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Infinite Jest A University of Sussex PhD thesis Available online via Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/ This thesis is protected by copyright which belongs to the author. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Please visit Sussex Research Online for more information and further details Reading Incompletion: The Fiction of David Foster Wallace Tim Cahill Gurowich Submitted for the examination of Doctor of Philosophy in English University of Sussex September 2019 ii Declaration I hereby declare that this thesis has not been, and will not be, submitted in whole or in part to another University for the award of any other degree. Tim Cahill Gurowich iii UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX TIM CAHILL GUROWICH DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY READING INCOMPLETION: THE FICTION OF DAVID FOSTER WALLACE SUMMARY This thesis makes a contribution to the growing field of criticism on David Foster Wallace, reconsidering the fundamental question of how we read Wallace’s fiction—the particular interpretative activity demanded by his work. Wallace’s fiction is essentially defined by its incompletion: an unfinished-ness which forms a foundational structural and thematic principle throughout his career. Tracing the various kinds of incompleteness found across Wallace’s oeuvre, this thesis questions how these incompletions inform our readerly responses to his writing. In this, it shows how Wallace’s work provokes a particularly self-conscious form of ‘active reading’, one which makes us persistently aware of our own role in ‘realising’ or ‘completing’ the text. This enquiry draws on a range of theoretical sources, including Iser’s phenomenology of reading, Blanchot’s conception of the ‘solitude’ of the literary work, and Felski’s contemporary discussions of the affective dimensions of the reading process. Ultimately, it shows how Wallace’s writing directs us outwards, inviting us to consider more broadly the complex, participatory nature of reading itself—the extent to which interpretation always involves an encounter with incompletion, a negotiation with an unfinished-ness inherent in every literary text. This investigation takes a chronological approach—tracing the development of Wallace’s concerns across his career—but also a thematic one, using each chapter to address a different facet of incompletion. The first two chapters focus on Wallace’s reading, addressing his intertextual engagements, both literary and philosophical, in The Broom of the System and Girl with Curious Hair. Chapter three investigates the tension between encyclopaedic ‘mastery’ and inevitable incompleteness in Infinite Jest. Chapter four explores the focus on silence and absence which characterises Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and Oblivion. Finally, chapter five draws these various enquiries together in reading the radical unfinished-ness of Wallace’s posthumously-published final novel The Pale King. iv Acknowledgments Firstly, my unreserved thanks to my two supervisors, Maria Lauret and Peter Boxall, who have consistently offered thoughtful, intriguing, and considerate feedback over the course of this project. I could not have hoped for a better supervisory team, and would not have made it to the end without both of their kind and generous support. Over the course of my time at Sussex, I have been lucky enough to have met and worked with a series of kind, brilliant, and inspiring people: thanks especially (though not exclusively) to Becky Harding, Joe Upton, Pete Brown, Kiron Ward, Katherine Kruger, Charlotte Terrell, Byron Heffer, Lana Harper, Michael Rowland, Laura Gill, Tom Houlton, Chelsea Olsen, Ross Owens, Harriet Barratt, Matthew Lecznar, Laura Vellacott, Pam Thurschwell, Sam Solomon, Andrea Haslanger, Jason Price, and Bill McEvoy. Particular thanks to the organisers and attendees of the Sussex English Graduate Seminar, the Ulysses, Infinite Jest, and 2666 reading groups, and the 2017 conference ‘Reading and Its Objects’, all of which had a profound impact on the eventual direction of this thesis. Thanks equally to my friends outside academia, who have likewise inspired and supported me in innumerable ways, and been considerate enough to refrain from asking too frequently when I was actually going to get this thing finished. Special thanks to Tom Cullimore, Rachael Malcolm, Lewis Fawbert, Emily Whitby, George Doherty, Harry Doherty, Oli Doodson, James Kettle, Alice Jones, Dakota Richards, Libby Beckett, Hannah McLoughlin, and Ffion Jones. Thanks also to Scott Cupit, Arrianne O’Shea, Faraday Loughlin, Greta Leipute, Jerry Marble, Rob Pettitt, Katy Leicester, Nicole Barrons, Liz Gibb, Will Segerman, and Ruth Fillery-Travis, for keeping me dancing. Enormous thanks to my family, and especially to my parents and brother, who have been a source of unwavering understanding, kindness, and support. And to Lynne and Hannah Cahill, for not interrupting the wedding (and for everything else). Finally, my deepest thanks to Alice, to whom this thesis is dedicated, and without whom it would not exist. Funding This thesis was generously supported by the CHASE AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership (Award ref: 1500769) and University of Sussex School of English. v Contents Declaration ................................................................................................................................... ii Summary ...................................................................................................................................... iii Acknowledgments & Funding ...................................................................................................... iv Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 1 1. ‘The limits of my world’: The Broom of the System ............................................................... 24 2. The Journey Worstward: Girl with Curious Hair ................................................................... 49 3. Failed Entertainment: Infinite Jest .......................................................................................... 79 4. ‘. .’: Brief Interviews and Oblivion: Stories ........................................................................ 107 5. Unfinished Reading: The Pale King ..................................................................................... 155 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 222 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................. 229 vi I should have liked to produce a good book. This has not come about, but the time is past in which I could improve it. Ludwig Wittgenstein, preface to Philosophical Investigations (1953) 1 Introduction Reading Endings ‘You can trust me’, R.V. says, watching her hand. ‘I’m a man of my1 The close of David Foster Wallace’s 1987 debut novel The Broom of the System presents us with a sentence, and thus a text, without an ending. While apparently pointing towards a specific endpoint (in this case, the single, final word ‘word’), the novel’s closing sentence teasingly leaves a blank space for the reader to fill. Taken at face value, Rick Vigorous’ unfinished final utterance seems merely an ironic—and arguably self-indulgent—joke on the part of its author. Reading the first draft of Broom, Wallace’s agent Bonnie Nadell insisted that ‘[y]ou absolutely cannot end the book with an incomplete sentence [. .] I just feel it isn’t fair to leave all the ends dangling’.2 Her response is illuminating, in part in its articulation of the readerly frustration provoked by the novel’s ‘dangling’ ending, but also in the fact that it was finally ignored by Wallace altogether. In his reply Wallace defended the novel’s final line, arguing that ‘the way [he] conceived and wrote the book’ did not place emphasis on ‘“resolution” as a major value’.3 Surveying this exchange, we are given a glimpse of the significance which Broom’s denial of syntactic or narrative ‘resolution’, its final lapse into potentially frustrating ‘silence’, holds for Wallace’s fictional project—a significance which far exceeds its ostensible status as a throwaway metafictional gag. Broom’s incomplete final line in part gestures towards an extended tradition of literary works which deliberately end mid-sentence, including Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, Beckett’s Malone Dies, and Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Beyond this, however, it also serves as an articulation of a wider denial of formal, thematic, or narrative resolution, manifested in various forms throughout Wallace’s novels and stories, which comes to stand as a defining feature of his oeuvre. The five books of fiction published in Wallace’s lifetime confront us with a series of comparably frustrated endings, a succession of narratives united in their failure to come to a definite close. ‘Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way’—the long story which closes Wallace’s 1989 collection Girl with Curious Hair—offers a 1 David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System (New York: Penguin, 1987). 2 Bonnie Nadell,
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