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Big Books: Addiction and Recovery in the Novels of David Foster Wallace

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Big Books: Addiction and Recovery in the Novels of David Foster Wallace BIG BOOKS: ADDICTION AND RECOVERY IN THE NOVELS OF DAVID FOSTER WALLACE By ROBERT W. SHORT A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2017 © 2017 Robert W. Short To Caroline, without whom none of this would have been possible ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful to these people, all of whom contributed to this project’s completion: my parents, Gordon and Aleta Short, who set the example and never wavered; my wife, Caroline, who never once asked me to stop talking about David Foster Wallace; Trysh Travis, who showed me how to say what I needed to say; Marsha Bryant, who steered this project where it needed to go; Matt Bucher, whose generosity and encyclopedic knowledge of Wallace remain invaluable; and—finally—to Slug and Walrus, though perhaps the latter more than the former. I hope you all like it. I made it with my own two hands. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...............................................................................................................4 LIST OF FIGURES .........................................................................................................................7 ABSTRACT .....................................................................................................................................8 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: NARRATIVES OF ADDICTION AND LITERATURES OF RECOVERY ...........................................................................................................................10 Wallace Studies ......................................................................................................................10 Recovering Theory Addicts ....................................................................................................20 Infinite Jest: Wallace as Wake-Up Call ..................................................................................25 Theory Addiction ....................................................................................................................31 Chapter Outline .......................................................................................................................36 2 THEORY BINGE: THE BROOM OF THE SYSTEM AS BENDER .....................................40 “I’d Grown Up Inside Vectors, Lines” ...................................................................................40 From Philosophy to Fiction ....................................................................................................56 Lost in Translation: The Broom Of The System’s Failures of Theory ....................................61 Chasing the “Click”: DFW’s Other Drug of Choice ..............................................................75 3 WALLACE’S ETHICAL TURN: WITTGENSTEIN’S MISTRESS AS HITTING BOTTOM ...............................................................................................................................81 The Inter-Novel Period: From Tucson to Normal ..................................................................81 Wallace in Tucson ..................................................................................................................83 Overloads and Collapses: Wallace Hits Bottom .....................................................................92 Thinking Out Loud: Wallace’s Inter-Novel Criticism as a Progression Toward His Mature Fictional Ethic ......................................................................................................106 Toward Infinite Jest ..............................................................................................................117 4 BIG BOOKS: INFINITE JEST AND THE LITERATURE OF RECOVERY ....................121 The “Normal Wallace” .........................................................................................................121 William James as Recovery Theorist....................................................................................128 The Influence of William James in Infinite Jest ...................................................................134 Infinite Jest’s Pragmatic Revisions to The Broom of the System..........................................137 Westward the Course of Wallace Takes His Way ................................................................149 5 AFTERWORD: DAVID FOSTER WALLACE’S TRANSFORMATIVE GIFTS AND THE LABOR OF GRATITUDE ..........................................................................................159 5 Labors of Gratitude, Gift Economies, and Wallace Communities .......................................159 Lewis Hyde and The Gift Economy .....................................................................................159 Wallace’s Kenyon Commencement as Labor of Gratitude ..................................................163 Labors of Gratitude and Wallace Communities ...................................................................171 “Offline” Wallace Communities and Personal Gratitude .....................................................181 LIST OF REFERENCES .............................................................................................................190 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................................194 6 LIST OF FIGURES Figure page 4-1 Photograph of David Foster Wallace’s AA Meeting Notes, page 1 ................................157 4-2 Photograph of David Foster Wallace’s AA Meeting Notes, page 2 ................................158 5-1 Photograph of David Foster Wallace’s annotations in The Gift ......................................186 5-2 Series of photographs of annotations ...............................................................................187 5-3 Series of photographs of Norman Rockwell’s “Golden Rule” ........................................188 5-4 Photograph of David Foster Wallace’s annotations in The World’s Religions ...............189 7 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy BIG BOOKS: ADDICTION AND RECOVERY IN THE NOVELS OF DAVID FOSTER WALLACE By Robert W. Short May 2017 Chair: Marsha Bryant Cochair: Trysh Travis Major: English My dissertation frames the evolution of David Foster Wallace’s writing ethic as a function of addiction recovery. Wallace completed only two novels—the first of which is generally dismissed as the work of a young author enamored of his talent, the second of which is not uncommonly hailed as “the voice of a generation.” Between these novels, he weaned himself off an addiction to the conspicuous narrative foregrounding of poststructuralist theory, progressing into a writer capable of bringing theory to life through narrative engagement with its application. This reformed Wallace repurposed these sterile, theoretical paradoxes as models for understanding not just the crises of individual experience, but also of American culture more broadly. Wallace’s life and work invite us to use the institutional language of addiction and the inherent narrative structure of twelve-step programs to read his novels as a progression toward an open-ended and always-contingent recovery from literary theory. Wallace was a chronic substance abuser during his teens and twenties and became a devoted member of twelve-step groups in the second half of his life. I use the three-part narrative schema of recovery—“what we were like, what happened, and what we are like now”— to account for the differences between 8 Wallace’s two novels. Wallace understood himself as an addict; failure to read him as one means neglecting the crucial ways 12-step recovery informs his larger fictional project. Yet Wallace’s writing complicates a purely twelve-step notion of theory recovery by rejecting certain edicts of Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous. Whereas Wallace’s substance- abuse recovery depended on adhering to twelve-step doctrine, his theory addiction required fashioning his own hermeneutic recovery process: a pragmatic appraisal of theory’s narrative value for his readers. The result of this process is a writing style that foregrounds the mental route Wallace took to arrive at his conclusions. By importing the classic math teacher injunction to “show your work,” Wallace imbued his writing with a sense of sincerity that rendered it capable of meaningful engagement with readers. 9 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: NARRATIVES OF ADDICTION AND LITERATURES OF RECOVERY All of David’s loves, I would argue, follow the model of addiction. —D. T. Max “Angels of Death”1 Wallace Studies David Foster Wallace’s work is more important than anything I can say about it. But the experience of reading Wallace feels more like having a conversation, so instead of compelling my deferential silence, it rather compels me to speak. And I’m not the only one. When he died on September 12, 2008, Wallace was forty-six years old. Despite the fact that Wallace produced only two novels during the relatively short span of his working years, the industry that has recently sprung up around Wallace is approaching the level of more long-established figures in the American literary tradition and continues to pick up speed. Since my first semester in the University of Florida’s graduate English program, there have been upwards of 165 scholarly articles published in anthologies or journals and at least twenty monographs
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