David Foster Wallace's Fictional Communities

A SEARCH FOR BELONGING: DAVID FOSTER WALLACE’S FICTIONAL COMMUNITIES ________________________________________________________________________ A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board ________________________________________________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ________________________________________________________________________ by Colbert Root December 2017 Examining Committee Members: Alan Singer, Advisory Chair, English Daniel T. O’Hara, English Sheldon Brivic, English Marshall Boswell, External Member, English, Rhodes College © Copyright 2017 by Colbert Root All Rights Reserved ii ABSTRACT As a writer popularly known for his fervent self-interrogations and encyclopedic second novel Infinite Jest , David Foster Wallace’s most apparent significance in US literary history lies in his explicit response to his postmodern predecessors, such as John Barth and Thomas Pynchon. In his now infamous essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction,” Wallace argued that postmodern authors had over-invested in the literary tools of irony and self-reference to such a degree that they became complicit in the erosion of the same communal principles that broadcast television attacks in its bid for increasing consumer dependency and profit. In search of a way beyond this complicity, Wallace called for a brand of “anti-rebels” who would discard irony for earnest principles and teach us how to resist the temptations of the United States’ consumer culture. This call was heard by literary critics. “E Unibus Pluram” is the center for arguments over Wallace’s fiction, as critics discuss whether that essay expresses the literary project Wallace actually pursued and to what extent it should guide our reading practices. One problem this dissertation identifies in these discussions is an overemphasis on specific devices like irony that Wallace analyzes in “E Unibus Pluram.” Though important for understanding his argument, this overemphasis comes at the expense of our seeing the deeper problem that Wallace identifies in “E Unibus Pluram,” which is the atomization of US culture that is fueled by our addiction to pleasure-based commodities like television. The loss of focus on this central problem has led to confusion in readings of Wallace that fail to see the abiding concerns that he carried from his first work to his last. This dissertation seeks to remedy this problem by reading Wallace’s mature fiction as a developing struggle against the atomization of US culture. iii In this struggle, Wallace launched a series of increasingly complex narrative strategies for promoting a communal way of life to his readers. This dissertation reads several of these strategies to reveal two developments in Wallace’s thought: his diagnosis of the problems facing US culture as created by an unmitigated individualism and his understanding of the best way to respond to individualism by emphasizing the great importance of social institutions. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that Wallace pictured fictional communities throughout his career as a means of critiquing the atomized space of the contemporary United States. He built these communities to help readers see that there are different ways to occupy the world than those promoted by consumer capitalism, but he also structured his narratives to teach readers how to see and think in the ways he thought necessary for realizing such alternatives. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many people helped me complete this project. I would like to thank my committee members Sheldon Brivic, Dan O’Hara, and Alan Singer for their time and guidance. Thanks to Marshall Boswell, who served as an outside reader for this dissertation. And thanks to the English Department at Temple University for its support. I am lucky to have a large and supportive family. In particular, I would like to thank my uncle, Patrick Flynn; my mother-in-law, Teresa Lawrence; my grandmother, Ruth Flynn; and my parents, Kate and Michael Root. I would also like to remember my grandfather, Cecil Flynn, and my great grandmother, Rowena Flynn. I have more good friends than I deserve. My thanks to David Spoeneman for putting David Foster Wallace on my radar. The Kant Reading Group did what it did. Adam Evans continually reminds me that this has mostly been a waste of time. David Lee listens to more than he should. Nathaniel Racine has looked ruefully backwards with me. Caitlin Hudgins has reminded me to look forward. Juliana Rausch shared my work. Jared Brey has been a boon companion. And John Kerrigan has been a guide and mentor for a long time now. Most of all, I want to thank my wife Brittany Root, particularly for this last year and a half. In a time of profound highs and lows, she made the lows bearable and the highs possible. v For Brittany and Corrina vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………...iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………………v DEDICATION…………………………………………………………………………...vi CHAPTER 1. GOING IN……….………………………………………………………………….....1 The Chapters……………………………………………………………………..25 2. THE END OF EXHAUSTION…………………………………………………….…28 The Political Impasse of the Postmodern Mind………………………………….32 Mauvaise Foi and Community Directives……………………………………….39 A Novel of Tendency…………………………………………………………….58 3. DFW, INFINITE JEST, AND THE PROMISE OF IDEOLOGY……………………….. 67 Hal Incandenza and the Atomization of US Culture..…………………………...82 The Dissolution of National Culture……………………………………………103 The Recovery of Don Gately…………………………………………………...117 4. ANOTHER LIEN ON LIFE……………………………………………………...…134 “Forever Overhead”…………………………………………………………….140 “What Is Enlightenment”……………………………………………………….148 “The Soul Is Not a Smithy”………………………………………………….....179 5. AN INSTITUTIONAL NOVEL……………….........................................................196 Change in Service……………………………………………………………....202 Glendenning Versus Lehrl………………...…………………………………....216 Called In………………………...……………………………………………....229 6. CODA…………………………………………………………………………….....237 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………243 CHAPTER 1: GOING IN: THE DEVELOPMENT OF DAVID FOSTER WALLACE’S INSTITUTIONAL FICTION It’s entirely possible that my plangent noises about the impossibility of rebelling against an aura that promotes and vitiates all rebellion say more about my residency inside that aura, my own lack of vision, than they do about any exhaustion of US fiction’s possibilities. -David Foster Wallace “E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction” Since his death in 2008, David Foster Wallace’s work has inspired a flurry of publication. His unfinished novel The Pale King was released in 2011. A collection of essays entitled Both Flesh and Not came out in 2012. In 2014, Little, Brown published The David Foster Wallace Reader , a selection of texts that tries to package Wallace’s work for easy canonization. Most recently, 2016 saw the release of String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis , a collection of already-published essays that Wallace wrote about the sport. Commentaries and remembrances of Wallace have also come from well-known writers who knew him or admired his work, from Jonathan Franzen, to Zadie Smith, to John Jeremiah Sullivan. Wallace’s widow, the artist Karen Green, published a beautiful and poetic book about her struggle with his suicide titled Bough Down in 2013. And, two books marketed as biographies appeared around the time of The Pale King ’s publication: D.T. Max’s Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story and David Lipsky’s Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself , which is actually an interview Lipsky did with Wallace after Infinite Jest ’s publication that never turned into an article. Somewhat incredibly, the conversation transcribed in this last book has been reimagined by James Ponsoldt into a movie titled The End of the Tour , which stars Jason Segel as Wallace. 1 Unsurprisingly, a still more profound outpouring has taken place in the world of academic publishing, as a constellation of works has gradually formed under the name “Wallace Studies.” Early critical projects, both from 2003, include Stephen J. Burn’s Infinite Jest: A Reader’s Guide and Marshall Boswell’s Understanding David Foster Wallace . Greg Carlisle’s Elegant Complexity appeared in 2007, which maps Infinite Jest ’s structures and themes. Ten years on from Carlisle’s book, the number of scholarly articles published about Wallace each year only seems to increase. These analyze all aspects of his writing: Wallace’s philosophical interests, his literary influences, and his depictions of women, race, and disability. More recently, now that there has been time to examine The Pale King and its relationship to Wallace’s later essays, critics have also come to explore more fully the spectrum of his political views and the influence that economic thought had on his writing. This critical energy has led to the publication of more whole volumes dedicated to Wallace’s writing. Bloomsbury Press alone has released six texts dedicated to Wallace since 2014, including edited collections and single-author monographs. The question about Wallace’s work that has drawn the most sustained critical interest though is his relationship with American postmodernism, as there is now a tentative consensus that he represents a break with the lineage of writers that moves through Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, and Don DeLillo. The striking thing about this view, as well as the dissent from it, is that in Wallace’s emergence as a major figure of American

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