—the father exposes his own relentless
infantile need and solipsism. Critical response to Wallace’s work has
leaned heavily on Lacanian ideas about the linguistic construct of the
self in elucidating its complex explorations of how the self becomes
constituted by language and in a linguistically determined world, and
rightfully so.11 But this story, in conjunction with Wallace’s numerous
other concerted explorations of the deleterious effects of the human
being’s inherently narcissistic wiring, points to the importance in
his work of essential Freudian ideas about primary narcissism, the
tripartite self and its conflicted system of drives, the interdependent
relationship between self and other, and the omnipresent threat of
solipsism due to both the nature of the self and contemporary cul-
ture’s exacerbation of that narcissistic core.
116 MARY K. HOLLAND
“The Depressed Person” refracts this problem of narcissism

and its attending threat of blocked empathy for the other through
the dilemmas of the fractured self and representation, resulting in
a tone so multilayered that its final intention remains indetermin-
able, easily misread, or both. Published initially in Harper’s, this
meticulous record of the tormented inner life of a profoundly,
poignantly, annoyingly depressed woman—whose best confidante is
a cancer-stricken friend whose calendar has been helpfully cleared
by chemotherapy, and whose therapist kills herself—offended early
readers by seeming to criticize a character who is suffering what we
understand as a disease.12 But more accurately the woman is suf-
fering narcissism: her need obsessively to know her self through its
development in and reflection by the other, to fill her void with
that reflected image. It is to this end that she applies, while skepti-
cally ironizing, 12-step methods for coping, such as “reaching out
to members of her Support System,” avoiding the “Blame Game”
(BI 39), creating “Childhood Reconstructions” (BI 40), and attend-
ing “Inner-Child-Focused Experiential Therapy Retreat Weekend”
(BI 46–47). The rampant capitalization and borrowed terms directly
evoke Wallace’s highly ambivalent use of AA- and NA-speak in
Infinite Jest, in which he posits elements of the 12-step programs as
both methods of escape from and intensification of narcissism and its
resulting addictive behaviors.
Also as in Jest, one fundamental problem here is the woman’s
method of dealing with her narcissistic need, not by sincerely engag-
ing herself in others’ present lives, but simply by asking them, from the
solipsistic safety of a telephone conversation or therapy appointment,
to fulfill her needs. The woman is aware of the limitations of these
one-sided methods of communication, but even these she interprets
as further threats to her own self’s fulfillment: from a memory of her
roommate making “gestures of repulsion and boredom” while talk-
ing on the phone to a boy in college, the woman creates further fear
that she will be so dismissed (BI 43–44). Meanwhile, she is aware that
she spends in therapy “$1080 a month to purchase what was in many
respects a kind of fantasy-friend who could fulfill her childishly nar-
cissistic fantasies of getting her own emotional needs met by another
without having to reciprocally meet or empathize with or even con-
sider the other’s own emotional needs” (BI 57n5). These anxieties
for the self even in an age that offers technological and clinical aids
to communication and self-discovery echo Wallace’s contemplation
of the same in Jest. The woman’s anxieties about the room for mis-
representation created by telephones reprise the anxieties that evolve
technology from telephone to videophone to video-inspired digitized

representations of the self (IJ 146). Similarly, her understanding of
the narcissism of her relationship with her therapist repeats the damn-
ing doubts of therapy culture exhibited in the fabulously ambivalent
“inner-child” support group that Hal stumbles into and witnesses
with growing horror (IJ 800–5). “The Depressed Person” ends with
crucial questions that it does not begin to attempt to answer: “what
words and terms might be applied to describe and assess such a solip-
sistic, self-consumed, endless emotional vacuum and sponge as she
now appeared to herself to be? How was she to decide and describe—
even to herself, looking inward and facing herself—what all she’d so
painfully learned said about her?” (BI 69). Thus it once again asks,
rather than elucidates, how we are to understand and communicate
the self, and escape narcissism, all through language, “words and
terms.” It also recognizes that the problem of literature is the prob-
lem of the self, and vice versa: both suffer from the necessity and
prison of representation, the self forced to “look inward,” to build a
separate self, to “face” itself, in some ill-fated, brutally fracturing, and
multiplying act of self-recognition (BI 69).
The 18 interviews in the cycle structurally recreate the problem
of the one-sided conversation that characterizes narcissism and dis-
ables empathetic connection. Wallace highlights the selfishness of
the responders, their disconnection from others, and the inherent
self-centeredness as well as all the talking so unpromisingly involved
in this particular method of knowing by omitting all questions, so
that even his “interviews” become monologues (a technique he will
repeat in The Pale King).13 Some of these “interviews” seem really
to be halves of conversations with an emotionally or sexually inti-
mately known (but structurally silenced) other. Many of them consist
of men manipulating a woman, their interviewer, into doing their
sexual and/or emotional bidding, and/or further forgiving them for
their objectifying behavior, underscoring the structural and thematic
challenge Wallace proposes to confront. For these men, irony—in
its modernist meaning of saying the opposite of what one means in
order to express a separate truth, or, to put it another way, lying with
purpose—works, in bitter, nasty ways. One interviewee (#11) blames
the woman, whom he is leaving, for driving him to leave her by fear-
ing that he will leave; another (#2), in “confessing” his weaknesses,
extracts gratitude and sympathy from this woman whose kindness he
has repeatedly abused with his own greedy need, even as he recounts
those abuses to her. These, and voices like them, enact a mask of ear-
nestness to work toward cruel, ironic purposes.
118 MARY K. HOLLAND
Another type of voice takes the opposite tack, enlisting our post-
modern culture’s predilection toward irony, or academic culture’s
fondness for irony’s handmaiden, poststructural indeterminacy, to
feed their selfish needs while appearing kind, thoughtful, or other-
wise worthy of admiration. One man (#46), seemingly an incarcerated
rapist defending his crime, argues for the mental and physical degra-
dation of women in the name of broader thinking (BI 116). Two men
in conversation in interview #28 (they must be graduate students)
use feminist and “post-feminist” beliefs to argue the gamut of sexist,
objectifying prefeminist prejudices about women. Quite a few other
voices articulate varying degrees of frightening misogyny and quo-
tidian sexism through a more banal lack of self-awareness: one man
declares his regard for women with choice lines like “I love how you
can never understand them [and] the way you just can’t keep them
from shopping no matter what you do” (BI 225–26). Another tells an
elaborate account of how his love of the television show Bewitched led
to masturbation fantasies in which he could manipulate the world,
especially women, at his pleasure, and then to his current God com-
plex, in which he connects his Bewitch ing masturbatory hand move-
ments to the movements of the planets. It is exactly this onanism of
self-absorption—power-hungry, pathetic, and objectifying everything
the self desires—that defines, unreflected upon, all of these men’s
relationships to women.
The interviews achieve greater and more powerful unity in light of
Wallace’s later revelation that they were all conducted by one woman,
the book’s “protagonist,” to whom “something bad happens over the
course of the book” (CW 90). Read through this lens, the chrono-
logically first interview offered, #2, depicts the interviewer’s romantic
partner pressing for her sympathy even while he is using and leav-
ing her (after, he himself points out, she has “moved all the way out
here” and “[had] to get rid of [her] cat,” BI 97). Interview #11 is
for the woman a reprisal of both the dumping and being blamed
for it. Taken together, these early interviews provide a motivation for
the interviewer to make sense of such offensive behavior, generating
and bridging future interviews. Later interviews follow these person-
ally upsetting experiences with more appalling revelations, attempts
to manipulate her (as in the wholly unselfconscious pick-up lines in
interview #19), and also, increasingly, confessions of truly twisted
minds conducted in various prisons and facilities (see interviews #15,
36, 46, and 59). According to the narrative set up by interviews #2
and 11, the entire body of interviews implies the woman’s dawning
understanding that the objectification she suffers is part of a larger
hideousness of gender relations whose spectrum spans from quotid-

ian to pathological. That something very bad indeed does seem to
happen because of the interviews (the last interview, #72, ends, “oh
no not again behind you look out! ” BI 26) suggests that the book
creates a moral universe: not by allowing the woman to prevail over
these repeated male attempts to dominate her with their verbal abuse,
but by ensuring our sympathy for her, by making plain her suffering
at male hands.14
Or the book accomplishes this morality and clarity of purpose if
we notice such a narrative arc, which we might not be likely to do.15
The text of the gathered interviews is itself incomplete, denying us an
inaugural, perhaps more explanatory interview #1, and dissipating its
narrative logic beyond easy recognition, through nonchronological
placement and division among three groups of interviews dispersed
throughout the collection. Thus the body of interviews repeats the
collection’s larger structure of presence made out of absence, order
in dialectic with disorder. Further, as in “The Depressed Person,”
Wallace complicates matters enormously by embedding the inter-
views’ clear theme of abusive self-absorption in murky layers of narra-
tive, tone, intention, and expectation. The pro-degradationist rapist
who ends his interview by asking, “What if I did it to you? Right
here? Raped you with a bottle?” (BI 124) not only verbally accosts
us but also elicits our empathy by asking us to imagine suffering the
same brutality he implies he has suffered himself. The man who ironi-
cally argues that being a “Great Lover” (BI 28) requires allowing
his partner the supreme pleasure of pleasing him strikes us as quite
earnest only a page earlier when he is extolling the virtues of mutual
sexual generosity, a definition of “great” loving that sounds quite
reasonable. Is it merely agreeing with him that makes him earnest for
us? What constitutes earnestness in conversation, and how does one
construct it in language? These interviews remind us that recognizing
earnestness and generating empathy depend on perspective and values,
negotiated between speakers; and that both require complex narrative
construction and context to be present in language.
Wallace demonstrates perhaps most brilliantly the complex slipperi-
ness of earnestness and empathy, especially as represented through
language, in the final interview presented in the collection.16 In it,
a young man with a history of using women for sex describes how
he was transformed by a woman’s totally “sincere” and “unposing”
account of being raped by a psychotic man who spares her life simply
because of her own act of empathy: she manages to create and sus-
tain, even through the vicious act of “anti-rape” (BI 312), a powerful
120 MARY K. HOLLAND
connection with the attacker that will not allow him to dehuman-
ize and kill her. The young man illustrates that he understands her
conversion of violation into caring complicity as at root an act of
mothering, of meeting the rapist’s gnawingly infantile need of narcis-
sistic fulfillment: he describes her “stroking the back of his head and
whispering small little consolatory syllables in a soothing maternal
singsong” (BI 310), and delivering “the well-known Female Gaze”
(BI 312), in the face of the rapist’s psychotic reaction to his “infantile
belief that without [mother’s] love he will somehow die” (BI 305).
Further, her extraordinary act of empathy inspires the young man,
once an empathy-poser like so many of the other interview voices, to
participate in his own sincere acts of empathy as he retells her story
for us. “Can you imagine,” he asks,
How in her altered state of heightened attention to everything around

she says the clover smells like weak mint and the phlox like mown hay
and she feels the way she and the clover and phlox and the dank ver-
dure beneath the phlox and the mulatto retching into the gravel and
even the contents of his stomach were all made of precisely the same
thing. (BI 309)
Later, while describing listening to her tell her story, he experi-

ences his own heightened sense of awareness, “remembering in
near-hallucinatory detail that evening’s outdoor concert and festival”
(BI 311) where he had picked her up by masking his disdain for her
“Granola Cruncher” “type” with a pose of sincerity. He notes that
the first thing he admires about her (post-coitally) is her absolute
lack of pose, her utter sincerity (BI 296, 297). From his powerful
encounter with this shockingly sincere woman he learns not only how
to empathize but also that doing so is our best way of coping nonpsy-
chotically with that infantile need that motivates us all. He recognizes
the psychotic man’s raping of the woman as a more extreme version of
his own use of her, understanding that “it isn’t the motivation that’s
the psychotic part” (BI 304), but the rapist’s extreme response to
it, and realizes that “there had been far more genuine emotion and
connection in that anti-rape she suffered than in any of the so-called
lovemaking I spent my time pursuing” (BI 312).
But ultimately this interview reminds us of the dangers lurking in
every act of telling. The interview ends with the man attacking, bru-
tally, sexually, and through language, his young, female, “feminist”
interviewer—“Judge me, you chilly cunt . . . I don’t care . . . I know I
loved. End of story” (BI 318). But even more revealingly, the interviewee
belies his sincerity throughout: the response in which he documents

his empathetic transformation also employs the same linguistic marks
of objectifying women and posturing irony that he believes he has
escaped. He refers to both the raped woman whom he “loves” and the
interviewer as “types,” and scare-quotes words as diverse as “love,”
“true,” (BI 317) and “brutal sex slayings” (BI 293), casting them in
equal doubt. In fact, the narrator’s most powerful method of under-
cutting both his transformation and the power of the woman’s empa-
thetic accomplishment lies in converting the entire account to words,
language, and narrative, his “story” drawing attention to itself as such
by referring to the “rising action” of the rape “anecdote” (BI 299),
and contemplating the horror of the woman’s experience of “being
left narratively alone in the self-sufficiency of her narrative aspect”
(BI 298). Thus, this final interview suggests the impossibility of ever
wholly transcending either the narcissistic self or language, while also
demonstrating the necessity of using them in conjunction to try.
Far more successful in using language, and narrative’s self-awareness
as such, in the service of enabling rather than undercutting empathy
and understanding is the cycle’s structurally and thematically cen-
tral piece, the 30-page “Octet.” This piece comes at us as a series of
pop quizzes that present the reader with moral and ethical dilem-
mas involving friend and family relationships, capped with ques-
tions requesting the reader’s judgment. What the quizzes do not
do, though, is dictate the terms in which they expect the reader to
make such judgments (one long quiz ends with the vague demand,
“Evaluate”), or ask the questions the reader expects to be asked (after a
scenario involving two “terminal” drug addicts: “Which one lived?”).
The quizzes underscore the idea raised more implicitly by moments
of tonal slippage that both communicating and reading empathy and
earnestness are unavoidably matters of judgment and values, and that
fiction’s ignoring this fact is at least unrealistic and at worst a form of
dissembling. From the start, Wallace forces the reader to aid in both
the answering and the interpretation of the quiz, implicating her in
his project of value exploration. The story’s other defining metafictive
element, footnotes (which sprout their own footnotes), also requires
from the reader concerted engagement: the notes both impede the
reading process, reminding the reader of the text’s constructedness,
and literally move her, by forcing much page turning and eye scan-
ning. Containing “excised” quizzes, these footnotes also allow the
text to sprawl beyond our traditional sense of the text proper, as if to
place the reader in intimate cahoots with a writer whose editor has
held him insufficiently apart from his audience.
122 MARY K. HOLLAND
As if these formal methods of bringing the reader into relation-

ship with the writer were not enough, Wallace then deploys the
second-person point of view to impose a direct shoe-swapping of
reader and writer: “You are, unfortunately, a fiction writer,” pop quiz
9 begins (BI 145), then proceeds to obliterate realism’s fourth wall by
telling us with “queer urgency ” (BI 146) about the need for “100%
candor” (BI 148) in “interrogating the reader” (BI 151) “sincere[ly]”
and “naked[ly]” (BI 154) that plagues said fiction writer—which is to
say, us, the readers. By the end of the piece, Wallace has collapsed even
these distinctions, making the “you” ultimately “more like a reader,
in other words, down here quivering in the mud of the trench with
the rest of us, instead of a Writer, whom we imagine to be clean and
dry and radiant of command presence as he coordinates the whole
campaign from back at some gleaming abstract Olympian HQ”
(BI 160). Here he articulates the power-defined reader-writer binary
only to collapse it as reader becomes a writer who is herself asked to
make the imaginative empathetic identification back with the reader
in whose position she began. Doing so allows him to accomplish the
goals he set for himself in the 1993 interview: it is the literary equiv-
alent of exactly that unthinkable act Wallace imagines in the story
for his reader/writer, “addressing the reader directly and asking her
straight out whether she’s feeling anything like what you feel” (154).
Only, he never does ask her outright. Instead he mediates the ques-
tion by placing it in the mouth of a character-writer who addresses the
reader supremely indirectly, in that he has already asked the reader to
imagine herself as, well, the writer.
Wallace also creates empathy between reader and writer structur-
ally, in a manner similar to Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse”: “Octet”’s
metafictive narrative strategies intensify the fictitiousness of the story,
throwing into relief an authorial voice that feels intensely real in com-
parison. In this way, Wallace revises realism, creating the feeling of
reality not by allowing the reader to absorb herself into another world
through the illusion of verisimilitude, but by creating a world so obvi-
ously false, constructed, written, that the voice responsible for writ-
ing that world, the man behind the curtain, seems to be sitting next
to us here, in our world. In so doing, Wallace converts Baudrillard’s
distinctively postmodern concept of the simulacra—that unreal thing
that exists to convince us that the rest of the world is real, an idea
that felt so threatening to human connection and even our notions
of humanity in the 1980s and 1990s—into a method for sculpting
through fiction a powerful human presence whose insistent engagement
with the reader makes her feel, in her own life, less alone.
Part two of “Adult World” more particularly extends the formal

arguments of immediacy through mediation in “Octet.” An outline
of a short story, it promises to complete its earlier part, therefore focus-
ing on the writerly techniques meant to be harnessed to answer ques-
tions raised by Part I and give it “meaning.” Here we find writing laid
bare: almost filmically, the outline shows us how it will manipulate
our judgments of characters and of their own morally and ethically
questionable decisions based on point of view employed, on what it
will reveal and what it will deny. Just as many of the “interviews” in
this collection make us cringe at the speakers’ unselfconscious rev-
elations of brutal (and largely linguistic) techniques for manipulat-
ing women into emotionally and physically brutal encounters, “Adult
World II” exposes the manipulations imposed on readers with every
act of writing. One of the things this collection contemplates, then, is
that we all, readers and writers alike, share in both the brutality and
the promise of the acts of power enabled by language.
Most experimental for Wallace in this cycle, in that it is neither neat
realism nor his usual sharp-tongued metafiction, is the surrealistic,
prose-poetic “Church Not Made with Hands.” This piece considers
most overtly whether art can offer salve or salvation for the estrange-
ments and sufferings of life. The story slips among settings and times,
contained both in- and outside the mind of its main character, named
only Day, while dreamily describing the grim days surrounding the
near-drowning of his stepdaughter as he, unable to swim, watched
helplessly. Its illogical impressionism mimicking both Day’s trauma-
tized mind and the girl’s brain-damaged one, the story piles synesthe-
sia upon synesthesia like thick ropes of paint, sculpting its narrative
into a heavy tactility like the suffocating thing Day’s life has become
since watching his stepdaughter breathe water instead of air. He
“dreampaints” day and night, blurring the boundaries between word,
painting, and music while all but erasing the boundaries between real-
ity and dream, life and art. One dreamt memory suggests the promise
of both art and dream to heal the ache of solitary consciousness: Day
recalls a lecture on Vermeer’s View of Delft, described by his professor
as offering “windows onto interiors in which all conflicts have been
resolved” by its “razor-clear” rendering, so that “the viewer sees as
God sees” (BI 203–4). Radiantly moved by the projected work of art,
the professor offers this vision of art as method of empathy and under-
standing between people, and people and art: “Day can see how it’s
the angle of the bright breeze against the screen that makes the wet
face atop the priest’s lit shadow glow”; “big jelly tears” move artfully
down his cheek to drop down to the “text” (BI 204).
124 MARY K. HOLLAND
But later, the “defrocked professor of art,” now sacrilegiously pray-

ing to time, will lead Day in a dreampainted vision of a church sprout-
ing from nowhere, encompassing him and the injured Esther, and
allowing their peaceful ascension, until his glance back to see where
he came from brings it all down. The failed vision seems to confirm
an observation made by Day’s boss, whose habit of making steeples
with his hands has taught him that “his one best church leaves no
hand free to open the door” (BI 208). When wholly constructed
by the self or the human, the promise and place of divine salvation
remain inaccessible to both. The architectural component added to
this vision by the church emphasizes the element of desired contain-
ment, the longing for a complex in which to be held, for space defined
by the clear borders that make the View of Delft a vision of conflictless
knowability. For all the blurring between genres, senses, types of art,
and art and life achieved by Day and this story as they grapple with
a trauma that cannot be adequately contained by any one of them,
both man and story seem to long for a clarity they can’t even imagine
for themselves.
Piqued by his shattering failure to protect his stepdaughter, Day
confronts his profound existential awareness that there is nothing and
no one outside himself to bestow the peaceful fulfillment of clarity
and meaning—no defined limits he can satisfyingly fill “right to the
edges like a swollen pond.” Yet any framework he builds with his own
hands “leaves no hand free to open the door.” Preventing this clarity
seems to be his understanding that, as the 13-year-old boy perceives
from the edge of the diving board, “it all changes when you get back
down.” Like this socially awkward adolescent, all eyes on him as he
hesitates between selves before stepping into those “eyes of skin” at his
board’s end, Day also suffers from an overabundance of eyes, awash in
an endlessness of disparate perspectives that causes all the blur. “The
sky is an eye,” the story ends. “The night is the eye’s drawn lid. Each
day the lid again comes open, disclosing blood, and the blue iris of a
prone giant” (BI 210). Literature, and visual art, have long enjoyed,
especially via a more monovocal traditional realism, contemplating
and constructing the order they could make of the world through
the narrative mastery of human perspective. Having shattered that
mastery into the insecurity and mess of a world made wildly multi-
plicitous, and each subject the object of every other subject’s gaze,
modernist and postmodernist art-making have become increasingly
at home with the uncanny (unheimlich, “unhomely”) boundlessness
of multiple subjective perspective. But in “Church,” Wallace pushes
the problems of subjective perspective and of the impossibility of
attaining a fixed position from which to know and be known one

step further: he imagines the world as we know it as subject to and
therefore constructed by the gaze of a giant other. It is the opposite
of filmmaker Terrence Malick’s favored image, starlings flocking at
dusk, the artful shapes made by their crazed masses and the beauty
and seeming purpose of their unified body visible only to us outside
their chaos.17 In Wallace’s vision, we are the chaos inside the unseen
shapely body, never knowing if the giant sees us as beautiful.
This anxiety about vision as a method of the self’s understanding
the self and the other haunts the cycle, incumbent as the method is
upon the simultaneously distorting and estranging necessity of per-
spective. Brief Interviews does not end with the final extended inter-
view #20 and its toothsome revelations about empathy, sincerity, and
the difficulty and possibility of maintaining both (especially while
telling a story). Instead, it closes with “Yet Another Example of the
Porousness of Certain Borders (XXIV),” a rare first-person story, not
interview, that wrests our empathy for its main character not through
metalinguistic pyrotechnics but through ordinary realist internal
monologue. As such, it ends the collection by returning it to the
bildungs-roman discoveries of self, via traditional realist devices, that
helped open the book with “Forever Overhead.” But “Porousness”
adds an emphasis on the ways in which external perspective unavoid-
ably bedevils self-reflection.18 In this final story, the boy narrator suf-
fers a haircut at the hands of his mother, while suffering more acutely
his twin brother’s galling miming of his every expression. Its first sen-
tence painstakingly situates all characters and setting elements in rela-
tion to each other, and in a series of claustrophobic frames: “Mum”
and boy stand between kitchen’s cold and stove’s heat, between open
drawer and wireless-scanning “Da,” between “window gone opaque”
and “the gilt ferrotype of identical boys.” This ferrotype picture con-
tains and inhabits its own series of frames, including the boys’ “flank-
ing a blind vested father” and the picture’s placement “in a square
recession above the wireless’s stand” (BI 319). Inside this “funhouse”
of framings—Wallace baldly invokes the comparison to Barth’s
seminal experimentation in literary self-consciousness (BI 320)—sits
the boy, unable to move, fully subject to the torture of his brother’s
“hung” face, copying the boy’s expressions “with such intensity and
so little lag in following that his face less mimed than lampooned
my own, made instantly distended and obscene whatever position my
own face’s pieces assembled” (BI 320). The boy’s discovery, akin to
that of the adolescent diver, is the terror of knowing he can only see
and know himself through reflection or representation, while every
126 MARY K. HOLLAND
external presentation of that self must come, distorted and “obscene,”

from the perspective of another.
Also tormenting the boy is the further understanding that in the
warped image of the “funhouse mirror” lies “the gross and pitiless
sameness, the distortion in which there is, tiny, at the center, some-
thing cruelly true about the we who leer and woggle at stick necks and
concave skulls, goggling eyes that swell to the edges” (BI 320–1). In
other words, the grotesquery reflects aninescapable truth about who
we are and how we see who we are. At first, he tries to escape con-
fronting this face with “an unseen fit that sent my eyes upward again
and again into their own shocked white.” But the boy finally realizes
that “the last refuge was slackness, giving up the ghost completely for
a blank slack gagged mask’s mindless stare—unseen and –seeing—
into a mirror I could not know or feel myself without. No not ever
again” (BI 321).19 This slackness is the permanent “lack of expression”
adopted by the career men’s room attendant, whose son despised him
for it (interview #42, BI 91), and it is the “anti-expression” of the
rapist robbed of all satisfaction by his heroically empathizing victim
(interview #20, BI 312). As in these other pieces, this final story pos-
its disaffection as our refuge from what DeLillo, in The Names, calls
the “self-referring” world in which self is constituted entirely through
its representation to itself (BI 297). Significantly, that the household
focuses on a framed “ferrotype” temporally locates this boy and
his dilemma of identity at the beginning of our now banal age of
technological reproduction. On the opposite side of the mechanical
age from the characters in the opening story, and from those in the
Barthelme story to which it alludes, this boy describes the sound of
his mother’s scissors as “lalation of shears meant for lambs” (BI 320),
thus envisioning himself as sacrifice to the image, himself being shorn
of something meaningful, while, muted by cloth, only the shears do
their mechanical talking.
To end with a pre-postmodern moment and its discovery of the
fracturing interactions among self, representation, and language that
would characterize the postmodern period is to in some way end at the
beginning, as if no distance at all has been traveled between such an
inaugurating moment and the cycle’s many attempts to overcome the
difficulties it bore. Thus the collection seems to imply that it (and we)
cannot escape the suffocating and distorting conditions of language
and representation in which it is made, and of the culture, intellectual
and otherwise, of which it is a part and from which it is born. In this
way the cycle seems no stranger to the discursive loop in which all of
Infinite Jest, even its attempts to escape it, are trapped. But it seems
equally fair to say that this cycle does create discrete moments, as in
“Octet,” “Forever Overhead,” “The Depressed Person,” and its final
interview, in which the reader can understand, even participate in,
acts of empathy constructed through self-conscious acts of writing
and representation. Always qualified by their encompassment in lan-
guage, and in any number of the endless other framing devices that
make up our making up of the world, these stories not only define
the gap in the self and between selves but also build bridges between
them with repeated invitations to “step into the skin and disappear,”
to become the writer who is himself “more like a reader,” to see in a
strange and mortal moment from the eye of the giant.
All of these imagined acts of empathy begin by taking a perspec-
tive outside the self, and in the end it is this shifting, even doubling
or multiplying, of vision that the collection diagnoses and enables,
that it greets with terror and gratitude. For though the vision proves
unsustainable in “Church,” it also provides, via a painting on can-
vas, its projection on a screen, and a blooming in Day’s mind, the
only space into which salvation floods. And however sobering is the
sheared boy’s discovery that he can only know himself through his
distorted reflection by another, such knowing must be less painful,
and more productive, than his eyes’ attempts to see blackly into him-
self. In this way the boy gains an external vision that allows him
to escape the “looking inward and facing herself” that plagues the
Depressed Person, whose profound solipsism is the mental equivalent
of the boy’s inward-rolling eyes. Like the adolescent on the diving
board who sees in a floating bee how thoroughly he masks his own
inner turmoil, and how different it all looks from down below, Brief
Interviews illustrates both the other’s distortion, even manipulation
and domination of the self, and the self’s need of the other to rep-
resent the self. In so doing, it critiques and celebrates the power of
language as a tool for such manipulation and as the material of vision,
handlessly constructing a space capacious enough to house, rather
than resolve, its contradictory impulses toward presence and absence,
empathy and solipsism, sincerity and twisted faces, even realism and
antirealism, knowing that “the lie is that it’s one or the other.”
Notes
1. To date, Marshall Boswell and Zadie Smith provide the only con-
certed considerations of this collection (see Understanding David
Foster Wallace and Changing My Mind, respectively); Adam Kelly,
Iannis Goerlandt, and Christoforos Diakoulas treat portions of the
128 MARY K. HOLLAND
collection in Consider David Foster Wallace. Only one journal arti-

cle focuses on the book, but that too examines only its brief open-
ing story, and then primarily to elucidate (with arguable relevance)
Raymond Carver’s minimalism (Dan Tysdal, “Inarticulation and the
Figure of Enjoyment: Raymond Carver’s Minimalism Meets David
Foster Wallace’s ‘A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial
Life’” in Wascana Review of Contemporary Poetry and Short Fiction
38.1 [2003]: 66–83). Charles Harris discusses the collection
briefly but effectively in the context of Wallace’s singularity as an
author (“David Foster Wallace: ‘That Distinctive Singular Stamp of
Himself’” in Critique 51.2 [2010]: 168–76). Reviews of the book
upon publication tended to express frustration with the book’s meth-
ods equaling their admiration of the book’s accomplishments.
2. Wallace describes the book as his attempt to “deal with” sex, a topic
he had not felt comfortable with before, in an interview with Lewis
Frumkes in the spring of 1999.
3. One year after writing this review, Wallace gave “Some Remarks on
Kafka’s Funniness,” also published in Lobster, in which he repeated
this concern that “our present culture is, both developmentally and
historically, adolescent” (64n3).
4. Of the 20 noninterview stories, Wallace published all but 2 (the sec-
ond “The Devil Is a Busy Man” and, interestingly, the collection’s last
piece, “Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders
(XXIV)”) prior to the collection. Of the 18 interviews, Wallace pub-
lished 9. The earliest stories, “Forever Overhead” and “Church Not
Made with Hands,” appeared in 1991, while the pre published inter-
views did not begin to appear until shortly before Brief Interview’s
own publication, one in 1997, seven in 1998, and another in 1999.
This publication history suggests that the interview format that shapes
and helps unify the collection came late in a writing process that had
already produced a formally diverse body of texts over several years.
5. While Ballard’s influence on Wallace has yet to receive critical atten-
tion, Wallace indicates his admiration for Ballard’s work as early as
1991, and specifically in terms of a work that had much in com-
mon with The Atrocity Exhibition. Ballard’s 1990 collection of sto-
ries called War Fever included two stories that were also included
in the 1990 edition of The Atrocity Exhibition: “Notes Towards a
Nervous Breakdown” and “The Secret History of World War 3.” In
his review of this collection for the Washington Post on April 28,
1991, Wallace asserts his affinity for Ballard’s book, and for these
specific pieces shared by The Atrocity Exhibition, for their “formal
fun,” “Borgesian . . . involution,” and first-person confessional per-
spective. He also registers his dislike of their “poverty of affect” and
tendency not to “give their readers a chance to exercise discernment
or insight”—perhaps signaling the ways in which he would accept
and reshape Ballard’s influence on his own later work.
6. Boswell accounts for both the structural alternating between short

and long pieces and these recurring themes by describing the
book as arranged “in a dialectical pattern of thesis, antithesis, and
synthesis” (182).
7. See the 1993 interview with McCaffery, the 1996 interview with
Lipsky, and a televised 1997 interview with Charlie Rose (to name
a few).
8. “Church Not Made with Hands” first appeared in Rampike (Winter/
Spring 1991), and “Forever Overhead” was first published in Fictional
International 19.2 (Spring 1991).
9. The story of Ambrose operates similarly in Barth’s Lost in the
Funhouse, both in the title piece and in the collection as a whole
(Ambrose’s story appears in three different pieces).
10. I find it interesting that Boswell reads “Step into the skin and dis-
appear” quite differently, the boy “disappearing” into the skin of
his “real” self, “safe from the self-consciousness that would displace
it” (203). Wherever one locates the vectors of “real” versus “social,”
their identities are clear, and anyway part of the point of the story is
that “the lie is that it’s one or the other” (16).
11. See, for example, Catherine Nichols’s “Dialogizing Postmodern
Carnival,” which reads Infinite Jest, quite wrong-headedly, in my
opinion, in terms of the “tyranny of the symbolic order.” Much more
helpful is Boswell’s elucidation of Wallace’s playful enlistment of
Lacan in interviews #28 and #48 (191–93).
12. See Boswell p. 205.
13. Zadie Smith suggests that the questions “are not only formally ‘miss-
ing’ from the conversations, their respondents have internalized them”
(268), solipsistically taking charge of both questions and answers.
14. The eight interviews that flesh out the interviewer’s backstory, as well
as build a moral universe in which the rest of the book must be read,
almost fully comprise the half that were not previously published,
perhaps suggesting that they were written for this collection spe-
cifically to provide the narrative throughline and moral framework
required by the book to make its formal innovations meaningful.
15. Like Barth’s Funhouse, whose “Seven Additional Author’s Notes”
reveals keys for reading several of the book’s stories, some of which,
like “Glossolalia,” remain inscrutable without them, the interviews
themselves, identified as taking place in locations all over the coun-
try and over at least a four-year span of time, do not clearly ask to
be read as conducted by one woman. Here is another surprising
case, in fiction much accused of killing the author, of a text that
relies on the input of its author to an extent that makes the death-of-
the-author argument seem ridiculous (or, as Wallace put it, “Greatly
Exaggerated”).
16. While the bulk of the interviews published prior to the collection
would not appear for another year (interviews #3, 14, 28, 30, 42, 48,
130 MARY K. HOLLAND
and 51 were published in Harpers Magazine in October of 1998),

interview #20 appeared first, in 1997 in the Paris Review. Here,
though, it appeared as Interview #6, with the title “E———on
‘How and Why I Have Come To Be Totally Devoted to S———and
Have Made Her the Linchpin and Plinth of My Entire Emotional
Existence’.” The new interview number in the collection raises the
question of whether the change was made to bring this piece in line
with the larger narrative of the woman interviewer’s story as it unfolds
across the course of Brief Interviews.
17. See Days of Heaven (1978) and Tree of Life (2011).
18. That this piece is one of only two noninterview pieces in the collec-
tion not previously published suggests that it finds its purpose in, or
was perhaps written for the purpose of, adding to the realism intro-
duced by “Forever Overhead” that counterbalances the metafiction
of the rest of the book. It also provides a throughline from one realist
bildungs-roman discovery to another that shapes the collection as a
whole.
19. The perfect aural tactility of “blank slack gagged masks’ mindless
stare,” its stringing of bland a’s and ah’s amid brutal consonant
clusters, not only repeats via language the synesthesia showcased in
“Church,” but also reminds us that Wallace, contemporary king of
the encyclopedic, was also in moments too seldom discussed a master
of poetic language. See the opening tableau of ThePale King as well.
CH A P T ER 7
“ . . . ”: Language, Gender, and

Modes of Power in the Work
of David Foster Wallace
Clare Hayes-Brady
It is becoming something of a convention among Wallace scholars to

lament the comparative absence of well-developed female characters
in his work. It is true that the female characters in Wallace’s novels
and short stories do tend toward the archetypal, from the bookish,
Converse-wearing Lenore to Avril’s towering maternality and the
shattering beauty shared by Joelle and Meredith Rand. It is also true
that there is a surprising absence of direct feminine narrative: those
female characters that appear are remarkably quiet. By contrast, the
masculine figures that populate Wallace’s writing are physically solid,
vibrant, and vocal. However, this distancing represents an approach to
women that—while it could be termed misogynistic—is not based in
antipathy but in alterity.1 Wallace’s awareness of the inviolable strange-
ness of the female to the male consciousness leads to the opacity of his
female characterizations, providing an oppositional balance with the
forceful, dynamic males. Wallace’s women, who wield the influence
if not the power, form the silent, shifting center around which his
representations of masculinity can locate their stable orbits.
Masculine linguistic power is characterized in Wallace largely by
direct speech, linguistic play, and univocality, with oppositional char-
acteristics such as excessive quotation or tonal slippage indicating a
lack of coherent identity. By way of contrast, Wallace signifies the cor-
responding security and coherence of identity in female characters via
vocal plurality, dialogue verbal manipulation, and, most interestingly,
132 CLARE HAYES-BRADY
the infiltration of the vocal patterns of the men who seek to subju-
gate them. This essay explores the layered complexity of Wallace’s
approach to language, gender, and power, in particular the power
relationships between masculinity and femininity.
This is not to suggest that Wallace’s attitude to femininity was
misogynistic or unconsidered, but rather that the complex interrela-
tionships of language, gender and power displayed in his work is not
a matter of simple chauvinism or misogyny, but rather of balance and
delicacy. Indeed, Wallace demonstrated an almost-pathological con-
sciousness of gender politics in his constant invocation of a feminine
subject. Such obvious consciousness of gender issues appears at odds
with the comparative lack in his writing of fully developed female char-
acters; however, while women are conspicuous in his writing either by
their absence or their lack of development, that absence emerges as a
consequence of Wallace’s awareness of their alterity. His hyperaware-
ness of gender difference, paradoxically, paralyses his authorial capac-
ity for empathy, leaving oblique engagement with femininity the only
available means of exploring gender issues.
Wallace’s treatment of the power struggles at play in linguistic
exchanges takes place on ever-shifting ground. The balance of power
moves between protagonists, never settling or resolving, and Wallace’s
treatment of gender indicates a consistent and considered engagement
with the relationships among language, gender and power. Wallace’s
representations of masculine and feminine language are broadly
contextualized in this essay against the work of several theorists of
language and gender, including Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva, Paul
Ricoeur, and Hélène Cixous. Wallace’s treatment of gender evokes
Slavoj Žižek’s account of contemporary incarnations of courtly love
themes, in which the female is disembodied and idealized out of
potency. However, Žižek’s representation is complicated by the actual
power dynamic that plays out through Wallace’s narrative, such that
the complex representations of gender and power ultimately present
an incarnation of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic; in other words, the
competing vocabularies employed by masculine and feminine voices
enact a powerful dynamic struggle between Self and Other whose
conflict cannot be resolved but must instead be accommodated.2
From a perspective less concerned with conflict, Paul Ricoeur’s the-
ory of narrative identity, expounded in Oneself As Another offers a
similar dynamic. The intimate relationship of Self and Other as it
relates to the specter of solipsism, a cornerstone of Wallace’s writ-
ing, is thrown into sharp relief by the play of gender in his work. To
articulate the dialectic at play within the gender relationships that
LANGUAGE, GENDER, AND MODES OF POWER 133
characterize Wallace’s fiction, this essay explores his separate articula-

tion of masculine and feminine identities, before exploring how these
distinct vocal qualities relate to each other.
Prior to engaging with the fictional embodiments of gendered iden-
tity, however, it is worthwhile briefly outlining Wallace’s own engage-
ment with questions of gender. As suggested above, these engagements
are complex, often with undertones of conflict. Wallace’s references to
his imagined readers always—to the point of affectation—envisaged
the reader as female. “All the attention and engagement and work you
need to get from the reader can’t be for your benefit,” Wallace told
Larry McCaffery, talking about good writing. “It’s got to be for hers”
(CW 50). Similarly, in “The Empty Plenum,” his review of David
Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress, he praises Markson’s ability to write
in a feminine voice while simultaneously articulating anxieties about
his own ability to do so. He refers to such work as “crosswriting”
(i.e., men writing women) (BFN 100). Here, as elsewhere, Wallace
demonstrates an acute consciousness of issues of gender, particularly
those associated with language and power.
Wallace mentions two emotions repeatedly with regard to gender
conflict: guilt in women, and fear in men. In a radio interview with
Michael Silverblatt, Wallace said, “My guess is that a certain amount
of misogyny . . . is rooted in fear,” indicating an ambivalence regarding
gender relations in general, and a surprising tolerance toward those
who displayed misogyny in their attitudes. This fear forms part of the
underlying structure of his fiction, particularly Brief Interviews with
Hideous Men. Similarly, in “The Empty Plenum,” he discusses a kind
of cosmic feminine guilt, in two streams: Hellenic, involving guilt as
object, and Evian, involving guilt as subject. In each case, the guilt is
associated with actions on the part of men that are seen as resulting
from the (in)action of the feminine. This negative cycle of guilt/fear
ensures the separation of the two genders, allowing for the othering
by each gender of its counterpart, thus reinforcing both the coher-
ence and the separation of gender identities.
The term “misogyny” specifically implies dislike, and has come to
be freighted with ideas of fear, mistrust, and oppressive tendencies in
the powerful male. Jonathan Franzen obliquely accuses Wallace of
misogyny in his essay “Farther Away,” arguing that part of Wallace’s
literary project was to sketch the edges of his own misogyny, not-
ing the “near-perfect absence, in his fiction, of ordinary love” (39).
I offer a slightly more nuanced vision of Wallace’s (admittedly frus-
trating) engagement with femininity and femaleness, however, one
that is not based in fear, but in the compulsive need for an Other. In
other words, Wallace’s “misogyny” is based in instability, in which

the feminine functions as a stabilizing Other for the masculine Self.
Images of self-delineation—particularly masculine self-delineation—
recur frequently throughout Wallace’s writing. I suggest that the
misogyny Franzen refers to might more reasonably be cast as the
superseding of Wallace’s obvious consciousness of gender relations by
his almost-obsessive fear of solipsism. This need for an Other to delin-
eate the Self is central to Wallace’s literary relationships generally, but
is most clearly on display in his representation of gender interaction,
where it overpowers another obvious and abiding concern: the place
of the female subject.
As such, the dearth in Wallace’s fiction of what we might term direct
feminine narrative stems from a—perhaps excessive—consciousness
of the alterity of the feminine. In other words, the absence of the
feminine is a matter of mystery rather than dislike. All that being said,
it does not necessarily follow that Wallace is without fault in employ-
ing this representational strategy, merely that the fault is perhaps less
simple than it initially appears. The term “misogyny” in its strict
sense is both too negative for Wallace’s approach to women, and too
positive, in the sense that the passion that informs misogyny implies
sufficient subjectivity in the Other as to inspire fear, where Wallace’s
women are beyond the human Other, to what Žižek, in his inter-
pretation of the feminine as Lacanian real, refers to as “an inhuman
partner in the precise sense of a radical Otherness which is wholly
incommensurable with our needs and desires” (“From Courtly” 96).
Wallace obliquely invokes Lenore Beadsman, the protagonist of
The Broom of the System, in “The Empty Plenum,” as his first foray
into “crosswriting” (BFN 100).3 Her primary characteristic is anxi-
ety regarding the legitimacy of her own existence, which she seeks
to locate through narrative. In this endeavor, and in her primary
source of stories—her boyfriend, the editor Rick Vigorous—Lenore
enacts the twin Ricoeurian theories of dual identity and narrative
self-definition.. Of particular interest is the fact that Lenore
uses her romantic relationship with Rick as the primary—and
ultimately unsuccessful—locus of her linguistic self-definition. The
interdependence of Self and Other is a cornerstone of Wallace’s writ-
ing as a whole, and the additional angles of both gender and sex in
Lenore’s search for self-actualization highlight the relational/oppo-
sitional power struggle of masculine versus feminine language in his
work. As both the first and the most narratively present female char-
acter in Wallace’s oeuvre, Lenore is an ideal model for the discussion
of Wallace’s particular brand of écriture feminine.4
Wallace was notoriously dismissive of his first novel. The Broom

of the System is indisputably the work of a young novelist, exuberant
and imperfect, but its very imperfection is it critical draw. As a rela-
tively unrefined characterization, Lenore offers a useful perspective
on Wallace’s early development of gender politics, in the sense that
the devices that go to make up her characterization are less subtle
than in later works. Both Lenore and her namesake, Lenore Sr., are
obsessed by language; even in his first published work, Wallace con-
nects language with power and both with gender. Of interest to the
present question is how Lenore’s engagement with language and
narrative evolves over the course of the novel. Lenore moves from a
narratively unfixed presence, dominated by her (significantly absent)
namesake, to a confident, self-contained character whose reliance
on the extrinsic validation of narrative has been supplanted by her
own solid identity, or what Ricoeur would call “attestation” (Ricoeur
21–23). 5 Significantly, Lenore’s inability to conceive of herself as an
extralinguistic entity further highlights the two-dimensionality of
the feminine in Wallace’s early work. Lenore makes clear that she
“has decided that [she is] not real,” or that she is “really real only
insofar as [she is] told”(BOS 248, 249), characteristics that have a
broad philosophical significance to Wallace’s work as a whole, but
which speak to the concerns of this essay in a specific way. Lenore
represents the passivity of the feminine, which contrasts sharply with
the active male—the tennis player, the criminal, the maker of objects,
and doer of things—that permeate the narrative. Lenore does not
tell, she is told. So although her journey is the central one of the story,
she remains wholly out of reach to the reader, acted upon rather than
active, always and only alien.
Lenore contrasts sharply with her great-grandmother, whose
absence is central to the novel, but whose linguistic control repre-
sents what would be the ultimate state of Lenore Jr.’s adjusted lin-
guistic profile. Lenore Sr. exploits language by way of antinomies
and riddles. She is also known as Gramma, which is significant in
several ways. Nicknames are common in Wallace’s writing, and while
they commonly have a comic aspect, they also function as signposts
toward relationships between characters. The same holds true in this
case. At the most obvious level, the word “Gramma” is strongly evoc-
ative of the word grammar, with its implication of rigid structure
and control. However, the structures of grammar are complicated
by the fluidity with which Gramma Beadsman manipulates language,
particularly given her involvement in the pineal-gland baby food
plot, which stimulates premature language development. At the same
time, Gramma Lenore’s appropriation of a second identity allows for

the younger Lenore to, as it were, claim the label “Lenore” (Boswell,
Understanding 33). As such, Gramma’s double identity highlights
the linguistic fluidity that characterizes her greatest strength.
Associations between linguistic manipulation, grammatical struc-
tures, and powerful female figures continue throughout Wallace’s
more mature work. In Infinite Jest, the primary embodiment of female
power is Avril Incandenza, whom Wallace portrays as the archetypal
maternal figure. Although she is peripheral to the action, Avril looms
large throughout the narrative. Yet for all her power, Avril’s words are
quoted by the men who surround her—men, it bears noting, whose
narrative presence is stronger than hers. Avril’s power does not work
along traditional lines; she is influential rather than potent. By way
of contrast, Kate Gompert, who is one of very few female characters
whose voice we hear directly, is significant for precisely the oppo-
site reason. Kate is articulate, her speech direct rather than reported,
but the purpose of her direct narrative is to demonstrate her lack of
agency. While the more-or-less-hidden Avril and the wholly absent
femme fatale Luria, whose narrative connection to Avril is definite
but ambiguous, are dynamic forces, the present, articulate Kate is
inert, passive, and without power. Later, the Granola Cruncher in
“Brief Interview #20” exhibits the same silent potency as Avril,
dominating the thoughts and linguistic direction of the man she has
entranced, the narrator. Later still, Meredith Rand is described in The
Pale King as immediately altering the dynamic of any male conversa-
tion into which she enters, influencing the linguistic exchange of the
masculine speakers in incalculable but quite predictable ways. While
this capacity to alter a dynamic is ascribed to Meredith’s beauty, it
is also partly by reason of her unknowability. In all these cases, the
feminine in Wallace’s writing is wholly Othered, Meredith in par-
ticular. This uncompromising alterity of Wallace’s female characters
also avoids what Judith Butler, in her essay “Subjects of Sex/Gender/
Desire,” considered one of the potential traps of feminine literary
representation, namely, asking “is the construction of the category of
women as a coherent and stable subject an unwitting regulation and
reification of gender relations?” (279).6 In Wallace’s writing of the
Othered woman, he manages at once to beg the question and to offer
an imperfect answer.
While in one sense the physical absence of many of the female
(prot)agonists makes literal their alterity, two characters in particular
enact the unknowability (for the author at least) of their sex. Joelle Van
Dyne, the Prettiest Girl of All Time (also an archetype) is physically
distanced from those around her by her veil. Joelle is also physically
distanced from the reader at a linguistic level by reason of her radio
show: we most frequently hear Joelle’s disembodied voice. The fact
of its disembodiment, however, is not noted in the way that Hal and
Orin articulate their disembodiment in their exchange of telephone
messages. Rather, Joelle’s vocal/physical disjunction is simply a fact
of the narrative. By veiling herself, Joelle voids the possibility of visual
engagement even when physically present. In Voiles, Hélène Cixous
and Jacques Derrida variously explore the implication of veils and
vision. The French savoir —to know—also evokes the idea of sight:
(se) voir —to see (oneself) and of self-possession: s’avoir —to have
oneself (Cixous and Derrida, Veils 28). Joelle’s veil might therefore be
read as a declaration of her own selfhood, the delineation of her body
as inviolate. Derrida points out the biblical association of the veil with
the idea of violation. Indeed, in French, the two are almost anagrams:
voile and violer, both also phonically associated with thievery (voler).7
Joelle’s veil, then, precludes the violation of her self by the gaze of
another, or—it is implied—her violation of their mental state by her
beauty.
Although the novel never clarifies whether Joelle’s veil protects her
or those around her, the veil symbol nevertheless highlights the larger
issue of physical embodiment, which is itself one of Wallace’s chief
markers for gender difference. In their physical and linguistic absence,
his female characters invoke Ž iž ek’s representation of the feminine as
the ultimate Other, actually inhuman, and so necessarily incorporeal.
As Ž iž ek points out, the lady in these constructions is “a strictly sec-
ondary phenomenon, a narcissistic projection” (“From Courtly” 96).
Such central physical absences directly oppose the bodily representa-
tions favored by Hélène Cixous, who paints femininity as inelucta-
bly physical. However, Cixous’s injunction that “woman must write
woman. And man, man” seems both to exacerbate the binaries she
seeks in “Sorties” to overthrow, and to obviate any possibility of rela-
tional exchange. In other words, Cixous’s writing of the body seems
designed to reinforce borders rather than to move for liberation, to
embrace the binary where Wallace’s incorporeal women allow for
multiplicity and flux (Cixous, “‘The Laugh of the Medusa’” 225).8
Absence and embodiment are also central to Toni Ware’s narrative
in The Pale King. Her obsessive attachments contrast wildly with her
mistrustful and threatening demeanor, signaling extreme ambivalence
toward the idea of proximity and emotional interaction—in other
words, connection with an Other.9 Toni’s childhood of flight and
feigned death contains perhaps the most visceral instance of violent
discomfort and self-awareness, in which she is so focused that she can

literally disconnect her eye contact, playing a convincing corpse as
her mother is murdered beside her. Toni absolutely objectifies her-
self, to the point of rejecting selfhood to save it, a characteristic she
shares with the Granola Cruncher in “Brief Interview #20,” a sort
of intrapersonal enactment of Kristeva’s theory of abjection.10 Toni’s
capacity for literal self-denial is in fact the strongest affirmation of her
self-sufficiency, her feigned death the mark of her absolute life. With
regard to the idea outlined in the case of other characters of the gaze
of the Other as a final mark of selfhood, Toni arguably transcends
the nauseating Othering of the male subject’s active gaze, by instead
actively abjecting her agency, by making herself the ultimate Other—
that is to say, a final object, totally passive in death.
The passivity of the feminine subject in Wallace’s writing tempts
a masculinist reading of his work. However, it is dangerous to read
Wallace as a writer of absolutes in any arena. The absent female func-
tions not in isolation, but in contrast, cooperation and combat with
the present, active male. This oppositional strategy is a central compo-
nent to Wallace’s larger project of subjectivity and selfhood. As such,
while an isolated reading of the feminine is dispiriting, it takes on a
separate character when read against and alongside the masculine.
In sharp contrast to the Othering of feminine characters, Wallace’s
writing is suffused with active masculinity, both of speech and of
physicality. Typically, Wallace’s narrators and protagonists are male.
While his female characters are inaccessible to the reader, the mascu-
line subjects are richly interiorized. Where the feminine is disembod-
ied, almost etherealized, the masculine is profoundly physical. In The
Broom of the System, the two primary male figures are Rick Vigorous
and Andrew Lang. Rick is linguistically unfixed, casting about for
narrative certainty, like Lenore, whom he seeks to fix in place as his
external sense of self. Despite his name, Rick is anything but vigor-
ous. Rick exemplifies an unsuccessful masculine subject. His search
for a suitable narrative and his need to be in a relationship at all times
bespeaks the absence of a central subjectivity. By contrast, Andrew
Lang demonstrates a masculinity of interiority. Michael Kimmel
offers a distinction between manhood, which denotes “a man of strong
character animated by an inner sense of morality,” and masculinity,
which he assigns to “a sensitive personality, animated by a need to
fit in.” Both concepts he sources to the nineteenth century. He goes
on to explain: “Inner-directed men went their own way, could stand
alone, tuned to the hum of an internal gyroscope; other-directed men
scanned a mental radar screen for fluctuations in public opinions”
(Kimmel 81). Andrew’s subjectivity is inner-directed, while Rick’s is

other-directed, or more specifically Lenore-directed. Thus Andrew’s
identity is fixed by his own interior life, whereas Rick’s is unfixed,
externally located in his control or possession of a female object.
Rick’s reliance on external narratives disrupts his masculinity,
either in the context of his relationship with Lenore, where he clings
to them as an increasingly ineffective means of controlling her, or in
his private life, where he retreats further into his Fieldbinder stories
and grows more and more interested in his dreams. It is telling that
the final scene of the novel involves Rick and Mindy, with whom
he begins a relationship after his attachment to Lenore ends. In the
scene, Rick debates whether or not he should tell Mindy about Lenore
and Lang. These two relationships illustrate successful and unsuc-
cessful relationships: Lenore and Andy are two individuals sharing a
relationship, which allows them to communicate successfully; Rick is
the dominant character in his relationship and so he speaks at, and
not with, Mindy. Although his character will never become a person,
Rick finds an unstable security with the vacuous Mindy, and Lenore
is free to pursue her independent ipseity with the “blond bestower of
validity” (BOS 347). The progress of their relationship is appropri-
ately silent.
Perhaps the most significant engagement between language and
masculinity comes in the form of Hal Incandenza. Infinite Jest opens
with the tennis prodigy and gifted linguist sitting mute in an inter-
view for a college sports scholarship. The 13-page scene follows Hal’s
internal monologue, which both describes the scene at hand and
recalls incidents from Hal’s childhood and present. Hal before the
onset of his disability is a clear embodiment of Wallace’s vision of
masculinity: physically gifted, linguistically potent and direct. Even
the opening narrative passage is notable for its fluency, and the obvi-
ous facility of the narrator with language. The clinical, analytical tone
that pervades the scene weakens slightly when Hal begins to describe
the mould-eating episode of his early childhood, at which point he
takes on the vocal persona of his brother Orin, from whom he heard
the story. Interestingly, although Hal has perfect mental command
of language, he has lost not only the power of speech, but also the
ability to master his limbs enough to write or even type clearly. The
medically significant event that is identified only as “something I ate”
(IJ 10) has so thoroughly damaged Hal that he is isolated inside his
head, appearing to outsiders as “only marginally mammalian” (IJ 15).
In this respect, the opening pages disrupt the possibility of mascu-
linity: because Hal cannot communicate, he is no longer a man but
an animal. In a Wittgensteinian twist, Wallace predicates manhood

and masculinity on interaction. Kimmel’s observation that manhood
is inner-directed while masculinity is Other-directed is useful to a
point, but both gender characteristics necessitate interaction with an
Other. Alterity is necessary to self, gendered or otherwise, and social
exchange is necessary to the individual.
While he is attempting to explain that he is not as damaged as he
appears, Hal repeats the phrase “I believe” (IJ 12) four times within
five lines of text, betraying an intellect fired by passion as well as by
pure ability, in sharp contrast with the affectless tone of the rest of the
narration of the scene. The twin concerns with grammar and major
philosophers echo the central concerns of The Broom of the System,
particularly the use of language to delineate the self. With this in
mind, it is worth recalling Lenore Beadsman’s expression of fear that
she might be no more than a story. The separation of abstract Self
from concrete body implicit in Lenore’s fear is made abruptly real
at the opening of the novel, when Hal opens his narration with the
sentence, “I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies”
(IJ 3).11 The detachment of Hal’s consciousness from his physicality
is strengthened by the detached tone, already mentioned, with which
Hal discusses the ultimately rather violent events of his afternoon at
the University of Arizona. In fact, the only passion in Hal’s narration
arises in his discussion of the intellectual pursuits now denied to him
by his inability to express himself. In short, Hal’s intellectual life is
ineluctably tied to, and limited by, his physical body. Where Lenore is
concerned that her physical existence may be an illusion, Hal is daily
beset by the insurmountable reality of his physicality.
The physical Self is of central importance in Infinite Jest, particu-
larly as regards Enfield Tennis Academy. References to the physical
appearance of a number of the players recur throughout the novel,
from Hal’s detailed description of his position in the interview room—
legs crossed “ankle on knee, hands together in the lap of [his] slacks”
(IJ 3)—through the descriptions of the physical toll of drills in the
Academy (e.g., IJ 97–105) and sustained via the repeated references
to small physical details of life in a sports academy. The novel also
exhaustively canvases the physical implications of drug and alcohol
addiction. Yet although Wallace establishes Hal’s tennis prowess early
on, he curiously quaranties that prowess from Hal’s other physical lim-
itations. We’re told Hal is a great tennis player, “gorgeous . . . possibly
a genius” (IJ 14) who has reached the semifinals of the “prestigious
WhataBurger Southwest Junior Invitational . . . as of this morning”
(IJ 4). This evidently means that Hal’s capacity to play tennis has
not been affected by the change in his condition, which is implicitly

connected to a visit to an Emergency Room “almost exactly one year
back” (IJ 16). However, that cannot easily be reconciled with the fact
that Hal’s gestures in the interview room are animalistic, and that he
is avowedly incapable of typing or writing clearly but instead produces
“some sort of infant’s random stabs” (IJ 9). If Hal is so gifted a tennis
player, how can he be unable to govern his movements sufficiently to
write clearly? Perhaps this discrepancy reinforces the mystery of Hal’s
condition by adding a bewildering and implausible symptom: that
Hal’s disability extends only to communication, spoken, written, or
nonverbal, but does not affect his performance in any other sphere.
In any case, the very disjunction between physicality and language
that characterizes Hal’s disability reinforces the connection of physi-
cality and masculinity, just as Hal’s twin gifts in sports and language
highlight the active masculinity that pervaded Wallace’s writing.
Other characters with similar traits include the older brothers Lavache
Beadsman and Orin Incandenza, both of whom are defined by pecu-
liarities of their legs. Both characters are associated by their younger
siblings with language: Lavache explains antinomies to Lenore and
Orin telephones Hal to say, “I want to tell you” (IJ 32). In both cases,
their speech is direct and unqualified. Don Gately, who is decidedly
not linguistically gifted, describes his experiences in explicitly physi-
cal terms. In all such cases, male subjectivity is expressed, as well
as masculine facility with language, has a clear physical component.
The same dynamic holds true for many of the men in The Pale King,
which is replete with male bodies. Interestingly enough, many of the
male bodies in that novel are in distress, from Cusk’s excessive sweat-
ing to the violence and disease that follow Leonard Stecyk. More
abstract illness and pain occur in the shapes of the discomfort and
ultimate deformity of the child who contorts his body to kiss every
part of it, whose story segment contains a meditation on pain. And
the novel’s final subsection is itself a meditation on the body, the fact
of embodiment, its peculiar discomfort.
The boy who seeks to kiss his extremities provides a singular portrait
of the deforming intrusion of full self-consciousness—that is to say,
of awareness of the Self as always also an object, to be looked at or
acted upon. His ambition, which simply put involves making contact
with all of himself arrives early, aged six, when he “came to under-
stand that unimaginable challenges lay ahead of him” (TPK 394). His
goal of self-delineation is a journey toward self-awareness: physically
outlining the object that is his body enacts the Othering of his Self by
linking the inner-consciousness with the outer physicality. The project
of self-Othering, evocative of Lacan’s mirror-stage,12 invokes and

complicates the idea of the gaze of the other that is more commonly
explored through gendered interaction, as, for example, in Jeffrey
Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides (1993). That novel, and particularly
the film adaptation, exposes what Julia Kristeva, in Tales of Love, calls
the “two borders of narcissism and idealization” between which love
operates (Kristeva 6). The Virgin Suicides, however, separates subjects
from objects, offering a gender struggle founded in adoration rather
than fear. Conversely, the episode of the boy in The Pale King com-
pounds the subject and the object in the boy’s desire to “pierce that
evil of inaccessibility—to be, in some childish way, self-contained and
-sufficient” (TPK 401). Yet because he is “just a little boy,” he isn’t
overtly aware of his own motivation, ironically implying that while
he may be physically self-accessible, he is still psychically inaccessible,
further reinforcing the idea that full, transcendent self-awareness is
both extremely painful and probably impossible.13
As a rule, then, Wallace signals successful masculinity by direct
speech, physicality, agency, and presence, and successful femi-
nine identity by absent centrality, disembodiment or disguise, lin-
guistic fluidity, and manipulation. Whereas instances of feminine
bodies are associated with states of fugue—Meredith suffers from
mental health issues and Toni lives a death-in-life—the depictions of
masculine physicality involve decisive presence, subjective agency, and
self-delineation. Yet while masculinity takes precedence in the con-
text of presence and speech, feminine characters influence the mascu-
line protagonists both linguistically and behaviorally. The genders are
therefore intensely interdependent. As such, the interaction between
masculine and feminine characters displays a Hegelian dialectic of
power in which the power shifts constantly but the battle can never
be won. Because the phrase “balance of power” implies an outcome
or finality that does not exist in this case, given heavy weighting in
favor of masculine agency, I use the term “dialectic” to avoid the
implication of equality and to emphasize interdependence. The sys-
tem of power exchange in Wallace’s writing is anything but stable, but
the two sides are held in an unending exchange. Most importantly,
such an exchange becomes clearest when we consider the episodic
collision of the masculine with the feminine.
Given this interdependence, it is possible to regard Wallace’s treat-
ment of gendered linguistic exchange as grounded in a principle of
“difference” rather than the more traditional dynamic of “domi-
nance” and “subjection.” Sally Johnson helpfully delineates the
two approaches when she argues that the original canon of feminist
linguistic practice was founded in the “dominance” mode, respond-

ing to suggestions like Robin Lakoff’s that “women speak a ‘power-
less language’, characterized by a tentativeness that conveys a lack
of authority” (Johnson 9). Johnson then goes on to argue that it is
important to consider “the complex role played by ‘difference’ in the
construction of ‘dominance’”; that is to say, how different approaches
to language construct different loci of power (25).
One of the clearest instances of Wallace’s “difference” approach
can be found in “Brief Interview #20,” involving a woman known
only as “The Granola Cruncher.” The double-silencing of the femi-
nine characters—Q., the narrator, and the “Granola Cruncher,” the
story’s object—coupled with the extremely aggressive masculinity of
the narrator, clearly portrays a linguistic power struggle mediated
through gender exchange. Told from the point of view of the man,
this story is striking for the silence of two of the three central char-
acters: the woman the story is about, and the woman the story is
for. Furthermore, the “Granola Cruncher” is silenced in two ways,
both by the narrator and by her assailant. However, as the narrative
progresses, the narrator begins to lose control: on the one hand, he
begins to respond more directly and emotionally to Q’s unseen ques-
tions, his coherent narration ultimately devolving into the misogy-
nistic rant that closes the interview. On the other hand, the Granola
Cruncher muted in both his narrative and hers, which he has appropri-
ated for his own purposes, begins to re appropriate her story by means
of infiltrating his voice, so that his narration is full of her language.
This apparently passive appropriation of power is savagely mirrored
in the story of her rape, where she “determines that her only chance
of surviving this encounter is to establish a quote connection with
the quote soul of the sexual psychopath” (BI 300). Exercising great
power of will, she duly does so, ultimately going beyond submission
to self-offering, robbing the act, and so the agent, of power. In the
end, although she is technically raped, the Granola Cruncher finds
herself with the upper hand, realizing that “her focus and connection
were inflicting far more pain on the psychotic than he ever could have
inflicted on her” (BI 312), thus converting the rapist’s sadistic intent
to an implicitly fatal masochism (“From Courtly” 99)
The Granola Cruncher’s appropriation of her would-be rapist’s
deed reads as a convincing parallel for much of the less graphic power
play in Wallace’s other work, where many of Wallace’s other mute
women subvert the controlling power of the narratively articulate men
by taking control of the masculine voice. We see this in “#20,” as Eric
increasingly peppers his speech with the exact words of the Granola
Cruncher. The same pattern is visible in the relationship between

Lenore and Rick in The Broom of the System, where Rick tries to
establish his centrality in Lenore’s narrative but ends up quoting her
words and reducing himself to caricature. That pattern is importantly
absent from Lenore’s later, better relationship with Andrew Lang,
who has no desire to mould her vocabulary and, unlike Rick, does
not attempt to appropriate Lenore’s name by repetition. Similarly, in
Infinite Jest, Avril’s obsession with language is often referred to by
other characters, like her sons, who regularly quote or paraphrase her
opinions about language. The fact that it is this story that stirs Eric’s
feelings for her strongly implies that there is a violent, aggressive side
to Eric’s attraction to the girl, as well as prurience in his desire to
possess her. In an essay on sexual violence and feminist theory, Liz
Kelly suggests that Western masculinity “draws on notions of virility,
conquest, power and domination . . . sex and aggression are linked for
most men” (347). The violence that is obvious in both Eric and the
original assailant is linked with the iteration of their masculinity, and
is complicated and undermined by the girl’s influence on both men,
in her escape from death in the first instance and her appropriation of
Eric’s articulacy as he narrates her.
Whether the narrative conceit of the connection between souls
is or is not legitimate, the outcome of the story—namely, the girl’s
surviving the attack and her assailant’s emotional breakdown and
flight—directly undermines the question itself, rendering the
question of what “really happened” irrelevant. In an essay on this
story, Cristoforos Diakoulakis offers the Derridean definition of love
from Sauf le Nom: “this infinite renunciation that somehow surren-
ders to the impossible” (Derrida, On the Name 74). Derrida’s defini-
tion resonates with the girl’s response to her rapist. This renunciation
also once again evokes Kristeva’s description of the abject, particu-
larly since Kristeva’s discussion of same includes specific references
to rape. The girl’s abjection of her self, her total submission to her
attacker, falls neatly under Derrida’s image of love that surrenders
(in the French, “se rendre,” literally “gives itself”) to the impossible.
Her power resides in this very same abjection or renunciation of the
self: as she abjects her subjectivity, renouncing her very identity and
giving herself wholly to the impossible Other, she robs that Other
of its object, which is the domination of her now buried self. In this
way we can say that Derrida’s definition of love as abject renunciation
of the Self appropriately contains the seeds of its own opposite. By
refusing to fight, to submit to the traditional dynamic of the crime of
rape, the girl actually negates the power struggle inherent in such a
dynamic. Paradoxically, like the Lisbon sisters in The Virgin Suicides

or Toni Ware in The Pale King, the Granola Cruncher’s apparent pas-
sive rejection of power is in fact an appropriative act. Such a reversal
of traditional dynamic further complicates the Derridean definition
of love: love is not mere submission but also a subversion of power
dynamics, the appropriation of power by virtue of its rejection. The
repudiation of identity, under these circumstances, becomes its most
irrefutable confirmation, signposted in the narrative by the narrator’s
inability to control his own vocabulary.
The question of naming, always a significant one in Wallace, merits
particular attention as regards the ideas of relationships and love that
mark this narrative. We know the names of neither the interviewer
(Q.) nor the girl (“the Granola Cruncher”). The narrator mentions,
late in the narrative how her name became a source of fascination: “I
kept saying her name and she would ask What? and I’d say her name
again” (BI 317). This obsessive repetition is presented by the nar-
rator as positive, an effort to overcome the singularity of the Other
by naming, imbuing her name with awe, the tender act of a lover.
However—especially given that the repetition itself reinforces the
narrator’s position of privilege, because only the narrator knows her
name—this reading seems hollow. In view of the power play at work
in the story as a whole—the background story of the rape, Eric’s
fixation on knowing the girl, on keeping her with him, saying “can
you see why there’s no way I could let her just go away after this?”
(BI 317)—the act of naming takes on a much more sinister aspect.
Rather than symbolizing tenderness, Eric’s naming seems more like
an attempt to possess the girl, to establish dominion over her in a
more complete way even than her attacker. In this context, his nam-
ing seems rather aggressive than amorous. Far from empowering
his lover by naming her, Eric seeks to control her by possessing her.
The problematic desire to possess and circumscribe female characters
recurs in a number of Wallace’s works, notably, as discussed earlier, in
The Broom of the System, in which acts of nomenclature are similarly
significant, though perhaps more overtly symbolic than here.
The issue of naming arises close to the end of the narrative. The
narrator provides his obsessive desire to keep and define the girl as
evidence of his love for her. This is another instance of the implicit
connection of language, gender, love, and power: by naming the girl,
he seeks to master her identity, as if naming becomes knowing. His
desire for mastery combines love and fear; he has been moved to love
by her story, or so he thinks, yet he fears submitting to her influence.
In this regard he mirrors her attacker, who, he suggests, “regards
rape and murder as his only viable means of establishing some kind of
meaningful connection” (BI 303) and yet for whom this process “is
the killer’s psychotically literal way of resolving the conflict between
his need for connection and his terror of being in any way connected”
(BI 305). For the narrator, that act is not literal but figurative: the
domination he seeks is not physical (literal) but nominal (linguistic),
again linking power to language and both to love.
The complexity of the narrator’s attitude to the girl, the striking
mixture of adoration and contempt, also maps on to Wallace’s expres-
sion of the attitude of a writer to his readers, the “love-hate syndrome
of seduction” (CW 32) that he saw as characteristic of much of his
generation’s fiction writing. For Wallace, there was an inescapable
paradox in the relationship between author and reader, and in “Brief
Interview #20” that paradox is made manifest. The complex relation-
ship between author and reader, in which the author depends on the
reader’s approval while offering something potentially important,
leads to what Wallace saw as “this desperate desire to please coupled
with a kind of hostility to the reader” (CW 25). It is not difficult to
see this dynamic at play in the story, where the narrator despises the
girl’s lifestyle and outlook, and yet finds himself almost obsessively
in need of her approval and love. As a consequence, he attempts to
master her, to prove his own superiority, in much the same way that
Wallace described the tendency he saw in his own work and others’
to challenge the reader with long sentences, too much data, or the
intentional frustrating of expectations. When that does not work, and
the narrator realizes that the power balance in the story has shifted
to the girl, he loses his control over language altogether, transferring
his rage to the other mute female character in an incoherent tirade.
While this story is a useful exemplar of Wallace’s approach to gender,
it also has a more general significance for the way language is used.
When Eric transfers his anger to Q., he not only equates her with the
Granola Cruncher, but also demonstrates what occurs when anyone,
irrespective of gender, loses linguistic control. Besides its implications
for reading the process of communication in Wallace, this story shows
a link between language, gender, and power that is nowhere else as
clear. The Granola Cruncher’s story draws a violent parallel with Rick
and Lenore’s relationship in The Broom of the System, in which he
seeks—and fails—to narrate her identity, a desire that comes into
conflict with her desire to locate her own narrative. In both cases, the
dynamic between the characters culminates in the male agent’s loss of
verbal control and the severing of the connection between masculine
and feminine, with the female character assuming narrative control.
The late story “Oblivion” provides a provocative coda to this explo-

ration of repression and revelation in the creation and maintenance
of a coherent identity. The narrator, Randall, has distinctively irritat-
ing vocal characterization, a trait he shares with several of Wallace’s
protagonists, including the memorable narrator of “Philosophy and
the Mirror of Nature.” The clear edge to the voice keeps the reader
alert to the parenthesized interjections that begin to creep in just over
halfway through the story (OB 222 and onward). Names, family, and
identity are repeatedly invoked, and of particular note is the narrator’s
reference to Hope’s father as “Father” (including scare quotes), despite
the fact that “I myself [Randall] had my own father” (OB 191). We
ultimately learn that Randall’s voice is in fact narrating Hope’s dream.
The parenthetical interjections, ascribed within the confines of the
dream to sleep-deprived hallucination, are actually the encroachment
of the real on the dream world. This twist also explains the paradoxi-
cal naming of Dr. Sipe as “Father,” which is perfectly natural given
that Hope’s subconscious recognizes a different relationship with him;
the obsessive need to rephrase, indicating the lack of certainty or con-
trol within an alien vocabulary, and finally the embedded language of
sleep, subtly undermining the primacy of the conscious mind.
“Oblivion” presents an extreme vision of the language appropria-
tion discussed earlier in this essay. Randall’s vocabulary has infiltrated
his wife’s mind almost fully, causing the complete collapse of her
autonomous identity, as shown by her confusion on waking: “Wait—am
I even married? . . . And who’s this Audrey? . . . None of this is real” (OB
237). The linguistic dynamic in this relationship is unidirectional, or
to put it another way, the relationship is almost completely univocal.14
Randall’s marriage to Hope projects the end product of the burgeon-
ing relationship of the narrator with the Granola Cruncher in “Brief
Interview #20,” although the gender dynamic has been reversed. The
collapse of the boundary between Self and Other reflects, or rather
refracts through a human lens, the postmodern desire to break down
boundaries, which McCaffery refers to in one of his questions to
Wallace (CW 39), a desire related both to the isolation of the Self that
Wallace seeks, paradoxically, “both to deny and affirm” (CW 32), and
to the nature of hierarchical representation in art. This desire for col-
lapse is, of course, comically foreshadowed by Norman Bombardini’s
project of expansion and absorption in The Broom of the System. Like
Bombardini’s farcical Project Yin, “Oblivion” suggests that the integ-
rity—and so the isolation—of the Self is essential, that only com-
munication, and not domination or collapse, can relieve the solitude
necessary to that integrity, and that identity depends on separation.
As “Oblivion” demonstrates, identity and exchange are depen-

dent on a plurality of agencies. While univocality is presented as a
mark of the successful masculine self, that Self exists in concert with
Other narratives. The balance of masculine and feminine identities,
both linguistic and narrative, has significance beyond simple gender
struggle; it speaks to the delicate balance of Self and Other that
pervade Wallace’s writing, as has been observed by several scholars.
As this essay has shown, there is a decisive difference between the
representations of successful masculine characters and those of pow-
erful feminine characters. However, while it is tempting to dismiss
the difference as misogyny or even simple laziness, the stories “Brief
Interview #20” and “Oblivion” in particular display a significantly
more complex reality of gender relations. The comparative silence of
the feminine characters may or may not mask an antagonism toward
the opposite gender on the part of the author, but the author’s moti-
vating sentiment is not at issue here. What is of interest, though, is
the way that that silencing of feminine characters functions in rela-
tion to the agency of the masculine ones. As shown by the reading
of “Brief Interview #20” and “Oblivion,” the successful interchange
between identities depends not on equal exercise of power, but on
an Hegelian master-slave dialectic, wherein an apparently simple
balance of power is disrupted by the dependence of the apparently
dominant party on the apparently submissive one. In other words,
it is arguable that the “submissive”—or in this case decentralized—
character in fact holds an insidious kind of power that is much harder
to challenge because it is so much less direct. Wallace demonstrates
the possibility of this kind of power exchange most clearly via the
appropriative power of the reported feminine, whereby the mascu-
line presence is infiltrated by the recalled feminine vocabulary, to
the destruction of the decisive voice that characterizes successful
masculinity.
Wallace’s attitude to and representation of women is by no means
beyond reproach; as earlier suggested, his characterizations are fre-
quently archetypal, almost stereotypical. The persistent distancing
of the female voice, coupled with his ostentatious invocation of a
female reading subject bespeaks a constant consciousness of the very
issues the author dexterously evades by writing around his women.
However, based on the differential reading of gendered linguistic
exchange offered here—rather than the dominant one—it seems clear
that the gender power dynamics in Wallace’s writing both depend
on and reinforce the active presence of the masculine and the absent
opacity of the feminine.
Notes
1. In brief, the idea of alterity should be taken to refer to the untouch-
able otherness, which might perhaps be referred to as “foreign-ness”
of a differentiated self. In other words, the idea of alterity should
highlight the otherness of an other, with emphasis not on the inter-
dependent self/other dynamic, but rather on the disconnectedness
that is also part of that relationship. See Thomas Docherty, Alterities:
Criticism, History, Representation for definition and exploration of
this concept.
2. In brief, Hegel suggested that the apparent dynamics of the relation-
ship between a master and a slave are complicated by the consideration
that the master’s position is predicated upon the slave’s, thus accord-
ing the slave some degree of mastery. The theory offers an approach
to power that is less simplistic than traditional perspectives, which is
useful in a consideration of the different kinds of powers sought and
exercised by different gender identities.
3. The term “protagonist” here is deeply problematic, given the afore-
mentioned tendency toward absence; the female characters might
more accurately be called agonists than protagonists.
4. The essay “Writing the Body: Towards an Understanding of l’Ecriture
Feminine” offers a useful perspective on this puzzling term. Of par-
ticular relevance to a consideration of Wallace’s feminine writing is
Jones’s reference to Kristeva’s idea of the negative function of women.
Jones argues that “‘woman’ to Kristeva represents not so much a sex
as an attitude, any resistance to conventional culture and language;
men, too, have access to the jouissance that opposes phallogocen-
trism” (363). The concept of woman as attitude further complicates
the self-confessedly autobiographical writing of Lenore Beadsman by
suggesting both that Wallace’s literary sensibilities may be female and
that Lenore’s linguistic resonances are male.
5. Attestation is the balance of the idem and the ipse. More specifically,
it is the belief of a character in herself, which cannot be verified by
empirical investigation or extrinsic proof, but is based on confidence.
Oneself as Another, the published version of his Gifford Lecture
series, is significantly referenced in Infinite Jest (IJ 543).
6. This question is taken up by Sally Johnson with specific reference to
language and gender construction in the essay “Theorizing Language
and Masculinity: A Feminist Perspective.”
7. Wallace had enough French to read Camus in the original, so it is
plausible that such a connection would have occurred to him.
8. See also “Sorties,” in Kemp & Squires.
9. Toni might arguably be read as a serious parallel to Norman
Bombardini in The Broom of the System, whose inability to connect
with an Other leads to the solipsistic physicality that threatens to
overwhelm Lenore.
10. Significantly, both Toni and the Granola Cruncher share distinct
maternal attributes, which they abjure during their ordeals, parallel-
ing Kristeva’s interpretation of the infant’s delineation of the self by
rejection of the maternal. (See Powers of Horror)
11. The same theme is further expanded in The Pale King, in the shape
of the boy who seeks to kiss his extremities, physically enacting the
same cycle of self-delineation.
12. The fact that the boy’s mother is absent adds to the Lacanian implica-
tions of the scene.
13. Arguably, indeed, the boy also presents an embodiment of Norman
Bombardini’s project: he seeks to be both Self and Other to him-
self, thus reducing the universe to himself (contrary to Norman’s
expansion into the universe). Again in the figure of the boy we see
Wallace’s antipathy to the idea of solipsism in any form, his vision
of the interdependence of Self and Other, which is writ large in his
depiction of gender difference.
14. This ending might be read as a mirror of Wallace’s own gradual
about-face from seeking to mistrusting “distinct problems and uni-
vocal solutions” (CW 32).
CH A P T ER 8
“The Constant Monologue Inside

Your Head”: Oblivion and
the Nightmare of Consciousness
Marshall Boswell
Nightmare of Consciousness
Of all of David Foster Wallace’s books, Oblivion is the bleakest.
Though the eight stories that comprise the collection provide brief
instances of humor and postmodern play, these moments are rare
and easy to miss, or at least to forget, amid the ponderous inten-
sity of the prose and the hermetic isolation Wallace imposes upon
his protagonists. From first to last, the book is a somber portrait of
souls in isolation. Yet these stories also deepen what Stephen Burn
has called “Wallace’s career-long fascination with consciousness”
(Burn “Paradigm” 373). Each of these long, introspective pieces
explores with tireless ingenuity both the linguistic nature of interior
experience and the neurological mechanisms of the mind. Although
Wallace has amply explored solipsism before—it is, after all, one of his
signature themes— Oblivion looks beyond mere solipsism to explore
the multiple ways in which his characters are not only alone inside
their heads but also controlled, sometimes to the point of madness,
by the layered, nested, entropic workings of their interiors. To quote
the registered motto of O Verily Productions, a fictional company
that figures prominently in “The Suffering Channel,” the collec-
tion’s concluding novella, “CONSCIOUSNESS IS NATURE’S
NIGHTMARE” (OB 282, all caps in original). By the end of the
book the reader is obliged to wonder if the title, which is culled from
152 MARSHALL BOSWELL
one of the collection’s most prominent stories, a long tale about a

couple with sleeping problems, also refers to a state of consciousness
deeply to be desired.
Even the layout of Oblivion’s pages clues us into Wallace’s con-
cerns. Aside from scattered sections of dialogue in “The Suffering
Channel,” the stories provide almost zero in the way of character
interaction or dramatic action. Rather, the entire volume appears on
the page as a vast, unbroken wall of text, the collection’s small type
filling page after page all the way to the narrow side and top mar-
gins, often without paragraph breaks. Each story locates the reader
in the protagonist’s word-drunk interior and traps her there for the
story’s grueling duration. Three stories in the collection—“Mister
Squishy,” “Good Old Neon,” and “Oblivion”—conclude 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. Meanwhile, Wallace’s famously detailed and loquacious
prose gets stretched to the absolute breaking point, as sentences often
run for the length of half a page. To open the book at random is
to encounter a visual analog for the state of consciousness Wallace
depicts in the stories themselves.
The list of characters at the mercy of their minds constitutes the col-
lection’s core dramatis personae. Terry Schmidt, the mild-mannered
Focus-Group facilitator who anchors “Mr. Squishy,” maintains two
simultaneously running lines of thought: one focusing on his work
as a data researcher, and the other, assigned to “the limbic portions
of Schmidt’s brain” (OB 31), preoccupied with a detailed plan to
inject poison into the sealed packages of a snack cake in the hopes of
bringing “almost an entire industry down on one supplicatory knee”
(OB 30). Schmidt even admits that he is “simultaneously fascinated
and repelled at the way in which all these thoughts and feelings could
be entertained in total subjective private while [he] ran the Focus
Group” (OB 31). Similarly, the unnamed narrator of “The Soul is
Not A Smithy” spends the bulk of his story creating in his head an
elaborate, private cartoon narrative using the small spaces of a win-
dow screen as panels, thus rendering him more or less (the word is
apt here) oblivious to the substitute teacher at the front of the room,
who has for some reason snapped and begun helplessly scrawling
“KILL THEM ” over and over again on the classroom chalkboard.1
In “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,” the first-person narra-
tor, while trying to explain the intricacies of his and his mother’s
liability suit against a cosmetic surgeon, cannot stop returning to an
unrelated episode in which a young boy from his neighborhood fell
“THE CONSTANT MONOLOGUE INSIDE YOUR HEAD” 153
through the roof of the narrator’s garage and was bitten to death by
the narrator’s collection of venomous spiders. Finally, in “Oblivion,”
an upper-middle-class husband obsessively outlines the intricacies of
a fight between him and his wife regarding his alleged snoring and
his concomitant conviction that his wife is only dreaming about the
snoring, a fight that, in the story’s own words, “just went on and
on,” with constant doubling back and repetitions, very much like a
fever dream—which the story in fact turns out to be. All of these
characters are trapped inside their heads as their minds perseverate
independently, even mechanistically, so much so that the narrator of
yet another story, “Another Pioneer,” repeatedly refers to brain activ-
ity in terms of the programmatic action of “CPUs” and the “Boolean
paradigm” (OB 134, 131).
In its abandonment of narrative action in favor of dense descrip-
tion, Oblivion calls to mind Georg Lukács’s famous indictment of
naturalism, “Narrate or Describe?”2 In an earlier essay in this vol-
ume, Patrick O’Donnell helpfully describes Wallace as a “naturalist,
in the sense that he is interested in the affective, environmental rela-
tions between objects, animals, humans” (2), a generic categoriza-
tion that, although originally directed at the young Wallace of The
Broom of the System, is equally apt for the mature author Oblivion
and The Pale King, both of which address the dehumanizing effect
of white-collar office work in the tornadic information age. So while
Lukács’s essay, which first appeared in 1936, looks back to the
first wave of late nineteenth-century naturalists, its basic argument
applies strikingly to Wallace’s work. Description, Lukács argues,
“becomes the dominant mode in a period in which, for social rea-
sons, the sense of what is primary in epic construction has been lost”
(127). The reason for this loss is “the development of capitalism,”
which spurred “the continuous dehumanization of social life” and
“the general debasement of humanity” (127). To make his point,
Lukács contrasts the work of Tolstoy, Scott, and Balzac with that of
Flaubert and Zola: in the work of the former, “we are the audience to
events in which the characters take an active part”; in the work of the
latter, “the characters are merely spectators, more or less interested
in the events,” with the result that “the events themselves become
only a tableau for the reader” (116). Although both Flaubert and
Zola seek to depict the “brutality of capitalist life” and the alienation
resulting from commodity culture writ large, their focus on techni-
cal description as opposed to dramatic narrative yields “a series of
static pictures, of still lives connected only through the relations of
objects arrayed one beside the other according to their own inner
logic . . . The so-called action is only a thread on which the still lives
are disposed in a superficial, ineffective fortuitous sequence of iso-
lated pictures” (144). What is a bug in Zola and Flaubert, at least
according to Lukács, is a deliberate feature of Oblivion, most of which
takes place in conference rooms, airplanes, and office cubicles, the
shadowless incandescent light and synthetic furniture enhancing the
characters’ alienation and isolation. Hence, when Lukács remarks of
Zola’s technique, “investigation of social phenomena through obser-
vation and their representation in description brings such paltry and
schematic results that these modes of composition easily slip into
their polar opposite—complete subjectivism” (140), he inadvertently
outlines one of Wallace’s key purposes.
Tom Sternberg, from “Westward the Course of Empire,” is per-
haps the earliest precursor to Oblivion’s lonely isolates, much the
same way Girl with Curious Hair, Wallace’s first collection, shares
a similar structure to its later coeval, as both collections alternate
long and short pieces before concluding with a novella whose primary
theme is art, Wallace’s or otherwise.3 As is typical in Wallace’s early
work, Sternberg is fundamentally a comic character, and so Wallace
accordingly depicts Sternberg’s loneliness, solipsism, and narcissism
with broad, cartoonish strokes. In addition to being neurotic to the
point of paralysis, Sternberg also has a “reversed eye” (GCH 253)
that looks, presumably, at his brain aswim in amniotic fluid and sur-
rounded by the cave of his skull. Yet these comic touches also dis-
close a serious component to Sternberg’s character. Wallace’s narrator
declares: “Like many Americans of his generation in this awkwardest
of post-Imperial decades, an age suspended between exhaustion and
replenishment, between input too ordinary to process and input too
intense to bear, Sternberg is deeply ambivalent about being embod-
ied; an informing fear that, were he really just an organism, he’d be
nothing more than an ism of his organs” (GCH 254). That “inform-
ing fear” of being embodied runs throughout Oblivion, as does the
tension between “input too ordinary to process and input too intense
to bear.”
But Oblivion’s tortured interior and dramatic monologues also
invoke another early figure from Wallace’s oeuvre, the college student
Bruce from the story “Here and There,” also included in Girl with
Curious Hair. For various and complex reasons, Bruce has broken up
with his long-distance college girlfriend just when they appear to be
ready for the altar. After first hiding away in the library to work on his
senior thesis, which his girlfriend describes as “an epic poem about
variable systems of information- and energy-transfer” (GCH 154),
a sardonic reference to Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System,

Bruce flees to his Aunt and Uncle’s house, where he eventually breaks
down while trying, and failing, to fix a failing stove, the latter perhaps
symbolizing a centralizing source of warmth and sustenance that his
interior lacks. The entire story is designed as a three-way correspon-
dence between Bruce, his fiancé, and the couple’s “fiction therapist,”
to whom Bruce admits: “Whole periods of time now begin to feel to
me like the intimate agonizing interval between something’s falling
off and its hitting the ground” (GCH 165). To this chilling descrip-
tion of absent-spiritedness, he adds,
I begin to feel as though my thoughts and voice here are in some way
the creative products of something outside me, not in my control, and
yet that this shaping, determining influence outside me is still me. I
feel a division which the outside voice posits as the labor pains of a
nascent emotional conscience. I am invested with an urge to “write
it all out,” to confront the past and present as a community of signs,
but this requires a special distance I seem to have left behind. (GCH
165–66)
In his conviction that something “outside” of him is controlling his

thoughts and voice, Bruce, even more than Sternberg, anticipates
Oblivion’s paralyzed isolates, and yet Bruce holds out hope for a way
out, namely by sharing this sense of a divided self with others via a
Wittgensteinean “community of signs,” a key concept in Wallace’s
apprentice fiction.4 Early in his career, Wallace went so far as to deem
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, which posits lan-
guage as a “game” requiring a community of players, as “the single
most comprehensive and beautiful argument against solipsism that’s
ever been made” (CW 44). As we shall see, for the Wallace of Oblivion,
Wittgenstein’s solution might not be enough.
At the book’s center, physically and thematically, sits “Good
Old Neon,” the collection’s best and most celebrated stand-alone
story. One of the three O. Henry Prize Stories for 2002, the story
has received even more attention in the wake of Wallace’s 2008 sui-
cide. The story’s narrator, Neal, a former classmate of a one “David
Wallace,” cannot escape from an overwhelming conviction that he is a
“fraud,” a self-absorbed narcissist whose emotional life is pure hollow
affect. Ultimately, he realizes that “maybe the real root of my prob-
lem was not fraudulence but a basic inability to really love” (OB 165),
an insight that compels him to kill himself in a planned automobile
accident. As in Vladimir Nabokov’s late novella Transparent Things
(1972), Neal narrates his story from beyond the grave, a perspective
that allows him to imagine, at story’s end, “David Wallace” gazing at
Neal’s yearbook photo and “trying, through the tiny keyhole of him-
self, to imagine what all must have happened to lead up to [Neal’s]
death in a fiery single-car accident he’d read about in 1991” (OB 178).
A standout high-school athlete and scholastic powerhouse, Neal imag-
ines that he must have appeared to “David Wallace” as someone with
a “seemingly almost neon aura around him” (OB 178). While gazing
at Neal’s yearbook photo, “David Wallace” tries “to reconcile what
this luminous guy had seemed like from the outside with whatever on
the interior must have driven him to kill himself in such a dramatic
and doubly painful way” (OB 181). Although the story is, ostensi-
bly, Neal’s dramatic monologue, both this final twist, as well as the
improbable posthumous chronology, confirm that “David Wallace”
is in fact imagining Neal’s voice to understand his motives. Neal him-
self admits that “it doesn’t matter what you think about me, because
despite appearances this isn’t even really about me”; rather, he relates
the events leading up to his suicide so that the reader will “have at
least some idea of why what happened afterward happened and why
it had the impact it did on who this is really about” (OB 152). Enter
“David Wallace,” who, we are told, has recently “emerged from years
of literally indescribable war against himself,” and who undertakes
this project “fully aware” of “the cliché that you can’t ever truly know
what’s going on inside someone” and yet determined “to prohibit
that awareness from mocking the attempt or sending the whole line
of thought into the sort of inbent spiral that keeps you from getting
anywhere” (OB 181).
“Good Old Neon” can profitably be read as the middle part of
a trilogy of pieces that begins with “The Depressed Person,” from
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and ends with Chris Fogle’s one
hundred-page dramatic monologue from The Pale King, Wallace’s
unfinished novel the writing of which overlapped with the writing and
publication of Oblivion, as has been amply demonstrated by Stephen
Burn and others.5 All three of these pieces deal in varying ways not
only with narcissism but also with doubling self-consciousness, what
“David Wallace” describes above as “line[s] of thought” that turn
into paralyzing “inbent spiral[s].” Not only do both Neal and the
anonymous “Depressed Person” go to therapists who die mid story,
but it is also possible to read Neal’s diagnosis of his “fraudulence”
and “inability to love” as a more accurate description of the DP’s
own self-diagnosed depression, which, according to the story, is
impervious to all known cures, including prescribed antidepressants.
Neal’s conviction that he “experienced everything in terms of how it

affected people’s view of [him] and what [he] needed to do to create
the impression of [him he] wanted them to have” finds a positive
analog in Chris Fogle’s habit of taking the drug Obetrol and experi-
encing what he calls “doubling,” a state of consciousness in which one
is both aware and aware of one’s awareness. What’s more, both Neal
and Chris Fogle experience blinding revelations from two random
snatches of televised dialog. In Fogle’s case, he comes to terms with
the pointlessness of his 1970s “wastoid” existence while watching the
opening credits of As the World Turns, during which the announcer
declares, “You’re watching As the World Turns ” (TPK 222). Similarly,
Neal finally decides to kill himself after hearing an analyst character
on a Cheers rerun declare, “If I have one more yuppie come in and
start whining to me about how he can’t love, I’m going to throw up”
(OB 168).6
Because “Good Old Neon” shares key component with each of
the other two pieces, it effectively links all three. “The Depressed
Person”’s vicious portrait of depression disguised as narcissism gets
revisited in “Good Old Neon” as narcissism and nihilism full bore,
while Neal’s suicide gets redeemed by Chris Fogle’s triumphant con-
version from 1970s “wastoid” nihilist to committed IRS agent, a job
in which he will end up rubbing elbows with a one “David Wallace,”
who appears in both texts. As with the fictional character “Philip
Roth” in Roth’s Operation Shylock (1993) and The Plot Against
America (2004), and the “Tim O’Brien” character who appears
in O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990)—not to mention the
“Richard Powers” character who narrates Powers’s Galatea 2.2
(1995) and the “Jonathan” who is the hero of Jonathan Safran Foer’s
Everything is Illuminated (2002)—“David Wallace” both is and is not
David Foster Wallace. When the character first gets introduced in The
Pale King, Wallace insists that “David Wallace,” who speaks in the
first person, is “the real author, the living human holding the pencil,
not some abstract narrative persona” (TPK 66), a denial of fictional-
ity that only enhances the fictionality, similar to the way John Barth’s
Ambrose, in “Lost in the Funhouse” (1968), declares that, “as with
other aspects of realism, it is an illusion that is being enhanced, by
purely artificial means” (Lost 73). According to the rules of this game,
as established by Roth, Wallace can peek through his narrative and
perform his self-disclosure while simultaneously disavowing all con-
nections to himself. As such, by casting Neal’s monologue as “David
Wallace’s” projection, Wallace both invites and dares his readers to
read Neal’s story as thinly disguised autobiography.
Jonathan Franzen, in “Farther Away,” accepts this dare. Franzen

mentions “Good Old Neon” immediately after providing a devastat-
ing analysis of Wallace’s darker side and resulting suicide, an analy-
sis that bears striking similarities to Neal’s own self-diagnosis that,
according to the story’s logic, is actually “David Wallace’s” imagina-
tive projection. Most tellingly, Franzen declares: “David’s fiction is
populated with dissemblers and manipulators and emotional isolates,
and yet the people who had only glancing or formal contact with
him took his rather laborious hyperconsiderateness and moral wis-
dom at face value” (Franzen 39). Conversely, Franzen insists that,
in his fiction, Wallace “gave us the worst of himself: he laid out,
with an intensity of self-scrutiny worthy of comparison to Kafka and
Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky, the extremes of his own narcissism,
misogyny, compulsiveness, self-deception, dehumanizing moralism
and theologizing, doubt in the possibility of love, and entrapment
in footnotes-within-footnotes self-consciousness” (39). In language
that eerily echoes Neal’s admission of “a basic inability to really love,”
Franzen cites “the near-perfect absence, in [Wallace’s] fiction, of
ordinary love” (39). Instead, Wallace creates “characters scheming to
appear loving or to prove to themselves that what feels like love is
really just disguised self-interest” (39).7 Franzen goes on to declare:
“If love is nevertheless excluded from his work, it’s because [Wallace]
never quite felt that he deserved to receive it” (40). In Franzen’s view,
Wallace, like Neal, felt “undeserving” of the adulation lavished upon
him, a feeling that was “intertwined, ultimately to the point of indis-
tinguishability, with the thought of suicide, which was the one sure
way out of his imprisonment; surer than addiction, surer than fiction,
and surer, finally, than love” (41). Finally, both Franzen and Neal
(and, by extension, “David Wallace”), deeply distrust “adulatory pub-
lic narratives” of suicide, such as the bromide that the suicide victim
was “almost too good for this world”—a phrase Neal “seemed unable
to keep from fantasizing a lot of [his mourners] saying after the news
of [his suicide] came through” (OB 170)—or that “this world was
never meant for one as beautiful as you,” as Franzen—sardonically
quoting “Starry Starry Night,” singer-songwriter Don McLean’s
schmaltzy tribute to Vincent Van Gogh—imagines Wallace’s idolators
saying of him.
“The Suffering Channel” provides yet another clue as to how we
might understand the relationship between “David Wallace” and his
creator. The novella circles around Brint Moltke, a chronically shy Roto
Rooter employee who somehow or other creates “literally incredible”
works of art from his own feces. It’s no accident that his initials are
B. M. The story’s protagonist, Skip Atwater, a journalist for a super-

market celebrity magazine called Style, tries to convince his editors to
run a feature on Moltke, in the course of which effort he concludes
that the story’s angle should focus on “the conflict between Moltke’s
extreme personal shyness and need for privacy on the one hand versus
his involuntary need to express what lay inside him through some
type of personal expression or art” (OB 271). Moltke’s wife, who sus-
pects that her husband is “some kind of closet exhibitionist,” credits
Brint’s gift to his “abusive childhood” in general, and nightmarish
potty training specifically, yet also acknowledges “the terrific shame,
ambivalence, and sheer human suffering involved in his unchosen
art” (OB 271, 328). Wallace does not play Brint for laughs. Quite
to the contrary, he goes to great length to establish shit as an elabo-
rate objective correlative for interior shame and the benefits of shar-
ing that shame. Shit is both “wholly common and universal” and
part of “personal private experience” (OB 244). While talking about
Moltke’s odd gift, a group of female interns and editors begin trad-
ing stories about “intergender bathroom habits and the various small
traumas of cohabitation with a male partner” (OB 265). In one story,
a woman farts while a male administers oral sex, after which the male
“lost literally about twenty pounds of illusion in that one second”
and, as a direct result, is now “almost unnaturally comfortable with
his body and bodies in general and their private functions” (OB 263).
In another story, a woman tells a man on their first date that he must
leave the room so that she can “take a dump”; while the man waits
for her to finish, he realizes “that he loved and respected [the] woman
for baring to him the insecurity she had been feeling,” a moment that
marked “the first time in a long time he had not felt deeply and pain-
fully alone” (OB 264). Atwater himself has one of his most searing
self-revelations while in a bathroom stall (OB 270).8 Shit, then, rep-
resents those parts of “private experience” that people “don’t want to
be reminded of” (OB 244) but which are nevertheless universal and
worth sharing. Brint Moltke’s art is an involuntary transformation of
those shameful truths into art.
If Moltke can be read as a figure of the tortured artist, then the
child savant in “Another Pioneer” might similarly be read as Wallace’s
wry parody of the artist as wise sage, an honorific often bestowed
upon Wallace himself. Both Wallace’s earlier story collections
included a mythic parody, starting with the William Gass pastiche
“John Billy” in Girl with Curious Hair and resuming with “Tri-Stan:
I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko” from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,
which updates John Barth’s Chimera- era postmodern mythic cycles
for the cable television era. “Another Pioneer” continues this tradi-
tion. Couched in the scholarly jargon of archetypal hero cycles popu-
larized by Joseph Campbell and others, the story comes to the reader
in the form of a pedantic academic lecture that the first person nar-
rator “derived from an acquaintance of a close friend who said that
he had himself overheard this exemplum aboard a high-altitude com-
mercial flight” (OB 116). The numerous layers of narrative remove
contrast with the centralized position of the savant child, who sits
on a raised chair, totally alone, in the exact center of the village of
which he is a citizen, where he answers questions posed to him by
his more “primitive” fellow villagers. The child’s alleged brilliance
initially refers to his “cognitive ability, raw IQ,” but later comes to
involve “sagacity or virtue or wisdom or as Coleridge would have
had it esemplasy ” (OB 119, 120). In keeping with the book’s over-
arching depiction of life in the information age, Wallace humorously
depicts an elaborate economy of “question consultants” that devel-
ops in the wake of the child’s unexpected gifts, with the “consul-
tant caste” helping villagers maximize the value of their questions.
Eventually, a neighboring village, in an effort to neutralize the child’s
power, sends over a shaman, who, with a single whispered question,
undermines the child’s self-confidence. Though the story’s speaker
can only speculate as to the exact wording of the question—which
varies according to different versions of the tale—he does offer one
key “variant,” which reads as follows: “You, child, who are so gifted
and sagacious and wise: Is it possible that you have not realized the
extent to which these primitive villagers have exaggerated your gifts,
have transformed you into something you know too well you are
not?” (OB 138). In other words, what if you’re a fraud? The possibil-
ity of fraudulence grips the child with every bit as much intensity as
it does Neal, to the extent the shaman’s question bends “the child’s
cognitive powers back in on themselves and transformed him from
messianic to monstrous, and whose lethal involution resonates with
malignant-self-consciousness themes in everything from Genesis 3:7
to the self-devouring Kirttimukha of the Skanda Purana” (OB 136).
The story ends with the villagers abandoning both the village and the
child, who sits alone and bewildered in his central chair as the village
ignites into flames all around him.
Both the involuntary nature of Brint’s gift and the boy’s uncanny
intelligence bear closer scrutiny primarily for the way these episodes
resonate with the lack of mental control that befuddles so many of the
book’s other key figures. Not coincidentally, the key take away advice
Wallace offered to the graduates of Kenyon College in his celebrated
commencement address to that body, later published as the chapbook

This is Water, was “to exercise some control of how and what you
think” (TIW 53). Perhaps nothing Wallace published did more to
burnish his public image as, in Franzen’s sardonic words, “a great and
gentle soul” and a “lost national treasure” (Franzen 38). Throughout
the speech, Wallace drills down on the fact that our thoughts and
belief systems are not “just hardwired . . . or automatically absorbed
from culture, like language,” but rather “a matter of personal, inten-
tional choice” (TIW 27, 28). Conversely, what is “hard-wired” is a
“default setting” of “natural, basic self-centeredness,” a conviction
that we are each “the absolute center of the universe,” and “the real-
est, most vivid and important person in existence,” a notion borne
from the fact that we are each “the absolute center of” every experi-
ence we have ever had (TIW 37, 36, 39). As such, the speech’s heartfelt
plea for us “to be a little less arrogant” and to exercise “a little critical
awareness about [ourselves] and [our] certainties” almost, but does
not entirely, masks Wallace’s much darker disclosures regarding how
difficult it is “to exercise some control over how and what you think,”
and, conversely, how easy it is to remain “hypnotized by the con-
stant monologue inside your head” (TIW 33, 53, 50). Nevertheless,
he insists that “if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult
life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about ‘the
mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master’” (TIW 55–56).
Immediately after this passage, Wallace points out that “it is not the
least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms
almost always shoot themselves in . . . the head ” (TIW 57–58). Missing
from the published version of the speech is the original address’s sub-
sequent line: “They shoot the terrible master.”
So whereas the speech urges the listener to avoid “going through
your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, uncon-
scious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being
uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out” (TIW 60),
Oblivion depicts with chilling intensity adult lives that meet, point by
point, that very same description. No character better exemplifies this
predicament than Terry Schmidt, the protagonist of “Mr. Squishy,”
which originally appeared in McSweeney’s No. 5 in 2000 under the
pseudonym Elizabeth Klemm, a subterfuge that fooled basically no
one. Though possessed of “a vivid and complex inner life” (OB 26),
Schmidt nevertheless spends his days—and the story—trapped in
soulless conference rooms with Focus Group participants who provide
him with marketing data about consumer products that he must then
sift through to determine which pieces of statistical data “made a
difference and which did not” (OB 12). In his early days on the job,
Schmidt hoped “to persuade tablesful of hard-eyed corporate officers
that legitimate concern for consumer wellbeing was both emotionally
and economically Good Business” (OB 29); by the time of the story’s
historical present, he can no longer ignore “the starry-eyed puerility
and narcissism of these fantasies” any more than he can believe, as
he once did, that he was “fundamentally different from the common
run of man, unique and in certain crucial ways superior, more as it
were central, meaningful” (OB 30). Yet this last belief Schmidt now
understands is shared by “a large percentage of bright young men and
women” largely because—in language that Wallace would requote
five years later in This is Water—“they themselves have been at the
exact center of all they’ve experience for the whole 20 years of their
conscious lives” (OB 30).
Like Neal, Schmidt both acknowledges his “default set-
ting” of “natural, basic self-centeredness” and distrusts it entirely.
Uncharacteristically, Wallace provides very little in the way of a
compensatory payoff for achieving this level of clarity. And here he
lays bare the dark but insistent tug of nihilism that is the dialectical
obverse of his otherwise hopeful posthumanism. In each of his major
works leading up to and including Infinite Jest, Wallace includes some
variation of Schmidt’s delusion of uniqueness but always with the
understanding that, because the illusion is universal, it is therefore
a check against true solipsism. Mark Nechtr, the hero of “Westward
the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,” most clearly exemplifies this
dynamic when the narrator lists among Mark’s key misconceptions
his belief “that he’s the only person in the world who feels like the
only person in the world,” which the narrator goes onto describe as
“a solipsistic delusion” (GCH 305). Later in the text, the advertis-
ing genius J. D. Steelritter observes not only that “solipsism binds us
together” but also that this same shared solipsism is an advertiser’s
“meat” (GCH 309). Corollary to this diagnosis-as-cure strategy is
Wallace’s stated intention, again to quote “Westward”’s narrator, to
design his work always with the “Reader” in the position of “a lover,
who wants to be inside,” with the work’s “Exit and Egress and End
in full view the whole time” (GCH 331, 332). Conversely, the stories
in Oblivion provide no way out. Each possible egress or exit out of
the cave of self that is the story’s one and only entry point proves
to be another framing interiority, such that many of the stories are
designed like “Russian dolls within Russian dolls,” to quote Corey
Messler, whose blurb is included in the paperback edition. The char-
acters are instead left marooned inside their interiors, “hypnotized”
as Wallace put it in This is Water, “by the constant monologue inside

their heads” (TIW 50) and left to manage a constant stream of “input
too ordinary to process and input too intense to bear” (GCH 254).
Schmidt’s entire vocational life consists of input too ordinary
to process, though process it he must, all in the hope of locating
“tiny gems of statistical relevance amid the rough raw surfeit of ran-
dom fact” (OB 9). Throughout both Oblivion and its compositional
companion The Pale King, Wallace is preoccupied with entropy,
which, as The Pale King ’s mysterious Dr. Lehrl explains on more
than one occasion, is “a measure of a certain type of information
that there is no point in knowing . . . Real entropy had zippo to do
with temperature” (TPK 12). This concern also sits at the center of
“Deciderization 2007—a Special Report,” Wallace’s introduction to
the Best American Essays 2007 for which he served as guest editor.
There he describes “U.S. culture right now” as a “culture and volume
of info and spin and rhetoric and context that I know I’m not alone in
finding too much to even absorb, much less to try to make sense of or
organize into any kind of triage of saliency or value” (BFN 301). This
surfeit of information that there is no point in knowing also occupies
the interiors of these characters, forcing the reader into the position
of sorter and organizer of all this information, a task that a Jesuit
professor of accounting, a key figure in Chris Fogle’s The Pale King
monologue, identifies as the last bastion of heroism available in con-
temporary life. “In today’s world,” the professor affirms, “boundaries
are fixed, and most significant facts have been generated. Gentlemen,
the heroic frontier now lies in the ordering and deployment of these
facts. Classification, organization, presentation” (TPK 232).
Nevertheless, both Oblivion and The Pale King confirm that such
work is soul-destroyingly dull and dehumanizing. In Schmidt’s case,
none of the data he is collecting for Felonies!, the chocolate snack
cake being marketed by the Mr. Squishy company, is meaningful.
Rather, it is the “entropic converse” of useful, sorted information, “a
cascade of random noise meant to so befuddle the firm and its Client
that no one would feel anything but relief at the decision to precede
with an O[verall] C[ampaign] C[concept]” that Schmidt’s employer,
Reesemeyer Shannon Belt Advertising, had already developed in
advance (OB 44). In other words, the data being collected “made
no difference. None of it” (OB 45). So Schmidt’s job, in addition to
being mind-numbingly dull, is also, in the purest sense, pointless—or
so he thinks. For running parallel to Schmidt’s interior monologue
is a concurrent narrative detailing an elaborate plan, hatched by the
advertising firm’s top brass, and unknown to Schmidt, to sabotage
the entire phony Focus Group Schmidt is leading. The plan involves
planting a “mole” in the room, in this case the story’s mysterious
first-person narrator, who is wired with a prosthesis and bag that
will projectile vomit quantities of masticated snack cake at the exact
moment a daredevil on the outside window abruptly inflates an enor-
mous balloon replica of the Mr. Squishy logo. The idea is to see “how
the facilitators reacted to unplanned stimuli, how they responded to
their Focus Groups’ own reactions” (OB 65). Once Schmidt could be
shown unable to cope with this unexpected random intrusion into
the orderly data collection process, Awad, the plan’s mastermind, can
proceed with replacing human facilitators with computer networks,
thus “doing away as much as possible with the human element,” the
primary source for the “unnecessary random variables in those Field
tests” (OB 62).
Schmidt, then, paradoxically suffers from a conviction that his
contributions “make no difference” while simultaneously function-
ing as the element in the process that “makes a difference” in the
data. Though he does not appear to know of the plan hatched around
him—nor do we see the plan take effect, as the story ends just prior to
full implementation—Schmidt’s ghastly obsession with poisoning the
snack cake supply suggests that he has intuited his diminishing value
to the company and longs to hit back. Even more disturbing, because
we know that Schmidt will soon be fired from his job and replaced
by a machine, we can infer an increased likelihood that Schmidt, post
severance, will carry through with his plan.
Wallace presents none of the above as linear narrative. Rather, the
plot unfolds along the margins of Schmidt’s interior monologue,
framing his narrative much the same way Awad’s plot itself will box
him in and expel him from his job. The reader must piece together
the story’s basic narrative from the welter of marketing acronyms
and concrete details. Whereas Lukács positions Flaubert’s or Zola’s
readers as “merely observers,” Wallace tasks his readers with entropic
task of ordering and assessing his dense descriptive tales. Nearly a
dozen internally defined acronyms clutter the pages of “Mr. Squishy,”
none of which bear upon the story’s emotional trajectory, while a
sizable portion of “The Suffering Channel” consists of detailed back-
ground data on secondary characters, precise descriptions of hotel
rooms and pay-phone kiosks, and brand-name cataloging of clothes.
The narrator of “The Soul is Not A Smithy” displaces the story’s
key event—the “hostage” crisis inaugurated by the crazed substitute
teacher—to the story’s periphery, focusing instead on his elaborately
detailed “panel” narrative, whose import both to the narrator and
to the story’s framing narrative the reader must determine. Far from
animating the stories, this process of data ordering directly replicates
the characters’ predicament. What Lukács calls Zola’s “passive capitu-
lation” to the dehumanizing effects of capitalism becomes in Oblivion
an active function of the stories themselves; what Lukács calls “the
capitalist prose” of the late nineteenth-century naturalists becomes in
Wallace’s art the data-overloaded prose of the information age.
In many respects, Wallace is guilty here of the imitative fallacy.
In trying to depict contemporary existence as a whirlwind of useless,
alienating, and unremittingly boring data, he also produces a book that
is, for vast stretches, dull and alienating. Lukács levels a similar charge
against Flaubert, who “complained unceasingly and passionately of the
boredom, pettiness and repugnance of the bourgeois subject-matter
he was forced to depict” (126). But Flaubert, Lukács argues, not only
“confused life with the everyday existence of the bourgeois,” but also
“struggled throughout his life to escape the vicious cycle of socially
determined preconceptions” (125, 126). Lukács goes on to assert,
“Because he did not battle against the preconceptions themselves and
even accepted them as incontestable facts, his battle was tragic and
hopeless” (127). As might be said of Madame Bovary, Oblivion can
at times be critiqued as a beautifully stylized depiction of bourgeois
boredom that is itself deadly dull. Unlike Flaubert, Wallace does not
position his readers as outside observers who can share in the author’s
contempt. The stories are not, as in Flaubert, mere “tableau”; they
are a cascade of data and concrete detail that the reader must sift and
sort. Although this task hardly alleviates the arduous work of reading
the book itself—if anything, it increases the tedium—it does succeed
in forcing the reader to experience what is being depicted. In this
way, then, Wallace collapses Lukács dichotomy between the narrative
impulse in the epic, in which readers “experience” the events, and the
descriptive mode of such capitalist art such as Zola’s and Flaubert’s,
with the difference that in Wallace’s art of the information age, the
reader experiences what is being described.
In many respects, this strategy hardly marks a shift in Wallace’s
art, for the same could be said of much of his work. In its portrayal
of addiction, isolation, and a world run amok with nonstop input and
entertainment, Infinite Jest plunges its reader into a massive labyrin-
thine text that simultaneously entertains, overwhelms, and isolates. Yet
in the case of that famous book, the payoff resides in the empathetic
bond Wallace creates between text and reader. By invading the reader’s
interior, Infinite Jest both dramatizes and alleviates the loneliness of
interior experience. And as early as 1993, Wallace was already speaking
about forcing his reader “to work hard to access [his work’s] pleasures,
the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of
hard work and discomfort” (CW 22). Conversely, Oblivion repeatedly
undermines many of the techniques for alleviation that Wallace had
already established. In Infinite Jest, addicts sit in AA meetings and
share their anguish; young athletes gather in sweaty locker rooms and
mentor to their “little buddies”; even Don Gately, who admits to feel-
ing “trapped inside his huge chattering head” as he lies paralyzed in
his hospital bed, gets visited by a wraith who talks to him in what
the narrator describes as a “dialogue” with something similar to a
“give-and-take” (IJ 922, 923). The characters in Oblivion have no one
to talk to, and if there are “wraiths” inside their head, these wraiths
are malevolent, engaging not in dialogues but in a battle for control.
As for the pleasures that once emerged from completion of the “hard
work” Wallace has set for this readers, those, too, seem to be aban-
doned in favor of a persistent confrontation with pain and suffering.
Oblivion even casts doubt on Wallace’s long held belief that lan-
guage can bridge the gulf between us, and that fiction “can allow
us imaginatively to identify with characters’ pain” so that “we might
then also more conceive of others identifying with our own,” an
agenda he deemed “nourishing, redemptive” (CW 22). Neal, in
“Good Old Neon,” best articulates Oblivion’s more pessimistic vision
of language as solution to our loneliness. In the middle of his narra-
tive, Neal observes, “I know that you know as well as I do how fast
thoughts and associations can fly through your head” (OB 150). Not
only do the thoughts and associations fly by so rapidly that “they
seem totally different from or outside of the regular sequential clock
time we live by,” but they also “have so little relation to the sort of
linear, one-word-after-another-word English we communicate with
each other with that it could easily take a whole lifetime to spell out
the contents of one split-second flash of thoughts and connections”
(OB 151). Neal insists instead that our attempts to communicate
what’s going inside us are “a charade,” for the simple reason that
“what goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected
for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of” (OB 151).
Here Wallace appears to be nodding in the direction of Steven
Pinker, author of the Language Instinct, published in 1994, two years
prior to Infinite Jest. Pinker makes a brief appearance in Infinite Jest,
in the form of his alleged participation in a panel discussion with
Avril Incandenza on “the political implications of prescriptive gram-
mar” that took place “during the infamous Militant Grammarians of
Massachusetts convention credited with helping incite the M.I.T. riots
of B.S. 1997” (IJ 987n). Wallace also takes the Language Instinct to
task in his review Brian Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern American

Usage¸ reprinted in Consider the Lobster as “Authority and American
Usage.” Among many other things, the essay addresses what Pinker
himself calls “prescriptive” and “descriptive” approaches to gram-
matical rules, the former concerning itself with the “prescribed” rules
for proper speech, and the latter offering a scientifically “objective”
description of how people actually talk. Wallace forcefully disagrees
with Pinker’s “descriptive” approach to the rules of grammar. His early
training in Wittgenstein convinced him that language is public and that
communication would be “impossible without consensus and rules”;
as a result, the Descriptivist argument “is open to the objection that its
ultimate aim—the abandonment of ‘artificial’ linguistic rules and con-
ventions—would make language itself impossible” (CL 88n). Wallace
does, however, grant Pinker’s underlying argument that humans might
very well be “wired with a Universal Grammar” (CL 93).
Similarly, in Neal’s description of thought and associations that
outpace the linear structure of language, Wallace also seems to be
embracing Pinker’s description of “mentalese,” or “the language
of thought” (Pinker 56). Pinker spends dozens of pages trying to
demolish the idea that language shapes thought rather than vice
versa—“If there can be two thoughts corresponding to one word,”
he says at one point, “thoughts can’t be words” (79)—an attempt
that even requires him to address Wittgenstein’s famous aphorism
regarding the alleged absence of consciousness in animals: “A dog
could not have the thought ‘perhaps it will rain tomorrow’” (qtd. in
Pinker 56). These arguments all lead Pinker to conclude that “people
do not think in English or Chinese or Apache; they think in the lan-
guage of thought” (81): in other words, mentalese. While describing
the relationship between language and mentalese, he writes,
Any particular thought in our head embraces a vast amount of infor-

mation. But when it comes to communicating a thought to someone
else, attention spans are short and mouths are slow. To get informa-
tion into a listener’s head in a reasonable amount of time, a speaker
can encode only a fraction of the message into words and must count
on the listener to fill in the rest. But inside a single head, the demands
are different. Air time is not a limited resource: different parts of the
brain are connected to one another directly with thick cables that can
transfer huge amounts of information quickly. Nothing can be left to
the imagination, though, because the internal representations are the
imagination. (81)
The verbal echoes between this passage and Neal’s description of his
interior are striking and, quite possibly, not accidental. Deliberately
or not, Wallace, throughout Oblivion, seems clearly to embrace the

possibility of a sublayer of interior experience that precedes language
and, in many cases, masters it. What’s more, Pinker’s comparison of
“mentalese” to a machine built of “thick cables” finds an echo in
Wallace’s “CPU” model of consciousness, very much the same way
Pinker’s description of the winnowing process that governs the tran-
sition of mentalese into language resonates with Wallace’s sustained
use of information theory and entropy to explain the particular con-
tours of information-era dread and anxiety.
All this being the case, then, Oblivion remains unique in Wallace’s
oeuvre in its unrelenting pessimism. His youthful ambition, as he
explained back in 1993, to create art that “locates and applies CPR to
those elements of what’s human and magical” (CW 26) gives way, in
Oblivion, to dense description without redemption. The stories instead
yearn for escape, for a release from the prison-house of interiority, but
offer no exit. Even in its unfinished state, The Pale King can be seen to
be a corrective, or at least a dialectical partner, to Oblivion’s haunted
insularity. Borrowing Wallace’s key terms from “Authority and
American Usage,” D. T. Max observes: “While Oblivion was descrip-
tive, The Pale King was supposed to be prescriptive. It had to convince
the reader that there was a way out of the bind [of consciousness]”
(280). Wallace was justly fond of Lewis Hyde’s description of irony as
“the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage,” a line he
quotes prominently in “E Unibus Pluram” and subsequently invokes
throughout Infinite Jest, such as in the novel’s early depiction of Joelle
van Dyne as “excruciatingly alive and encaged” and in that section’s
subsequent description of James O. Incandenza’s film Cage III, the
final image of which leads the narrator to conclude: “What looks like
the cage’s exit is actually the bars of the cage” (SFT 67; IJ 222). In
Oblivion, that cage is consciousness itself. Vladimir Nabokov once
fancifully described “the marvel of consciousness” as “that sudden
window swinging open on a sunlit landscape amidst the night of
non-being” (“Interview” 22). The characters in these late-period fever
dreams rattle desperately at that Nabokovian window only to discover,
upon successfully springing the lock, not a sunlit landscape but rather
another enclosure. In that sense, Nabokov’s “night of non-being” is
just a lovely alliterative way to describe oblivion.
Notes
1. Also of importance here is the narrator’s obsession with a disturbing
dream sequence from the motion picture The Exorcist (see OB 94–97).
Though the narrator never overtly makes the connection, the reader
can easily intuit a thematic overlap between a film of demonic posses-
sion and the deranged behavior of the substitute teacher, whom the
local paper later describes as “Possessed” (100).
2. I am indebted to the anonymous author of an essay titled “Information
Overload?: The Ethics of Description Across Media” for directing
me to Lukács’s formative essay in the context of Wallace’s work in
general.
3. I am indebted to Stephen Burn for the keen insight in this sentence’s
second half. It’s also worth noting that both collections preceded a
major novelistic statement.
4. For more on the importance of Wittgenstein’s work in Wallace’s
apprentice fiction, see Boswell, “The Broom of the System: Wittgenstein
and the Rules of the Game,” in Understanding David Foster Wallace
(21–64).
5. In fact, Burn, after reading through Wallace’s papers at the Harry
Ransom Center at the University of Texas, speculates that the first
seeds of the novel might have been planted as early as 1989. But the
bulk of the writing seems clearly to have hit a stride around 2005,
which is when the “Author Here” sections are set. What’s more, the
two books share a wide range of thematic concerns and, in many
cases, direct phrases. In a footnote, Burn points out, “As one exam-
ple of the blurrings of the edges between works, Michael Pietsch
[Wallace’s editor at Little, Brown] notes that both Oblivion’s final
story and the opening of The Pale King are preoccupied with shit, art,
and death” (Burn “Paradigm” 386n4). To cite one obvious instance
of overlap, in §7 of the novel, Claude Sylvanshine and his fellow new
IRS agents are carted to the Regional Examination Center via 14
“Mister Squishee [sic]” trucks (TPK 47).
6. One more unrelated instance of textual overlap: early in “Good Old
Neon,” Neal quotes the line “Or like a leaf that doesn’t believe in the
tree it’s part of, etc.” (152). This same line, which is a paraphrase from
DeTocqueville, also appears in §19 of The Pale King, which section
dramatizes a debate about civic duty and the 1980 presidential elec-
tion between Carter and Reagan. The text reads, “DeTocqueville’s
thrust is that it’s in the democratic citizen’s nature to be like a leaf
that doesn’t believe in the tree it’s part of” (141).
7. In his recent Wallace biography, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, D.
T. Max quotes a letter Wallace wrote to writer Elizabeth Wurtzel,
author of Prozac Nation, in which he admits, among other Neal-like
observations, “I go through a loop in which I notice all the ways I
am—for just an example—self-centered and careerist and not true to
standards and values that transcend my own petty interests, and feel
like I’m not one of the good ones; but then I countenance the fact
that here at least here I am worrying about it, noticing all the ways
I fall short of integrity, and I imagine that maybe people without
any integrity at all don’t notice or worry about it; so then I feel
better about myself . . . ; but this soon becomes a vehicle for feeling
superior to (imagined) Others . . . It’s all very confusing. I think I’m
very honest and candid, but also proud of how honest and candid I
am—so where does that put me” (203). Wallace, in the wide-ranging
correspondence Max chooses to quote, sounds this theme through-
out the biography.
8. “The Suffering Channel” is hardly Wallace’s only attempt to explore
the various ways in which bathrooms aid in self-reflection. One is
reminded, for instance, of the scene early in Infinite Jest in which
Hal, after his interview breakdown, repairs to a bathroom and won-
ders “why U.S. restrooms always appear to us as infirmaries for pub-
lic distress, the place to regain control” (IJ 13). In addition, “Brief
Interviews with Hideous Men” #42 provides a detailed catalogue of
the sounds and smells of a public bathroom as witnessed daily by the
narrator’s father, a bathroom attendant. It is also perhaps fruitful to
compare Atwater’s behavior in bathrooms, both public and private,
to that of John Updike’s Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, specifically the
“Rabbit” of Rabbit is Rich, which is preoccupied throughout with
the Freudian connections between shit and money (“filthy lucre”),
and which features episodes of anal sex as well as long descriptions
of bathrooms and toilets. Wallace had a vocal and clearly ambiva-
lent relationship with Updike’s most famous creation, as testified by
his homage/parody, “Rabbit Resurrected,” which appeared in the
August 1992 edition of Harper ’s. When Atwater visits the Moltkes’
bathroom, we are told, “nothing but an ingrained sense of propriety
kept Atwater from trying to press his ear to the wall next to the medi-
cine cabinet to see whether he could hear anything. Nor would he
ever have allowed himself to open the Moltkes’ medicine cabinet, or
to root in any serious way through the woodgrain shelves above the
towel rack” (OB 304). Conversely, Rabbit, when he visits the bath-
room of his rival Webb Murkett, rifles through the medicine cabinet,
where he finds a damning package of Preparation H, which leads
him ruefully to conclude, “Medicine cabinets are tragic” (Rabbit is
Rich 286).
CH A P T ER 9
“The Chains of Not Choosing”: Free

Will and Faith in William James and
David Foster Wallace
David H. Evans
Infinite Jest is a book containing many secrets, and containing many

individuals with secrets. Characters are drawn to mysterious spaces,
like Hal Incandenza, who is “as attached to the secrecy as he is to
getting high” (IJ 490), to the ETA Pump Room, or poor Tony
Krause to his narrow toilet stall in the Armenian Foundation Library
men’s room (IJ 301). Some carry their secrets around with them,
invisible even when in plain sight. Randy Lenz, for example, keeps
his emergency stash of cocaine in a curiously deceptive container—a
hollowed out copy of “Bill James’s gargantuan Large-Print Principles
of Psychology and The Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion” (IJ 543)
better known as the Varieties of Religious Experience. The inappro-
priate contents of this tome should, no doubt, suggest to the wary
reader that the book he holds in his hands must also be approached
with some suspicion, perhaps a suspicion of the metaphor inherent in
the idea of the “contents” of a work of art.1 But equally important is
Wallace’s choice of the particular author whose work is honored in its
deliberate misappropriation. Is there, one cannot help but wonder,
any significance in this fact for our understanding of the relation of
the two writers?
Obviously, you are about to read an argument that there is. But
the mention of James in Infinite Jest is not the only reason for think-
ing so. Wallace himself admitted his fondness for the philosopher
and psychologist. During a 1996 interview he was asked to name,
172 DAVID H. EVANS
in standard interviewed author fashion, his favorite writers. In the

group portrait of those who made him “feel unalone—intellectually,
emotionally, spiritually . . . human and unalone and . . . in a deep,
significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and
poetry” (CW 62), James appears yet again. To be sure, the vivid style
and metaphoric vigor of James’s prose has been admired by many over
the years, including Rebecca West, who claimed that James wrote
“philosophy as though it were fiction” (11). For his part, Wallace,
who started out wanting to be a professional philosopher like his
father, is an intensely philosophical fiction writer. Nevertheless, it is
slightly surprising to find James sharing space with such improbable
peers as John Donne, A. S. Byatt, and “35 per cent of Stephen Crane”
(CW 62).
Given these direct allusions, it is somewhat odd that James has
been pretty much ignored as one of Wallace’s precursors and influ-
ences. James Ryerson, for example, in his introduction to Wallace’s
undergraduate honor thesis in philosophy published in 2011 as Fate,
Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will, invokes Descartes,
Voltaire, Sartre, J. L. Austin, Derrida, and above all Wittgenstein
among Wallace’s philosophical inspirations, but never mentions James,
despite the fact that the latter’s Pragmatism anticipates some of the
central themes of Philosophical Investigations. I am going to propose,
however, that William James was a crucial figure for Wallace, a figure
with whom he could recognize remarkable parallels, both in terms of
the moral dilemmas they confronted in thought and life, and in terms
of the solutions that they attempted to apply to them. I will focus
on two issues that concerned both writers deeply: first, the place of
free will in a world where the self seemed to have been reduced to
an effect of immense inhuman structures and processes; and second,
the nature and possibility of religious belief in a culture dominated
by scientific and naturalistic assumptions. We should take Wallace at
his word, that is, when he says that James made him “feel unalone—
intellectually, emotionally, spiritually.”
Scholars have long recognized a close connection between James’s
thought and his biography. It is no denigration of the value of the
version of pragmatism that would become his most important con-
tribution to philosophy to argue that it can be seen as a response to
his own emotional and moral dilemmas. Indeed, pragmatism affirms
that the only justification for any philosophical idea is that it satisfies
some fundamental need of the philosopher. James’s own emotional
life was a troubled one; from his late adolescence on he suffered from
recurrent bouts of depression, sometimes so severe that he considered
“THE CHAINS OF NOT CHOOSING” 173
suicide. There is evidence that on at least one occasion he checked him-

self into the McLean Hospital (Menand 13–14).What appears to have
been most disheartening about these episodes is the sense of passivity
and paralysis that accompanied them, rendering the very thought of
action futile; a suggestive entry in his diary from this period says that
the outer world “seems to be void or evil, my will is palsied. The dif-
ficulty: ‘to act without hope,’ must be solved” (qtd. in James William
Anderson 374. The first subject is conjectural). The anxiety caused by
the threat of paralysis appears frequently in James’s writing, including
one of the most famous passages in his works, the description of an
experience of “panic fear” in the Varieties of Religious Experience. In
Varieties, James attributes this account to a French correspondent,
but he later admitted that the experience was his own:
Whilst in this state of philosophic pessimism and general depression

of spirits about my prospects, I went one evening into a dressing room
in the twilight to procure some article that was there; when suddenly
there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the
darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously there
arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen
in the asylum, a black haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic,
who used to sit all day on one of the benches, or rather shelves against
the wall, with his knees drawn up against his chin, and the coarse gray
undershirt, which was his only garment, drawn over them inclosing
his entire figure. He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat
or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking
absolutely non human. This image and my fear entered into a species
of combination with each other. That shape am I, I felt, potentially.
Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate, if the hour for
it should strike for me as it struck for him. There was such a horror of
him, and such a perception of my own merely momentary discrepancy
from him, that it was as if something hitherto solid within my breast
gave way entirely, and I became a mass of quivering fear. (134–35)
The causes of his depression have been debated over the years, but what
is more important for philosophical history is that he interpreted his
personal distress in the terms of one of the great intellectual debates of
the later nineteenth century, the question of free will versus determin-
ism. The loss of a sense of agency during James’s periods of depres-
sion resembled all too distinctly the condition of human beings in the
picture of the world offered by the most advanced scientific theories
of the time, a world of inhuman mechanical processes, in which indi-
vidual free will was a mere sentimental chimera. In 1869, for example,
174 DAVID H. EVANS
he wrote to his friend Thomas W. Ward: “I’m swamped in an empiri-

cal philosophy—I feel that we are Nature through and through, and
that we are wholly conditioned, that not a wiggle of our will happens
save as a result of physical laws” (Letters 152–53). The personal and
the philosophical seemed to reinforce one another in a vicious circuit
offering no escape: James’s sense of moral paralysis was explained by
the regnant doctrines of determinism, while those doctrines appeared
to have found verification by the empirical evidence of his own pre-
dicament. Natural science and logic had made the unpredictability of
free will simply inconceivable, and James could find no grounds either
in himself or in the external world for imagining an alternative.
At this point an event took place that would come to be seen as
a crucial turning point in the narrative of James’s intellectual jour-
ney: his discovery of the writings of the French philosopher Charles
Renouvier, in which he found an escape hatch from what he later
called the “iron block” image of the universe offered by determin-
ism. A much quoted entry in his diary, dated April 30, 1870, reads
as follows:
I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of
Renouvier’s second Essais and see no reason why his definition of free
will—“the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have
other thoughts”—need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I
will assume for the present—until next year—that it is no illusion. My
first act of free will shall be to believe in free will . . . [I will] believe in
my individual reality and creative power. My belief, to be sure, can’t be
optimistic—but I will posit life (the real, the good) in the self-govern-
ing resistance of the ego to the world. Life shall be [built on (?)] doing
and suffering and creating. (Letters, 147–48) (emphasis in original)2
The strictly philosophical merits of James’s argument can be debated,

but his assertion was, for him, as decisive as Bartleby’s explosive dec-
laration: “I prefer not to.” In both cases, it is the affirmation of the
possibility of choice that is central. A world without choice is a world
without agency, and so for James a world without humanity. If objec-
tive evidence and natural law seemed to argue for belief in such a
world, then a higher law must be invoked, one which legitimized the
role of subjective interest in the choice of belief. In James’s opinion,
the scientific or philosophical insistence on the necessity of objectivity
had elevated truth to the position of an insatiable god who demanded
the endless sacrifice if its own idolators. Throughout his career, he
would insist on the individual right to “believe at our own risk any
hypothesis that is live enough to tempt our will” (Will to Believe 32)
and to resist the arguments of those who propagated the assumption

that “truth, to be real truth, ought to bring eventual messages of
death to all our satisfactions” (Meaning 87).3
What is original Tautology about James’s argument is that it does
not invoke a Cartesian subject or agent that precedes its action, some-
thing secure from the molestations of “physical laws.” Rather the
action itself is the agent. His inspiration is to put activity rather than
passivity at the core of our relation to the world. One thing that James
emphasized throughout his writings was the creative role of the act
of cognition: “In our cognitive as well as in our active life we are cre-
ative . . . Man engenders truths upon [the world].” (Pragmatism 123).
In this sense, it is not the chooser who chooses so much as it is the
act of choice that brings into being both the chosen and the chooser,
which in this case are one and the same.
One might think that, as a thinker and writer, Wallace found him-
self in a situation that could hardly be more different from that of
James. From the perspective of the later twentieth century, the posi-
tivist conception of science against which the philosopher struggled
had come to seem an historical relic as quaint and culturally specific as
stovepipe hats and button shoes, consigned to a dusty museum by the
sharp critiques of cultural theory and science studies. I would argue,
however, that the scientific determinism James found so dismaying
has its equally oppressive late twentieth-century counterpart in the
image saturated sensorium that comprises the postmodern situation.
Like the determinist model of the physical universe, the society of the
spectacle reduces the self to a passive spectator with no active role to
play. The individual is converted into an entirely reflective and pre-
determined consumer of commodities that are increasingly spectacles
themselves. For Wallace, this situation is made even more dire by the
fact that the most “advanced” theoretical responses to this degrada-
tion of the individual reinforce that degradation by assailing the very
category of the individual, forcing upon one “the dilemma of having
to deny yourself an existence independent of language” (CW 45), and
rendering any na ïve appeal to the traditional notion of what Infinite
Jest calls “this hideous internal self” (IJ 695) a philosophical non-
starter. However, I want to propose that, like James, Wallace found a
solution to this discouraging situation by appealing to his predeces-
sor’s conception of choice as an act that brings into being the actor,
and preserves what it means to be human.
It should not be surprising that the threat of paralysis is the central
theme of Wallace’s greatest novel, Infinite Jest, whose title alludes
to the play about the most famous procrastinator in literature, the
176 DAVID H. EVANS
victim of “paralyzing doubt about everything” (IJ 900).4 The fear of

immobilization haunts the novel; the word “paralysis” and its deriva-
tives appear some 40 times, according to my Kindle edition. The
book begins with a scene in the course of which Hal Incandenza
winds up lying “catatonic” (IJ 12) on the floor of a men’s room; it
concludes (ignoring the endnotes) with Don Gately “flat on his back
on the beach in the freezing sand” (IJ 981). Gately is in fact remem-
bering a past episode in a fever dream, but his present situation is
hardly more active, since he is lying in a hospital bed after his violent
run in with Hawaiian-shirted Canadians, “effectively paralyzed and
mute” (IJ 828). The threat of stasis ties together the three overarch-
ing narrative lines, those of Gately and the Ennet House rehab center,
Hal and the ETA, and Rémy Marathe and the Assassins des Fauteuils
Roulants, each protagonist in his way a version of the “catatonic hero”
whose advent Hal’s seventh-grade term paper proclaims (IJ 142). The
struggling addicts are the most obviously entrapped, having surren-
dered their free will and humanity to the debilitating habit that dic-
tates their lives. The consequence of their psychological dependence
is underscored by its reflection in the literal catatonia of the “objay
darts” warehoused in the nearby Unit #5, the “Shed.” Throughout
the novel, drugs are associated with isolation and incarceration. Ken
Erdedy, for example, “once he had dope . . . would not leave his bed-
room except to go to the refrigerator and the bathroom, and even
then the trips would be very quick” (IJ 19–20). A still more miserable
case is that of Poor Tony Krause, who winds up crouching for days,
like James’s epileptic patient, in a toilet stall in the men’s room of
“an obscure Armenian Foundation Library” (IJ 301). In Gately and
Fackelmann’s climactic drug binge that concludes the novel, the two
lie semi-comatose in their own excrement for days, the latter inca-
pable of taking action even to escape his own horrific fate.
The world of ETA—a preserve of pampered prodigies, in train-
ing for a shot at the Show, the opportunity to become international
superstars—seems at first to share little with that of Ennet House,
but as the novel develops it becomes clear that they have some essen-
tial things in common. Both, after all, occupy the same hill, Ennet
House at the foot and ETA on the flattened top, its elevated posi-
tion symbolizing clearly enough the immense social and economic
height that separates it from the former. It is a sort of locus amoenus, a
meticulously landscaped walled garden whose athletically gifted and
cultivated denizens could hardly differ more from their physically
decrepit and psychologically troubled neighbors. Yet the two sites are
not opposites but rather two stages in a single process. The hill bears
a distinct resemblance to Dante’s purgatorial mountain, and both

groups of Wallace’s characters, like Dante’s, are on a journey to a
better self. Dante’s mountain also has an earthly paradise on its sum-
mit, but it is a place of dangerous temptation rather than the proper
end of the pilgrim’s ascent. As he enters the garden, Dante is given
a choice by Vergil; he must use his free will (“arbitrio” ) to choose
whether to stay where he is or go on in the direction of full human-
ity (“seder ti puoi e puoi andar ”) (Purgatorio XXVII, ll. 140, 138).
Likewise, ETA. is a deceptive paradise, which, in the process of train-
ing its students, in fact dehumanizes and empties them of agency.
Troeltsch explains the philosophy clearly: “It’s no accident they say
you Eat, Sleep, Breath tennis here. These are autonomical. Accretive
means accumulating through sheer mindless repeated motions. The
machine-language of the muscles . . . Until [fifteen] you might as well
be machines, here, is their view” (IJ 117–18). Or, as Charles Tavis
puts it to a potential recruit: “What we actually do for you here is
to break you down in very carefully selected ways, take you apart as
a little girl and put you back together again as a tennis player . . . we
will take apart your skull very gently and reconstruct a skull for you
that will have a highly developed bump of clarity and a slight concave
dent where the fear-instinct used to be” (IJ 520–21). ETA’s goal is to
turn its students into highly effective but empty shells, like the “husks
of Lemon Pledge that the school’s players used to keep the sun off”
(IJ 223) in Orin Incandenza’s weirdly fetishistic collection.
Even a trophy product of ETA like Hal ultimately feels that his suc-
cess has come at the cost of his humanity, and that there is a vacancy
at the core of his being. Emotions and values have become for him
no more than algebraic “variables” that “he can manipulate . . . well
enough to satisfy everyone but himself that he’s in there, inside his
own hull, as a human being” even though he feels that “he’s far more
robotic than John Wayne” (IJ 694), the school’s model of technical
tennis perfection and its own sure bet to make the Show. His collapse
in the first chapter comes when he tries to break out of his hull, and
to assert that he is more than the supremely efficient ball striking
mechanism he has been turned into: “I’m not a machine. I feel and
believe . . . I’m not just a creātus, manufactured, conditioned, bred for
function” (IJ 12). But by this point it is too late, and Hal is too “dam-
aged” (IJ 14) for such an affirmation of free will.
The target of Wallace’s satire, however, is not simply the debilitat-
ing training regimen of one school, but rather America’s addiction
to the dehumanizing effects of professional sports. Amateur athletics
has traditionally had as its goal the education of the “whole man”; the
178 DAVID H. EVANS
professionalization of sports, in which ETA participates, creates on

the contrary human beings reduced to particular hypertrophied
parts, like Hal’s right arm that looks like a “gorilla’s arm . . . pasted
on the body of a child” (IJ 173) or his brother Orin’s “big left leg”
(IJ 43), producing a world that recalls Emerson’s surreal vision in
“The American Scholar” of a society “in which the members have
suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walk-
ing monsters,—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never
a man” (Emerson 54).The purpose of such specialization is, of course,
to produce a champion, but the corollary of the champion’s success is
the failure of everyone else.5 The relentless preordained spectacle of
the champion reduces all other participants in the game to the role of
what the wraith who visits Gately in the hospital identifies as “figu-
rants,” extras who fill the background of the drama. “What a miser-
able fucking bottom-rung job that must be for an actor, to be sort of
human furniture,” reflects Gately (IJ 835), and the Lemon Pledge
gag turns very sour indeed when we realize that this is the fate most
likely awaiting every player at ETA, and for that matter every partici-
pant in the Show, excepting only one: to live as “human furniture.”
But the immobilizing effects of both the addiction to drugs and the
addiction to sports are ultimately less important than that of the other
addiction in the novel—the addiction to what Wallace likes to call
“spectation,” the debilitating mass craving for passive entertainment.
Unlike the first two, this is a universal national addiction, which
reduces the viewing public to inanimate consumers of prepackaged
and easily digestible commodified images. In his essay “E Unibus
Pluram,” Wallace made the association explicit, stating that “watch-
ing TV can become malignantly addictive” (SFT 38).The malignancy
of the addiction consists in the fact that television gives us exactly
what we want, simultaneously shaping its unending spectacles to our
desires, and ceaselessly legitimizing our insatiable desire for the spec-
tacular. The posture of the viewer becomes ever more disablingly pas-
sive as, Wallace argues, television absorbs even its own critique into its
entertainments. The novel’s great whatzit, James Incandenza’s short
film, “Infinite Jest,” is of course Wallace’s emblem for this process, an
entertainment so perfectly pleasurable that it “paralyze[s]” (IJ 940)
the viewer, leaving him “an empty shell” (IJ 508). The book’s conceit
is that dissemination of this legendary tape would render Americans
void of free will; its bitter joke is that they already are. The round of
solitary pleasure offered by “the Entertainment” is perfectly designed
to imprison the citizens of the ONAN in the unending satisfaction of
their desire, and it is no accident that, according to Joelle van Dyne,
the opening scene involves two people trapped in the glassy cage of a
revolving door, both of them coming over and over again (IJ 938–39).
The circular relations between pleasure and compulsion are another
version of the annular patterns that dominate Infinite Jest, and permit
of no exit for an ONAN-ist; a critique is only possible for a character
positioned outside the national addiction to passive amusement, like
the Quebecois separatist Rémy Marathe. Ironically, Marathe and his
fellow members of the Assassins des Fauteuils Roulants (AFR) are
literally immobilized, incapable of independent ambulation, but like
Odin’s sacrifice of his eye, the loss of Marathe’s lower members has
apparently been compensated for by the gifts of freedom and enlight-
enment, and it is Marathe who is able both to diagnose the malady
and suggest a cure.
Strikingly, that cure turns out to be the same one to which William
James resorted: the affirmation of the reality of choice. Twice in the
course of the nightlong conversation between Marathe and Hugh
Steeply, they dwell at some length on the question of choice. In the
first instance, their initial topic is the treachery of Rod Tine, chief of
the US Office of Unspecified Services, motivated by his “great and
maybe even timeless love” for Luria Perec (IJ 105). When Steeply
defends the “kind of tragic quality, timeless, musical” of Tine’s love,
Marathe responds contemptuously that what Steeply calls love is in
fact fanatical attachment. The problem, however, is neither attach-
ment as such nor its degree; in fact Marathe concedes that both are
inevitable. Rather, Tine’s problem is that he did not exercise freedom
of choice:
Are we not all of us fanatics? I say only what you of the U.S.A. pretend
you do not know. Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your
attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great
care. What you wish to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not care-
fully chosen . . . Make amusement all you wish. But choose with care.
You are what you love . . . For this choice determines all else. No? All
other of our you say free choices follow from this: what is our temple.
(IJ 107–8)
Steeply makes one more attempt to stand up for overpowering

emotions, but for Marathe this is to surrender both freedom and
dignity:
Then in such a case your temple is self and sentiment. Then in such an
instant you are a fanatic of desire, a slave to your individual subjective
narrow self’s sentiments; a citizen of nothing. You become a citizen
180 DAVID H. EVANS
of nothing. You are by yourself and alone, kneeling to yourself . . . In

a case such as this you become the slave who believes he is free . . . You
believe you would die twice for another but in truth would die only for
your alone self, its sentiment. (IJ 108)
This is a philosophical dialogue, and although Marathe has the most

to say, it would be risky to conclude that the novel endorses his point
of view. When he advances a similar argument later it is in the rather
more grotesquely comic context of his own marriage to the woman
without a skull. During a boozy conversation in a bar with Katherine
Gompert, he describes the moment when he rescued his future wife
from death and found a meaning for his life. When he first sees her
crossing the street and minutes away from being run over by a truck,
he is “transfixed by horror inside me, unable to move” (IJ 778).
Conversely, the moment he stops thinking about himself, he finds he
can act, releasing the brake on his wheelchair and racing to her aid. As
he explains it: “The moment broke my moribund chains, Katherine. In
one instant and without thought I was allowed to choose something as
more important than my thinking of my life” (IJ 778). And although
he freely admits that he is now “chained” to his handicapped wife, he
still insists, “I needed this woman. Without her to choose over myself,
there was only pain and not choosing . . . this choice, Katherine: I made
it. It chains me, but the chains are of my choice. The other chains: no.
The others were the chains of not choosing.” (IJ 780–81).
Like Steeply, Katherine speaks up for “passionate love,” but
Marathe diagnoses her need as a soft-focus version of the national
addiction to passive pleasure, arguing that “the love you of this
country speak of yields none of the pleasure you seek in love. This
whole idea of the pleasure and good feelings being what to choose.
To give yourself away to. That all choice for you leads there—this
pleasure of not choosing” (IJ 781).Similarly, James Incandenza’s film
“Infinite Jest,” the mysterious weapon of mass diversion which the
AFR seeks to unleash on the United States, will not kill so much as
reveal that American culture is “already dead.” As Marathe explains
to Steeply: “This appetite to choose death by pleasure if it is available
to choose—this appetite of your people unable to choose appetites,
this is the death” (IJ 319).
It would no doubt be a considerable oversimplification to identify
Marathe as Wallace’s spokesman; there is surely something valid in
Steeply’s objection: “Now you will say how free are we if you dangle
fatal fruit before us and we cannot help ourselves from temptation.
And we say ‘human’ to you. We say that one cannot be human without
freedom” (IJ 320). Not coincidentally, in what is no doubt his most

widely read work of prose, namely his 2005 Kenyon Commencement
Address, published in book form as This is Water, Wallace, speak-
ing in his own voice, makes a case for the importance of the act of
choice in terms that borrow liberally from the ferrovehicular assassin’s
lecture:
There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The

only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for
maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—
be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or
the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is
that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.(TIW
99–102)
Wallace’s speech is in effect an extended paean to the importance of

“choice.” The acquisition of the ability to “choose” is, he argues, the
whole purpose of a liberal education: “‘learning how to think’ really
means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you
think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what
you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from
experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult
life, you will be totally hosed” (TIW 53–55). Nor does an unhosed
life exhaust the benefits of selective attention; as he continues, the
power of choice takes on truly redemptive implications: “if you’ve
really learned how to think, how to pay attention . . . it will actually be
within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell
type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the
same force that lit the stars: compassion, love, the subsurface unity of
all things” (TIW 92–93).6
If, as I have suggested, Infinite Jest should be understood as a kind
of Purgatory, a spiritual half-way house, it would be misguided to
expect to find salvation for any character. But Hal and Gately, like
Dante’s pilgrims, seem to be moving in the direction of freedom,
and in each case, the decisive event is the critical choice that they
make to assert control over their own lives. Both, to quote James,
assert the possibility of “self-governing resistance.” Hal gives up
his marijuana habit, and breaks with the consequent immobilizing
“marijuana thinking,” and its “paralytic thought-helix” (IJ 335).7
More dramatically, he will break with the institution from which
his marijuana habit was a self-defeating escape, the oppressive cul-
ture of professional sport, declaring his independence in the opening
182 DAVID H. EVANS
scene of the novel—unfortunately to an audience that is incapable

of understanding it. In a book whose leitmotiv is pain, it is given
to Don Gately to endure the most excruciating of choices. Lying in
his hospital bed, suffering agonies from his bullet wound, he refuses
the offer of various pharmaceutical pain relievers. Physically incapaci-
tated, he has no action left for him but that of choice, to resist the
drugs that would allay his misery, but at the cost of abandoning the
free will he has so painstakingly realized, and shutting the gate on his
own self-determination. As with James, the choice is what makes the
chooser, or as Wallace remarked elsewhere, “a self is [not] something
you just have . . . the horrific struggle to establish a human self results
in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle”
(CL 64).
I wish to turn now to a second topic in which I will argue that
James’s thought offered a model for Wallace, that of religious belief.
One of the most discouraging things about the contemporaneous
scientific interpretation of the universe for James was that it left no
space for either God or meaning. His position was frustratingly diffi-
cult because religious options in late nineteenth century were becom-
ing increasingly polarized between the agnosticism/atheism of the
scientists and the ever more rigid dogmatism of the High Church
apologists, or in America, of protestant fundamentalists. As a con-
sistent celebrator of chance and openness, James was constitutionally
opposed to dogmatisms of any sort, but he was also unsatisfied by
what he saw as the intellectual intolerance of the hard antitheists,
contemporary thinkers such as T. H. Huxley and W. K. Clifford, who
argued that faith without evidence was intellectually irresponsible.
James’s solution to this dilemma was to reconceptualize faith: though
he had not at this point worked out a fully pragmatic conception of
truth, in his early defense of belief he is already using something like
it to understand the meaning of religious faith in a distinctive way.
The truth of faith, he proposes, is not to be measured by how it cor-
responds to a state of affairs, but by its practical consequences in the
life of the individual. Faith “becomes” true by its results. As James
will put it in a later essay, the “verity [of an idea] is in fact an event,
a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its very-fication.”
(Pragmatism 97). This represents a radical detranscendentalizing of
religion. No longer Nietzsche’s Platonism for the people, faith is, for
James, defined by its efficaciousness in this life and this world, not in
any other. The believer, therefore, has a right to believe what truths
he may, if those truths give him a reason to live; it is not the sub-
stance, but the result of belief that matters.
The most thorough articulation of this position is offered in what

is probably his best-known, and most controversial, lecture, “The Will
to Believe,” but his own personal stake in this dispute and his own
fear of the implications of the arguments of those who decry faith
unsupported by evidence as irresponsible is most clear in an earlier
essay, “The Sentiment of Rationality.” This essay not only makes a
similar defense of the legitimacy of faith against Huxley and Clifford,
but also indicates what most alarmed him about their arguments, for
they contained an implicit threat of the sort of paralysis that haunted
James’s own intellectual and private life. His rhetoric becomes ever
more impassioned as the essay approaches its conclusion:
If this really be a moral universe; if by my acts I be a factor of its des-

tinies; if to believe where I may doubt be itself a moral act analogous
to voting for a side not yet sure to win,—by what right shall they
close in upon me and steadily negate the deepest conceivable function
of my being by their preposterous command that I shall stir neither
hand nor foot, but remain balancing myself in eternal and insoluble
doubt? . . . Yet obvious as this necessity practically is, thousands of
innocent magazine readers lie paralyzed and terrified in the network
of shallow negations which the leaders of opinion have thrown over
their souls . . . And if I, in these last pages, like the mouse in the fable,
have gnawed a few of the strings of the sophistical net that has been
binding down [their] lion-strength, I shall be more than rewarded for
my pains. (Will to Believe 89)
Like James, Wallace struggled with the possibilities of faith in a fun-

damentally secular world. The question of Wallace’s religious attitudes
is a vexed one; he said that he tried twice, unsuccessfully, to join the
Catholic church (CW 99); however, it has been argued that he really
should be thought of as something of a postmodern Puritan (Theo
Anderson). He was no more attracted than the philosopher to insti-
tutionalized religion, but he was equally unsatisfied with the vision of
the universe offered by atheism.8 The most important parallel between
his religious attitudes and those of James, however, is his focus on the
consequences of faith in the life of the individual rather than on the
nature of the divine. As the passage from the Kenyon address quoted
above suggests, it is of little moment to him whether one worships
“JC or Allah, . . . YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess.” He is even
prepared to accept that “the mystical stuff” is not true (TIW 94).
What matters is what a particular faith makes of you: “If you wor-
ship money and things . . . then you will never have enough, never feel
you have enough . . . Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure
184 DAVID H. EVANS
and you will always feel ugly . . . Worship power, you will end up feel-
ing weak and afraid . . . Worship your intellect, being seen as smart,
you will end up feeling stupid” (TIW 103–10). In other words, “the
capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.” (TIW 129).
Additional insight into Wallace’s religious attitudes can be gained
by looking at a section of his last, unfinished novel, The Pale King.
The subject of that work, the Internal Revenue Service, is not an
obviously religious one, but one section clearly wants us to think
of James’s reflections on faith in Varieties : the monologue of Chris
Fogle. Fogle’s story is one of conversion, not to a particular reli-
gious faith, but to faith itself, a commitment to “service” and dis-
cipline—“heroism”—that confers a meaning on his world. Fogle,
a self-confessed seventies wastoid, has spent his adolescence, to the
despair of his father, in a fog of druggy indolence, with sense of nei-
ther direction nor purpose, until, as he recalls with a sort of halluci-
natory vividness, “the Monday of the last week of regular classes for
the Fall ’78 term” (TPK 222–23). As James observes in the chapter
on “Conversion” in Varieties, part of the conversion process is an
inexplicable change in attitude: “We have a thought . . . repeatedly, but
on a certain day the real meaning of the thought peals through us for
the first time” (163). In a scene that echoes the annular metaphorics
of Infinite Jest, Fogle is sitting in his dorm room, “trying to spin a
soccer ball on my finger, and watching the CBS soap opera As the
World Turns ” (TPK 223). Apart from the significance of the title,
the televisual genre is revealing, since the soap opera creates a parallel
social universe ruled by Hegel’s bad infinity, whose existence contin-
ues in order to continue its existence.
Fogle’s conversion must first involve first an aversion—a turning
away from the ever-returning cycle of passivity that constituted his
prior existence, “the reiteration of the simple fact of what [he] was
doing, which was, of course, nothing” (TPK 225). What makes it pos-
sible to change his “direction” (TPK 226) and break out of the “direc-
tionless drifting” (TPK 225) and repetitive circling that defined his
life hitherto is, ironically, the repetition of something he has heard a
hundred times before, but never listened to: the announcer’s familiar
declaration, “You’re watching As the World Turns” (TPK 224). When
he does listen to this line, the real meaning peals through him for
the first time, and he is “suddenly struck by the bare reality of the
statement” (TPK 224), and by the slightly delayed recognition of the
“show’s almost terrifying pun” about the viewer’s wasting his life while
“real things in the world were going on” (TPK 224). This amphibolic
revelation prepares the way for the beginning of Fogle’s conversion,
and it should be no surprise that self-creation by way of the act of

choice is crucial to that process: “If I wanted to matter,” he reflects, “I
would have to be less free, by deciding to choose in some definite way.
Even if it was nothing more than an act of will” (TPK 226).
The climax of Fogle’s conversion takes place by way of a similarly
fortuitous accident—an apparently wrong turn that takes him to
a different classroom from the one he had intended and into one
where a substitute Jesuit and former tax assessor is delivering a lec-
ture on Advanced Tax. As he proceeds, the Jesuit’s lecture turns into
something like a sermon, as he claims for accounting the aureole of
saintliness, and effectively identifies the pallid auditor in his “desig-
nated work space” (TPK 232) with the ascetic athlete of God in his
cave or atop his pillar: “this is heroism . . . This is effacement, perdur-
ance, sacrifice, honor, doughtiness, valor” (TPK 231). The difference,
however, is that this is an entirely private faith, without an audience
even in the form of god, and an askesis without heavenly reward.
The lecturer ends his “hortation” (as Fogle calls it) with a stern
confirmation—“Gentlemen, you are called to account” (TPK 235)—
but the account at issue here will not be that of a sinner to his creator,
but that of a human being to himself, someone with a life-story that
now has a meaning.9
Infinite Jest ’s attitude toward faith is more ambiguous. Certainly
the novel’s representations of institutionalized religion are too gro-
tesque to be taken seriously, as in the case, for example, of James
Incandenza’s rare commercial success, Blood Sister: One Tough Nun,
featuring a “tough and street-smart nun [who] wimple or not still
rides her Hawg from parish to parish and still knows akido and is not
to be fucked with, is the word on the streets” (IJ 705); or the com-
petitive reminiscences exchanged by two unnamed members of Ennet
House about their cults of choice in their abusing days:
“And then our Divinely Chosen’s Love Squads made us chop wood
with our teeth when it got cold. As in like subzero wintertime.”
“Yours let you keep your teeth?”
“Only the ones for gnawing. See?”
“Sheesh.” (IJ 730)
However, against these hyperbolically satiric vignettes, there are

occasional eruptive and redeeming moments of grace, like Mario
Incandenza’s spontaneous grasp of the “fuliginous hand” (IJ 971) of
Barry Loach, who has made himself look “homeless and disreputable
and louse-ridden” in a last-ditch effort to demonstrate that “the basic
186 DAVID H. EVANS
human character wasn’t as unempathetic and necrotic” as his brother

thinks (IJ 969).
But by far the most important attempt to conceive of a form of
religious faith that is possible in a post-metaphysical age is accorded
to Gately. His very name may be intended to suggest a religious reso-
nance, with its recollection of Christ’s admonitions in the Sermon
on the Mount: “Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate,
and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be
which go in there at:/Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the
way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it” (Matthew
7:13–14). To be sure, there is not much that is Christian in an ortho-
dox sense about Gately, who has evidently grown up “with 0 in the
way of denominational background or preconceptions” (IJ 443). Yet
his disgust with his “Diseased will” (IJ 443) and his desperation to
escape the hell of his own creating are as sincere as that of the most
Bunyanesque of repentant sinners.
The AA/NA program that is Gately’s last hope of course puts a
belief in a “Higher Power” at its core. The novel allows space for some
reservations about the program’s “Attitude of Platitude”; Blood Sister,
according to one character’s reading, is the elder Incandenza’s alle-
gory of “Boston AA as just an exchange of slavish dependence on the
bottle/pipe for slavish dependence on meetings and banal shibboleths
and robotic piety” (IJ 706), but he is hardly to be taken as a reliable
critic. What the novel seems to endorse, however, is not the reality
of a Higher Power, or even belief in a Higher Power, so much as the
willingness to act as if one believed in a Higher Power. Gately, speaking
to an AA meeting, struggles mightily with the group’s enjoinder to
surrender to divinity, by staging an opposition between two different
conceptions of God. The first is concerned with passive representa-
tion, with realizing an adequate idea of the nature of the divine, and
at this Gately frankly confesses his utter failure: when he “prays or
meditates or tries to achieve a Big-Picture spiritual understanding of
God as he can understand Him, he feels Nothing—not nothing but
Nothing, an edgeless blankness that somehow feels worse than the
unconsidered atheism he Came In with” (IJ 443). Against this he
offers a different conception of a religion that is, like that of James,
active rather than passive, oriented towards effecting results in this
world rather than towards understanding the nature of the other:
“His sole experience so far is that he takes one of AA’s very rare spe-
cific suggestions and hits the knees in the A.M. and asks for Help and
then hits the knees again at bedtime and says Thank You, whether he
believes he’s talking to Anything/-body or not, and he somehow gets
through that day clean” (IJ 443). It is, he freely admits, a form of
faith that is indistinguishable from superstition: “He feels about the
ritualistic daily Please and Thank You prayers rather like a hitter that’s
on a hitting streak and doesn’t change his jock or socks or pre-game
routine for as long as he’s on the streak” (IJ 443). Gately recognizes
that his accommodation of the mystery of the Godhead to human
understanding by way of an “unwashed athletic supporter” (IJ 443)
is not likely to persuade the literalist, but this is precisely the point.
“The whole defence of religious faith,” affirms James, “hinges upon
action” (Will to Believe 32n4). What matters is not the “picture,” but
the liberating effect of the act of faith in the individual life, which for
Gately means “just how good it is just to be getting through the day
without ingesting a Substance” (IJ 444). Gately’s willingness to act
as if he believes liberates him from the narcotic that has been paralyz-
ing him, but only insofar as he liberates himself from the effort to
understand the Divine Substance, an effort that inevitably brings him
into a confrontation with a “Nothingness” that leaves him sick and
afraid of life (IJ 444).
One of the things that drew Wallace to James, I would argue, is
the latter’s lifelong conviction that philosophy should be of some use
in the life of the individual. His writings are infused with his belief
that his intellectual struggles and the pragmatic reconception of truth
that emerged from them could provide real practical help for others,
could liberate, in the rather melodramatic but sincere words of “The
Sentiment of Rationality,” the “lion-strength” that was the natural
endowment of his audience. Wallace shared James’s desire to speak
to his readers’s emotional health, declaring his hope that his writ-
ing might be “nourishing, redemptive,” that it might apply “CPR
to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and
glow despite the times’ darkness” and “illuminate the possibilities for
being alive and human” (CW 22, 26).
There is however, a distinction to be made, a distinction, perhaps,
rooted in the fact that the novelist was always more conscious of the
fictionality of fiction and the difference between language and real-
ity. Unlike James, Wallace was sadly aware of the limited power of
words to affect the world, regardless of an author’s hopes. So much,
at least, is suggested by the curious character of Kate Gompert, who
appears in only a few, but highly significant, scenes. She is first intro-
duced to the reader in a passage that looks like the most explicit of
all the novel’s allusions to James’s panic fear episode. James’s patient
had “his knees drawn up against his chin” and was “black haired”
with “greenish skin.” Kate is also first observed from the perspective
188 DAVID H. EVANS
of a visiting doctor, who notes “her knees drawn up to her abdomen

and her fingers laced around her knees,” her “black bangs,” and “her
face obscured by the either green or yellow case on the plastic pillow”
(IJ 68). In Varieties, James calls the panic fear induced in him by
the apparition “the worst kind of melancholy” (134); Kate’s misery
will later be described by the narrator as “the worst kind of depres-
sion” (IJ 695). For James, the real “horror” of the scene was that he
could not hold himself back from a vertiginous identification with the
patient: “That shape am I, I felt, potentially. Nothing that I possess
can defend me against that fate, if the hour for it should strike for
me as it struck for him.” Readers have often seen Kate Gompert as a
version of Wallace himself, suffering, like her creator, from a chronic
depression and a feeling of “horror . . . Like something horrible is
about to happen, the most horrible thing you can imagine” (IJ 73),
and the description, on pages 692–98, of the “level of psychic pain
wholly incompatible with human life as we know it” she feels is some-
times read as a kind of disguised suicide note. The novel does not give
us Kate’s fate, any more than it does that of Hal or Gately; we are left
only with possibilities. Tragically, Wallace’s own death indicates one
of those possibilities, a fate from which no amount of either literature
or philosophy can finally defend us. James’s noble hope was that he
might have provided a possible answer to the question of despair;
Infinite Jest, wiser perhaps in this regard, seems to confess that litera-
ture can leave us at best only with the hope for hope.
Notes
1. As is suggested by the role of the endnotes, for example—ordinarily
outside of a book’s contents, but here containing vital “insider”
information.
2. I do not mean to imply here that either the cause or cure of James’s
depressive episodes was in fact philosophical, only that he inter-
preted his own emotional distress in philosophical terms. As Menand
observes, “depression is not a problem, it’s a weather pattern” (25),
and such resolution as James achieved probably had more to do with
changes in his emotional life, such as his marriage, than with intel-
lectual insights.
3. For a good discussion of the objectivist scientific consensus of the
time, and the self-denying ethos it gave rise to, see Levine.
4. Readers have often made comparisons between Hal Incandenza and
Hamlet; this connection takes on a further significance in the light
of the historian George Cotkin’s argument that William James “in a
sense metaphorical and empirical . . . came to construct and interpret
his life along the culturally inscribed lines of Hamlet” (41).
5. Not surprisingly, the players at ETA come to define themselves entirely

in terms of their ranking: “‘Hey there, how are you?’: ‘Number eight
this week, is how I am.’” (IJ 693).
6. Wallace’s focus on the importance of “attention” is distinctly
reminiscent of James’s description of free will in the Principles of
Psychology : “The essential achievement of the will, in short, when it is
most ‘voluntary,’ is to ATTEND to a difficult object and hold it fast
before the mind . . . Effort of attention is thus the essential phenomenon
of will.”(1166–67, James’s emphasis).
7. A later note elaborates on the paralyzing effects of marijuana: “Bob
Hope-smokers . . . Marijuana-Think themselves into labyrinths of
reflexive abstraction that seem to cast doubt on the very possibility of
practical functioning, and the mental labor of finding one’s way out
consumes all available attention and makes the Bob Hope-smoker look
physically torpid and apathetic and amotivated sitting there, when
really he is trying to claw his way out of a labyrinth” (IJ 1048n269).
8. “You know, I enjoy church and I enjoy being part of a larger thing.
I think it’s just not in my destiny to be part of an institutional reli-
gion, because it’s not in my nature to take certain things on faith.”
(CW 99). In the original draft of this interview, which Patrick Arden
has posted on his own website, Wallace goes on to say: “With athe-
ists it’s fun to say, ‘If you presume that religion has no force, not just
literal force but sort of moral or metaphorical force—that none of the
point of being here resides in religious stuff—then what is the point
of being here?’” (Wallace, “David Foster Wallace Warms Up”).
9. For further a more detailed analysis of the influence of Varieties on
this novel, see Marshall Boswell’s article “Trickle-Down Citizenship:
Taxes and Civic Responsibility in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale
King.”
CH A P T ER 10
The Pale King, Or,

The White Visitation
Brian McHale
Readings
The title page reads, The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel. How can
one responsibly comment on an unfinished novel, posthumously
published, pieced together by an editor from materials retrieved from
the author’s workroom? Anything one ventures to say about the lost
whole that would have been The Pale King will inevitably be specula-
tive. Where does one even begin?
Literally, where does one begin? Since the order of chapters has been
determined by the editor, Michael Pietsch, and might well have been
different if David Foster Wallace had lived to complete his novel, it is not
clear whether the present §1 warrants the kind of interpretive weight
we typically give to novelistic beginnings. Nevertheless, accidental or
unauthorized though it may be, this beginning does resonate. In the
space of two dense paragraphs, it evokes the sensory impressions of a
Midwestern landscape on a summer morning—presumably somewhere
near Peoria, Illinois, the novel’s main setting; possibly on the very
mid-May day in 1985 when several of the characters arrive for “intake
processing” at the Internal Revenue Service’s Regional Examination
Center there. The text literally draws us into this landscape, address-
ing us in the second person, metaleptically reaching across the divide
between worlds: “Look around you.” It ends by inviting us—no,
instructing us—to read this landscape closely, almost microscopically:
The pasture’s crows standing at angles, turning up patties to get at the

worms underneath, the shapes of the worms incised in the overturned
192 BRIAN MCHALE
dung and baked by the sun all day until hardened, there to stay, tiny
vacant lines in rows and inset curls that do not close because head
never quite touches tail. Read these. (TPK 4)
A world of death and excrement, yielding hieroglyphs that may be

read, if one only knew the code: where have we seen this before? I
am reminded (and perhaps I’m not the only one) of another novel in
which the patterns of the world appear potentially legible—in which,
for instance, “stones [that] the water has left behind shining black
wait like writing in a dream, about to make sense printed here along
the beach”; in which even raindrops seem to solicit an act of reading:
Big globular raindrops, thick as honey, begin to splat into giant aster-
isks on the pavement, inviting him to look down at the bottom of the
text of the day, where footnotes will explain all. He isn’t about to look.
Nobody ever said a day has to be juggled into any kind of sense at day’s
end. (Pynchon, Gravity’s 108, 107)
The novel I am quoting from, of course, is Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s

Rainbow (1973)—another text that, like The Pale King, sometimes
reaches metaleptically right across the divide between worlds to but-
tonhole us, cajoling us, implicating us, even insulting us (“You used
to know what these words mean”; “Which do you want it to be?”;
“You will want cause and effect. All right.”; “Ha, ha! Caught you with
your hands in your pants”) (480, 133, 676, 709).1
This is far from the only echo of Gravity’s Rainbow that I detect in
The Pale King, as will become clear in what follows. However, even
as I hear the echo, I can’t help but notice a telling difference between
these texts. In Pynchon’s, the world is typically poised on the brink of
legibility, but the act of reading doesn’t actually happen, or is outright
refused (“He isn’t about to look”). Here at the outset, however—
granted that it is the outset—Wallace’s text seems, by contrast, to
affect a certain confidence that the world can be read. Perhaps Wallace
is bluffing, or being ironic; or perhaps he is rebutting his postmodern
precursor, the Pynchon of Gravity’s Rainbow: “Read these.”
Anxieties
In an influential omnibus review entitled “The Panic of Influence,”
A. O. Scott once claimed that Wallace was “haunted by a feeling of
belatedness,” of being preempted and overshadowed by his postmod-
ern precursors (39). Another, more constructive and forward-looking
THE PALE KING, OR, THE WHITE VISITATION 193
way of putting this would be to call Wallace a “post-postmodernist,”

as many critics have done by now.2 If it means anything beyond sheer
sloganeering, “post-postmodernism” surely implies acute conscious-
ness of one’s postmodern precursors, both their imaginative achieve-
ments and their limitations, as well as engagement in some kind of
creative dialogue with them, potentially ranging from mimicry and
pastiche all the way to parody, polemic, and other forms of resis-
tance, rebuttal, and overcoming. The inevitable quote, it would
appear, in any discussion of Wallace’s post-postmodern belatedness
is the one from his interview with Larry McCaffery in the Review of
Contemporary Fiction, where Wallace names names: “If I have a real
enemy, a patriarch for my parricide, it’s probably Barth and Coover
and Burroughs, even Nabokov and Pynchon” (CW 48). That even is
especially interesting and ambiguous, as though Wallace were express-
ing regret about having to kill off precursors he admired as much as
Nabokov and Pynchon.3
Barth and Coover and Burroughs, even Nabokov and Pynchon:
all of these father figures are certainly present in Wallace’s fiction,
sometimes embraced as models, sometimes slyly subverted, some-
times actively resisted, and even travestied. Robert Coover’s presence
seems especially strong in the early short fictions of Girl with Curious
Hair, along with that of Donald Barthelme and Max Apple (neither
of whom are mentioned in the quote from the McCaffery interview).
Barth, whom Marshall Boswell calls Wallace’s “primary fictional
father” (Boswell, Understanding 9) is notoriously the object of oedi-
pal resentment in the novella “Westward the Course of Empire Takes
Its Way” (also from Curious Hair), which, according to the disclaimer
on the copyright page, is not only “written in the margins of John
Barth’s ‘Lost in the Funhouse” but also in the margins of a story
by Cynthia Ozick, another name overlooked in the McCaffery inter-
view. Burroughs’ is a more diffuse presence, detectable perhaps in
Wallace’s grotesque bodily humor and elaborate, campy “routines,”
but certainly in his preoccupation with addiction and control. The
mock-scholarly apparatus of Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962) is surely the
main precedent for the over-the-top endnotes of Infinite Jest, and it is
impossible to ignore the echo of Nabokov in the title of Wallace’s last
novel—though exactly how The Pale King might be related to Pale
Fire is harder to say.
What about Pynchon? Tom LeClair identifies Wallace as one of
three novelists of his generation—along with Richard Powers and
William T. Vollmann—who stand in a conspicuously filial relation to
Pynchon, and of the three it is Wallace whom he regards as the most
194 BRIAN MCHALE
ambivalent toward Pynchon’s legacy—the most patricidal, shall we

say (“Prodigious” 12). Certainly, at the outset of his career Wallace
seems to have been all but overwhelmed by the Pynchon precedent.
His first novel, The Broom of the System, seems abjectly imitative of
the Crying of Lot 49 (1966), hardly more than a rewrite of it.4 Its
heroine, Lenore Beadsman, is transparently modeled on Pynchon’s
Oedipa Maas; her eccentric shrink, Dr. Jay, seems to owe everything
to Dr. Hilarius of Lot 49 ; the plot in both cases is driven by suspicions
of an all-encompassing conspiracy; both heroines undertake tours of
contemporary subcultures and underworlds; in both cases, the climax
is withheld; and so on. Wallace reportedly claimed not to have read Lot
49 until after he had published Broom, which Boswell, for one, finds
implausible, so closely does Wallace’s novel appear to be modeled on
Pynchon’s.5 I’m inclined to give Wallace the benefit of the doubt here,
however. This may be one of those cases, like the pervasive influence
of Ulysses on subsequent generations of modernists, where one need
not actually have read a novel (as Faulkner, for instance, sometimes
professed not to have read Joyce) to pick up everything one needed to
know about it second-hand from one’s contemporaries, from writings
about the novel, from “common knowledge.”
Whether or not Wallace actually knew that he was imitating Pynchon
in Broom, he subsequently learned to put up greater resistance to
Pynchon’s dangerously attractive precedent—not, however, without
leaving traces of his struggle with his precursor. His effort to deflect
or inoculate himself against Pynchon’s influence is readily apparent in
Infinite Jest, where Wallace takes preemptive action by having a char-
acter, Orin Incandenza, use the pseudonym “Jethro Bodine,” adopt-
ing the surname of a recurrent Pynchon character.6 Challenged, Orin
defends his pseudonym as “A private chuckle,” a little in-joke (IJ 1014
n110). It is Wallace’s “private chuckle” too, of course; but just as not
knowing he was imitating Pynchon in Broom didn’t save it from being
swamped by the latter’s influence, so the knowingness of his sly little
gesture in Infinite Jest doesn’t prevent that novel from being perme-
ated with Pynchon’s presence throughout.
That presence is detectable not so much at the level of Infinite
Jest ’s plot, world, or characterization—though it is certainly traceable
there, too—as at the finer-grained level of incident, phrasing, and
local texture. Hal Incandenza, in a disturbing dream, turns his head
“to look back at what’s been right there all along, the whole time”
(IJ 61–62), just as, time and again throughout Gravity’s Rainbow,
ominous faces in dreams and hallucinations turn to look threateningly
at the dreamer: “a face he knows begins to turn” (145); “The pilot is
turning to Rózsavölgyi . . . whose eyes are these, so familiar, smiling

hello, I know you, don’t you know me? Don’t you really know me?”
(648).7 Rémy Marathe’s and Hugh Steeply’s all-night conversation,
perched on a ridge high above Tucson, Arizona, begins with their
shadows being projected across the landscape in the “well-known
‘Bröckengespenst ’ phenomenon” (IJ 88; see also 994n38), much as
Tyrone Stothrop’s and Geli Tripping’s shadows are projected from
the peak of the Brocken itself in Gravity’s Rainbow (334–36). Later
that same night, the rising constellations seem to gaze over Marathe’s
shoulder (IJ 507–8), recalling the “watchmen of world’s edge” who,
from their vantage point far out to sea, bear witness to Sir Stephen
Dodson-Truck’s confession to Slothrop on the beach (217–18).
The “incredibly potent” drug DMZ, whose “effects are less visual
and spatially-cerebral and more like temporally- cerebral and almost
ontological” (IJ 170; see also 996n57), seems akin in its effects to
Pynchon’s Oneirine, whose “property of time-modulation” means
that the crew of the John E. Badass, having ingested a massive dose
of the drug, are not where they are supposed to be when a German
torpedo intersects with their course: “the two fatal courses intersect
in space, but not in time. Not nearly in time, heh, heh” (395). At
the climax of the catastrophic Eschaton match in Infinite Jest, the
game computer’s hard drive, monitor, and modem are catapulted into
the air; in slow motion, the “hardware that’s now at the top of its
rainbow’s arc” (IJ 34) descends onto the unfortunate referee. That
“rainbow’s arc” is gravity’s rainbow—the parabolic flight path traced
by V-2 rockets and other ballistic missiles.
I could go on. Many other such details, threaded throughout the
texture of Infinite Jest, testify to Pynchon’s presence in Wallace’s text,
and in his imagination. They also testify, however, to Wallace’s resis-
tance to his precursor. More often than not, the details that most
strongly recall Pynchon have been torqued in some way, displaced or
reoriented, reflecting the counterpressure that Wallace exerts against
the insistent pressure of Pynchon’s texts. Thus, for example, the omi-
nous turning-face gesture in Infinite Jest has been displaced from the
dream figure onto the dreamer himself. This displacement is similar
in its antithetical spirit to the worm-trails of The Pale King, natu-
ral hieroglyphs that we are urged to read, whereas the equivalent
hieroglyphs of Gravity’s Rainbow— wet stones, raindrops—remain
illegible or go unread.
It’s no accident if this all sounds reminiscent of Harold Bloom’s
“anxiety of influence” (introduced in 1973, the same year as Gravity’s
Rainbow). Arcane though his apparatus is, Bloom’s basic insights into
196 BRIAN MCHALE
the agonistic relationship of powerful imaginations to their precursors,

and the countermoves (swerves, inversions, deflations, etc.) that suc-
cessors undertake to evade, contain and counteract their precursors’
influence, are amply borne out, first by the postmodernists’ relation-
ship to their modernist precursors, then by the post-postmodernists’
relationship to the postmodernists. Others before me have noticed
the relevance of Bloom’s anxiety model to Wallace. For instance,
A. O. Scott’s title, “The Panic of Influence,” only kicks Bloom’s
“anxiety” up notch; while Boswell argues that Wallace’s “Westward
the Course of Empire” amounts to a Bloomian misprision of Barth’s
“Funhouse” (Boswell, Understanding 103–4).8 For that matter,
Wallace himself seems somewhat uneasily aware of the potentially
good fit between Bloom’s account of influence and his own filial
(and patricidal) relationship to his precursors. In the same way that he
tries to inoculate himself against Pynchon’s influence in Infinite Jest
by making a knowing (nudge-nudge, wink-wink) allusion to Gravity’s
Rainbow, so he also tries to inoculate himself against Bloom’s anxiety
model by preemptively subjecting it to explicit parody (IJ 911; see also
1077n366).
How anxious a book, in Bloom’s terms is The Pale King, and anx-
ious about whom? Here, too, as in the McCaffery interview, Wallace
names names. Using as his mouthpiece the character “David Wallace,”
his fictional alter ego—not a straightforwardly autobiographical fig-
ure, by any means, but not entirely divorced from the author’s self,
either—Wallace admits to having dreamed “of becoming an immor-
tally great fiction writer à la Gaddis or [Sherwood] Anderson, Balzac
or [Georges] Perec” (TPK 73). “Anderson” perhaps indicates Wallace’s
career-long commitment to capturing the American Midwest, while
“Balzac.” “Perec,” and “Gaddis” perhaps testify to the scale of his
ambitions generally.9 What strikes me most in this list of names is the
absence of Pynchon from it, which looks to me like evasiveness.
If the tip-offs to Pynchon’s intertextual presence in Infinite Jest
are certain keywords and phrases—the name “Bodine,” the mention
of the “rainbow’s arc,” and so on—then such tip-offs abound in The
Pale King as well. Some of these keywords are so closely identified
with Pynchon as to almost bear his copyright: “entropy” (TPK 12, 16);
“thanatoid” (TPK 68), which pertains to members of a community
of TV-addicted zombies in Vineland (1990); and especially, “the
preterite,” one of Pynchon’s signature terms, which appears twice in
§ 24, both times associated with the pseudo-autobiographical charac-
ter “David Wallace” (TPK 292, 298).10 The presence of such Pynchon
trademarks proves nothing in itself, of course, but it does prompt
one to wonder whether Pynchon’s presence permeates this last novel

as it did The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest before it, and what
measures Wallace may have taken to evade that influence—even as
(presumably) he succumbs to it.
Approaches
A case in point: our first approach to the IRS’s Midwestern Regional
Examination Center outside Peoria in § 24 (TPK 256–309), for
which our guide is none other than “David Wallace,” reconstruct-
ing for us his first impressions from notes he claims to have made
on the day of his “intake processing” as an IRS examiner. Previous
episodes have been set inside the Exam Center, but this is our first
look at it from outside. Similarly, we have heard from “David Wallace”
before, in the “Author’s Foreword” that has been displaced to § 9,11
but this is the first occasion on which “Wallace” mingles with some
of the novel’s other characters. “Wallace’s” first-person narrative is
heavily footnoted, and the footnotes feature metaleptic address to
the reader, recalling § 1: we are being put in the picture, literally.
“Wallace” approaches the Exam Center as a passenger in a minivan
packed with new IRS recruits or transfers from other postings, and
his account amounts to an exercise in cognitive mapping. He speci-
fies Peoria’s geographical situation, then the center’s location relative
to Peoria’s downtown (TPK 265–66), then the beltway and special
access road that lead to it (TPK 269–74). As his distance and viewing
angle change, different perspectives of the Exam Center come into
view, until he finally reaches the main entrance (TPK 274–81). It is
a tour-de-force of narrativized description— a description animated
and rendered dynamic by the changing position of the experiencer.
Once again, I am reminded of Gravity’s Rainbow: our first direct
exposure to “The White Visitation,” a country house on the southern
coast of England, formerly a mental asylum, now requisitioned to
house a psychological-warfare unit, and the setting for crucial epi-
sodes in the novel’s plot (84–85). Pynchon works here from the inside
out, beginning by plunging us into the house’s backstory and the
internal political squabbles of its current inmates, then, in the chap-
ter’s long, virtuosic final paragraph, pulling back from the building
to its surroundings. It is the verbal equivalent of a traveling shot: we
pass from interior architectural details to exterior ones (balconies,
gargoyles), then to a view from further away (“from a distance no
two observers . . . see quite the same building,” [84]), then withdraw
along the drive and all the way out to the main gate where a sentry
198 BRIAN MCHALE
“stands port-arms in [the] masked headlamps” of an approaching car

(84–85). It is just here, where the retreating perspective intersects
with the approaching car, that the text shifts into second person:
“your masked headlamps”; “you must halt for him” (emphases added).
Who is you, exactly? It is hard to say; but it certainly includes us,
Pynchon’s readers.
Let’s hypothesize that “David Wallace’s” approach to the Exam
Center in The Pale King both evokes and resists the model of
Pynchon’s White Visitation. I’ll fill in further details of that model
below, but for now, let’s consider only Wallace’s strategies of resis-
tance, which so far appear to be twofold: reversed direction and ampli-
fication or hypertrophy. Where Pynchon pulls back from the building
to its periphery, Wallace, reversing direction, advances toward the
building (albeit obliquely and by stages). To put it another way,
Wallace in effect places his alter ego in that car that turns up at the
check post in the last lines of Pynchon’s chapter: “David Wallace” is
you! In addition, Wallace amplifies, inflating an episode that occu-
pied a five-hundred-word paragraph of Gravity’s Rainbow into fifteen
dense, footnoted pages of The Pale King.
Reversed direction, amplification—to these two we can add a third
strategy of resistance, namely displacement. What seems to me to clinch
my working hypothesis about “David Wallace’s” first day at the Exam
Center is its climax (pun intended). The episode ends on a some-
what scabrous and thoroughly politically incorrect note, when Ms.
Chahla Neti-Neti—dubbed by her colleagues “the Iranian Crisis”—
fellates “David Wallace” in an electrical closet of the Exam Center, on
the mistaken assumption that he is a powerful senior administrator
(TPK 308n67, 309). This is, one might say, the very same blow job that
the conniving behaviorist Edward Pointsman receives from Maudie
Chilkes (171–72), an administrative secretary, in a storage closet of
the White Visitation, which Mr. Pointsman interprets (correctly) as
sign that he has gained the upper hand in internal power struggles.
Wallace displaces that blow job—from the powerful Mr. Pointsman
to the powerless “David Wallace,” via a comedy of mistaken identity,
and in time from a later phase of Mr. Pointsman’s career to the first
day of “Wallace’s”—and in the process torques it, giving it an extra
ironic spin beyond what it already had in Pynchon’s scenario.
Talents
The Peoria Exam Center of The Pale King and Pynchon’s White
Visitation have this much in common, at least: they both belong to
the same chronotope, in Bakhtin’s sense, the same spatial-temporal

category, which we might call the chronotope of the special unit. (In
the Service-speak of The Pale King, the preferred term might be the
Post; see TPK 244). The “special unit” occupies its own dedicated
space—in both of our cases, its own spatially complex building; each
has its own special assignment or mission, typically short term rather
than permanent; and crucially, each brings together a collection of
eccentrics possessing special talents.12 Real-world analogues of the
“special unit” of fiction abound. The White Visitation, for instance,
seems to have been modeled on a number of wartime institutions,
but especially on the decryption unit housed at Bletchley Park,
Buckinghamshire, famous for cracking the German Enigma code and
for its association with Alan Turing, one of the fathers of computer
science.13
The special talents of those assembled at the White Visitation,
typically for this chronotope, are extremely heterogeneous. Some of
the staffers are conventional scientists (Mr. Pointman’s group), others
practice “fringe” science, while still others possess psychic powers.
Carroll Eventyr is a spiritualist medium; Ronald Cherrycoke reads
people’s minds by handling their personal effects; the Reverend Paul
de la Nuit produces strings of numbers through automatic writing;
Margaret Quartertone is able to induce distant recording apparatuses
to register her voice; and, most bizarrely of all, Gavin Trefoil can
modify his skin color at will. Like other institutions belonging to this
chronotope, the White Visitation is riven by conflict and incompati-
bilities among the talents housed under its institutional roof. Different
factions reflect different worldviews: scientists versus occultists, and
among the scientists themselves, determinists (Mr. Pointsman) versus
adherents of stochastic processes (Roger Mexico), and so on.
Some of these special talents are more or less decorative, merely
serving to add texture, complexity, and comedy to Pynchon’s story
word. Others have pivotal narrative functions; for instance, Eventyr’s
séances facilitate flashbacks from England in 1944–45 to Weimar-era
Berlin. A few serve thematic functions integral to the novel’s deep
conceptual design. Of these the most important are Slothrop and
“Pirate” Prentice, neither of them staff members of the White
Visitation, yet both deeply implicated in its operations. Prentice, a
captain in Special Operations, cooperates with the unit housed at the
White Visitation, while Slothrop is the main object of its research—
its prized guinea pig. Prentice’s talent is the ability to experience
other people’s fantasies, and he is assigned to “manage” the fantasy
lives of individuals whose time would be better spent on the serious
200 BRIAN MCHALE
business of waging war. Slothrop’s talent, notoriously, involves his

sexual response to the V-2 rocket.
Many of these same features of the “special unit” are discernible
in the Exam Center of The Pale King, despite the incompleteness and
fragmentary nature of the text. Lacking the larger framing context that,
had he lived to do so, Wallace might have provided (or maybe not),
we are compelled to turn for orientation to the “Notes and Asides”
gleaned from Wallace’s notebooks and the margins of the surviving
typescripts (TPK 539–47). Here we learn that Merrill Erroll Lehrl,
the upstart HR Systems Deputy—presumably the “Pale King” of the
title (TPK 128)—having displaced the center’s former director, DeWitt
Glendenning, is recruiting examiners with special talents.14 (Unless,
that is, it is Glendenning who is doing the recruiting—Wallace’s notes
are contradictory; see TPK 539). Lehrl (unless it is Glendenning) is
on the look out for immersives, examiners with the capacity to utterly
lose themselves in concentration (TPK 546–47), an invaluable talent
in view of the soul-destroying boredom of examining tax returns, of
which we have so much evidence in the course of this novel. The form
of the immersives’ talent varies, but apparently in every case it is corre-
lated with childhood trauma (TPK 543), which explains the backstories
that are such a conspicuous feature of the text that Wallace left us.15
Thus, for example, Claude Sylvanshine, one of Lehrl’s right-hand
men, is a “fact psychic.” Subject to “sudden flashes of insight or
awareness [that] are structurally similar to but usually far more
tedious and quotidian than the dramatically relevant foreknowledge
we normally conceive as ESP or precognition,” Sylvanshine possesses
“Random-Fact Intuition,” or RFI (TPK 118). He knows, for instance,
all about an observatory in Fort Davis, Texas, on a day in 1974 when
an eclipse was predicted, and about the milkman who was boffing the
observatory director’s wife (TPK 120); he knows that a trainer at the
Exam Center is planning to kill herself, and exactly when and how she
plans to do it (TPK 332); he knows all about an incident involving an
adult male’s severed thumb (though he doesn’t know whose life that
incident belongs to; TPK 415–16); and so on (see also TPK 7, 13, 18,
46, 316). No doubt Sylvanshine’s talent bears some resemblance to
Cherrycoke’s “reading” of personal effects at the White Visitation, but
it bears even a closer resemblance to “Pirate” Prentice’s talent. Just as
Prentice is the fellow who has other people fantasies, so Sylvanshine
is the one knows other people’s facts ; indeed, it’s hard not to see
Sylvanshine’s talent as torqueing or troping on Prentice’s.
Extraordinary as Sylvanshine’s talent is, it is less valuable in the
context of the Exam Center’s mission than Chris Fogle’s. Nicknamed
“Irrelevant” Chris Fogle for his garrulous and digressive storytell-

ing style, he is able to keep track of the exact number of words he
speaks, hears, or reads (see TPK 158, 160, 161, 214, 220, 225, 230,
246). He also professes to have a drug-induced capacity for intense
self-awareness, which he calls “doubling” (TPK 180–84, 187–88).16
While either of these talents, one might think, would be sufficient to
qualify him as an “immersive,” we also learn from the “Notes and
Asides” that he may possess knowledge of a 5-digit string that pro-
duces total concentration (TPK 539, 541).17 Unfortunately, no trace
survives in the text itself, as published, of this aspect of Fogle’s mani-
fold talents.
Other examiners’ talents are less fully developed, or left ambigu-
ous. David Cusk concentrates to stave off attacks of copious sweating
(TPK 318, 319). Toni Ware is mainly distinguished by her horrifically
traumatic childhood experiences—supposedly a good predictor of
“immersive” talent—which leave her “damaged goods” (TPK 443);
is her talent perhaps related to her ability to “play dead” (TPK 441)?
Leonard Stecyk is preternaturally, and ultimately intolerably, nice. Is
this talent valuable in some way to the mission of the Exam Center,
or has Stecyk been brought in by Lehrl to drive the other examiners
crazy, as the “Notes and Asides” suggest (TPK 540)? Lane Dean Jr.
seems utterly bereft of “immersive talent,” as does “David Wallace.”
And what about the boy who aspires to kiss every part of his body
(TPK 394–407)? He is manifestly talented, in a potentially immer-
sive way, but which of the examiners would he grow up to be, if any
of them?
Finally, the most striking of all the examiners’ talents is Shane
Drinion’s. We learn initially that he possesses machine-like intelli-
gence but is defective in reading and relating to interlocutors’ emo-
tional cues, both perhaps symptomatic of Asperger’s syndrome (TPK
§46). In these respects he recalls Pynchon’s Marcel, not one of the
talented staffers assembled at the White Visitation, but rather a
comic-book-style superhero—literally a mechanical man, possessing
a powerful intelligence but “unfortunately much too literal with
humans” (688).18 Drinion, too, has something of a tin ear for meta-
phor, humor, irony; “You’re a very literal person,” his fellow examiner
Meredith Rand tells him (TPK 481).
But Drinion’s most astonishing talent, beyond his intelligence and
Asperger’s-like blind spots, is his ability, when lost in concentration,
totally immersed, to levitate. As he begins to become immersed in
Meredith Rand’s narrative, “no part of his bottom or back is touching
the chair,” although the “slight gap between Drinion and the chair”
202 BRIAN MCHALE
is initially so slight that it would pass unnoticed “unless somehow

a bright light were shined from the side” (TPK 469). Continuing
to listen, he rises higher and higher in his chair, to Meredith’s mild
puzzlement (TPK 471, 497–98, 504–5). Levitation while concentrat-
ing is a feature of Drinion’s on-the-job performance as well; “One
night,” we learn, “someone comes into the office and sees Drinion
floating upside down over his desk with his eyes glued to a complex
[tax] return” (TPK 485). If, as someone tells us elsewhere, the IRS is
on the side of the laws of nature, including the law of gravity (TPK
105), then Drinion seems somehow to be on the other side—the side
of lightness of being, the side (despite his humorlessness) of levity.
Whatever other meanings might attach to Drinion’s talent, it cer-
tainly seems to allude slyly to the motifs of gravity and lightness that
run through Gravity’s Rainbow, beginning with its very title.19
Subuniverses
Well, so what? So what if the talented pool of staffers assembled at
the Midwest Examination Center seem to be displaced and distorted
versions of those at Pynchon’s White Visitation? So what if Wallace’s
Exam Center belongs to the same chronotope as the White Visitation,
and so what if the former appears to be modeled on the latter? What
use is it to ferret out these traces of Pynchon’s influence on Wallace?
For one thing, if we posit that Wallace’s Exam Center is in some
sense a version of the White Visitation, then that could usefully inform
our speculations about the ultimate shape that The Pale King might
have been moving toward—about the lost whole, of which only these
fragments have survived. It might help us fill in some of the gaps and
bridge over some of the disconnections that are consequences of the
text’s incompleteness. In other words, we might hypothesize that,
had he managed to finish his novel, Wallace would have aimed to
do with the Midwestern Regional Examination Center something like
what Pynchon did with the White Visitation. But this speculation,
this “something like,” would also need to take into account Wallace’s
resistance to Pynchon, the displacements, deflections, and torqueing
symptomatic of his influence anxiety.
What, then, is the purpose of this chronotope of the “special unit,”
in Wallace as in Pynchon, beyond those functions that I mentioned
above—decorative, narrative, thematic—in connection with the unit’s
specially talented staff? One hypothesis might be that Pynchon and
Wallace share an interest in the way that institutions—in this case,
“special units”—both constitute worlds in themselves (microcosms)
and also project versions of the world at large. I am proposing, in other

words, an analysis in the spirit of an influential text of Pynchon’s own
historical moment (though there is no reason to think that he him-
self was particularly aware of it), namely Peter Berger and Thomas
Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality (1966). A seminal
contribution to the sociology of knowledge, The Social Construction
of Reality treats institutions as apparatuses for producing and sus-
taining “subuniverses of meaning” that mingle and jostle in modern
pluralistic societies. While every society possesses a “shared core uni-
verse,” its constituent “partial universes,” associated with different
institutions and subcultural enclaves, coexist in a state of competition
and mutual accommodation (Berger and Luckmann 79–83, 115 and
passim). Institutions, however, are also susceptible of “reification,” in
the sense of acquiring a spurious “ontological status,” as though they
existed “independent[ly] of human activity and signification” (Berger
and Luckmann 84). In other words (though this is not quite the lan-
guage that Berger and Luckmann use), they risk being mistaken for
autonomous worlds.
These sorts of insights, it seems to me, animate Pynchon’s treatment
of the White Visitation. His “special unit” realizes and dramatizes
both aspects of institutions as “subuninverses”: their world-modeling
aspect and their world-making aspect. The White Visitation, enclosed
within its secure perimeter and housing a heterogeneous population
of eccentrics and misfits, constitutes a “small world,” something like
a scale model of the wartime world that surrounds it. It can perhaps
even be viewed as a mise en abyme, a mirror and microcosm, of the
world at large—the world of England at war, of the “war effort.” This
reading is perhaps confirmed by the presence at the White Visitation
of a certain “long-time schiz,” a holdover from its days as a mental
hospital, who believes he is the “War.” Identifying with the War’s ebb
and flow, he falls dangerously ill on the day of the Normandy inva-
sion, recovers when the Germans counterattack at the Bulge, and is
fated to die (apparently) on V-E Day (133). Does this schizophrenic
function as a kind of metonymy, a figure for the institution that shel-
ters him, itself a scale model of the War?
As for projecting a world, here the telling episode is the supposed “cre-
ation” of the Schwarzkommando. As part of a psychological-warfare
campaign to undermine Nazi morale, psywar specialists at the White
Visitation fabricate evidence that black conscripts from Germany’s
former African colonies are manning V-2 rocket emplacements inside
the Reich, and then arrange to plant the evidence where German
troops will find it (76, 114–15). Outrageously, as the perpetrators
204 BRIAN MCHALE
of the hoax subsequently learn, it turns out that such black-African

rocket troops, the Schwarzkommando, actually exist! The megalo-
manic director of the fake footage claims credit for literally bringing
the Schwartzkommando into being, and a sort of ontological panic
ensues at the White Visitation (279–80). Leaving aside its grotesquely
comic hyperbole, so typical of Pynchon, this episode can readily be
seen, in the spirit of Berger’s and Luckmann’s analysis, as reflecting
the way institutions project worlds, or parts of them—the way they
function as world-building apparatuses.
It is no stretch, I think, to see that Wallace shares with Pynchon,
and for that matter with Berger and Luckmann, a long-term fascina-
tion with institutions as microcosms and as world-building engines.
He has a substantial track record, in his nonfiction writings, of bring-
ing a sociologist’s eye to bear on such institutions as state fairs and
cruise ships (in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again), as well
as on the adult-video industry, political campaigns, talk radio, and
even the Maine Lobster Festival (in Consider the Lobster). Wallace’s
fiction, too, foregrounds institutions and the worlds they build. This
institutional dimension of his fiction is palpable already in The Broom
of the System, with its old-age home, college campus, therapeutic prac-
tice, and televangelist ministry, but it becomes more pronounced in
his treatment of the tennis academy and halfway house in Infinite Jest,
and stronger still in the market research company, glossy-magazine
editorial office and cable-TV station of the late stories in Oblivion.
Wallace seems fascinated, in his nonfiction and fiction alike,
with what we might call the ecologies of institutions, with the spe-
cial languages they develop as part of their world-building and
world-sustaining apparatus, and with their self-perception as scale
models of the world at large. “Like all psychically walled communi-
ties,” he writes in “Big Red Son,” “the adult industry is rife with
code and jargon” (CL 23n18), and he goes on to sample some of
it, as he does the technical vocabulary of political campaigning in
“Up, Simba!” (CL 167–70) and the specialized register of talk radio
in “Host.” The episodes set at ETA in Infinite Jest are shot through
with technical language from the registers of sport (tennis) and edu-
cation, while specialized AA discourse, pharmaceutical terminol-
ogy, and criminal antilanguage (often glossed; see IJ 201–4, and the
endnotes throughout) mingle at Ennet House. Such institutions,
their status as “walled communities” reinforced by their use of spe-
cialized languages, typically perceive themselves as separate from but
also as mirroring the larger society. “So much about today’s adult
industry seems like an undeft parody of Hollywood and the nation
writ large,” Wallace writes (CL 29), while talk-show hosts “(like pro-
fessionals everywhere) tend to see their industry as a reflection of the
real world” (CL 323).
With respect to institutions, their ecologies, and the worlds they
mirror and project, The Pale King clearly continues the preoccupa-
tions found elsewhere in Wallace’s writing. Using nearly the same
phrase he had previously applied to the porn industry, Wallace writes
of the IRS that “like most insular and (let’s be frank) despised gov-
ernment agents, the Service is rife with special jargon and code ”
(TPK 69n; emphasis added); and indeed, Service-speak and IRS
nomenclature—often glossed, though not always—are everywhere
in this novel (e.g., TPK 242, 244, 305n63). The perception of the
IRS as constituting a distinct subuniverse, separate from society at
large yet also a microcosm of it, is articulated several times, in differ-
ent ways, in the course of the novel. A bureaucracy, somebody tells
us (but who?), is “a parallel world, both connected to and indepen-
dent of this one, operating under its own physics and imperatives of
cause.” “The bureaucracy is not a closed system,” he or she goes on;
“it is this that makes it a world instead of a thing” (TPK 86). Much
later, another unidentified speaker declares: “I learned that the world
of men as it exists today is a bureaucracy” (TPK 437). The “world of
men” is a bureaucracy, and the institution of the IRS, while continu-
ous with that world, forming part of it, is also, perhaps by virtue of its
“insularity,” a scale model of it.
What “world,” exactly, does the Midwestern Regional Examination
Center of The Pale King model and project? Lacking a full “insti-
tutional ecology” of the Exam Center, presumably because of the
unfinished condition of the text—though of course there’s no
guarantee that Wallace would have provided a fuller picture even if he
had finished it—we are reduced to speculation. But perhaps we can
extrapolate from Pynchon’s The White Visitation, of which the Exam
Center appears to be in some sense a version. If the White Visitation
models the War en abyme, and projects parts of the War (such as the
Schwarzkommando), then perhaps the Exam Center, if we had a full
picture of it, would have been seen to model and project nothing less
than the United States: America en abyme. But this is only a guess.
Hauntings
Nobody, in my view, ever offered a better (or more concise) read-
ing of Gravity’s Rainbow than Laurie Anderson did in her song
“Gravity’s Angel,” recorded on her 1984 album, Mister Heartbreak.
206 BRIAN MCHALE
Here, among other things, she reminds us that the world of Gravity’s
Rainbow is populated not only by angels but also by ghosts : “this
ghost of your other lover walked in.//And stood there. Made of
thin air. Full of desire” (Anderson, “Gravity’s Angel”).20 While no
episode in Pynchon’s novel precisely corresponds to this incident, 21
Anderson’s insight is nevertheless sound: Gravity’s Rainbow is cer-
tainly a haunted novel, one in which ghosts, phantoms, and appari-
tions abound. A little English girl is haunted by the unquiet ghost
of her father, fallen in the war (178–90); Slothrop, on the lam in the
north-German countryside, is visited in a dream by the ghost of his
friend, Tantivy Mucker-Maffick (561); ambiguous phantoms, some-
where between “likenesses of the dead [and] wraiths of the living,”
haunt the underground missile factory where slave laborers were once
worked to death (308); and so on. The White Visitation, in particular,
is a kind of haunted house, as its name perhaps suggests it ought to
be. Though at least two deaths are reported to have occurred on its
grounds—including that of the “long-time schiz” who thought he
was the War—it is not these dead who haunt the house, but rather the
spirits whom Eventyr contacts through his séances.
If an eccentric English country house, formerly an insane asy-
lum, with a suggestive name seems a good candidate for haunting,
then surely an Internal Revenue Exam Center in Peoria must be a
very poor one. Nevertheless, the Exam Center of The Pale King is
indeed haunted, so we are told, by at least two ghosts (as opposed
to the hallucinatory “phantoms” with which examiners are apt to be
afflicted from time to time). One is the ghost of Garrity, who in life
had been an inspector for the mirror works that formerly occupied
the Exam Center site, and the other that of Blumquist, a tax exam-
iner who actually died at his desk and whose death went unnoticed
by his coworkers for four days (§26, §4). The reality of at least one
of these ghosts is confirmed when Garrity visits Lane Dean Jr. at his
desk (TPK 382–85), and speaks to him using words and allusions that
Lane himself does not know (just as James Incandenza’s “wraith” does
when he haunts Gately in the hospital nearly the end of Infinite Jest).
Garrity can’t be merely a figment of Lane’s imagination, because his
knowledge exceeds Lane’s; ergo, he must be real.
If the “Notes and Asides” are to be believed, haunting, at least
by Blumquist, the deceased examiner, actually improves living exam-
iners’ productivity (TPK 542). If this is so, then the ghosts would
have fulfilled the same function as the examiners’ special talents: that
of enhancing concentration and helping to counteract the deaden-
ing effects of boredom. Ironically, these hauntings are themselves
boring: boring ghosts, perhaps ghosts of boredom. In this respect,

they recall Gravity’s Rainbow yet again: this time, Tchitcherine’s
haunting by a phantom who might be Nikolai Ripov, a Stalinist
appartchik sent to enforce party discipline, but is just as likely due
to the long-term effects of Oneirine, recognized for producing “the
dullest hallucinations known to psychopharmacology” (717). In the
end, this haunting proves to a real visitation by Ripov, but either way,
it would have been equally boring.
What is the point, then, of this motif of boring hauntings in The
Pale King? Again, given the incomplete status of the text, and con-
sequently the fragmentary nature of the motif itself, it is hard to say
for sure. Perhaps, as I’ve just suggested, the ghosts merely function
as figures of boredom personified. Whether they do or not, they may
also serve to reflect Wallace’s anxiety about Pynchon’s influence, and
his resistance to it. Recall A. O Scott’s metaphor, an all but inevitable
one is this context: Wallace, he wrote, is “haunted by feeling of belat-
edness” (emphasis added). The Pale King, we might say, literalizes
that metaphor—as did Infinite Jest before it, if we are to believe Tom
LeClair, who identifies the wraith of James O. Incandenza that visits
a feverish and hallucinating Gately with Pynchon (“Prodigious”
32–33).22 If the ghosts of the Exam Center both personify boredom
and are identified with Pynchon, then perhaps this motif can be seen
as yet another device for deflating or degrading the literary precursor,
for reducing Pynchon’s influence to manageable proportions, cutting
it down to size.23
Disappearances
One striking feature of The Pale King, as I have already noted more
than once, is the presence among its cast of characters of a surrogate of
its author, a character named “David Wallace” (§9, §24, §27, perhaps
elsewhere).24 The Pale King is in part a pseudo-memoir—“more like
a memoir than any kind of made-up story,” “David Wallace” insists
(TPK 67; also 70, 73). Its factuality is strenuously asserted, and also
slyly discredited. But beyond what appears to be its obvious purpose,
that of problematizing life writing and authorial presence, it is hard
to speculate about what other purposes “David Wallace” might have
served had the real David Wallace (as opposed to the textual one)
lived to complete it.
Once again, “Notes and Asides” suggests a possibility. A work
note, keyed to no particular chapter, reads: “David Wallace disap-
pears—becomes creature of the system” (TPK 546). Here Wallace’s
208 BRIAN MCHALE
debt to Gravity’s Rainbow is so blatant, so undisguised, that one can

only assume that, had he lived long enough, he would surely have
found some way to skew or camouflage this naked acknowledgment
of Pynchon’s influence.
Notoriously, Pynchon’s Tyrone Slothrop disappears.25 Dispatched
into the Zone, the anarchic, heterogeneous power vacuum that suc-
ceeds the fall of Hitler’s Reich, he goes native, gradually losing his
identity. He begins “to thin, to scatter” (517); his selfhood disperses.
Eventually it becomes “doubtful if he can ever by ‘found’ again, in
the conventional sense of ‘positively identified and detained’” (726).
The “story about Tyrone Slothrop, who was sent into the Zone to
be present at his own assembly—perhaps, heavily paranoid voices
have whispered, his time’s assembly,” lacks a punch line: “The plan
went wrong. He is being broken down instead, and scattered” (752).
In the end, only Seaman Bodine (the character whose name Orin
Incandenza appropriated in Infinite Jest) can still manage to see him
as some sort of “integral creature” (755).
Slothrop’s disappearance is ambivalent. On the one hand, it can be
seen as a psychic defeat, a loss of self to the systems of incipient post-
modernity; Slothrop, like “David Wallace,” becomes “a creature of the
system.” If this is the version of Slothrop’s disappearance that the real
David Wallace was modeling the textual “David Wallace’s” on, then
this tends to corroborate our uneasy sense of The Pale King as a five-
hundred-something-pages suicide note, loaded with premonitions of
Wallace’s own self-willed disappearance. But there is another side to
Slothrop’s disappearance. It can also be viewed as a liberation, an escape
from the “albatross of self” (635) with which Slothrop had been saddled
by those who conditioned and manipulated him. In this reading, the
programmed self gives way to a condition of “just feeling natural” (638).
Moreover, there is even some hope that in his dispersal Slothrop has
seeded the Zone, and that “fragments of Slothrop have grown into con-
sistent personae of their own” (757). If Wallace had lived to resolve the
fate of “David Wallace,” perhaps the liberatory influence of Pynchon’s
model would have leaked or bled through into The Pale King. Sadly,
we will never know for sure. The Pale King is, after all, unfinished.26
Notes
1. See Brian McHale, “‘You used to know what these words mean’:
Misreading Gravity’s Rainbow,” in Constructing Postmodernism.
2. Stephen J. Burn, Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism, espe-
cially 19–26; Robert McLaughlin, “Post-postmodern Discontent:
Contemporary Fiction and the Social World”; Robert McLaughlin,
“Post-Postmodernism.”
3. Unless this is a gesture of humility: “If I were so audacious as to claim

Nabokov and Pynchon as forebears, I would even have to include
them in my patricidal resentment.”
4. See Olsen, “Termite Art”; cf. Boswell, Understanding, 51; Stephen
Burn, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (first edition), 14.
5. Boswell, Understanding, 215n18.
6. Stephen Burn reminds me that “Jethro Bodine” was also a character
on the long-running CBS sitcom of the 1960s, The Beverly Hillbillies,
so Wallace’s allusion here is double, with the sitcom reference perhaps
serving to screen and deflect the Pynchon reference.
7. All emphases in these quotes are the authors’. See also the turning-face
experience in Jeni Roberts’s nightmare in “Adult World (I),” from
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (179–180).
8. I’m not sure I agree, actually: Wallace’s rewriting—or counter -
writing—of Barth strikes me as just a bit too programmatic, too
calculated, to qualify as genuine misprision in Bloom’s sense, which
entails a certain degree of un consciousness and inadvertence. In
fact, I would even speculate that Wallace’s overt dialogue with Barth
might serve to deflect attention away from more genuine sources of
anxiety—perhaps including Pynchon.
9. Stephen Burn informs me (personal communication), on the basis of
his work on Wallace’s correspondence, that Wallace seems not to have
read Gaddis until relatively late, so that his mention of him in 1993’s
“E Unibus Pluram” seems unlikely to reflect any particular indebted-
ness, but just a general recognition of Gaddis’s stature.
10. Cf. “preterition” in “The Suffering Channel” (OB 270, 284). See also
this sentence: “A certain amount of situational setup and context to
the incident Leonard Stecyk no longer recalls, not even in dreams and
peripheral flashes ” (TPK 417; emphasis added). Compare Pynchon:
“Those like Slothrop, with the greatest interest in discovering the
truth, were thrown back on dreams, psychic flashes, omens, cryptog-
raphies, drug-epistemologies . . . ” (Gravity’s 592).
11. In this case, Pietsch, the editor, evidently had explicit authorization
for the out-of-order placement of the “Foreword” (TPK vii).
12. Akin to the “special unit” chronotope is that of the “school for
superheroes,” where those who possess special talents are trained and
nurtured, familiar in popular culture from the X-Men’s academy and
the Hogwarts of the Harry Potter series.
13. Bletchley Park itself, since the declassification of its top-secret accom-
plishments beginning from the 1970s, has yielded a number of fic-
tional treatments, including Christine Brooke-Rose’s novel/memoir
Remake (1996) and Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon (1999).
14. Compare, in Gravity’s Rainbow, Mr. Pointsman’s sidelining of
Brigadier Pudding as director of the White Visitation by exploiting
his survivor’s guilt and masochism.
15. Cf. also Cayce Pollard’s talent, in William Gibson’s Pattern
Recognition (2003), which involves knowing intuitively which logos
210 BRIAN MCHALE
will succeed with consumers, but with the downside of being physi-
cally allergic to most commercial branding. Cayce’s special talent no
doubt descends from the talents of Pynchon’s White Visitation staff.
16. Fogle also reports experiencing his own memories as though they
were someone else’s (TPK 162), another echo of Prentice’s talent for
having other people’s fantasies
17. Do we catch here another echo of the White Visitation, this time of
the number strings of the automatist, Reverend de la Nuit?
18. For instance, Marcel exhaustively parses his fellow-superhero
Maximillian’s greeting, “Hey man gimme some skin man” (Gravity’s
688).
19. Cf. the grotesquely comic-ironic experience of “levitation” and “grav-
ity” in Wallace’s “The Suffering Channel” (OB 270, 278, 279).
20. See Brian McHale, “Gravity’s Angels in America, or, Pynchon’s
Angelology Revisited.”
21. The closest match is probably Slothrop’s fantasy in which his tryst
with Geli Tripping is violently interrupted by the arrival of her “other
lover,” Tchitcherine (Gravity’s 298); Tchitcherine, however, is no
ghost, but only a figment of Slothrop’s overheated imagination.
22. Recall that the reality of Incandenza’s wraith is confirmed in the
same way that the reality of Garrity’s is confirmed in the Pale King :
in both cases, the ghost’s vocabulary and range of allusion outstrip
his “host’s” knowledge.
23. There is precedent for this strategy in Bloom’s “revisionary ratios,”
both in the relationship to the precursor that he calls kenosis, which
involves a self-deflation that also serves to deflate the precursor, and
in what he calls apophrades, or the return of the dead. See Bloom
14–16 and passim.
24. Cf. sudden, belated appearance of “David Wallace” in last paragraph
of “Good Old Neon” (OB 180–81).
25. The first edition of Burn’s Wallace’s Infinite Jest (79), suggests a
parallel between the disintegration of Hal’s selfhood in Infinite Jest
and Slothrop’s dispersal.
26. My thanks to Lisa Samuels, for asking me (politely), “So what?”
CH A P T ER 11
The Novel after David Foster Wallace
Andrew Hoberek
In August 1996, around six months after the publication of David

Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Junot Díaz published Drown, the hybrid
novel/short story collection1 that grew out of his time in the MFA
program at Cornell University. Drown begins like this,
We were on our way to the colmado for an errand, a beer for my t ío,
when Rafa stood still and tilted his head, as if listening to a message I
couldn’t hear, something beamed in from afar. We were close to the
colmado; you could hear the music and the gentle clop of drunken
voices. I was nine that summer, but my brother was twelve, and he was
the one who wanted to see Ysrael, who looked out towards Barbacoa
and said, “We should pay that kid a visit.” (3)
This paragraph, the opening of Drown’s first story (or section)

“Ysrael,” displays in miniature many of the qualities that character-
ize the book as a whole: the lyrical first-person voice composed of
simple words and the occasional vernacular phrase (“that kid”); the
mix of the specific (the unitalicized Spanish words for a kind of gen-
eral store common in the Dominican Republic, and for uncle) and
the universal (childhood, the tension between self and family); the
themes of coming-of-age and retrospection. Gestated in an MFA pro-
gram, Drown in turn became a writing seminar mainstay, a fact no
doubt attributable to the way in which it simultaneously exemplified
“the large body of work—some would say it is the most characteristic
product of the writing program—that most often takes the form of
the minimalist short story” (McGurl 32) and extended this body of
work into the terrain of multiculturalism and Latino writing.
212 ANDREW HOBEREK
Yet Drown went 11 years without a follow up—an interregnum

Díaz himself has attributed to a combination of post-9/11 politics
and personal issues2 (“An Interview”)—and when his second book
did appear, it was very different from the first. The Brief Wondrous
Life of Oscar Wao (2007) opens not with the domestic subject matter
of minimalism but, on the contrary, nothing less than the history of
the Western hemisphere:
They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the
enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one
world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into
Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the
Antilles. Fukú americanus, or more colloquially, fukú— generally a
curse or doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom
of the New World. Also called the fukú of the Admiral because the
Admiral was both its midwife and one of its great European victims;
despite “discovering” the New World the Admiral died miserable and
syphilitic, hearing (dique) divine voices. In Santo Domingo, the Land
He Loved Best (what Oscar, at the end, would call the Ground Zero
of the New World), the Admiral’s very name has become synonymous
with both kinds of fukú, little and large; to say his name aloud or even
to hear it is to invite calamity on the heads of you and yours. (1)
If Drown embodies the minimalist characteristics of “exclusion” (in

the Ernest Hemingway / Raymond Carver sense of leaving things
out of stories), “privacy,” “contemporaneity (a narrow span of story
time),” and reduced “verbiage or syntactic complexity,” then Oscar
Wao clearly embodies the opposed characteristics of maximalism:
“inclusion,” “publicity,” “historicity (the great sprawl of historical
fiction),” and amped-up syntax (consider that final sentence, with its
parentheses and semicolons).3 Oscar Wao does contain the material
of minimalist narrative—family life, ill-fated love affairs, personal
failure—but it insists upon mapping these subjects against the larger
histories of the Dominican Republic (especially its time under the
dictator Rafael Trujillo) and the Dominican diaspora. As Michiko
Katkutani wrote in her New York Times review: “It is Mr. Díaz’s
achievement in this galvanic novel that he’s fashioned both a big pic-
ture window that opens out on the sorrows of Dominican history,
and a small, intimate window that reveals one family’s life and loves”
(“Travails”).
The transition from Drown to Oscar Wao, I would like to suggest,
is not just a personal but a broadly literary-historical one: in the period
since the mid-1990s, serious American fiction, and to a certain extent
THE NOVEL AFTER DAVID FOSTER WALLACE 213
creative writing programs as well, have turned from minimalism back

to the maximalism (embodied at the time by the big postmodern
novel a la Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, and Stanley Elkin) that
it eclipsed beginning in the mid-1970s. In Díaz’s case, two novels
underwrite this transition. One is Michael Chabon’s 2000 book about
a pair of comic book creators The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier &
Klay, which won the Pulitzer Prize and thereby licensed the turn to
previously disreputable genre models among a cohort of novelists in
their mid- to late-forties including Díaz, Jonathan Lethem, Colson
Whitehead, Jennifer Egan, and Aimee Bender. The same shift from
minimalism to genre that we see in Díaz’s oeuvre also occurs, a bit
earlier, in Chabon’s—indeed, it is the real subject of Chabon’s 1995
novel Wonderboys —and Whitehead’s recent New York Times piece
“How to Write” mounts an extended parody of minimalism with its
burlesque of “the famous editor-author interaction between Gordon
Lish and Ray Carver” and its advice to “Try to keep all the good stuff
off the page.”4
The other book is, of course, Infinite Jest, whose influence on Oscar
Wao was immediately apparent to Kakutani—so much so, indeed,
that she mentioned it twice, describing Díaz’s book as “so original it
can only be described as Mario Vargas Llosa meets ‘Star Trek’ meets
David Foster Wallace meets Kanye West” and mentioning its profusion
of “David Foster Wallace-esque footnotes and asides” (“Travails”).
The idea that Oscar Wao’s originality lies in its indebtedness to its
sources in fact points toward one of Wallace’s crucial contributions to
the twenty-first century novel, a point I will return to in my conclu-
sion. But for now I’d like to take up the second of Kakutani’s claims.
The use of footnotes might seem to mark a superficial resemblance
between Oscar Wao and Wallace’s most famous novel, but in fact it
gets at the heart of the contemporary departure from minimalism.
If minimalism is characterized by Hemingwayesque exclusion, by
the notion that Whitehead (only slightly) parodies with his advice to
“keep all the good stuff off the page,” then Wallace’s footnotes not
only put this material back, but also put it back in a state of explicit
awkwardness. Footnotes violate the aimed-for transparency and flu-
ency of minimalist prose, gesturing toward academic and other forms
of propositional writing and (as anyone who has read Infinite Jest
knows) making it both physically and cognitively difficult to coordi-
nate the main narrative and the notes.
They function, in this regard, like what Don DeLillo calls, in
another context, “the offsetting breeze of Dave’s plainsong— OK
then and sort of and no kidding and stuff like this ” (“Informal” 23).
214 ANDREW HOBEREK
This stylistic tic—the signature element of Wallace’s voice—does at

the level of Wallace’s sentences what the footnotes do at the level of
Infinite Jest as a whole, calling even further attention to their depar-
ture from “the aestheticized inarticulacy of [minimalism’s] highly
crafted, paired-down sentences” (McGurl 300).5 Consider just one
inordinately long sentence from Infinite Jest :
So on 1 April. Y.D.A.U., when the medical attaché is (it is alleged)

insufficiently deft with a Q-Tip on an ulcerated sinal necrosis and is
subjected at just 1800h. to a fit of febrile thrushive pique from the
florally imbalanced Minister of Home Entertainment, and is by high-
volume fiat replaced at the royal bedside by the Prince’s personal physi-
cian, who’s summoned by beeper from the Hilton’s sauna, and when
the damp personal physician pats the medical attaché on the shoul-
der and tells him to pay the pique no mind, that it’s just the yeast
talking, but to just head on home and unwind and for once make
a well-deserved early Wednesday evening of it, and but so when the
attaché does get home, at like 1840h., his spacious Boston apartments
are empty, the living room lights undimmed, dinner unheated and
the attachable tray still in the dishwasher and—worst—of course no
entertainment cartridges have been obtained from the Boylston St.
InterLace outlet where the medical attaché’s wife, like all the veiled
wives and companions of the Prince’s legatees, has a complimentary
goodwill account. (IJ 34–35)
This sentence is light years away from the opening sentences of Carver’s
aptly titled “Nobody Said Anything”—“I could hear them out in the
kitchen. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but they were argu-
ing” (Where 1)—not only in its length and the deliberate sloppiness
of its syntax, but also at the level of word choice: the colloquialisms
(“and but so,” “at like”), unattached as they might be in a minimalist
short story to a first-person narrator6; the medical jargon; the military
time notation. We can find an analogue for this, too, in Oscar Wao,
which supplements the Carveresque English and Dominican Spanish
of Drown with the nerdspeak that the narrator Yunior never quite
manages to contain in the dialogue of the would-be science-fiction
author who is the book’s title character: “Perhaps if like me he’d been
able to hide his otakuness maybe shit would have been easier for him,
but he couldn’t. Dude wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light
saber or a Lensman her lens. Couldn’t have passed for Normal if he’d
wanted to” (21). As this brief passage suggests, Díaz, perhaps even
more than Wallace, takes a kind of pure joy in the violation of the
proprieties laid down by minimalist practice and pedagogy.
Much commentary on Wallace’s place in literary history focuses,

quite naturally, on his relationship to postmodernism. Wallace him-
self preemptively licensed this line of critique with his frequently cited
1993 essay “E Unibus Pluram,” in which he argues that television has
“institutionalized” (SFT 68) and thereby defanged the irony that was
central to the fiction of Pynchon, Gaddis, Ken Kesey, Don DeLillo,
William Burroughs, and Robert Coover (SFT 66). Whereas these
authors had worked “to illuminate and explode hypocrisy” (SFT 65)
by “exploiting gaps between what’s said and what’s meant, between
how things try to appear and how they really are” (SFT 65), televi-
sion—and the contemporary “image-fiction” (SFT 50 ff.) like Mark
Leyner’s 1990 My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist that is complicit with
it—offers not resistance but a disempowered, cynical knowingness.
Critics’ tendency to pose Wallace in opposition to “a strawman
postmodernism” elaborated through an insufficiently critical reading
of this essay (Burn, Review 467) ignores, however, a crucial point:
Wallace’s Fredric Jameson-influenced account of 1980s and 1990s
postmodernism as serving “the ends of spectation and consumption”
(SFT 64) is largely political rather than aesthetic. Momentarily setting
aside Wallace’s call for a new generation of fiction writers who might
be willing to eschew irony and risk “accusations of sentimentality,
melodrama. Credulity” (SFT 81), his fiction self-evidently draws on
many of the devices of postmodernism. Other essays in this collec-
tion demonstrate this point in detail, although here we might note
one feature of Wallace’s writing in particular. “Ultimately,” Stephen
J. Burn has noted, “Wallace seems to have been most consistently
appreciative of those postmodern novels that inhabit the zone where
modernism and postmodernism shade into each other in the form of
the encyclopedic novel” (Reader’s Guide 26–27). The elements that
Wallace adopts from encyclopedic postmodernism—the incorporation
of multiple (high and low) styles; the intentional violation of canons
of good taste, literary and otherwise; and, at the most basic level, a
commitment to length rather than excision—all suggest that he turns
to postmodernism in reaction against minimalism.
Caryn James’s New York Times review of Wallace’s first novel, The
Broom of the System, recognized that Wallace deployed the techniques
of postmodernism against a then-dominant minimalism. After not-
ing that “the very mention of a first novel by a 24-year-old barely
out of college might make a reader say, ‘enough is enough’—enough
pared down, world-weary creative writing projects,” James described
Wallace’s first novel as “an enormous surprise, emerging straight
from the excessive tradition of Stanley Elkin’s Franchiser, Thomas
216 ANDREW HOBEREK
Pynchon’s V, John Irving’s World According to Garp [sic].” “As in

those novels,” she wrote,
the charm and flaws of David Foster Wallace’s book are due to its
exuberance—cartoonish characters, stories within stories, impossible
coincidences, a hip but true fondness for pop culture and above all
the spirit of playfulness that has slipped away from so much recent
fiction. (22)
That Wallace himself understood his fiction as operating in this way is

suggested by his less frequently cited criticism, in “E Unibus Pluram,”
not of postmodernism but of “the self-conscious catatonia of a platoon
of Raymond Carver wannabes” (SFT 64 ). By adducing these writers
as an example of “the degree to which televisual values influence the
contemporary mood of jaded weltschmerz, self-mocking materialism,
blank indifference, and the delusion that cynicism and naïveté are
mutually exclusive” (SFT 63), Wallace links it with his discussion of
late postmodernist image-fiction as reproducing rather than critiqu-
ing television’s own self-mocking irony. Indeed, Wallace himself cites
David Leavitt, generally considered a minimalist, as a practitioner of
image-fiction for his tendency to imagine “brand loyalty [as] synec-
dochic of identity, character” (SFT 43). The hinge between these two
groups no doubt consists of the Brat Pack writers Bret Easton Ellis,
Tama Janowitz, and Jay McInerney, who were the most prominent
young literary celebrities when The Broom of the System appeared.
Sometimes classified as minimalists (McInerney in particular stud-
ied with Carver and Tobias Wolf at Syracuse), the members of the
Brat Pack wrote prose characterized by both lean, efficient sentences
and a fascination with brand names and the other accouterments of
mass culture. A representative paragraph of Ellis’s 1991 American
Psycho reads, for instance, “Later, the next night in fact, three of us,
Craig McDermott, Courtney and myself, are in a cab heading toward
Nell’s and talking about Evian water. Courtney, in an Armani mink,
has just admitted, giggling, that she uses Evian for ice cubes, which
sparks a conversation about the differences in bottled water, and at
Courtney’s request we each try to list as many brands as we can”
(247). While Ellis’s fascination with upscale brands, not to mention
the extremities of his plot, distinguish the content of his fiction from
that of the Carveresque minimalists, his writing bears obvious simi-
larities with theirs at the level of style.7
This style differs markedly from that of both Wallace’s contempo-
raneous writing and from the majority of literary fiction circa 2012,
and it is here, with Wallace’s elaboration of an intentional bad form

starting at the level of the sentence and extending outward, that we
must begin to assess his impact on twenty-first century American
writing. Wallace’s intentional violations of proper literary form place
his work within another American literary opposition even more
long-standing than the one between minimalism and maximal-
ism: the opposition between approved forms and the kind of strate-
gic rule-breaking that characterizes the work of, for instance, Walt
Whitman, the Mark Twain of Huckleberry Finn (1884),8 and the
Beats. For authors in this tradition (who include, among Wallace’s
contemporaries, Dave Eggers), bad form in the aesthetic sense merges
with bad form in the social sense to connote sincerity 9: in the process
of speaking from one’s deepest self, one cannot bother with, or is
indeed actively hindered by the artificiality of, the canons of good
form. It is his participation in this periodic revival of bad form, rather
than any pursuit of avant-garde innovation (which is often implicitly
or explicitly committed to the refinement of form), that constitutes
Wallace’s true literary legacy.
This helps to explain why Wallace’s example did not in fact initiate
a revival of the big postmodern novel. His most obvious heir, in this
narrow sense, might be Mark Z. Danielewski, whose 2000 House of
Leaves combine Wallace-esque features (footnotes, an obsession with
a lost or perhaps apocryphal film) with an ergotic exploration of the
novel as a medium. But Danielewski’s work is far from representative,
and House of Leaves had much less impact on subsequent fiction than,
as I have already suggested, Chabon’s novel of the same year. Indeed,
from a somewhat larger perspective, the postmodern novel was not
even moribund during the years leading up to Infinite Jest, but had
rather relocated from the avant-garde cutting edge to other sites:
international fiction (Salman Rushdie, Haruki Murakami), multi-
cultural fiction (Leslie Marmon Silko, Karen Tei Yamashita), even
genre fiction (Neal Stephenson, pre-breakout Jonathan Lethem).
And if the stylistic elements of high postmodernism increasingly
appeared in sites other than experimental fiction, experimental fic-
tion at the same time grew increasingly distinct from postmodern-
ism. While George Saunders is one contemporary experimentalist
who has much in common (albeit not length) with Wallace,10 others
such as Ben Marcus have very little: Marcus revives a different tradi-
tion, descended from figures such as Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes,
and John Hawkes and invested in the play of language and meaning,
the elaboration of new patterns of thought using poetic as well as
novelistic techniques.11
218 ANDREW HOBEREK
Here James Wood’s notorious 2001 review of Zadie Smith’s White

Teeth (2000) “Human, All Too Inhuman,” although often criticized
for its dismissal of the work of Smith, Wallace, and others, actually
offers a number of vital insights into Wallace’s role in recent liter-
ary history. Wood groups White Teeth and Infinite Jest, along with
Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet (2000), Pynchon’s Mason
& Dixon (1997), and DeLillo’s Underworld (1997), as examples of
the emerging genre he calls “hysterical realism” (41). While this roll
call, along with Wood’s invocation of E. M. Forster’s notion of “flat”
characters (see Forster 67–78), might suggest that he is offering a cri-
tique of high postmodernism, the fact that Infinite Jest is actually the
chronologically earliest book here should give us pause. And in fact,
Wood’s essay lives up to its title in that what is at stake is clearly a kind
of realism. He traces these authors’ problem with characterization,
again via Forster, back to Charles Dickens, and his description of their
plots begins with characteristically postmodernist forms of irrealism
but takes an interesting turn:
Recent novels—veritable relics of St. Vitus—by Rushdie, Pynchon,

DeLillo, Foster Wallace, and others, have featured a great rock musi-
cian who, when born, began immediately to play air guitar in his crib
(Rushdie); a talking dog, a mechanical duck, a giant octagonal cheese,
and two clocks having a conversation (Pynchon); a nun called Sister
Edgar who is obsessed with germs and who may be a reincarnation of
J. Edgar Hoover, and a conceptual artist painting retired B-52 bomb-
ers in the New Mexico desert (DeLillo); a terrorist group devoted to
the liberation of Quebec called the Wheelchair Assassins, and a film
so compelling that anyone who sees it dies (Foster Wallace). Zadie
Smith’s novel features, among other things: a terrorist Islamic group
based in North London with a silly acronym (KEVIN), an animal-
rights group called FATE, a Jewish scientist who is genetically engi-
neering a mouse, a woman born during an earthquake in Kingston,
Jamaica, in 1907; a group of Jehovah’s Witnesses who think that the
world is ending on December 31, 1992; and twins, one in Bangladesh
and one in London, who both break their noses at about the same
time. (41)
As this list reminds us, Underworld and White Teeth are not in fact
unrealistic at all. And in general what bothers Wood is not impossi-
bility (Wallace’s lethal entertainment shows up here, but his catapults
that shoot American waste into the Great Concavity/Convexity do
not) but implausibility, which Wood considers a kind of cheat: “The
conventions of realism are not being abolished but, on the contrary,
exhausted, and overworked. Appropriately, then, objections are not

made at the level of verisimilitude, but at the level of morality: this
style of writing is not to be faulted because it lacks reality—the usual
charge against botched realism—but because it seems evasive of
reality while borrowing from realism itself. It is not a cock-up, but a
cover-up” (41).
Where Wood errs, arguably, is in reducing all kinds of realism to,
and judging them by the standard of, one sort: the complex, psy-
chologically fleshed out variety that we associate with writers such as
Gustave Flaubert, Henry James, and Forster himself.12 But what he
gets right, for our purposes, is describing Wallace as a kind of real-
ist. This makes biographical sense. As Evan Hughes has detailed in a
recent piece in New York magazine, Wallace was the youngest member
of a literary scene whose members have gone on to success as (in a num-
ber of cases quite self-conscious and even militant) realists: Jonathan
Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides, Rick Moody, the memoirist Mary Karr.
It is harder to see the similarities between Wallace and Franzen in the
wake of Franzen’s 2002 New Yorker essay “Mr. Difficult,” in which he
declares his ambivalence about the difficult “Status” novel written by
authors such as William Gaddis and his preference for the “Contract”
novel based upon “a balancing of self-expression and communica-
tion within a group” (How 240).13 “Mr. Difficult” was taken by Ben
Marcus and others, not without justification, as a manifesto against
experimental writing in general and postmodernism in particular (see
Marcus, “Why Experimental Fiction”), but treating Franzen’s essay
as a retroactive explanation of his career in fact obscures some cru-
cial points about it. His first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City (1988),
looked more like Wallace’s own debut of the year before than any-
thing else: both books departed from minimalist expectations in ways
influenced by postmodernism (although Franzen’s story of a scheme
by the female former police chief of Bombay, S. Jammu, to monopo-
lize power in St. Louis has more in common with early DeLillo than it
does with Pynchon and others); neither made anything like the splash
that their authors’ later works would. As Burn has noted in his book on
Franzen, both he and Wallace (as well as Richard Powers) represented
an emergent “post-postmodernism” that “explicitly looks back to, or
dramatizes its roots within, postmodernism” ( Jonathan Franzen 19).
If in the works of these writers “the balance between the importance
of form and something closer to a conventional plot grounded in a
recognizable world . . . is weighted toward plot to a greater degree than
in the work of the postmodernists” ( Jonathan Franzen 20), none-
theless their writing constitutes “a development from, rather than an
220 ANDREW HOBEREK
explicit rejection of, the preceding movement” ( Jonathan Franzen 19).

In the long view, Wallace and Franzen are less opposites (champion of
postmodern difficulty versus proponent of realist engagement) than
opposite ends of a spectrum defining an emerging cohort of writers
who sought to assimilate the postmodern tradition in the interests of
replacing one unnecessarily narrow version of realism (minimalism)
with a more expansive version harkening back to Dickens and others.
The big postmodern novel was, for this cohort, not an end in itself
but a route back to a different kind of bigness: the large-scale, sprawl-
ing, multicharacter narrative that dominated nineteenth-century real-
ism and, indeed, the novels that preceded it. One way to understand
Infinite Jest, I would suggest, is as a return not to postmodernism but
to the form of the novel in place before even the rules of realism were
fully formulated, when the novel strove for the impression of social
mimesis, but had not chosen this as its singular mission and had not
yet fully formulated its strategies for doing so.14
In contrast to Wood’s complaints that Infinite Jest fails to par-
ticipate in the putatively progressive development of realism via the
ever-increasing refinement of psychological depth, we might instead
see Wallace as engaged in a project of exploring the various strategies
by which the novel seeks to represent reality. As Elizabeth Freudenthal
suggests, Wallace is not so much unable to convey psychological
depth as committed to the elaboration of “anti-interiority” as a mode
of subjectivity that is “founded in the material world of both objects
and biological bodies and divested from an essentialist notion of
inner emotional, psychological, and spiritual life” (192). Freudenthal
identifies Wallace’s fascination with pharmaceuticals and the recovery
movement as key sites for this project, and with this in mind we can
see how Franzen’s 2001 The Corrections, with its formal as well as
thematic exploration of senile dementia and antidepressants, moves
beyond the traditional realism Franzen has since come to champion
(albeit perhaps in less thoroughgoing ways than the work of authors
such as Wallace and Powers).15
In a similarly-nuanced reading of Infinite Jest, Samuel Cohen has
noted,“The joyousness of Wallace’s pastiches, his perfect ear not only
for the way other people talk but also for the way other writers write,
his inclination to take in all the culture in which he swims” (75).
Cohen here emphasizes the latter term to get at the friendly dimen-
sions of Wallace’s relationship with postmodernism, but it’s worth
lingering over Wallace’s engagement with “the way other people
talk” insofar as this has long been a central preoccupation of realist
representation. While DeLillo’s pseudonymous 1980 novel Amazons
(cowritten with Sue Buck and published under the name Cleo
Birdwell) inspired the dialogue of Infinite Jest ’s Quebecois separat-
ists, for instance,16 something different seems to be going on in the
sections involving the Alcoholics Anonymous member Don Gately.
Consider, for instance, this passage about Gately’s pre-AA life as a
drug addict and housebreaker:
As an active drug addict, Gately was distinguished by his ferocious

and jolly élan. He kept his big square chin up and his smile wide,
but he bowed neither toward nor away from any man. He took zero
in the way of shit and was a cheery but implacable exponent of the
Don’t-Get-Mad-Get-Even school. Like for instance once, after he’d
done a really unpleasant three-month bit in Revere Holding on noth-
ing more than a remorseless North Shore Assistant District Attorney’s
circumstantial suspicion, finally getting out after 92 days when his
P.D. got the charges dismissed on a right-to-speedy brief, Gately and
a trusted associate paid a semiprofessional visit to the private home of
this Assistant D.A. whose zeal and warrant had cost Gately a nasty
impromptu detox on the floor of his little holding-cell. (IJ 55)
As third-person narration rather than dialogue, this passage might

seem to be even less interested in “the way people talk” than the
dialogue of Wallace’s separatists. But the hallmark of this passage—and
indeed of all the subsequent passages involving Gately, Ennet House
Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, and the various Boston-area AA
chapters—is the mixture of the narrator’s writerly diction (“ferocious
and jolly élan”) with other fragments of speech clearly reflective of
Gately and his Boston underclass milieu (“He took zero in the way
of shit”; “Like for instance once”; even the abbreviation of Public
Defender). This is no less artificial in its way, of course, than Steeply
and Marathe’s dialogue. Its formal analogue, however, is not post-
modernism but rather, perhaps surprisingly, the Boston crime novels
of Dennis Lehane and the Boston-set films (many based on Lehane’s
books) that have proven reliable Oscar-bait since 1997’s Good Will
Hunting. With their fascination with the white ethnic southern New
England accent, these novels and films are perhaps the contempo-
rary epicenter of a realist interest in “how other people talk,” one
with obvious continuities to the local color tradition. And insofar as
Gately’s dialect serves to distinguish him and his compatriots from
the students of ETA and others from different backgrounds, it serves
(like local color more generally) one of the classic goals of the real-
ist tradition, which is the concrete representation of class and other
forms of social difference.17
222 ANDREW HOBEREK
Lehane early on demonstrates a similar interest in mapping the

social terrain of Boston. Speaking of the African American woman he
has been hired to find, for instance, Patrick Kenzie, the narrator of
Lehane’s 1994 A Drink Before the War, writes,
Jenna Angeline, like me, was born and raised in Dorchester. The casual
visitor to the city might think this would serve as a nice common
denominator between Jenna and myself, a bond—however minimal—
forged by location: two people who started out of their separate chutes
at identical hash marks. But the casual visitor would be wrong. Jenna
Angeline’s Dorchester and my Dorchester have about as much in com-
mon as Atlanta, Georgia, and Russian Georgia. (17)
As the invocation of the two Georgias makes clear, Lehane is inter-

ested in a difference that goes beyond language, even if language
is his tool for representing it. Here we might speculate that amidst
the late twentieth-century dominance of minimalism—and, on a
longer scale, the rise since the late nineteenth century of the kind
of psychologically inflected realism that Wood champions—genre
fiction became a preserve for some of the traditional functions of
realism. Hence the fact, toward which I’ve been driving, that the
most realistic parts of Infinite Jest are also the ones that sound, to
our Dennis Lehane and Ben Affleck trained ears, the most like genre
fiction.
With this in mind we can begin to understand why Wallace’s DNA
is if anything more apparent in the work of contemporary realists
than of experimental writers. This work includes, of course, writing
by Wallace’s cohort, including two major novels—Franzen’s Freedom
(2010) and Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot (2011)—that are among
the recent subgenre of books that contain “direct allusions to Infinite
Jest ” or characters based on Wallace (Burn, Reader’s Guide 2–3).
But it is not by any means limited to books by these authors. Egan
provides an interesting case since she combines an interest in genre
models with a more traditionally realistic bent—although the dis-
tinction seems like less of a distinction if we think about her work
in relation to Wallace’s. Consider, for instance, Chapter 12 of Egan’s
2010 A Visit From the Goon Squad. This is perhaps the most remarked
upon section of the book because it is the most formally innovative,
told entirely in the form of a PowerPoint presentation by the teen-
aged daughter of Sasha, the woman Egan introduces at the start of
the novel as the assistant to record executive Bennie Salizar. Alison
has not been born in these early passages, and indeed Chapter 12
is set in the reader’s future, as we learn from the date—“May 14th

& 15th, 202-”—on her second slide (177). This slightly estranged
near-future setting should immediately remind us of both The Broom
of the System and Infinite Jest, and in fact the whole chapter can be
read as an homage to the long section of Infinite Jest devoted to the
Interdependence Day screening of Mario Incandenza’s film, based
on his dead father’s The ONANtiad, about the origins of the ONAN
(IJ 380–442). Where Wallace alternates between elaborate transcrip-
tions of the on-screen action, descriptions of it, and accounts of the
screening itself, Egan simply gives the PowerPoint; where Wallace
specifies the font size of the headlines that “Mario as auteur” employs
in imitation of “his late father’s parodic device of mixing real and fake
news-summary cartridges, magazine articles, and historical headers”
(IJ 391), Egan simply presents texts in various fonts. In this way Egan
goes even further than Wallace in offering a formal concomitant to
what Freudenthal describes as anti-interiority’s representation of sub-
jectivity in the interface between the mind and the material world:
the PowerPoint reveals Alison to be, like Mario, most able to express
herself through the indirect procedures of art. Dana Spiotta employs
a similar technique in her own rock novel Stone Arabia (2011), which
incorporates portions of the character Nik Kranis’s massive, multi-
media history of his fictional career as a rock star. In Egan’s case
especially, this technique risks, in Wallace’s words, “accusations of sen-
timentality, melodrama. Credulity.”18 Elsewhere, though, Egan turns
her science-fictional setting, as Wallace often does his, to the satirical
intensification of contemporary social tendencies: “Alex glanced over
at Rebecca, who scorned the term ‘pointer’ and would politely but
firmly correct anyone who used it to describe Cara-Ann . . . Now that
Starfish, or kiddie handsets, were ubiquitous, any child who could
point was able to download music—the youngest buyer on record
being a three-month old in Atlanta, who’d purchased a song by Nine
Inch Nails called ‘Ga-ga’” (254).
In a reading of Infinite Jest as a novel of artistic development,
Cohen suggests that the opening scene in which Hal Incandenza
struggles to convey his thoughts to a group of college administrators
investigating his academic record can be understood as an image of
profound anxiety not only about Hal’s personal coming of age but
also whether “the artist will ever escape his influences and grow out
of his clever youth” and whether “the contemporary American novel
will ever reckon with its postmodern inheritance and find whatever
form it will take next” (76). But in the wake of modernism and post-
modernism, asking what form the novel will take next is inevitably
224 ANDREW HOBEREK
implicated in what Cohen elsewhere cannily describes as “the generic

expectation of literary history [as] a story of innovation, of radical
breaks driven by the Bloomian urge to slay the literary father or by
historical changes that render current forms unusable” (73). From
this perspective the most important thing about Wallace’s fiction may
well be that it refuses the imperative to absolute originality that drove
novelistic innovation throughout the twentieth century. As I have
been suggesting, Wallace’s work, and Infinite Jest in particular, reside
at the tipping point of a major shift not in experimental fiction but in
realism: from the small-scale domestic dramas of Carveresque mini-
malism to a revival of the large-scale, sprawling, multicharacter novel.
But there is good reason not to understand this shift as some sort
of advance on previous literature. As McGurl points out, the terms
“minimalism” and “maximalism” describe not stages in a progressive
literary history (Hemingway, following Stein, invents a better way of
writing fiction) but rather poles between which particular works, and
particular moments in literary history, swing (377). As we have seen,
Wallace, so far from moving beyond postmodernism, in fact employs it
to license a renewed maximalism. This renewed maximalism returns,
moreover, not only to Pynchon and other postmodernists, but also to
the premodernist novel—sprawling, multicharacter, unafraid of mass
culture—that was temporarily displaced from the main line of literary
history by the modernist and postmodernist drive for literary prog-
ress. Infinite Jest ’s account of Johnny Gentle’s obsessive-compulsive
program for projecting US waste outside of US territory can be seen,
in this light, as a subtle parody of the modernist-postmodernist drive
to eschew any form that has already been employed. We might see
the waste and detritus everywhere in Wallace’s novel, that is, as a
figure for the remnants of literary history itself that modernism and
postmodernism continually tried to push away.19 Wallace’s books
invited American writers to see literary history not as a series of out-
moded styles waiting to be superseded, but rather as a storehouse of
formal options (whether realist, experimental, or generic) awaiting
renewal. Surveying contemporary fiction, one sees ample evidence
that Wallace’s contemporaries and successors have taken him up on
his offer.
Notes
1. In an interview published on the BookBrowse website, Díaz says:
“Since its inception, Drown was neither a novel nor a story collection,
but something a little more hybrid, a little more creolized. Which
was why we didn’t put ‘Stories’ or ‘A Novel’ on the cover. We wanted
folks to decide what it was, as long as they didn’t foreclose that it

could also be something else” (“An Interview”).
2. In response to a question from the BookBrowse interviewer about the
11-year period between his books, Díaz says: “I wish I could have
written four, five books in the span of those years. Just couldn’t do
it. Didn’t help that the novel I was trying to write at the start of that
period was about the destruction of New York City by a psychic ter-
rorist . . . a novel that 9/11 ended real fast. Had to rethink the whole
thing, was too busy experiencing the transformations in-country to
write about them in an interesting way . . . But it was more than just
being sideswiped by history. Other stuff. Being scared, for sure. I can
put the pressure on myself like nobody’s business. Years of depression
didn’t help (if you’d grown up in my family you would have been
depressed too). My own struggle against myself” (“An Interview”).
3. These qualities are taken from McGurl (377).
4. Whitehead writes: “What isn’t said is as important as what is said. In
many classic short stories, the real action occurs in the silences. Try to
keep all the good stuff off the page. Some ‘real world’ practice might
help. The next time your partner comes home, ignore his or her exis-
tence for 30 minutes, and then blurt out ‘That’s it!’ and drive the car
onto the neighbor’s lawn. When your children approach at bedtime,
squeeze their shoulders meaningfully and, if you’re a woman, smear
your lipstick across your face with the back of your wrist, or, if you’re
a man, weep violently until they say, ‘It’s O.K., Dad.’ Drink out of a
chipped mug, a souvenir from a family vacation or weekend getaway
in better times, one that can trigger a two-paragraph compare/con-
trast description later on. It’s a bit like Method acting” (“How to
Write”).
5. McGurl is here speaking specifically about Carver, but the point
clearly applies to minimalism as a whole.
6. Carver: “I elbowed George. I thought he would wake up and say
something to them so they would feel guilty and stop. But George is
such an asshole” (1).
7. Walter Benn Michaels argues that Ellis’s interest in brands marks his
old-school realist difference from the identity-focused mainstream
of late twentieth-century writing: “It’s this interest in money and
class rather than culture and race that establishes American Psycho
as the novel of manners (rather than mores) it declares itself (begin-
ning with an epigraph from Judith Martin) to be, with its notorious
insistence on documenting the dinners, the toys, and above all the
clothes of its ‘yuppie scum’ and with its establishment of [Patrick]
Bateman himself as the rightful heir of men like Edith Wharton’s
Larry Lefferts” (150).
8. I include Twain at the suggestion of Stephen Burn, who notes (per-
sonal correspondence) that Huck Finn is the source of Wallace’s
beloved word “fantods” and that there is an annotated copy of the
226 ANDREW HOBEREK
novel in Wallace’s archive at the University of Texas. Huck Finn is

apposite in another sense, if we bear in mind that we mean the novel
as it actually exists and not the one that Hemingway nominates,
contingent on an act of proto-minimalist editing worthy of Gordon
Lish—“If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen
from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating”—as the
source of “All modern American literature” (22).
9. For other accounts of Wallace’s relationship to the category of sincer-
ity, see Giles, “Sentimental Posthumanism” and Konstantinou.
10. Burn limns Wallace’s influence on Saunders in Reader’s 9–12.
11. Marcus’s writing is to my mind highly illuminated by Michael Clune’s
account of how the poet John Ashberry draws upon the representa-
tional techniques of novels to “familiarize” his radically unfamiliar
images. Clune argues, for instance, that Ashberry “uses dialogue to
show ‘all that remains unsaid’ about a thing, to provide the thing
with a background, to demonstrate its familiar shape . . . By placing a
thing in dialogue, placing it between people, he transforms it from a
surprising juxtaposition to a familiar thing instantly recognizable to
the ‘anyone’ of a world. Another way to put this is that dialogue kills
Ashberry’s figures” (454). Marcus, especially in his most recent novel
The Flame Alphabet (2012), similarly embeds his unusual images in
an implicitly quotidian but largely unexplained context to make us
apprehend the strange as though it should be familiar.
12. Forster, notably, doesn’t collapse this distinction. He acknowledges
that Dickens was not so much uninterested in or bad at characteriza-
tion as he was committed to a different version of it. “Nearly every one
[of Dickens’s characters] can be summed up in a sentence,” Forster
writes, “and yet there is this wonderful feeling of human depth.”
While Dickens “ought to be bad . . . his immense success with types
suggests that there may be more in flatness than the severer critics
admit” (71).
13. “I craved academic and hipster respect,” Franzen writes, “of the
kind that Pynchon and Gaddis got and Saul Bellow and Ann Beattie
didn’t. But Bellow and Beattie, not to mention Dickens and Conrad
and Bronte and Dostoevsky and Christina Stead, were the writers I
actually, unhipply enjoyed reading” (How 247).
14. The English novelist Tom McCarthy suggests in his study Tintin
and the Secret of Literature that the early novel’s struggle to ally
itself “to solid values of honesty and accuracy” often led to the most
transparently artificial devices: the scenes in which the hero of Don
Quixote reads and discusses the manuscript in which he is supposedly
appearing, for instance, cannot in fact be read mimetically, but can
only function as “paradox and playfulness” (5–6). This is the reason
why early novels like Quixote and, in the English canon, Tristram
Shandy, are sometimes incorrectly identified as the first works of
postmodernism. Burn notes the resonances between “Wallace’s love
of adjectivally inflated titles” and the “overly explanatory titles” of

the first English novels (Reader’s 24) in the midst of a more general
survey of Wallace’s indebtedness to the novelistic tradition through
James Joyce (Reader’s 23–25).
15. Rachel Greenwald Smith’s “Postmodernism and the Affective Turn,”
on Powers’s experimentation with nonindividualist modes of sub-
jectivity in the Echo Maker (2006), offers a companion piece to
Freudenthal’s account of Infinite Jest.
16. See Burn, Reader’s Guide 26. I would argue for a connection (both
through Amazons and independently) with Pynchon as well. For
example, the conversations between the separatist Marathe—with
his comically convoluted syntax, incorrect idioms, and article
confusion—and the cross-dressing American agent Hugh Steeply—
with his clipped, hard-boiled diction—seem to me to bear the imprint
of Pierce Inversarity’s “Lamont Cranston voice” (3) in the Crying
of Lot 49 (1966) and the exaggerated accents Pynchon periodically
gives other characters. By the same token, the phone conversations
between Hal Incandenza and his brother Orin—
“Why do I always get the feeling I’m interrupting you in the
middle of some like vigorous self-abuse session?” It was Orin’s
voice. “It’s always multiple rings. Then you’re always a little
breathless when you do.”
“Do what.”
“A certain sweaty urgency to your voice. Are you one of the
99% of adolescent males, Hallie?” (IJ 135–36)
—capture perfectly the bluff, masculine tone of much of DeLillo’s
dialogue, especially that of the earlier novels.
17. The connection between Wallace and Lehane becomes clearer when
we recall Fredric Jameson’s account of Raymond Chandler as “pri-
marily a stylist,” whose “sentences are collages of heterogeneous
materials, of odd linguistic scraps, figures of speech, colloquialisms,
place names, and local sayings, all laboriously pasted together in an
illusion of continuous discourse” (“On Raymond” 123–24). At the
same time, Jameson notes how Chandler’s detective Philip Marlowe
serves a realist function: “As an involuntary explorer of the society,
Marlowe visits either those places you don’t look at or those you can’t
look at: the anonymous or the wealthy and secretive” (128), and in
this way “the form of Chandler’s books reflects an initial American
separation of people from each other, their need to be linked by some
external force (in this case the detective) if they are ever to be fitted
together as parts of the same picture puzzle” (131).
18. One slide, for instance, is titled “What I’m Afraid Of,” and consists
of various sizes of panels featuring the statements, “That the solar
panels were a time machine,” “That I’m a grown-up women com-
ing back to this place after many years,” and (in a series of embed-
ded windows), “That my parents are gone, and our house isn’t ours
228 ANDREW HOBEREK
anymore. It’s a broken-down ruin with no one in it. Living here all
together was so sweet. Even when we fought. It felt like it would
never end. I’ll always miss it” (241).
19. Heather Houser, who reads Infinite Jest ’s obsession with waste the-
matically, as an index of its “environmental imagination of toxifica-
tion” (Houser 130), also sees the novel’s form as cognate with its
thematic concerns, suggesting that it explores whether “excess” can
function as “a peculiar form of control” (131).
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C on tr ibu t or s
Kasia Boddy is a lecturer in the English Faculty at Cambridge

University. She has published extensively on contemporary US fiction,
and her books include The American Short Story since 1950 (2010) and,
as editor, The New Penguin Book of American Short Stories (2011).
Marshall Boswell is the author of Understanding David Foster
Wallace (2003) and John Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered Irony
in Motion (2001). He served as guest editor for a two-part special
issue of Studies in the Novel devoted to Wallace’s work as a novelist.
In addition, he is the author of Trouble with Girls (2003), and a short
story collection, Alternative Atlanta (2005), a novel. He is profes-
sor and chair of the Department of English at Rhodes College in
Memphis, TN.
Stephen J. Burn is the author of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest:
A Reader’s Guide (2003, 2012), and Jonathan Franzen at the End of
Postmodernism (2008). He is the editor of Conversations with David
Foster Wallace, and coeditor of Intersections: Essays on Richard Powers.
He is associate professor at Northern Michigan University, and is cur-
rently editing a volume of David Foster Wallace’s letters.
David H. Evans is associate professor in the English Department
at Dalhousie University, where his specialty is twentieth-century
American literature. His publications include William Faulkner,
William James and the American Pragmatic Tradition (2008), and
articles on Herman Melville, Robert Frost, Flannery O’Connor, and
Don DeLillo, among others. He is currently working on a book-length
study entitled The Plot for America: the Fate of Epic Vision in 20th
Century American Narrative.
Clare Hayes-Brady received her doctorate from Trinity College Dublin
in 2011, on communication in the work of David Foster Wallace. She
has presented and published widely on Wallace’s work, as well as on
other aspects of contemporary literature including film and transatlan-
tic exchange. She is currently working on a critical overview of Wallace’s
work, with particular attention to his short fiction.
242 CONTRIBUTORS
Andrew Hoberek is associate professor of English at the

University of Missouri-Columbia, where he teaches twentieth- and
twenty-first-century US literature. The author of The Twilight of the
Middle Class: Post-World War II American Fiction and White-Collar
Work, he is currently pursuing (among other things) a project on con-
temporary writers’ relationship to genre fiction. He is a member of
both Post45 (www.post45.org) and the Association for the Study of
the Arts of the Present (http://artsofthepresent.org).
Mary K. Holland is assistant professor of English at the State
University of New York, New Paltz. Her book, Succeeding
Postmodernism: Language and Humanism in Contemporary American
Fiction (Continuum, 2013), reads twenty-first-century fiction as
returning to humanism and realism through poststructuralism, using
works by Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Mark Danielewski,
A. M. Homes, Cormac McCarthy, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Steve
Tomasula. Recent essays on literature and film appear in Critique and
The Journal of Popular Culture.
Brian McHale is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of
English at the Ohio State University. He is one of the founding mem-
bers of Project Narrative at Ohio State, and served as president of
the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) in
2010–11. The author of three books on postmodernist fiction and
poetry—Postmodernist Fiction (1987), Constructing Postmodernism
(1992), and The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole: Postmodernist
Long Poems (2004)—he has also published many articles on mod-
ernism and postmodernism, narrative theory, and science fiction. He
is coeditor, with Randall Stevenson, of the Edinburgh Companion
to Twentieth-Century Literatures in English (2006); with David
Herman and James Phelan of Teaching Narrative Theory (2010); with
Luc Herman and Inger Dalsgaard of the Cambridge Companion to
Thomas Pynchon (2012); and with Joe Bray and Alison Gibbons of the
Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature (2012).
Roberto Natalini is an Italian mathematician and research director
at the Istituto per le Applicazioni del Calcolo of the Italian National
Research Council. His scientific work is focused on Partial Differential
Equations, and a variety of areas of applied mathematics, including
mathematical biology and the conservation of monuments. He is
known for his work popularizing mathematics, and he is one of the
principal contributors to the Archivio DFW Italia, the main reference
source for Italian readers of Wallace’s works.
CONTRIBUTORS 243
Patrick O’Donnell is professor and chair of the Department of

English at Michigan State University. He has authored and edited
a dozen books on twentieth- and twenty-first-century American
and British fiction including, most recently, The American Novel
Now: American Fiction Since 1980 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), The
Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century American Fiction (coedited;
Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), and Approaches to Teaching Faulkner’s AS I
LAY DYING (coedited; MLA, 2011). He is currently completing a
book on the contemporary British novelist, David Mitchell.
Paul Quinn is a freelance writer, independent scholar, and documen-
tarian. He has written on contemporary, modernist, and postmod-
ernist literature for various publications including the Times Literary
Supplement, the London Review of Books, PN Review, The Review
of Contemporary Fiction, and Poetry Review. He has also produced
numerous documentaries, interviews, and essays on literature, the
arts, and cultural history for the BBC. Endnotes, a documentary he
produced about David Foster Wallace, was first broadcast on BBC
Radio 3 in 2011.
Inde x
Abbot, Edwin A., 94 Bateson, Gregory, 84n21

Alter, Robert, 61 Baudrillard, Jean, 88–91, 122
Anderson, Laurie, 205–6 Beckett, Samuel
Apple, Max, 193 Film, 83n20
Murphy, 83n20
Bacon, Francis, 83n20 Berger, Peter, 203–4
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 37–8, 39, 40, 67, Berman, Morris, 84n26
83n19, 199 Berte, Leigh Ann, 96
Ballard, J. G. Bewitched, 118
The Atrocity Exhibition, 109, 128n5 Birkerts, Sven, 81n4
“Notes Toward a Nervous Blake, William, 83–4n20
Breakdown,” 128n5 Bloom, Harold, 39, 63, 194–7,
“The Secret History of World 209n8, 210n23
War 3,” 128n5 The Anxiety of Influence, 26
War Fever, 128n5 Boddy, Kasia, 83n19
Barth, John, 27, 31, 66, 72–3, 99, Borges, Jorge Luis, 88–91
125, 159, 209n8 Boswell, Marshall, 22n1, 34, 40n1,
“Ambrose his Mark,” 25 41n4, 41n12, 59, 60, 84n23,
The Floating Opera, 85n28 100, 127n1, 129n6, 129n10–11,
“Glossolalia,” 129n15 189n9, 193, 194, 196, 209n8
“The Literature of Exhaustion,” 25 “A Gesture Toward
Lost in the Funhouse, 25, 109, Understanding David Foster
129n15 Wallace,” 93
“Lost in the Funhouse,” 25, 30, Understanding David Foster
32, 157, 193 Wallace, 82n6
“Menelaiad,” 25 Brooke-Rose, Christine, 209n13
Sabbatical, 18 Büchner, Georg, 71
“Seven Additional Author’s Burgess, Anthony, 41n10
Notes,” 129n15 Burn, Stephen J., 102–3, 151,
The Tidewater Tales, 85n28 156, 169n5, 209n6, 209n9,
Barthelme, Donald, 27 210n25, 215
“At the End of the Mechanical “The Machine-Language of the
Age,” 111 Muscles,” 82n7
“Paraguay,” 30 “A Paradigm for the Life of
Barthes, Roland, 28 Consciousness,” 82n10
S/Z , 2 Burroughs, William, 193
Barzun, Jacques, 29 Butler, Judith, 136
246 INDEX
Cantor, Georg, 44–6, 48, 56, 83n17 Egan, Jennifer

Carroll, Lewis, 88 A Visit from the Goon Squad,
Carver, Raymond, 28, 30, 128n1, 222–3, 227–8n18
214 Eggers, Dave, 105–6n6
What We Talk About When We Eisenstadt, Jill, 27
Talk About Love, 33 Ellis, Brett Easton, 56n1, 216,
“The Writer as Teacher,” 32 225n7
Cavell, Stanley, 37–9 Less Than Zero, 27, 30, 34, 41n10
In Quest of the Ordinary, 41n15 Lunar Park, 27
“Othello and the State of the Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 178
Other,” 41n14 Eugenides, Jeffrey
Pursuits of Happiness, 41n15 The Marriage Plot, 222
Chabon, Michael, 213, 217 The Virgin Suicides, 142
Cixous, Hélène, 137 Exorcist, The, 168–9n1
Clifford, William Kingdon, 182,
183 Fisketjon, Gary, 27, 30
Cohen, Samuel, 81n5, 220, 223–4 Foer, Jonathan Safran, 157
Conroy, Frank, 41n8 Forster, E.M., 218, 226n12
Coover, Robert, 28, 193 Francesco di Giorgio Martini, 89
Pricksongs and Descants, 25 Franzen, Jonathan
The Corrections, 83n15, 220
Danielewski, Mark Z., 217 “Farther Away,” 133–4, 158, 161
Dante, 177 Freedom, 222
Dedekind, Richard, 44 “Mr. Difficult,” 219, 226n13
DeLillo, Don, 66–8, 70, 73, 77, “My Father’s Brain,” 64
83n15 The Twenty-Seventh City, 219
Amazons, 220–1 Frye, Northrop, 8
End Zone, 82n12
Great Jones Street, 66, 82n11 Gaddis, William, 209n9, 219
Mao II, 62, 63 J.R., 63
Ratner’s Star, 48, 56, 57n3, Gardner, John, 36, 41n8
66–7, 82n12 On Becoming a Novelist, 32
De Man, Paul, 28 On Moral Fiction, 32, 41n15
Derrida, Jacques, 137, 144–5 Gass, William, 27, 32, 159
“The Double Session,” 82n8 Omensetter’s Luck, 25
“Plato’s Pharmacy,” 82n8 Gibson, William, 209–10n15
Díaz, Junot, 224–5n1–2 Giles, Paul, 98, 103
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Grazulis, Thomas P., 101, 104
Wao, 212–13, 214 Griffiths, Frederick and Stanley j.
Drown, 211–13, 214 Rabinowitz
Dickens, Charles, 14, 218, 220 Novel Epics: Gogol, Dostoevsky,
Dostoevsky, Fyodor and National Narrative, 81n1
The Brothers Karamozov, 63, 82n6
Hager, Chris, 49, 50
Eco, Umberto Haraway, Donna, 28, 37
The Name of the Rose, 99 Harris, Charles B., 85n28, 94, 128n1
INDEX 247
Harris, Thomas, 83n18 Lacan, Jacques, 28, 41n4, 60, 129n11

Harvey, David, 105 Laing, R. D., 71–8, 84n23
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, The Divided Self, 71, 76, 77, 78,
68, 132, 149n2 83n20, 85n28
Hemingway, Ernest, 226 The Politics of Experience, 85n28
Hempel, Amy, 28 Lawrence, D. H.
Hills, Rust, 27 Studies in Classic American
Hobbes, Thomas, 68 Literature, 90
Holland, Mary K., 81n2 Leavitt, David, 28, 30, 216
Howard, Gerald, 40n2 Martin Bauman, 40n3
Hughes, Evan, 219 LeClair, Tom, 60, 84n22, 193–4
Huxley, Thomas Henry, 182, 183 Lee, Chang-rae, 24
Hyde, Lewis, 168 Lehane, Dennis, 221–2, 227n17
Lelchuck, Alan, 41n12
James, William, 60, 171–5, 179, Lethem, Jonathan, 28
181–8, 188n2, 188n4, 189n6 L’Heureux, John, 41n8
“The Sentiment of Rationality,” Lipsky, David, 31, 41n9, 129n7
187 Lish, Gordon, 28, 30, 41n3
The Varieties of Religious Luckmann, Thomas, 203–4
Experience, 173, 184, 188, Lukács, Georg, 153–4, 164–5
189n9 Luria, A.R., 80
“The Will to Believe,” 183 Lynch, David, 4–6, 71
Jameson, Fredric, 7–8, 25, 28, 29, Lost Highway, 83n17
37, 65–6, 85n28, 215
Postmodernism, or the Cultural Malick, Terrence, 125
Logic of Late Captialism, 78, Days of Heaven, 130n17
84n27 Tree of Life, 130n17
Jarrett, Keith, 34 Marcus, Ben, 217, 219, 226n11
Jayne, Julian Martone, Michael
The Origin of Consciousness and “Flatness,” 88, 106n10
the Breakdown of the Bicameral Max, D.T., 41n15, 61, 82n8, 106n8
Mind, 68 McCaffery, Larry, 27
Jenkins, Walter, 29 McCarthy, Cormac, 25, 40n1
Johnson, Sally, 142–3, 149n6 McCarthy, Tom, 226n14
Joyce, James, 35, 82n6, 106n6 McElroy, Joseph, 66
A Portrait of the Artist as a McGurl, Mark, 23–4, 224
Young Man, 35, 100 McHale, Brian, 79
Ulysses, 63, 76, 89, 99 McInerney, Jay, 216
Bright Lights Big City, 28
Kant, Emmanuel McLean, Paul D., 66–7, 69–79, 80,
Critique of Judgment, 15 83n16
Kennick, William, ix McMurty, Larry, 40n1
Kierkegaard, Søren, 60, 68, 84n23 Mendelson, Edward, 22n3
Kimmel, Michael, 138–9, 140 Möbius, August Ferdinand, 52
Kristeva, Julia, 144, 149n4, Moore, Lorrie, 24
150n10 Moore, Steven, 34–5, 40n2
248 INDEX
Nabokov, Vladimir, 155–6, 168, 193 Spark, Debra

Nagel, Thomas, 67 20 Under 30, 28
Natalini, Roberto, 82n7, 84n24 Sperry, Robert, 67
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 182 Spiotta, Dana, 223
Norris, Frank, 10 Staggs, Daniel, 101
Stephenson, Neal, 209n13
O’Brien, Tim, 157 Reamde, 92
Ozick, Cynthia, 193 Some Remarks, 105n
Stilgoe, John R., 95
Perec, Georges, 80, 85n29
Perloff, Marjorie, 28 Tartt, Donna, 28
Peterson, Dale, 81n1 Tolstoy, Leo, 13
Pietsch, Michael, 60, 75, 101–2, Twain, Mark, 217, 225–6n8
109, 169n5, 191, 209n11
Pinker, Steven, 166–8 Updike, John, 170n8
Powers, Richard, ix, 64, 83n15, 157 Toward the End of Time, 108
Puccini, Giacomo, 63
Pynchon, Thomas Vermeer, Johannes, 123, 124
The Crying of Lot 49, 2, 14, 21,
22n2, 95, 97, 105n4, 194, Wallace, David Foster
227n16 “Adult World (I),” 101, 123, 209n7
Gravity’s Rainbow, 192–5, “Adult World (II), 110, 123
197–208, 209n10, “All Things To One Man,” 40n2
209–10n14–18, 210n21 “Another Pioneer,” 153, 159–60
Mason & Dixon, 95 “Authority and American Usage,”
Vineland, 105n4, 196 95–6, 167
“Big Red Son,” 204–5
Quinn, Paul, 82n7 Brief Interviews with Hideous
Men, 107–130
Ricoeur, Paul, 132, 134, 135, 149n5 “Brief Interviews with Hideous
Riemann, Bernhard, 53, 56 Men,” 105n1, 117–121
Roth, Philip, 41n12, 157 “Brief Interview #2,” 117–18
The Anatomy Lesson, 59, 71, “Brief Interview #11,” 117–18
83n18 “Brief Interview #20,” 110,
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 68 119–21, 125, 136, 138, 143–6
Ryerson, James, 41n16, 93, 103–4, “Brief Interview #28,” 118
172 “Brief Interview #46,” 118
Ryle, Gilbert, 68 “Brief Interview #42,” 170n8
The Broom of the System, ix, 1–22,
Sacks, Oliver, 77 26, 30, 64, 71, 72, 82n1, 92,
St. Ignatius Loyola, 100, 105n6 95, 134–6, 138–9, 140, 141,
Sandou, Victorien, 63 144, 146, 147, 149n4, 149n9,
Saunders, George, 217 150n13, 194, 204, 215–16
Scott, A.O., 192, 196, 207 “A Church Not Made of Hands,”
Shakespeare, William, 82n6 110–12, 123–5, 128n4,
Hamlet, 63, 65, 73 129n8, 130n19
INDEX 249
Consider the Lobster, 128n3 “Little Expressionless Animals,”

“Consider the Lobster,” 3 29, 36–7, 39, 40n2
“Crash of 62,” 40n2 “Luckily the Account
“Deciderization 2007—a Special Representative Knew CPR,”
Report,” 163 26, 38–9, 40n2
“The Depressed Person,” 116–17, “Lyndon,” 26, 29, 38, 39
127, 156–7 “The Math Melodrama,” 44
“Derivative Sport in Tornado “Mister Squishy,” 91, 152,
Alley,” 48, 93–4 161–4, 204
“The Devil is a Busy Man,” 110, “My Appearance,” 37
128n4 “The Nature of Fun,” 62–4,
“The Empty Plenum: David 70, 79
Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Oblivion, 65, 91, 97, 108
Mistress,” 22n1, 133, 134 “Oblivion,” 147–8, 152, 153
“E Unibus Pluram: Television “Octet,” 110, 121–3, 127
and U.S. Fiction,” 23–5, 28, “Other Math,” 40n2
62, 98, 107, 168, 178, 215–16 The Pale King, 61, 64–5, 71–3,
Everything and More, 44–9, 54, 82n9, 84n25, 85n29, 91,
57n6, 93, 104, 126, 129n11 99–104, 105n5, 130n19, 136,
“Everything is Green, 25, 33, 38, 137–8, 141–2, 149–50n9–13,
40n2 156–7, 163, 168, 169n6,
“Fictional Futures and the 184–5, 191–3, 195–202,
Conspicuously Young,” 24, 205–8, 209n10, 210n16–17,
27–8, 38 210n22
“Getting Away from Already “Philosophy and the Mirror of
Being Pretty Much Away from Nature,” 152–3
It All” (“Ticket to the Fair”), 96 “Rabbit Resurrected,” 170n8
Girl with Curious Hair, 23–42, “A Radically Condensed History
64, 108 of Post-Industrial Life,” 111–12
“Girl with Curious Hair,” 34–6, “Say Never,” 35, 40n2
40n2 “The Soul is Not a Smithy,” 152,
“Good Old Neon,” 45, 65, 152, 164–5
155–8, 166–8, 169n6, 210n24 “The Suffering Channel,” 97–8,
“Here and There,” 31–2, 35, 151, 158–9, 164, 170n8, 204,
38–9, 40n2, 154–5 209n10, 210n19
“Host,” 204–5 A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never
Infinite Jest, ix, xi, 26, 46–52, Do Again, 5, 83n17
54–6, 57n3, 59–85, 87–9, 91, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll
93, 95, 102–3, 104, 107–8, Never Do Again,” 108
116–17, 136–7, 139–41, 144, This is Water, 51, 97, 160–1, 163,
165–6, 168, 170n8, 171, 181, 183–4
175–82, 185–8, 188n1, “Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to
188–9n4–5, 189n7, 194–6, Ecko,” 159
206–7, 208, 211, 221–4, “Up, Simba!,” 204
227n16 “The View from Mrs.
“John Billy,” 25, 38, 40n2, 159 Thompson’s,” 98–9
250 INDEX
Wallace, David Foster —Continued Williams, William Carlos, 114

“Westward the Course of Empire Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1, 3–6, 15,
takes its Way,” x, 23, 25–7, 37, 155, 167, 169n4, 172
29–31, 33, 40n2, 43, 88, 90, 93, The Philosophical Investigations, 4
101, 105, 154, 162, 193, 209n8 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,
“Yet Another Example of 41n11
the Porousness of Borders Wizard of Oz , 104, 106n8
(XXIV),” 110, 112, 125–6 Wood, James, 218–20
Weierstrass, Karl, 44–6
West, Rebecca, 172 Žižek, Slavoj, 132, 134, 137, 143
Whitehead, Colson, 213, 225n4 The Ticklish Subject: The Absent
Wilde, Alan, 33 Center of Political Ontology, 16

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A MERICAN LITERATURE R EADINGS IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Series Editor: Linda Wagner-Martin

American Literature Readings in the 21st Century publishes works by

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

1. Wallace, David Foster—Criticism and interpretation. I. Boswell,

List of Abbreviations vii

1 Almost a Novel: The Broom of the System 1

10 The Pale King, Or, The White Visitation 191

Works Cited 229

Quotations from Wallace’s books are from the following editions,

BOS The Broom of the System. New York: Penguin, 1987.

Along with a cluster of similar remarks stretching back to the start of

later work generates its own narrative momentum by either implicitly

necessary because if Wallace’s fiction may initially seem suspicious of lit-

ranging through mathematics, the spatial turn in contemporary criti-

Almost a Novel: The Broom of

short snippet[s] of about ten to a hundred milliseconds, an elemen-

synthesis techniques in which different sound grains are combined is

Think of granular synthesis in terms of writing, and this seems to me

principle and animal suffering in “Consider the Lobster,” where lob-

of “self” to “other,” which for Wallace is homologous to the rela-

Lynch—“is about somebody turning into somebody else,” where the

“A full universe, Vigorous, Ms. Beadsman. We each need a full universe.

Following the binary logic of “Project Total Yang,” Bombardini plans

aphorism and the novel’s title: if an object can no longer be thought

off-rhyme of his name suggesting his failure as both a businessman

unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in

Yet, as much as the novel is invested in performing satirical work as

I seem to remember that he [the anonymous author, i.e., Rick him-

Rick’s defense of the story manifests his anxiety about boundaries

a novel; almost inscribing a character with a completed agency and

(1) The narrative of the disintegrating relationship between Lenore

(2) The narrative of Lenore’s search for her great-grandmother,

Lenore Beadsman as the heroine of an irresolute bildungsroman.

Lenore’s grandfather (husband of Concarnadine and son of the elder

The Broom of the System is composed of many other narrative grains

the other, as well as Wallace’s insistence on the irresolute nature (and

(1) Antinomy. Classically (from the moment of Kant’s invocation

Lenore describes an antimony in which the subject of the statement

terms of semiotic and affective weight: the coordinating conjunction

In its hypotactic dimension, everything in this mini-novel of a sen-

“evidence” it provides, that its language is able to nail down precisely

language in The Broom of the System and throughout his writing—in

thinking Self. Each line in the protruding network-fan may of course

Recalling that Rick Vigorous is voicing Monroe Fieldbinder in this

then it only works as a means of showing up the paradoxical fragility

writing that Wallace will pursue throughout his career—peripatetic,

A Fiction of Response: Girl with

be “the increasingly intimate relation between literary production and

Doing as Much as Possible

old man observed, with detailed relish, by a young man—think of

Fictional Futures for “Kids Our Age”

set of cultural and political styles” (Lasch 53) becomes irresistible.

VCs received their first publication in expensive, desirable paperback

whose sense of the “leaky distinction . . . between the animal-human

but, as one critic put it, manufactured mechanically and en masse

Just This Side of Standing Still

Minimal Mambo . . . the dancers appearing to be just this side of

distinguished the pioneer—Less Than Zero, he said, was “very, very

His other ambition, as he suggested to Moore, was avoiding “specta-

The subject is first addressed in “Little Expressionless Animals,”

She makes it human, something with the power to emote, evoke,

Julie represents a kind synthesis of the modes offered, in “Girl with